Website Advertising and Affiliate Programs

So you've found a name, registered it, found a hosting company, designed the site, written some content and added a gallery. Now what happens and how can you make the site pay for itself?

Well, you sit back and hope some visitors come along. You can submit your site to search engines, and after a few weeks some of them will start listing it.

But it's costing you maybe $100/year to host it. Can you recoup any of that? The answer is maybe, depending on how much traffic you get. Many companies offer affiliate programs. That means if you advertise them on your website, and a visitor to your site clicks on a link you have and makes a purchase from the advertising site, you get paid! For example Amazon.com has an affiliate program. If you advertise a book which is available on the Amazon site and a visitor to your site clicks on the link, goes to Amazon and buys the book, you get paid (eventually!). If the book costs $25 you get around $1.25. If you sell 7 such books each month, the payment will cover your $100 webhosting fee.

There are also companies which will supply banner or text ads. Some of them must first approve your site, and if you have a small new site with little traffic you may not get approval, but if your site is attracting a reasonable number of visitors and it has worthwhile original content, you may be accepted into and advertising program. For example Tribalfusion requires that your site has a minimum of 1,000 unique users per day before they will allow you into their advertising program. AdSense doesn't have specific requirements, but they have to approve your site - and many sites do get rejected if their traffic is small or their content is poor. Of course you may not want some of the ads these services may serve. I've tried several programs and cancelled them because I didn't want the type of ads they served on my website. I have a photo website. I don't want banner ads advertising cars, soap powder or mortgage lenders here!

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