If you’re like us, you hear about the latest and greatest Social Media tools every day - only to be disappointed.
We’ll we’ve found a few that we feel are actually useful. We found these three tools on Rhea Drysdale’s Refresh Jacksonville Social Media Presentation. Rhea has a fairly new blog out of Jacksonville, FL, but we like what we see so far…
In her presentation, she listed several Social Media Tips and Tools.
Here are three tools that we really liked and have add to our list of useful Social Media tools.
This is the only tool in the list that isn’t completely free, but it’s still a must have tool for us. The sales letter sucks in my opinion, but Brandon Hall has been awesome to work with. They handled the Netscape to Propeller change within a few days.
If you submit to more than one Social Media website, you need this tool.
This tool allows you to enter your URL, Title, Desription, and Tags one time and then submit to the major Social Media Sites with a few mouse clicks. Think about it, if you submit a story (we submit at least 10 per day) to the top 5-7 Social Media Sites - how many times do you have to copy paste?
This tool saves us so much time every day!
The tool is the the ultimate time saver to building powerful social media accounts. One of the secrets of top Diggers, Stumblers, Navigators etc… is being the first to submit stories already becoming popular on other social news sites. For example you can browse Reddit to find good stories already submitted and be the first to submit them to Digg. You can browse Digg and be the first to Stumble pages that are becoming popular there. Most if not all articles on the front page of Digg are submitted to StumbleUpon and will get a lot of Thumbs up. If you were the first to Stumble that when the page reaches the Popular page for its tags and category on Stumble your account will be the one listed next to it, which will give you more friends and fans and so on.
This is a great tool! In additional to the above stuff, it also makes it easier to support your friends who may not have links or buttons on their blog posts. This tool will tell you if it’s been submitted on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious at a glance. It will also let you submit a link with the click of a button.
This is a great little tool that allows you to track the status of you recently submitted stories without having to log in to Digg. It show a list of your latest 1- 100 submissions with the number of votes and comments. The tools automatically updates the numbers for you at the interval you set. We have ours set to every 10 minutes. It even tells you when your story is made popular.
Ever wonder who’s got your back on Digg? The Digg Entourage tool checks the last 25 stories you submitted, figures out who dugg the most of them, and prints out your Digg Entourage along with tons of data on who your friends really are (or who should be)!
This is an interesting little tool that tells you who votes on your stories and how many times they’ve voted on your stories. The best thing about this little tool is that we found several people who support us that were not currently on our friend’s list. We never would have know about these people without this tool.
Tags: Digg Alerter, Digg Entourage, Firefox extensions, Rhea Drysdale, Social Media For Firefox, Social Media Tools, Web2Submitter
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ClickBank has been a source of endless frustration for so many of us who not only make money online, but actually make a living purely online!
On one hand the ClickBank network offers some of the best converting affiliate products anywhere. So, we all work with them. They also reliably make payouts every 2 weeks, yet another strong point in their favor.
But the major problem until just recently - they refused to show you how much traffic you’ve sent them, so you could never accurately figure out which affiliate products are converting better than others. AAAhhhhh!
So what’s the problem?
While this may not matter much to someone who’s happy to get a $50 ClickBank check every few months, for those of us who bring in several thousand dollars a month from affiliate revenue (from sales of many different affiliate products), optimizing your conversion funnel matters. It matters A LOT.
Can’t you track affiliate conversions yourself?
In short, no. The best you could do was to use OpenAds to track your outgoing clicks for each affiliate product, and then compare that with the actual sales at the end of the month. But that’s error prone.
What you want is to see a per-product breakdown of how many clicks you’ve sent and how many sales you made. THEN you can see what’s actually making you money, so you know where to focus your energy the most. Read: do more of whatever works the best.
So how can you see product conversion stats from ClickBank?
Well, this is a new feature, and it’s buried down deep. But, if you look deep within their reporting tools, and select just the right combination of options (see the image), you’ll get… drumroll please… conversion stats broken down by product! Yeah!!!
Note that currently this is only available for the "by publishers" report, and only for the past 30 days.
And this is what you’ll be seeing… Note how neatly the crucial numbers are computing for you. You see "clicks per order" and how much money you actually made per click. Looking at this graph, can YOU pick out the obvious winner?
While we found it quite by accident while reviewing our top money makers for the past several months, we’re very happy and grateful to see this new feature.
Any great tips to optimize affiliate conversions?
Absolutely. More on this in a future article, but here are some big ones…
- Use OpenAds to split-test ad headlines, and see which attract more clicks to each affiliate products. Every couple of weeks, choose a winner, and add a new contender to "beat the control".
- Use "goals" in Google Analytics to track how well your pre-sale review of the affiliate product is performing. You can see how many clicks to the product sales page you generate, and what your abandonment rate is. You DO pre-sell your affiliate products, don’t you?
Tags: affiliate marketing, analytics, ClickBank, clickbank stats, conversion stats, Google Analytics, Google Analytics goals, make money online
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The debate over providing a full RSS feed or just a partial (teaser) feed has been going on in the blogosphere for years. Some bloggers swear by full feeds, while others are hesitant to offer more than a few lines of teaser text for each post.
Wait a minute, what’s the difference here?
Some people will only read blogs in RSS feed readers. They’ll visit some web sites directly, but every day they sit down and scan headlines from their favorite blogs in their feed reader.
When you set up and start your new blog, one of the most important configuration decisions you make is whether to give these readers full access to your text content directly in their feed readers, i.e. a full RSS feed.
Your other option is to show them only the headline and a teaser for each article, and to make them click through to your site to read the full article.
Why would you NOT offer a full RSS feed?
There are various reasons bloggers give for not offering a full feed…
Bloggers who focus on making money online usually prefer to have their readers come to the actual site, where they can click on ads, etc.
Readers who consume the content through RSS are not nearly as easy to monetize as are visitors who visit the website directly. Through an RSS feed, they can’t click on AdSense ads, etc.
There are definitely ways to monetize your RSS feed as well, but they’re not as elegant or as flexible as general website monetization options.
Providing a full feed makes it easy for scraper sites (a.k.a. AdSense scraper sites) to suck and republish their content.
The concern here is that if Google stumbled upon your hot new article on these sites FIRST (before finding it on your site), then this "SPAM" site would essentially trick Google into thinking they published it first. That would give them "first content rights", so that site would "rank" for your article content instead of you.
Theoretically, this could indeed be an issue for small blogs, since small blogs are not spidered by Google nearly as often as the most popular sites are. So, technically Google MAY discover that fresh content on another site that just sucked it down and republished it.
However, that’s only an issue for sites while they’re very small, and frankly it’s not really much of an issue at all.
The good people at Google are very good at sniffing out junk sites and sifting through all the crap to find the truly useful sites. If your site is actually good and useful, then people will be linking to you organically, and your blog value will rise. Not only will Google start indexing your content much faster, but they’ll immediately know that your site has much more value than some SPAM site that nobody has ever linked to without a reciprocal link.
The short version is: don’t worry about this! Stay the course and focus on making your blog the absolute best that it can be. There are also measures you can take to foil these scraper sites.
Deep linking - The secret to foiling AdSense scraper sites?
One simple solution to get around the issue of scraper sites republishing your content by RSS and taking credit for it is to place deep links to your own content within each post. Then when Google scans the articles on these sites, you’ll get free linkbacks from these very sites - very cool!
Note that deep linking is very valuable to begin with, whether you care about scraper sites or not. People naturally click on links, so if you link to your own articles from within articles you write every day, your readers will spend more time on your site and find articles they would not have found otherwise. Definitely a good thing.
Also, Google will notice that you find your own content useful enough that you yourself link to it, so you’ll get SEO kudos for it as well.
Are there any real advantages to offering a full RSS feed to your readers?
Absolutely! To us, it’s all about our readers and getting our content in front of as many readers as possible. Period!
Fact is, some people will only read blogs in feed readers. Not all, but some. That’s just a reality of the world we live in. Those people simply won’t come to your site, and won’t subscribe to your RSS feed unless it’s a full feed.
So we offer our content to our readers the way they want it, and this way we capture these people as readers.
Hogging the full RSS feed is essentially making decisions out of fear and a lack mentality. That’s a very bad place to be if you hope to grow and prosper.
So set your full RSS feed free and watch your RSS readership surge!
Tags: adsense sites, FeedBurner, full feed, partial feed, readers, RSS feed, scraper sites, spam sites, subscribers
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Can you Make REAL Money with Affiliate Marketing?
Ah, the mysterious and sometimes black art of affiliate marketing… the well kept secret of the most successful Internet marketers.
Many people have tried and failed to make any money online with affiliate marketing… usually because they give up way too quickly. Fact is, affiliate marketing takes some up front effort to get optimized and working right, but when it’s working, life is very, very good.
Most bloggers only use Google AdSense to monetize their sites. AdSense is a great revenue option, but affiliate marketing can easily bring in double your AdSense revenue, WITHOUT impacting your AdSense earnings.
What’s more, the work you put into developing a good affiliate marketing strategy will pay off for months and years to come. You only do the work once, and it keeps on giving! Now that’s working smarter, not harder.
Passive income, and Blog Monetization Zen.
The best kept secret of affiliate marketing…. Shhhhh!
The biggest secret to successful affiliate marketing is this… It’s all about the pre-sale.
Putting up banners and links will get you some conversions - if you’re lucky. But if that’s your main attempt at affiliate marketing, then it’s a big waste of your time and effort.
People visiting your site (your readers, web visitors) are looking for information. And if you’re doing your job well and putting together great information, then your articles and reviews will be indexed and well ranked by the search engines - making it THAT much easier for these searchers to find your site instead of someone else’s. The more search engine traffic you’re getting, the better.
This is because people WHO ARE MOSTLY READY TO BUY search for reviews and articles about their products of choice. Sometimes they want to see their options for a product category, but often times they just want to justify to themselves why it’s OK to buy that product they really want.
So - they want to see an honest, objective review of a product before they buy it. They want your personal seal of approval. So find great products, provide and honest review with benefits and weaknesses, recommend the product, and offer affiliate links to purchase them.
But what if you don’t like the product you’re recommending? Is that dishonest? Will it still work?
A question plaguing most beginners with affiliate marketing… "Isn’t it dishonest to recommend something you don’t like?"
Of course it’s dishonest to recommend something you don’t actually believe in. And here’s a little secret. If you write a dishonest review, your readers will pick up on that, and they’ll probably move on and NOT buy using your affiliate links.
So here’s a radical solution. Focus on doing reviews and writing articles for products that you LIKE and can actually RECOMMEND. 
Where to find the BEST affiliate products to promote
You know your niche inside and out, don’t you? If not, go back to the drawing board and learn it!
To make thousands of dollars every month in passive income from your blog, your information must be top notch, and for that you have to be an authority on your topic. It’s that simple.
OK, so now that you have an idea about what types of products MIGHT be interesting to your nice, you set out to find the best performing products. No, not just any products… you want to find the ones that are performing well for others, and you start there. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
ClickBank tips and tricks - how to start making money today
ClickBank is a huge marketplace for selling digital products. And it has the easiest to use affiliate program out there. You literally just sign up, search for products to promote by keyword, and get the code to promote them on your site.
You can also see how much you’ll get for every sale, and what percentage of the sale amount that is. Hint - - don’t look for the larger total price, but rather the program that offers you the highest percentage of each sale.
The downside: ClickBank has the worst stats tracking of any affiliate network out there. They don’t show you how many clicks you’ve sent to a product, which can be really frustrating. They only tell you when you’ve made a sale, and how much you made. This approach also doesn’t allow for testing to make sure your links are good. But alas, it’s basically a must for any serious affiliate marketer. So go sign up for ClickBank and find some products to promote.
Commission Junction
Comission Junction is another top affiliate network. It provides great stats for clicks sent, and also gives you great comparative numbers on how much others are really earning for sales across all merchants.
But their products are generally not as juicy as those on ClickBank. Nevertheless, sign up for Comission Junction as well to round out your list of affiliate products, and find yourself some well converting products to try out.
Other affiliate marketing networks and programs
There are some other affiliate networks out there that are worth paying attention to, but it’s very important to not spread yourself too thin. Do your research and find the programs you’ll be focusing on, and go from there.
SharePayNow vs. Clickbank
Another affiliate network similar to ClickBank that’s starting to gain some ground is SharePayNow.
This network is very similar to ClickBank, but unlike ClickBank, it DOES show you how many clicks you’ve sent to a campaign - which is always nice. However, unlike ClickBank, it doesn’t show you which programs in their marketplace are converting and how well. But SharePayNow is definitely worth checking out when you’re choosing products to promote on your site.
AzoogleAds vs. LinkShare - alternate affiliate networks
If you’re looking for some banner ads to check out, you’ll need to find an affiliate program that provides those. AzoogleAds and LinkShare are both large affiliate networks that are worth checking out.
But there’s a big difference, and having dealt with both we’ll be avoiding LinkShare in the future. LinkShare feels like a large, sluggish company, while AzoogleAds is young and on the ball. The AzoogleAds support is great, and you get your own very responsive dedicated account manager that’s actually eager to work with you and help you find well converting campaigns for your site. Wow, imagine that.
Here’s a major difference though - AzoogleAds tends to offer well paying promotions for affiliates, which pay out significantly better than their counterparts on LinkShare.
Check out AzoogleAds and see which of their promotions could work for you.
The Amazon affiliate program
And of course, the most popular affiliate program of all time, the Amazon affiliate program.
For some truly bizarre reason, the Amazon affiliate program is one of the most popular and successful affiliate programs in the history of Internet marketing.
Maybe it’s because it’s downright easy to set up Amazon affiliate links for your site, and start making a little money. More likely, it’s because we all BUY books and other products from Amazon regularly, so we’re comfortable with it. And we know that others buy from Amazon as well.
Here’s the catch though. Amazon pays you roughly 5% of the revenues you generate for them. That is lower than just about ANY website and blog monetization scheme out there.
While it is another monetization option, there are just too many other better options with much higher payouts.
Knowing this, should you still sign up for the Amazon affiliate program?
Yes, you should definitely still sign up for this program. You will eventually either refer to or actually review various books on your website. These books will likely not have direct affiliate options, so the only way to monetize these referrals will be through a quick link to the Amazon product page.
Also, that Amazon affiliate link is a great way to provide your reader more information on the book you’re talking about, and make it easy for your readers to purchase the book.
Amazon also has a really neat feature for affiliates, which creates a dynamic preview of the book when your readers hover their mouse cursor over the book link on your site. All it takes is a tiny JavaScript snippet you’ll get from Amazon.
For an example of the Amazon product preview pop-up, check out this post on AskDanAndJennifer.com answering a reader question about steamy date night DVDs - hover over the DVD titles.
So go ahead and sign up to the Amazon affiliate program as well, but don’t spend a lot of time putting up their banners and other sales tools. Instead, us this as a laser focused way to monetize reviews and references to popular books that you include in your articles.
And suddenly you have ONE MORE revenue source paying you every month…
The eBay affiliate program and AuctionAds
Yeah, the whole "make money with eBay" thing was and still is a great opportunity for some, but it’s become more of a fad. Starting a blog is a solid way to make long term income - just for doing some writing on stuff you actually like and care about. Imagine that!
Unlike Amazon, eBay shows some serious lovin’ for it’s affiliates. In fact, in June 2007, eBay nearly doubled it’s affiliate payout amounts. That’s some serious affiliate lovin’.
eBay pays you both a flat reward for each referral you send them (a customer who creates an eBay account and eventually buys something) and also a percentage of the sales generated from the referrals you send them. Now that’s pretty cool.
What’s the best way to add eBay listings to your site and make money?
Until recently, it’s been a challenge to add eBay listings to your site in a visually appealing way, so as to really get your visitors engaged. But AuctionAds makes it very easy to do this, with their easy to customize widgets. You can customize the ad unit on their site, copy the little code snippet, and add it to your site. Done - you’ve got eBay auction ads.
Can you make more money with eBay by using AuctionAds?
YES! The eBay affiliate program is tiered to pay you a lot more money as a high traffic affiliate. So if you have a lot of sales and referrals every month, you make much more PER REFERRAL than someone with just a few sales / referrals per month.
By joining AuctionAds, your commissions are based on the entire AuctionAds member base, not just your own sales. So each referral and sale you generate are compensated as a very high traffic affiliate. Again, this is working smarter, not harder. Sign up for AuctionAds to add eBay auctions to your site - and make money as a high traffic eBay affiliate.
Adult affiliate programs - web cam girls, kinky adult personals, and more… Oh, my!
Wait a minute - is there really money to be made in the adult industry?
Where’ve YOU been? Oh yeah, most definitely. Where there’s demand (as in 50% of all the web traffic today), there’s money to be made.
OK kids, everyone who’s going to be offended here please cover your eyes and skip this section like good boys and girls.
What’s the best adult affiliate program to get started with?
One of the most successful and best paying affiliate programs in "the business" is ClickCash. They’ve been around since the mid 1990’s. Their iFriends site connects people with webcams (a.k.a. cam girls, or "content producers") with web surfers (a.k.a. "consumers"). They provide web cam streams for every possible sexual interest that might have enough consumers who posses credit cards. And they provide a way for many content producers to make a LOT of money from the privacy of their own homes.
ClickCash offers a variety of well converting banners and sites, but some of their best converting sites are Sizzling Cams and Totally Free Cams - WARNING, these are adult sites. Before you click, cover your eyes - and if you’re at work, turn your speakers off!
And get this… you actually make $40 for every FREE signup you send them. These referrals only have to sign up with them and provide a valid credit card, but they’re not charged anything. This person is signing up for a free membership, and they’re asked for their credit card to "verify their age".
Admittedly, getting a credit card is indeed a more accurate way of verifying adulthood than asking your visitors to "click here if you’re over 18".
Anyway, their profit margins are so high, that they will pay you $40 or more (up to $80) per sign-up you send them. And the pay scale is graduated - for more than 5 referrals in a week, you get $45 each, and it goes up to $80 per FREE referral.
Downline referrals
Oh, and if you get other affiliates to sign up, you’ll receive an extra 10% for all the money THEY make. So, you refer your friend who gets 10 conversions next month. That’s $400 for him and $40 for you more than you’re making now. Think of it as a gift for referring your friend to such a successful affiliate program.
So if you’re a little adventurous and open minded, sign up with ClickCash today and start making serious cash from sending FREE signups to ClickCash and iFriends.
But what about adult personals sites, like Adult Friend Finder?
An adult personals site is an excellent complement to promoting ClickCash streaming video sites. Providing more options for your visitors is Always a good thing.
Adult Friend Finder is the most popular adult personals site on the Internet today. What many people don’t realize is that AdultFriendFinder gets more web visitors every day than Match.com, eHarmony, and Yahoo Personals put together. Hmmmm… perhaps there’s money to be made in this niche anyway.
Adult Friend Finder pays between $30 and $85 for EACH paid membership you send them, depending on the promotion they’re running at any given time.
But remember - unlike ClickCash, these visitors need to actually buy something. Regardless, the conversions here are much better than traditional non-adult online dating sites.
Sign up to the Adult Friend Finder affiliate program and give it a try.
Must have affiliate marketing tools
Don’t waste your time and money fumbling around in the dark. You can so easily waste too much of your already scarce time and energy. You should be spending that time laser-focused on doing the things that will MAKE YOU MONEY!
Don’t re-invent the wheel. Find successful affiliate marketers and do what they’re doing!
First, check out the Super Affiliate Handbook. Rosalind Gardner, one of the most successful affiliate marketers in recent years, laid out all the basics on how to really succeed with affiliate marketing in the Super Affiliate Handbook. She goes into great detail about what she did, how she did it, and how you can follow her example. No, it’s not going to show you every step of the way and guarantee your path to amazing riches, but it’ll get you started and on the right path, fast.
Download the Super Affiliate Handbook and get the basics down BEFORE you spend lots of time and money with trial and error.
Then, when you’re ready for advanced affiliate and ClickBank tactics, you’ll want to check out Affiliate Project X. This guide reveals some really well thought out, advanced tactics for making more money on ClickBank, and shows you how to easily figure out what the successful affiliate marketers are doing - so you can do it too! Some people really like it, while others think it’s not so great. We consider it well worth the time to read it, as well as the modest monetary investment. Here’s our recent review of Affiliate Project X.
How to get these guides, and why you should do it
These books are well worth getting, and they’re electronic, so you can actually be scouring them just a few minutes from now.
What’s really great is that you can basically "try" them to see if you like them, so there’s no risk to you. Just because we like them, that doesn’t mean you will. But the great think is that you can download them and make up your own mind. If you don’t feel you got an excellent value, they both offer an immediate no-questions-asked refunds. That’s a major reason we’re very comfortable recommending them both to our friends.
So there’s no reason to put this off. Download Super Affiliate Handbook today.
Tags: adult affiliate program, affiliate comissions, affiliate marketing, Amazon affiliate program, AuctionAds, AzoogleAds, blogging, ClickBank, ClickCash, Comission Junction, eBay, iFriends, make money online, SharePayNow
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