Chicago, Illinois (USA) based ShareASale.com is an affiliate marketing network which allows you to sign up for merchant affiliate programs that pay out on a per sale, per lead and/or per hit commission depending upon the merchant.  Once accepted to a merchant’s affiliate program you’ll be able to grab code to insert links and banners to that merchant’s site.  Also, some merchants have made “data feeds” available which allows you to grab their entire product catalog to import to your own site and create product specific links.

One word of advice regarding signing up for affiliate programs: make sure that the merchant is relevant to your blog audience.  While there may be merchants that interest you personally, the focus of selecting merchants should be your blog visitors since they’re the ones who will be generating clicks and sales.

This past week I found a new “pay wiki” site, OneBuckWiki, who’s offering pages for $1 (until 1000 pages are sold, then it goes up to $10).

While this is a new concept for me*, I do see the potential. But only as long as it is moderated, page owners offer valuable content (more than just ads and a bunch of videos or simple iframe inclusions of existing web pages, as those won’t be taken quite as seriously and will drive people away from the site instead of taking the time to look around), visitors continue to come well after the buzz has died down (and people have moved on to a “clone”) AND people are still willing to buy pages after it goes beyond $1…$10?, $20?, what about $100?.

But for a one time $1 payment I guess there’s not really a whole lot to lose. If you get any site traffic from it, it’s well worth the investment, right (as long as your page rank isn’t penalized for some reason, say if the “powers that be” don’t like the concept)?

Anyway, we went ahead and purchased a few pages to help promote Watershed Studio and Surge Bucket Media. (So far we’ve only had a chance to add content for the weird news page which promotes Squirrel Dish, Utter Oddcast and Utter Oddness.) We’ll see how it goes, and hopefully it’ll turn out to be worth the investment.

* Side note, it does seem somewhat like what you can do with Squidoo (for free), but you have a whole lot more control over the content (which may or may not be a good thing depending upon the design knowledge of the page owners…that could be a decent business service though, probably under the guise of SEO).

For advertising on the Watershed Studio blog we are moving away from Google AdSense and we are giving AdBrite a whirl. While AdSense does a great job of serving up relevant “pay-per-click” advertising, we feel it would be better to have the option of advertisers intentionally advertising on the site for as little as one day and at a set price.

If you’re interested in advertising on the Watershed Studio blog you have two options at the moment; advertising on the sidebar of the main page or at the bottom of every individual entry. For advertising information click on the “Advertise with Watershed Studio” link located in the advertising sections.

[Update: January 28, 2008 - We are no longer accepting advertising on the Watershed Studio Blog, but we are still "in the loop" with advertising options and do accept advertising on many of our sister company's (Surge Bucket Media's) blogs.]