Put Your Spare Domain Names To Work For You Using Affiliate Programs


by Benjamin Cortese - Date: 2007-01-05 - Word Count: 456 Share This!

Every website owner/operator is familiar with affiliate programs, we all belong to one or more, or have at one time, and display banners and buttons on our websites offering anything from a credit card to viagra, Which is completely fine for attracting perspective buyers to products that your affiliate sponsors offer. There's no crime in earning a little revenue to support your website and your hard work designing, developing and supporting it.

But if you're like me at all, you have a few domain names sitting around doing nothing too. It occurred to me that having the domain names listed for sale has generated little or no revenue, but every year I renew them because I think that they are good domain names and have marketing potential if put into the right hands.

So I decided to do a little research and find out what affiliate programs were out there that offered more than buttons and banners, and I found that there are a number of affiliate companies that offer RSS feeds and Data Feeds and even some offer complete "Turn-key" websites already built for you, download an asp or php version of the Turn-Key site to put on your own server and you're good to go. Point your domain name to it, and you're offering a service or product that people have a use for, just go about your normal marketing practices for the site(s).

I narrowed my search to those affiliate programs offering "Data Feeds". These are feeds that come in the form of XML or RSS feeds, as well as Text or CSV files that the affiliate would make available to you to download and use how you see fit, with some restrictions of course. Researching those affiliate programs I found that these feeds would provide all of the information, or at least much of it to the same extent as the affiliate website themselves. Which to me meant that I could build a dynamic website offering some great things in a way the I controlled without having to maintain an inventory or process payments or handle returns and deal with any billing issues should they arrise.

I've also cross referenced each of the sites with my own banners promoting the other sites from within my sites so that visibility to all of the affiliate programs is blended throughout the 3 websites which is helpful in generating sales if not traffic. So if you are sitting on a few domain names and would like to put them to work for you, try researching some of the affiliate programs out there that offer these type of data feeds and see if you can use them to your advantage as well.

Thanks for reading, and happy (and hopefully profitable) coding.


Related Tags: affiliate programs, affiliate, rss, domain names, xml, data feeds, csv, txt

Ben Cortese is a developer and business analyst for the financial industry and enjoys developing personal websites.

Copyright 2006. Article can be reprinted as long as author credits are given and content remains unchanged and intact.

An example where I use these feeds can be seen in action here http://www.news-junkie.net. This is a personal site that I had developed a while ago that is a simple news aggregation website with a number of different topics. I found it fun to develop and good practice working with xml and CF. The information is constantly updated and visitors to my site see fresh new articles everyday, and all I have to do now that it is built, is keep the domain name active and maybe switch around a few of my affiliate links which hopefully provide a little income to pay for the hosting of the site.

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