News and Features
If your eBusiness serves a local market, you could consider joining an affiliate program that offers local news, weather, entertainment, and events. AOL Digital City’s affiliate program (home.digitalcity.com/chicago/affiliate/) (see Figure 3.1) lets you offer guides to local restaurants, clubs, attractions, live music, museums, art and cultural events, movies, and more. You just add one of its local content boxes to your site and every time someone clicks on that box, you get paid $.03.
For more general news, affiliate programs from InterestAlert! and Strategy.com can fill the bill. InterestAlert! (interestalert.com/remote/siteia/affiliate.html) (see Figure 3.2) lets you put news headlines and summaries on your pages. Categories include top news stories, women’s news, political news and commentary, sports news, a stock index, and a large variety of industry news. Your site gets paid $.0025 per paid view on the news pages they serve.
Figure 3.2. InterestAlert! lets you put news headlines and summaries on your pages from a variety of categories.
Strategy.com’s affiliate program (www.strategy.com/About/affiliates/Businesses.asp) enables you to deliver information to your site to visitors whenever and wherever they are via Web, wireless, and voice.
By becoming an affiliate, you can offer your customers personalized finance, weather, and news information. When your shoppers subscribe to these services (co-branded with your logo and your Web site’s look and feel) through your site, they can choose what information they want (earnings reports, local severe weather alerts, top world news, and so on), when they want it (if a stock moves by 12%, only when rain is in the forecast, Thursdays at 10 a.m., and so on), and how they want to receive it (via e-mail, mobile phone, pager, and so on). Your business receives 15% of the net revenue generated by your site and 5% of the net revenue generated by other sites you refer.
Do
| Do join content affiliate programs that allow you to customize their content to your site. |
Another free news feed affiliate program is EchoFactor (www.echofactor.com/affiliate.html). If your company sells music, you can have a news feed on Britney Spears. If your company is involved with travel, choose a news feed on a specific city or destination. EchoFactor pays $2 for each news feed you place on your site.
Moreover (http://www.moreover.com/associate) provides breaking news from 1,800 sources, and it pays a commission every time you refer a new Web site owner who puts a Moreover headline Web feed onto his or her site. Moreover pays $1.30 for each unique visitor who completes the three-step Web feed builder, and $2.00 for each unique completion when the visitor is referred from the Moreover news feed on the front page of your site.
There’s also an affiliate program for one of the biggest content providers on the Web. When you join About’s affiliate program (affiliates.about.com/index.htm), you can take advantage of a wide range of quality content from over 700 of its expert guides. Each guide specializes in one area and provides in-depth information on his or her subject. You can link to an individual guide’s content that is relevant to your company’s interests. You can also add the ability for shoppers to search exclusively within your topic area, or search the entire About network. About will pay a standard rate of $0.01 for each qualified click-through from your site to About.
Some niche affiliate programs offer content as one of their linking options (see Figure 3.3). ClubMom (www.clubmom.com), a free membership organization created exclusively to reward and celebrate moms, makes a new article (with affiliate links) available to affiliates each month. Similarly, the One and Only Network, a matchmaking and romance site, offers a number of articles to affiliates that are integrated with affiliate links. These niche affiliate programs provide the valuable content to affiliates to improve the caliber of their sites and to reach a very defined-target marketing audience.
Figure 3.3. About offers affiliates access to hundreds of thousands of pages of content in more than 800 categories of information.
