We discuss many accessories to your site here at Virtually Ignorant that are available for cobranding. We thought it might be best to offer one page where we review the concept of cobranding and review some of the services available.

• What is co-branding?
• Why co-brand?
• What to co-brand?

Co-branding is a form of customization. A third party provides a service, such as free email or a search box for your site, and you are allowed to "brand" it with your site's logo, look, and more. Often these days, as an incentive, co-branding services offer affiliate programs and you can make residual income from encouraging other webmasters to sign up for them.

Branding a particular function from one of several script providers gives you the advantage of streamlining the service to look like your site and keeping your visitors on "your" pages. Many of these services can be found for free, sometimes with advertising by the service provider on the results page.

Advantages of co-branding include:

• You do not need to be an expert in setting up the actual service such as web based email, search script, free instant messaging, or free internet hard drive space. The service provider does it for you.
• The server bandwidth is provided by the co-branding company. This can be significant when running such services as a chat script which many web hosting providers will not allow due to the large amount of bandwidth the script can use.
• The co-branding company takes care of any maintenance or upkeep that is needed for the service.
• Many services you can offer require your visitor to come back to your site to log in to the service. This gives your visitors a reason to return often to your site, where you can have fresh content waiting for them to give them more reason to browse the site.

What service you might co-brand depends upon the type of site you own. There are search boxes, free email, discussion boards, free internet storage space, instant messaging, and more.

• Search boxes allow you to offer the most popular activity on the internet on your site, with the results page streamlined to look like it belongs to your site. Some providers of co-branded search boxes include Everyone.net, Mamma.com, www.metagopher.com.
• Free email allows you to offer email@yourowndoomain.com as a service to your viewers. It also brings them back to your site to login and view their mail. Additionally, the free email service may allow you part of the advertising space as well. Often you can set a signature on each outgoing file that your viewers send which contains your site name and URL, thus giving your site more exposure with every outgoing email. Some providers of free co-branded email include Everyone.net, Bravenet.com.
• Discussion boards are a very useful service which offer your site visitors a chance to ask questions, interact with other visitors, or view discussions by other visitors. While owning your own script may be more flexible, you will save all the bandwidth and storage space of a discussion board by using a co-branded service. Check out Everyone.net , www.ikonboard.com for starters.
• Offering Free Internet storage space may be a nice addition to a site that offers MP3's or free images. Your viewers can then save their own hard drive space on their personal computer, and use your site to log in to the storage space service. One such service is www.freedrive.com. Freedrive.com will even pay you $0.25 for each signup from your site.
• Instant messaging gives your visitors the ability to see which of their friends is on-line and chat with them. While many instant messaging services require a download and take up room on your hard drive, JMessenger.com provides a java driven instant messenger that you can co-brand and offer on your site. It is no longer free, and will cost you $50/month.

There are many other services that you can offer on your site, and find a co-branding host for them. You can thus provide more services to your viewers without having the headache of setting up or maintaining the service yourself. With many you can make residual income either with the advertising provided on the service, or with an affiliate commission that they will pay you. Try a few: they're free and can add to your website services.