Click here to view the embedded video.

Question 1: Why are you starting a blog?

It’s the most profound question you will ever ask yourself, but also the most important. Why are you doing this? What do you hope to accomplish? Do you want to make money? Do you want to help people? Do you want to make people laugh? Do you want to vent about something (society, politics, your love life)? There are no wrong answers here, but you do need to have one. You need to know why you are doing it, but more than anything you need to be passionate about doing it, whatever it is. If you love Spam and you want to sing the praises of Spam on your blog, then you will be successful. But if you’re a Vegan and you hate spam and someone offers you a ton of cash to blog about Spam, it’s just not going to work. It’s a job at that point, and you’ll hate doing it, and more importantly, you’ll hate yourself for doing it.

Question 2: What’s your niche?

Everyone needs an angle. Whether you’re a writer blogging about being a stripper, or a stripper blogging being a writer, you need a hook, pure and simple. You can’t be all things to all people and you shouldn’t try. You will fail. You can only succeed if you can identify a portion of the market that is being underserved (ideally, they won’t be getting served at all) and then speaking and marketing to them. This isn’t as hard a question to answer as it might seem. Once you answer the first question, the second question will largely answer itself.

Question 3: How will you set yourself (and your new blog) apart?

Here’s the really tricky question. You know why you’re blogging, you know what your niche is, now what? How do you stand out in a sea of endless bloggers? What’s your angle on your angle? Maybe you’re giving relationship and dating advice from the Born Again Christian perspective, for example. Or maybe you’re a divorced dad offer dating and parenting tips. The point is, whatever your niche, there is probably someone already there serving it as there are very few new ideas under the sun. What makes you worth listening to? Tricky question, to be sure, but an important one.

Once you have the answers to these three questions, you’re good to go. Just be aware that the answers, may change over time, and probably should. Your answers to these three questions represent a snapshot of where you are at the time you answer them. If you have a vision and a goal of say, getting ten people a day to visit your blog, and then that happens, then what? What happens is your answer to these three questions will probably change. You’ll need to re-answer them, and that will affect why you are doing this and how you go about doing it.

Don’t worry about this. Don’t wait to have the perfect answers. You won’t. You’ll not only never get it “right,” but you never even get started either. It’s all about progress, not perfection. You must repeat “Progress over perfection” in your head one million times. Okay, actually only three. But you get the point, hopefully. Perfection is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It robs people. Of their hopes, of their dreams and of the chance of actually making those hopes and dreams a reality. If you don’t get in the game you’ll never get a chance to win it, but there are some that endlessly practice and attempt to perfect whatever it is they working on before they show it to the world. But it’s never perfect. Ever. I don’t even know if anyone knows what that means.

It’s vitally important that you have a plan, vision and something to shoot for. But don’t let the prep work consume you to the point where things are unhealthy. That’s as much a life lesson as it is a lesson about blogging, but it certainly applies here.

Don’t waste your time trying out each Wordpress plugin to find out which one you want. Here are the top 10 Wordpress plugins that you want your blog to have, hands down.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

W3 Total Cache

For top-notch website performance, you need the W3 Total Cache Wordpress plugin. Both your blog visitors and search engines care about how fast your website is. If your pages take forever to load, you’ll lose readers and search engine traffic. In fact Google just announced this week that they are not officially taking site response time into consideration for rankings. Of course they are: speed means quality of experience for their users.

W3 Total Cache can reduce your page load time by as much as 50% or even more – something you definitely want to do. AND it will help you keep your site running and available instead of crashing if you get a major rush of traffic all at once, such as getting a popular story on Digg or a “StumbleUpon attack”.  Other major caching plugins like WP Cache and WP Super Cache are OK, but in our opinion they are not as versatile or as powerful as W3 Total Cache (and we’ve used/tested them all).

Google XML Sitemaps

You want search engines to know when you post new content so you get more traffic. Google XML Sitemaps automatically generates an updated sitemap and submits it to top search engines without you lifting a finger. Don’t rely on search engines to crawl your site and find new posts – use this plugin to automatically tell them the instant you post – before someone else copies your post and pretends they wrote it – which happens. And “original content” (i.e. where Google “finds” a post first) gets much more credit than duplicate content (i.e. other places Google finds that post).

GravityForms or cForms

Your readers need an easy way to contact you, whether it’s to ask you a question or to advertise on your site. Contact form plugins like GravityForms or cForms allow you to easily create a great-looking contact form for your website. Instead of putting your email address out there for everyone (including spam bots) to email you thousands of times, use GravityForms or cForms to allow your readers users to contact you easily without cluttering your inbox with lots of spam.

Disqus Comments

Another interactive tool for your blog readers is the all-important comment box. Disqus Comments is an excellent Wordpress plugin that allows visitors to comment on your articles with a great looking social interface and great spam control. Use an advanced plugin like Disqus Comments instead of Wordpress’s integrated comment tool. It looks much, much better and gives you more control over comments. It’s also a hosted comment plugin that automatically syncs the comments with your Wordpress database, and provides great social interaction with your readers.

Two other very popular comment oriented Wordpress plugins are JS-Kit Echo and IntenseDebate. We’ve tried them both and feel Disqus is currently the better choice. The backend comment management of JS-Kit Echo leaves a lot to be desired, and we feel the Disqus comment layout just looks better than the IntenseDebate option. Frankly, this is a matter of preference, they’re all good options!

Akismet

This plugin automatically comes with Wordpress and does a great job catching comment and trackback spam. If you’re using a hosted comment service like Disqus, Akismet won’t apply to you. Actually you can still use the Akismet service through Disqus, just won’t need to enable the plugin.

FeedBurner Feedsmith

Redirect your RSS feed to FeedBurner and have your RSS subscribers poll Feedburner instead of your site. This Wordpress plugin makes your feed much more usable, since it provides far more optimized RSS feed than Wordpress alone does. It will also offload the feed reader traffic to Google (who now owns FeedBurner) so it’s much,  much faster than your web server, improving your blog’s performance even more. This will sound a little technical to a new blogger, but do it anyway, it’ll work better that way.

YARPP

This Wordpress plugin is an excellent tool to use if you want readers who are interested in your topics to stay on your website longer. YARPP automatically displays the most closely related articles from your blog to your readers at the end of the article, allowing them to easily browse through the content they’re interested in on your site instead of allowing to look for what they want elsewhere.

After The Deadline

This easy to use spell and grammar checker for Wordpress is available for free and is essential to use even if you feel like you’re spelling and grammar error-free. It doesn’t cost anything and will ensure each post is error free and looks as good as it is.

Sexy Bookmarks

A bookmarking tool is essential for your blog and Sexy Bookmarks is an excellent tool to use with great eye candy. It adds a nice visual appeal to your blog, while encouraging readers to share the article they’re reading with their friends on Twitter, Facebook and more. This means more linkbacks to your blog and more readers for you!

Viper’s Video Quicktags

To embed your YouTube video on your blog, you’ll need Viper’s Video Quicktags. Newer versions of Wordpress (2.9 and above) allow you to embed videos without special plugins, but Viper’s Video Quicktags allows you much better control over how the videos look in your posts. You can set the format for all of your videos in one place instead of coding it in each post – and having to edit ALL your posts to make a change.

After building very successful Wordpress blog and online magazine AskDanAndJennifer.com over the last four years, these Wordpress plugins are our personal favorites – and for the most part, the only ones we actually use.

Do you have favorite “must have” Wordpress plugins that aren’t in this list? Let us know! Leave a comment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Camcorder

One of the obvious things you need to start a succesful blog or website with a video show is a camcorder, or possibly more than one if you have them. You don’t have to have an expensive camcorder – you can even use your webcam if you don’t have a more traditional camcorder. Regardless of whatever camcorder you have, make sure you have a stable place to set the camera up for filming. If you’re using a traditional camcorder, you’ll definitely need a tripod. Don’t have someone hold your camera for you – they’ll never be able to keep it steady enough to keep your viewers from getting motion sickness.

Good Lighting

Your living room overhead or a lamp just won’t work if you want good, even lighting for your online video show. Lamps and overheads create shadows, which look unprofessional in a video. Visit a camera store or browse online for some discount lighting fixtures or lighting kits. You don’t need super expensive lightboxes or anything like that. A simple bulb with a broad umbrella will do just fine.

Lapel Microphone

Strong, even sound is as important as good lighting. For a professional looking and sounding online video show, you want to minimize echos and static. Some computers and laptops have built in microphones that may work, but your best bet is a lapel microphone, especially if you’re shooting your video on a set in front of a camera instead of with a webcam. Lapel microphones are very inexpensive, but they’re worth their weight in gold.

Video Editing Platform

Good video editing software is essential for a professional looking video show. There will be lots of things you want to edit out, without spending hours re-recording a video to be perfect because you don’t have editing software. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to have a Mac to have a great video editing platform. Adobe has some great options for Windows video editing, including Adobe Premiere Elements which is available for less than $100. However, their best program so far is Adobe Premiere Pro, which comes in at just over $700 – if that fits your budget.

Use Video Sharing Sites

Video sharing websites, like YouTube, are free and your most valuable tool for getting people to see your video show and start making money online. Create accounts with several of the most popular video sharing websites and start uploading your video show online regularly so people can start watching what you’ve created. Tubemogul is an excellent option if you want to upload one video to multiple video sharing websites without the hassle of uploading large files over and over to different sites. Tubemogul allows you to upload the video once and it will distribute your video to various video sharing websites for you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Staying Relevant In Your Niche

Using social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook is one of the easiest ways you can stay connected to your blog readers and relevant in your niche. Regular Tweets and Facebook posts keep people reading and keep people “in the know” about your favorite topics. Also, one of the best forms of advertisement is through word of mouth. Fans of your Facebook page will inadvertently direct their friends to your page via their Wall and so on and so on. Your Twitter followers might Tweet about a topic you’ve already Tweeted about and tell their friends about it and so on. Using social media outlets is a must if you really want to be a successful blogger and build your own brand.

The Benefits Of Scheduling Your Tweets

The benefits of scheduling your Tweets is that you don’t always have to be at your computer when you want something Tweeted. While there are applications that can allow you to Tweet from your cell phone, sometimes you just want to take some time off without completely withdrawing yourself from staying on top of things and staying relevant. That’s where scheduling your Tweets (and your blog posts) comes in handy.

Tweeting Responsibly

There is definitely a fine line between using Twitter and Facebook scheduling tools and abusing them. While you can schedule many of your Tweets, it quickly becomes obvious that all you’re doing is scheduling your Tweets and you’re not really relevant in your niche anyways. Your Twitter followers and Facebook fans will ask you questions, and it’s important that you answer them. Although you do schedule some of your Tweets, you should add to it by answering questions and having real conversations with people. This is the best way to build your brand and let people know that you’re available and interested in what your blog is about. Social media outlets give you the opportunity to actually be in the action instead of simply being behind the scenes. Use your Twitter and your Facebook pages to talk about your favorite topics, ask your fans and followers questions of your own and get them involved and interested in your blog topics. Not only will this generate tons of traffic for your blog, it will also generate real interest, and that’s something that can’t be bought. Be responsible with your Twitter and Facebook. Take the time to talk to your fans and followers, and schedule your Tweets and posts when you have to.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Content Is Key

You may have the best SEO keywords on your website or blog, but without quality content, the search engines are going to start overlooking you. You may get an influx of site traffic for awhile, but it will quickly cease as the search engines realize that people aren’t staying on your website very long. If you’re not offering people anything of value on your website, you won’t be getting traffic for long, if you ever got it at all. The key to a successful blog or website is to produce quality content that people want to read on a regular basis. Search engines will pick up on regular publishing and start taking a better look at your website or blog. If there’s good stuff on there that people are interested in and searching for, the search engines will start sending them to you. It’s as simple as that.

Search Engine De-Crappers

Search engines, especially Google, spend millions of dollars every year on technology that allows them to filter through websites that publish what is known as Internet “crap.” Search engines don’t want to send traffic to websites that don’t offer people anything of value. You can only fool search engines with SEO tricks and keywords for so long, if at all these days. Search engines are continuously working on ways to weed out the bad and useless content, regardless of how many fancy keywords and SEO there is. If you don’t produce quality content on a regular basis, search engines are going to figure it out and fast. Without quality content, you’re not going to get the traffic you need for a successful blog or website.

Regular Publishing

To take this #1 tip on blog and website success a little further, you must continue publishing good content that people want to read on a regular basis. You may have a great article up on your site or blog, but if you’ve only published one or two articles, the search engines aren’t going to know to look in your direction. Search engines want to send people to websites and blogs that regularly publish good content, not a website or blog that published one or two good articles. Search engines such as Google love websites that stay relevant and stay in the game by continuously posting content.

Ask yourself this question: do you publish information to your blog for yourself (just so you can say something) or so that other people can get value from What you have to say, what you’ve discovered, etc?

Do you discriminate against half (or more) of your website visitors?

So you build a great looking blog (or website), start publishing some great content, and you even make sure the website looks good.

But here’s the catch: it looks good to YOU, with your web browser (Firefox 3.0 or Internet Explorer 8.0), running on your operating system (i.e. Vista).

Here’s a fun fact: different people end up using different web browsers. For example, our Ask Dan & Jennifer love and sex online magazine and advice column gets 52% visitors using Internet Explorer, 33% visitors using Firefox, 9% using Safari, and so on.

And those break down further by browser release verions (ex. IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, and so on).

How can you know what web browsers your visitors are using?

Well you do use web analytics, right? That just means a (often free) web software that keeps track of who visitors your website so know how many visitors you have every day, where they’re coming from, what articles/pages they like, and so on.

And the good analytics services will give you a detailed breakdown of what web browsers (and operating systems) your visitors are using. Our absolutely favorite web analytics tool is Google Analytics: in our opinion the bar none best analytics tool out there. Plus, here’s a bonus: it’s free.

Not all web browsers are created equal

OK, so people use different browsers… so what? Well, the problem is that each of those browsers shows your website a little differently.

But no big deal right? Wrong. Just a few little differences can result in your site lookign completely messed up to half your visitors. Worst yet, it looks fine to you, so how can you even know?

How you can quickly and easily see how your website looks in the most popular web browsers

So what’s the solution? Do you just call up your friends who you know run the different web browsers and see if they’ll keep testing your website every time you make a change? No way!

Do you install all the browser versions on your own computer at home? Nope, you can’t run them all… and seriously, who has time to mess with that!

Here’s the smart and easy way: you use an online service that actually shows you what your website looks like in all the major browsers.

The original solution: online screenshot and web validation services

There have been services online offering this functionality for some years now. Here’s a list of them. With most of these services, you just type in the web address, and it shows you a screen capture of how your website and how it looks in 20 different browser editions.

The down side with many of these services is that they’re very slow: it can take an hour to get your screenshots. and if you’re going to make tweaks or fixes, that just won’t work.

Today’s better solution: Adobe BrowserLab

Yesterday I was looking for a better solution… and found our favorite one ever, which happens to be from Adobe (we love their software anyway, so that was an added bonus). It’s called Adobe BrowserLab. And according to Adobe, “BrowserLab provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems, on demand.”

Here’s why BrowserLab is the best tool for this that we’ve seen: it brings up your website in the top web browsers immediately: so in under 5 minutes you can just know what your website looks like to the vast majority of your visitors! And that frankly is a must for any web designer – or anyone really who has a website that gets more than a few thousand visitors a month. Also check out this recent PC World article on BrowserLab.

As an added bonus, Adobe BrowserLab is currently offered free by Adobe… but I suspect web designers would also pay for this service if they had to.

The downside of BrowserLab is that it (as of now) only shows you what your website looks in the top 5 or so browsers. But honestly unless you have a dedicated web design team that’s doing this for you, that meeds the goal of today’s test: making sure your website isn’t “broken” for half your visitors.

And with Adobe BrowserLab that’s become a very easy thing to do. If you know of other great tools for doing this, be sure to let us know in the comments what they are and why you like them!

What are these buttons? Usually they’re tiny logos representing a handful (or 20+) social media sharing sites.

But here’s the catch: for most people these social media buttons are confusing. At first glance the uninitiated (read: non-techie) reader has no darn idea what those buttons are. Once  you look closer you’ll see

Most people have just never heard of all those fancy social media sharing networks. But just about everybody and their dog has heard about Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

So should you really add these social media buttons to your site?

Absolutely! If you want people to bookmark your articles and share them with their friends, you have to give them a very easy way to do that.

But do it in a way that’s not confusing, focusing on just the top few sites that the readers of your site are likely to recognize.

Sadly we didn’t include these very visible buttons on our Ask Dan & Jennifer site or on our other sites… instead we opted for the “all social media buttons in one” Add-To-Any widget (more on this below). But ultimately it proved a little confusing and was too easy to ignore or just plain not notice.

So… we finally decided to add some social media buttons at the bottom of aritcles for our major sites: Ask Dan & Jennifer, Blog Success Journal, and our Personal Blog. Just to make it easy for people to share and bookmark stories they like on these sites.

What Social Media Buttons Should You Choose?

Ah, now to the rubber hitting the road… That’s a very fine line. Most people opt for showing every button available, to increase the odds that your visitor happens to have an account on one of those sites. In theory that’s a good startegy, but it can backfire.

Pretend you’re not a blogger, but a non-techie person who happened to stumble onto a great blog. Fact is, too many buttons can confuse non-techie readers. So you need to figure out what are your “big bang for the buck” sites… which sites best target your core readers base.

To find the rigth buttons for your site, Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you have a techie readership that prefers Digg or Reddit?
2. Do you have a more mainstream (non-techie) readership that prefers non-techie sites like StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz?
3. How about Facebook and Twitter… would your readers know what those are?
4. What’s  the primary language for your audience… are you perhaps popular in places that speak other languages? Think “Meneame” for example, the Spanish-language Digg-like site.
5. Out of the answers above, which sites are most likely to drive more traffic to your site if bookmarks are shared there?

For us, after significant deliberation (probably too much, LOL), we came up with our top list, in this order: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Buzz, Del.ici.ous,  Meneame, and StumbleUpon.

What’s the best way to install these buttons on your blog?

Probably the easiest way is to find a social media button service (such as AddToAny) that will give you a simple piece of Javascript you can add to your site.

If you’re running Wordpress you can also choose from a myriad of plugins that will show these buttons. And there are LOTS of these types of plugins to choose from.

Which begs the question…

What are the best social media button plugins or services for your blog?

There are so many social media button options out there, it’s hard to even begin listing them. So we’re not going to. If you want to find all the options we didn’t choose after doing extensive research, you can search Google yourself for “social media button wordpress plugin” or something to that effect.

We’re just goint to tell you about the ones that we like enough to actually use ourselves.

AddToAny – A great one-size-fits-all social media button bar

AddToAny is a really cool, customizable, and easy to use widget that you can add to literally any blog. Oh, and it’s free too.

You just go to their site, customize how you want the button to look, etc. and they give you a piece of Javascript code to add to your site. It’s that simple.

Here’s what the AddToAny widget looks like:

And it works great, which is why we use it. We recommend AddToAny highly, you should definitely get it set up on your blog or website.

But here’s the question… is it enough? We used to think so, but no longer.

The problem with JUST having the AddToAny widget is that not everyone clicks on your pretty little “share or bookmark” button. Sure some will, but many won’t. They may not see it, or they may just not care.

SocioFluid – The first truly unique social bookmark button solution we’ve seen to date

So, we set out to find a good set of very pretty, polished, and unique social media buttons to add to the bottom of our posts… to make a facebook user say “hey, this was good, i’ll click on that facebook icon and share it with my friends”. Same for Twitter, etc.

When we started looking for the right social bookmark plugin / utility for our sites we were disappointed with all the blah, boring, all-the-same button options out there. And finally, finally we found one that is truly unique!

It’s called SocioFluid and it’s just plain and simply cool. It comes as a customizable Wordpress plugin… and more recently, it’s also available as a simple javascript widget that you can add to any blog, even if it’s not Wordpress (get that from SocioFluid.com).

Want to see this REALLY COOL tool in action? Just scroll down to the bottom of this article and hover over the nifty social bookmark icons… Facebook, Twitter!

OK, Now a question for you!

So what social bookmark / sharing plugins or widgets do you use for your blog? let us know in the comments below!

And be sure to Tweet this article or Share it on Facebook! Just click on one of the pretty sharing icons below!
Thanks! — Dan & Jennifer

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.

Web2Subbmitter

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!

Social Media For Firefox Extension

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.

Digg Alerter

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.

Digg Entourage

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.

It’s seems that the Digg redesign has fubar’d everyone’s avatars. 

Here’s how we made ours look good – not fuzzy! 

The new size of your avatar should be 60 X 60 pixels. Most importantly, your image should be square.

Here’s a great, easy to use thumbnail tool. We use it to generate all of the images across our blogs. The stock photos that we use in our blog posts are around 200K downloaded. We run them through this tool and they are under 20K with no image degradation.

For example… check out the excellent (and really hot) image on this post. It’s only 11k – down from the 161k iStockPhoto original. Not bad, huh? 

The tool is called Extreme Thumbnail Generator and it rocks! (No this is not an affiliate link – just a great tool. )

It’s easy to use and just simply works. Whether you’re trying to create an avatar or upload pics to your website, we’ve found Extreme Thumbnail Generator to be a must have tool.

No, it’s not free but neither is beer. However, it comes with a free 19 day trial with no registration required, so get it and fix your Digg avatar!

I’m tired of looking at fuzzy pictures!

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? 

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!

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.

But when it comes to Affiliate Project X…

There seems to be a serious disconnect between many bloggers and Internet marketers. Some love it, and other say it’s utterly worthless. Wow, it’s unusual to see such a drastic difference in opinion.

Maybe this drastic difference comes from the very salesy and hypey Affiliate Project X website. This article was prompted in part by one of our readers who commented that he finds no value whatsoever in Affiliate Project X, and asked what redeeming value we possibly saw in it.

The short answer is yes, we definitely found it valuable, which is why it’s one of just 2 or 3 affiliate marketing guides that we recommend to our readers.

To take a step back though – Jennifer and I put a LOT of value on always learning and growing. As such, we spend hundreds and thousands of dollars a year on books, guide, programs, and lectures. We’re always absorbing something new. And for those people hoping to make it on their own, and make a good living from their blogs and websites (read: small business), learning is a make it or break it reality.

There is a huge difference between very successful people and those that always seem to fail at everything they attempt.

And that difference is man-made

First and foremost, it’s the can-do attitude that always gives away a truly successful person. Successful people don’t make excuses as to why they can’t do something. They KNOW there’s a way, and they go after it. They also never use the words "someday I’ll do this". "Someday" is the refuge of a person lying to themselves and their friends. We all know someday never comes. Yesterday is just a memory, and tomorrow is a hollow promise. All that is real is TODAY.

The four little words that stop success in its tracks

Your attitude toward the world a huge difference in your life. When I look at something new, I NEVER pick it up saying "I already know this". You know those words… your mind whispers them in your ear every time it’s too lazy to actually think about something.

Rather, embrace it as a challenge to find some new tidbit of information that you’ve been missing. And without fail, you will always learn something new, something that makes you that much more knowledgeable and successful. 

Destiny or coincidence? 

We believe that you always come upon the information you need, when you need it in life. Call it what you will, but we’ve seen too many instances of this to chalk it up to "coincidence". So when something comes at us, especially when it comes at us from two or three sources in a short time span, it’s generally time to take action.

So back to the question… do we think there’s really any value to Affiliate Project X?

Absolutely. It’s not a huge book, but it gives you the insights of a seasoned veteran. You’ll get a glimpse into how he works his ClickBank affiliate promotions, and how he analyzes and defeats his competition. 

Is Affiliate Project X the end-all, be-all dynamite Rosetta Stone that will make money FOR YOU on autopilot while you sit on the couch with your favorite beer watching the game? 

Nope. There’s no such thing. But it IS a great stepping stone to becoming a much more successful affiliate marketer – this means you’ll  know more tactics that work, so you can employ these to make MORE money while working LESS.

Passive income and the free money myth

Remember, we’re talking about "passive income" here. You write a good article and promote it, and it keeps on bringing in money for years to come. We are NOT talking about "free money", i.e. winning the lottery. 

What if you get Affiliate Project X and your worst fears come true – you don’t like it?

Well, you could cry and get mad, or you could do what we would do in that case. Politely ask for your money back.

The funny thing is that we’ve only requested two product refunds, out of all the dozens and dozens of information products we’re always scouring. And in both cases it was only because the sales copy was completely different from what you actually got in the box. Rarely is there a case when you don’t learn something of value. 

We recommend Affiliate Project X because we like it, but also it has a full refund guarantee if you’re not happy with it for any reason – for as long as 60 days. Read that again – if you get it and you truly believe you didn’t learn anything of value, you can just ask for your money back – and they will give it to you. It’s that simple.

Next steps 

Give Affiliate Project X a try and see what YOU think. If this or any other product doesn’t meet your expectations, then do the right thing – ask for a refund. But we’ll be surprised if you feel that need.

Check out Paula Mooney’s great round-up of the top money-making bloggers

The top few slots are actually people making money online who aren’t bloggers per-se, like Markus Frind who runs the PlentyOfFish.com free online dating site.

But should recognize number 4, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, followed by many other familiar blogger names and faces, like Matt Drudge, Steve Pavlina, ProBlogger Darren Rowse, John Chow, and of course Dan and Jennifer.

So is blogging income Salary or PASSIVE INCOME?

The article talks about blogger salaries, but let’s clear up that definition a bit. Unless someone is paying you to sit there and write blog posts, blogging is passive income.

Salary is when you’re working for a company and they pay you regular wages

You go to work, they pay you. You don’t go to work, they don’t pay you. That’s selling your time for money, hour by hour, for a fixed amount, and with very little freedom.

Blogging is Passive Income, which means you keep making money from work you’ve already done

Basically you do the work once (i.e. write an article) and it keeps making you money for years to come. The more great articles there are on your site, the more traffic you will get, and the more money you will make.

This is a very important distinction for perspective bloggers to understand – because you can make A LOT MORE MONEY with passive income, and it’s A LOT EASIER to make.

It’s a wonderful feeling to wake up in the morning and count the money you made while you were asleep!

Anyone who hasn’t experienced this is seriously missing out.

A blog is your very own small business, doing something you enjoy

If operated in that way, a blog can be very profitable. The great thing is that with a blog you can really help people by putting out really great content, and you don’t have to try to sell it to them. Rather, you get vendors and advertisers to sponsor your site with ads and so on. What a great deal!

Check out Paula’s Cover of Forbes!

And yes, we’re on it – bottom left.

So, if you’re not on this list yet, what are you waiting for?

No excuses. Here’s How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online – in 10 Easy Steps.

Above all, have fun!

How to get started with Text-Link-Ads in 5 minutes or less

1. Go sign up with Text-Link-Ads right now. It’s a short form.
2. There’s no real work to do whatsoever. You just fill out a form, install their small code snippet (or activate the WordPress plugin) on your blog, and your site shows up in their marketplace.
3. Then the fun begins… Whenever someone purchases an ad for one of our blogs, we get an automated email to approve the ad. We log in to Text-Link-Ads, look at the new link and it’s ad text, and we approve the ad. Whew… time for a break!

THIS definitely qualifies as passive income – talk about Blog Monetization Zen.

What’s the downside? Any gotchas?

Yes, Text-Link-Ads keeps 50% of the link cost as their fee. That’s a little high, but fact is that’s the cost of being in their catalog of links that advertisers go to IN ORDER TO BUY LINKS.

If your cut isn’t enough for you, raise the price until you feel happy about it. If that 50% still bothers you, then get over it and do something about it. Later on, when you get around to it, you can ALSO offer links to advertisers directly for the same price and keep ALL the profits.

But you should have your site in the Text-Link-Ads marketplace, so that people shopping there will see your blog and buy your links. If you’re not there, those happy link shoppers will buy links on another site.

One mistake many people make is to leave a very low price for links on their blogs. Of course, don’t set it too high… just value yourself appropriately as compared to other advertisers in your niche. Remember – if you don’t see your own value, nobody else will!

How much money can I expect to make?

We consistently make over $500 per month from Text-Link-Ads these days, with very little effort. Other bloggers we know make between $100 and $1,500 per month just from Text-Link-Ads. The higher the Google PageRank and Alexa Rank your blog has, the more advertisers will want to buy space on your blog, and the more money you’ll be making.

This is just like real estate. In fact, think of your blog as Virtual Real Estate. And the more you develop it, the more it will be worth.

This means start early, develop the property, and stay the course!

Go sign up with Text-Link-Ads right now. This is a real no-brainer option for blog monetization.

When you complete the short Text-Link-Ads sign up form, they MAY ask you if you’d like to participate in a cool new "beta" program called "In-Links" or something to that effect. What they don’t tell you is that this new program REPLACES the regular Text-Link-Ads program. Just say NO! Some of our friends have tried it and had all kinds of bizarre problems. Keep it old school, skip that new "beta" plan and do the regular Text-Link-Ads program! And let us know how it works out for you.