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.

It was an honor to first be nominated and then be a finalist for Pinnacle Awards Affiliate of the Year Award along with Mike Allen of Shopping-Bargains.com and Scott Aikin of Hawkee.com.  During Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas earlier this week (great time, btw), Mike won the respected title, and it couldn’t have gone to a better person.  I’m happy for him and privileged that I was acknowledged as his peer.

Congrats to all the winners of the Pinnacle Awards…

While in Boston, I was on the panel of the “Content that Kills” session (TrishaLyn’s review) with Lisa Picarille and Angel Djambazov.  We focused on strategies for developing compelling content to draw visitors.  Of course, our session was scheduled for the exact same time as “My 5 Favorite SEO Strategies Exposed” with Wil Reynolds so I don’t blame anyone for picking his session over ours.  And if I hadn’t been on the panel, I would have been at his session.  I’ve heard him speak several times, but learn something new from him every time.  So if you ever have the chance to see/hear him, just do it! 

I did take a little (ok, a lot) of slack from Sam Harrelson for bringing up Ping.fm as a resource during the session.  I think Ping.fm is a great tool as you can update all of your social networking sites (twitter, myspace, facebook, etc) all at the same time, and you can update via various methods (text, email, apps, etc. I use AIM).   Sam I am, on the other hand, thinks of this as spamming.

I offered to mud wrestle him over it, but since he didn’t show, I claim victory. Oh, and I’m getting sick of watching the Olympics, too.  Anyway, my theory is as long as you don’t use Ping.fm excessively, it’s not spamming, but a great source of traffic to your websites.  I use it when I write a new blog post and include the title and a twurl.nl link. This week, I’ve gotten the most traffic from plurk – a site I didn’t even know existed until joing Ping.fm. Now, I don’t suggest sending every tweet and facebook comment thru Ping.fm – now that would be spam, Sam.  Use in moderation, and it’s all good.

If you haven’t signed up with Ping.fm yet, today’s beta invite code is “vivalaping” (it was “pingitlikeitshot” the day of our session, thus the title inspiration).

I haven’t even signed up for half of the social networks available to use with Ping.fm, yet anyway.  You can even use it to post to blogger.  So, I’m making a list there of my social networks, mainly just to jog my memory.  Anyone know how to make the links clickable on there without manually editing them? The good thing about blogger is, once you update, you’re more likely to show up in the “Next Blog>>” for people surfing blogs.

Now, as if I don’t have enough food on my plate (and I’m hungry), I think I’m going to look for a new theme for this site. This one is boring me out. Revolution maybe?