Adsense or Affiliate Links?

Although affiliate links are a great way to generate commissions to a particular affiliate product, they are a hindrance if you are trying to earn through the Adsense program.

Affiliate marketing is all about testing and tweaking to find out what will work with your site the best.  In my experience, using Adsense ads along with affiliate links is not such a good idea.

If you have an affiliate product or CPA that you think will convert well, I would recommend trying it out first before adding Adsense to your site.  Once you have traffic, and you see that your visitors are clicking on your affiliate links, then you can determine whether or not your niche is a high converter for affiliate promotions.

If you are not making affiliate sales or commissions from CPA offers, and you decide to try out some adsense ads throughout your site, you may want to think about removing the affiliate links while you are testing.

Internal links are great for SEO, and I do recommend that you link back to your own pages, but I would advise you to add the links below the fold.  This way, when a visitor arrives at your site, they have only two options:

1. Read your content or
2. Click on your adsense ads

If there is too much commotion going on when they arrive at your page, they will most likely leave.  I have personally tested this theory, so I know that for my niche sites, I have better luck leaving the text links below the fold if I am trying for a high CTR with adsense.

If you are interested in a high converting Wordpress theme, you may want to check out CTR Theme.  I have recently tested it, and you can read my review here.