Amazon Associates and Google Blogger Now Integrated
Today we are excited to announce Amazon Associates for Blogger, a direct integration between Amazon Associates and Blogger. This new collaboration enables Bloggers to monetize their content by adding relevant Amazon products to their blog posts without interrupting the blog editing process. Amazon Associates for Blogger is available now available here on Associates Central. Amazon Associates who don’t have a Google Blogger account can set up a free Blogger account with their Associates ID and start earning right away.
The new tool allows Bloggers to add links and images to their blog posts in just 2 easy steps:
1.Bloggers highlight the relevant text and the Amazon Product Finder will search Amazon’s millions of products and recommend the ones that are most closely associated with the text
2.Bloggers can then insert a link or image to that product which includes their Associates ID, enabling them to earn up to 15% in referral fees from Amazon
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Stumble ItSocial Network Website Builder For Joomla, It Looks Really Good!
First of all I’m not big on Joomla, Wordpress is my weapon of choice when it comes to building websites not because Wordpress is better but it’s just the tool I started with on the web and I’ve always been satisfied with it so I have no reason to change it. Since I run a website called Site Builder Tips I can’t make it all about Wordpress, Though I don’t use Joomla for any of my projects I do use some there theme designs, meaning I’ve seen some great CMS themes for Joomla that I then convert to Wordpress themes, I have a membership at Joomlart which is a Joomla premium themes site that has some really great themes that I convert to Wordpress themes.
It’s on Joomlart where I discovered a site called JomSocial which is a Joomla social network website builder plugin, I have to say this is the first time I ran into a tool that I couldn’t find for Wordpress, I mean there is BuddyPress but JomSocial is a whole other level. The cool thing about JomSocial is that the site it self is a social network that allows you to see the extension in action, a couple months back I joined the site and I completely forgot that I was trying out a demo because It was a real social network where I was interacting with other members. I think that’s a great way to sell a tool, the look, feel and functionality of JomSocial reminds me of being on Facebook.
JomSocial does a good job with this tool and they’re quite a few successful sites powered by JomSocial, 3 of which are GibLink.com that has 113,380 + members, OnlineRadioStations.com with 49,500 + members and KenyaHub.com with 120,583 + members just to name a few.
A few features and Specs that stood out for me.
Ad.ly – Make Money With Twitter, Don’t Miss This Plane
There has been quite a few Twitter advertising networks to come out the would works over the past year or so such as Sponsored Tweets, Betweeted, Twitvert, Twittad, Magpie and a dozen more. The problem is none of them have truly don’t understand how Twitter works on a social level most of these Twitter advertising networks are usually broken down into two types of networks, the ones that only go after celebrities with high a high volume of followers and the other that just goes after spammers and tire kickers and doesn’t ad any real value to advertisers or Twitter.
Ad.ly is the first network to accommodate all Twitter users, they have a large number of high profile celebrities but there is also room for the little guys with only a few thousand followers. Some of you who have already joined the network a while back might remember that campaign NBC had for upcoming shows one of which was True Blood (love that show) which I think everyone at the time got paid to tweet about the season finale which was $290 for a Tweet, yeah that’s right one Tweet. Some Users are even getting upwards of $5,000 per tweet,and this is just the beginning.
Checkout the video from their Launch back in September. It includes some pretty big celebrity endorsements like Dr Drew, Chamillionaire, Tony Hawk, and many others:
How To Get 1,000 + Visitors Per Day From Facebook Fan Pages
Now I know everyone goes ape shit over Twitter being the greatest thing since slice bread and has great appeal as a social marketing tool, but in all honesty Facebook holds far more weight. From the perspective of a website owner Facebook has much more social value.
About eight months ago I decided to set up a fan page for my hip hop blog (HipHopMusicDotCom.com), I didn’t do much with it until I noticed I was getting fans most of which were most likely referred by my friends who I initially invited when I first launched the page.
It wasn’t until September 24th that I really started to see the benefits of using Facebook fan pages. Since that date I’ve been averaging 1,000 new fans per month and averaging 1,000 + visitors per day which has increased my overall traffic by 14 percent. At this rate I’ll be averaging 2,000,000 page views per month by December.
How To Set Up A Blogger Blog Correctly
The great thing about Blogger is that it’s a free service, a free service so good that people would actually pay for it if it wasn’t free. It allows you to customize every aspect of your theme, use third party ads and set up unlimited blogs along with a long list of other features. Some of the most popular blogs on the web are hosted on Blogger and many have turned their blogs into profitable businesses.
In many instances Blogger serves as a starting point for most Bloggers, a place where they can start blog with little to no risk and if it turns out to be a blog that has the potential to be a business then they can then upgrade to a self hosted service like Wordpress .org. Though they’re many Bloggers out there that make a full time income with blogs hosted by Blogger. In this guide I layout the steps to creating a blog that is scalable. People use Blogger for many different purposes such as affiliate sites, news sites, video blogs, gossip, music blogs, photo blogs or a simple online journal or diary which was the original purpose of a blog, but that was a long time ago and the times have changed. Here’s how to set up Blogger correctly or at least just the smart way.
WP Affiliate Platform – Wordpress Affiliate Program Plugin
About a year ago I was looking for a Wordpress plugin to run an affiliate program, I searched high and low without any luck, it just didn’t exist. I considered having one built but never got around to it, now that I’m working on my membership site that I will be launching in a few months, I need a tool to manage affiliates. I was considering going with iDevAffiliate which is a great affiliate management tool but I really wanted something that worked within Wordpress and didn’t require extra integration and customization. Before making the decision to go with iDevAffiliate, I decided to search one last time for a plugin for Wordpress to manage affiliates. I was actually looking for a membership plugin for Wordpress and accidentally ran into what I’ve been looking for over a year, WP Affiliate Platform is exactly what I’ve been looking for and I’m glad someone finally created it.
Yahoo Answers Traffic Guide – How To Get Traffic From Yahoo Answers
One of the easiest ways to generate traffic to your website is often one of the most overlooked methods as well, Yahoo Answers. Not only is it a simplified method of driving targeted traffic to your site, it is also absolutely free to use.
This strategy will be broken down for you in a step-by-step format, making it easy for you to incorporate this technique into your own marketing efforts. You’ll quickly discover just how incredibly powerful this tactic is when you begin to analyze your traffic and see just how much Yahoo Answers is directing your way.
And for those who might be wondering whether Yahoo Answers has a large enough user base to yield a worthwhile response, here is what Yahoo Answers has to say:
a With more than 21 million unique users in the U.S. and 90 million worldwide, Yahoo! Answers is the largest knowledge-sharing community on the Web.
Is that big enough for you? If so, let’s get started!
BigCommerce – The Best All In One Online Store Builder
As ecommerce continues to grow at a unstoppable pace now currently a 10 billion dollar a year industry, the demand for more capable ecommerce solutions are needed more than ever. I’ve seen quite a few different companies come out the wood work with so called ecommerce solution that clearly displays there lack of knowledge in what consumers are looking for in today’s web environment, while some companies such as Yahoo,ProStores and SiteBuildIt that have been around for quite some time have evolved with the times a remained at the top of list.
BigCommerce is a new comer (well sort of new) to the list of ecommerce solutions BigCommerce is a hosted, fully managed version of Interspire Shopping Cart that was launched by Interspire in June 2009. With the Interspire Shopping Cart software being so highly popular and successful they the decided to launch a full blown hosted version of it, it’s a hosted solution meaning they take care of the servers, security, upgrades and backups for your online store so you don’t have to, this is great for small and large size businesses that looking to run there business and no worry about managing a server. Not I know I said ProStores was the The Best Ecommerce Website Builder, but I think BigCommerce could give them a run for their money and here is why.
BigCommerce does a pretty good job of describing all the features that are included in there service so I won’t do their job for them but instead I’ll touch on only a few of the key features and why they’re important in today’s web environment.
Life After Adsense, What To Do When Adsense Starts To Suck Ass
Now anyone who has a website that receives consistent traffic over a long period of time and uses Google AdSense to monetize their traffic have noticed a few things. In the beginning the earnings are really good for a couple months, they have higher payouts depending on the time of year, and the click through rates are much higher in the beginning. Over time all of these things change and in many cases depending on the topic of your website the changes in the earnings are so drastic that it does not make sense to even continue to use Google AdSense as a primary income stream. As a matter fact you might want to consider removing AdSense all together in order to find new ways to make money with your blog or website.
So Whats The Cause Of These Changes?
Ad Inventory: The most obvious reason for the drop in earnings is that the ad inventory for AdSense has gone down, when the economy took a turn for the worst so did the Ad rates and not just for AdSense but for all Ad Networks across the board. Advertisers have much smaller budgets to work with thus Google AdSense has to lower there rates, now of course there are some exceptions to the rule such has the health industry and few other markets that still have healthy ad payouts but they are few and far between. I can tell you from personal experience working in the music industry that music and entertainment related websites and blogs are not making much from AdSense, last year my hip hop blog was making a full time income and this year even with more traffic the site isn’t even making half what it made last year. In fact AdSense has become a third tier income stream for that site.
Ad Formats and Placements: Believe it or not this plays a major part in how well Google AdSense performs on your website, depending on your site design and what ad formats you use, it will directly affect how much money you will make. The best way to figure out which site design, ad formats and positions will perform the best. I suggest you setup three different variations of your website (Designs), run each different design with different ad formats and ad positions. Run each variation for at least a week depending on your traffic, if you have a high traffic website you can make it less than a week. This is split testing in it’s simplest form. To know exactly what your visitors are interacting with on your website I suggest you check out CrazyEgg, it’s a really sick analytic tool that gives you a visual view of your website with a heat map overlay that shows exactly where your visitors and their mouses went and where they didn’t go.
PicAdMedia.com Make Money From The Images On Your Site
Even though sites like Youtube stream 1.2 billion videos per day it still pales in comparison to how many images are viewed on the web daily, yet there is still no company to successfully monetize images. Of course sites like IstockPhoto and ShutterStock make millions from selling images but that business model only works for a few. Websites, blogs and social sites with millions of images can’t benefit from that business model. This is where in-image/in-picture advertising comes in, which is an idea that works similar in-video advertising where an overlay ad is placed on top of the image. Now the concept of making money from images by means of In-Picture Advertising is not a new thing, BritePic (A product of Adbrite) was one of the first services to offer a monetization model for images but the model’s possible success was hindered by the inconvenient method of implementing the ads into your images.The idea is that you would have to log into BritePic or Adbrite and manually ad your images which would return a embed code for you to place on your website. The problem here is that the code is javascript and it generates a flash version of your image, this means Google or any other search engine would not be able to pick up those images which means less traffic and if you have a website with allot of images your already aware that a significant percentage of your traffic is accredited to the images on your site. Secondly this is a time consuming method not to mention that all the images already on your site will not benefit from the method.
Introducing PicAdMedia
About a month ago I received a email from someone over at PicAdMedia inviting me to a private Beta testing of there new In-Picture Advertising service, as soon as I saw “In Picture Advertising” I remembered BritePic and I deleted the email. For about 3 weeks from time to time I continued to receive emails from them, they eventually wore me down so before I decided on adding them to the spam list I went to check there service out. After signing up and checking out the dashboard I quickly realized that the method by which they place the ads on websites was completely different from BritePic’s and adheres to standards of web usability. I decided to test out the service on my hip hop music blog HipHopMusicDotCom since it had the most images on it.
