1 - To earn AdSense income.
2 - To promote your newsletter and build an opt-in email list.
3 - To present a direct sales pitch for a product (a “sales letter” site).
4 - To start a blog for quick indexing and free targeted traffic.
5 - Purely for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes.

In practice, you will usually combine a couple of the above purposes into one website. And if you're smart, you'll ALWAYS include an opt-in form on ALL your sites Let's look at the five types of websites in a little more detail.

1 — The AdSense Site

The goal here is to make a site with good AdSense placements. If you aren't familiar with AdSense,. AdSense is an ad program offered by Google. Unlike affiliate programs, where the visitor has to make a purchase for you to get paid, AdSense pays you whenever someone clicks one of its ads.An AdSense site offers your visitors excellent quality information, plus it displays AdSense in a way that encourages them to read the ads and click on the ones that interest them the most. What you make from an AdSense click depends on many different factors it can be anywhere from a couple of cents to a couple of dollars. Once you qualify for an AdSense account, you place a small piece of code on your website where you want ads to display.

2 — The Opt-In Site

As I mentioned earlier, you should actually build an opt-in list on ALL your sites. But sometimes you will build a site for just this ONE purpose to get subscribers to your opt-in list On an opt-in site, there will be nothing else on the main page except your opt-in box and a call to action, encouraging the visitor to subscribe. The goal of your opt-in site is, of course, high conversions. In this case you're not selling a product you'll do that in your email newsletters though I guess you could say that your newsletter is a free product! The point is to get as many visitors as possible to actually become subscribers.

3 — The Direct Sales Site

The name says it all. Everything on this page layout, content, graphics is designed to “pre-sell” the reader on owning the product. The Direct Sales site is designed to encourage visitors to click through to the merchant's sales page and BUY the product. There's a lot you can do with this type of website. You could provide full product reviews, mini-reviews, videos of the product, testimonials and endorsements, and even compare several similar products side-by-side. Later on I'll show an example of one type of Direct Sales site that has converted very well for my own article traffic.

4 — Blog

Blogs are a very interesting phenomenon, and can really multiply your article marketing efforts. Blogs have a couple of advantages over ordinary websites:

a.Search engines love blogs. If you set up your blog correctly, Google will index your blog pages very fast. This means that if you put the right keywords into the articles you put on your blog (called “posts”), you'll start to get free traffic from searches almost immediately.

b.The beauty of a blog is that you can easily add little scripts to it called “plug-ins” that allow readers to share what you've written on these sites, and with just one click. That's more free targeted traffic, and you don't have to lift a finger to get it. Blogging works incredibly well with affiliate marketing and article marketing if you set up your blog properly. In fact, over the last year and a half I've been using blogs almost exclusively when building new websites. And there are bloggers who make five figures a month using blog marketing, so it definitely works! Recently I developed a whole course on blog marketing with Rosalind Gardner, who you may know as one of the world's most successful affiliates The point is, blogs work hand-in-hand with article marketing

5 — The SEO Site

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the art and science of creating web pages that the search engines especially Google will display on the first page of results for certain keywords you are targeting.

Basically SEO involves more research than the Ezine Articles and ClickBank research you just learned about. You'd need to research keywords related to your niche using a tool like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Then you would write your content using those keywords a specific number of times, as well as including related keywords.

You'd also need to make sure your web page code makes it easy for search engine scripts called “spiders”to read your pages. And finally, you'd start a link-building campaign to get other sites, especially important sites called “authority sites,” to link to your web pages.