During my son, Taylor’s New Student Orientation at UNL, I received this free tshirt from the Nebraska Bookstore. I was hoping to get the other design, something about “the best things in bed are between the covers” – get your mind out of the gutter, they were talking about books.  Instead I got this one about “going green” which I believe has less to do with the eco-system, and more about saving money since the Nebraska Bookstore offers to beat the prices of the University Bookstore. And we all know I’m all about saving money! 

When Taylor got an email from the University Bookstore offering “a pre-populated shopping cart based on your submitted classes,” I clicked on the link to do some price comparison. The Nebraska Bookstore let me input the class ID numbers and showed the same books. Yes, they were a dollar or two cheaper, but out of stock on some of them.  Being the online shopping guru that I am, I set out to find the books even cheaper!  I ended up saving almost 50% off college textbooks! It took a bit of research as UNL didn’t specify the ISBN numbers, and I had to make sure I had the right editions, but I think the extra time was worth my savings.

But thanks for the free shirt!  Speaking of free shirts, I need to get some more smiley face tees printed up to give out - anyone have any recommendations for cheap screen-printers?

Jonathan Leger’s newest venture is SearchWinds.com – a search engine powered by Bing and YOU.  Users vote on the search engine results to move them up or down in the ranking.  And you can suggest sites that you feel should rank for various keywords.

Since this is a new site, Jon is offering free advertising in the coming pay-per-click system (coming in September) in exchange for testing out the site.  Simply perform searches you’re knowledgeable about, vote, and make suggestions. As others vote for your suggestions, you credibility points.  For each point you earn, you’ll earn $1 worth of free advertising per month!  Plus you’ll receive $1 in advertising credit for every visitor you refer that creates an account.

Create your account at SearchWinds.com now and start earning free advertising credit as you build credibility.

Whenever I get a message from someone – be it an email, phone call, Facebook friend request, even a fax - thanking me for inspiring them to create a website and earn money from affiliate marketing, it makes my day. Those messages motivate me to continue to keep at it more than anyone knows! 

This past weekend, though, I think I got the best compliment ever in person from my Uncle Lee, who I haven’t seen in several years as he’s been in the military.  He came “home” with my other two uncles, who I do get to see a couple times a year.  We all laughed so hard that I cried reminiscing the “old days” of growing up together.

Uncle Lee took me aside and told me thank you for inspiring him to create his website GTO Alley six years ago. He took my advice to pick a passion and run with it, and his website has been profitable since its inception.  Sure, one site alone usually doesn’t allow one to quit their day job, but it’s some nice extra ”fun money” as my first site was over a decade ago.

Since looking over his site today, I’m going to email and offer him some tips that I think could earn him even more revenue. The top five tips being…

1. Convert to a Wordpress site complete with recommended Wordpress plugins.  Wordpress just isn’t for blogs anymore.  I use Wordpress for 90% of my websites (including this very one).  Sure, it may be a hassle to convert all your HTML pages, but it’ll be worth it in the end.

2. Change Google Adsense ads from “Link units” to Ad units” – the reason being that you don’t get paid for the first click on Link units, just if they click on an ad on the second page, whereas you get paid on the first click of Ad units.  Plus I personally think the Ad units are more appealing to the visitors to click on.

3. Add Chitika | Premium Ads to cash in on your search engine traffic.  Only traffic arriving from Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc will see the ads, and the ads will highlight the keywords they used to get there, thus increasing click-throughs.  I added Chitika Premium to one of my sites a few months ago (just on the “Single Post” pages of a Wordpress site), and it’s been making over $100 per month. Not too shabby for simply adding a few lines of code, eh?

4. Create a XML Sitemap – you can do this for free at XML-Sitemaps.com. Then submit that Sitemap using Google’s webmaster tools.

5. Remove ”function disableRightClick(btnClick)” script. If people really want to steal your images, all they have to do is look at your source code (as I did to get the banner image below). If you have your own copyrighted images, add a watermark with your site URL right on the picture for free advertising.

I hope Uncle Lee doesn’t mind me constructively criticizing his site publicly!?! But my hope is that my suggestions may help someone else. Gotta pay it forward.

And I suppose I should give a shoutout to my other uncles’ websites so they don’t feel left out…

My Uncle Brian’s website (he is actually younger than me – yes my mom and grandma were knocked up at the same time…) is American Muscle Authority for his car restoration business.

And my Uncle David actually designs and develops websites at iGroupStudios. His clients - surely, you’re heard of them – include Suze Orman and Omaha Steaks. If not, you live under a rock, and please don’t call me Shirley.