Choosing Quality Affiliates

One mistake I have made as a webmaster is not filtering who I promoted.  Once you become popular there will be advertisers frequently requesting a banner or link spot on your site.  Usually price is dependent upon the amount of traffic you receive daily.  Anything under one hundred people a day is really not worth setting up a paid advertising section for your site.  If you are receiving a hundred or less people daily then you will want to use affiliate sites such as amazon, ebay, and other product sites that pay commission for each product you sale. These sites allow you to choose exactly what products you would like displayed on your site which allows you to only display products that are extremely relevant and useful to your visitors.

If you grow to over 100 visitors daily you may want to consider opening up advertising as a possible income solution.  I recommend using paypal for these transactions and in the beginning simply opening a box that is 250 pixels by 250 pixels and cut it into four small boxes which are 125 pixels by 125 pixels.  This is of course only a suggestion and you can choose the area and size of banners, but I have found these are pretty simple to work with.  You will then need to set up a page which is linked to by your home page in the navigation and within the place you are selling a banner.  You will want to use words such as Buy Advertising or simply Advertising as the link text.  This is what the majority of webmasters use and will alert your possible advertisers that you are open for business.  Another thing you may want to do is open up a gmail or yahoo account or an account on with your hosting company specifically for advertising.  There will be a lot of back and forth with people asking questions about performance and wanting different things with their banners.

Now once you open the site up for advertising you will want to price it wisely.  You do not want to give a bunch of money away nor rip off your clients.  When I opened advertising on my MMO site it was receiving 500 unique visitors daily and I charged 50$ for a 125x125 and 150$ monthly for a large banner above my content.  This is actually pretty cheap considering but with the affiliate sites I was promoting my monthly income was around 2k monthly.  This was a site filled with banners so adding a couple more that people paid for really did not dilute the quality of the site since the site was an affiliate site.  Now for my site now I would stake my reputation on the banners and would require quite a few requirements before I would even think of letting people advertise.

For those who have worked their butt off for their presence and care about what goes on their site I recommend only allowing sites which are very relevant and only promoting what you have tried out.  A good example of this is when I was asked about selling an ebook on my site I required them to give me a free copy so I knew my traffic would not be scammed.  Remember you are responsible for what you place on your site so if you are promoting a scam or terrible products the traffic which purchases the products will not want anything to do with you or your presence.  It is more than your right to know exactly what you will be promoting so don’t worry about making product testing a requirement for advertisement.

Now before I end this there is one more point to hit on.  First keep records of every dollar you collect from clients for tax purposes you will need to claim it all at the end of the year.  Second never sale do follow links on your site.  This is strictly against Google guidelines and if caught your site will be completely kicked from the indexed or dropped down so low no advertiser will want anything to do with you.