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.

Last Friday, this wizard (aka me) was trying to publish a post on one of my blogs and got the following window pop-up saying “The server WEBSITENAME at Magic requires a username and password” (example on Flickr from yonghokim). My initial thoughts indeed included profanity. Magic? WTF! Am I seeing an optical illusion?

Scared that I have a virus, worm, parasite, whatever, I google its demise and end up in the WordPress forums.  Many cited that upgrading WP alone did the trick.  So I upgraded to the latest version of WP and was able to post normally.  My blood pressure went down.

Until yesterday when I got the same Magic error on the same blog!  Double WTF! My first instinct was to pick @yonnage’s brain, hoping he could make the magic disappear into thin air, but he had to go and get married on me and take the day off! Doesn’t he know marriage is sometimes overrated? Anyhow…

Back to the forums I go. To solve the problem for good, I had to manually edit all of my plug-ins as 50% of them had a line a crap code (example) at the very top of them that I had to delete (Yes, Chris Pearson, I know I need to convert to Thesis Theme).  A couple plugins wouldn’t let me edit them without an error, so I deleted those via FTP and reinstalled.

Wait, I wasn’t done yet! I then had to reinstall the wp-includes/vars.php file to get the final Abracadabra! Now, hopefully (fingers and toes crossed) everything appears to be working fine!

Do you Believe in Magic?

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.