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.

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.

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.

Each month I read hundreds of different blogs, some monetized and some not. It’s always interesting to me to look closely to see how different bloggers monetize their blogs and which ones are using affiliate marketing. I’ve attended blogging conferences (like Blog Indiana) and followed closely others through posts and tweets (like Blog World). Aside from ways to drive traffic, monetization is always one of the biggest topics. Ironically, affiliate marketing is usually not what everyone is talking about! When it is, it is often in a negative light and referred to as “MLM” or “scammy.”

Affiliate marketers are trying hard to get bloggers tuned into affiliate marketing. Affiliate Summit is even featuring a “Monetize Summit” in January as a part of the larger Affiliate Summit to draw attention to how bloggers can monetize their blogs with affiliate links.While the movement overall is growing, there is still a substantial segment of the blogger community that eschews affiliate marketing on principle.

The arguments that I hear from bloggers who are against affiliate marketing usually involve the feeling that they are somehow “selling out” when they are paid. And yet many of those same bloggers have no problem accepting merchandise from a company to blog about it. If the disclosure that you received the merchandise for free is enough to make you feel good about the blog post, why not just disclose that you are an affiliate marketer as well? If you are willing to run a banner ad for paid placement, how is that any different than running a banner ad for which you are paid on a cost per sale basis?

It’s not that I am begging for more competition in affiliate marketing; there is already quite a bit out there. But I can’t help but wonder if our industry would be even stronger if we had more voices like those of the bloggers. Bloggers are adept at building audiences and networking. They are the perfect people to have in our industry as we seek through initiatives like the PMA to unify ourselves.

Are you a blogger who embraces affiliate marketing? If not, why not? If you are, what are you doing to reach out to other bloggers?

While I was checking out all of the SEO functions of some new Firefox extensions I installed, I happened upon Archive.org and the Wayback Machine. Out of curiosity, I went back and looked at the first week of the first site that I ever launched. It was 2004 and my site Helping Moms Connect was brand new. After my initial laugh at the site, I started looking more closely at what has changed and what has stayed the same over the last 6 years. Although I completely scrapped the site a little over a year ago and started fresh, it was interesting to see what stayed the same and what changed.

See Helping Moms Connect in 2004

See Helping Moms Connect now

Major differences:

Then: Frontpage (which most other people at my skill level at the time were using)
Now: WordPress (which most other people at my skill level are now using)

Then: Pink! I thought if it was for women, it should be pink. Thankfully, I realized I was wrong.
Now: Green and yellow. A little more neutral.

Then: No advertisements. I hadn’t discovered affiliate marketing yet.
Now: A few banner ads on the main site and some tasteful text links.

Then: An email address and phone number to communicate with me.
Now: Twitter, RSS feeds, and newsletter.

Similaries:

When I look past those huge differences, I actually end up with a whole lot of similarities. A straightforward header with our name. Basic navigation to categories. Articles for moms that are updated at least a couple of times each week with female-friendly topics.

Despite a complete overhaul of the site, including moving it from hand coded HTML to a blog platform, I stayed true to my original purpose when I started the site. I always wanted Helping Moms to be a source of good content first and revenue second (and that is definitely still the case!).

How have your sites evolved over the years? Are you still true to your initial purpose? Has what you learned online changed your perspective and as a result your website?