A New Approach To Site Promotion

(c) 2005 by Andrew J. Morris

I have a bad habit of designing great websites, then letting
them flounder for lack of promotion. It's not that I don't
know how to promote a site, I just don't like doing it. I'd
rather work on my next site than take the time to promote an
existing one.

I don't think I'm alone in this. There are lots of sites
that promise to do the promotion for you, so they must be
targeting people like me. But most of those sites take a big
fee to do one type of promotion, and we all know diversity
is the key to reaching a wide audience.

But I also suspect there are folks out there just the
opposite. People who love to promote, but hate the day to
day grind of content creation. Obviously, a partnership is
called for -- but matching up the builders with promoters
seems a daunting task.

In any partnership there are issues of trust, compensation,
accountability, and expectations. Working such a
relationship over the Internet makes it even harder. I'll be
first to admit there is no perfect solution, but I think I
have found a very good approach, which overcomes most of the
problems inherent in partner relationships.

I plan on using Google Adsense to reward my
promoting-partner -- let's see how it works:

Google Adsense Program

Google lets webmasters earn money by placing ads on their
websites. Google charges advertisers, matches ads to the
content of the page the ad appears on, and pays the
webmaster for each click the ad receives. Naturally, they
charge advertisers more than they pay webmasters, so Google
makes a profit, the webmaster earns money and the
advertisers get targeted traffic - a win-win-win situation.

The Partner Agreement

So I have a new website that I think fills a niche and
provides a service or product. I need someone to promote
that site for me, because I'm just not good at doing things
I don't enjoy.

I'm offering my new partner space on that website to place
an Adsense ad -- with the partner's Adsense account number.

This solves several problems at once. It doesn't cost me
anything out-of-pocket (Google pays them!) Compensation is
directly tied to results -- more visitors to the site (the
object of promotion) the more clicks they will get on
the Adsense ads, the more the partner earns.

The partner is highly motivated to do a good job, the better
they do the more they earn. I get traffic to my new site (of
course it has to rely on something other than ads for
revenue) at the cost of forgone advertising income.

The partner does not have to worry about not being paid,
Google pays him, not me. I do have to worry about the
partner not doing a fair share of work on promotion -- no
promotion, no earnings, but no penalty either. So our
agreement has to include an option for termination for
non-performance.

But performance can be measured, and an acceptable level
agreed upon from the start. Traffic is not a good measure
since a click-bot could be set up to generate useless
traffic. But sales, memberships, or other criteria may
be appropriate, depending on the nature of the site.

I checked with Google and this does not conflict with their
Adsense terms of use policy -- so long as ads from two
different accounts do not appear on the same page (which
leads to double-serving, and is against policy) I can even
have my own Adsense ads elsewhere on the site.

So the agreement with the partner may specify his/her ads
appear only on certain pages within the site. So long as the
expected revenue is sufficient to compensate for the effort,
everybody wins.

There are lots of variants on this idea that might be tried,
depending on circumstances. Just be careful to abide by the
Adsense terms of service agreement, be fair to all parties,
and be creative.

About the Author

To see this process in action (and even apply yourself if
you read this in April 2005) see:
http://www.qanswered.com/partner.htm