Many people want to make some additional income from their websites. One of the most common ways for people to start is to use Google Adsense ads. Google Adsense ads are a very easy monetization method to start earning money from your website. Simply setup your account, copy and paste some Javascript code into your website and you can start earning money from every click that you get.

The problem with Google Adsense is the payout per click can be low and it can take a considerable amount of time to make enough for Google to pay you when you only get a few clicks per day. You also have little to no control over the types of ads that Google displays. While they do a good job of displaying ads that relate to your content you can never be sure of all the ads. There is also the possibility that Google will, at their discretion, ban your account and you will never get paid. Not to mention the constant changes that they often make to their terms of service that require you to update your website privacy and disclosure policies.

That being said the ease of setup of Google Adsense can make it a great way to earn some additional income. Here is something to consider though, last month for every dollar I earned using Adsense I earned $449.00 in affiliate commissions! That sounds great doesn’t it! Now don’t expect to simply replace your Adsense ads with affiliate ads and your will be rolling in the dough. With affiliate marketing it is certainly possible to make more income than from Adsense but it can take a while to find the right affiliate program to promote with your website. This can leave you with little to no income while you experiment with different programs and networks. If you are currently not making any money from your website then this is not a big deal.

Make no mistake about it, making money from affiliate marketing will take a lot more work but the payoff can be well worth it when you find the right program(s) to promote. It can take a lot of trial and error to find the right affiliate program to promote on your website. Having a blog on your website can help because you can write posts on a number of topics to experiment.

If you are looking to monetize your website more Adsense is an easy way to start, but seriously consider affiliate marketing. Your website could go from making coffee money every month to making more than your regular pay check.

If you are thinking of doing affiliate marketing from your WordPress blog you might have come across a plugin from MaxBlogPress called Ninja Affiliate. A couple of high profile blogs, like Daily Blog Tips and Problogger, have made posts about it and it does look like an impressive plugin. I have not personally used the Ninja Affiliate plugin but I have read about it and it does look impressive making it easy to automatically link keywords that you specify in your blog post to your affiliate links, while at the same time displaying a friendlier URL for your readers. This is a great way to help increase your affiliate sales and at the same time make it easier to manage your affiliate links. Did you know that you can get much of the same functionality of the Ninja Affilate plugin by using a couple of free GPL WordPress plugins instead of spending $97.00?

One of the great features of Ninja Affiliate is it ability to automatically turn keywords that you specify into affiliate links. For example if I type the keyword “Mozy online backup“, (you all know I like Mozy right), the keyword Mozy online backup will automatically be turned into an affiliate link leading to the Mozy website. It saves time by automatically linking keywords to affiliate links. There are a few plugins that offer similar functionality that you can try.

• Batch Links
• SEO Smart Links
• BlogMechanics KeywordLink
• KB Linker

I have not personally tried each of those plugins, but I have used SEO Smart Links and BlogMechanics KeywordLink on other WordPress blogs and both are good plugins. If you want to limit the number of affiliate links per keyword you might want to look at SEO Smart Links first. The BlogMechanics KeywordLink offers the ability to link the keyword once or all the time. This can make it harder to control how often the keyword is linked. SEO Smart Links offers a little more control over linking limits.

That takes care of part of the work. Creating nice friendly URL’s for your readers to see instead of some long affilaite link can be done with a plugin that I recommned that every WordPress blog have installed. The WordPress Redirection plugin. This plugin helps you to manage 404 error redirection, changing post permalinks, and it can be setup to manage custom affiliate links.

The WordPress Redirection plugin allows you to create groups so you can manage your affiliate links. You can create a custom group using the WordPress Redirection plugin called “Outgoing” or “Recommended”. You can then create redirection links using your affiliate links and add them to your “Outgoing” or “Recommend” group. This allows you to easily manage all of your affiliate links in one place. To create your reader friendly URL’s simply decide on a URL structure for your links. If you noticed my Mozy online backup keyword link links to http://www.lgr.ca/go/mozyonlinebackup.html, this link then redirects to my Mozy affiliate link. This is much friendlier than the Mozy affiliate link. If your affiliate link needs to be changed you now have one place to edit the link and all your keyword links that are using that URL will be redirected to the new URL. This is much faster than hunting through hundreds or thousands of posts to change your affiliate links.

It is best practise that affiliate links should be nofollowed so the search engines do not follow them. This can be done in two ways. Depending on the keyword link plugin you choose you might be able to add the nofollow attribute on the link itself using the keyword link plugin. I know that both SEO Smart Links and BlogMechanics KeywordLink allow you to do this. You can also add your custom URL’s to your robots.txt file to prevent the search engine spiders from following your affiliate links. For example I could add the following line to my robots.txt file:
Disallow: /go/

There might be other features that the Ninja Affiliate plugin can perform that I have not covered. It does appear that it has more statistics built in than is available in the Redirection plugin. The Ninja Affiliate plugin does offer all of the management in one place, while with this method you will need to go to multiple places to manage your keywords and links. Nothing a couple of opens tabs can’t do mind you. If you don’t want to spend the $97.00 to get the WordPress Ninja Affiliate plugin you might want to give this technique a try. It can help to boost your affiliate sales and provide you with an easy way to manage your affiliate links.

What do you use to manage your affiliate links on your WordPress blog?

I routinely try out new affiliate networks looking for new products and services to promote for myself and for clients. Market Leverage has been around for a while but it has only been recently that they have been making a bigger splash in the affiliate marketing world. They have been sponsoring a number of affiliate marketing challenges across the web on a number of other blogs and even have some bigger name bloggers promoting them like John Chow and Shoemoney.

Market Leverage has some good points and some not so good points, like all affiliate networks. The good things I have found about Market Leverage is their people. I have personally talked with my affiliate manager over the phone and they are open to being in contact with their affiliates. I hear from my affiliate manager quite often through email, and over the phone. It is only the second affiliate network that I have ever actually heard from over the phone.

Market Leverage also has a large number of programs to promote in a large number of categories. Depending on your topic it is likely you will be able to find a program to promote. Many programs are also very open to using PPC for sending people to the offers, so you can try Market Leverage without have to place their ads on your website. Each program is clearly marked what types of promotion is allowed, Email, Web and Search. The programs also list where they are targeted so you can set up your PPC and other advertising to only send people from the United States. Most of the programs I have looked at all provided a good assortment of advertising formats. The majority of the ad formats are for email and web campaigns, so if you are thinking of doing PPC you will need to make up your own creative and keyword lists.

Market Leverage also keeps affiliates up to date with their MLTV blog. There they post some of the latest programs that are available and some of the best performers that you might want to look into promoting. This is helpful to stay on top of the new programs and changes in existing programs. Getting in on a program early can make a huge difference in the amount of profit you can make on a program. The programs that I have had work the best for me are the programs I joined soon after they launched the affiliate programs.

While you might not see a lot of negatives on the blogosphere about Market Leverage, no affiliate program is perfect and Market Leverage does have a few areas where it could use improvement. The list of programs to promote is large and many offer good compensation, but there are many programs that have a spammy feel to them. Lots of programs that you have never heard of, have only a landing page, and if you do a Google search the majority of consumer reviews about the service or product that you find are negative. Not to paint the whole network with a bad brush, but I would recommend you pick and choose wisely in the programs you promote from Market Leverage. It does not help your own credibility to promote a bad product or service, so be picky.

The best program that I have found on Market Leverage is its own affiliate program for referring new publishers. This is both a positive and a negative. You can earn 5% of the earnings of every new publisher that signs up under you. The Market Leverage referral program is a good program, but it always makes me nervous when the best program in an affiliate network is to recruit more publishers. My pyramid scheme sense goes off and I am suspect. If there were some high quality programs to promote in the network it would easy my suspicion. (For the record the links on the site to Market Leverage are my affilaite links).

If you are interested in checking out another affiliate network Market Leverage might be the one you are looking for. I have been trying the occasional Market Leverage program on PPC, but have not focused a lot of energy on my efforts. Merely just testing the waters on different programs. They might be just the network you need to help pay off the credit cards after Christmas.

It has been a little while since I wrote “A Beginners Guide to Affiliate Networks”. Things have changed a little since I wrote that. eBay has launched its own partner network, AuctionAds was sold and of course there have been some other affiliate networks that have come online. It has been awhile since the Pepperjam network actually launched, but I have only recently started using them on some of my sites.

The Pepperjam network is different than many of the other affiliate networks. The first difference you can see is the types of ads you can create. You can create the typical ads that all affiliate networks offer and place them on your website, but Pepperjam also offers text based ads that are similar to other text based ads, such as Google Adsense. It is a simple process of selecting the partners that you want to include in the ad and placing the code in your website. It is a great way to swap Pepperjam ads into your existing ad spots that you might already have other ads in already. Now adding affiliate ads is as easy as adding a contextual system like Google Adsense.

Here is a sample of a Pepperjam network ad.

You can easily save the ad and edit it later. It would be nice if you could edit the ad and have the changes happen automatically without adding the new code again, but overall it is a great system.

Finding partners to promote is also easy to do. When you first login as an affiliate you are presented with the latest programs that have join Pepperjam and the top performing programs on the network. You can also search through the Find Partners section by category and keywords. You can also narrow your search by CPA and revenue share offers. Compared to some affiliate networks, finding programs to promote on Pepperjam is one of the easier tasks to do.

Perhaps the nicest feature of the Pepperjam network is the Pepperjam Store Builder. Similar to an Amazon Astore in someways, the Pepperjam Store Builder allows you to add your partner sites products as a store right in your website. In four simple steps you can embed your partners products right in your website so your visitors can shop right from your website instead of leaving right away. The code can even be optimized for pasting into a blog to make it easy to add a store into a blog post. Here is a store I made for RatFink tshirts.

The Pepperjam network also offers its own affiliate program that you can join to help promote the network. They offer new affiliates a $10.00 signup bonus and even offer bloggers an incentive to write and promote the program (Note: this post is not a part of the Pepperjam blogger incentive program, but the post does contain affiliate links). If you are thinking of checking out a new affiliate network I would suggest you give the Pepperjam network a look. They have a lot of interesting partners to promote and some new and inventive ways for affiliates to help promote them.

I don’t usually post my earnings online, mainly because I don’t think I should have to post how much money I earn from my online ventures to prove to people how successful I am. March, however, was a particularly good month and I just wanted to brag a little. I am always seeing these “make money online” blogs and the reality is most of them make next to nothing. Why are people reading them? Anyways, I digress. If you want to know how well I do here are the numbers for March. This is not just from this blog but from several of my online ventures.

Text Links Ads: $110.50 (from only one site)
Affiliate Sales: $1,562.20
Google AdSense: $1,954.40
Other Ads: $751.00
Direct Sales from Websites: $964.60
Grand Total: $5,342.7

That is just over a 30% increase from February. April should be even better since many of my sites are still going up in terms of users and traffic.

If you have been surfing around some blogs lately you have probably come across some blogs that are running Project Wonderful ads. They are particularly popular with people that are using Entrecard.

Like all advertising options the only way to know if something will work well for you is to try it, so I signed up and created an ad box on one of my more popular websites. The site gets regular traffic and generates 1000′s of page views a day. Google AdSense did not perform well on the site so I thought it would be a good candidate for Project Wonderful. Was I ever wrong. I had the ads up for just over two weeks. The grand total from Project Wonderful was .90 cents! The bidding never went up past .03 cents per day. I did better with the odd click from Google AdSense.

I was not very pleased with how the ads turned out from Project Wonderful for that particular site. I thought perhaps they are more targeted at blogs, since there seem to be several blogs running the ads and it was just a bad fit for the site I tried them on. When I changed the theme here I thought I would give Project Wonderful another try, on a blog this time. So far I have been less than pleased. The bidding has not gone up past .02 cents per day and I have had to cancel several bids because they were advertising adult content. I had the ad box set to only display safe for work ads but because hardly anyone on Project Wonderful actually rates their ads I was not getting any bids at all. If both ad spots will stay at .02 cents/day that would be a total of $1.20/month. That does not even buy me a coffee at Tim Hortons.

I did try running a campaign with Project Wonderful and as an advertiser you can get a lot of cheap advertising on a lot of blogs for next to nothing. In the campaign I setup I limited the cost per day to .01 cent and I was able to place advertising on a large number of websites across the network. The disadvantage is that my click through rate was horrible. Less than .05%. I would rather spend my money on AdWords and get less impressions but traffic that is more targeted. I suppose if you limited your advertising to certain websites and blogs you might do better than I did in running the campaign.

Overall I am not sure why Project Wonderful ads are currently so popular with bloggers. As a publisher there are better and more profitable ways of making money on your blog than as a publisher with Project Wonderful. As an advertiser you will get better value for your money using other advertising systems. I will probably leave the Project Wonderful ads up here for a few more days, as I am busy with other projects, but they will be coming down in the near future most likely to be replaced with private ad sales. If you would be interested in advertising here on the LGR Webmaster Blog feel free to contact me and we can arrange something.

If you monetize your website(s) with Google Adsense you have probably been asked to agree to another long and tedieus Terms and Conditions agreement again. Of course Google does not do you any favours and give you the parts that they have changed, rather they just go and make you read all of the legal mumbo jumbo again knowing full well that the majority of people do not understand a word they say. Silly Google.

If you want to real lowdown on the new Adsense Terms and Conditions check out Jensense. I have talked about Jensense in the past, but she has done a fantastic job of making sense of the latest changes from Google. Perhaps Google should hire her to write the posts on their weblog detailing that they have changed the Terms and Conditions. Then the changes would make more sense to people.

Thanks to Jensense for making sense of Google’s new Terms and Conditions for Adsense. Go and take a look if you want to understand the latest from Google, then start to work on that Privacy policy that we all need.

There have been a few things on my to check out list, BritePic happened to be one of them. BritePic is a service offered by AdBrite. I just recently started running some AdBrite ads again and thought this would be a good time to look at BritePic. BritePic is basically a way of making the images on your website more interactive. You can add ads with that as well or you can leave the ads off.

The only way to really describe what BritePic does is to show you. I thought I would show off a photo from our trip to Rouleau Saskatchewan, for Corner Gas fans, otherwise known as Dog River.

Here is the elevator, without BritePic,

and here it is using BritePic.

You can choose whether you want to include the ad or not, I thought I would because I wanted to explore as many features of BritePic as I could. I like the menu option, so people can zoom in on the photo, email to people and even embed it on other sites. Gives the photo the possibility of going viral.

I don’t know if I would use BritePic very often but it certainly is another way to monetize your website.

If you want to make money on the Internet, you need to earn the trust of your readers. Trust is something you have to earn, it does not come easily. Readers have to trust that you are telling them the truth. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that does not trust. While the reasons are many and varied the reality is we don’t trust. Businesses value the bottom line over people and all marketers are liars, trust is not easy to find.

We all find different reasons to trust the businesses/websites we use. One of the online businesses I use regularly is Amazon. I trust Amazon because my experience of them has been good. The items I order ship quickly and the prices are fair. I have also read many good reviews of the company and I believe that I will receive the same level of service. Amazon has earned my trust and gets money from me because I trust them.

The same is true of the blogs I read. I trust the bloggers I read to give good advice and be truthful. For example: Problogger. I trust that the information from Problogger is good advice on blogging. He has been doing it a long time and from what I can tell offers good advice.

How do you earn people’s trust? Everyone will have different reasons for trusting your website or blog. Some people trust the bloggers that publish their monthly earnings. If those bloggers can make $xx,xxx amount of money obviously you can trust what they say. Some blogs you trust because they have given you helpful advice or because of how long you have been doing something. There is a reason I say that I created my first website in 1994 on my about page. It helps people trust that I know what I am talking about. How you earn people’s trust will depend on your website, but if you can’t earn people’s trust you will not make any money.

Here are some ways that you can help people trust your website:

• Have an about page.
• Have a contact page that people can use to get in touch with you.
• Create a blog to get to know people and let them get to know you.
• Reply to email, the sooner the better.
• Create a testimonials page or add testimonials to your website.

What are some ways you build trust with your website?

Today the Internet has become a better place because AGLOCO is dead! It was a bad idea from the very beginning and really nothing more than a pyramid scheme. People kept saying it does not cost you anything so why not try it? Well how many hours did those people invest into a scheme that paid them absolutely nothing! They could have spent all that time building a blog that talked about something they care about and could still be making money. I was surprised the great John Chow talked about it since he was their biggest supporter. So what is John Chow’s AGLOCO referral stats worth? Well let’s see 29668 members times by a big 0 is ABSOLUTLY NOTHING! I can’t help but laugh.

Here is their email if you want to read it:

We would like to update you on the status of AGLOCO’s operations. We continue to believe in the AGLOCO concept, but our revenue is currently not sufficient to give Members a meaningful distribution. And though there are increases in membership, the resulting revenue is not enough to support operating costs. As a development team we are unable to continue to use our savings to fund the operations. If any Member would like to pursue continuing the operations of AGLOCO, you may contact us at agloco1@live.com.

We would like to thank every Member for supporting our effort to bring a piece of the Internet directly to the user. We hope that we can find a way to keep the operations going.

AGLOCO Development Team

Well now that one part of the Internet is a better place I can go and get my second cup of coffee and get to some real work that will make me a living.