<== Site Review (2012-12-14) ==>

A Fountain of Bargains

A Fountain of Bargains is my personal attempt at affiliate marketing. Sales from AFountainOfBargains.com support the Community Color web sites and other web efforts. Features of the site include the following:

Coupons and Deals

The site displays links for Daily Deals along with coupons. NOTE: when I add a coupon to aFountainOfBargains, the program adds the coupons to the site reviews for the merchant.

Store Inventories

The site uses a GoldenCan integration to show the inventories of top Internet shops including Betty Mills, Cameta Camera, eBags, Vann's, etc.

Store of the Day

AFountainOfBargains includes an index of the Community Color Store of the Day. The store of the day program integrates with the calendar system.

The site also includes a categorized list of banner ads (eg outdoors and finance).

Cascading Style Sheet

NOTE: I actually bought the domain and made the site to test different cascading style sheets. Developing an affiliate web site is a great way to practice web design because you can concentrate on design ... without having to answer to a client.

Less Intrusive Advertising

I started Commmunity Color with high ambitions of creating high quality, information rich sites. To create quality, I needed an income.

My observation is that people interface with the internet in two distinct modes (browsing and shopping modes). When a person is in a browsing mindset, they are looking for information or entertainment. Showing ads to people in browsing mode is a waste time.

The goal is to attract people when they are in shopping mode. When people are in shopping mode, they are looking for the best path to product information and deals on products.

Realizing that people surf the web in two distinct modes, I figure that the best design is to create information rich pages that have a minimum of ads ... but links into a site honed for shoppers.

This idea might work great ... except I've never been that into shopping.

I developed aFountainOfBargains.com with the dual mode idea in mind. My content sites (Affirmative Rationality, etc) have links into the commercial site.

I post quarterly earnings from all of my sites on the affiliate stats page. My costs are $200 a month ($600 a quarter). I post the total income from the Community Color sites (a Fountain of Bargains included) on the . As you see, I have many quarters in which I barely make enough to cover hosting and ISP expenses.

With this model, I would need about $5,000 a quarter to create one minimum wage job.