I canceled my Adsense, Searchfeed, and Revenuepilot accounts last year. The simple reason is that I had found, over the previous year, that I could make more money promoting affiliate products than from PPC. The side benefit is that I didn't have to worry about Adsense fingerprints or TOS violations. Mainly I switched over to some contextual linking and some Adsense lookalikes, and the occasional banner.

My plans for monetization continue to be affiliate products, and eventually my own products in certain markets. The method to determine which markets will be very similar to something I saw mentioned by Kurt and Top Hat elsewhere in this forum. It's a method that I know a certain well-respected Warrior uses as well. This Warrior builds content sites, & throws either Adsense or affiliate ads on them, but isn't all that concerned about monetization early on. For the sites that do well in attracting traffic, filling gaps in the SERPs, etc., this Warrior then creates products to sell to that market, and removes all Adsense & affiliate ads in favor of promoting that product. The process is very simple, and it works very well.

I think having your own product is really worthwhile, but yes, it does bring customer support hassles with it as well, so it's a tradeoff you'll have to decide on. I actually had a couple of ebooks selling fairly well for a while, under a pseudonym. (They did well because of lucky timing, and certainly not good marketing on my part!) So I know the amount of support required for that type of product.

I think we all need to place a renewed emphasis on building sites to promote affiliate products though, and here's why. (By affiliate products, I mean non-IM - market to the masses). The cost of gasoline is rising rapidly in the US, and it will likely continue to do so. More people shop online every year anyway, but I think the new reality of gas prices will accelerate that a lot. I know gas prices elsewhere have been higher for years, but many large population centers in the US don't have mass transit capabilities in the same way they do in much of Asia and Europe, so the impact will probably be greater.

As driving costs go up, people will drive less, and all but the most essential trips will be cut back or eliminated the higher fuel prices go. Fewer Sunday afternoon lunches at the food court in the mall, less running around town looking for a particular brand of an item, etc. This means that it's very likely that people will turn to online shopping for not only more of their gift items, but for many of their essential & "affordable luxury" items as well. And that's of course great news for us as affiliate marketers!

Sure, there will always be a market for Rolexes and other luxury items, so keep building those sites. But also think about building affiliate sites promoting not only gift items, but also products such as high quality makeup, specialty diet & snack foods, auto parts, things people use and want every day. Merchant datafeeds converted to RSS, Tuelz, and Bombs are perfect for this.

Jeff