Old school graphic designers need help....

This is my first post on this forum. So hello to all.
It seems everyone is very helpful and I am looking forward to receiving advice on subjects we are poor in.

We are a small design agency and we've been around for 11 years, and our pedigree is obviously graphic design. However, we have had to move into web design due to the number of our customers who want us to do it.
We currently outsource the web design side of things although we are gradually trying to bring it inhouse.

Our website www.thisworks.co.uk gets around 2500 visitors per month and has a Google PR of 4.

The reason for my post is this...

We know NOTHING [and I mean nothing..] about Adsense. One of our customers asked why we didnt use adsense, so I looked it up.
All I know is that it involves your website carrying adverts...

Can someone advise us if Adsense might be a viable proposition for our website?
[ we do have good ranking on google for a few key phrases,
'free leaflet design' comes Page 1 Number 1 on Google with approx 1,950,000 results ]

If so, where would you suggest we place any Ads?

And how many?

We are also mindful that we are slightly reluctant to disturb the balance of the design...[ i know you cant have it both ways...but is there a way to get a blend? ]

Thanks for any suggestions......

 

With that level of traffic you might bring in anywhere between £5 and £50 per month.

You would risk losing potential customers to your competitors though.

Since you have a product to sell (your services) then you might find the downsides outweight the benefits.

I am sure others will disagree, and they might be correct, but my feeling is that you really have no reason to use adsense.

regards

Chris

 

If you put adsense on your sites they will display adverts of your competitors. Since you are offering a service, this might not be a good idea.

For instance, it could show advertisers of other people offering webdesign services. Why would you promote them?

 

With your website, I'd avoid Adsense. It tends to make websites look less professional. If I were looking for your type of services and I found your site, I'd see the Adsense ads and think, "if they're so good, why do they need to use Adsense to make money sending people to their competitors?"

 

no adsense on your site no. The only thing you could do is have an adsense referral offering the GOOGLE PACK for free for the visitor, with a text saying "ORGANIZE YOUR PHOTOS. FREE GOOGLE PACK"
that way you can earn up to 2$ per install of the google pack.

you can use your PR4 to increase popularity of another site, if you wish to begin using adsense to earn money, but on other sites.

 

Can you elaborate on this idea please?
Regards
Chris

 

He means make outbound links from your current site to another site like "Check out our other site here" and it can be an information-based site or anything like that. Then, you can put ad's on this new site, and generate revenue. The outbound link from your current site with raise the PageRank of the new site and make people find it faster with google, which in turn gets you more hits and more clicks.

Hope that helped.

 

Dave....

I think my instinct is that you are maybe correct....

The only thing that nags me is this.... I see lots of good sites that DO have adsense on them and they also offer services, like we do....

Why would they do it if it didnt pay?

Not saying youre wrong....just an observation.

Thanks for the feedback..
Chris

 

Show me the links to these other websites.

I'm sure it 'pays', but you have to think about your image here, and if you want to expand. If you owned a McDonald's franchise, for example, and Burger King offered a few thousand dollars for you to display advertisements (for Burger King) inside your restaurant - would you accept the money? What happens if someone, who would have potentially bought a burger from you, decided to go to Burger King instead? And then they found out that they prefer Burger King burgers much better, and continued to eat there forevermore. Now multiply that by a few hundred (how many clients do you get?) and tell me whether it's worth it.

And honestly - with the amount of visitors you're getting, you're not going to make more than $20 - $60 a month. Surely your services net you more than that!

 

in my opinion, adsense has become an internet standart which help youto show related links to your content. because of this, every web site can use adsense

 

Just because they CAN doesn't mean they SHOULD.
There are some instances where you don't WANT to show related links to your content, since you will be directly advertising your competition.

 

Can you please explain what you mean in more detail....

There are obviously plusses and minuses.....and I would like to attain more knowledge before we make a decision.

I DO see the point of uneccassarily pointing people away from our site......but I feel that if we cant pursuade a visitor to use us by delving into the site, and finding out more about us and how we operate, then we aint probably going to get that visitor anyway....so why not try and monetise our traffic..which is steadily increasing now each month?

Thanks to all who have taken the time to reply to my thread....it IS appreciated.

Chris.

 

If you are tempted by adsense, go for it, but don't hide it at the bottom, display it proudly, and write somewhere in your FAQ for example:
Q: Why are you displaying ads from your competitors right at the top of your site?
A: Because we're not afraid of competition, we do believe that we offer a competitive service for competitive rates, feel free to compare, study our portfolio as well as our competitors's offers and come back to us when you're ready, we stay at your disposition for any complementary information.

 

Asking people to compare could be regarding as asking them to click the ad's, I would avoid this. Bear in mind if google decide to close your account there is no real way to appeal and not much you can do about it.

I've not looked at the OP's site but its an easy answer without doing so. If you sell a product there is absolutely no way you should be using adsense. If you have seen other people selling products with adsense on their sites, either their product is garbage and they cant sell it, or they are not professional, neither is an opinion you want to give off! For example, both sites in my profile are mine. One sells a physical product, no adverts or outgoing links on it at all - I work damn hard to get traffic to my site there is no way I'm going to have them leave my site for a couple of cents! My other site listed, I have a decent amount of ad's on it - its the sites sole earner so I am happy to see people click them and leave.

 

Adsense wouldn't ban, it would send a warning email if they felt it would be unappropriate, which I don't believe they would.

Now please people in general stop being so paranoid about adsense closing account for this and that, honestly I've never heard anyone complaining about an account terminated for anything else than fraudulent clicks and/or account related to an account previously banned for fraudulent clicks.

All the other cases are first warned with a polite email asking you to modify your page(s) to comply with adsense tos if it is the case that it is against the tos. And only if you don't comply OR if you re-offend on the same issue, then you could be banned.

---
About loosing your customers, first it's stupid to think that you can blind them of the competition and have them hire you on the ground that they think you're the only one on earth selling this product/services.

Before adsense I was even advocating giving free links to your competitors in order to show a potential customer that you're not afraid of the competition, because you find it healthy and you are confident of your own value. People will recognize that, and clicking on an ad can bring you more than a few cents, plus don't worry for your customers, except if they're really new to the internet, they know how to get back to a site they want to visit again, so they can find you back, they're not lost forever in cyberspace or on the closed-minded site of your ad-paying competitor.

 

In my opinion, its a bad tactic - unless you have a truely unbeatable deal. Yes most people know how to navigate back to your site, but why risk them seeing something else they fancy on another site? If you are selling an ebook or some other rubbish then yes it might be worth it, but if you are selling something of value then its bizarre to even consider linking to your competitors.

 

My thinking is based on the fact that I don't believe we can hide anything from "them", internet is very open and when they searched for a site such as yours, they probably already got dozens results and are just investigating one of them when they come on your site. So based on that, we might as well pretend, in our sales pitch, that we COULD hide to them the competition like others do, but we don't because we're so confident in our product/service that showing them the competition will make them come back to our product/service.
For some people, it will be another argument in favor of this product/service.


OF COURSE I wouldn't recommend this approach for a bad to average graphic designer or someone trying to sell a product at twice the price of the market.