You answer(s) to this question will determine how you proceed. If you are just trying to get traffic or increase your search engine ranking, then you do not need to put in anywhere near as much time and care into your program. Just create your graphic, a simple explanation page and make your award known.

If, on other hand, you've got loftier goals, then you need to continue your thought process. Now that you've decided on your purpose, think about some other things.

1) Do you want a general award (best site) or a specific award (best Star Trek The Next Generation fan site with pictures of James T. Kirk?)

2) Do you want to allow automatic submissions (which means many people will who apply for your award will never even see your site?)

3) How specific do you want to get with criteria? Some programs just say "you'll get it if I like your site" and others have pages of complex equations stating exactly what is expected to get an award.

4) This is very important: how much time do you want to spend on your awards program? A couple of hours a week? More? Less?

5) Are there specific types of sites that you do not want to allow? For example, many programs exclude adult sites and our own program excludes psychiatric sites. It doesn't matter whether or not anyone agrees with your exclusions - it is your awards program and you need to be comfortable with it.

6) Do you want to allow children under age 13? If so, you had better review legal requirements involved (specifically Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.)

In addition to all of this, it is also important to treat your awards program seriously, at least as seriously as your web site. As you hand out your award to more and more sites, you will find people judging you based upon whom you have judged. Give out your award lightly just to get some traffic, and you will find your own site judged lightly and visited infrequently.

Earmark a certain percentage of income for additional advertising.

Spend a little time marketing your site -everyday-!

---Another option

The more I look at 'affiliate stores', such as Vstore ( http://www.vstore.com/ ), more I like idea.

Using Vstore as an example: within a few minutes you can have a very professional looking website, with products to sell, and a way to make money.

This cuts down on html learning curve, and time necessary to find affiliate programs with products that you want to sell.

They generate website for you based on a number of templates, then you promote it, and if you make any sales you get a percentage of those sales.

The nice thing about this approach is that you get to skip ahead to marketing and promoting phase of your Internet presence.

And as you are learning how to bring people to your site you have ability to make some money from them.

You still need to get your own domain name and have it point to your Vstore. This is necessary because:

Good domain names -really are- disappearing at a very rapid rate. A big reason for this is that there are entire companies out there that have a business model based on buying and reselling good names. They dedicate people to going through dictionary grabbing everything they possibly can.

And ridiculously over-inflated prices amaze me. If you visit Great Domains at http://www.greatdomains.com you will see what I mean.

There are biggies like loans.com which sold for $3 million dollars. Well, it is a short name, easy to remember, and there is a ton of money to be made in Internet loans.

This I can somewhat understand. But what about those that have: myreallystupiddomainname.com and are trying to sell it for $150,000?!

That part I don't get. But either way, name that you want for your business will be gone if you don't get serious and grab it.

Besides, it used to be a $70 decision...not anymore. A newsletter that I follow recently mentioned http://www.000domains.com as having great service, and at a low price.

They register your domain, for as little as one year, up to 10 years, for only $13.50 a year!!!

If you can't afford $13.50 for your business...its time to get that lottery ticket again!

Anyway, if you can, go ahead and find an inexpensive website host, ones for $10 a month will do. Create your index.html and then have that page point to your Vstore.

Don't do any automatic redirecting, make it a decent page with your keywords, and a description of your store. A nice graphic will do, or you can even copy look of your actual Vstore. Then put a 'Click Here to Enter' link that sends them to your Vstore.

This is very powerful for several reasons. You can control your keyword selection and experiment with different looks and content for your main page.

Many search engines penalize you, or won't even list your page if it automatically redirects to another site.

If you outgrow your Vstore relationship, or come up with a better idea and decide you want to change it, then you can just modify your index.html file and move on.

It is much better to be in control. And, you won't have to start your promotional efforts all over again, because your name will be out there all over place already.

Plus, you now have a www.yourname.com address to point your friends and potential customers to.

Well, we've talked about a couple of options here. You can choose either one, just make sure you have right mindset if you decide to throw up something on free sites.

Don't base your success or failure on them...instead use them as a training ground to prepare you for when you are ready to create a -real- website.