How to lay out content for an information site.

To use images or pure content.

[Andrea]

Hi,

I am thinking of starting a character theme product site.

Can you let me know which of the following would be the best way to approach this?

* Write a page description on each character, for example
Harry Potter, Winnie the Pooh, Thomas the tank engine and then talk about the different products that are available on these themes, such as bedding and so on. The page would probably have no images on it. However, it would have text links included within it to various merchant sites. (Should I also include google adsense)?

or

* Write a page description on each character, as above and include images of the products as well as text links to those merchant sites? (Should I also include google adsense)?

or

* The above and only include google adsense?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards

Andrea

[mack]

This is a good question. Unfortunitly there is no definate answer.

If you are building a site with the various different topic areas you will have a lot of very good content. Work very hard on the content, make sure it is as good as possible, and lots of it. This will help you out in a number of ways, sites will be more prepared to link to you based on your content. Search engines will have a lot of rich content to crawl as they rank your pages.

The question of adsense/affiliate links is a complicated one. It all comes down to what converts the best. I think the only true way to find this out will be to try both approaches, then work out what one works best for you in terms of generatign revenue.

Mack.

[Beagle]

If the merchants you're working with allow you to use their images, I'd think that would help make the pages more interesting to look at. The images wouldn't necessarily have to be links themselves; you could still use text links. Even though kids won't be inputting credit card info (their parents hope!), they'll probably have something to say about what's bought, and interesting, colorful pages should be a positive for that.

As mack kind of said without saying it -- For this type of site, I'd agree that you'd want either affiliate links or adsense, not both. However you set up your pages, they'll be very focused; you'd end up with adsense ads saying "search e-bay for Harry Potter" on the same pages where you were trying to sell Harry Potter stuff through your affiliate ads.