Raw
The sponsor pays you each time a surfer clicks on a link to the sponsor’s site. If the same surfer clicks on a link twice, you’ll get paid twice.

Unique
Sponsor pays each time a “unique” surfer clicks on a link to the sponsor. Unique is defined as a surfer that hasn’t been to the sponsor’s site from you or anyone else for a specified period of time. If the same surfer clicks on a link twice, you’ll get paid once.

Blind Links
You use whatever misleading text or links you can to get the surfer to click on the link to the sponsor. This isn’t allowed by all sponsors and you should pay attention to Sponsor’s terms and conditions.

Per Impression
You get paid according to how many times the sponsors advertisement gets seen on your page.

Per Sign Up
You’re paid when the surfer signs up. It’s a one time payment. This is mostly used these days and I would recommend you start with this type of sponsorship.

Partnership
The sponsor pays you a percentage of what the surfer pays whenever they pay for membership/access to the site. It pays each and every time the surfer renews their membership.

Email
Pays per verified email address. A surfer enters their email address and the sponsor sends a confirming email. When the surfer responds to the email from the surfer, you get paid.

Commission
You earn a percentage based on how much a surfer spends at a sponsor site. This is typically a sextoys store.

You’ve learned some HTML, you’ve acquired a few applications to get you started, and you’re anxious to launch your first site… So what’s first? Well I don’t know that you have any *one* thing that is first as much as doing many things simultaneously. So let’s consider a checklist — not in any particular order:

Domain Registration

Register your own domain and start your empire. Domains can be registered for as little as $8.00 up to $35.00. Some registrars will allow you to “park” your domain there if you don’t have a host. Some park for free. Be sure to research your domain choices before registering one. Use this Free Domain Search Engine to help you find just the right one!

Hosting

If you’ve bought a domain, you’ll need a host. Not sure how much it will cost? Visit here for a great tutorial on estimating bandwidth. Then use this Bandwidth Cost Calculator to help you figure the cost. Be sure to read up on hosts to get the best deal. Or maybe you don’t have a domain and you’d rather use a free host. Free hosts are okay for beginners because you can sort of practice on a free host. But remember on a free host, you will be sharing your traffic with your host.

Site Building Process

Start building your site. Get a concept in your mind. Let’s say you’re building a freesite, then you should sketch out what you want the site to look like. You might sketch out the navigation plan. Generally a free site might consist of about 5 pages. An index page, 3 gallery pages, and one recip links page. Each gallery page should have no more than 10 images for a total of 30 images on the entire site. More than that and you are really giving away too much free stuff.

Keywords

Consider the keywords you want to add to your site. Be familiar with Search Engine guidelines, you don’t want to do something that is considered spamming the search engine. Use this Search Term Suggestion Tool to generate keywords. There are many other keyword generators, take advantage of them!!

Targeting Traffic

Since this is a free site, you will not be submitting your site to TGP lists. Think about it.. where would you submit? To search engines, link lists, and maybe trade recip links with other free sites. Be sure to put a link on each of your sites to the other sites. Increase your own link popularity !! If your freesite is “Mature Mommas” then you prolly don’t want to list your site on a Teen Link List. Be logical!! But you can diversify a little.. Mature Momma fans might also like to buy some new sextoys!! So you might to channel some of your incoming traffic to a sextoys store site.

Marketing

Marketing is the fun part and it’s so crucial! If you have 8 different sponsors on your site, your surfers are not going to believe you when you say “This is the very best blah blah blah” nineteen different times for nineteen different sites. Your slogans need to be credible. Don’t slap up too many banner ads, text links have been shown to be just as effective and take less time to download. Visit your sponsors and study their tours. See what they are using to sell the site. What words do they use? What features?

1. Use fewer files and directories

• Every file is a separate call to the server.
• Instead of using many small images you might consider using an imagemap.
• Decrease the number of directory structure levels.

2. Limit your spacing

• While we know that spaces in your code, as a rule, should not effect the layout, it does effect how it’s parsed. Decrease or eliminate the spaces between your lines of code.

3. Use relative addressing instead of absolute addressing.

• Instead of using href=http://www.mydomain.com/images/pic1.jpg, use href=”../images/pic1.jpg”
• To really speed things up use the <base> tag in the <head> like this: <base href=http://www.mydomain.com> then use relative addressing in the rest of the page.

4. Use HTML to control spacing when possible

• Instead of using a spacer.gif to manipulate space, try using &nbsp; for horizontal spacing and the <br> and <p> tags for vertical spacing.

5. Eliminate repetitive tags

• This is something you’ll often find in pages created with point and click web applications (WYSIWYG HTML editors) for example:<font face=”arial”>Hello World</font> <font face=”arial”>Welcome to my web page.</font>

  In this example the first </font> and the second <font face=”arial”> could be eliminated.

6. Eliminate attributes with default values

• For example, you don’t need to use these:
  <body text=”black”>
  <div align=”left”>
  <font size=”3″ color=”silver” face=”times”>

7. Use short file names and directories

• Instead of href=”../imagefiles/companylogos/advertisements.html try href=”../imgs/logos/ads.html

8. Use Cascading Style Sheets

• Use CSS to position your content. It requires less code and you have more accurate control over layout.

9. Beware of WYSIWYG code trash

• Many web authoring apps add their own proprietary code. FrontPage is notorious for this. Beware!!
• Clean up your META tag. You don’t need the following info in your METAs:
  <META NAME=”generator” content=”Microsoft FrontPage 4.0″>
  <META NAME=”ProgId” CONTENT=”FrontPage.Editor.Document”>

10. Table Savvy

• Avoid nesting tables. Rather than creating complex table layouts, use the attributes rowspan and colspan to control content layout.
• If you can, fill empty table data cells with &nbsp; This weighs less than a spacer.gif.
• Tables take time. Even if you need to use a table for some of your content, the entire page doesn’t have to be in a table.

Do you have any other suggestions? Add them to the comments below! Ok, the holidays are over… Let’s get back to work.