This week I was lucky enough to give a webinar through Affiliate Summit entitled “Monetize Your Blogging Skills with Affiliate Marketing.” The intent of the webinar was to teach bloggers how they can easily move from blogging to affiliate marketing with a little bit of important information and some easy tools. It was not a basic seminar about what affiliate marketing is (see my Start Monetizing Your Blog video for that information). Rather, it was food for thought about disclosure statements as well as some helpful plugins and network information.

Below are some notes and links from the presentation as well as a YouTube replay of the seminar.

• Disclosure statements are necessary for any bloggers who start recommending products or merchants. The FTC requires that they be “clear and conspicuous.”
• Visit disclosurepolicy.org to help you formulate one.
• The Exec-PHP WordPress Plugin is useful for inserting php into WordPress pages and posts.
• Use it in conjunction with GoldenCan and PopShops to create SEO friendly shopping pages or coupon directories.
• The Pretty Links plugin is great for redirecting affiliate links and cloaking (if you use the old version).
• Sub-identification tracking will help you better understand your conversions. Each network does this differently.

I think this webinar will be helpful to both brand new affiliates as well as those who have been in the business for awhile because we all do things a little bit differently and have different tips and shortcuts. Thanks to Affiliate Summit for giving me this opportunity!

Last year I was lucky enough to participate in a panel at Affiliate Summit West with two industry veterans, Kristin Kinsey (affiliate manager and owner of MadHatter Consulting) and Carolyn Tang Kmet (now the affiliate manager for Groupon), and moderated by Marty Fahncke. Our presentation was entitled Start Monetizing Your Blog Today and is a great primer for new affiliate marketers. A few things have changed (Carolyn got married!) but the basics of the presentation are still solid.

Carolyn started the presentation with an introduction about the basics of affiliate marketing, who the players are, and how it all works. I then discussed ways that bloggers can use affiliate marketing including banner and text links. Kristin finished up by explaining the role of affiliate managers and Outsourced Program Managers (OPMs).

Areas Covered

• Affiliate Marketing 101
• Stakeholders
• Evaluating Merchants
• Types of Creative
• The Affiliate Site
• Extreme Site Makeover
• Resources
• Contact Info

Below you will find both the PowerPoint (via Slideshare) and the actual video of the presentation thanks to Affiliate Summit.

my philosophy

I’ve recently been talking to a number of bloggers who are having a hard time understanding the types of products that they can promote through affiliate marketing. Many of them associate affiliate marketing with either ebooks or diet pills. I decided to try a little experiment and see how many products I used in one day that I could easily blog about and include affiliate links. Some of these products I would just mention in passing in a blog post. Others could be an entire written or video review. I actually got tired of writing them down there were so many. Here’s are some of the highlights.

• Took a shower using philosophy senorita margarita shampoo, shower gel, and bubble bath
• Got dressed in my favorite jeans-1969 long and lean from Gap (which also happen to be on sale as part of their Columbus Day Sale)
• Straightened my hair with my Sedu Ionic Ceramic Pro Flat Iron that I got from Ulta
• Put on my favorite perfume, Pink Sugar by Aquolina (purchased from different places depending on who had it on sale, usually Sephora)
• Made a cup of tea using my Teavana Perfect TeaMaker
• Got some work done on my Dell computer with my two Dell monitors
• Listened to music I had downloaded from Amazon and iTunes
• Opened some packages with my Slice Box Cutter
• Read some of The Iron Witch by Karen Mahoney
• Got dressed for Zumba in my Tek Gear shirt and pants (from Kohls) and my Saucony running shoes (from Shoebuy)
• Spruced up with Black Candy Apple body lotion from Bath and Body Works
• Watched recorded movies on my DirecTV DVR with my husband

I could go on and on. But the point is that these are all products that I really use and could easily write about. They fit into niches like beauty, moms, home, reading, entertainment, exercise, food, etc. And this was only about half of what I even wrote down. In a given week I would also have affiliate marketing recommendations for travel sites, kids’ clothes, toys, gardening, football, cooking, finance, and more. It’s all about looking at your site and figuring what fits into it and then where to find those links.

If you need more help making that transition from blogger to affiliate marketing, I’m doing a webinar for Affiliate Summit on October 19th, 2011, at 12pm EST entitled Monetize Your Blogging Skills with Affiliate Marketing. It is free but there are limited spots available. I also did a webinar as part of the Blogging ABCs entitled 5 Affiliate Marketing Benefits for Bloggers that you can view on replay.

Inspired by the Wil Reynolds keynote at Affiliate Summit as well as Eric Nagel’s custom rel=”author” coding, I convinced my husband that I needed a plugin for my sites. Most of my sites run the Thesis theme, so I asked him to make it Thesis specific. He likes to think bigger than that, so he created it to run on any WordPress blog. You can visit the Easy Rel Author plugin page for more information if you are not running Thesis. If you are running Thesis, keep reading to find out how the plugin works for you.

What’s the Purpose?

If you are not sure yet why you even need to include rel=”author” on your posts, check out the search results below. I did a search for “seasonality in affiliate marketing.” Although my own post about my Seasonality session at Affiliate Summit ranks highest, Eric’s post grabs your attention first because of his picture next to it. How did he get his picture there? He’s included rel=”author” in his blog.

Search Result Example

Before the Plugin:

Before you even modify your site or add the Rel=”Author” Plugin, you need to set up a Google Plus profile for yourself. You then need to add profile links FROM your Google Profile to any sites that you blog on. These go on your About page on the right side. (see my Google Profile below)

Google Profile Links

Install the Plugin:

The Easy Rel Author Plugin is very simple. Click here to download it. Install it and then choose whether you want your Author Byline to link to your Google Profile or whether you would like an additional line added to your footer. The default is your Author Byline.

If you choose the additional line added to your footer, you will also need to choose whether you want a small Google Plus image or your name for the link. You’ll see that for this blog, I chose the default Author Byline link at the top of my posts. If you want to use it as a footer, check the first option in the settings. If you want it as a footer but your name rather than the Google+ image, check both of these boxes:

Footer Options in Settings

Add Your Google+ URL to Your Profile:

For each user on your blog, go into their User Profile and add their Google+ URL to the Contact Info section.

Add Google+ URL to Profile

Link Your Byline:

If you choose to have your Byline as the rel=”author” link, you will need to go into your “Thesis Option” “Display Option” “Bylines” and check “Link author names to archives.” If you are going the footer option, you do not need to do this.

Testing 1, 2, 3:

Although it can take a week or two to see your picture in the search results, you can use Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool to test your individual posts to see if they are working. I’ve heard that new posts take a couple of weeks but older posts can take even longer depending upon how frequently your posts are crawled. You may also need to fill out Google’s Authorship Request form. From what I can tell, Google is still manually deciding who can use this functionality and who cannot. The general consensus is that it will be turned on for everyone before too long.

Those are the basics. The plugin is still brand new, so I’m sure that we will quickly get a lot of feedback. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something built into Thesis soon to take care of this. If you are not using Thesis and still want to use the plugin, you can follow most of the above but go to Easy Rel Author Plugin for more information.

Please let us know if you are using the plugin and if you start seeing results!

Updated 10-11-11 The plugin works! It took me awhile to get my profile approved, but as you can see below, my picture is now showing up next to my search results. You can see that it is much bigger than the pictures below the search results where people have +1 the post. The only thing that I am confused about is that it seems like it is only working some of the time. I am guessing that it is just a matter of getting replicated across all of Google’s servers at this point? But it is progress!

The Rel=Author Plugin Works!

As part of my presentation for Affiliate Summit East 2011, I have prepared an Editorial Calendar (“editorial calender” for those of you with spelling issues) to help bloggers, affiliates, and merchants take advantage of Seasonality in Affiliate Marketing. The calendar is basically a listing of different holidays, events, and seasons that you might want to write about or monetize in some way. While it certainly is not an exhaustive list, it should give you a good start on your planning as well as get your creative juices flowing about other similar events. Understand that some events change dates from year to year and that you need to be looking at least a month in advance to plan for many of the events.

You can download the calendar by clicking on this link: Seasonality Calendar. Use it however you like but please link back to me if you decide to post it on your own site.

Hopefully those of you in attendance enjoy the presentation and those who download the calendar find it helpful! Let me know if I missed anything major and I may revise the calendar as necessary.

I admit that I am lazy when it comes to photos and graphics for my blogs. I’m not creative and I don’t have time to search for a lot of free images. I’m also careful not to violate copyrights. So I use iStockphoto for most of my sites. 9 times out of 10 I can find what I need in there within just a few minutes. Their images give my blog posts a little life and my sites a more professional look (like the image on my tutoring site).

Up until today, I didn’t even realize that they have a referral program. But even better than the fact that I can get something for referring you (assuming you buy credits in the next 30 days), I found out that YOU can get 10 free iStockphoto credits when you sign up through my link! That’s a pretty good deal, especially if you are just looking to try the service for the first time or only need a picture or two. Take the free 10 credits and don’t feel bad if you don’t end up buying any more than that. It’s worth it just to try it out.

The price of their pictures depends upon the type of pictures that they are and the size that you need. I find that I only ever need the smallest sizes for my sites, so that keeps the price down. I also buy my credits in bulk because I know that I will use them. You don’t have to link back to their site when you use the images either (which is the major down side to a lot of the free graphics and free photo sites).

I’m excited to pass along the free iStockphoto credits to my friends because I know almost all of you could use them for something or other. If you are already using iStockphoto, leave a comment below with your experience. If you’ve got another site that you use regularly for images, post that as well so that we can all take a look.

Last month I blogged about The Ugly Side of Affiliate Marketing and described some major issues that I was having with, among other things, with my Google Adsense Account and the eBay Partner Network. I’m happy to report that all of the problems have been resolved. However, it wasn’t without a lot of help and a lot of lessons learned–lessons that can apply whether you get hit with the nexus tax, unexpectedly dropped by merchants, or even dropped from entire networks.

I took the opportunity to discuss it with my Blogging ABCs co-hosts Deborah Carney and Liz Fogg. Here are some of the things that we talked about in the podcast that I learned from this debacle:

1) Diversify. Have different types of sites in different niches. Work with different merchants across different networks. This saved me because I still had other revenue streams even when two of them were down.

2) Separate Accounts. Use separate network accounts when you have multiple sites or especially different types of sites (incentives, coupons, gambling, etc). It will come in handy if one of your sites gets flagged or if you decide to sell a site. If I had done this with both Adsense and eBay, I likely would not have run into either problem that I had.

3) Use link redirecting. Redirecting will help you change out links quickly if you need to. In addition, you can use shorteners so that your domain shows up instead of someone else’s when you post your links in other places. In some cases where I did this, I was able to change out my links quickly. Where I didn’t, I will probably have a lot of dead links and lost revenue opportunities.

4) Network. Meet in person with as many people as possible. Further, after you connect with them, follow up, reinforcing your connection. When you need help, those connections may be the difference between keeping and losing your business.  I can honestly say that without my network I may not have ever gotten these problems solved.

Some Resources we mention:

Pretty Link Lite
YourLS Open Source shortener that you can install on your own website

In the end there was a silver lining; my sites are back to normal and I’ve learned some valuable lessons that I need to share with everyone else so that this doesn’t happen to them. You just knew with a nickname like “Sunshine” it would have to end like this, right?

Although I have been working on it for the last month, I am excited to officially announce my newest venture. Starting with Episode #10, I have joined the Blogging ABCs Podcast.

What is Blogging ABCs? In short, it is a podcast series for bloggers no matter their niche or experience level. We talk about basic blogging topics like how to structure your blog but also more advanced topics like running giveaways and SEO. You can subscribe to us through iTunes or Google Listen or just listen on the Blogging ABCs site itself or Geekcast.fm (our host).

I am excited about this for so many reasons. Shall I count the ways?

First, I am happy to be working on a project with Deborah Carney, Vinny O’Hare, and Liz Fogg. We’ve worked together in an affiliate/OPM capacity before but never on anything really creative or educational. Each of us has different strengths so the podcasts are working well as a tag-team effort.

Second, I am getting to stretch my podcasting muscles again. With the exception of guesting on a couple of other podcasts, I have not been doing anything of my own in awhile. I love podcasting because I love talking. (surprise!)

Third, I’m learning a lot. I know I’m supposed to be one of the “experts,” but I can’t help but scribble notes to myself during each podcast we do because I always learn something new from my co-hosts.

Lastly, I’m getting an opportunity to speak to other guest hosts and expand my network. Our first guest was James Martell, and it was a great experience working with someone with whom I have never worked before. I’m looking forward to the lineup of other guests that we already have planned for the coming months.

Please check out Blogging ABCs and let me know what you think. What would you like to hear from us? Are you interested in being a guest host?

Not only is my review cheap, it’s free! Of course, so is the book. Keep reading if you want to find out why you need to get a copy and can start learning from it in less than 15 minutes.

I’m one of those affiliate marketers who was lucky enough to start my business on a shoestring budget. I’ve never spent more than $100 in a month for Google Ads, I watch for free trials of tools, and I spend a lot of time generating my own content. Yet sometimes I find myself feeling “stuck” because the more sites that I have, the more content that I have to generate. When I saw that my friend Todd Farmer had written a new ebook about cheap content, I was interested. I was even more interested when I found out that I could get it for free by signing up for his My Content Pro site.

Todd apologizes up front for the name, The Cheap-Ass Guide to Online Content. That in itself sets the tone of the entire book. It’s like sitting down with someone who knows an incredible amount of information about content generation and is willing to tell you everything he knows off the cuff. He not only shares with you what he thinks works best but also what he thinks doesn’t work very well but you might want to try anyway because you are curious.

What I most like about the book is that no matter what your experience level is, you will find something you didn’t know. From basics like the definition of “article spinning” to more specific tips like where to get creative-commons licensed music for your podcasts, each page has at least 1 or 2 takeaways that almost anyone who generates content can use.

One other hidden little nugget that I found interesting is in the Disclaimer–that Todd used Fiverr.com to create the logo and eBook cover. That’s truly practicing what you preach. If you can get something on the cheap that works for you, why pay more for it somewhere else?

The book covers articles, syndication, podcasts, music, artwork, images, and just about everything you could need to generate a site cheaply (if not free). He even throws in a couple of paid services that I agree are worth investing in, especially as your site grows (like Aweber). If you are new to blogging, this might be the most important paragraph in the entire book : “However, we are business people. We are building a business, with the intention of generating revenue and having complete control over our websites, so we host our own WordPress install. Remember, we will spend a little bit of money on quality hosting.”

The ebook is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the great information that Todd is putting out there right now. Head to My Content Pro, Todd’s site with the incredibly creative and talented Lisa Picarille, and sign up for your free membership so that you can get The Cheap-Ass Guide to Online Content for free as well as a number of other great resources. I don’t know if it all will continue to be free for much longer, so get in there and grab as much as you can quickly!

I get a lot of questions about my treadmill desk and how it works. All of the treadmill desks that I looked at were pretty expensive, and I didn’t know if I would really even use one. So my husband and I decided that we would try to build one using an older treadmill that we didn’t feel comfortable running on anymore.

In the first picture you can see the basic setup. We basically drilled 2 shelf brackets ($7 each at Home Depot) into the top of the treadmill and placed a wireless keyboard mouse on top of a plain wood shelf ($10-$20 at Home Depot depending on the size and type). You could use a SurfShelf if you didn’t want to try to make one yourself (about $40 through Surfshelf.com). We already had a television in the “exercise room” (unfinished basement), so we just plugged one of our laptop docking stations into it. I simply take my laptop from the docking station in my office to the docking station in the basement to keep working. If you don’t have any of the above already, you can always go the TrekDesk route for about $500 (available from Amazon).

What can I do on the treadmill and how fast can I go? I actually keep a spreadsheet of every time that I work at the treadmill desk. An example of a good week where I used the desk 4 different days was a total of 432 minutes, 19.27 miles, and 2270 calories burned. That was walking before lunch each day, stopping for lunch, and then walking again after lunch.

As seen in the video below, I tend to walk at about a 3.0 pace and a 3.0 incline when I am checking email, blogging, and doing other things that require typing. If I am watching videos, listening to podcasts, or reading articles, I can walk at about 3.5-4.0 before my “desk” starts to wiggle too much for my liking.

I will caution that the first time that started using my treadmill desk, I ended up with plantar fasciitis and ended up having to buy a couple of products from Heel That Pain to make it better. I still use the products and the plantar fasciitis flares up on me. I can’t say with 100% certainty that it was from using the treadmill desk too much, but that was pretty much the only exercise that I was getting when it happened.

The short video below shows the mechanics of how my treadmill desk is put together, how fast I can walk on it while typing, and a brief glimpse of my infamous Pajama Jeans.