I am a marketing guy and for many years my business has been helping people in the Huntsville Alabama area market their products and services over the internet. Maintaining the Spica website gives me a platform to investigate advertising programs and to make recommendations based on my firsthand experience. This not only helps me better understand these programs, but also see how changes in these programs impact the "publisher" and advertiser as they occur.
How this Started:
I am a long time Spica devotee and being web savvy, focused my passion on building a comprehensive resource for Spica owners that was also optimized for search engines (SEO). The Spica site has been around for a while now, so I will be the first to admit that like many websites its content and scope has grown a bit beyond my original plans.
My motivation:
I created this site out of the frustration I experienced from trying find the information I needed to repair my speakers. My goal was purely altruistic, with no plan for recouping any of my expenses. While this is a work of love, there are real recurring costs such as hosting services and domain renewal fees. There are also the soft-expenses managing the site, keeping the software updated, dealing with malware and the occasional hacker, that take time away from my Internet Marketing business.
What I do to recover *some* of my expenses.
I run Google and Affiliate Ads on this site. This is called "monetizing content." On the Google side, I am enrolled in the AdSense program. From the advertiser's perspective, I am considered a "publisher" and this is a "content" site. The ads they run are submitted through Google's AdWords program. I am paid when people click an ad to investigate an advertiser's products and services.
I am also running "affiliate ads." There are several "affiliate programs" some of the more common are Commission Junction, eBay, Amazon, as well as Yahoo's and Google's Affiliate Networks. Affiliates get paid differently depending on the program, but generally if someone clicks through from an affiliate site and makes a purchase, the site displaying the ad gets a percentage of the sale.
If you are a business owner in the Huntsville area and need help marketing or monetizing your website, contact me!
