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.

A good site map is crucial, not just for search engines to find your content, but also for your visitors.  

Search engines depend on site maps to find all of your buried articles

One of the real benefits of a blog or web site is that your articles accumulate over time, and so your site becomes more valuable to the search engines. So, you end up getting more web site traffic over time.

But search engines can’t send you traffic if they don’t know what great content is hiding on your site. Let them quickly and easily find all our your articles with a dynamically generated site map.

For a quick example, see what we’re doing with site maps in the footer of our www.AskDanAndJennifer.com Dating & Relationship advice column. 

Your web site visitors often like to look around and get their bearings

A site map is also very helpful to give your visitors an at-a-glance view of your site, how it’s organized, what information is available where, and so on. Some visitors like and even expect easily accessible site maps, while others don’t care for them. But you’re better off having one and giving them the option.

How to create a great, dynamic site map which automatically updates with your latest web site content

First, create an automatically updating HTML site map page for your visitors

This is mainly for your visitors, but also for some search engines that happen to find it.

We recommend the XHTML site map template from Chris Pearson.This is not a plugin per-se, but rather a custom WordPress page that auto-generates your site map. Get it here. 

Then, create a Google XML site map for your favorite search engines 

Although the format is referred to as "Google Site Map format", the other major search engines (Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com) have agreed with Google on this format, so they will all be able to use the same site map. 

Get the Google XML Sitemap Plugin, which auto-generates a site map in Google Site Map format. This plugin also updates the site map every time you make a blog post.

You absolutely do NOT want to be updating a site map by hand every time you post. Unless of course you would find that therapeutic.

To get the most search engine benefit, include your UTW tag pages in your site map

Add your UTW tag pages to your dynamic site map with the Google Sitemaps – UTW Tag Addon plugin.

Tell Google directly about your site map

You can tell Google where to find your site map through Google Webmaster Tools.

Login to Google Webmaster Tools with your Google account, and tell Google the location of your site map.

1. After logging in to Google Webmaster Tools, fill in the name of your site, and submit it. You’ll have to prove that you own the site, but it’s a very easy process – basically uploading a file to your site for Google to verify. Follow their very simple directions.
2. Then follow the prompts to submit your site map. 

Tell Yahoo directly about your site map

Yahoo also provides a way to submit the location of your update site map, through the Yahoo Site Explorer. 

Then follow the simple step by step process to prove to Yahoo that you are the owner of your web site, and then submit the location of your site map. 

The process is very similar to the one with Google above. 

Update your robots.txt file to tell the visiting search engines where to find your site map

The major search engines (Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com) have finally agreed on an easy, universal way to notify a visiting search engine of where to find your site map.

This is a very easy single-line addition to your robots.txt, as shown in this example. Of course, change MyDomain.com to be YOUR web site address.

# Robots.txt file domain: http://www.MyDomain.com/

Sitemap: http://www.MyDomain.com/sitemap.xml

This article is part of the "How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online" series. Be sure to subscribe by RSS or email so you don’t miss the follow-up articles, with all the juicy details.

And be sure to check out How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online – in 10 Easy Steps if you haven’t done so already.

This is because some people prefer to send everyone their web address in the form of MyReallyCoolWebsite.com, since it looks less techie. Others use www.MyReallyCoolWebsite.com.

And most web hosts will set you up so that BOTH of these will work, and take visitors to your site.

But is there really a difference? 

As search engines see the world, these are TWO different sites!

http://MyReallyCoolWebsite.com is NOT the same as http://www.MyReallyCoolWebsite.com

Which means that in some cases you get HALF the search engine value to one, and HALF the search engine value to the other. Not to mention the duplicate content between the two sites – having 2 sites with identical content is BAD for your search engine rankings.

Should you use the WWW in your web site URL or not?  

Ok, the question of the hour…. which one should you go with? As search engines go, it doesn’t really matter. It only really matters in how you promote your site.

Why we prefer to use the www.MyReallyCoolWebsite.com

Your readers and friends can easily spot a web address that begins with www, so you never have to begin it with http://MyReallyCoolWebsite.com.

Picture your web site address on a billboard by the side of the road. Someone driving by has about as much attention span on your site as a visitor cruising your site or someone looking at your site address in an email.

The www at the beginning tells EVERYONE at a glance that they’re looking at your web address. Without that, you’re not drawing their eyes to your address, so they’re less likely to go to your site.

How do you tell Google what your REAL web address is?  

You can tell Google what your real web address is through Google Webmaster Tools.

Login to Google Webmaster Tools with your Google account, and tell Google that both your web addresses are actually the same site. You can also specify which one is your preference – www or non-www.

After logging in to Google Webmaster Tools, go to:

   Diagnostic — Tools — Preferred domain

That’s all there is to it.

How do you tell the other search engines your REAL web address? 

The easiest way to make sure all search engines (and all your visitors) are going to your preferred web address, is to configure your web server to redirect all traffic to your chosen domain.

If you’re running the Apache web server (most everyone is), this change is very easily made to your .htaccess file, in the root directory of your web site directory structure. If you’re running WordPress, you already have this file – so all you need to do is find it, download it, make a backup copy, edit up, and re-upload it. And say a little prayer.

WARNING: You can break your site very easily by having anything incorrect in your .htaccess file.

It’s crucial to back up your .htaccess file before making any changes to it. 

How to change your .htaccess file 

Here’s what this section of the .htaccess file looks like after adding this server redirect command.

For this example, replace MyReallyCoolWebsite.com with whatever your actual domain is.

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
# redirect domain.com to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_Host} ^MyReallyCoolWebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.MyReallyCoolWebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

Don’t forget to redirect individual post URLs, not just your main web site home page 

Note that there are other simpler ways to add a redirect command to your .htaccess file, but this option above is more powerful.

In addition to redirecting your www and non-www addresses to the same place, this configuration will also redirect specific articles on your site to your new address. This is very important. Without this, even if your main home page is redirected to your new address, any links from other sites to specific pages on your site can break.

We’re not talking about making $2.47 a month from your hobby. We’re talking about making hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars every month doing something you enjoy.  

Selling your time for dollars is one of the worst ways to make a living, but people do it because it SEEMS safe. But how many times have you seen hundreds or thousands of people without a job because of some corporate layoff? And do you really enjoy fighting traffic twice a day and barely getting an hour or two with your family when you get home exhausted and ready for bed?

Whether you’re seeking freedom or just some extra money, this is the best time to start a blog and make real money online.

Is Passive Income a Myth?

Well, it depends on your definition of passive income. Many people think that passive income is sitting around doing nothing while the checks roll in. This is not passive income, this is free money, like winning the lottery! Our definition of passive income is doing the work once and reaping the benefits (read passive income) for years to come. We call this mailbox money and making money while you sleep. There is nothing more refreshing than taking the day off and checking stats at the end of the day to see that, even though you were not working, you still made money!

Can You REALLY Make Money Online With Your Blog?

Absolutely! But, there’s a catch, the golden rule: it’s all about CONTENT. If you provide extreme value with great content, people will come back again and again, and you’ll make more and more money. It’s that simple.

Some people spend tons of time trying to trick the search engines only to find their income stream ripped out from under them the next time Google updates their search algorithms.

Content is king! Provide lots of good, relevant content for your readers and Google will love you for it. 

What about all those people making $2.47 a month with THEIR blogs?

As with everything in life, there are people who are very successful, and there are people who are not successful. Those who make a meager effort and quickly throw in the towel end up just wasting their time and telling everyone else that this blog thing doesn’t work.

But the successful ones, the ones who are willing to put in the effort, have escaped the corporate world and set themselves free!

And what about choices? There are many who choose to keep their corporate jobs and enjoy making a few thousand extra dollars every month.

Which group do YOU want to be in?

In just a few months we went from nothing to bringing in over $2,000 every month with our Dating & Relationship advice blog. We have personal friends making anywhere between $500 and $40,000 per month, all from their blogs.

STOP! Think about that for just a minute. What are the possibilities for you? What do you enjoy talking about, writing about, reading about? Why not turn your hobby, or obsession, into a passive income stream?

What TYPE of monetization will work best on your site?

Depending on whether you have a product-focused blog or an information blog, different monetization options will work best. But regardless, the most important concept here is to make an educated guess and actually implement a few of the following money making options. Only then will you know what will work best on your blog.

And remember – test, test, and test some more to truly optimize. We are constantly testing and trying new monetization schemes.

Top 10 Tips to REALLY Make Money with Your Blog 

Tip #1: Make Money by Showing Ads

Is it right to show ads and make money with your blog?

Hmm… the age-old question that’s been plaguing bloggers for years.

Should you provide great information to people free of charge? Do ads make your blog seem cheap and of lower quality?

To be honest we never had this problem, in part because we started our blogs specifically to help people and make a good living at it. Why go to a job when you can make better money actually enjoying what you do?

Visitors expect to see ads on successful sites. In fact, not showing ads can make your site seem small and unimportant because people EXPECT to see ads on popular sites. Every major website shows ads. Just look at Netscape.com, Amazon.com, About.com, etc… They ALL show ads.

Another example. You go to a job every day, and ask your employer for money if they want you to show up for work. Really, would you show up if they didn’t pay you? Nobody has a problem with that and yet many will not ask for money or show ads on their blog for fear that it will devalue the content.

Get over it and monetize your blog. You don’t have to market products or charge a subscription fee, but to us, ads are a no-brainer. 

How soon should you put ads on your blog?

Ok, now that we feel fuzzy about making money online with our blog, where to begin? Should you place ads from the very beginning? Do you need to wait a minimum of 90 days? How about waiting until you have 2,000 visitors a day?

The answer is simple – do it now! 

You COULD wait until the magical day when you receive 2,000 visitors a day, or even 10,000 visitors a day. Unfortunately it’s likely that day will never come unless you monetize your blog to help it pay for itself.

How would you like to see 1,000,000 people visiting your site every single month?

Guess what – that type of busy site costs money to run, and takes a LOT of time invested on your part. But here’s the wonderful part – if your blog is well monetized, you can quit your day job and work on your blog full time, writing about and promoting things that make you happy.

What is the best ad placement?

Different placement works better for different niches and for different ad networks.

Test, test, test. Changing the placement of an ad can make you dramatically more or less money, so test and track your results carefully.

What types of ads are NOT OK?

It’s all about relevancy.

Ads that provide value to your readers are generally welcomed by them. For example, recommended books and services that are truly related to the content your visitors came to see are great. But ads that are NOT related to the content your visitors came to see, will annoy and alienate your visitors – and will NOT make you money.

Use quality, relevant, ads that actually provide value to your readers, and you’ll be surprised at how well the ads are received.

Make it easy for advertisers to buy ad space on your blog.

This is the first step to making money with your blog – make your intent clear.

Always make it EASY for people to take whatever action you’d like them to take.
Create a visible page on your site to tell people exactly HOW to go about advertising on your blog. The easier you make something, the more people will go for it.

If someone comes by your site and would like to advertise, but they don’t immediately see how to do it, they’ll lose interest and move on to someone else’s site – and they’ll advertise with THEM.

Create a page that explains in simple terms what types of advertising spots you’re offering, what the rates are, and how someone can go about purchasing your ads right away. Don’t make them email you to find out the details. They won’t.

Make it simple and it’ll happen.

Tip #2: Make Real Money with Affiliate Marketing

Ah, the art of affiliate marketing… the well kept secret of some of the most successful Internet marketers.

Many people have tried and failed to make any money with affiliate marketing… usually because they have given up 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 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. Now that’s working smarter, not harder.

How do you find 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, 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 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

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.

The downside: ClickBank has the worst stats tracking of any affiliate program 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.

So go sign up for ClickBank and find some products to promote.

Commission Junction

Comission Junction 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. But sign up for Comission Junction as well to round out your list of affiliate products.

The secret to affiliate marketing

The secret to successful affiliate marketing is that it’s all about the pre-sale. Putting up banners and links will get some conversions. But people want to see an honest, objective review of a product before they buy it. They want your 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.

Must have affiliate marketing tools

Don’t waste your time fumbling around in the dark. You can easily waste too much of your already scarce time and energy. Find successful affiliate marketers and copy what they’re doing!

Rosalind Gardner, one of the most successful affiliate marketers of all time, laid out all the basics on how to really succeed with affiliate marketing in the Super Affiliate Handbook. 

Download the Super Affiliate Handbook and get the basics down BEFORE you spend lots of time and money with trial and error.

When you’re ready for advanced affiliate and ClickBank tactics, you’ll want to get Affiliate Project X. 

Tip #3: Create True Passive Income with Paid Text Link Advertisements 

Don’t sit around waiting for advertisers to come to you. People are out shopping for link ads RIGHT NOW in marketplaces like Text-Link-Ads. If you’re not in there, then someone else is going to get paid to put links on THEIR site today.

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

There’s no work to do whatsoever, you just fill out a form, install their small code snippet on your blog, and your name shows up in their marketplace.

Yes, they keep 50% as their fee, but fact is that’s the cost of being in their catalog of links that people to go IN ORDER TO BUY LINKS. If you’re not there, they’ll 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.

We consistently make over $500/month from Text-Link-Ads these days, with very little effort. We get an email to approve an ad, log in to Text-Link-Ads, and approve the ad. Whew… time for a break! THIS definitely qualifies as passive income – talk about Blog Monetization Zen.

Check out our review of Text-Link-Ads and how well it really can work for bloggers. 

Tip #4: Make Easy Money with Contextual Pay Per Click Advertising 

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is so successful because of their ability to show ads that are truly relevant to your site. Irrelevant ads annoy readers and also won’t make you any money.

For a blogger, Google AdSense is the easiest option to implement.

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)

YPN is the major alternative to Google AdSense. In fact, many publishers have changed from AdSense to YPN because YPN tends to pay more on a per click basis. But their content targeting is nowhere near as effective as Google’s, so in the end you’ll likely bring in less money with them.

Test your AdSense and YPN placement

Test, test test… start with Google AdSense and try out different placement options around your site. Track all your changes thoroughly, and make only one change at a time. Literally, only make one change at a time to placement, link color, and text color. If you change the placement and the link color at the same time and your click throughs go through the roof, how do you know which change worked?

When you’ve figured out what placement is the most effective for your site, you can try replacing AdSense with YPN for a few weeks, or few months, depending on your patience levels, to see how your bottom line results differ from AdSense.

Must have Google AdSense tools

Just like with affiliate marketing, it’s easy to waste months and months of your time with basic trial and error (mostly error). Our approach is to study what the successful people are doing, and learn from them.

There are many books and guides on AdSense, and we have a couple of favorites. Our favorite is Michael Cheney’s step-by-step AdSense Videos, because of all the detail he goes into. But beware – Michael goes into extreme detail on how to place your ads, what impact you can expect to see from different positioning and color changes, and so on. If you’re dedicated, these videos will be well worth your time.

Download Michael Cheney’s AdSense Videos and see step by step how you can get the most out of AdSense.

Tips #5: Make Money with Related Search Results from Ask.com

Ask.com just launched a really great monetization tool that can be implemented alongside AdSense and the other monetization items already in place on your site.

Your visitors click on these related search links, and they are presented with Ask.com search results. You make money when they click on the sponsored results at the top.

What do Ask.com Sponsored Search listings look like?

Here’s what these ad units can look like. You’ll notice that a publisher has full control of the layout, and even the search box and Ask.com logo are optional:

How can you sign up for this monetization tool?

Currently this program is invitation-only. Ask.com is also limiting the program to publishers with over 50,000 visitors monthly.

If you have a quality site and receive 50,000 total combined monthly visitors between all your sites, send us a message and we can make a personal recommendation which should get you accepted.  

Tips #6: Get Paid to Write Reviews for Related Products and Services with Sponsored Reviews

Your readers can feel your credibility in everything you write. Think of it this way – if you’re not telling the truth, the person you’re talking to can tell. It’s the same when you’re writing. People can smell BS a mile away. So keep it real and talk to your readers like you would to your friends.

There are several major sponsored review marketplaces today, but our best experience has been with ReviewMe.

Go sign up for Sponsored Reviews with ReviewMe right now, this is a real no-brainer. There’s no work to do whatsoever, you just fill out a form and your name shows up in their marketplace. When someone purchases a review for your blog, you get a notification to log on and review this offer. You can accept it, reject it, or ask for different terms. It’s literally that easy.

While this is not passive income, it can be a nice boost for your wallet. 

Tips #7: Monetize Your Content Automatically with Dynamic In-Text Advertising

Services like IntelliTXT and Kontera can dynamically embed ads in the text content of your website or blog.

Unfortunately these sites are generally difficult to get up and running, and we consider these dynamic text ads to be intrusive in the body of your articles. More importantly, our results have been less than impressive. In fact, this was he least fruitful of all our monetization efforts, even below the Amazon Affiliate Program.

We do however know bloggers who make good money with this type of advertising – as much as a 20% increase in revenue. These sites are focused on technology and gadget topic. Basically product and technology oriented blogs tend to do well with this type of in-text advertising.

Tip #8: Make Money with eBay AuctionAds 

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.

Tip #9: Make Money Online with a Product Review Blog and Chitika

Product Blogs are focused on discussions and reviews of products, such as electronics and other goods, as opposed to providing information and advice. The readers visiting these product blogs are generally in the market to purchase the products they’re reading about. So you’re inherently writing to an audience of perspective shoppers. 

In contrast, information blogs are visited by people who usually have no particular goal of purchasing anything. For these blogs, the publisher has to be much more creative in selecting very compelling offers that tie directly in with the content presented, so that the reader will immediately see the benefit and consider making that purchase.

Chitika

Once you have your product blog set up, you’ll want to make it EASY for people to purchase the products you’re talking about.

A great way to do this is with Chitika. They provide all kinds of graphical widgets, dynamic product photos, interactive product comparison shopping widgets, and even custom shopping portals, for most any product you could be talking about on your site.

A comparison shopping widget is a great way to engage the reader of a product review. And get this – you make money when your reader just CLICKS on the product widget. Yes, this is a CPC program. So even if you don’t have a lot of site traffic, you should see good results from adding Chitika to your site. 

Chitika is a natural extension for any product blog, and it’s also quick and painless to set up.

Click here to sign up for Chitika, to easily add interactive product comparison shopping to your site and product reviews.

Tip #10: Don’t Forget to Include 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…

Bonus Tip #11: Add CPM Banners and Make Money With Every Single Page Viewed on Your Site

CPM banners are banner ads that pay you a certain dollar amount for every thousand impressions shown on your site.

Nobody has to click on any link, buy a product, or anything else. You’re guaranteed that revenue for just showing those banners on your site. That’s it.

You will, however, have to reach a certain traffic level (normally around 100,000 page views per month) before most CPM agencies will approve your application. So once you’re established this is a great way to add additional revenue. 

One of the more popular CPM ad companies, especially for bloggers, is Tribal Fusion. The application period takes about a week, and then the implementation is very simple.

Bonus Tip #12: Make Money While Helping People – Answer Questions and Give Advice

Once your sites starts to grow in popularity, you will gain a regular reader base and a growing following. Many of your readers will start asking you questions about how to do this, how to do that, how you you would solve this problem, and so on.

This is an opportunity for you: offer to help your readers in exchange for monetary compensation. 

Yes, you could help them for free, but you’ll quickly see that all your time is spent solving other people’s problems, and you won’t have time to run your site and grow your business. All this while you’re probably still going to a job every day, working for someone else. Yuck.

Also you’ll likely not have time to help every person who asks you for help. Adding a paid options helps to prioritize which questions to answer first.

Take control of your time AND give your readers a chance to get a guaranteed response.

Some people have issue with asking people for money to help them. But understand this: you can always help as many people for free as you CHOOSE to.

Now think about your readers, from their perspective. Why not make it fair to them, and offer them a guaranteed, helpful, well though out, and timely response to their problem, for a certain fee. Your employer pays you for your time, and that’s OK. Then why not allow your readers to decide for themselves if they are willing to pay you for your time, to help them with THEIR problems?

Check out www.AskDaveTaylor.com and www.AskDanAndJennifer.com for some great examples of how this can work.

Your next steps… 

1. Bookmark this article to be sure you implement all the choices above.
2. Are there any great monetization options we’ve left out? Leave a comment below and let us know what’s worked best for you.
3. Then, sure to subscribe to our RSS feed so you don’t miss the great series of follow-up articles. We’re going to be delving into the juicy details of EACH monetization method above – hot insider tips, what works best, what will just waste your time, and what to really watch out for.

Rich sent us an email this morning with a blog post that he felt our reader might be interested in. I almost didn’t read it because BlogSuccessJournal blog has nothing to do with credit cards and finance.

But then I actually took a few minutes to read the post and I realized that they’re all bloggers…

If you’re like many Americans, you probably have some concerns about your personal finances. You may be worried about credit card payments, high interest loans or whether your retirement plan is going to provide you and your spouse with enough money to sustain you. The bloggers highlighted in this article used to have similar problems, but they’ve all decided to make a change for the better. Although many of them haven’t yet achieved what they set out to do, they can all be considered successful. They’ve changed the way they think about money, and that’s the most important step you can take. In this article we have collected 100 of the most inspirational stories of financial turnaround from around the web in order to provide you with the inspiration you need to make a change in your own life

Read the full post to see how 100 other bloggers have turned their personal finances around.
The 100 Most Inspirational Personal Finance Turnaround Stories Online

This means you’re giving the search engines what they want, and they’ll reward you with more and more web site traffic over time.  Yet, many WordPress bloggers aren’t taking advantage of some of these hidden gems.

Of course, many people host their blogs on Blogger.com or TypePad, but that’s another story for another day. The short version is that while WordPress may look a little intimidating at first, it’s just as easy to manage as TypePad, and has immensely more flexibility than either Blogger or TypePad.

Oh, and if your free Blogger.com blog mysteriously disappears overnight (as we had happen once), you have nobody to call. So if your blog matters, get yourself a good web host and give it some WordPress lovin’.

These are the Top 10 Must-Have WordPress plugins that every serious blogger should be running. Yes, they are a handful at first, but it’ll be well worth it. Set aside an afternoon to give them a try, and watch your readership and your free search engine traffic go through the roof. 

Get lots of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) goodness with a Tagging Plugin

We’ve all been seeing tags show up all over the place, as a replacement for categories. They’re everywhere, from Amazon.com to all your favorite blogs. Their main purpose is to segment your information so your readers can easily find it – kind of like categories, just a little more flexible.

But tags are very important for SEO, since tag pages rank very well in natural search engine results. This means that a well configured tagging plugin can help you get more web site traffic for free.

We use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for tags, and recommend it highly. It’s a little complex to configure at first, but then it just works.

After you install and configure your new tagging plugin, remember to display the tags for each post under that particular post. The tagging plugin will create a "tag page" for each tag, so clicking on a tag will list all the posts on your blog pertaining to that tag.

One thing you may not realize at first is that for every tag you create, a new page is create on your blog. You can quickly go from 20 pages to 800 pages – tons of good quality content for Google and Yahoo to slurp… 

A bonus tip: when showing these tags, configure them to point to the particular tag page on your site, i.e. NOT to Technorati or elsewhere, which is often the default configuration. This way the search engines will also find and give importance to these pages.

Make it easy for readers to RSS subscribe to your blog, with Feedburner

Just a year or two ago, RSS was the domain of the hopelessly nerdy and geeky. Fact is, most modern desktop software, from operating systems to Internet browsers, is coming out with RSS support. And your readers want to access your content over RSS. So are you going to make it easy for them or not?

What’s the best way to configure and track RSS for your readers?

While WordPress comes with good built-in RSS support, FeedBurner provides some great "finishing services" that you won’t want to miss out on. They’ll transparently format your feed so that any RSS reader will be able to read it. Also when people click on your "sign up my RSS feed" button, they won’t get a jumbled confusing mess in their browser. FeedBurner detects a regular browser and shows them a pretty HTML subscribe page. 

More importantly for many bloggers, they’ll give you feed analytics. Yep, you’ll find out how many people are actually reading your RSS feed. Pretty cool.

To get set up with FeedBurner, download and install the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin. Then follow the directions to create a FeedBurner account and configure your new RSS plugin with the specifics of your new FeedBurner feed.

As an added bonus, your new FeedBurner plugin will automatically redirect all your current RSS subscribers who are on your blog’s original feed, and get them all pulling on that shiny new FeedBurner feed. So you’ll have real numbers on who’s reading your blog by RSS.

Should you provide a full or just a partial RSS feed?

This debate has been raging in blogger circles for years. Many bloggers are afraid to provide a full feed, because some spam blogs may pull their feed and get their original content scanned by Google first. This means the spam blog will get Google original content credit.

This is technically a fair concern, thought it’s a little short sited. A professional blog with a strong following will be Google cached MUCH more quickly and frequently than some fly-by-night AdSense spam blog. Those tend to have a short life expectancy to begin with.

On the other hand, there are people who will read your blog ONLY if they can get it as a full RSS feed. They like to use their feed reader, and that’s it. So it’s up to you to decide if you want those readers or not.

More often than not, your best bet is to listen to your audience and give them what they want, the way they want it. Don’t base your decisions on fear and a lack mentality.  

Keep your readers engaged and on your site longer by showing Related Posts

Visitors to a new site are amazingly flighty. They take a few glances around and decide quickly if it’s worth staying. The ones who stay are usually sucked in by the great content on your blog.

What’s the point of showing related posts? Does it really matter?

When a reader comes to the end of that very captivating article, what is it they want more than anything in the world?

Since they took the time to read your article, their brain is focused on that topic, and it’s feeding on that very yummy content. And by it’s very nature, it’s screaming for more! Showing a list of related posts at the end of an article is a brilliant strategy to keep readers engaged and ON YOUR SITE!

How and where should you display related posts on your blog? 

The best place to show related posts is a bulleted list right at the end of the article. Our stats show that links just below the post have the highest click through of any location on the page!

We went with the WASABI Related Posts plugin, since it’s the most popular related posts plugin, and it just works. Keep those readers hooked. Remember, the first taste is always free!

Add related posts to your feed as well

As an added benefit, you can display related posts  Just like showing related posts under a particular blog post on your site, this is a great way to engage RSS readers by giving them more options. This means more to choose from if they don’t like the particular item they’re reading, or they just want more!

Use this plugin which brings together UTW and WASABI Related Posts to add a list of related posts to your feed.

Dust off and feature some of your older posts by showing Random Posts

Over time, dozens and then hundreds of posts get buried and abandoned in the archives of most blogs. A great way to bring these out is by featuring Random Posts in a spot either in your sidebar or somewhere around the list of Related Posts.

There are many reasons to pull up these. First of all, the search engines are still sending visitors to those post, IF they know how to find them. Getting even more activity there means better rankings for those posts in the search engines, and thus more web site traffic. Yumm.

This is now easy to do since the good people who brought you the WASABI Related Posts plugin have also made available the excellent WASABI Random Posts plugin. 

Get your readers involved and keep their interest with Latest Comments

People love to talk and share their opinions on all kinds of topics. But most people don’t want to be the first to say something.

Get them talking and involved by highlighting the latest comments across all the posts on your blog. As your blog grows in size, you’ll find people landing on older posts from search engine or direct traffic, and leaving comments on those. Showing those comments in a "latest comments" list will prompt more discussion on those topics. And more content on those pages is a great way to get even more search engine traffic.

This is great to feature to add in your sidebar, thus getting yet more comments and visibility to those previous posts. We recommend Brian’s Latest Comments plugin. It’s simple, very customizable, and works great.

Show off your Most Popular Posts – new visitors love these

Capture the interest of your new visitors and regular readers by giving them easy access to your best and most popular articles.

The most popular articles are generally those that are the most interesting to your readers – unless you do very strong and focused social media or other promotion, but this is generally not the case.

Be aware that there IS a little increased overhead on your system with this, since the plugin will record EACH view of EACH post on your site by logging ALL these views in your MySQL database. This shouldn’t be an issue, but can add up if your site gets over 50,000 visitors a month.

We use the Top Posts by Category Plugin.

Give visitors and search engines an easy way to navigate your blog with a Site Map

New visitors often like to look around and get their bearings

A site map is very helpful to give your visitors an at-a-glance view of your site, how it’s organized, what information is available where, and so on.

Search engines depend on site maps to find all of your buried articles

Search engines can’t send you traffic if they don’t know what great content is hiding on your site. Let them quickly and easily find all our your articles with a dynamically generated site map.

For a quick example, see what we’re doing with site maps in the footer of our www.AskDanAndJennifer.com Dating & Relationship advice column.

First, create an automatically updating HTML site map page for your visitors

This is mainly for your visitors, but also for some search engines that happen to find it. This is not a plugin per-se, but rather a custom WordPress page that auto-generates your site map. Get it here. 

Then, create a Google XML site map for your favorite search engines 

Get the Google XML Sitemap Plugin, which auto-generates a site map in Google Site Map format. This plugin also updates the site map every time you make a blog post.

You absolutely do NOT want to be updating a site map by hand every time you post. Unless of course you would find that therapeutic.

Bonus tip: To get the most benefit, add your UTW tag pages to your dynamic site map with the Google Sitemaps – UTW Tag Addon plugin.

Help your visitors promote and spread the word about your awesome articles and get you more web site traffic

People love to share cool stuff they find with others. They also like to bookmark good articles and websites for later. Social media makes sites like del.icio.us and even Netscape.com and Digg make it possible to do BOTH of these at once.

Make it easy for your readers to spread the word about you, and they’ll do it. Use a social media plugin that automatically pre-fills the fields for these visitors to submit your article to these social media sites.

Many people use either Alex King’s Share This plugin or the newer but very popular AddThis.com plugin.

Place this widget in a prominent spot toward the end of your post, and watch others spread the good word for you.

Encourage bloggers to comment on your blog by linking back to their sites 

When people leave comments on your blog, it’s customary for them to enter their web site address. It’s only fair that people who leave insightful comments should get a linkback from your blog to their site, and get some search engine goodness from it.

Whether you think it’s fair or not, this is still a great motivator to get ambitious bloggers involved in the discussions on your blog. 

Disable the WordPress nofollow tag 

WordPress is configured to mark all these linkbacks with the "nofollow" attribute, so that they are ignored by Google and other search engines as far as SEO value to the commenters blog.

There’s a movement to encourage comments by disabling this "nofollow" tag for comments left on WordPress blog. Of course, there’s a DoFollow plugin that will do this for you.

Feature your top commentators on your sidebar, with a full link to their site

A similar and more powerful way to encourage serious commentators to become involved in the discussions on your blog is to feature the top 10 or so commentators in your blog sidebar. Only the true top contributors will show up in this list, and it’s well worth the sidebar real estate to encourage the conversation these readers will often facilitate.

This can easily be done with the WordPress Top Commentators plugin.

What plugins do you use? Which are your absolute must-haves?

There are many other plugins available for WordPress, to perform just about every imaginable blog task. Leave a comment below and let us know your favorites.