WPAffPro (WordPress Affiliate Pro) is a “must-have” WP plugin for bloggers interested in monetizing their WordPress blog.

The plug-in is easy to install and configure, and allows you to instantly add thousands of affiliate links to your WP blogs.

In a moment, I’ll share with you an efficient method I use to add monetized links to multiple WP blogs quickly and effectively. First, let’s look at 10 benefits of using WPAffPro, including some that may not be so obvious at first glance:

WPAffiliatePro Benefit #1 - A Passive Source Of Making Money

What can be easier than setting something up once and then letting it run forever on autopilot, making you money 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? As posts are added to your blog, any keywords or keyword phrases you have set up in WPAFFPRO will instantly be hyperlinked to your affiliate page destination. If you own a blog or blogs that other people also contribute content to, even better. You will have an automatically growing source of revenue.

WPAffiliatePro Benefit #2 - Direct Visitors To Any Site, Not Just Affiliate Pages

If you want your blog to feed visitors to one of your websites, just associate the keyword or keyword phrase in WPAFFPRO with the link of the destination page you would like people to visit. Your visitors will then be directed to that page when they click on the hyperlinked word or phrase. This is great if you have your own product page, or a site that you want to feed more potential customers to.

WPAffiliatePro Benefit #3 - Create Anchor Text Links

Anchor text is the hyperlinked words on a blog or web page. In other words, the words that people click on when they click on a hyperlink. Anchor text usually gives your visitors useful information about the content of the page you’re linking to (except if you’re using “click here” as the anchor text, for example). More importantly, it tells search engines what the page is about. When used wisely, it can significantly increase your rankings in search engines, especially in Google. With WPAFFPRO, you will automatically be adding targeted anchored text to your blogs as new posts are added containing your selected keywords and keyphrases.

WPAffiliatePro Benefit #4 - Fully Compatible With AdSense

If you currently use AdSense in your blogs, you can add an extra affiliate income stream to your pages without breaching Google’s Terms Of Service.

WPAffiliatePro Benefit #5 - Complete Satisfaction Guarantee

The owners of WPAFFPRO offer a no obligation, 8 Week Satisfaction Guarantee. If you aren’t completely satisfied with WPAffiliatePro, you will receive a complete refund of your money …

Read the complete review here: WPAffPro Review

John Reese, who is famous in Internet Marketing circles for being the first online marketer to have a “million-dollar” product launch day, has just released a new, powerful and free viral blogging tool. Adding this tool to your own blogs will help drive more targeted visitors to your blogs, because the software utilizes several powerful built-in traffic-driving features.

Before we look at these features and why the software is an example of brilliant marketing, let’s take a look at some market statistics regarding blogging, bloggers and the blogosphere:

According to Technorati, there are 1.6 million blog postings per day and 175,000 new blogs created each day with over 50 million being tracked. This is quite simply a huge and massively growing market.

The new tool is called BlogRush. It is an attractive-looking blog sidebar application that is easy to add to your blog - simply copy and paste a few lines of code. It then displays 5 other people’s blog post titles, with the name of the blog shown below the post and these change every time the page is refreshed. You can see it displayed at the bottom of my blog sidebar.

What’s so cool about this script, is that every time a page is displayed on your site containing the script, the title of your latest blog posting is shown on the widget of another theme-related blog. This has the effect of not only promoting your blog around the Internet, but promoting it to a theme-relevant and targeted audience.

So, for example, if your blog is about health, the links shown in your widget will be related to this topic, and your blog posts will be shown in other blogs about similar subjects. When you first set up a blog in your control panel (just four lines of information are required: blog title, blog URL, blog feed URL and category), you choose the category of blogs you want to cross-promote your posts with.

If you are concerned that adding this tool to your blog will take people away from your blog to other blogs, you’ll be happy to know that whenever one of your blog visitors clicks on one of the post titles displayed in the widget that belong to someone else’s blog, a new window opens. This allows you to keep visitors in your own blog, while also providing them with more information related to your content. Of course, this application will also help other people find the information they are looking for by leaving other people’s blogs to come to yours.

I was actually impressed with how relevant the posts were to my blog themes when I added the code to several of my blogs. As the tool builds more users, it will have more posts to pool from and the algorithm will continue to be improved, therefore, bringing more and more relevant content to your blog

Earlier I mentioned that the software utilizes several powerful built-in traffic-driving principles. Let’s take a look at some these now …

Read the complete review here: How To Drive Massive Traffic To Your Blog

BlogRush - the latest venture from John Reese, looks set to be a huge success in the Internet marketing arena. If you haven’t taken a look at BlogRush yet, wander over to BlogRush and watch the demo movie - it’s one of the most professionally made intros I’ve seen in a while and explains everything in a very clear way.

Basically, BlogRush is a service which promotes blog posts across a network of member sites. To become a member you only need to submit your blog and RSS feed, and choose a category. Once you’ve completed the sign-up process, you get a snippet of code to add to your blog. Once you’ve added the code to your blog, you’ll see a nifty little box appear (which does look very cool) containing five posts from other related blogs.

Of course the question we’re all asking is how do we get our blog posts appearing on other blogs? Easy, you just need a few visitors. Every time someone visits your blog and the BlogRush gadget is displayed, you get a credit in the BlogRush system, which means a link to your blog will be displayed on another related blog somewhere else in the system.

Seems fair, doesn’t it? But even better than that, if people click on the BlogRush gadget on your site, and they then go on to sign up for the service, you receive credits for people viewing their blogs, in addition to your own. The video at BlogRush shows clearly how this works down to 10 levels of referral.

I have to admit, I wish I’d thought of this. It’s an ingenious way of promoting your blog for free, and you can tell by the way it’s been done that a lot of thought has been put into it. All credit to John Reese and his gang for this one. I expect to see BlogRush gadgets popping up all over the place, get yours now.

Portal blog feeder is one of the most powerful features available with Portal Feeder, or really available anywhere in the internet marketing world.

What it does is allow you to make posts to a number of different blogs, depending on your category. Posts are category specific, and can be randomized using different titles, body variations, keywords, and links, so you are not making the exact same post to every blog. Each should be a little different for maximum effect.

I’m using PBF to make this posting to a number of internet-related blogs!

Within hours, these posts will have been spidered by the search engines, and will start showing up as links back to my site. It’s true!

Read my complete review of Portalblogfeeder here.

I just received the email from ReviewMe that they have launched their affiliate program and are paying out $25 per referral. Here’s what their blog states -

We are excited to announce our very cool affiliate program is ready for your blog! Not only will the affiliate program drive traffic to your individual listing at ReviewMe which will encourage review sales for you but it will also pay you $25 for any referred sale even if the visitor does not purchase a review from your blog.

I must admit that’s a good combination - you get paid for the review and the referral if they buy from your site, or if they buy a review from another site you still get the $25 referral fee. Needless to say, I have begun implementing my referral ID into posts here on my blog.

ReviewMe have also set up a badge you can apply to your blog that includes your affiliate ID and entices people to purchase reviews. The badge for Entrepreneurs-Journey looks like this:

Get In Now!

As a blogger who makes good money from affiliate programs I suggest you start promoting this one as soon as you can. The earlier you start the more you will make because the market is not saturated yet. Once everyone knows about ReviewMe it will be tough, especially for those of you with smaller blogs, to make any money from programs like this, but if you act early you have a much better chance of signing up new people.

Custom Pricing

ReviewMe have also changed their system so bloggers can determine the price to charge. I know for some bloggers this will be great because they can increase their fee and not impact their sales (perceived value anyone?). In my case I’m going to leave the pricing as is for now because I’m happy with the amount of review requests I receive at this time.

Praise For ReviewMe

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the service ReviewMe offers. The pricing structure is very rewarding and more often than not the review requests I receive are for very relevant and interesting subjects. Of course I get some that I either cannot do because they require too much research, or the topic is not relevant enough to my audience, or I’m traveling or too busy, but there are enough that I can do that it brings in a few hundred a month.

I’ve also offered some of the paid reviews to the Small Business Marketing & Branding writers whenever they come up, splitting the income with them if anyone volunteers to write the review.

That being said, writing reviews is a fine art and it can be hard not to feel like you are selling out just for the money. You have to think like you are writing the article because you are genuinely interested in the topic and not doing it for the cash, which, when the topic is relevant, is easy enough, but if it’s a little off-topic or a subject you no little about, it can be hard to make a review interesting.

Praise For Patrick Gavin

I don’t know if his companies are profitable yet given the focus at the moment appears to be on customer acquisition at both Text-Link-Ads and ReviewMe, but I have to give big props to Patrick and his partners behind the two sites.

Patrick’s come up with two very simple ideas for how to monetize blogs and offer advertisers great value. The services are perfectly positioned as middlemen in the transaction between advertisers and bloggers/site owners, both use a many-to-many business model so it’s possible to scale quickly without needing to increase resources significantly and the execution of the businesses has been great. The sites are clean and simple and the service is delivered with ease. I suspect both companies may well become multi-million dollar enterprises if they are not already.

I just wish I was as fast acting and thinking as Patrick and his team - they are definitely doing something right!

If all this is new to you, check out Text-Link-Ads where you can buy and sell text links and ReviewMe, where you can buy and offer reviews on blogs.

I also wrote an article when ReviewMe launched here - Should Bloggers Accept Money For Reviews?.

Yaro Starak
Reviewer

Feature: Lead Generation - SalesBuilderOnline.com - The Leader in Behavioral Profiling & Targeting

Original post by http://ReplytoYaro.com (Yaro Starak) and software by Elliott Back

You may have noticed after upgrading to Wordpress 2.1 that even if you have the settings to full feeds for your RSS subscribers, they would receive a [more] link if you use the tag when publishing the article.

A few months ago I started applying code to my larger posts because my blog homepage would take too long to load if I published a few of my characteristically large articles (2000+ words) in a row. The more tag breaks the article down on the front page and visitors to the blog have to click the read more link to go to the full article.

Previously if you published full text feeds and you used the more tag it didn’t affect the feed, but with the upgrade to WordPress 2.1 it did and would look like this:

Full Text Feed Plug-In

Blaine Moore today told me to install a new plug-in that fixes the problem, which I just did.

The plug-in is called Full Text Feed from the folks at CaveMonkey50.com.

I suggest if you also want to offer full feeds to your readers and you are running WordPress 2.1 or above that you consider installing this plug-in. As I have written about before, it’s most important that your blog is read, and full feeds makes this as easy as possible.

Feature: Email Autoresponder - AWeber.com Email Newsletter System - As Recommended by Yaro Starak

Original post by http://ReplytoYaro.com (Yaro Starak) and software by Elliott Back

The recent series of articles I wrote on blogging as a business model sparked a few queries about how I have gone about outsourcing the writing of my blogs. In the article I talked about how it is important to move away from being solely responsible for content output, otherwise you limit your potential for growth and are effectively self employed.

SmallBusinessBranding.com Case Study

Over a year ago I purchased the blog SmallBusinessBranding.com (SBB) from Michael Pollock. When I first took over ownership of the blog I began writing the content myself, doubling my writing commitments since I was also writing to this blog, Entrepreneurs-Journey (EJ), at the same time.

I had a lot of difficulty writing to two blogs. Each time I wrote an article for SBB, I realized it was appropriate for EJ as well. I went from writing one blog 100% of the time to dividing my output across two blogs, and I knew from experience running two businesses at once would end in weakening both sites (see my business timeline for the story of the English School I was running [badly] as a second business). I decided to come up with a solution to keep SBB running without me as the author, since I wanted to devote all my writing output to EJ.

After asking for suggestions in my forums and brainstorming, I decided to bring on one or two bloggers to write for SBB. My initial plan was to advertise for the bloggers and test them for a month. If they proved dedicated I would offer them revenue share of income generated by SBB - I was thinking something along the lines of 50%. I was going to do some number crunching first to work out how many posts were done vs how much they would get paid, but this situation never eventuated.

After placing the ad for bloggers I was flooded with responses and a good 4-6 of them seemed like they could be candidates for the job. At that point I had a different idea.

Instead of hiring only a couple of bloggers who would have to commit to multiple articles per week, I’d take on everyone who looked like they could do a good job and reduce the amount of articles required to one per week each. With up to six writers, one article per week would result in near-daily content, which was my goal.

The problem was how to remunerate the authors. Part of the justification for writing for SBB was the exposure and credibility you can build. There are at least 1000 daily RSS readers of the blog, which for a new author can be a nice boost to their readership. As much as I think that is valuable, I didn’t want that to be the sole motivation behind wanting to write for SBB.

I thought about a revenue share, but with only about under $400 a month coming in from that blog and six authors to pay, it wasn’t going to work out very well. In the end I came up with an innovative way to empower authors with the ability to monetize their content published to SBB in whatever way they chose.

I commissioned Michael Pollock, the original owner of SBB, to do a redesign of the site. Previously SBB looked like a sister site to EJ with a similar design that clearly focused on me. For the new design the focus moved away from me and SBB became a blog magazine with multiple authors profiled.

Each author was provided a homepage [ example ] within the site that lists a history of their articles and other data about what they do and how they can be contacted. Also on this page are designated advertising areas where the writers can decide to promote anything they want to. They can use Google AdSense or Yahoo Publishers Network, or banners from an affiliate product or their own business banners, or text links or any content they wish to promote.

Each article the author writes also has the same adspace where their content is displayed, so effectively every page that author contributes to the blog, contains an area where they can monetize their work.

The more articles an author writes, the more pages they have online with ads, potentially bringing in traffic and thus income. Add to this the combined efforts of every writer working hard on great content increasing the blog’s overall traffic, *should* result in each author enjoying exponential traffic growth to their individual pages as well. In this way every author benefits from the traffic brought in by the other authors. It pays to be part of the group as long as everyone contributes to the overall growth of the site.

Unfortunately that ideal situation hasn’t quite eventuated yet at SBB because some of the authors had to stop writing or reduce their contributions to focus on their own projects. It takes some testing and a clear purpose/flow from article to advertisement in order to monetize their adspace and I don’t think any of the authors writing for SBB have made much money from it yet. Those who have kept writing are enjoying the more intrinsic value that comes from blogging - exposure, networking and creative expression - like Danielle Rodgers, Nick Rice and our latest team member, Christine Buske.

In future the new authors who join the site will have to be prepared to write often and carefully choose how they monetize their content if they want to make money directly, or perhaps a better strategy, have a way to leverage the exposure and traffic indirectly by promoting their own business, blog or website as the current authors do. Incidentally, if you know a thing or two about small business or you are running one now and want to tell your story, contact me if you are interested in joining the Small Business Branding team.

Locating Talent

One very good thing did come of the SBB outsourcing experiment so far - I met Robert Kingston.

Rob lives in Brisbane, like me, and demonstrated great enthusiasm for SBB when he first came aboard as a writer. Because of this I offered him the opportunity to take over management of the blog and he’s also coming on board for some other projects. I’m very grateful that he’s shown so much interest, professionalism and talent too.

I’m sharing revenues with Rob obviously because he deserves it for all the work he is doing running four of my sites and as a form of motivation for him to increase the income the sites produce. If he can help to double the income of the sites he is in charge of, his own income will double as well. I’m still involved and will definitely help Rob with the strategic direction, but it is his job to implement, which no doubt will give him all kinds of experiences that will enhance his Internet marketing credentials and give him a great head-start when he finishes university.

The key ingredients to make blog outsourcing work is managing people well. If you can’t structure something that people want to work for, then you won’t get people prepared to work for you. Many elements, including your blog’s current traffic, revenues, credibility, and exposure can all help to attract the right people and give you tools to motivate others, but it’s not a clear cut area - there are many ways to structure a system and it might take some experimentation and creative thinking to figure out what works.

Now that you know how I set-up SBB, you can see one possible blog outsourcing model. In the next article I’m going to run through the different considerations and models you should contemplate if your goal is to bring in additional authors to your blog.

Yaro Starak
Blog Manager

Feature: Lead Generation - SalesBuilderOnline.com - The Leader in Behavioral Profiling & Targeting

Original post by http://ReplytoYaro.com (Yaro Starak) and software by Elliott Back