Michael Campbell on Adsense sites and Affiliate sites
Michael Campbell made a post at his blog that I found interesting. He’s now using smArticle Composer for Adsense sites and XSitePro for affiliate revenue sites.
The use of smArticle Composer is because it gets very, very high clickthrough rates and so earns the maximum amount for the traffic each site receives. It’s also shockingly fast at building site.
I’ve built sites using smArticle Composer and I can see why the pages get lots of clicks (just check out the examples in the sales letter to see for yourself). However, the sites are very basic. Naturally you can edit the templates by hand (yeugh) or get someone else to do it for you, but the problem you’ll encounter, most likely, is that people won’t link to the site naturally.
It’s all well and good to get your own links by submitting articles or submitting to directories but real sites grow links organically because they’re useful and so people link to them as references. When sites grow links organically you won’t have to worry about maintaining your PageRank or traffic.
So the line is drawn… are you going to build Adsense sites with articles that “survive” in the search engines but don’t get organic links and only get inward links because you do the hard work of building them, or are you more attracted to building true quality sites that get links organically because other webmasters want to link to them as resource sites?
Neither strategy can really be called “right” or “wrong”. It’s down to your own preference at the end of the day. Personally, I can see that living on the edge with a ton of sites that are “surviving” in the search engines in July 2006 may not be a good place to be in July 2007. 
