In the January/February 2007 (Vol 4) issue of Revenue Magazine, I was reading a column by Pedro Sostre called By Design. In his column Pedro selects a site and features it in the ‘Revenue’s By Design Makeover’. As always, he offered some excellent insight in this issue on how a webmaster can more effectively monetize his content. Find Pedro’s column archive on the By Design homepage..

What struck me though, was his intro for the Jan/Feb 2007 article where he discusses the two camps of site administrators:

I find that many website owners are divided into two camps. One camp is very good at developing unique content and garnering tons of search engine traffic, but they have a hard time turning that traffic into dollars. The other camp is great at monetizing traffic, but they can never generate very much traffic.

The reason this was interesting to me is because we at AvantLink have classified site administrators exactly the same way. There are many quality, legacy content sites out there that have very far reaching search engine exposure, yet they haven’t quite figured out how to earn valid commission through all their hard work. These sites might not use the most stylish designs, but they drive high traffic volume primarily through the major search engines like Google or social networking sites like Netscape or StumbleUpon. The reason? They are exploding with rich, unique and informative content!

And content is what they’re good at. That’s their thing. This is where AvantLink comes in. We not only provide pro Affiliates with all the technology and tools they need, but we also offer webmasters who aren’t yet Affiliates powerful and dynamic solutions that help them monetize their existing content. These publisher owners don’t necessarily have the time to learn to program a datafeed or add targeted product displays. Their strengths are article and copy writing, and by integrating our advanced tools they can continue to do what they’ve always done to drive traffic.

Take for example the site Hometips.com. Hometips is a legacy content site that features hundreds of home improvement and do-it-yourself pages, all crawled regularly and indexed by the major search engines. They’ve been online for a number of years publishing very informative and useful content. With a great readership it wasn’t a good idea for the Hometips folks to take time away from content building to learn datafeeds and page monetizing, so we suggested adding a few ToolKing.com categories from our Datafeed Manager. A couple of weeks of discussion and working together and the result is an organized, dynamic and seo-friendly tool store linked up from their main navigation (notice the pagerank!). It was just a matter of configuring the Web Service Datafeed Client for Hometips, installing the product, and linking it up. That’s all! Hometips has since enjoyed an additional revenue source from their site that requires no maintenance.

Oh by the way, if you have a far reaching content site and you would like AvantLink to install a relevant datafeed for you like we did for Hometips, drop us a line! As an authority and respected site, your product content will rank in the search engines effectively harnessing the best converting traffic on the web.

Gary & AvantLink