Clarifications and questions from a newbie

Amateur questions regarding site design

[Raligan]

Hey all, I'm new to the boards, LTLFTP*, and I have a bunch of questions; this website has opened my eyes to a lot of things that I'd never even considered having to deal with, but I believe I am ready. I just have a few questions.

1.) In Brett's 26 steps, here [webmasterworld.com] and continued to here [webmasterworld.com], he mentions having 100 pages of content at launch time, and then adding a page a day. My question is, what sort of content should I look at for a merchant page? There was one reference in the thread to a vacuum cleaner shop that would link back to info on higher-ranked sites, but it didn't exactly answer my question. Should I make a shop section, where the products go, and, literally hundreds of... articles regarding the product? If so, the articles should be about the products in general? Or a different article about each product? Or should I just make 100 products available, each on it's own page, and then add a product a day?

2.) Are affiliate programs particularly profitable, in general? Specifically, are there any favorites that you have?

3.) The view of virtual hosting seems to be fairly negative, around here; any classic compelling arguments you'd care to link to? I have 3 sites, all run off my ISP's "free" service, but with registered DNS names (just for redirect purposes). Does this look newbie-ish to a prospective buyer? What is the cheapest form of hosting available that works around this (without banners, etc.,)? Someday, I'd like to host my own sites locally, but while that isn't an option, what options are viable, without unduly hurting search engine rankings?

4.) Is paypal a good way to go for merchant tools? Their buttons seem good, but in Tabke's 26, it seems clear that there should be more content than html, and the paypal buttons are pretty html heavy. Is this a bad thing?

5.) My main site, which is (see question 3 above) virtually hosted, has a PR of 4. The other two sites, one / level deeper, are both PR 0. They link back and forth to each other, why would this occur?

6.) Are there banners that will pay you just for being viewed? Or is that a myth? Or just out-dated?

This is all that comes to mind immediately, I'll be sure to post more later.

Thanks all!

* Long Time Lurker First Time Poster

[mack]

In terms of adding content this works really well for letting the search engines know your site is frequently updated. In your scenario the content could be anything from additional products to product reviews. Reveiews would work well because this is the sort of content that may make search engines to rank your products well.

The types of affiliate programs that work well are the ones that fit in as best as possible with your sites theme. Because your visitors are interested in your topic, they are very likely to be interested in products from similar companies via adverts.

Virtual hosting can and does work well for many sites. We need to stop short of recomending hosting companies due to the terms of this board, but you can find loads of good hosting companied via Google or any other search engine. In terms of virtual hosting , that is pretty much the indusry standard now.

with reguard to the paypal button I dont think this will be a problem. I agree that keeping page sizes down is importaint but the button code is not extreme.

When you say your main site has a pr4 and your other sites have a pr0 cross linking is not always the answer. Try and get as many good quality inbound links from external sites and you shoudl see a rise in page rank.

If you are looking for banners that pay you just to display them try searching on your fav se for "cpm banner affiliates" cpm - cost per thousand impressions.

Hope this helps.

Mack.