Giving Away Free Stuff

Where to Host Your Content

is, you have to consider questions such as: Does my site fit the theme of the other sites on the network? (This is not only important for branding purposes, but also for traffic, since you are only going to receive benefits if you can interest users from those other sites.)

Basically, with an affiliate program you can expose your website to more traffic sources and reach a larger, hopefully more mainstream audience. Of course, the retailer is only interested in promoting the program to the publishers who are doing publicity for the products.

Of course, revenue sharing and Cost-Per-Click or Cost Per Impression models are not of prime importance to you, not if you want to earn traffic the fastest and most effective way. The bottom line is that you can take your website and your stats directly to advertisers and make more money without any content restrictions or other annoying rules that you might encounter at an affiliate network.

Many entrepreneurs have worked with affiliate networking programs and passed their minimum traffic requirements…only to realize that there wasn’t much money to be gained besides a few pennies a day. That, together with the fact that only hanging large banners on your site seems to increase revenue—and that this may be in violation of new search engine standards—make this a questionable opportunity

Joint Venture opportunities are similar to link exchanges and affiliate marketing but only involve working with one or more large companies and establishing your own sort of mutually beneficial “network”. Once again, this will only prove effective if you focus on joint content development, or perhaps guest blogging. Keep things interesting and don’t let the links do all the talking. Make sure you including some interesting text and anchor text along with your links.