I recently spoke on the “Affiliate Marketing Blogging Secrets” panel, part of the Monetization track at Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas with….

Jim Kukral, Moderator
Brian Littleton, President of Shareasale (shown in pic with me)
Angel Djambazov, Managing Editor of Revenews.com
and Todd Sawicki, stepping in for Ben Huh from ICanHasCheezburger.com.

I’ve had several people since then ask me for a list of the “tools” I mentioned that I personally use on my sites.

Many of my websites use the Wordpress platform, therefore I incorporate a lot of WP-Plugins (as I haven’t taken the time to convert to Thesis Theme yet).

Link Cloaking – I use this to mask my affiliate links, and it automatically adds the “nofollow” attritube. There is also NinjaAffiliate which is more robust, but is not free. Someone also mentioned SkimLinks.com, but I haven’t had time to experiment with them yet.

I also like to import content from my other sites that aren’t powered by Wordpress and my Twitter status updates into the sidebars of my blogs, therefore I use the Aggregate Plug-In and Twitter Tools. More recommended Wordpress Plug-Ins.

Speaking on monetizing my blogs, my main source of income is generated through affiliate programs, but I also generate revenue through additional sources, such as…

Chitika – The organic traffic visitors that I receive via Google Images generally aren’t looking to buy anything, so Chitika is cool in that it only shows relevant ads to the keywords they used to search with that pay per click.

List Building – Collect email addresses on individual post pages. I use AWeber to create hover pop-overs (usually unblockable), sign them up to receive the RSS feed via email, and set the thank you to a CPA offer (ie MarketLeverage Email Submit).

Affilistore – I have played around with this free downloadable script to make datafeed stores. If I can make a website with it in under an a hour, I’m presuming most others can as well. I downloaded datafeeds pertaining to my niche from ShareASale, changing my user id and re-uploaded to my new site. The only “marketing” I’ve done is adding the website and it’s sitemap to Google Overview and watched the sales come in.

Banner Ads – Since most people do not actually click through a banner, I prefer to shy away from CPA and CPC offers, but instead sell banner space or use a banner network such as Glam Media or TodayShow Network that pay per impression.

Google Adsense I presume everyone already knows about Google Adsense? Chloe Spencer from NeopetsFanatic.com fully monetizes her website with only Google Adsense.

Chloe was on the panel before mine “Are You Getting the Most Money Out of Your Blog as You Can?” with Dave Taylor, Tim Jones and Chris Pirillo, which was similar to our panel.

Some people wrote blog reviews about our panel, including Ms. Babble and Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media. I think our session was too “basic” for them and aimed more towards newbies.  Can’t please ‘em all.

TradePub is offering a complimentary eBook excerpt of Twitter Means Business – How Microblogging Can Help or Hurt Your Company.  Learn what Twitter is, how your company can benefit from using it and what you can expect from the rest of the book.

Personally I think twitter has helped my “company” (aka websites) tremendously. The only way it has maybe “hurt” it is that sometimes I get distracted reading other tweets and their links that follow, thus making me unproductive!

Read how Twitter can help drive traffic to your websites, too!

I attempted to take a pic of today’s Free Shirt, courtesy of LinkScape via DailyBooth.com, but since the writing is backwards and hard to read, I had my daughter attempt to take a pic of the back of the shirt…

… which isn’t much more legible. It says “SEO!!! Moz – 30 Billion Pages devoured and still hungry!”

So what is LinkScape?

Linkscape provides link data never available before on over 54+ billion URLs across 230+ million domains.

Looks like they need up update the number on their shirts!

So I decided to use http://kimarketing.com as my “URL to Analyze” and “Run Basic Report” and here is the score badge it generated (I just ran a free report, but you can upgrade for more indepth statistics)…

I chose that domain first, just because I had a problem with it getting blocked by filtering software. Scott Jangro helped me find the root of the problem and blogged about it on his new site, AffBook.com – definitely a good site to bookmark about affiliate marketing.

*Yes, I know my office is a pit. I am slowly in the process of making room for a Treadmill Desk like Tricia Meyer uses.