We have just launched the Wordpress Shopping ECommerce Themes Pack from Creative Theme Design for under $30 for 5 Top Shopping Webstores Themes. Along with 5 Top Shopping Themes, we also give away 3 popular ebooks that would help anyone expand their online marketing business!

If you are a prolific blogger or an online affiliate marketer, this could be a very profitable offer for you. You can Buy the Shopping Themes Pack & get each theme for less than $5 (thats a 50% discount right away).

You can also sign up as one of ur affiliates & make handsome money by selling our Creative Wordpress Products for Personal Business, Home Businesses & Small Businesses.

Click Here to Become our Affiliate & Make Money Now.

Our Themes for Individual, Home Business & Small Businesses are very unique:

• These Creative WP Themes are simple but very effective
• They are highly optimized for search engines giving better organic search results
• The Popular Multi-Ads Wordpress Themes could increase ad click through rates by over 40% (that’s 40% increase in ad revenues right away)
• The Themes are designed & tested by professional small business owners, affiliate marketers & successful money making bloggers, making them perfectly suitable for all small businesses, home businesses & individuals making money from blogs
• Lowest Price each costing under $10 a theme, or under $5 when you buy the Themes Pack

Join Our Team of Affiliates & Help Other Bloggers achieve their dreams of making money from their blogs & websites. You could also be helping online retailers & small business owners get the right Wordpress Themes for their online retail businesses.

Our Affiliate Program is supported by full fledged marketing & promotional materials, including emails, blog articles & a large set of banners & buttons to help you promote & market them efficiently. We constantly add new promotional content to keep you equipped with all the competitive edges our products provide to the customers.

These individual multi-ads creative themes are sold from here as well as from Business Themes site. We will continue to sell these money making themes & add new ones to the stores.

After several requests from our readers & customers who run a variety of blogs on Wordpress, we have rolled out the Complete Multi Ads Wordpress Themes Pack, with 10 incredible high performing creative themes, for under $40 now!

Along with these 10 Super Multi Ads Themes, we have also provided 3 incredible ebooks absolutely Free.

To buy these 10 Amazing Multi Ads Themes Pack for under $40, Click Here Now.

You can also sign up as an affiliate & make money selling the themes pack. These themes sell pretty much by themselves & is priced so attractively that its hard for anyone to pass on the bargain!

Click Here to Start Selling Multi-Ads Themes Pack to Money Making Bloggers Now!

We will support your marketing efforts with a handsome commission & all marketing materials. We would love you to join our team & grow with us.

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools today. Challenged by spams & anti-spam measures by ISPs, you have to partner with the best email marketing partner to make your email marketing effective.

Even though we have used 3 Top email marketing services, for the most part, we have used only one. Especially when it comes to new bloggers & new affiliate marketers, our recommendation is still one of the three!

We only recommend Aweber to anyone who is starting new with building email lists for affiliate marketing & affiliate blogging.

Click Here to Sign Up with Aweber for Just $1 Now.

So why do we recommend thier services when there are so many choices out there? We have 25 Solid Reasons to Recommend Them to All New Bloggers, Affiliate Bloggers & Small Businesses.

1. Easy Sign Up – from the very beginning, it is about making it easy for you, beginning with the easy sign up process for their email marketing services
2. Meant for Business, New Bloggers & Affiliate Bloggers – they have all the features any small businesses would need & they do not clutter with unwanted & unnecessary features that you have to pay for, but never use
3. Meant for Non Technical People – you do not have to be technically expert to know how to use it. We compared all the 3 services we used and found Aweber to be the easiest to use
4. Hundreds of Free Email Templates – you can use hundreds of free email templates to send emails to your subscribers. You can also design your own but you will never have the need, given their wide variety of choices
5. Over 100 Free Subscription Form Templates – they have preloaded professionally created subscription form templates that you can use & customize. No matter what your niche marketing area is, you will find a suitable sign up form to use
6. Completely Customizable Forms & Emails – you can completely customize all the free templates, be it for emails or subscription forms, to suit your blog or website’s style
7. Creative Display of Sign Up Forms – Aweber allows you to creatively display your sign up form on your website or blog. All you need to do is to create one from all the available options of In-Line Sign Up Form, Hover Sign Up Form, Pop-up Sign Up Form etc
8. Custom Email Alerts – you can get an email every time you have a new subscriber. You can set up custom email alerts for new sign ups & unsubscriptions
9. Easy Step By Step Guide – every time you create a new list or sign-up form, a easy visual guide helps you step by step. You may decide to ignore that, but to this date, we still use these guides blindly & never make any mistake
10. Very High Penetration Rates – Aweber has one of the highest penetration rates (meaning, your email will not be blocked by ISPs as spam) & is white-listed with a large number of global ISPs
11. Completely Customizable Email Messages – apart from the follow-up messages & broadcasts, the Confirmation Email is completely customizable. You can use any of the pre-formatted ones or customize them to your liking
12. Each Email is Checked for Spam Index – Spam Index is a number that indicates the possibility of that email being seen as spam by ISPs. Every time you customize an email, Aweber will indicate the spam index on it so that you may want to change the messages for a cleaner one
13. Easy to Measure All Clicks on your Emails – you can track each & every links on your emails & know how many are delivered, how many are opened & how many links are clicked
14. RSS to Emails – you can send your blog updates in an email simply by adding the RSS feed URL to your emails
15. Unlimited Follow Up Messages – follow up messages help in specific marketing activities, especially when you are running a campaign. You can set up limitless follow up emails in this case
16. Unlimited Broadcast Messages – similar to follow up emails, you can set up an infinite number of broad casts to your subscribers as well
17. Set Custom Days, Dates & Time for Message Delivery – very easy options to set a specific date, date or time on all your messages. This allows you to control the exact time you expect subscribers to receive your emails
18. Very Attractive Affiliate Offer – Aweber has one of the best affiliate offers too, so while you pay them to manage your lists, you can also earn from them by referring others. If you click on our links & sign up with them, we will get a small commission too (that helps us keep most of the site & content free)
19. Easy to Import Old Lists – it is always a risk to change Email Marketing Service providers. But Aweber makes it very easy to move to them & you may be able to skip the double opt-in in may cases legitimately
20. Detailed Subscription Tracking – each subscription is tracked & you can run reports to see 25+ metrics, including countries, states, time zones, forms used etc
21. Detailed Report on All Emails Sent – you will be provided real time report on all emails that you are sending out, including, countries, time delivered, emails opened, links in emails clicked, conversions etc
22. Perform A/B Tests for Effective Placement – much like A/B tests for ads to help you with the effective placement of ads, Aweber allows you to test Sign Up form’s effectiveness with simple A/B tests
23. Free Email Marketing Tips for Your websites & blogs – you can display their Email Marketing Tips & Tutorials through RSS feeds. Like any other RSS feed, they too help in providing new content for your website & improve the SEO
24. Numerous Free Webcasts on Email Marketing – they have some of the best webcasts arranged that teaches you how to effectively do email marketing & how to use Aweber features in the best possible way. They will also answer ALL your questions when you attend their webcasts & trainings
25. The Unbeatable $1 Trial – if you Click Here & Sign Up with Aweber Now you will get the first month for only a dollar

This is more than just reasons to help you understand that Aweber meets all the needs of any new or experienced bloggers & affiliate marketers. We have been using their services diligently for years now & we continue to recommend them to anyone who is looking for all the right features at the most affordable price.

Click Here to Read More on Google red Internet Profit Success System.

This auto-start system allows you to activate customizable websites stocked with products in just minutes.

This is a Free 3-day trial offer of the Internet Cash Machine program. You are given immediate access to the program for 3-days from the date of your submission. If you find that the system is not right for you, simply cancel the offer before the end of your 3 day trial period and you will not be charged anything.

Click Here to Read More on Google red Internet Profit Success System.

There are quite a few Benefits of using the Free Trial Offer.

• There is no inventory to keep and the drop shipper fulfills the product for you.
• Your free trial program includes website development, pre-built customizable templates
• Over 7,000 products and e-books ready to be sold (some with 100% profit margin)
• Ability to sell your own custom products
• Continuous online learning, design and marketing
• A distribution center
• Live online help with an online video arcade
• a Road Map to Success shipped directly to you and more.

Click Here to Read More on Google red Internet Profit Success System.

This system is a simple to operate commerce website that allows you to sell goods and services online. The free offer comes with pre-designed templates, a product catalog, shopping cart and payment gateway already integrated & it saves you the hassle of setting it all up on your own.

The discussion first started during the Q & A with New Affiliate Bloggers & then in the article on the Key Facts about Email Lists & lastly on the Challenges in Changing Email Marketing Services. There is no doubt, one of the most critical decisions every effective blogger & affiliate marketer has to make is which email marketing partner to choose.

The reasons here are from my personal experience, as well as that of others with whom I have been associated, and who have all referred me to AWeber as the best choice. And right now, you can try out their services for just $1.

This is a great offer for any New Blogger or New Affiliate Marketer to evaluate the right email marketing service provider. This is a completely risk free offer & you have nothing to lose, especially, when they will give you a thousand reasons to partner with them!

Click Here to Start AWeber for Just $1 Now.

In fact, you can use this form right here to test drive the system.

Why is Aweber the Right Choice for Your Email Marketing?

1. It’s the simplest to use & operate. Once you sign up, you would be ready with your subscription form & email system in less than 10 minutes
2. You don’t need to know any programming to be able to use it
3. You can customize your email subscription form & mails in hundreds of ways
4. You will get a constant supply of templates across all the niches for your subscription form as well as emails
5. it has one of the highest penetration rates & very rarely ends up in spam
6. It’s still the cheapest option, now having trial run for less than a dollar!

There are more reasons to choose Aweber but my personal reasons are choosing them.

While a new blogger or internet marketer might find these niches difficult to get in, most of these are extremely high profiting niches to those who have been marketing them for sometime. Here is a list of 4 Profiting & Growing Affiliate Marketing Niches.

A couple of advertisers could help you with free advertising dollars to begin promoting your new niches. Promote your Website with BidVertiser & Get $20 in FREE clicks.

1. Weight Loss Products & Programs Niche Market

Weight loss has 2 unique variations – food & diet on one hand & fitness equipments, exercise products & pilate programs on the other. Both these have been doing tremendously well & continues to show strong growth.

The new weight loss programs that are showing signs of growth now are the various training videos, club memberships (localized campaigns) & sales of exercise products that can be quickly assembled at home.

2. Diet & Healthy Living Products Niche Market

After the Aloe Vera & other oriental products, it was time for the high selling Aci Berry products. From the affiliate reports of 2009, Acai Berry is still selling well. So are the oriental herbal products. All these have very successful sales record from 2006 & still continue to sell in high numbers.

Now the competition has strengthened, with affiliates from Philippines, China, Malaysia & other south east Pacific countries.

Here are a few affiliate programs that have high converting Health care & Weightloss products:

1. Click Bank Healthcare Products

2. Never Blue Healthcare Products

3. Revenue Ads Healthcare Products

4. Click To Sell Healthcare Products

Health care Affiliate Marketing Tips:

1. Buy the products yourself before you start selling – too many people just jump into writing pages of the product without actually using one, thereby missing out on vital pros & cons of marketing the right products in the right way
2. Evaluate & compare products for your buyers. Help them choose one line of products instead of buying all the varieties & trying them out. You would need to know your products well to be able to recommend them to your buyers
3. Don’t pitch a variety of products to the same audience. This is one common mistake that new marketers do, hoping that it would increase their sales conversion. On the contrary, it causes people to unsubscribe faster
4. Create a marketing roadmap to pitch health care products to your customers. Introduce products in well designed periodicity so that users can mature into multiple product lines.

3. Foreign Currency Exchange Products & Services Niche Market

This is a very strong niche with lots of competition but very high returns. The biggest advantage of this financial niche is that you can sell both one-time products as well as make money from recurring billing sales.

If you are running your own Foreign Currency Exchange Products websites, you can also make money from financial institutes who will sponsor your websites at high monthly rates (usually exceeds US $1000 / month).

Here are a few affiliate programs that have high converting Financial products & Foreign Exchange products:

1. Click Bank Financial & Currency Products

2. Never Blue Financial & Currency Products

3. Click To Sell Financial & Currency Products

4. Energy Savings, Utility Products & Green Energy Products Niche Market

This is a very small niche & has grown by over 700% in sales in 2009 & is likely to grow even more in the next 4 – 5 years. It started off as a consulting business by professional energy & manufacturing experts advising corporates to become environment conscious.

Very soon, small businesses also realized that they could implement many of what the large businesses are doing that will not only save the environment, but will also save them a lot of expenses & get them added rebates from the governments.

In 2006, online affiliate marketers sold thousands of eBooks & training videos for small businesses & metal shop owners on Energy Savings & Green Technologies.

Here are a few affiliate programs that have high converting Energy Savings, Green Technology & Utility products:

1. Click Bank Financial & Currency Products

2. Click To Sell Financial & Currency Products

Energy Savings, Green Technology & Utility products Affiliate Marketing Tips:

1. This is still a very infant business domain & not many people know in-depth about how to market these products. You have to spend a lot of time & effort in educating your customers before & after the sales
2. Your customers are small business owners, shop owners, manufacturers & educators rather than retail shoppers. Your marketing should be designed to connect with efficiency experts & the potential customers
3. Testimonials are very essential in marketing Energy Savings, Green Energy & Utility Products. You will surely sell more if you could get a few of your customers to speak of you on videos
4. Service is a vital component of this niche that will bring you long term revenues along with simple product sales

There are a lot more high profiting niches but what makes these 4 high on the list are the facts that they continue to show growth, some of them for over 5 years & will continue to grow in the future too.

Here are a few relevant articles on ProMediaBlog:

1. Emerging Affiliate Marketing Niches

2. 10 Popular Niche Blogging Topics

3. 5 Success Tips for New Affiliate Marketers

Referrals could get you good money in the long run, but it takes at least 12 – 18 months for any of the new referrals to start earning from their affiliate marketing business. And most of the Top Affiliate Marketing Networks seem to give up the idea of Referral Income for Life!

The latest to announce that was NeverBlue. In an email to all their affiliates on the 24th of December 2009, they announced that affiliates will earn 2% of referral income for the first 6 months (compare that to a 2% income for life offer). While it is still one of the best programs that we have worked with, this announcement caught us by surprise! This is going to have a serious impact on many affiliate’s revenues.

AffiliateBot still continues to provide 5% of referral income for life, & is still one of our most preferred affiliate network till date.

In the past, we have seen similar actions from AZN network & Google, where they drastically cut down on their referrals or completely stopped it. It appears that once any of these new affiliate networks gain momentum & reach a certain base of affiliates, the first thing they do is to stop referral incomes.

Coming back to the question of this post – How Much Time & Money Should You Spend on New Referrals?

I have suggested this before, affiliate marketers should always focus on building their niche market, building their customer base & their own direct income. Statistically, a successful affiliate marketers does not spend more than 5 – 10% of their time & money on building new referral affiliates.

With affiliate referral income restricted to 6 months, you can be very sure to have zero income from any new referrals. People who sign up are usually new to affiliate marketing & it takes them anywhere from a year to two to find their own sweet selling spots!

The extended content of this post is in the 12 page ebook. The ebook is mailed to all our subscribers. This post will have the excerpts from this ebook.

Twitter could be very involving, very addictive in many cases. However, learning to use Twitter effectively in 10 simple steps could mean building an effective blog & even make money from Twitter.

Here are some more articles of similar interest on using Twitter published earlier:

• Effective Blogging – 5 Easy Ways You can Use FaceBook Twitter to Promote Your Blog
• Twitter & Social Media Advertising – Twitter Gives Over 600 Percent ROI
• 10 Essential Twitter Features Tools to Use – Blogging Tips to Maximize Twitter Benefits
• Innovative Uses of Twitter for Business – FirstGroup International Transportation Services
• Making Money from Sponsored Tweets and Twitter Advertisements

We hope you would enjoy the ebook & find it helpful to make your business blogging more effective.

The best part of this popular Affiliate Networking Software Systems is that it completely integrates with your existing websites & blogs & you do not have to be a technical expert to host, run, expand or maintain it!

Many of the growing affiliate marketers often opt out of the run-of-the-mill 3rd party affiliate networks & run their own chain of affiliates & affiliate network globally online. They have a need for more customization & ability to provide customized services to their affiliates.

Click Here to Read the Details of the Affiliate Networking Software Systems.

What problems do this Affiliate Networking Software System solve for growing & expanding affiliate marketers?

• helps you recruit your own affiliates to build your network – you build your own team & you know who is part of your success
• helps you offer custom commissions to your affiliates depending on products, niche markets, experience & sales volume
• track & reward the affiliates who are performing better
• track the niches that are doing better so that you can replicate the tactics in other niches
• customize marketing campaigns in various niches individually
• create custom reports on campaign performance, affiliate performance, sales, commissions, margins etc
• since you know who your affiliates are, you can provide additional training, tips & supplemental information to all or select few to boost your sales
• since you host the software system, it is completely under your control & you do not have to depend on 3rd parties to be effective
• since you own the software you do not have to pay any monthly fees to anyone else

Click Here to Read the Details of the Affiliate Networking Software Systems.

When is the right time to Host your own Affiliate Networking System? How do you know you are ready to Setup Your Own Affiliate Networking Software?

The affiliate software system does not require you to be technical or know any sort of programming. Since the system can be set up with the wizard & can be configured easily, you do not have to know any software programming to be able to use it. So technology should not be the deciding factor in deciding the right time to use it.

You know when you should start hosting your own Affiliate Networking Software System when:

• you have approximately 0ver 20 affiliates in your network
• a large part of your monthly income is coming from the sales your affiliates are making (approximately when 70% of your income is generated by affiliate commissions)
• you are selling less yourself than your affiliate network
• you are operating in multiple niche markets that require different marketing tactics
• you want to monitor & train your own affiliates in specific marketing niches
• you already have a handful of successful affiliates & want to focus on training more of them for the future
• you want to build new niche markets  & measure success of your campaigns etc
• you want to measure success in specific niche markets so that you can focus on the high-profit ones

Click Here to Read the Details of the Affiliate Networking Software Systems.

We highly recommend this Affiliate Networking Software to all the growing affiliate marketers & those trying to break into new niche markets. There are 3 important success criteria for the growing affiliate marketers:

1) breaking in early into newer niche markets – both for products as well as for new geography

2) using technology to operate globally, reduce operating cost, measure campaign success to operate more efficiently

3) a solid team of affiliate marketers, trained to sell & helped with customized reports on their sales

This easy to use Affiliate Networking Software System addresses all these key elements of success. You pay once – when you buy it & you never have to pay any more. And for the first year, all your upgrades are free of charge. The documentation is helpful to allow technical laymen to set up & host this system on their own.

Many of you who have signed up from my websites have come back with one big question – why isn’t the sales growing? Though I have answered most of you in emails with tips, I thought it might be a good idea to publish a few of the tips that can help new affiliates in this post on Affiliate Marketing Tips Series.

We will shortly publish an ebook with more than 25 tips that can help you have a great start with your affiliate marketing.

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 1 – Choose the Easy Path First

For beginners to affiliate marketing, it could be very overwhelming to compete with the large retailers who offer tremendous discounts & spend millions of dollars marketing their products.

My first advice to new affiliate marketers & affiliate bloggers is to choose the path of least resistance. Choose products or services niches that have sold eternally – books, music, games, electronic accessories etc are possible choices.

Take advantage of being first in the new emerging markets (Click Here to Read Emerging Affiliate Marketing Niche – Get Started Early to Profit in New Niche Markets) where its easy to sell & the profits are higher.

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 2 – Plan Advertising Ahead of Time

Most of the new affiliate marketers jump into setting up a website, load it with products, wait for 2 months for things to happen & when nothing sells, start to advertise!

Wrong approach!

Even before you begin, you must keep the proven sequence of activities:

• choose your niche – research to identify products, geographies & demographics
• choose the right domain name for your website
• choose the right technology & layout to build your affiliate business site
• choose the right email marketing partners
• choose the incentives to offer – discounts, free gifts etc
• choose the right advertising networks – direct ads, social media ads etc
• initiate a campaign to measure the response
• launch your products

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 3 – Focus on Landing Pages

Once you have a visitor, either from a campaign or from organic searches, close the sale as quickly as possible. The biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make is to try & sell too many things to one visitor even before they buy a single product from your site!

Wrong practice!

Choose the right website design so that the visitors can focus on one product at a time. Once a sale is closed, show other products & offer the customer a tour to other parts of your website.

Focus on the landing page that can help close a sale. Click Here to Read Affiliate Marketing Tips – Whats Wrong with Your Landing Page.

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 4 – Optimize for Search Engines

I would never advise you to spend hundreds of dollars on optimizing for search engines. Click Here to Read Blogging Tips – How Far Should You Go with SEO. But I do recommend following a few simple points that will go a long way in optimizing your website landing pages for organic searches:

• use META tags correctly – TITLE, KEYWORDS, DESCRIPTION
• use keywords in your landing pages – 1:4 is a good keyword density
• use images on your landing page & tag images with an optimized name, TITLE & ALT tags
• do not hide keywords or stuff your landing page with keywords – this only harms your landing page
• use breadcrumb navigation so that any page is just one or 2 clicks away from the main index page of your site

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 5 – Target Sales the Right Audience

Pitch your sales to the right audience. This could help you save advertising money & get more conversions. As an example, if you are selling Acai Berry health supplement, run advertising campaigns where people are health conscious & spend money on nutritional products. Narrow your campaigns within a certain age group that are more likely to use Akai Berry frequently.

Many times, affiliate marketers run general ad campaigns, using up all their advertising budget with few hits & almost no conversions.

Conclusion

Planning is important. As a new affiliate marketer you may be thrilled to go out there & sell, but you will only come back empty handed if you have not planned each & every campaign properly.

There is no magic wand, no generic mantras that will get you thousands of dollars when you set up an affiliate website. Follow these tips & you will see results. I will also encourage you to experiment – run split tests to understand how your visitors are navigating your sites. With the results, optimize one step at a time.

The last point, as I have repeated very frequently, is patience! To give you some idea, the first sale we made on one of our affiliate site was 4 months after we launched our site. Those were the longest 4 months we ever had – but we kept our patience & experimented with designs, layouts, campaigns, SEO & finally they all came together!

These are great indicators for an exciting year ahead. In this article on Effective Blogging, I decided to list down 10 Things we should do to make our blogs more effective in 2010. Also Read Blogging Tips – McKinsey Report on Post Recession Consumer Behavior for more insights.

1. Sell a Product or a Service – can you think of a product that you can sell from your website or blog? With more & more shoppers spending their money online, getting to sell a product would be a definite advantage in 2010.

If you do not have anything that you make, you could sign up with the top affiliate marketers & sell some of their products from your blog. Click here to see our recommendation of some of the best affiliate programs. This could start adding to your revenues & also help generate long term residual income.

2. Revamp Your Website & Blog – inspect your website (or blog) and see if it has all the features of the modern day websites. Is it easy to run, maintain & update? Is it Web 2 enabled? Is it helping in your SEO? Is it geared for connecting with users through Social Media sites? are some of the questions you should ask.

• Click Here to Read Affiliate Marketing Tips – Whats Wrong with Your Landing Page
• Focus on Website Templates – Why Themes & Templates are Important for Shopping Blogs

If you are running a traditional static website & you are afraid of changing everything, then you may want to add a companion blog to your site. This simple action solves most of your challenges as far as Web 2 features go.

If you are already running a profitable site, evaluate if there are any more enhancements you want to add that could improve your visitors’ experience.

3. Finalize that Social Media Strategy – no more experiments of what works & what doesnt. Twitter & Facebook works. Period. You should freeze the plan on how to best use Twitter & Facebook for your business. Here are some more articles:

• Social Bookmark Popularity – What Share Buttons Work for You
• Blogging for Money – 10 Ways to Use Twitter Effectively for Advertising & Making Money
• Effective Blogging – 5 Easy Ways You can Use FaceBook Twitter to Promote Your Blog

4. Plan Ahead of Time to Make the Best Use of All the Festive Seasons – holidays are the best time to generate huge revenues from your websites. This is also a time for great promotions, enrolling new customers & increasing customer loyalty. Read our Holiday marketing tips:

• Affiliate Blogging Tip – 12 Months to Grow Sales
• Top 10 Ways to Promote Small Business During Holiday Seasons

This does not happen overnight. This requires planning & larning from your past experience as to what sells well, in what holidays, for what group of customers. Numerous affiliates offer incentives in the form of discounts & free gifts during the holidays. When you plan ahead, you would be able to pass on these incentives to your customers, resulting in more sales.

5. Make Your Email Lists Effective – you must have grown your customer list. You may in fact have several of them, each with thousands of names & email address. It is time to weed out the inactive ones, or maybe start a fresh one too.

Email lists are not stagnant – people change email addresses, people mark emails as spam by mistake & many people just develop the habit of ignoring emails from certain places. You need to make sure that your subscriber list is crisp & not full of old inactive users.

Click Here to Read Autoresponders Mass Mailers Email Campaign Software for Effective Affiliate Marketing & use them effectively to refresh your lists.

6. Write Personal Messages once in a while to Customers – you must be sending daily, weekly or monthly newsletters to your customers. That is wonderful. But once in a while, represent yourself & write personal notes to your customers too.

Personal notes reassure the customers that they have “YOU” to depend on if they need any assistance. Personal notes make your business more human friendly & adds a human touch to the relationships.

7. Revise your Pricing Strategy – Prices are the one thing why buyers hesitate to procure while on the other side, its the one thing your business needs. Do you have a solid pricing strategy that you can carry forward? Especially in light with the post recession buying & spending trends?

There are 2 misconceptions or wrong assumptions among marketers:

• One of the wrong assumptions that marketers have is that they can command attention if they give things free
• Because you are giving things for a lower price, you do not need to think about support

More and more online shoppers are now leaning towards cheaper & better alternatives to branded products. Cheap is no longer associated with poor quality, less durability or even lack of support. The McKinsey Report I spoke about earlier shows the statistics clearly.

8. Transform Technology from a Cost Saver to a Business Driver – many small businesses look at technology as a way to save cost. You set up an auto email system so that you don’t have to send out postal mails any more. True, but not always right!

Web 2 & Web 3 technology opens up a huge opportunity to use technology to drive & grow more business than simply to save cost. Read these relevant articles:

• Online Presentations – How Online Presentations Save Time & Money & still Builds Customer Relations
• Increasing Reader Engagement – 15 Easy Ways to Bring & Keep Blog Visitors

9. Collaborate, Collaborate & Collaborate – success in 2010 will come to people who collaborate. Find all ways to collaborate with vendors, other partners, customers and look for opportunities to either save costs or drive more business through collaboration.

Collaboration could also be in the form of partnerships. Are there opportunities where you can offer your product or service to another & you can jointly present a better product or service to the business community?

10. Catch on Early to New Initiatives – businesses that can catch on early to new systems, products or services, will get to benefit more. Look out for new opportunities that can help your business.

Think about Twitter. Had you started with a twitter account a year & a half back, you could be making a lot of money with Twitter. If you had a blog up & running in 2001, by now, you would be making a hundred thousand dollars a year from sponsorships!

So what are the few things to look out for in 2010 to grow your earning & business?

Collaboration Tools, Mobile Tools & Apps, Mobile Advertising, Affiliate Tools, Advertising (Video Ads, Twitter Ads, Facebook Ads). Also keep an eye for new training tools (like Blog Mastermind) & those coming in from SMO experts like Dan Zarrella & Guy Kawasaki.

In conclusion, 2010 will be exciting for all bloggers & affiliate marketers & be sure to have all the tools & knowledge to be effective in the coming year.

Plugins are Web 2 tools that can be added to your Wordpress blog with a mouse click. Affiliate Marketing plugins help to add more functionality to the affiliate blogs. Primarily they help build an effective blog, build page ranks, eliminate duplicate content keeping search engines happy, help enroll sponsors & advertisers but most importantly many of them directly help to sell.

Here is a small list of some of the best plugins that are widely used by business bloggers, affiliate marketing bloggers, online webmasters running shopping blogs & blog marketers.

• DupeMagic WordPress Plugin – Dupe Magic is a premium Duplicate Content Management Plugin for WordPress. It has 2 different functions (a) alter post & (b) alter page content without altering the readability of the content to human readers
• 2 Powerful & Profitable WordPress Plugins – Adps2 & ZipPoster – These 2 power plugins automatically drip Feed Content for months. You can add Affiliate Datafeed Products, or Load Up 100s of articles instantly saving you hours & days of product building work
• Wp Spinner WordPress Plugin – this is a multi-purpose plugin essential for money making blogs. It can completely eradicate concerns over duplicate content on your WordPress Business Blog. You can build your own Free Unique Article Spinner.You can also defeat the risks of Proxy Hijacking. Along with that, you can dynamically rotate ads, thus increasing your chances of making more money from ads. With this Pro Plugin you can test your ad layouts & do A/b Split Testing. It also has built in Affiliate Tools and much more.
• Wp Affiliate Pro – The #1 Plugin For WordPres Blogs – With this Pro Plugin, you can instantly identify, manage & track your highest performing Affiliate Links over your entire Wordpress Blog in less time than it takes to pour a glass ff Kool Aid & make more money doing so
• Wordpress Link Cloak – An Amazing Wordpress Plugin To Increase Revenue – Wordpress Link Cloak Plugin allows business bloggers to automatically & easily hide as many links as you want on your Wordpress Blog through the Admin Panel. Affiliate & text links are often penalized by Google & hence it is safe to protect your blog by cloaking the affiliate links
• The Famous 3 x Wordpress Plugins to Automate Your Blog – with this Pro Plugin you can stop worrying about updating your Business Blog & notifying the Social Bookmarking Sites. Just ‘Set-And-Forget’ your Business Blog, while all posting & promotion is done automatically. You can also keep content fresh in the eyes of the Search Engines by publishing content from different RSS sources with the built in RSS aggregator
• Wordpress Viva Social & Mashup Web 2.0 Plugin – this novel Wordpress Plugin And Theme makes maintaining a cutting edge, Magazine Style Wordpress Blog easy.You can automate your Wordpress Theme Thumbnails on the fly, scrollable carousels for product display, smart google maps & more. This is one of the best Magazine Style Theme & Plugin around.

An effective website or a blog is the key to online affiliate marketing. Plugins complement your content with advanced features that could differentiate your blog from the rest.

The several features built into the new Pro Shopping Theme allows the seller to quickly customize the product pages as well create clean landing pages for search marketing campaigns.

Here is a quick preview of the upcoming ProShopping Wordpress Theme for Small Online Retail Businesses.

The ProShopping Affiliate Sales Theme header

Top Features included in the ProShopping Theme header:

• rotating single line ads on the top – this can be used effectively to promote affiliate products & new affiliate campaigns or could be used to show text ads
• social media links – the text links to social media is built into the header. You can link it to any of your preferred social media websites like Twitter, Facebook etc

The Top Category Browser in ProShopping Theme home page

The Pro Shopping Theme has a unique slider that shows the leading products in a few categories. The sliders contains built in Get It Now buttons that can be linked to external credit card sites like PayPal or Google. The Buy button can also be deep linked to your affiliate product pages too if you want to make a pass through sale.

The Product (Post) Pages

The key features of the individual product pages on Pro Shopping Theme:

• the individual product pages are designed to increase click through rates & increased conversion
• the product pages on Pro Shopping Theme show multiple ads to make advertising revenues
• there is an addition advertising option on the top portion – you can show custom text ads for the product or you can show general text ads. There is no limit on how many text ads you can show here
• you can add any number of product images – there is no limit to how many images you can show

• the pricing & the Get It Now buttons are programmed to show only when the product is in stock
• you can add any number of discounts that you are offering – there is no limit to showing the number of discounts or incentives for the product

The new Pro Shopping Online ECommerce Retail Theme for Wordpress driven online stores is now being tested by advanced affiliate marketers & experienced online retailers who run their own small business online.

We shall incorporate any important feedback that comes in from the usability tests for the next week & release the theme here as well as on Business Themes.

The secret is to be early in the game & partner with the best affiliate programs (Click Here to read our Evaluation of the Best Affiliate Programs). And to persist for at least 12 – 18 months before deciding on whether to quit! The last & probably the most kept secret is to be able to decide whether you want to sell volumes of products with less margin or sell less of those with high profit margins.

Personally, I go with the first option – go with high volume of sales. In most cases these products are easy to sell & are priced under $50 making them quite affordable to the general people, even if it is towards the end of the month.

The other reason for my success at the cost of 2 hours a day & zero advertising dollars is that I have chosen the best affiliate network programs. (Click Here to See All the Top Affiliate Networks We Work With)

In addition, we have also implemented almost all the 15 Ways to Make Money from Blogs in various capacities. With time, they have brought us great results & higher incomes.

I had published 2 interesting posts earlier:

• 10 Popular Niche Blogging Areas
• 5 More Niches for Affiliate Marketing

Subsequent to that, I had numerous emails telling me how extremely competitive these niches are. Popular niches imply 3 things:

• there is always a huge demand for products & services in these niches & thus almost anyone can make some money in these niche areas
• because its easy to make money, there is tremendous competition in all these niches marketing areas
• because competition is high (& so is the demand) the successful affiliate marketers in these niches sell in volumes, & to keep their price attractive, make less margin on each sale

For new bloggers & new affiliate marketers, it could be very intimidating to spend thousands of dollars in advertising or quite frustrating to make pennies from each sale! For the new bloggers, the emerging niche areas are often more suitable to gain market & build their online business.

Here is a small list of some of the new & emerging niche markets that could be great for all new bloggers & new affiliate marketers. And if you are experienced, you can quickly build your own market in these niches.

• Online Marketing Kids Products – great niche with numerous possibilities to extend your network in kids’ products, kids’ toys & kids games. Click Here to Read Quick Ways to Set up a Kids’ Store
• Alternative Medicines & Herbal Products – most of these are still confined to a small number of retail stores, but the demand for such herbal products & herbal medicines are increasing every day
• Mobile Software Distribution – mobile software especially on the new Android & Symbian platforms are going to be in immense demands in the coming few years with most cell phone manufacturers adopting the Android or the Symbian OS
• VOIP & Telecommunication gadgets – this includes devices like Magic Jack & teleconferencing products that can be used in home offices & small businesses
• Security Software Distribution – with higher percentage of people depending on the internet in the upcoming years & the increasing dependence on collaborative & cloud computing technologies, the need for security software will grow immensely in the next few years
• Small Business CRM Software Packages – with small businesses emerging from recession there will be a huge focus on shifting the fundamental business processes on technologies like CRM & ERP. So far, these have remained with the large multi billion dollar companies like IBM & Oracle. But a lot of new software makers are now coming up with CRM & ERP versions for small business & home businesses

Many of these have traditionally belonged to the enterprises that could spend billions of dollars in infrastructure set ups, security & advertising. But the Web 2 & Web 3 revolution is paving the way for smaller, individual distributors & affiliate marketers to build their own customers in these niches.

The ProStores Wordpress ECommerce Shopping Theme is very easy to set up, without any maintenance cost & lets you to be very flexible in displaying your products as you would have in any retail stores.

Click Here to see  Demo & Download the Pro Stores ECommerce Shopping Theme.

The Pro Stores Online Retail Shopping Theme includes many of the premium functionalities & design you would see in the most highly acclaimed online retail shopping stores like Target, Walmart or Office Depot.

You can read the details of the ProStores Shopping Theme Here including all the important features that make this theme one of the best options for small online businesses running online retail shopping stores.

The essential features include:

• absolutely easy to set up – you could have your online retail shop up & running in less than 10 minutes with the Pro Stores WP Theme
• customizable navigation links
• custom welcome messages & promotional banners on home page
• the Pro Stores Shopping Theme promotional banners can be linked to other pages on your site or any page of your affiliate business, increasing conversions

• easy Sign Up area for your visitors to sign up to your newsletter mailing lists
• display custom categories that either convert well or have high returns on conversion on the home page of the Pro Stores ECommerce Shopping Theme
• customize which all categories of products you want to display on the home page

• internal product pages (posts) lets you upload & display any number of product images – there is absolutely no limitation on the number of images you can show
• images on the Pro Stores Shopping Theme expand on clicking & shrink back again after its viewed
• quick conversion box displaying prices & any additional incentives you are offering to your customer
• bold ‘Buy Now’ button to convert quickly – the button could link to Paypal or Google Checkout or any other credit card processing site
• custom messages in case products are out of stock

Click Here to see  Demo & Download the Pro Stores ECommerce Shopping Theme.

Other features of the Pro Stores Wordpress Online ECommerce Shopping Theme include the integration of social networks, ability to send any of the product pages by email to any email address, ability for the visitor to print the page.

The ProStores Shopping Theme is also a Multi Ads Theme, having all the high paying AD Formats built into the theme. The 300px wide sidebar widget can also be used to display additional ads if necessary.

This is a great Wordpress Theme for any online retail shopping business & small online businesses. This is especially suitable for Affiliate Marketers who run promotions on affiliate products & can display as many products as they want for better conversion.

Like all our multi-ads Wordpress Themes for small business, the ProStores theme is also priced at an affordable under $10!

Click Here to see  Demo & Download the Pro Stores ECommerce Shopping Theme.

In this section of the Blogging for Money Series I will talk about my approach to affiliate marketing is slightly different from many other pro-affiliate marketers. I use the consultative selling methods to market products & services. And that’s where my choice of the best affiliate program networks help.

While hardcore affiliate selling would involve email marketing, promotions & advertising, in consultative selling you simply define a problem, offer solutions & along with that recommend products & services that could solve the problems.

The most important success factors with consultative marketing is your ability to choose solutions & compare products that meet the needs. This requires me to choose my programs that offer multiple solution providers.

You can read about the top affiliate network programs that are extremely suitable for soft sellers & new affiliate marketers & new bloggers. These are the best of the lot!

Recommendation 1 – Never Blue Affiliate Network

You get a wide range of providers to choose from, from technology & technology service providers, to small business solutions. They also have a wide network of advertisers in finance, health, nutrition & diet categories too.

Their payment is always on time & even though they pay by check, once you start earning consistently, they can start paying you through paypal.

Click Here to Sign Up with Never Blue Affiliate Network

Recommendation 2 – Revenue Ads Network

This is an international network of advertisers & you can monetize most of your international traffic. The major advantage that we have seen with this network is the number of alternative products in each niches.

Click Here to Sign Up with Revenue Ads

Recommendation 3 – Click Bank Affiliate Network

This is one of the oldest affiliate networks. Along with products, they have upgraded their systems to show advertisements in specific categories too. Their commission structure varies from 50% to over 70% for most of their products.

This has consistently been a great network especially for software products, software downloads, training & educational products & financial solutions especially for home business & small business.

Click Here to Sign Up with Click Bank Affiliate Network

Recommendation 4 – Affiliate Bot Network

This is a comparatively new network with the latest technologies & payment structures. Much like the others, they have an extremely wide range of advertisers ranging from technology, home improvements & social niches.

Click Here to Sign Up with Affiliate Bot Network

If you are new to affiliate marketing or you are a blogger getting into affiliate marketing, here are a few tips to improve your ROI.

Affiliate Blogging Tip 1: It takes time to start generating high incomes consistently. Please be patient & keep publishing & promoting for the first 12 months without really worrying much about how much you are earning.

Affiliate Blogging Tip 2: Keep advertising under control. Most advertisers would want you to advertise & compete on search campaigns to sell. It is easy to spend more in advertising without realizing that you could be losing more money than you should. Track your ad spends carefully, especially in the first 12 months.

Affiliate Blogging Tip 3: Choose only a few networks, but choose the best affiliate programs to partner with. Simply signing up with a large number of affiliate networks will not help. It could be disastrous too. When advertisers see that you are constantly failing to generate revenue for them, they might ban your company from participating in their programs.

Affiliate Blogging Tip 4: Unless you are in a niche, try out various types of products & see which ones work well for you & your website visitors. This could also give you a fair idea on what niche to choose from. Choosing a variety of products also help to balance your earnings over the course of the year & reduces your risk of failure in case one specific product line does not work out.

This is an absolute new system, so there isn’t much to write about how effective sponsored advertising tweets could be. They have been running sponsored tweets for a little over six months now and mostly in the areas of pay-per-click tweets.

Click Here to Sign Up for Paid Sponsored Tweets.

I have tried their beta system for over 2 months, mainly to experience how sponsored tweets work & if it could have a good potential of making money for the twitters. My choice had been the pay-per-click tweets & although I measured a large number of clicks, the earning had been less than $50.

Twitter has the potential to be a great marketing & branding channel, but I believe that marketers could beat this system to death. There has to be some control in how a sponsored advertising PPC system should work on Twitter. And we still don’t know how advertisers are measuring the validity of the clicks.

Click Here to Sign Up for Paid Sponsored Tweets.

As long as you have over 200 followers you are eligible to get sponsors. You set your own price and if the advertiser finds you credible enough, you will get an offer directly from the advertisers.

As for sharing the profit, you, as a tweeter, get to keep 50% and the system will retain another 50%. So if you are asking for $1.00 for a tweet, the sponsor has to pay out $2.00 to the marketing agency.

But then again, advertising on Twitter will get more complicated & competitive. So I would suggest that you register now & start experimenting. If nothing else, you would still get to learn how sponsored tweets work & if at all that could get you a handsome income in the future.

In addition to this, we have also made significant money from tweeting relevant ads & sponsored messages with these Twitter advertisers below. If you have a Twitter account, you can sign up for free with all & be on your way to making money from Twitter.

• Advertised Tweets – Click Here & Sign Up with Adly & Make Money tweeting messages on twitter
• Tweet Paid Ads – Click Here to Sign Up for Free with Twitter Ads & Make Money on Twitter
• Twitter Revenue – Click Here to Sign Up With Twitter Revenue & Make Money Tweeting on Twitter

Twitter is also a viral way to advertise. Read our experience on how we earned 600% advertising on Twitter here.

The title probably does not do justice to the post! I call these the “Easy Ways to Make Money Online” for 2 reasons:

1. Reason 1 - these are proven techniques & hence there are less possibilities of failures
2. Reason 2 - many of these websites can be run on auto-pilot, meaning you do not have to work continuously to make money, making them good channels for long term residual income streams.

• Easy Forex Trading – is a revolutionary Forex trading platform. A pioneering display of animated trades enables an intuitive and simple interaction with the financial market.
  

You can easily Access real time Forex rates, easily connect with the Online trading community. To help you profit easily from the foreign exchange rates, the system will provide you with trading charts & Innovative trading tools.

If you have some experience in the financial trading market, this could be a great way to make money online, working part time from the comfort of your home or even during any free time at work.

Click Here to Start Your Forex Trading Business Now

• Open Your Own Kids Online Store – over $221 billion dollars are spent on kids every year making this is a great niche for online business.

This system will gives you all the tools needed to open your  own turnkey online business solution to profit from this expanding market. They are offering a free trial to users with shipping costs of ONLY $1.97.

You can take a break from the overcrowded, traditional Business Opportunity markets (Google, eBay, etc) and cash in on a niche with very less or almost no competition!

Click Here to Start Your Own Kids Online Store Now

• Online Pet Stores – much like the kids stores, this niche has an estimated $40.8 billion spent every year on pets in the US alone. When you sign up, you will receives free information about having your own online pet supply store.
  

There is no set up fee to begin earning money in this niche offer. There is not much competition in this niche either, especially from the small business & individual business entrepreneurs, making it another great place to make money easily.

Click Here to Get Started with Your Own Online Pet Stores Now

• Join Survey Team – You can sign up for free & start earning money from online surveys. Marketing companies spend millions of dollars gathering feedback on various products & services.

Once you sign up for free, you could earn $3 bonus just for signing up, & in addition you can own the products you review, depending on the particular survey. This is a no risk way to make money online, but the returns are generally low earning you cash rewards of up to $80 for each simple online survey you complete!

Click Here to Join Survey Team for Free & Start Making Money Online

• Make Money the Easy Way with Inbox Dollars – much like the earlier system, here too, you can make money by taking surveys, playing games etc. These are promotional reviews, paid for by the companies that are marketing the product. The earnings are not high, but it is one of the easiest ways to earn cash online.

Click Here to Sign Uo with Inbox Dollars & Start Making Money Now.

There is a huge market for affiliate marketers & affiliate bloggers in the niche of  kid’s products.

If “How to Get started?” is bothering you, then we have an answer right away! You can make money with your own online store for kids with iKids Place. They will give you all the tools needed to open your very own turnkey online business solution to profit from this expanding market.

Right now, they are offering a free trial to users with shipping costs of ONLY $1.97!

This is a great online affiliate marketing opportunity. It’s a very specific niche with low  competition & not overcrowded like the traditional Business Opportunity markets encouraged by Google, eBay, etc. This has been a cash rich niche with almost no competition!

You can immediately start selling with your own online store, complete with popular kids products in a variety of categories. The free kit includes the iStore Quickstart Marketing Guide that will give you the step by step instructions in the  to begin getting customers to your store.

The best part is you don’t have to handle any inventory or manage any logistics. You simply get customers to your own website & the parent company does all the rest for you.

Click Here to get started for Free or click the button above.

One of the major issues that we wanted to protect ourselves from was the downtime of our sites. The second issue on our radar were security & safety. Infrastructure is one of the key areas of focus for any webmaster.

We wanted to leverage the popular Web 3 Tools & SaaS options to keep our content safe & available in case anything bad happened to our hosting services.

Option 1 – Safe Secured & Easy to Use Internet Storage from BOX

We have been using the Free Box account for years now, not so much for media files (like images, audio or video) but mainly for the content. This includes all our files related to the sites as well as back up of our contents.

Apart from just storing the files, this system lets you securely access & share all your files over the internet. We don’t send large files in emails any more – we load them on our Box account & send the link in an email. We can also protect certain content with passwords so that no everyone can see them.

Since we do a lot of work from our mobile offices (read about Setting Up a Simple Mobile Office & how its an easy & low cost option), using the Box system saved us a lot of internet bandwidth too. Now I even send presentations to my customers from the same Box account without physically printing the large presentation files.

Option 2 – Similar Internet Based File Storage system from Amazon S3

This is also similar to the above except that you pay for only the bandwidth you use. The S3 stands for Simple Storage Services. This is supposed to provide the customers with a scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

However, as we found out, that Amazon S3 has too many problems. Apart from being the cheapest solution, S3 did not appear to be the right solution for us. Setting up Amazon S3 is painful & time taking & so is maintaining & uploading files. The biggest challenge is that it only works with Firefox!

I spoke to a lot of my colleagues who run high traffic business blogs & they all seem to agree on the hassles of using the Amazon S3 services. Mary Jaksch published a similar report on the difficulties in using Amazon S3.

Our Final Decision & Recommendation

We chose to go with Box. We have used them over a year now. Using the services is as simple as A-B-C. And we have not had any problems so far.

They also provide free trials so that you can test out their services. We have now opted for the more reliable Enterprise version. The customer support for all Enterprise Accounts is prompt & there are practically no downtimes. They already have close to 2 million international users & the number is growing. Though it is slightly costlier that the S3 (it is still less than $25 a month), the amount of time it would save us is immense. And any of my team members can learn to use it in less than 2 minutes flat!

Click Here to Get a 14 Day Free Trial with Box.

Popular Money Making Tips on Pro Media Blog:

• Best Affiliate Programs for bloggers & online affiliate marketers
• Make Money from Blogs for a lot of tips on ways to monetize your blog
• Adsense Like Ads as Alternatives to Adsense to make money from blog ads
• Monetize all posts on your blog by Selling Text Links
• Best Chitika Shopping Ads for bloggers
• Top CPM CPA CPC Advertisers to make your choice on the various ad networks to choose from to monetize your blog
• More Shopping Ad Networks to monetize your blog
• 3 Places to Invest Money for Building a Business Blog
• Writing Paid Posts & Getting Paid to Review Products lists 6 of the best sponsored post networks
• Top Tools to Increase Blog Earning on all tools to maximize your blog revenue
• Tips to Monetize Images & Videos for all pictures on your blogs & especially if you run photo blogs

These are some of the popular posts on ProMediaBlog. My readers have found them useful & have wanted me to write more of these tips in the coming days. There are a lot more to come & I will again publish a similar summary next quarter.

I often refer to this course as the “Bible of Money Making Blogging” – because it is a complete course that starts from the very basics of selecting a name for your blog or website & moves on to the last detail of social networking.

The Blog Mastermind Coaching Program is a one stop shop for anyone aspiring to become a professional blogger & make an easy living publishing blogs & marketing affiliate products online.

This is also one of the few coaching program that I promote. Because it has helped hundreds of people like me in a very short while. I had been running my photo websites from early 2001 but never knew how to monetize any of my online real estates. Now I do!

Click Here to Read more on Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Coaching Program.

I have detailed out the courses to help you understand how this will benefit you. However, one word of caution. Any coaching program can only train you & make you aware of things that would make you successful. You have to put in the effort to make it work.

And it is not an easy task! When I began, I had put in over 20 hours of work each day for months together. However, as I have repeated over & over again, you have to persist till you make it work for you.

The internet is more competitive now that it was 5 years back. And it is getting more competitive everyday. The quicker you get yourself trained & the harder you work today, the faster you will succeed.

And this coaching program, also called Profit Blogging, will help you for the very beginning. Read the details of the program to evaluate how this will help you transform your outlook from a regular blogger to one who makes money from the online business of blogging.

Click Here to Read Details on Profit Blogging.

One of the biggest challenge that new bloggers face is to find the right affiliate network programs that would work for them. There are tons of affiliate networks & many of them are good. But I have worked with only a few.

For reference, you can sign up for the affiliate network programs that I have worked with & had great success:

• Best Affiliate Network Programs for New Bloggers

Choosing the right affiliate network is the first important step to a successful money making strategy. What will follow is a continuous effort to build your affiliate sales business.

Few of the problems that I hear from bloggers who are new to affiliate blogging are:

1. I am blogging very well but my sales is very low
2. Visitors are clicking on my links but my sales are very few
3. My products are not doing well may be I have not chosen the right product to sell
4. My sales vary widely from month to month etc. etc.

Do you have these problems as well? Then you are not alone!

Majority of these problems are because of a single reason – the way you are promoting the products. It is not the problem with the products, but the way you are blogging about them.

The other important issue here is that you may still not have the trusted followers you could sell to. So while visitors are clicking on your link, you are not able to convince them on buying the products from YOU!

Affiliate Blogging is Different than Casual Blogging

The earlier you realize this, the better for your business. Many normal casual bloggers try to write about a product from the affiliate network & expect people to buy them. It does not work that way. This is the one area many early bloggers falter.

You have to Train your Mind & Learn How to Sell from your Blogs

Anyone who is making $5,000 or more from their blogs from affiliate networks have trained themselves on how to blog effectively for affiliate sales. Once you are trained, blogging is the easy part.

So What Affiliate Program I Recommend?

There is only one affiliate training program I, or any other successful affiliate blogger for that matter, will recommend. This coaching program comes in from Yaro Starak the master affiliate blogger.

Click Here to Read the Details of the Blog Master Mind course.

I have mentioned this coaching program many times before. For 2 reasons. One, there is no alternative to this course & all the pro bloggers of today, including Darren Rowse (of ProBlogget.Net fame) & Brian Clark (of CopyBlogger.Com fame) have benefited from this course.

And Two, this course is a complete all-round course. It starts from the basics of blogging & shows you step-by-step how to get to the $10,000 earning mark!

This course is very costly. Off course you would earn much more than the cost of the course in a few months. This course is very intense & would require your complete attention & dedication. I would strongly suggest that you do not sign up for this coaching program is you are not serious about affiliate marketing or making big money from your blogs.

You do have the backing of a big enterprise to bear the risks of your failure. This makes it even more essential that you do all that are necessary to equip you with all the right tools & the training to help you succeed.

I have detailed out the benefits of Blog Mastermind Profit Blogging coaching program by Yaro Starak. This is a complete all-round coaching program ideal for anyone trying to be successful as a profiteering blogger or an online affiliate.

The complete coaching program uses audio, video & text to teach you from the very basics of how to make money blogging. Sections of this training course to become pro-bloggers also deep dive into case studies. It analyzes why certain websites are successful & why some are not.

Click Here to Read the details Blog Mastermind Profit Blogging Coaching Program.

Do you have the experience of any similar programs that could help bloggers to transform their online business?

While some of them require you to have your own blog, many want you to write guest posts for a handsome pay. Nonetheless, blogging jobs are now a popular option especially for freelancers & anyone who wants to make money blogging.

Here is a list of 10 Places to Find Great Blogging Jobs.

1. Freelance Writing Jobs – on enlisting you get offers from organizations who want you to blog for them. The pay varies from $10 for a 200 word article to over a couple of hundred dollars for any experienced blogger.Click Here to Sign Up for Freelance Writing Jobs
2. Blogging Jobs in Business Magazines – one of the best places to look for freelancing are the freelancing & business magazines. These periodicals list hundreds of opportunities every month.Click Here to Sign Up for Entrepreneur Magazine for Discounts
3. Blogging Job Boards – companies advertise for blogging & freelance writing jobs. In most cases they do not require you to have your blog. But they do expect that you have experience in blogging.

   Click Here to Look Up Blogging Opportunities in Job Boards

4. Paid Blogging – you can get paid to write about products & services. Many marketing agencies look to getting their products verified & their reviews published. Bloggers often make over hundreds of dollars reviewing such opportunities. You do need your own blog for this though & you would be willing to back link your sponsors for each of the paid content.

   Click Here to Sign Up with 6 Top Sponsored Posts Agencies

5. Paid Guest Posts – expert bloggers get paid to write guest columns. Many of the top running blogs make thousands of dollars from advertising & sales. And they pay other expert bloggers to write posts on their networks. The cost varies from a few hundred dollars upward for the well known networks.

This is only a few of some of the advertisers we have had great experience with. In various phases they have helped us achieve quite a few milestones.

• increase awareness about our websites & blogs within international blogging communities
• build buzz around our product launches for our product related sites
• general all round advertising
• increase sales
• increase website registrations & sign-ups
• increase our search engine ranking with effective advertising

We advertise year round as a part of our marketing strategy. our networks allow us to plan out an affordable annual ad budget & monitor our spends & ad effectiveness.

• How seriously do you plan your advertising?
• How frequently do you run campaigns?
• What percentage of your blog earning do you budget for advertising?

You can literally sale 12 months of the year. And with a little planning ahead of time, you can do well with these international holidays & festivals.

• January: New Year’s Day, Chinese New Year, Martin Luther King Day
• February: Valentines Day
• March: – Holi (also called the Festival of Colors)
• April: Earth Day
• May: Mother’s Day, Labor Day (also called the International Workers’ Day, May Day, Memorial Day or Decoration Day)
• June: Father’s Day
• July: Independence Day
• August: Friendship Day
• September: Back to School, Eid ul-Fitr (also called Id or Id-ul-Fitr)
• October: Dīvali (also called Dīpāwali or Deepavali)
• November: Thanksgiving, Veteran’s Day
• December: – Christmas, Hanukiah (also called Menorah, Festival of Lights or Festival of Dedication)

Each of these (& these are only the major ones known & celebrated internationally) holidays 12 months in the year are great opportunities for growing sales. Apart from these you should also focus on any of the regional holidays.

Use this as a affiliate blogging tip & focus on any such events that people often go out of their way to shop. Each country & community would have their occasions to celebrate too & you would have a year planned for selling.

• Have you tried selling specifically for any such events in the past?
• How much time do you spend planning for any of these potentially huge sales events?

Our Google Adsense ad revenues have been affected negatively from March 2009. I reported out that there were severe drop in ad clicks-through-rates on all our sites. On further analysis I found out that Google was not serving contextually relevant ads.

What were the Problems With Google Adsense that Caused a drop in Adsense Revenue?

Problem 1 – Low Cost Per Click – due to a poor economy advertisers had cut down on their ad budgets. This in turn caused the cost per click to go down drastically. In some cased we noticed that the drop was as big as 90% (i.e. if each click were giving $100 earlier, now they were giving only $10)

Problem 2 – Irrelevant Ads – the Adsense revenue drop was mainly due to Ineffective Google Ads that had nothing to do with the content! And over 60% of the time Google were promoting its own products like Google Chrome or Picasa etc. These products are so common & so widely used that unless you are a newbie to the internet, these ads will not attract your attention.

What were the solutions?

Solution 1 – Replaced Google Adsense with Adsense like Ads - we balanced out income quickly by using other Adsense like Ads. The effect was almost instantaneous.We replaced Google Ads with other contextual ads.

Solution 2 – Improved Content – we looked deep into the contents & found out that there were many ways to make the content richer. We made changes to a large number of our posts & improved the content.

Solution 3 – Started Long Tail Selling – we signed up with a couple of new affiliate programs that are well known for their success in long tail products. In these products the commission per sale was less but there were high volume of sales that made up for our blog earnings.

Solution 4 – Miscellaneous Improvements – we also tuned our themes & made ad filters stronger to make the ads as relevant & contextual as possible. Using proper ad filters also eliminated common products from being advertised & hence increasing the click-through-rates.

Which Top 3 Advertisers Did Well in the Poor Economy?

• Ad Brite including Ads for Videos & Pictures
• Widget Bucks
• Chitika including Premium Ads & Search Ads

Which Affiliate Programs Provided the Products that are Selling Well in the Poor Economy?

• Never Blue Affiliate Programs for all new products & pricing
• Click Bank even though the lead time to make money was higher, the returns are fantastic

What has been your experience with Google Adsense in the first half of 2009?

How did you balance your revenues?

Which Advertisers were your Top Performing in the first half of 2009?

In 6 months I was making a couple of hundred dollars a month from that blog selling pictures. That is when I started affiliate marketing as well. I had picked up on the business aspects of blogging for money with my other photography sites as well (Journal Image for motion & candid street pictures & Photo Duniya for nature & impressionistic art photography).

At the beginning my affiliate marketing did not go well as I wanted to. And now, when I make more money from commissions, I look back and see that I had done quite a few things wrong.

Here are the 15 mistakes new affiliate bloggers make, especially if they have been a successful blogger & have just taken up affiliate marketing;

1. affiliate marketing is not the usual blogging – the same success factors do not always work for affiliate bloggers. You just cannot writing what you want when you want – everything has to be planned when you are blogging for affiliate marketing
2. affiliate bloggers need a longer time to succeed – you cannot be an overnight millionaire & the lead time to profit is high (& so are the earnings)
3. affiliate bloggers have to focus on the best tools to succeed – marketing tools are an absolute must to grow your affiliate blogging business
4. online networking & branding is very essential – affiliate business has to do with sales & hence you need to build your brand that eludes trust & confidence. You can refer to my article on How to Start Building an Online Network to help you get started
5. affiliate blogging is a serious business much like running your own stores – you need to value your online business as much as you would do if you had invested a million dollars in it
6. affiliate blogging needs careful wording to close sales as efficiently as possible – you cannot leave any article open ended
7. email subscriptions is very much essential – email is like soft cash to affiliate bloggers & successful affiliate bloggers focus on email subscribers from day 1. I have published an article on Email Marketing Trends & another one on How to Market your Business with Emails
8. affiliate marketers need a lot of training – bloggers need training on products & marketing rather than being a copywriter
9. you can be a successful affiliate marketer without being a blogger – technically speaking, affiliate blogging is more marketing than blogging & quicker you realize this the faster you earn
10. affiliate marketing needs investments – it could be as low as $100 a month but it does have expenses for promotions & advertisements
11. affiliate marketing needs serious planning – I know affiliate bloggers who have set plans (for investments & earnings) short term plans (for the next 30 days, 60 days) as well as long term brand building plans (that extend to a year or more)
12. affiliate bloggers need professional marketing themes – specialized themes are necessary to build their business. Look at our themes for Coupon based affiliates & Online Web Store themes to understand the differences. More such themes on our Business CMS Themes site
13. affiliate bloggers use professional plugins for their blog – I have listed out all the plugins that are used by affiliate marketing bloggers at the later part of this page. The important ones to begin with are
    1. WP Affiliate Pro Plugin
    2. WP Link Cloaking Plugin
    3. WP Dupe Magin Plugin
    4. WP 3X Automation & Social Networking Plugin
14. choosing the right affiliate program & products need experience – there are numerous affiliate programs that all look attractive but it needs market knowledge & an understanding of the challenges of affiliate marketing to be able to choose the right programs & products to sell. I have published a list of some of the best affiliate programs that are suitable to new & experienced bloggers
15. affiliate marketing bloggers have to understand SEO & Search Advertising very well – driving traffic to your affiliate products’ page involve deep understanding of landing page creation, search engine bidding & search advertising. There are lots of books available to help you train yourself. I follow Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization: Drive Traffic, Boost Conversion Rates and Make Lots of Money (Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guides) by Jon Rognerud.

Affiliate marketing & affiliate blogging is a highly rewarding business model. If I had to do it all over again, I would avoid these 15 mistakes. If you have been blogging for some time & want to move onto becoming a successful affiliate blogger, you can easily relate to these common mistakes that I made.

You will get a lot of educational & training resources to Start Your Own Business at Entrepreneur Publications.

• What would be your tip to new affiliate bloggers?
• What normal blogging practices worked or you in affiliate blogging?
• What practices did not work for you?

The challenges of email marketing are also too many. In my earlier post on Email Marketing Trends – Right Email Marketing for Blogging Business, I wrote about the technical & logistic challenges that need to be overcome.

I have worked with a lot of these email marketing agencies & have experimented with a lot of them. There are several good ones out there. But if asked to recommend a few, especially for new bloggers, my suggestions would be:

• iContact – Sign up today for a 15 day free trial. Try iContact now!
• Constant Contact – Email Marketing and Online Surveys by Constant Contact make it easy to connect with your customers. Try it FREE for 60-Days.
• Sign Up with AWeber – the favorite email marketing system of all bloggers

You could sign up with any of them without thinking twice. They all offer:

• extremely affordable & flexible billing plans based on the volume of your subscribers – as your subscriber list grows (and you earn more money) you can pay out more to these agencies
• very customizable emails in professional layouts (templates)
• customizable responders
• customizable content – could be aggregation of your posts, or custom text or both
• you define the frequency of emails depending on your campaigns
• ability to run campaigns & measure the effectiveness
• no long term contracts
• so many other advantages

However, the most important factor is that they employ superior technology & constantly upgrade their technology so that they do not get filtered out as junk, or worse, get tagged as spam. They have higher deliverability (ability to reach the recipient’s Inbox without being filtered as spam or junk) rate in the industry & that is solely because of their technology & reputation.

As I had mentioned in my earlier article, changing email marketing agency in the middle of your program is a big risk. Although it is technically possible to move your subscriber list from one host to another, it results in loss of a lot of your confirmed subscribers.

So, while I give my recommendations because I have used them in my blogging business, I suggest that you do your research before you sign up with any of them.

This article is based on our understanding of the growing niche blogging topics, market data & feedback from some of the top niche bloggers.

As a reference, you can read our previous articles on:

• Top Affiliate Programs for Bloggers
• Popular Topics on ProMediaBlog
• 10 Most Popular Blogging Topics to Make Money Blogging

You will find numerous references to money making resources in these articles that will help you to choose & sign up with some of the best blogging programs.

Niche blogging is one of the oldest blogging styles. Bloggers deep dive into specific areas & write extensively in that area. Over time, they become experts in their niches & are seen as advisers by the readers.

Here are some of the Popular Niche Blogging areas:

1. Specialized Sports & Hobbies – examples include golf & angling where bloggers passionately write about their hobbies & sports. This also includes areas like car racing hobbies, toys & popular mechanics.

2. Adult Relationships & Dating – more & more people are getting into the business of marketing adult relationships & dating programs. These are usually subscription based programs & hence bloggers & webmasters in this niche earn a lot of money quickly.

Some of the popular high paying affiliate programs in this niche include:

• People Finders Affiliate Program
• Ashley Madison Adult Dating Affiliate Program
• Singles Network Affiliate Program

3. Cruise Travels & Exotic Travel – cuises & travels to exotic countries have picked up in the last couple of years & with countries spending billions of dollars to build their tourism industries, this niche business area is likely to grow a lot.

Niche blogs on Cruise & Exotic Travels have started to replace the traditional travel agencies since they are able to offer custom & cost effective travel plans.

4. Video Games & Online Games – gaming is one of the biggest industry in the world now & niche bloggers in this area also make a lot of money. The industry is also conducive to this niche since hundreds of new games are rolled out almost every day & there are numerous free downloads to keep the readers happy.

5. Personal Development & Training – as long as there is competition in the job market, this niche market will continue to grow. Bloggers in the niche business of training & personal development make money by connecting trainers with trainees & selling training materials.

6. Mobile Phone Downloads & Ringtones – this niche is suitable for technical bloggers & phone marketers.  With the increase in mobile phone users & the teens using mobile phones not as a utility but as a fashion accessory, this niche is growing by leaps & bounds.

7. Fashion Kits & Beauty Products – with the increase of social networking & the spending power of teens increasing, sales of fashion & beauty products are on the rise. Niche bloggers in this niche promoting fashion kits & beauty products are seeing huge income from their niche blogs.

8. Real Estate Marketing – real estate has always remained a local business. Partly because people are more comfortable in their locality but mainly because of lack of awareness of great real estate deals outside their locality.

Niche real estate bloggers are seeing an increase in sponsorships for their blogs & real estate agents are also paying bloggers for promoting their properties.

9. Antique Items sales – although eBay has been the power website for sales & auction of antiques, this is still a very profitable nich blogging area. The challenge is to run these niche blogs as a community & bring in business.

10. Handicrafts  Hand Crafted Life Style Accessories - there are very few bloggers in this niche. But those who write & sell international handicrafts & hand crafted items for daily use make a lot of commission from these sales. This niche has an international appeal & bloggers see sales rising very quickly.

Note that niche blogging business takes longer time to make as much money as other popular blogging topics. You will need all the Pro Blogging Tools to get you started & make quick money from any of these niche sites.

However, if you look at it, you are still investing money everyday to build & grow your blogging business. You pay the website host (to many this is the only investment!), you pay to register your websites, you pay for email marketing & then you spend time to write (which is probably the biggest expense!).

• So what are the choices of investments?
• And what are the best places to invest to build your blogging business effectively?

1. Website or Blog Registration & Hosting:

There are too many people offering website hosting services. We have worked with 5 of them & they are the best. They offer unlimited domains, complimentary website registration, Wordpress ready & cheap monthly billing. Most importantly, they are very responsive to their customers’ questions & you will get to speak to them 24×7 in case there is a problem.

• BLUE HOST – Free Domain With $6.95 Hosting Package. With a cheap monthly billing, you can Host Unlimited Domains for 1 account at $6.95 Per Month
• Host Monster Web hosting – Host Unlimited Domains On 1 Hosting Account. For a cheap monthly rate you get Free Domain, Free Setup, Host Unlimited Domains for $6.95 a month
• Lunarpages Web Hosting – for a low monthly rate, you get a website from $4.95/month with Unlimited Emails, Storage & $700 Free Bonus Software – Limited Time Offer!
• Hostgator web Hosting – you get Quality Support for 24/7 Via Phone, Live Chat, and Email with Web Hosting Services from Hostgator
• GoDaddy Web Hosting – you can get your own online store in minutes with Quick Shopping Cart with GoDaddy.com

All of these web hosts offer one click Wordpress set up with full integration with shopping carts, emails & ftp accounts. It is worth spending a dollar or two more on your web hosting service rather than lose thousands of dollars in sales with hours of downtime (this is when your web hosting services bring down all the websites for maintenance & no one can access your websites).

2. Email Marketing for your blogs & online business

I have mentioned in other articles (Email Marketing for Bloggers) how important a subscriber’s or customer’s email is to anyone doing business online. However, to drive & grow business with that email, you need a solid foundation of technology that comes from your email marketing partner.

Here is our recommendation of the best affordable email marketing partner for your blogging & online business. Either of them is absolutely suitable:

• iContact – they have a range of sophisticated features bundled into a single, affordable product
• Constant Contact – provides Email Marketing and Online Surveys making it easy to connect with your customers & grow your online business. Now you can – Try it FREE for 60-Days.
• AWeber – this is one of the most popular email marketing services among bloggers. It offers flexibility & low costs that work out in favor of new bloggers
  

We still suggest that you do your research before you sign up & talk to the customer service managers to understand how their email services will work for your blog & business. Note that it is a big risk to have to change email marketing agency in between.

3. Business Logo & Professional Accessories

Logos, business cards or even business courtesy gifts & accessories are not something that we focus on everyday. However, they represent how serious you are about your business & gives a sense of professionalism & comfort in the minds of your customers.

The nice thing about these accessories is that with so much of competition, a lot of these office products come in free. We have always used these 3 agencies for our business related products.

• The Logo Company – for professionally designed Business Logo Design for your blogs & business
• Business Cards – you can get free business cards to start off with & when you have designed your own logo you can start printing business cards with your own logo. Vista also gives huge discounts all throughout the year
• Overnight Prints – provides very highly discounted but high quality office products & marketing stationery

These are 3 of the essential products & services where you need to plan your investments & expenses. These are essential expenses & many of them are ongoing expenses too. Having a good partner in these 3 key areas will give you the peace of mind as well as help you grow your online business.

Reference:

1. Study: Deliverability Could be Better on MediaPost

2. E-mail’s Killer ROI Less Lethal by the Year: DMA on DirectMag

How is this affecting bloggers, especially who have been trying to build their email subscription list in order to sell & market more.

Affiliate marketers & bloggers who sell affiliate products depend heavily on email marketing. They are used for various reasons – to build relations, build brands, educate people on products (pre-sales) and off course in an attempt to sell.

On talking to various experienced email marketers & money making affiliate bloggers, I got some great insights into what the problems are & how some of them could be avoided.

The Challenges faced by Money Making Affiliate Marketers & Bloggers:

• not all emails are valid – people often give false emails to get free stuff, like free eBooks or free training courses
• not all emails are monitored regularly – many people maintain more that one email IDs. They use them for various reasons – a few for personal emails, a few for business & a few to trick marketers. I dont know how they do it, but they do!
• not all subscribers confirm their subscription – email marketing legally requires double opt-in by subscribers. However, many people do not go back to confirm their subscriptions & hence fall out of all the email marketing campaigns
• email set-ups change without the owners’ knowledge – many people use free emails (hotmail.com, yahoo.com etc), many use the ISP’s emails while many use their business emails. The technical changes to stop spam & junk emails often require some action from the email owners – like saving email IDs in the ‘Safe List’ failing which certain  emails will end in the junk folder
• frequent emails could end up in the junk folder without people even realizing it
• emails with lots of links & attachments could end up in the junk folder too – not all email systems scan attachments or links to check their validity. Some simply route them to junk folder
• not everyone checks their junk or spam folders regularly to retrieve valid emails – so if your email has, for some reason, ended in the junk folder of the recipient & is not retrieved as “Not Junk”, your emails will continue to be routed to the junk folder
• email marketers often fail to build a relation & the recipient does not care – email marketing is often dull, one way communication when the affiliate wants to sell a product
• sometimes email marketers change their email marketing agency – such change requires that the new agency send out a new “opt-in” email from their system to you existing subscribers. This confuses people & often many of them do not opt-in again & you get to lose important valuable subscribers
• there are several other challenges but none as significant as the above that could hurt your business

There are no easy solutions, especially if the recipients do not care for your business, are indifferent to your messages or are completely unaware that your emails are ending up in their junk folder.

However, these experienced bloggers & affiliate marketers also gave a few tips to avoid many of them. In my blogging business I have found that these tips work.

• don’t try to run your own email mailing lists & manage subscriptions – there are many software programs that let you run your own campaigns & manage your own subscribers. Its a good idea when you have 50 subscribers & you’re a small affiliate but it is a severe handicap when your subscribers increase or your affiliate business grows
• don’t change your email marketing agency – decide on one & stick to it. Do your research before you choose your email marketing partner & let them do the thing that they are good at – email marketing
• build limited auto responders – one good use of auto-responders is at the beginning to ensure that subscribers do opt-in & for any regular updates (like a weekly update on your business)
• communicate in person – make your emails more personal & less official. Ask questions & ask for help (everyone feels good when asked for help!) & don’t be pushy more than you need to
• have textual content in your emails & not just links
• send reminders to check their junk emails in case any of your emails have ended up their. many suggested that you should drop the subscribers who have not opted-in after 4 reminders
• respond to your subscribers’ emails – this is a big challenge in case you have a large subscriber list & you are the only person handling email marketing
• its a good idea to pre-sale any product for a week or two before you finally pitch your product – always draw reference to prior emails to refresh their memory & do not expect that they remember your last email
• share success stories & make them feel a part of your success or failure. Occasional free gifts & giveaways are a great way to do this. Many people often run competitions to encourage participation & awareness of your business

The subtle point in all these tips is to keep email marketing simple & realistic. We also recommend these email marketing agencies that are quite well known for their high quality of service & the features they offer for small business & affiliate business bloggers:

• iContact – Sign up today for a 15 day free trial. Try iContact now!
• Constant Contact – Email Marketing and Online Surveys by Constant Contact make it easy to connect with your customers. Try it FREE for 60-Days.
• Sign Up with AWeber – the favorite email marketing system of all bloggers

Share your thoughts with us too:

What has been you experience with Email Marketing?
What challenges have you faced in your email campaigns?
How did you solve your problems to improve your email marketing effectiveness?

This limited time free money making blogging tool kit contains:

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The easy answer is Business CMS Themes, a collection of Wordpress themes that we have created for small business & for those professionals who run business blogs for selling & marketing!

There is another great option too, where you can instantly create fantastic looking, unique Website templates and Blog themes.

It’s the Web Design Generator – Artisteer.

This auto-theme generator is also the:

• a popular Automated Web Design Software for Blogs, CMS and Portals. Generate templates for Wordpress,  Blogger, Joomla and Drupal.
• #1 Wordpress Theme Generator. Instantly create great looking and professional Wordpress Themes.
• #1 Drupal Theme Generator. Instantly create great looking and professional Drupal Themes.
• #1 Joomla Template Generator. Instantly create great looking and professional Joomla Templates.

While I write about Wordpress, there are numerous people who are using other free open source softwares like Joomla & Drupal. The exciting part about theWeb Design Generator – Artisteer is that you can create innovative designs, unique to your own business blog, for any of the technologies – Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Blogger or even static HTML.

Why is it so easy? Can you really create your own layout or theme in minutes?

• you choose a layout from the software – whether you want a left column or a right column or both, or whether you want the usual columnar layout or a magazine style
• you choose the colors – this is a very unique part to get the colors to make your website look great, so the software suggests the best color combination for columns, body, headers, navigation
• choose your unique style – this includes fonts, links, headings, body, footer & navigation
• once done, you export the design for your business blog – you can save it as a template for Blogger or a normal HTML & as themes for Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla

You can change your design later & all you need to do it to export it for your system & upload it to your website!

Click Here to Get Started with the Web Design Generator – Artisteer.

But marketing companies have paid bloggers for sponsored reviews to write about their products & services & publish certain keyword links that they promote. Although we do not encourage using this method to make money from blogs many bloggers have used disclaimers on such posts to keep Google informed that the post is a paid review.

New bloggers tend to sign up with a lot of these blogging agencies at the begining of their journey to make money from their blogs. Slowly they realize that not all these agencies are what they promise to be. They land with:

• extremely cheap orders to write paid reviews
• reviewed products or services are completely irrelevant
• reviewed products or services conflict with your business interest
• very less work orders in a month

I have always suggested that you sign up with a few, but only the good ones. There are several marketing agencies that:

• do the research & take the time to assign proper work orders on writing posts that are relevant to your sites
• maintain a minimum level of payout or even lets you set your own price
• allow you to mention that these are paid posts & paid reviews keeping your business safe from search engine rules
• keeps enough clients to keep the work coming constantly
• allows you to contract writing jobs directly using their market place

I would recommend these following Paid Posts & Paid Review Services to other bloggers.

1. Buy Blog Reviews – They have a great reputation in the market & their rules do not conflict any of the search engines’ s for over a decade & is reputed to have great payout, timely payment & a good amount of clients to keep your work coming.

2. Freelance Writing Jobs – They are an organized forum of writers & publishers with their own marketplace & database of freelance writing jobs. You can either write & publish articles on your own websites or sell the content for the clients.

3. Sponsored Reviews – They are very well knowing in the blog marketing world. They maintain a high quality of bloggers & advertisers & the payout is also very high. They also let you set your own price, however they do advise you on the best price for your websites & blogs for the current market situation.

4. Paying Post - They have a large number of small clients. The payout is usually less, but they have a lot of assignments for general as well as some niche blogs. They are well focussed on family related blogs & sites as well as sites related to shopping & marketing.

5. Link Worth – This is more than just a service to connect bloggers with marketing agencies for paid blog posts. You can get a whole lot more of money by using their services – you can dedicate links, write a whole page for a sponsor or even write single posts. You can also sell PPC advertisements from their websites to make more money.

6. Smorty - This is again a sponsored paid blogging service with a large number of customers from the general marketing & promotions business. Their payout is less but you can continuously bid on open opportunities, so that your work keeps coming in. Blogs that are family related or related to entertainment & shopping can earn hundreds of dollars a month writing for their clients.

7. Review Me - This is a high profile sponsored review post agency. They have high profile clients & only allow selected bloggers to join their forum. They are focused on social media marketing & hence blogs with high PR & inflencial bloggers get to work with them. The payout is very high, sometimes over a thousand dollars for posts, but the number of assignments are less.

The percentage of our earnings from writing paid reviews & sponsored posts is extremely low. We have done that intentionally since our business is more to do with teaching new bloggers the best ways to make money online. And off course, photography!

As a blogger,& especially if you are a new blogger trying to make money blogging, leave your comment on:

• is paid posts & sponsored reviews one of your focus areas?
• what percentage of your blog earning comes from paid reviews & sponsored posts?
• how many agencies have you signed up with & how many of them are actually helpful in growing your income?

I have been asked these 2 questions very frequently:

1. What are the Right Affiliate Programs for Bloggers? and What are the best Affiliate Programs that I would recommend?

2. How do you choose the Right Affiliate Marketing offers? What are the key features of a good affiliate program?

Other references on here that you may find useful are:

• To find out about all the ways in which you can make money bloggin, read my recommendations on 15 Ways to Make Money from Blogs.
• All the various advertisers that could help you make money from blog advertisements, read my recommendations on Best AdSense Alternatives to Make Money from Blog Ads

In this article I am going to share thoughts on how to evaluate the best affiliate programs for your line of blogging. I would love to hear your comments, ideas & suggestions on this too.

1. The Top Affiliate Programs for Bloggers

Amongst the hundreds of Affiliate Programs for Bloggers available these days there are a few that has proved to be good for all experince levels of bloggers.

Once you sign up with an affiliate program, you would like to be partners for a long time. The simple reason being that it takes time & effort (and money at times) to build a good market for them & you would like to see the market grow over time. You would not like to choose an affiliate program that runs out of business in a year or two. So you choose affiliate programs that have been in the business for a period of time & has built its own credibility among bloggers.

1. Here is a list of some of the best affiliate programs we work with & who have been recommended to me by other successful bloggers (Click Here to Read the Complete List of Best Affiliate Networks)

Never Blue Affiliate Program – this affiliate network has products & services in some of the very niche markets. One of the best features is that they have many internation offers. Since many of your website visitors & followers would be international, it pays to work with an international affiliate team.

• Click Here to Sign Up with Never Blue Affiliate Program.

LinkShare Affiliate Program – this is also an international top affiliate program for bloggers. They are tied up with some of the best international brands with e-commerce business solution for over 3.5 million online relationships & over 500 premier online merchants.

• Click Here to Sign Up with LinkShare Affiliate Program.

Chitika Affiliate Program – this is a relatively new affiliate network but has significantly grown in terms of inventory & has brought in new advertising tools. This is also a part of the Shopping Adverising network, which means that they also have PPC based click ads to help you make money from blogs.

• Click Here to Sign Up with Chitika Network

Click Bank – this is another great affiliate marketing network. They have a great variety of products & services in their inventory that would attract a wide variety of bloggers. At the same time, they also have a very strong brands in their inventory that could definitely help you to sell well. Click Bank has worked great for niche marketers & niche bloggers. People are known to have made tens of thousands of dollars selling & promoting their products on websites & blogs.

• Click Here to Sign Up with Click Bank Affiliate Network Program.

Monetize Your Site’s Content With FinditQuick – this is a 3 in 1 affiliate program offer with very high potential of residual income. I call it 3 in 1 because it let’s you make money from selling ads, make money from search engines (much like Google with some additional features) & one of the highest paying affiliate program.

• Click Here to Join the FinditQuick Search Engine Affiliate Program.

Commission Junction – it is another very popular affiliate marketing program to focus on. They have been in business for a long time & have superior systems & reports to promote your affiliate business on your blogs.

• Click Here to Sign Up with Commission Junction Affiliate Program

The above are some of the large international affiliate network programs for bloggers. You will find great support from the affiliate managers, training & tips from them as well as timely payment & detailed reporting. I recommend signing up with them to beging making money from affiliate programs.

There are a few smaller & very niche programs that I also recommend. They are particularly suitable for new bloggers who are in the business of online downloads & make frequent monetary transactions on the internet. These programs, though they seem insignificant at first, are very rewarding in terms of their usefulness to the users. They are easy to sell mainly because of their all-encompassing features.

e-Junkie – this is an online system to help people sell their inventory online. A very useful & cost effective system given that they help you run your own affiliate networks as well as sell directly on eBay. There are 4 benefits to using e-Junkie in your online business:

(a) helps you sell your inventory by providing a secured online hosting service at the most affordable cost (about $5 a month only!)

(b) helps you run your own online affiliate marketing network by allocating affiliate links to your partners

(c) takes care of all the financial transactions for your affiliates so that you can focus on marketing your products

(d) track your sales & even integrate that with Google Analytics to be better able to optimize your websites

• Click Here to Sign Up for e-Junkie Affiliate Network Program

PayPal – we use Paypal for more than just accepting credit cards. We have PayPal integrated with our websites for shopping carts, for our affiliates networks as well as for any of the eBay transactions. PayPal also has an affiliate program that we use & promote. This is a very rewarding program & PayPal is very easy to sell to anyone who is involved with online business.

• Click Here to Sign Up for the PayPal Affiliate Program

So that sums up our recommendations of the top affiliate network programs for bloggers. Please note that we are part of many of these networks & our affiliate codes are built into these links. If you decide to sign up, please use these links above so that it could be a mutually beneficial act.

Now coming to the second question, as to what are the features of the right Affiliate Network programs & what to look for before signing up with any of them. I suggest that you sign up with only the ones you believe could be helpful to your business now & in the long run.

You would like to partner with affiliate programs & build on their products & your service. Any disruption in the days ahead could cause severe dents in your earnings.

2. What are the features of a good affiliate program & what should you evaluate before you sign up with any of them?

• how long have they been in business – an affiliate business trives & grows with trust. So any affiliate program that is in the market for a long time surely enjoys the trust & contribution of a large number of successful marketers
• what is their product mix? Are they only promoting very niche products or do they have a wide variety? Most bloggers who also sell affiliate products like to promote a variety of similar products through their online websites & blogs. Having too niche products could become a big risk in the long run
• what is their reputation in the market? Search the internet for reviews on the affiliate programs & learn what others are saying. This will give you a general flavor of whether the affiliate program is worth looking deeper into
• how much do they help their affiliate partners & bloggers? Do they run educational campaigns & training camps? Many of the top affiliate programs run their own training sessions for the bloggers & affiliate website owners to help them sell better & sell more. They also train their affiliate partners on newer ways & technology that can be used to sell better
• how do they report out on performance? Reporting is very crutial to understand if any of the marketing campaigns have worked well for you. The top affiliate programs will have numerous ways to promote – web based promotions, email marketing, incentivized sales & search marketing are some examples. The affiliate programs should be able to provide you with detailed reports on the performance of every campaign that you do
• how much do they pay? when do they pay? After all you are working to make money! Generally the best affiliate programs will pay within 30 days & they will also provide detailed reports on which all products have earned you the commissions. You may read through their websites to know more on their payment terms

Please take all the time, consult as many people as you want, even write to the affiliate managers or call them up to clarify all your questions before you decide to sign up. Once you do, plan for the long term. Seek advise from them as well as from your fellow affiliates to help you get onto making money.

The CPC rates have gone down & in a bad economy it requires more traffic to get you the same income from ads. While many shoppers have cut down on internet shopping leading to decrease in earning from Blog Affiliate Marketing & Sales.

I have experimented over the past 6 months with various selection of advertisers & campaigns & have seen good results in some cases. This post is about what all strategies are working great for me.

1. Optimize your Themes – take a good look of your theme and find all places to optimize them for content, ads & SEOs. Here is what I did to optimize all aspects of my themes.

• choose a business CMS theme that is created to sell more & show ads in places where the click through rates are higher. You can choose from some of the best Wordpress Business CMS Themes that come in for less that $10
• add the Google ad tags to focus only on the relevant content for contextual ads. This is a very simple pair of HTML tags: <!– google_ad_section_start –> at the beginning & <!– google_ad_section_end –> at the end. For more, read the Google Adsense Help
• have the essential SEO plugins built into your blog. I have a small list of Essential Wordpress Plugins that everyone should use
• if you have a lot of pictures & images on your business blog, this is the time to add the ALT tag & TITLE tag to all those images. They greatly improve your ability to be found by search engines. Click Here to see How you Can Monetize Pictures on your blogs too

2. Minimize Risk by Partnering with Multiple Advertisers – there are numerous advertisers who have great pay out rates. I have found that many advertisers have much more CPC CPM & CPA rates than Google Adsense.

I have been using a lot more advertisers than I used to before to keep up my earnings. However, if you have noticed I have not increased the number of ads on my websites. In fact, I have cut down on the total number of ads I show on my websites, even when the economy is bad.

• Click here to check out the various Advertiers & Google Adsense Alternatives I use & Sign Up with them
• Click here to Sign Up with Advertisers that have a higher payout rates
  

3. Post Regularly & Control Spam – this is the most important tip. I have been meeting a lot of bloggers who are ready to give up. Especially if you have started towards the mid of 2008 when the economy started to sink, you are in double trouble – your blogs may not be completely indexed & you may not have found the best advertisers. But keep writing regularly.

• use this time to build your social network as well. Spend time reading others’ blogs & comment on them
• build your community on some of the popular social networking websites. The popular ones are FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Bebo
• increase your subscriber list. I do that with FeedBurner & all my Wordpress RSS are redirected to FeedBurner
• control spam comments. Allowing spam pingbacks & comments to show up on your posts will only hurt your blog’s rankings & ratings. It is better to have zero comments than to have a hundred comment from spamming websites
• you may want to write or repost a few of your articles that have always been very popular in the past
• use sites like Flickr & YouTube to get more publicity & more traffic

4. Post Variety of Topics – this does not mean that you go writing about topics that are not relevant to your blog at all. Find subjects & topics that are popular & see how you can write posts relevant to those topics.

• Here is a list of 10 Most Popular Topics to Make Money Online.

Although Pro Media Blog is about helping people to set up their blogging business & helping them make money from blogs, I had posted earlier on how my slow BlackBerry Storm mobile phone was not performing to my expectation.  You can Click Here to See the posts on BlackBerry Storm.

5. Earn More from Freelancing – freelancing for other blog networks & writing on other blogs are a good way to build inbound links, build your credibility as well as earn extra money.

Here are some of the best freelancing websites:

• Click Here to Sign Up for Freelancing Jobs
• Click Here to Write on Other Blogs & Get Paid
• Click Here to Write Reviews & Make Money

These 5 techniques have helped me increase my earnings from my blogging business even during the bad economy. Had the economy been good & the ad CPC CPM payouts higher, my income would have increased many folds.

I would like to hear from you as well:

• Have your blogging business been affected in this slow economy?
• What have you done to increase your blog revenue in this bad economy?
• What strategies worked for you?

Depending on what your blog marketing strategy is, here is a list of 11 Essential Blog Marketing Tool that you will find immensely helpful to grow your online blog business.

1. Professional Business Cards – this is one of the most essential marketing tools for anyone. Get professionally made business cards with your logo & catch phrase.

• Click Here to create MOO Business Cards, MiniCards and Postcards – Create unique Business Cards and Stickers to help your business stand out!
• Click Here to get discounted Business Cards from Overnight Prints

2. Web Based Custom Surveys from Blogs – create a lot of user interaction & get readers’ feedback through polls & visitor surveys. Get professional surveys customized to your blog done by Creating custom web-based surveys and get rapid results! Create custom web-based surveys and get rapid results!

• Click here to Sign up for custom marketing surveys for your blogs
• Click Here to Build your Business with Online Surveys from Constant Contact & FREE 60-Day Trial

3. Print Professional Brochures, Flyers & Marketing materials – You can create & distribute various marketing materials from time to time. Many bloggers use such material as promotional materials to keep in touch with potential clients & dedicated readers.

• Click here to create marketing brochures, flyers, newsletters & postcards
• Click Here to get discounted Brochures & marketing tools from Overnight Prints
• Click Here to Save up to 90% & get FREE Shipping on all Marketing Products

4. Create Large Marketing Posters – these are absolute essential marketing tools especially for marketing & blogging events. Pro Bloggers & network bloggers have their logos & messages printed in large formats for distribution at kiosks & stalls.

• Click Here to Print Your Photos, Logos & Messages Extra Large!

5. Design Professional Logo for Your Online Brand – a Logo is essential to create a unique brand identity. There are numerous sites & sevices that provide free logos, but none of them are unique. You need to employ professionals who can understand your themes, the specific audience & create a custom logo.

• Click Here to Design Custom Business Logo

6. Email Marketing Services for Blogs – email marketing is an essential tool to succeed in the business of blogging. It helps you to be in constant contact with your readers, subscribers & use your affiliate products to recommend sales to your email subscribers.

• Click Here to Sign up Today for a 15 Day Free Trial with Email & Subscription Marketing
• Click Here to Build your business with Email Marketing from Constant Contact & get FREE 60-Day Trial

These are some of the essential blog marketing tools that every professional blogger have used over time to build their own brand, market their blogging business on the internet as well as in various marketing forums & meets.

If you want to share any other technique & marketing tool that you have used for marketing your blogs, please share it with our readers here.

Custom Themes on Social Networking

These layouts & custom designs for MySpace, Hi5, LiveJournal, Blogger etc have been used to “pimp” your online social profiles in the past.

The Webfetti feature enables you to customize a social networking profile page with layouts, graphics, custom cursors, music and video.

Along with the free download of custom layouts, you also get free smileys, cursors, screensavers, ecards, avatars, the MyWebSearch® search box and Search Assistant – relevant search results in response to incorrectly formatted browser address requests.

You can Download Custom Layouts Designs & Themes for your MySpace Blogger LiveJournal Hi5 Profiles Free.

These Free downloads are free of any spyware or adware.

The Free Download installs a web browser toolbar. The custom themes & all the free smileys, cursors, ecards & avatars etc can also be accessed from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Outlook, Outlook Express, AOL 9.0 Email/Browser, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, Becky! and Incredimail desktop applications.

The search box, located within the toolbar that will help you search the Internet with search results from our search results partner. While the search assistant provides relevant links and results when you make a search request in your browser address bar or if your browser address (DNS) request is invalid, misspelled or incorrectly formatted.

Click Here to Download the Webfetti Custom Layouts Designs & Themes for your Social Networking Profiles pages for Free.

Professional Bloggers use a variety of tools to create content, create social awareness & buzz & gather trusted followers. There are automated tools available, along with training materials, that you have to know & implement to reach the next level of making substantial money from blogs.

In this article I shall detail out the Top 10 Tools that all Pro Bloggers use to Increase their Blog Revenue. You may need to implement few or all of them depending on how much money you want to make from your blogs & websites.

• Social Bookmarking Automation Software Blog Comment Software – with this automated software, you can Get Unlimited Supply Of High PR Backlinks And Laser Targeted Traffic
  From Major Bookmarking Sites. Just Fill In Some Blanks And Press The Start Button, And You Can Start Increasing Your Affiliate Commissions, Product Sales And Adsense Income Today – All Done In Minutes On Autopilot
• Push Button Marketer – Automation Software For Internet Marketers – this automated software Automates Tasks Like Email, Writing, Creating Websites, Checking Stats, Blogging, Website Maintenance, Posting Ads, Research, Product Reviews, And So Much More. It can also help in Managing websites, Managing PPC campaigns, Building websites or web pages & manage social networking.
• Learn How To Blog [Step-by-Step Video Tutorials] – Easy To Follow Video Tutorials Showing You Exactly How To Set Up Your Blog. All You Have To Do, Is Follow The Paint-by-numbers System Weve Put Together. Its Never Been Easier To Learn How To Set Up & Make Money from Your Very Own Blog.
• Super Affiliate Handbook – Start Your Own Home-Based Affiliate Marketing Business With Super Affiliate Rosalind Gardners Expert Guidance! Topics Include Blogging, Market Research, Affiliate Programs, Web Design, Problem Avoidance And So Much More! It will give you all the tips, tricks and the secrets of the Affiliate marketing trade to increase your affiliate blog earnings.
• Learn How To Make Money Blogging – Blog Mastermind – this is one of the BEST programs available on the internet, done by Pro Blogger & millionaire Yaro Starak. The Blog Mastermind Coaching Program Led By Six-figure Yaro Starak Teaches You How To Set Up And Profit From A Successful Blog. Start Making Money From Blogs By Following This Step-by-step, Weekly Coaching Program.
• Wp Affiliate Pro – The #1 Plugin For WordPres Blogs – this is a Wordpress plugin with which you can Instantly Identify, Manage & Track Your Highest Performing Affiliate Links Over Your Entire Wordpress Blog In Less Time Than It Takes To Pour A Glass Of Kool Aid And Make More Money Doing So. It lets you focus on the highly popular pages, products & services increasing your blog earning dramatically.
• Automatic Rss & Blog Submission Tool – this is an automation software to Submit Your RSS Feeds And Blogs To Over 58 Directories And Sites. Save Time And Let Our Software Do The Work. Blogs that always show up on the top of the search pages are submitted repeatedly, once a month to once a quarter, to all the key directories.
• Cash Cow Guide To Adsense Wealth – a great tutorial on all the Adsense secrets for bloggers who use Adsense to generate blog income. It is a Step-by-step Formula For Creating Profit Pulling Wordpress Blogs.
• Wordpress Affiliate Elite – New WordPress Plug-in - A Powerful WordPress Plug-in. Convert Any Keyword In Your Blog To An Affiliate Link With Only A Single Mouse Click. This saves time in creating individual product links to earn commissions.
• Auto Content Cash – Wordpress Auto Blog System – all pro bloggers use auto content, either through PLR articles or opening it up to other members of the network & paying them to write for you. Auto Content Cash is based on the very latest gray hat marketing strategies that anyone can easily apply.

As I have said so many times before, persistence is the key to making money from your blogs. When you combine your persistence with effective strategies & social networking abilities, you blog income will increase dramatically.

If you have benefitted for any such programs above, please feel free to share it with our readers by leaving a comment or writing on Pro Media Blog.

I share my experience, what worked for me & what did not & some of the best tips on advertising, on this blog. In this post, I will share some of the resources provided by the established blogging Gurus.

• Roadmap to Becoming a Successful Blogger – Free Video Tutorials to help you get started with your online business & how to make money blogging.
• Blogging to the Bank – an indispensable resource for anyone wishing to become a pro-blogger & making thousands of dollars from your blogs.
• Wordpress Goldmine – all our blogs & affiliate websites are built on Wordpress. Thousands of affiliates & individuals have built their marketing & blogging network on Wordpress to make millions of dollars online. This invaluable resource shows you the tips & tricks to convert your ordinary Wordpress blog into a money making blog & affiliate site.
• How To Make Money Blogging – Blog Mastermind – this set of blogging resources come from one of the best in the business of blogging, Yaro Starak. The Blog Mastermind Coaching Program Led By Six-figure Yaro Starak Teaches You How To Set Up And Profit From A Successful Blog. Start Making Money From Blogs By Following This Step-by-step, Weekly Coaching Program.
• Earn 6 Figure Incomes from Professional Blogging – 6 figure incomes are possible from professional blogging. This is one of the top rated resources for blogging professionals. It has the Best In Class Content, 260 Pages Of No-nonsense Expert Advice, Stack Of Videos, & Completely Updated For Wordpress based blogs.
• Cash Fusion Success Videos – a complete video tutorial on blogging, from the basics to the finer elements of differentiating your blog from the remaining. These videos teaches you the art of Hyper Article Marketing & Super Affiliate Blogging that makes bloggers earn thousands of monthly dollars a month.

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Along with these educational resources & extensive step-by-step video tutorials to help you create a professional blog to make money online, here are a few of the most important Wordpress Plugins that are essential to making money from blogs:

• Wordpress Plugins that Automate your Blog – automation is the key to increasing your internet wealth. It frees up your time to do new business or spend time on your passions. This is a set of essential Wordpress Plugins especially for the professionals who are building Wordpress Blogs to make money online. These plugins are not available from any other online stores.
• Wordpress Link Cloak Plugin – affiliate links earn you money, whereas the same link, left open could also lead you to lose a lot of money. The Link Cloaking Plugin hides the affiliate links & secures your legitimate earnings from affiliate business.
• 2 Profitable Wordpress Plugins for ADPS & Zip Poster – Adps2 & ZipPoster Are 2 Powerful Wp Plugins That Will Automatically Drip Feed Content For Months Or Years To Come. Especially for affiliate & marketing blogs, with these plugins you can Add Affiliate Datafeed Products, Or Load Up 100s Of Articles Instantly.
• WP Affiliate Pro – the Number 1 Plugin for Money Making Wordpress Blogs – this is a plugin that is used by every Wordpress blogger who makes money from their blogs. It helps you instantly identify, manage & track your highest performing Affiliate Links over your entire Wordpress blog automatically. You can thus focus on promoting the links that already sell high & devise your strategy for those links that have the potential to do better.
• Wordpress Affiliate Elite Business Plugin – this plugin is used by all the affiliate marketers and anyone who makes thousands of dollars from product sales, either from Amazon or any other affiliate program. The more you can link products to your affiliate links, the more you earn from your blogs. This business plugin is a Powerful WordPress Plug-in to Convert Any Keyword In Your Blog To An Affiliate Link With Only A Single Mouse Click.
• WP Spinner Plugin – this is a great Wordpress business plugin to help online bloggers eliminate duplicate content from your blogs. Along with this, this plugin also protects your online business blog from Proxy Hijacking. It also Dynamically Rotate Ads, performs A/b Split Testing to find the perfect format & location of ads & adds Affiliate Tools & affiliate-programs to your blogs.

These are some of the treasured resources that are used by all professional bloggers & by business bloggers who make money from blogging. Although many of the business plugins I recommended on this post are for Wordpress, I am sure similar ones will also be available for TypePad or MoveableType blogs as well.

You can download these resources right now & spend some quality time understanding the tutorials. They are made by the Blogging & Online Business Gurus & have helped millions like myself to earn significant money from online blogs.

You can Sign Up for Chitika Ads for Free.

You can read a more detailed review on our success with Chitika here.

There are several advantages of using Chitika over other popular advertisers that could help you make money blogging. Although they provide ads for all categories, we have seen the best results on our blogs on photography, technology, electronic gadgets, fashion & accessories.

Chitika Premium Ads could increase the revenue of any bloggers many folds. Especially if you are writing blogs on products, fashion or accessories, Chitika could increase the money you make online from blog ads.

The key features of Chitika Premium Ads are:

• sign-up is free & suitable for new & experienced bloggers
• ads are targeted to search traffic & are contexual to search keywords making them very relevant to the visitor’s needs
• ads are international but more targeted to US traffic
• ads can be combined with other ads like Google Adsense
• ads are available in both IAB standard formats of leader boards, skyscrapers & wide banners as well in other formats that are designed to be suitable to blog themes
• ads can be customized to match the blogs look & feel
• ads can be collapsed for non US search traffic or other ads could be displayed when Chitika cannot show their ads
• since these are mainly shopping ads CPC rates are very high
• innovative ads like Whitespace ads also available to help you earn money from any space on the visitors’ monitor
• reporting is easy & payments are very prompt

In our performance review of Chitika, we have found that Chitika could increase your earnings from ads multi folds, double or triple is some cases. Since these ads are generated real time based on visitor’s search, the ads are very relevant to what the surfers are looking for.

If you making money online from blogs & websites, you can Sign up for Chitika Premium Ads free & start making money from high paying shopping ads.

You can download the WP Affiliate Elite plugin & stop any leaks in your affiliate business.

The key features of this plugin are:

• quick and easy link building
• includes a affiliate link to all your keywords automatically
• increasing the affiliate link increases the chances of sales
• hides the affiliate link so that you do not lose any commissions
• pre formatted linking style is included
• each link can be tracked individually so that you can analyze which links are converting more
• comes with a 60 day money back guarantee

Most of the top money making bloggers use these professional plugins to run high conversion Wordpress blogs. Normal bloggers who sell affiliate products by creating links manually could never be able to create a top money making blog unless they use professionally created automatic products like the WP Affiliate Elite plugin.

All these systems allow bloggers to simply insert a small code on their blogs, like a Shop Now or Add to Cart buttons, and they can take in credit card transactions for selling from their websites.

Many of these systems also have the ability to redirect the visitors to different sites or pages upon a successful credit card sale or to some different sites or blog pages if the credit card sale failed for some reason.

Bloggers who make money on the internet & use any of these credit card processing systems, either sell their own product or resell some other products, like affiliate products. ejunkie is a great Paypal alternative & also a great alternative for Google Checkout systems.

The most important things to look for when signing up for any of these online credit card processing systems are:

• is the system reputed enough to handle secured information, like you bank details, your login & passwords & your email & personal details
• is there enough information on their website, along with any help desk number to call, if you need any help
• what is the commission structure – do the commission rates & the commission structure work for your type of sales
• is there any annual maintenance fee that is not clearly spelled out
• is the system available 24 hours a day 365 days a week to help you sell day in day out
• is there an affiliate program where they can share their income with bloggers who promote them
• are the reports good enough for your needs
• is there a forum for all the users where you can discuss issues, suggestions & resolutions

While people have used PayPal & Google Checkout for a long time, the one system proferred by bloggers is the ejunkie. This has become extremely popular with bloggers for a few simple reasons:

1. ejunkie systems are as secured as Paypal or Google. This is a great alternative to Paypal & Google Checkout
2. ejunkie has a flat fee structures for bloggers, especially small online sellers, who can keep the transactional costs low
3. ejunkie lets you create your own online shop with your own url
4. ejunkie offers secured downloads that can be used across multiple blogs. This can also be used to sell clickbank products and any other affiliate products
5. ejunkie also allows you to create & run your own affiliate network, setting your own affiliate revenue share
6. ejunkie has a great affiliate program where they share their revenue with bloggers who use ejunkie
7. ejunkie was created with bloggers & affiliate sellers in mind, they offer more facilities for affiliate sales, small internet resellers & for bloggers who simply wish to sell products from their blogs with a simple shopping cart

You can sign up for ejunkie & start selling from your blogs, start your won affiliate networks & allow secured downloads from your blogs.

In very layman’s terms, Web 3.0 cloud computing means that the user does not have to own all the computers & softwares, but can use them from the internet, and pay for them according to the usage.

Much like you pay for your house utilities every month, you will use software as a service & pay when & how you you use them.

Web 3.0 & cloud computing will bring immense value especially to small business & online business operations.

Large corporations like IBM, Google & Microsofts of the world are spending large amount of money in getting ready for cloud computing. The first challenge these companies face is the ability to support the infrastructural needs.

The increased computing power of their servers, the ability of their software to support millions & millions of online transactions, the immense amount of space needed to store the users’ data & the bandwidth required to provide lightening fast responses.

The concepts & some of the systems of Web 3 & cloud computing have been available for a log time. Hotmail for example, is one of the first to offer web-based email. You were no longer required to have emails on your own computer. You can write, send, read & receive emails from anywhere in the world. All the emails & the software remained on the internet!

Google Apps & Zoho are 2 great examples where business software were made available to users from the internet. You no longer need to buy the expensive Microsoft Office Suites. You can access almost any of the software required to create documents, worksheets & presentations from the internet.

Storage systems had been very costly at some time. Now you can buy gigabytes of memory stick at less that 10 dollars! Now internet based storage systems are available for commercial use. Small Business could save a lot of money by using online storage systems.

They offer much more than just storage space – they back-up your data & files, they provide a secured protected system to share your data with other users & they protect your data from virus & malware – many of which are sometimes ignored if you are owning your own hard drives!

Box.net is one great example. It is a complete data & file hosting service at a very cheap price. Your data is completely secured from viruses, unauthorized users & there is no shortage of spaces.

With Web 3.0 cloud computing small businesses will have the option of not owning or maintaining their own software & computer systems. This saves huge amount of money in the form of upfront expenses & long term running costs. That apart, since the software & services are offered as services, you pay only as you use them (Software as a Service or SaaS model).

It would take time for small business owners to switch completely onto the Web 3.0 cloud computing mode of working. However, that is going to be the next big change & makes complete sense to start thinking & planning on a smooth transition.

If you are planning to invest in your computer systems for your small home based business, stop & think if any of them are already available as a service? Many services like Google Apps for example, are offered free of cost. Why not start using them now?

While the big IT companies’ challenge is to create the IT infrastructure & a billing model for the users, the biggest challenge for users is adoption of the new facilities. The earlier you adopt, the more you will save going forward.

The Pro Affiliate Theme combines information, sales deals, promotional items with a personal touch. This is a great theme to use even if you are using the website with contributions from your affiliates.

The author page helps to set up individual identity, while the overall theme also helps creating your MLM business brand. The photoshop logo files are included along with extensive documentation to help you install the theme quickly.

The theme also displays multiple ads, to that in addition to your affiliate sales, you can earn extra money from advertising revenues from multiple ads.

The theme can be further customized to suit your individual needs. The magazine style theme can be set up to focus on any particular category, or a group of them all at once. The built in slideshows & the tickers help to make the best of the spaces & delivers maximum impact.

The slideshows & the tickers are programmed in basic scripts. This means that they will work even if Wordpress upgrades. Unlike many plugins that have problems with upgrades, this one will perform great with all newer Wordpress versions.

More & more competent individuals looking at the internet to earn extra money & some generating significant money from the internet.

Although the slow economy could slow their plans, there are some areas where you can focus on right now. These can help you make good money even in tough times & do even better when the economy improves.

1. Re look into your website design & see if you can make any improvements. While you do that, also check if your website has all the Web 2.0 tools. A few of them are the social networking options, polling options & the ability to ping. If you are using Wordpress, we have a lot of essential Wordpress codes to help you get more traffic. Twitter tools are also very important to your blogs.

2. Look into your web hosting services. We have a list of the best performing & cost effective web hosting services. Very recently we saved almost $ 500 a year by consolidating our websites. You may also like to stop all the non-performing websites. That would also save you money, time & frustration.

3. In the same lines, take a close look at your CPC CPA & CPM advertisers. Many advertisers are finding it hard to provide good ads. Google too is suffering in the slow economy – not only has the contextual ad quality gone down, but the PPC rates are very low. You may also start signing up for Shopping Ads. Data shows that the slow economy has made more people look for online deals & shop online – saving fuel, time & getting the best deals.

4. Submit your websites regularly to search engines. Remember to submit not just to Google but submit to all popular search engines as well. In the long run your online success would depend not only on Google but also on Ask.com, MSN.com, yahoo.com & some of the European & Asian search engines as well. It is a bad idea to ignore them now.

5. Compile your website & blog visitor statistics. Look into the posts & articles that are popular. Research those topics more & post updates again. While you are researching website statistics, look at all the different countries your visitors are coming from. In case these countries do not have the same language as your website, you may want to have a translation plugin.

6. Write paid freelance articles. Numerous websites hire freelancers for professional articles. Start your work-at-home career for $7.00. Get direct access to thousands of freelance and home-based jobs. Click here to find work now. This gives you the flexibility to control your own income & balance between all your businesses. Many also let you post your own link, allowing you to build your website’s incoming links.

7. Write reviews of products & review websites & get paid for writing. You can Sign up for free with Blog Reviews set your own review price & then bid on open review opportunities. Advertisers pay from as low as $ 10 for a review to as high as $ 500 for the reputed authors & blogs.

Another option is to get your post sponsored. Internet businesses buy posts from bloggers. This helps them in their marketing & also helps them increase their page rank.

8. Build your followers on social networks. Twitter, LinkedIn & FaceBook are excellent places to start building your online communities. Socialize with the intent of socializing & not with the intent of getting more visitors. If your followers like you & see your contributions valuable, they will usually stay with you. Otherwise you are just spamming the system!

9.  Invite your readers & people from your community to write on your blog. Guest posts, though not as popular, also helps in link building. You can also offer money to review your website or blogs. They build great inbound links & over time proves to be an inexpensive way to build link popularity.

10. The biggest effect of a tough economy is people’s unwillingness to spend money. This is a great opportunity for you to offer things at a discount, or more appropriately free. Free always does not been bad quality.

You should give things for free that your readers would otherwise love to pay money & buy. If you offer something useless for free, no one would anyway buy it. Worse, it would spoil your brand reputation. I think it is also a good choice to mention why you are giving something for free.

Many bloggers & online business owners request an email subscription to their newsletters in return for some free download. This is a great way to generate new subscribers. You should also be aware that just because someone is signing up does not mean that you get a proper subscriber. Many use bogus email accounts to sign up! But then again, I always hope that people respect business model & do not commit that nuisance.

Although various MLM business have their own rules, the most that I have come across, is a simple landing page with a Pitch at the beginning, ending in an effort to sell.

I have not seen many MLM business owners even trying to show Google PPC ads to supplement their MLM income. There could be various reasons for that, including the MLM rules & regulations, as well as restrictions by many advertisers to show their ads on MLM sales pages.

Let us look at some of the popular internet PPC advertising companies & see what their policies are towards MLM sites.

Google: The Google Adsense Policies do not restrict any publisher from showing Google PPC or Google Image ads on MLM websites. However, Google mentions that ads from other companies – be it MLM company or any other source, should not be displayed in a way to confuse the reader that such ads are also from Google.

Although ability to combine Google ads with others could result in better earnings from ads for sure, Google policy does not talk specifically about CPM betting on Adsense ads. However, Google does say that the ads cannot appear on a pop up window but should always be on the main page.

Most of the ad servers do allow for Google Adsense to compete for CPM. Ad brite for example. It is one of the best ad servers for new bloggers & allows you to bid Google Adsense with other competing ads.

Google ads can be placed on any website as long as the site runs on the given Google Adsense rules of advertising. You can show MLM ads or other CPC, CPM & CPA ads along with Google Ads on your MLM & business websites.

We have spent hours in understanding the needs of online business owners, MLM marketers & small web store retailers. And we have added a Demo site for all users to try out the themes before they download!

Many of our friends, associates & our Tweeters have responded with so much of enthusiasm on our new releases. We hope our Business Themes make their internet business successful!

Here is a quick recap of the themes released so far.

1. Affiliate Ad Theme – a great Wordpress Theme for internet affiliates who wish to sell on the internet & earn extra money by showing ads. This is a widgetized multi ad theme created specially for affiliate business owners.

2. Wordpress Shopping Theme – a great Wordpress Theme for small shoppers & especially a great theme for online amazon & ebay retailers. This professionally designed theme packs functionalities that will help small online business owners sell more & promote more products & services online.

3. Wordpress MLM Theme – this is a unique theme designed for MLM business owners & online business professionals. The Wordpress MLM Theme is created with the MLM business owners in mind. The design addresses some of the key success crtieria of the internet based MLM business & tends to help affiliates promote services & action based ads.

The MLM Theme is jam packed with features – custome searches with custom sponsored links, widgetized footers to add more content, built-in top digg posts to increase search engine effectiveness, ads placements in line with the content, re-defined index page to show mutiple channels or posts are a few.

4. Wordpress Modern Ads Theme – this is a multiple ads theme with some great features. One of the best is the built in slide show. The design is simple & the features are built on basic programming tools, which makes it robust. The slide shows are completely customizable & can include several distinct galleries.

The Wordpress Modern Ads Theme is available in 2 popular color choices – Aqua & Monochrome.

5. Wordpress Bold Ads Theme – this theme is already becoming very popular. The Theme allows users to show multiple ads, yet the layout is designed in a way not to distract the readers. This theme is great on social networking too. The Wordpress Bold Ads Theme is highly optimized for search engines & you can see the effect on your visitor counts within weeks of implementation.

6. Blue Ads Theme – this is a simplisctic Wordpress Theme for multiple ads. The 3 column design allows the users to show high paying CPC CPM & CPA ads on their sites. This is a core theme – meaning that it can be customized very easily to include ads either in widgets or in the text areas.

7. Red Ads Theme – this is another very light theme designed in 3 columns. The theme is widgetized & allows the user to show multiple ads on there themes. Apparently this is one of the simplest themes we have designed. But we feel that this is a great theme especially for new bloggers.

It is important for new bloggers to experiment with ad placements, ad sizes & formats. The Red Ads Theme offers the flexibility to the new bloggers to try our various combinations of ads & evaluate what works for them.

In summary, we have published 7 great themes in less than 8 weeks! We are delighted. And we have received some great feedback & emails too on some of the tests we ran. We did an extensive Beta testing for the MLM Theme & we have included some of the feedbacks from the MLM professionals.

What’s coming up?

We are working on 2 new themes, again! The first one is a Pro Affiliate Theme, for those bloggers who have some experience in online MLM & Affiliate business sales. It is going to be a combination of a typical web store type of blog & a content driven web page. We hope to release the Pro Affiliate Theme later in Jan 2009.

The other one is a Personal Blog Theme. The intent is to create a theme that professionals could use along with their business blogs. However, all the ones we tested, seemed to scream for attention! So we went ahead, did some market study on what the professionals really wanted on their personal blog & the result is “Signature“.

We hope to release signature by Jan 21, 2009. The Personal Wordpress Theme Signature is currently being tested & will be ready for release on Pro Media Blog within a week.

I had earlier announced that the Wordpress Shopping Theme is about to be released. After thorough testing over the last weekend, the Shopping Theme is finally released!

You can read more & see a Demo of Wordpress Shopping Theme.

This Shopping Theme is created for bloggers who also want to display their own products & sell from their blogs. So apart from having all the benefits of a Web 2.0 technology, this Shopping Theme also packs in some key selling tricks:

• built in product showcase to show as many products as you wish – the product blog slideshow is custom built and with minor configuration, you can show case your best products in a professional way
• the Shopping Blog Theme allows you to display product specific discounts & promotions. This is available on the post pages where the discounts can be shown. At the same time, this feature can be easily used to run general campaigns across your blog
• display 6 top categories of your wish & display recent posts from these categories
• display an infinite number of text ads! This is the most valuable feature where text ads can be rotated in 3 different locations in the header. The ads holders are designed in a way that they form an integral part of the shopping blog theme

• there are place holders for other high paying ad formats like the 300px x 250px or the leader board formats
• social networking bookmarks are built into the theme
• brand your own business with your logo & message

These are only some of the features of the professionally designed Wordpress Shopping blog Theme. It is completely modular in nature – meaning that you can customize this theme very easily.

The Wordpress Shopping Theme is a 3 column theme & is fairly optimized for search engines. We also encourage you to use the other essential plugins & popular plugins that could help more.

So download the Online Web Shopping Theme & convert your blog into an online webstore in minutes!

The theme is on a minimalistic design but includes all the key features that would help MLM & affiliate sales business, sell more & sell more effectively.

While networking, social bookmarking are also the other important aspects of a successful internet business, videos & slide shows also add to the effectiveness of adding convincing evidence of success.

The ideas, features & the design of this Wordpress Modern Ads Theme have all come in from successful internet business professionals. They all started small & gathered success with various trial & error tactics.

The Wordpress Modern Ads Theme includes several of their important learning that made them successful.

This Wordpress Modern Ads Theme solves 2 key MLM & Affiliate business issues.

For one, the problem of networking easily on the internet. The web holds the greatest possibility of networking with people who are interested in your business. It also has millions of potential buys & millions of potential members for your MLM business.

The social networking ability of the Wordpress Modern Ads Theme solves the problem of people finding you, following you on popular social networks like Twitter & Facebook. The author page with the credentials are important to building relations on the internet.

Secondly, this Wordpress Modern Ads Theme allows you to professionally showcase your most successful products, services as well as display events, success stories & messages with a professional Wordpress slide show. A very generic slide show is built into the theme that can be very easily customized to your needs.

Being generic, the slide show is not quite dependent on what version of Wordpress you use – it will not stop working just because you have upgraded or changed your technology. Moreover, you can group your messages into many different chapters or slideshow galleries so that the visitor can choose what to see.

The important aspects of the design of this Wordpress Modern Ads Theme are:

• minimalistic but professional design makes it very light weight so that it can load very fast
• 3 column widgetized design that can hold most high paying ad formats to make money from popular ads
• index page has 2 columns for content – they can show specific categories or a combination of categories, depending on your need
• includes a slideshow that can be completely customized to suite your needs. The slideshows can be grouped in several galleries or just one & each of the slides can be linked to specific pages
• the Smoothgallery slideshow is generic code using open source software MooTools & created by Jonathan Schemoul & is completely customizable. It does not depend on the versions of wordpress. Moreover, the Modern Ads Theme is designed in such a way that you can include the slideshow on any page you want
• if you later decide to implement another theme, you can copy & paste the slideshow code quickly & easily
• the theme has options to show multiple ads in key locations without distracting the readers from your key content. You may opt not to show ads in any of these locations at all
• ability to brand your business with logos on the header & the footer as well as pictures on author pages
• author page for all registered authors showing key details like author descriptions, websites & pictures
• well optimized for search engines but you can also use other essential plugins

This Wordpress Modern Ads Theme for MLM & Affiliate business to show multiple ads & key promotions is tested on Internet Explorer 7+, Mozilla Firefox 3+, Flock 2+ & Safari. The slideshow too has been tested on Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 & Safari. The credits for the slideshow goes entirely to Jonathan.

If you require any additional customizations or have any suggestions to improve this theme, please leave a comment or email back. We have released the Wordpress Modern Ads Theme with different theme color options – Aqua & Monochrome.

The Wordpress Affiliate Ads Theme includes the feedback & suggestions from a large number of internet MLM Business & Affiliate Business owners.

Many of them are very experienced & know all the tips & tricks that work successfully on the internet.

The Wordpress Affiliate Ads Theme has included the most valuable recommendations from the successful internet business owners. The Theme is designed to promote products that are hot selling, products & services that are high revenue earners.

The most important highlights of the Wordpress Affiliate Ads Theme are:

• professionally design & created with the intent of increasing internet Affiliate sales & MLM business
• 3 column theme with widgetized sidebars & widgetized footers
• built in author page with author image, website & contact information to help branding
• multiple ways to show high paying ads to increase ad revenue

• ability to show sponsored links in search reducing dependency on Google search
• ability to show high paying affiliate products & services within post
• video ready widgets to show multimedia productions like trainings, product demos etc
• networking ability with large buttons for social network bookmarking

The Wordpress Affiliate Ads Theme is highly optimized for search engines. But we also recommend using other essential plugins & popular wordpress plugins to increase search visibility.

When you pay out to ad agencies to display your website ad on relevant searches, for example, you expect people who are interested in what you are selling to come to your website by clicking on the ad.

These are supposed to be the visitors who are seriously looking for your content & could be a potential customer. You pay money for every such click on your ads.

Click Fraud could become a nightmare especially when the frauds are working in large networks who click on each other’s ads. This article looks at click fraud as an organized crime that is getting very difficult & expensive to prevent.

Smaller businesses & individuals who have a limited advertising budget could be badly hit by click frauds. There are ways in which you can identify & prevent some of these click frauds, although there is a possibility that the larger part will go unnoticed.

The key findings from the latest Click Forensic report are:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.0 percent for Q3 2008. That’s down slightly from the 16.2 percent rate reported for both Q2 2008 and Q3 2007.

• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 27.1 percent. That’s down from the 27.6 percent rate reported for Q2 2008 and the 28.1 percent average click fraud rate reported for Q3 2007.

• Traffic from botnets was responsible for 27.6 percent of all click fraud traffic in Q3 2008. That’s up from 25.2 percent for Q2 2008.

• In Q3 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from Russia (4.9 percent), France (4.8 percent) and the U.K. (3.5 percent).

And in a matter of 2 years after, there are over a million people using Web 2 technology to sell on the internet.

TechCrunch reported impressive Wordpress growth in 2008 – Two million new blogs created for the year & 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million in 2007).

Technology could be a major deal maker for all businesses, including small business & home professionals. It is time for individuals to take a look at what Web 3.0 is bringing to the table. It is important that you know how technology is changing  & what is available to you that could radically change your business.

Whether you decide to implement any of them, or decide not to, is a matter of choice. But as a small business owner, you cannot afford not to know the changes that are about to happen. And most of them will be free software, if not, they will be no doubt cheap. So it could be rather easy to afford many of the newer technologies.

The major change that we expect in Web 3.0 is the seamless integration of all applications – from software programs, to databases to presentations. That is easier said than done, but when in place, there will be enormous possibilities of peer-to-peer business operations. There is also a good amount of information on Web 3.0 on Wikipedia.

Google & a few of the advanced advertising companies are already working very hard to understand micro-conversations. It is like figuring out what 2 people are talking on Twitter, or the meaning of the Status on a Facebook profile!

Facebook, for example, have been trying to show ads on profiles that are contextual to the messages displayed on them. They have not been very successful yet, but soon ad researchers will find out how to put the right advertisement by reading these small messages.

From the perspective of a small business or a home business professional, I would keep an eye on a few of the ongoing & upcoming developments on Web 3.0:

• more use collaborative systems – it could be as simple as using Safe Online File Sharing & Storage services
• virtualization tools – these systems increased both productivity & save thousands of dollars in expenses. A great example is Virtual Phone & Fax, that includes 300 FREE Fax Pages per month
• peer-to-peer communications & networking – this is one technical area that will explode with possibilities. With all the major computer companies, from Yahoo! to Google, encouraging freelancers from around the globe, there will be numerous applications that will help business professionals connect with peers & customers very fast. This will also lead way to larger trading business – that is also known as “sell through” or “affiliate” business
• mobile applications – iPhone, Google Android & Blackberry led the way to create a mobile environment for business. Google realized the potential of the market within mobile phone users & have been going strong with their mobile ads. Your webstore has got to be accessible on mobile devices & customers or affiliates should be able to pass on a sale from any mobile communicator
• professional web stores – web stores that allow fast creation & sale within a secured system that lets the customer shop in peace. Advanced internet stores will let businesses Reach new customers, grow online sales, and accelerate business growth.
• effective use of multi-media – Web 3.0 will integrate all forms of communication making it easier to combine audio, video & text in a more meaningful way. This means that you cannot depend only on a text-based blog to make it big. Videos & on-demand multimedia presentations will be used widely to impress the customers.

Not everything will be rosy though. While most people will find good use of the technical progress, a successful business professional will also have to protect his interests in the virtual world. Identity theft, website hacking, credit card frauds, advertising click frauds will also increase.

As a small business house you would have a limited amount of time & money to invest in protecting your business interests against these future threats. There are ways in which you can prevent these online frauds from reaching you or your customers.

• use cost effective professional online store fronts like that from ProStores (an eBay Company) These companies protect their customers, like you & a thousand other small business professionals, from online frauds
• use online theft protection like credit checks – Life Lock is the only Identity Theft Prevention Solution backed by a one-million dollar guarantee!
• if you are hosting your own website or blog, do so with an established web hosting provider. I have listed out the best & the most affordable web hosting providers. They are committed to keeping your online business up, running & protected from internet hackers, viruses & malware.

Her blog did not show up on compete for any measurable traffic yet, but hopefully when Bonnie puts all the $400 miracles to work, the blog might show up!

You can Snoop on the competition with Compete Pro. It gives you all the necessary information on internet traffic to make your own strategies. But if you spend as much time understanding what people are saying to build traffic as I do, you will see these e-books sell for $50 at almost every SEO website!

I happened to talk to a few of the SEO experts who are professionally employed by Fortune 50 companies & their remark was very candid – “If it does not work, blame it on the content! E-books have a disclaimer on what you write!” That’s easy!

And think of it, with hundreds of millions of websites, getting a consistent traffic of 50,000 a month could be good enough for anyone to earn $70,000 a year. But most of the bloggers get stuck at the dreadful 4000 hits-a-month number! It has more to do with just the content.

Spending a large sum of money every month on Google Adwords or any other advertising company is not really an option when new bloggers are not really selling anything. All they put up is content for sale. How much of traffic do you really think that a search engine could drive on that?

When I began, I was struggling to cross the ominous 4,000 hits-a-month number. I experimented with content, layout (or Themes), ad positioning, advertisement optimization & even networking. You will find all that information on this blog.You could also subscribe by email or follow me on Twitter.

Fortunately, I hit on the things that work pretty quick. Well, many of the standard things that I kept reading on the internet from the so called “experts” did not work – mainly because one was not different from the rest!

The reason why I was able to cross that hit barrier was I decided to opt for one of the two options to begin with:

• should I earn the most I could from whatever hits I have, or
• should I try to get more hits & expect my earning to go up?

There is a subtle difference. Once I got more experienced, I implemented a combination of revenue optimization & high hit counts.

It is true that if your search engine traffic goes up, your earning from ads & even affiliates will increase. But when you are beginning, focus on what is in your control – optimize your earnings from what hits you have.It is easy & fast to implement.

As a long term strategy, continue to create your content so that eventually it will start bringing in search engine visitors. But while you do, do not lose out on all the money that your blog can bring in today!

People show ads on their blogs, Google Adsense, or choose from a large number of advertising network.

The most common advertisers are the CPC advertisers & the Shopping Ads.

Many of the “leisure bloggers” who write for fun struggle to earn $100 a month from advertising. However, people who seriously write for money, make 6 figure income in this internet business model. How much you could make would depend on what you want to achieve by writing on blogs.

There is not much difference between writing in a blog and publishing on a standard website, expect that you could port your blog’s content easily to different places. This allows others people to find you easily.

New bloggers often struggle with the dilemma of choosing between advertising earning & affiliate marketing. I struggled with the same issue for months. Now, less than 10% of my income comes from advertising. But as a new blogger, advertising was close to 95% of my monthly internet income.

In the first couple of months I was earning about $100 from advertising, but my income grew very rapidly when I started affiliate marketing. And within months my income from the internet was close to $1000 a month. Not bad, considering I was writing for about 2 hours a day & that I could still work on my full time job.

It is perfectly all right if you have decided to make money just from advertising. You can still make thousands of dollars provided you have a large number of visitors coming to your website every month.

However, if your business model is affiliate marketing, it will take you a little longer to start making serious money, but when you do, it will be much more than what you could make from advertising. There are certain subtle differences in approach to affiliate marketing.

Especially when anyone & everyone can be an affiliate. Especially when you may not have anything more to offer to your readers & customers from the next affiliate.

I am a self made internet affiliate marketer. I have made several mistakes & learned from them. I also learned a lot by experimenting & reading a lot of books.

A successful affiliate marketing blog has to be compelling in many ways:

• extremely professional look & feel – that is, the theme should be designed to impress. We publish a lot of great free Wordpress themes for advertising blogs
• you need to have a networking strategy – not everyone in a network could be an ally in affiliate marketing. Many affiliates follow other competitor affiliates on twitter or through email subscriptions to be aware of what competition is offering
• your content has to be compelling enough for users to buy off your website. The “call to action” in your posts & pages have to be strong & effective
• your content has to be complete in all matters of the product or service you are marketing. If your information is incomplete, readers will simply move away to other places that provide more detailed information
• think for the buyer & write for the buyer – it is easy to copy the affiliate promotional material onto your blog. That is what most bloggers do & they all appear the same to the readers. If you are not different, do not expect to earn any more than the millions of other copy cats
• since affiliate sales include monetary transactions, providing a contact email or telephone number adds to the confidence of the buyer. However you have to respond to email & messages in time too. If you cannot help in any particular situation guide them to the right person. This is where many of the casual affiliate marketers lose out – they are just not serious enough
• read, read, read & read – read as many books as possible on internet marketing, read books written by successful internet affiliate marketers & read all about technology to make it work right for you
• subscribe to Pro Media Blog – we have gone through the entire process of setting up, establishing & publishing successful  affiliate marketing blogs & we know that even when a million people would read this, only few will put this to use. You could be one of the few.

Write to us or leave a comment if you find this useful or you have a question.

MLM business model has changed over the years, and so has ways to make money in MLM business.

Merely making a list of all your friends & family who you could pitch, consuming products yourself, making phone calls to prospective downline members or even attending the MLM meetings may not bring you any money at all.

The few of my friends who started MLM all followed the traditional ways their business owners had preached. Some even spend hours in shopping malls in the hope of finding someone who they could entice. If they had put the same amount of effort in Affiliate marketing, they could have been more successful.

Affiliate marketing is nothing more than MLM without the uplines & downlines. In affiliate marketing you put in all your efforts to grow your own business. And you keep all the money. You dont waste time prospecting downlines in the hope that someday they will work so hard that you will have millions of dollars in residual income!

Affiliate marketing is nothing but MLM with all its money making benefits and without the pains of traditional MLM networking.

Shopping Affiliates are the most successful. I have listed some of the most successful shopping ad networks that are far better than MLM. They tie up with leading brands, run complex software systems to provide you with all the facilities required to start your affiliate marketing business. And most of them are free to join.

You can use the affiliate networks to sell on the internet or, if you prefer traditional sales methods, you could do that too. There are no limitations to how you can sell your affiliate products or services.

Many affiliate networks also run free trainings for affiliates. They provide free promotional materials & provide assistance that many MLM networks can’t even think of. Two of my affiliate companies even promoted my websites at their cost to help me get started!

I keep adding to the list of affiliate networks that I have benefited from. Their processes & payment methods are very transparent & they have always paid on time. Most of them will even have a dedicated Affiliate Manager who will assist you anytime you need help.

This is not to say that the usual MLM companies like Amway or Avon will not make you successful. It may require a much longer time (often upto seven or eight years if you are lucky) and surely more effort on your part compared to an internet affiliate marketing business.

In Pro Media Blog I have shared tools, tips & businesses that I have been very successful with. When I started, I was working on my internet ventures about 5 hours a day. Over time, I have constantly lesser and lesser time without compromising on my incomes.

One of the best is Matt Mullenweg. Matt is synonymous to blogging & is the founder developer of WordPress.

But that is just one of his creation. He went on to create / acquire a lot more than that: BBPress, Intense Debate & Poll Daddy are just a few of them.

Matt has also published one of the Best Bloggin Books with Wordpress – WordPress Blogging for Dummies. With this book, you’ll soon be navigating WordPress templates plugins, and themes with no problem.

Matt teaches you the basics of Wordpress blogging:

• Personalize WordPress settings
• Understand common template tags
• Manage and moderate comments
• Deal with spam and trackback
• Troubleshoot common problems

Another great blogger, who makes a Six Figure Income from blogging is Darrn Rowse. He created ProBlogger which is now one of the most popular blogs in the community. His best blogging book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income is entirely based on his experience on successful blogging.

Darren Rowse & his ProBlogger is where bloggers worldwide go for advice and information on enhancing their blogs presence. Whether youre just starting out or have been blogging for years, these two professional bloggers show you how to turn your passion for blogging into extra revenue.

This practical guide to creating and marketing a blog with the potential for generating a six-figure income shows you how to choose subject matter that works for you, handle technical issues, and evaluate your blogs success so that you can use your blog to generate income indirectly.

The third book, Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business is written by DL Byron & Steve Broback.

DL Byron has just completed the development of Boeing’s blogs. He is currently working on the next Blog Business Summit and rolling out a network of sponsored blogs.

Steve Broback is the co-founder of the Blog Business Summit and the i3forum conferences. Steve manages the editorial blogs rawformat.com and pixelupdate.com which are the center of Avondale’s marketing strategy.

Written from the business person/designer’s perspectives, this book shows how businesses can leverage current, real-world blogging techniques, tools, and platforms to promote and enhance their ventures. The key idea is that the conversation with your market is stronger and more meaningful with a blog.

Filled with practical information and a how-to approach, this book provides case studies of companies as large as Boeing or General Motors and as small as Clip-’n-seal. Readers will learn about the types of business blogs, how companies use blogs, how to sell blogs to management and IT, effective blog design, content, and conversation, pitfalls to avoid, how to develop Web presence, and more.

The fourth must-read book on blogging is Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers. Its a detailed personal account of some of the most successful bloggers who made it big. It talks about how they did it & how they became the best bloggers.

Some also share their personal tips & suggestions on how to sharpen blogging skills, on social networking aspect of blogging & how to keep improving on your blogging techniques.

The fifth most popular book amongst bloggers who are serious about blogging & want to make it big from start, is Blogging for Business: Everything You Need to Know and Why You Should Care. Written in a simple way by Shel Holtz & Ted Demopoulos, this book focuses on some key aspects of business blogging.

In Blogging for Business, authors Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos tell you exactly how and why more companies are incorporating blogs into their business strategies.

This smart new guide helps you engage in the global conversation by creating and maintaining blogs to generate heightened awareness and greater customer mind share.

Some form of these free advertising that I will discuss here help you grow your credibility over the long term, while some can bring attention & focus right away.

Though these free advertising are available to all, many new bloggers either have not used them effectively, while some haven’t believed that they work at all.

Either way, many have lost the opportunity to make the best of these tools.

On the other hand, many bloggers & new internet marketers have used these simple tools very innovatively. They stand out different from the others & get more attention from the visitors.

• Place your ad on thousands of sites with BidVertiser. Get $20 in FREE clicks. – Sign up for free & they will give you $ 20 work of advertising free. You can promote your blog free, on thousands of websites, like any other paid advertisement.
• Create a Free Business Page on your Facebook Profile. Keep the Business page on Facebook professional with important information like contact, products & services clearly mentioned.
• Free Business Cards – even though they are free business cards, the quality is high. Business cards are one of the best ways to promote your business. Attach your business cards to gifts, presentations & mailers to your customers.
• Make the best use of the popular Social Networking websites. Keep profiles updated on Facebook, LinkedIn & any of the other Social websites that you sign up for. Respond to any queries that other interested parties leave on your business profile.
• Use Free Tools like Twitter & FriendFeed to share your blog updates with everyone. Twitter, for example, helps you create followers who are interested in your blogs. Mention your Blogs name in all the posts – repeatability often helps people to remember the blog easily.
• Use RSS reader apps on any of the social networks. Facebook for example, has its own RSS reader application. Add your blog feeds to your profile so that everyone in your friends list know what you are publishing.
• Participate in Readers Forums. There are plenty of discussion groups where you can get serious attention from people interested in you business. A great example is photo.net. This excellent photo sharing website has helped numerous serious photographers get assignments & work from other members in the forum. However, you have to seen as a member who is constantly adding a lot of value to the group.
• Start a Free Group on Yahoo or Facebook with people who could be interested in your line of blogs. This also invites competition. But this is a great option for those bloggers who have that extra charisma of motivating groups. You can also use the group emails to correspond with other members about the business.
• Sign up with Adbrite Advertising & join their Spotts Program. This is a free advertising programs where one member’s website is promoted on another within the network free of cost.
• If you are showing advertisements on your website, there is a possibility that not all the times an ad will be displayed. Create a backup ad for your own website. So when your advertiser has no ad to show on your website, you can show your own website blog banner.

Though any of these free advertising will attract visitors, you have to offer genuinely good content to your readers to have them coming back. You cannot ignore the power of great content & think of making money just by selling ads.

Although these are free, the quality is extremely good & all of these are very essential for your home office & small business. Many people often spend hundreds of dollars to buy them.

You could explore these free essential tools for your home business & try many of them for free for life. They would save you upfront buying cost & since most of them provide highly discounted products to their customers throughout the year, you will keep saving.

Here is a small list of the Top 5 Essential Tools Services & Office Gadgets:

• Internet Fax – Free Trial plus 10% Off . RingCentral delivers all the power of a “big company” phone system but with no hardware to buy and nothing to maintain. It’s an ideal telecommunications solution for small businesses, home offices, and mobile professionals. Internet Fax provides easy, secure, affordable, and convenient internet fax service for small businesses and mobile professionals.

• Email & Contact Manager with iContact. It is perfect for managing small business email marketing with email lists, you can use tons of our features with your free trial. Get your free trial now! It is that Email Marketing Service That Allows You To Easily Track Sends, Opens, Clicks, and all that is required to sell more.

• Free Promotional Office Stationery like Calendars & cards. You get all the essential office stationery – FREE Calendar. Wall, desk or a magnet calendar available FREE at VistaPrint! You also get professional business cards for free & seasonal gifts are always available at highly discounted prices.

• Free Online Web Stores for professional selling. Ebay gives 1 month Free offer to set up an online store for your small business. You will have Your Own Web Store at Your Own Web Address in this Free Trial offer from ProStores – an eBay company.

• Free Trial of Small Business Project Management Software. This industry leading PM Software helps you track all your projects, costs & schedules. Get more visibility into your business with Daptiv PPM. This Home Office PM Software also fits in well with all the collaborative tasks for your small business. Using Daptive collaboratively with your small business partners gives high productivity gains to your new business.

Let me explain why is makes more sense to start off with an online store from ebay rather than investing money in setting up your own online shop.

• First, it costs to create a professional webstore. Take a look at online stores that make a lot of money – the design, the pricing the shopping cart all costs money to design. A professionally designed small business online store could cost anything between US$ 100,000 to over US$150,000.

• Second, it costs money to host the online webstore. A professional host could cost anything from US$100 to over US$250 a month for small business. The host has to be reliable in their infrastructure, with low or no downtime.

• Third, it costs to maintain the web store. This includes regular upgrades to the software programs, regular updates to anti-virus software & upgrades of the software programs that run your online stores like shopping carts.

• Fourth, it costs to make a credit card payment. ProStores has everything you need to start selling online Today – shopping cart, domain hosting, merchandising & reporting. Professional web stores also converts currency to your domestic currency. This is very important to sell all over the globe.

For a limited time, ebay is offering One Month Free Trial for ProStores – an eBay Company. The free offer includes your own online store at your own domain, professional shopping carts & design.

Since bloggers & small business professionals run more than one blog or website, or even collaborate with other websites to promote their business, setting up an ideal technology infrastructure is important.

You plan your office in a way that you can easily expand as you open up new websites. But if you plan only for one blog or website, over a period of time you would have spend more money in expanding your business.

One of the key success factor for a small home business is to keep cost under control. This means that your investments could be directed towards direct growth of small business sales rather than technology that enables them. With that factor in mind, let us look at the cost effective technologies for small business owners.

1. upload large files, photos & videos onto a collaborative system. Use Box.net for Safe Online File Sharing & Storage. You can access your files from anywhere in the world. If you have multiple websites where you want to show your product images, or do a product demonstration with a video, using an Online file storage from Box.net to upload, share, and access your files anywhere is very cost effective
2. if you are using pictures & videos directly on your website, use the ALT & DESC tags correctly. Search engines cannot understand pictures or videos. Instead Search Engines read these ALT & DESC tags instead. Using IMG tags effectively help your websites & blogs to show up in search results even when people are searching for pictures or videos
3. if you have a large quantity of videos, use custom channels on YouTube. Describe your videos with keywords. YouTube videos are searched millions of times a day. Having your video on YouTube would help your website being found whenever people are searching for similar videos on these video sharing websites
4. if you have a large number of pictures for your products or services, a professional photo sharing system is a huge productivity gain. Unlimited photo storage and sharing services from SmugMug is a great option. Professional designers use it to store, share, download images across multiple customers
5. submit your images to Image Search Engines like Google for Images or MSN for Images. Having your pictures tagged with key words & key phrases will make it easy for search engines to find your website easily
6. post sample pictures & sample videos on other websites. Link your posts, with key words that describe your business, to your websites. Your posts in other website or blogs should add some value to them as well. Otherwise, you could be de-linked as spam

Create custom web-based surveys and get rapid results! Sign up for Zoomerang today!

For a limited time there is a free trial offer to set up Online Survey Forms on your small business websites.

Professional Online surveys go hand in hand with your small business strategy of promoting your home business through emails. Surveys could be done either by setting up an online custom form, or even by attaching survey & feedback requests to your email readers.

Online Polls are a good option to getting customer feedback. But the information secured through pools is very limited. This makes online survey forms very valuable. They are structured towards specific objectives.

For example, you could drive a campaign for your small home business seeking feedback on some of the products or services that you have offered. In a case like that, your professional online & email survey would find out who uses them, what are the features that are most used, what features are rarely used.

In case you are running an investigative survey for new products, your small business online & email survey would try to find more about competition. Whichever way you want to benefit from these campaigns, professional surveys could help drive more business.

A very popular story in the technology industry is that of Palm PDAs. The CEO keeps measuring how many clicks it took to access any application on the Palm PDAs. This led to an efficient design of the smart phones. Today, Palm still remains the PDA designed with the highest efficiency in mind.

It is essential that you make the best of your customers attention. So professional surveys, like that you can create when you sign up with Zoomerang gives you the best results. It runs the full circle – Create Surveys, Invite Participants & you can also Analyze Results.

An online identity is essential to maintain & updated. Facebook is very popular both as a social network as well as a networking site for small business . And so is MySpace if you are an artist selling your audio video tracks online .

However, since the social networking sites are over crowded, new bloggers can find it very difficult to create a momentum with his or her blogs.

In this article I shall share how I started off building my own online friends & how you could start converting social network contacts into readers & possibly customers .

These 3 tools described below have worked for me & many other new bloggers & home professionals who wanted to benefit from having online friends & communities.

• start off with locating your friends from school & college. Reconnect with classmates again . I have connected with more trusted friends from schools & colleges in this way. They have not only helped me expand my network but have also become my dedicated readers
• use People Search to locate people you know from work or from the neighborhood. These sites have millions of registered users & provide accurate information on postal address & emails that you can use to reconnect
• use People Finders to reconnect with people you have associated with either at work or on social occasions. These websites verify their information & could provide you with very accurate demographic information too

Social networking websites lose traction after a while. You may add hundreds or even thousands of "friends" on your Facebook or Myspace, but if they cannot relate to you, they may not be interested in your activities as well. This is dormant relationships – good to show off but of no real use in business.

LinkedIn began as a networking solutions for professionals & has been used to build customers, reconnect with costomers & even make cold calls for sales. But this one too suffers from the problems of adaptibility. And it could change its business model to put restrictions on users from generating newer business connections.

Constant Contact is a great option to start off with professional newsletters & email contact management .

Another great affordable option is an Email Marketing Service That Allows You To Easily Track Sends, Opens, Clicks, and More.

However, wherever possible use the free trial periods offered by these services to see how convenient they are for your business.

Having a strong email strategy for your small business has multiple benefits:

• you still get to reach your readers & customers on your schedule
• you can keep the conversation going with your customers even though there is no immediate sale
• you can seek valuable feedback from your users & customers
• you can seek statistical information in the form of polls from your readers
• you can sell non-competing products to your email readers

One of the mistakes that I commonly see that small business & home professionals make is choosing a product just because it is free & not based on its merits. Off course the price is important, but managing your email poorly weighs much more in the long run.

One of the biggest threshold problem to any small business email marketing is getting readers. You will see the phrase "Double Opt In" being used very frequently. By law, emails have to be subscribed to consciously & then there has to be a second confirmation from the user to start accepting your emails. Above that, every legitimate email should have the option of opting-out of your email list.

Take a moment to look at your own email box – you probably receive over 100 promotional emails daily – and many of them trying to sell you the same product. The only way in which you can make your emails being read & acted upon is to make it useful for the reader. Knowing your users will help you group them into possible categories to target specific groups for promotions .

I find it ridiculous when I get promotional newsletters from a small software product company trying to sell me timeshare condos! Its a bad mistake & will immediately eliminate you from the readership. It is better not to send an email rather than sending one that is useless to your reader. Again, the reader has to find immediate value in your content .

Professional email systems enable you to slide & dice your data to form better understanding of your customers. They give you as close a view as possible of your readers needs & wants. However, any of these systems will only give you data. Your small business email strategy should be strong & reliable to interpret that data & make meaningful information to further your own business.

For those small business that report slowdown in sales during the holidays, this time could be used effectively to build your small business brand within your local communities .

Here is a list of innovative Top 10 Ways to Promote Small Business During Holiday Seasons :

1. Send greeting cards on new seasons. Mail them to your local business houses & neighborhoods. People love to get greeting cards with a warm message. There are various organizations that offer discounted cards & notes on festive seasons. You can get a lot from Vista Prints & they come with huge discounts especially during the holiday seasons.
2. Again, in Halloween, pass on Candy – treat them instead of tricking the children. Along with the treats for kids, pass on a complimentary Note Card for the parents. Mention your brand & your business & any upcoming events or launches.
3. Tie up with another local brand – a complimentary brand that already has a popular presence in the community, for road shows during the festive seasons. They strengthen your brand from the association with one that is very popular.
4. Help promote a social service by printing Fliers for them. Societies do a lot of charity work during the holiday seasons & makes it easy for a small business to get involved.
5. Holiday seasons are also great for outdoor festivals – like a local food fest, or a community honoring a war veteran or an artist. Help spread the news with Direct mailers invitations.
6. Send "Seasons Greetings" cards to the neighborhood on branded greeting cards with a personal message. Printed promotional Holiday Cards with unique greeting cards using your photos, designs and logos .
7. The Holiday Seasons are a perfect opportunity for small business to send promotional gift items with your logos & your brand message . If you already have your logos & images ready, upload them & create an unique gift for your customers that speak well for your brand.
8. Place a poster in an adoption center – Print Your Photos Extra Large & put up the banner in a pet adoption center or a Goodwill donation center. In most cases, you may have to require the store’s permission to do it. You can also run a campaign to offer a small courtesy gift to anyone who either donates or adopts a pet during these holiday seasons.
9. Help a non-profit organization & spread any valuable community message. Donate to National Geographic by buying their discounted products & giving them out as gifts. One of the most vital messages these days are Conservation of the Green & environmental protection.
10. Spread a strong message with funny lively T-Shirts banners & gifts. Shop or Create What’s On Your Mind at CafePress .

The holiday seasons are one of the best times to spread a brand message. There are numerous businesses that offer discounted shopping for other business houses during the holidays. You can use them effectively to build & revamp your small business awareness & the brand.

Media Cubs has already partnered with promising new bloggers & have launched the site Media Cubs to encourage new bloggers to start earning money.

New bloggers have several options to start a blog. There are free hosts & there are paid hosts. But most of the better known free hosts do not allow bloggers to earn money from ads.

Media Cubs give you a free subdomain, free blog templates & will host your blog for free. They will also sign you up with some of the best paying blog-ad companies.

As a blogger all you need to do is configure your advertisements & display them on your blog. You publish to your heart’s content & let the money roll in. So whats the catch?

While you earn your money from ads or selling your own products on your blogs for free, Media Cubs will also show one ad, usually in the footer. This ad does not interfere with your blog’s theme, content or messages in any way. Media Cubs will earn about 5 – 10 cents a month (if you blog is extremely popular) from your blog.

What are the advantages of a Free Blog with Ads host like Media Cubs? Plenty!

• you don’t pay a dime to host your site
• you don’t sweat to to maintain the infrastructure, upgrades, updates or anything
• you own your own sub-domain; if you already have a registered website you can redirect your domain to your Media Cubs site; you can even cloak your sub-domain URL if you want
• you get Themes that are properly tested & optimized for Search Engines
• you get the essential plugins for free
• you don’t have to think of search engine submissions; Media Cubs submit your blogs to hundreds of search engines
• you can sell your own products, promote your own company as much as you want
• you don’t have any contract with Media Cubs; you can take your content away any time you want
• you can create as many blogs as you want for free

Media Cubs is always looking for new enthusiastic bloggers & they come up with a list of priority subjects. Preference is given to those whose blogging interests match with what Media Cubs is looking for.

However, if there is something you wish to blog in a niche area, send them an email with you ideas. Most of the time they listen!

All new bloggers go through the same stress of finding the right advertisers. I will point you to the right advertisers – advertisers with good click costs CPC & advertising with good impressions costs CPM.

There are more articles on his website that will help you find out themes for effective ad layouts, free wordpress themes for ads & how to choose the best ads for your blog .

Adbrite accepts new blogs to display ads. Adbrite displays both CPC ads to earn from clicks & CPM ads to make money from impressions.

Apart from just ads, Adbrite also displays ads for videos & pictures helping you to earn from all images on your site, as well as any video that you display.

The program is free to join & is extremely suitable for all bloggers who are new to blogging & have just started with earning money from ads.

The other advantage is that there are large number of text formats to fit your themes. The ad formats can be customized in size & number of ads to make it more like an integral part of your blog.

Widget bucks provides both CPM as well as CPC ads together. This is one of the best part of this ad. The sign-up is free & there are always ads for international blog traffic.

You get paid every time your blog loads & every time anyone clicks on the Widget Bucks ads.

One of the highest paying CPC & CPM ad provider for new bloggers as well as the advanced pro bloggers is Chitika. This is one of the best ad providers for new bloggers for 2 reasons.

The CPM ads are extremely high paying – some ads pay over US $2 to US $5 CPM. The ads also has added CPC click rates so you get paid when visitors click on the ads too.

Chitika also has a wide range of ads, from Whitespace ads to fill any space on the monitor, to entire shopping sites for parked domains.

The number of ad formats is the most varied with Chitika so that you can always find one format that matches your website.

Google Adsense is extremely contextual. This means that the ads would be effective if you have sufficient good content on your page. New bloggers should take some time to plan for a strong Adsense Strategy, since Adsense revenues can be tweaked & improved for very high revenues.

This website contains a lot of information on how new bloggers & small business owners can improve revenues from advertising. Feel free to browse or suggest content that could help you more.

A great email strategy helps in Successful Affiliate Marketing as well as building your website visitors over time.

So while you focus on avoiding mistakes in building your website , choosing the right blog hosting service , the best free website themes & the best ads for your web , also build a good strategy around an email process & a newsletter mailing system .

FREE Trial Email Marketing helps you set up & fine tune your email marketing solution for your blogs, small business & affiliate marketing.

Laws for emailing & publishing newsletters have changed considerably. Permission based emailing means that users have the ability to unsubscribe anytime they want. Not only does your email have to add value to the reader but also have to be targeted to the right readers.

Constant Contact provides very consistent & measurable email solution for small business & new bloggers . You can create HTML emails , upload a list of opt in email addresses and start communicating. 

This cheap and highly effective email system could be slowly expanded to involve existing readers as well as reaching out to affiliate customers.

The complete solution includes:

• Email List Management Tool with mailing list that can be updated easily with new subscriptions & unsubscribed readers could be removed
• Creating attractive newsletters that are easy to read, quick to download with a focused message
• Ability to promote & sell products directly from emails – many email hosts filter emails with more than 2 links (treating them as spam) so the email design is important to reach the readers
• Ability to modify newsletters easily
• A cheap mail management program that can run outside your host, so that you can control your emails independent of your website or blog

Here are Free & Free to Try Email & Newsletter Offers to help new bloggers & small business owners get started with a mail management system from Constant Contact .

• Email List Management Tool – 60 Day Free Trial
• Email Newsletters – 60 Day Free Trial
• Permission Based Email Marketing – 60 Day Free Trial
• Email List Manager – 60 Day Free Trial

Not all advertisers pay the high amount of money cost-per-click-money or cost-per-impression-money . Ads have to be optimized to maximize your earning from website .

I have stressed over & over again that content is the king . For one, content is the main reason why you have your readers. Ignore content, and you lose them one by one.

For two, content generates interest & followers. Social networking starts with valuable content – that which provides important facts & information to your readers.

For Three, solid content helps attract the best contextual ads. Contextual ads complement your content – so they are more likely to be clicked by visitors.

I have discussed the practical aspects of a good layout of content & ads . If you search this website you will find so much valuable content on designing an effective website, choosing advertisers & themes that are suitable for earning advertising revenues.

For beginners, choosing an advertiser could be a problem, primarily due to the fact that good, high paying advertisers will have entry requirements. Some advertisers are suitable for starters who do not have a high page rank or high link popularity.

Google stands out to be one of the best advertiser , both to starters as well as for the highly popular sites & blogs . It is essential that you have a Strategy for Google Advertising right from the start.

Here are the Top 10 Reasons why Google Makes the Best Advertiser for Publishers :

1. Google Ads are international – no matter who visits your ads from around the world, Google will have enough good ad inventory to display. This increases your chances for higher ad earnings
2. Google Adsense Ads have the highest cost-per-click rates – the CPC rates for Google Ads are one of the best in the industry. Because of the best contextual ads, Google is able to deliver a high success value to the advertisers. Hence, advertisers on Google pay high CPC rates
3. Extremely Contextually Relevant – Google Ad strategy is best designed when you treat Google Ads are an integral part of your content. Form your posts & content in a way that leaves room for Google to publish relevant ads
4. Combination of CPC & CPM Ads – Google ad inventory provides impression based CPM & click-based CPC ads. So there is a good balance in your earning from Adsense ads
5. Low Click Fraud Rate – Google Monitors click frauds very minutely. Click Fraud is one of the biggest problems in the ad industry. Google monitors their advertisers & publishers very minutely to reduce loss of earning for false ad clicks
6. Google Adsense has Multiple Ad Streams – Google has all the possible ways to maximize your content. It has text & image ads for your post content, Feed Ads for all your RSS Feeds, Video Ads to earn from your videos & Mobile Ads for your blog or websites mobile website
7. Integrate with other Advertisers to Maximize Ad revenue – Google Adsense has the option of providing alternate ads in rare cases where Google cannot find relevant ads for your content. Google is also accepted by most of the other good advertisers as the back-up ad server so you can maximize your earnings. Advertisers like Chitika , Adbrite , BidVertiser , Vadpay all work well with Google Adsense
8. Integrated Ad Earning Reports – Google services include webmaster tools, Adsense monitoring tools as well as AdWords tools along with Site Monitoring tools. All these services are integrated to help you understand how your website is working, how your ads are working & what are the best keywords for your blogs posts & website’s content
9. Timely Payout of Ad Revenue Earning – Google is one of the most respected advertising companies in the world. Google has made millions or bloggers & internet business successful & continues to pay billions of dollars to publishers as their earnings. Their payout is on time, everytime & Google also details how, when & what you have earned from the ads
10. Google Adsense & Google Adwords Support & Help Forum – Google has a dedicated help & support program to help people succeed & maximize their ad revenues. Google also runs the Adsense Blog to keep their publishers & advertisers posted on new developments, issues & solutions

I would recommend that new publishers focus on creating a Google Adsense Strategy from Day 1. You would need to experiment with Google Sandbox to refine keywords & ad formats for maximizing the ad revenues from your blog ads.

YouTube, the number 1 video hosting website, now have major educational institutes & business organizations, publishing marketing & editorial videos on their custom channels.

While YouTube by itself helps them spread the news, the same videos can be embedded in several other blogs & sites. There are several ways to start with Video Blogging.

The possibility of sharing a video clip increases the revenue potential. On the other hand, it spreads your message to a wider audience, often in a viral way. The Battle At Kruger video, shot by a tourist, had over 36 million views & soon went on sale at Negative Space Media.

YouTube also has special ads for videos. So anytime you can show ads on video, & earn money from it. A recent article on AdAge wrote how you can also find out the more interesting spots on a video clip. The tool, called HotSpots, allow “video creators to monitor how viewings rise and fall within a video.”

“HotSpots plays a video alongside a graph that maps whether the audience is lower or higher than average for a particular length of video.

When the graph goes up, the video is ‘hot,’ and more viewers are watching – because there’s either less attrition or some viewers are fast-forwarding or rewinding to isolate a particular point in the video.

When the graph goes down, the video is ‘cold’ because viewers are leaving the video or skipping to another part of the content.”

Another report on Marketing Sherpa talks how Circuit City has used videos to retain customers. They have hosted “How-To” videos to increase their customer loyalty. Many large organizations also use customer feedback videos for their internal training purposes.

Next comes the question, what tools are available to get started with creating videos at home. Small business will not have the luxury of engaging costly studio crew, but there are quite a few good options to create professional quality videos right from your home office.

• The best solution for making videos at home comes from Adobe – you can put ideas in motion with the total post-production solution from Creative Suite 3 Production Premium
• The next option is the Adobe Premiere that comes with Adobe Photoshop Elements & is available for Apple Mac computers as well as Windows PCs.
• Pinnacle makes a great Home Video-editing software – Pinnacle Studio Plus to make professional quality videos right from your desk
• Another very popular video editing software from Pinnacle that allows affordable Multiple Stream Native HD Editing is Liquid Edition 7

Any of these software could help you get started with publishing professional quality videos right from your home office. You can post them on your own sites, or to increases revenue, you can share them on your custom YouTube Channel too.

You can also look up my recommendations for more small business & home video software solution.

Having created the video, the next step is to post it & distribute it to a wider audience. Again, you can use YouTube custom channels for distribution, or use a professional distribution & collaboration host for Safe Online File Sharing & Storage.

The last part is a continuous monitoring of your online videos. Easy measures, like the number of views, HotSpots etc could give you insights into what could be popular subjects & contents of your video messages.

As the report said, “How-To” videos are always popular. You can plan a series of How-To videos on your products or services to get started with online videos.

iCLIPART offers the highest quality collection of clip art available on the Internet. Plus we have the largest QUANTITY of any clipart site with over 7.8 million images.

The vast majority of our content is provided in vector file formats (.EPS & .AI) making it the perfect choice for home, hobby, school and professional users.

When you subscribe to the World’s largest collection of sound, image & icons on iCLIPART , you have download access to every clipart image, photo, font and sound for the duration of your subscription.

Although there are specialized services for Fonts , professional logo design , Royalty Free Music & background sound ,  iClipArt provides a single place for a great collection of all the needs for a blog designer.

ClipArt , be it the music, pictures or just icons, can be subscribed monthly or annually. The yearly subscription gets you the cheapest rates on all downloads. And with new images & sound clips being added every month, the annual subscription could get you all the latest cliparts .

iCLIPART.com subscription gets you unlimited access to more than 7 million clipart images, photos, photo objects, fonts, and sounds for one low price. The benefits are many:

• Unlimited Access to Over 7.8 Million Images
• Diverse Array of Styles and Categories
• Multiple File Formats – WIN/MAC
• Professional Quality
• No Per-Image Fees
• wide choice of latest sound cliparts
• wide choice of latest web icons
• large variety of latest photo cliparts & backgrounds

To be Successful at Affiliate Marketing & Sales, you have to follow some basic steps. Again, I will focus on being successful in Affiliate sales on the internet.

This does not require you to have any shops or any real estate. You do your business on the internet. All you pay for is hosting your website & paying for your website’s registration. Nothing else.

Before I get to the 5 tips on making big money from affiliate sales, I must say that you have to really learn the ropes. You can either do it by trial & error – refining your techniques over years, or train yourself in a structured way with experienced & successful affiliates showing the way.

In my case, it was a combination of both, though I focused on