Brett_Tabke - 8:39 am on Oct 10, 2000 (gmt 0)

A couple quick comments:

>a good base of loyal viewers
>i.e. to get free beer in virtually any city in the world

How did that slip by? That has a lock on quote of the week!

Back to the original post: I'm about in the same situation over at SEW. I've looked at every affiliate program there is on the net for webmasters in the last six months. I've yet to find one I felt was worth the cost. Once you go that route of affiliation on a large scale from volumn, or from quality, I think you have to re-evaluate why you got into web site production in the first place.

I've also looked at going the other route of paid services like Danny does over at se watch. I'm not fond of that option because that makes you responsible for information. Most of that information is freely available on the web. I'd feel like I was short changing people. There is also the necc comittment to keep fresh info coming.

I've also mulled setting up a PPC style engine just for webmaster related products. I could get the traffic, but I don't think it would fly in the long run. Sounds good in theory, but PPC's take a huge promotion effort to keep and generate traffic.

Lastly, I've looked at taking several of my scripts into the commercial arena. One is all setup in that regard and I think I am going to give it a shot.

I'd say if you are making that kinda change from a site, I wouldn't mess with it too much Shri. Go back and rethink your content, what is it missing? What are my users not finding? Have I tapped all the market for users that I can? Where do I need to put in time to generate even more traffic?

I think affiliate programs are best 'eased into'. What I've been trying is targeting specific users as test cases to see what the affiliate programs do for production and what they do to the site. I use AOL'ers as a test bed. I generate a good data set before I start (clicks per user, method of finding the site...etc) and then see what effect the affiliate button or banner has on the page views. If I can keep the 'hit' to under 5%, then I think it is worth it.