Jason Rubacky and I were joking awhile back about how fun it would be if a bunch of affiliate marketers would take a picture of themselves wearing a sweater vest in front of a fireplace, and then we all mail them to the ShareASale office for Christmas. Note to Brian Littleton – we were not mocking your apparel choices by any means. In fact, we all look up to you and want to be just like you. Remember the idiom – imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

So, being the clearance shopper that I am, I knew I had to snatch up this Nebraska Huskers sweater vest for only $1.  Because, well, I personally don’t own a sweater vest. And I don’t ever plan to, thus why I kept the tags on this one to re-gift. Or maybe I’ll list it on eBay. Too bad I already bought an ugly Christmas sweater to wear for our family Christmas.

I’m already behind on sending out my Christmas cards, as I just picked up my photo cards today from Wally World. And since I’m too lazy to search for some photo paper to print out a card for the ShareASale gang, and it probably wouldn’t arrive in Chicago by Friday anyway, I thought I’d publicly share my season’s greeting with ALL of my affiliate friends!

Here’s wishing you all a very
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
from my home to yours…

I’ve done a lot of traveling and attended a lot of conferences, and I’d have to say that ShareASale’s Think Tank took the cake this year for the finest venue. It was held at the beautiful beyond resort Pelican Hill in Newport Beach, California.  I can’t possibly express the fabulosity of it all, but other attendees did a great job of recapping the event:

ShareASale ThinkTank 2009 Recap by Shawn Collins

ShareASale ThinkTank 2009 Wrap-Up by Missy Ward

ShareaSale Think Tank 2009: ReCap by Ian Fernando

Shareasale ThinkTank09: Epic Win! by Joe Sousa

Lessons Learned from ShareASale ThinkTank by Matt McWilliams

I didn’t plan to arrive early enough to participate in the golf outing, as I’m not a good golfer.  But after watching the Think Tank Golf Classic Video, I wish I would have tried. I may have had a chance at beating Asif Malik from GoldenCan! Watch the video for a good laugh PLUS learn how to embed your own video content that can includes affiliate links for monetization.

Special thanks to Brian Littleton and the ShareASale gang for including me in this awesome event! Are we really going to Hawaii next year?!?!

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.