You already know that the affiliate with the most clicks gets higher sales, the question is how can you too get more clicks and higher sales.

The answer is simple: turn your blog keywords into affiliate links. With this cool tool you can actually not only do that, but also hide your links [protect yourself from thieves] and even display keyword-rich links at random through your blog post [this feature is truly powerful].

I’ve been using this amazing Wordpress plugin on several of my blogs for months now – take a look through some of the posts on this site and you find several customized affiliate links. I’ve had an over 200% increase in my affiliate commissions since I began using this fantastic tool!

Check it out yourself at:

MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate

Oh and this plugin – Ninja Affiliate is on SALE! You can get $30 off the regular price if you buy before Midnight on Friday August 21st!

What kind of company doesn’t notice that they have a glitch in their payment system for over 6 months?

A few months ago when I noticed that my payments had increased I wondered what was up, but the site that I do work for them on had increased in rank and popularity so I thought I’d just had a pay increase. Unfortunately their system is kind of hard to get into and it’s difficult to see just how they pay for different tasks. So I don’t consider this my fault although I guess in hindsight I should have thought to question them about the payments.

This totally sucks. I hope that the extra stuff I’m going to have to do to pay off the debt doesn’t ruin my site! Argh!

BTW I’m purposely not mentioning the company name as it’s against their TOS and well I don’t want to suffer a slap from the internet gods – even though it’s not this site that is involved in the glitch.

International CPM Ads

Here’s an upcoming feature. In early December, we will start serving CPM ads to the non-U.S./Canada traffic. This will give you revenue, per impression, for your site visitors who come from other countries. This is designed to help publishers who have a blend of traffic from a variety of countries.

Our system will do the geo-location for you, determining where the visitor is coming from. Then we’ll either show the regular pay-per-click widget (to visitors from the U.S. and Canada) or show an ad that pays per impression (to visitors from other countries). You’ll see a new column, called “CPM Revenue” in your earnings reports.

So it appears that they listened to the concerns or more likely complaints of those who have a good portion of their traffic from non US or Canadian visitors and implemented this new CPM ad system.

Now hopefully they’ll do something about their widget slowing the loading of a site. I had, had Widgetbucks on my main blog Tricia’s Musings, but I only had it up for a few days before I removed it. It didn’t severely slow my page loads but I found that it didn’t load until you reached the portion of the page that the widget was located on and if you were trying to scroll past that point you had to wait until it finished loading. I didn’t like that.

On that site I had the widget code in the middle of my sidebar. I have ads near the top of my sidebars that I can’t move due to my TOS agreement with those companies. I do believe that Widgetbucks probably does best when it’s near the top of a sidebar and loads when the page is first visited. At least it wouldn’t impede a visitors ability to scroll a page if it was near the top and already loaded.

I’ve decided to try Widgetbucks on this site and a few of my other sites again to see what happens.

What I wanted to talk about today is Widgetbucks. I’ve just finally gotten around to signing up and from what I hear that’s a good thing because sometime over the next week they won’t be as open about letting just anyone sign up.

I decided to try Widgetbucks on my main blog Tricia’s Musings in the middle right sidebar. It’s very easy to sign up (right now) and create a widget to place on your site. All you need to do is select which category your site falls into, and pick whatever keywords you’d like to have Widgetbucks use to display products from Mpire on your site and tada … you have widget code to place in your blogs sidebar.

I didn’t realize this, but right now they have a signup bonus that puts $25 into your account when you register. Since the payout minimum is $50 this means that just by signing up for Widgetbucks you’re already closer to getting your first payment.

Unfortunately Widgetbucks is changing it’s algorithm and I believe as of this week they will only be counting clicks from US and Canadian visitors. For bloggers who’s majority of site visitors are Canadian or American this won’t make a huge difference in income, however those who have a high percentage of site visitors from other countries the clicks won’t count.

As a result I probably won’t add Widgetbucks to this site. I just looked at my recent stats and only 54% of my visitors are from the US and Canada. Actually all my blogs have quite an international audience. The stats for my main blog which I thought had mainly North American visitors shows that of my recent visitors only 68% are from the US and Canada. Now if Widgetbucks would include visitors from the UK I’d have closer to 80% of my visitors clicks count.

So the moral of this story is that Widgetbucks can certainly help you monetize your blog quickly and easily but those with mainly US and Canadian audiences will do best. Still, if you want that initial $25 sign up now!

There are several types of Amazon widgets that you can configure for your site so that you can feature various products or product categories in your sidebar or on your pages. It literally takes one minute to set up a new widget for your site.

Amazon announced their new widgets on the 21st of September, but I’d discovered them and had started playing around with them the day before they were publically released.

You can select colors, the layout and or theme to match your website.

Amazon affiliates will earn referral fees of up to 10% on these new widgets.

There are 6 new widgets – Slideshow, My Favorites, Quick Linker, Wish List, Product Cloud, and the Amazon Unbox Video Previewer.

Go explore the new widgets. They should be easy to find in the left sidebar of your affiliate dashboard.

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I’ve written about some of the programs I’ve tried on this site, WebStyle and of course my main blog Tricia’s Musings either as I’ve added them to one or many sites or after I’d been using them for a while.

I’ve been using Amazon on my main website for a number of years. I can’t remember exactly when Amazon started up it’s affiliate program but I’ve been using since the late 90’s I believe! In those early years I made quite a bit of money with Amazon and it was in fact the only way I monetized my website. These days I still make money with Amazon, but no where near as much as I used to due to changes in the program and I suppose a huge increase in the overall amount of affiliates!

I added the WP-Amazon wordpress plugin to my blogs a couple of months ago, but I’ve yet to really get going with using it. I think I’ve only created two affiliate links within my posts so far! Shame on me. Part of making money with affiliate programs is using them when appropriate. Of course I can still go over my old posts and add some Amazon links to them.

Text Link Ads has also been a very successful program for me. I joined a couple of years ago when I only had one HTML based website. I could never figure out how to get Text link ads to work on that site though! (if anyone can help me with this I’d really appreciate it! I know there’s a way to do it.) So I didn’t earn anything on my account until I got around to starting some blogs in 2006.

Google Adsense has worked out fairly well for me too. I don’t earn anywhere near as much as I think I could be making with the program, but I earn more than enough to get paid every month by Google. Again, I only had Google Adsense on my two websites for the longest time. Then sometime last year I put it on a couple of blogs but not my busiest ones. I’ve now rectified that mistake and I use Google Adsense and the utilize the Adsense Deluxe plugin on all of my blogs.

I only added Google Adsense to my busiest blogs about a month ago and I’ve already almost doubled my income. Hopefully once the Google Media bot fully indexes those sites I’ll really start to do well with Google Adsense. I’m still of course going over old posts and using the Adsense Deluxe plugin to add ad blocks to older posts. I don’t like to use them in my newest posts. Perhaps I’d earn more if I did, but I prefer not to irritate my regular readers with too many ads. Those coming in from search engines to the older posts will get the full extent of the advertising on my sites.

This actually brings up a good point.

When you monetize your sites do you consider how it might appear to your visitors? We’ve all seen sites with far too much advertising and for me it’s a total turn off. Links everywhere, advertising to the full extent, all kinds of different affiliate program banners and so on … I try not to do that. As I’ve just said I’ve been going back to older posts and adding in a bit more advertising, but I still try to keep it as tasteful as possible.

Everyone’s got to find their own balance between developing content, advertising and continuing to build traffic. Too much advertising can make people close your site and never return.

It’s fine to experiment with different affiliate programs. Even trying different badges and products to advertise on your site with each company. Just don’t try everything at once. If you overwhelm your visitors they won’t click on your ads. They’ll just click over to another persons website.

How do you monetize your sites? Do you think you’ve accomplished that fine balance that allows you to successfully monetize your site while keeping your visitors happy?

What programs do you use to monetize your site? I’ll discuss other programs that I’ve been using successfully in future posts.

So what are “Text-Link-Ads? Well, publishers can sign up for an account and then submit their websites or blogs to Text Link Ads. Sites are approved or rejected almost immediately through their automated site checking system.

If your site qualifies for the program you can add some code to your site that will allow any links that advertisers have purchased on your site to be shown. Text Link Ads can be displayed on the same pages as Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher network and other contextually served ads since Text Links Ads are not a contextual product.

You can have Text Link ads either automatically approved on your site, or you can request that you be allowed to approve any link requests prior to them being added to your site.

It’s very important that when you add one of your sites to the Text Link Ads system that you take the time to fill out a good site description. Remember, you are competing with a number of other publishers for the advertisers attention. Once you’ve listed your site it will be added to the Text Link Ads directory where advertisers can browse through the listings and choose which sites they’d like to publish their links on.

Links may be purchased on your site for as little as a few days to a whole month. If the advertisers like your site and how their link has been performing on your site they will often renew their purchase each month.

Each link is sold for a minimum of $25 per link. You will be paid half of that price, and Text Link Ads will keep the other half for their part in creating the code for your site and securing an advertiser for you.

You can run as little as one to as many as 10 to 12 text link ads at one time on your site, and you may also add text link ads to Wordpress feeds.

If you’re site has some PR, a number of other sites linking to it, and has also achieved a decent Alexa and Technorati ranking it will likely be accepted into the system. If you try to add a site and they don’t accept it right away don’t worry, they keep track of your rejected site and if it does achieve enough rank to qualify they will add it to their system for you.

You can also use affiliate text links or badges on your site. You can earn $25 for referring a new publisher or advertisers to text link ads.