Let's start from another direction. Let's say you sell widgets offline and followed advice last decade and registered www.widgets.com. If a widget can be described easily on a web-site and costs less than $1,000, you probably sell them directly on your web-site. If not, you probably have press releases, contact information for your various departments, descriptions of your various widget products/services, etc. You sell your widgets off-line, but your site supports that process.

Every site in this category would like more traffic. More traffic means more sales means more profits. Isn't that odd? The guy with information site had opposite problem. He had too much traffic. Let's say you realize that and try to increase your traffic by adding some free content. You start writing articles about widgets, start a discussion forum, etc. What happens? Your traffic increases dramatically, but your sales barely increase at all. In fact, you might notice that your sales go down. The new distraction of free content on your site is pulling away attention of those who might otherwise be buying. You find yourself with same problems as above guy who runs a content site. Your focus has been split and core mission of your site (selling widgets) suffers.

There must be a way. Of course, if you sell widgets, you can purchase advertising on widget information sites. And if you have a widget information site, you can sell advertising space. Many find a balance that works well here.

Here's another option. Create a sister site of other type. One site will be 100% informational (almost). The other site will be 100% sales. On informational site, devote most of home page to an advertisement for sales site. We find that about 40% of our traffic ends up at home page no matter how they entered site (many search engines deliver them to a page other than home page). If you place a large advertisement on home page with a large "Enter Site" link under advertisement, we find that you can receive a 30-50% click-thru rate if your sales and information sitse are well matched in topic. That means that you can deliver a significant portion of most likely buyers from your information site to your sales site. Now that your ad is done, don't ever think about commercializing your information site in any other way. Don't put any banners, affiliate links or anything else to drive away information seekers. Just focus on being very best widget information site possible.

Do same for your sales site. Don't ever place anything to distract folks from buying. If you are tempted to put up some kind of content, do it on your information site. If you are starting with an information site and looking for a way to monetize it, forget about all affiliate programs and banners. Either find one good sponsor and put them on your home page, or start your own sales site and become your own sponsor. After a bit of lost focus (setting up sales site) you can hopefully turn all of your attention back to your information site and leave your sales site alone.

With this arrangement, you can drive traffic from an informational site to a sales site and never lose sales because they are distracted by some free content on your sales site.

7. You don't offer a free affiliate program. One of people's basic needs to survive is money. When you offer them a free opportunity to make money they'll line up to visit your web site.

8. You don't offer a free online utility. When you offer a utility that can solve a problem, people will visit your web site. The utility could be a free autoresponder, e-mail account, search engine submission, etc.

9. You don't offer free current information. Supply news stories related to your web site. People want up-to-date news on topics they are interested in. They will also be interested in visiting your web site.

10. You don't offer free samples of your product or service. Have you ever been to a store and you jumped at chance to get a free sample of food? This same concept will also attract people to visit your web site.