Saturday, July 19, 2008

#5: Find Advertisers

When the domain has been populated with unique and useful content, its time to find contextual or affiliate-based advertising programs you can promote on the site. You might want to wait until the site has built up some traffic and reputation, but the time between writing the website and promoting it can be a useful moment to sign up for some advertising programs and learn a little bit more about how they work.

Since each program has its own standards and policies, I can't say which is best for your website and subject areas. What is good to recognize from this phase of building a website is that advertisers have efforts to improve the quality of the sites they market on and what kind of revenue publishers can expect to earn.

Find a place to put the ads, either in a blogs sidebar or by modifying the template of a forum or social bookmarking site to include the code provided by the advertiser. Pay close attention to quality guidelines! Do not use misleading placement or words to encourage clicks from people who aren't otherwise interested in the things being promoted. This will likely get you banned before you see a penny.

It can take a long time for a website to become a good source of steady revenue - be patient and continue writing content to see the results grow over time. Slow and steady wins the race!

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