Viral Marketing and Branding

Another example of a site that's become hugely popular is Beer.com.

I know nothing about the owners of the site, their business model, or how they got to where they're at, but there's no reason you can't learn some lessons from how they became so popular.

The biggest thing they did to start generating lots of traffic was the virtual bartender campaign. Talk about something that got the traffic rolling in. And of course, you can submit your email address to get updates too, and I go back to visit the site every time I get an email from them.

Their content isn't specifically designed to sell a product, necessarily; it's designed to generate traffic. That traffic is then used to generate ad revenue, I'd imagine. No reason someone bright couldn't do something similar using an affiliate marketing model or Adsense to begin with, and then do their own media selling once they have the traffic to warrant it.