...money makingmachine."Turn your visitors into CASH COWS!", "We send your email to 100Million potential customers!" and similar flukes spam ourmailboxes and then in our trash cans.What makes the Internet so difficult is that due to the highlevel of competition among e-commerce sites, most sites do notsell their own products anymore, but they offer products fromsome affiliate program. There are some problems why the typicalmodels do not work for most of us:* Not enough customiza...

...tion * Small commissions * Less Loyalty,so that users return to the merchant and not to your site * Notransparency of revenuesTypically, if you are not an SEO guru, you will have troublegetting enough visitors on to your site and you will end upspinning your wheels with the traffic you buy from searchengines and other placements.The larger merchants can operate because they have investedmillions into their loyalty campaigns, distribution channels andtech development, so there is enough site loyalty and theirtraffic will always convert better than yours at the beginning.As an affiliate site that searches many travel sites at once,Travelgrove had to fight with just these problems. We knew thatrunning CPC (cost per click) campaigns would generate morepredictability of our revenues and would give us more powertowards our merchant partners. The question was only whether wecould convince merchants to work with us on a CPC base ratherthan with commissions.To our disappointment, not a single larger merchant that offersan affiliate program will switch you to CPC, unless your salesforce is on them constantly and by the time it happens your sitemay be broke already.Travelgrove's model was innovative enough to get a few smallermerchants signed on for a trial and was able to start drivingmore traffic. However, with more volume the cost per user wasincreasing quickly, so that Travelgrove wasn't able to increasetraffic more with just marketing.What's to be learnt here is that despite most products in theworld, cost per unit (in this case users) increases with theincrease in volume. With most products we know you would expectthe cost per unit to drop with the increase in volume.Also, the more targeting you apply, the more expensive the usergets. Travelgrove built a partner program to generate morevolume from publishers that implement their searchfunctionality. The volume quickly increased and higher CPC rateswith the merchants could be negotiated.None of this is new, Google Adsense as well as Overture andother PPC feeds are profitable for the reason that they wereable to increase their traffic through third party sites andthose ads often work better in terms of revenue than any otherad you sell to advertisers.Recommendations for those of you who are seeing several similarproblems with your site:1. Join a publisher network like Travelgrove's that allows youto predict your revenue stream and that already has arrangementswith advertisers.2. In addition, choose an ad network that provides you withquality travel targeted banners and then only focus on makingyour site better and better.We believe in joining forces with others to increase our volumeand create a more efficient marketing as well as distributionchannel. For more information about Travelgrove please visitwww.travelgrove.com.If you would like to receive more information about ourpublisher program please send us an email and we will contactyou shortly.