Sometimes you face the problem of bandwidth leakage, even you don’t see much traffic for your site your controlpanel shows heavy bandwidth usage. So you must check what is going wrong with your bandwidth.
There can be many reasons for this but first of all you should check for your images/video and take care for not being compromised or hotlinked. Some blackhat webmaster tries to save their bandwidth by hotlinking files at other sites.

What is Hotlink :
When you link to an image/video on someone else’s server instead of saving that image to your computer and uploading it to your blog/site. When you do this you are stealing bandwidth of the other linking site.
When your visitor loads the page with those images, they are actually loading image/video from the other site eating up the bandwidth of that site.

Some webmaster do such unethical practices as to save their bandwidth, as they have limited amount of bandwidth allowed each month and if it get exceeded then their host may suspend their account so they play such tricks. As a webmaster we should be aware of such illegal practices and should protect us.

How to Detect The Bandwidth Thieves :
Most effective way to check who are the culprits is through checking your web server logs for referrals to the images on your website. Trace the referrers in the logs to the actual referring website and check the offending web page. If you find your graphics displayed on their page, check the HTML source for that page and find out where the graphic files are hosted. If the IMG tag points to your website, it means they are using your bandwidth for their website.

How to protect yourself :
Using .htaccess, you can disallow hot linking on your server, so those attempting to link to your images are either blocked (failed request, such as a broken image) or served with different content may be with some funny image.
Note that mod_rewrite needs to be enabled on your server in order for this aspect of .htaccess to work. If you are using Wordpress, there is a hotlink protection plugin that you can install which fights bandwidth theft.

Once your site is online with good traffic you might wish to have some extra revenue from it. You may consider signing some affiliate program so that you start earning from your site. Before signing any affiliate program you must think which program you should choose, you may consider the most basic form as Pay Per Click (PPC) or Pay Per Performance (PPP). Both should bring satisfactory results depending on how you evaluate them.

Pay Per Click (PPC):

This type of affiliate programs have gained popularity among affiliate marketers due to it’s easy setup. Using Pay Per Click affiliate programs you get your click rate whenever a visitor click your advertise and is diverted to your merchants’s site regardless
your visitor buys some product or not. Your merchants can either offer text or banner ads for you to place on your site so when a visitor clicks on text or banner you get paid certain amount or percentage for each click. You should not except to get big bucks for a single click because at most a single click can be charged for as low as $.05 but if try to pull a huge
traffic then your click through ratio increases giving you a good payout.

Pay Per Performance (PPP):

Using this type of affiliate program you can earn huge revenue but your diverted traffic should be targeted traffic for your merchant so that they can get converted to customer/service user or buys some product. Your merchant will pay you certain commission for each sale they get from your traffic.
This type of affiliate programs are popular among merchants and are often used by finance and insurance companies who need sign-ups for their business to grow.
The commission pay out is quite considerate ranging around 15% to 50% depending upon the product and it’s value.

These two programs are most popular affiliate programs and are widely used.