We are launching a new site www.wineryzone.com.  We have registered the domain and done some very preliminary design work but we probably won't have a great deal of time in the foreseeable future to do the work necessary to have it really functional.

My questions are: does it make sense to set it up as one of those mostly ad sites you see where the pages are mostly generated with sponsored ads?  If so, is there an easy way to do this?

I have always been curious if this pratice is looked upon either favorably or negatively upon by the pay per click serch engines.

Thanks.

My questions are: does it make sense to set it up as one of those mostly ad sites you see where the pages are mostly generated with sponsored ads?  If so, is there an easy way to do this?

If thats the kind of site you're trying to make then it makes sense.  If its a site for your business or something then maybe it doesn't.

But yes its pretty easy to set up, Personally I've got dozens of trash sites that are 90% ads like that.  Nothing wrong with that really as long as your expectations are correct.

I have always been curious if this pratice is looked upon either favorably or negatively upon by the pay per click serch engines.

For a pay per click search engine, I don't think they really care whats on your site as long as you're paying.

If you're going for organic search engine placement, I'd advise against it - use the ads sparingly if at all.

If you're using Google Adsense - Beware!

Although this change happened in late 2005, I've only just become aware of it.

What change?

Sorry, should have mentioned!

People buying traffic through Google AdWords now have two different bid prices - one for the SERPS and one for publishers' pages.

If you are targeting high paying keywords in the SERPS, you're likely to get a much lower CPC on your site.

If you do plan to make most of your business revenue from advertising then you'll want multiple streams of revenue - AdSense is a start, and is just one example of PPC.

Although PPC agents will only let you show PPC ads from one agent, there's nothing stopping you from running affiliate programmes for other people's products. - And this is where it gets interesting. On a range of site's I'm about to launch I've developed my own custom software to do the contextual placements of click-bank products (click-bank sell over 15000 'digital-data' products, software, ebooks, etc).

Staying with affiliates, Amazon have launched a new tool in their range of affiliate advertising - contextual adverts for Amazon products - I have yet to trial it but the contextual placement claims to work in a very similar way to AdSense: Amazon will read your page and supply appropriate adverts that pay commission on sales (not clicks).

You could therefore have AdSense and Amazon products easily placed on your pages.

Back tot he point about SEs

brewpubzone wrote:

My questions are: does it make sense to set it up as one of those mostly ad sites you see where the pages are mostly generated with sponsored ads?  If so, is there an easy way to do this?

You've hit the nail on the head with what you've actually said here, "mostly ads" - SEs love content. Real content that can be used by a site visitor. Else, why bother ranking you?

Goal - Create a resource where people will keep coming to, and monetise with the PPC and affiliate ads. Your resource will bring in the traffic and your adverts will bring in the cash.

Careful with your 'resource' - forums won't work, other community type sites may not work [for reasons beyond the scope of this reply]

Hope this helps and wishing you success!

great advice northie..couldn't have said it better

There are a number of sites from where you can get advertising links - www.linkshare.com is one of them.  I do not thik that the online malls are thought of very highly.  Because of this I do not think that they are very effective (but I may be wrong as I lack any sort of empiracal data).  You may want to put some sort of hook on your site.

www.linkshare.com
www.amazon.com