Reviewer of Sites

I’m going to develop and try to review a list of non-Adsense revenue sharing sites.   What I intend to mention would be sites that primarily provide revenue sharing opportunities, but do so via other sources, such as Amazon, Zazzle, and others as a way to make extra money online.

If you have suggestions, please leave a comment below and I will add them.

Already to be considered:

• Zazzle
• Cafe Press
• Brighthub
• Squidoo (via affiliate modules/links)
• Hubpages

Tags: Affiliate by reviews
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I have to say that Squidoo has proven to be the most enjoyable, profitable, and enjoyable (emphasis on enjoyable!) internet venture to date.  There’s virtually no commitment, unlike running your own ecommerce site or moderating a forum, and you get to take advantage of a huge list of excellent prebuilt tools that have been created by Squidoo.

An offer to you:

If you have not yet signed up for Squidoo, I will even make an offer to mentor you, by giving tips and explaining things about Squidoo. All I ask is that you do your best, be fairly patient, and sign up via my referral link (click HERE).

My Experience:

Currently, I have 2 lenses within the top 100, out of a total of over 700,000 lenses in existance.  I’d say I’ve learned a thing or two by now.

In just the past few months of being an active member I consistantly make over $100 per month in Squidoo payments, not including affiliate royalties from Amazon, AllPosters, and others. It will only grow from there!

The Benefits:

There are so many ways to make money within Squidoo, it’s amazing.  The nice thing is that you don’t have to sign up for any other affiliates, if you don’t want to.  You can simply sign up for Squidoo and you will get a portion of the revenue.

If you don’t care to make money for yourself, you can also have your earnings automatically submitted to various charities too.

One of the benefits is the ability to focus on SEO down to the page level, unlike being concerned with entire sites. This really helps in understanding (better) the effects on on-page SEO and the value of backlinks and the internal linking structure.

The other is more from an affiliate point of view. you get to experiment with a multitude of different affiliate programs, most of them without signing up for anything. Just use Squidoo’s own affiliate modules and reap the rewards.

And last, but not least, you get to make lenses about whatever you feel like making.  I look at many of the topics of my lenses as doing a “research paper”, in that I may not be an expert on the subject, but have a curiousity about it.  I then research it and make an informative lens on the subject.  By the time I’m done, I am quite familiar.  All in all, it’s really fun!

I should also point out that the Squidoo community is very supportive and fun.  It’s one of the best experiences you could have online.

Tags: Affiliate, Web Design by reviews
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TagFoot is a fantastic new social bookmarking site that is currently in private beta.  However, you can sign up by clicking here.

TagFoot is similar to Del.icio.us, Digg, and  Squidoo, but has it’s own unique features. It is designed in the smooth and easy to use Web 2.0 format.  Currently, visiting the main page will only bring you to the video, but you can still sign up and take part.  Once the site is fully operational (out of beta mode), then the search engines will crawl and rank the pages.

The supports staff are super friendly and very rapid to work on issues or ideas that the users think up.

Another nifty fact is that they have a 50% Adsense Revenue sharing program. The links are also dofollow, so you not only get traffic from your friends, but get a good backlink.

• Import your existing IE and/or Firefox bookmarks (you can import all as private and change later)
• easily manage and access all of your bookmarks from any computer
• quickly share anything you find on the web with your friends
• share what you want, when you want, with whom you want
• tag all of your imported bookmarks so they are more easily found
• If you’re using Firefox, you can drag and drop links onto your sidefoot – onto a specific tag or section.
• tag your friends and you can send a message and/or share with that tag – everyone you tagged will get your message as opposed to you having to remember everyone’s member name. I use this when I post the Adsense articles – I share with “super users.”
• go to Amazon, find something you like and add it to your tagfoot wishlist. Watch as tagfoot scrapes the page and grabs all of the possible prices for you.
• Play with privacy settings. Add something to your wishlist that you want to buy for a friend, tag it with your friends name, and set it to private. You just created a private shopping list for that friend!
• It’s 100% free!

TagFoot Signup

This is the time to sign up so you can give them your feedback on what you would like to see!

Update: Tagfoot is now adding, not only Adsense revenue sharing, but also has plans for adding other ways of making money (along with being a part of a fun and growing community).  They are asking the members for input right now on other ways, such as Ebay, Amazon, Cafe Press and many more.

Read this:

Additional revenue sharing
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
So, we’ve got our Google Adsense sharing program setup and we’re thrilled so many have jumped on board. We’re now looking forward to getting tagfoot out into the wild so we can start making you guys (and us too) some real money. Until then, it’s going to continue to be pennies no doubt.

First, we need to quiet down the “messages overload” noise we spoke about last week – and we’re on that hard core right now. While we’re banging away on that, there are a couple of other things we can get into regarding moving to a public beta.

One of the most important, is making money.

Revenue sharing
We’ve got a ton of options beyond Adsense and we’re hoping some of you pros will help us whittle it down a bit. Here are a couple of ideas we’re tossing around that we think have the most potential – both keeping in mind the same type of impression based sharing we’re currently doing with Adsense.

1. Amazon
2. iTunes

Amazon
Your personal tagfoot wishlist can end up being a virtual treasure trove in more ways than you think. Not just a place for your friends to find stuff for you on your birthday, your wishlist can make you money all year round by driving traffic from your blogs, MySpace, Facebook etc.

It’s an easy setup. Simply pop in your Amazon affiliate ID, just as you did with your Adsense ID, and we’ll attach it to everything in your wishlist. Next, plug your tagfoot wishlist RSS feed into your personal blog, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and you’re done.

iTunes
The tubefoot is being used to play free music all day long right now by quite a few. We’re guessing it’s going to get hit pretty hard once word gets out. We can set up the tubefoot with a “purchase” link for each track – linking directly to iTunes.

Same drill – plug in your iTunes affiliate ID, we attach it to the tracks, members copy your tracks and potentially buy’em.

Let’s do this
We’ve got a couple of other ideas we’re throwing around but, we thought it best to hand it off to you guys at this point. We’d like to get most of this stuff solidified over the next couple of weeks so we have a chance at generating some holiday revenue for every one – let’s act quick.

1. What are your thoughts regarding the methods above?
2. What other options would you like to see us consider?

No holds barred.

So, if you want to be in on the discussion, NOW is the time to do it!  Sign up and make your ideas heard.

Tags: Affiliate, Social Bookmarking by reviews
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I am now experimenting with making Squidoo lenses based upon lyrics of songs.  There are a number of benefits to their simplicity, including:

• The potential that you could rank higher is the way in which your lens is constructed and the fact that you could have more related content, thereby probably ranking higher in the SERPs than a competing page.
• You can add easily add the song’s Youtube videos and other content that is not included on other lyrics sites.
• Another benefit includes your including Amazon links to the album or MP3 single.

First, take a look at How To Make A Lyrics Lens.  He did a GREAT job describing how you can make one and the benefits of it.

My modifications include:

• Using the Amazon Spotlight module for the album
• Using the Amazon module for the singles (mp3 singles of just the one song)
• Adding a Blackbox module at the bottom, pointing to other related lenses
• Lensroll your related lenses together
• Adding a Flickr module and set it to a slide show (for the artist or band)

I just started and am already seeing good traffic.

After you’ve got your lenses out of WiP status (work in progress) add them to the following groups.

Lyrics Headquarters – add your lyrics lenses to groups, including this one

Here’s some of my current lyrics lenses:

Beck – Replica

Beck – Modern Guilt

Beck – Volcano

Beck – Orphan

Portishead – Hunter

Portishead – Silence

Constantines – Our Age

Constantines – Hard Feelings

Constantines – Trans Canada

Usher – Moving Mountains

Fleet Foxes – Your Protector

Tags: Affiliate, Marketing, Social Bookmarking by reviews
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Plus you get a 25 to 30% commission!

First of all, many webmasters are often looking for ways to legally use images for their sites. The beauty of this is that you can actually make money with those images!

In addition to your own hosted website, you can use these images on the free Blogger, Wordpress, Squidoo, and Hub Pages accounts. *Squidoo and Hubpages are revenue sharing too!

If you add that all up, you can have quite a package for making some extra money to supplement your income.

Please select this link to sign up: All Posters

Reasons to join and use All Posters:

• High commission rates: 25-30%
• Large inventory: 400,000 of posters, prints and photos
• International program: Sites in six languages
• Affiliate banners and tools in English, French and German

Effort

Art Print

Buy at AllPosters.com
[Read more →]

Tags: Affiliate, Web Design by reviews
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I’m sure you’re all aware that Amazon has an affiliate program and you can make upwards of 10% commission just for having people order products via your Amazon product links.

You may also know about the aStore feature in which you can easily create as many as 100 stores and host them on Amazon. A better option is to embed the aStore in one of your sites via an Iframe tag. The Iframe code is easily available when you are editing your aStore.

The beauty of all of this is that it is all easy to do, doesn’t require any shipping headaches from running your own store, and that there are millions of Amazon customers that won’t be put off when they are ready to checkout. The aStores show a “Powered by Amazon” logo, which would instill a level of trust in your customer.

So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and make a few aStores and add some Amazon product links to your blogs! It’s all free for you!

First, join Amazon Associates

Once you are registered, you will be able to begin building aStores. You can literally build an aStore in as little as 15 minutes! Although, I’d recommend taking more time, just to make it right.

Click here to Build an aStore

Once you’ve created your aStores, add your store to this free Amazon/aStore directory You do need to be a Squidoo member (remember, Squidoo pays you because they are a revenue sharing site).

If you’re not a Squidoo member yet, please click the logo

To make adding your links even easier, you can use this Firefox addon to easily add Amazon product links. The tool will give you the link in either html or as a simple url. It will include your Amazon Associates ID in the link. Very nice!

Tags: Affiliate by reviews
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As you are probably aware, affiliate (aka associate) marketing is when one internet business/website offers a commission per sale, or other criteria, for each visitor that came from the other website’s affiliate link. These programs have proven to be very successful for some and not so successful for others. The good thing about these programs is that you do not keep any product inventory on hand and there is normally no expense, other than for maintaining your website. You are just the middle man, getting paid for referring a customer to the receiving site.

One of the lesser known, and a personal favorite is the Gomez PEER program. This is one of the few that runs on a pc and is not ran via a website. You can earn some pretty decent money for doing nothing but having an active internet connection and running your computer with it in your system tray. The most sought after affiliates for the Gomez Peer program are those people with computers anywhere in Australia, South America, or Mexico, and any computer with dial up connections in the USA, parts of Asia, and Europe.

Gomez Peer program

An excellent resource for the various affiliate programs is Associate Programs dot com. Associate Programs has an extensive list of affiliate programs, broken down by topic. Also, they also have a very nice selection of articles for the beginner all the way to the advanced affiliate.

Important Tips for Affiliate Marketers:

Need ideas? Look at what is selling well and getting great reviews. Maybe it’s something new on the market. Well, visit the manufacturer or seller website and see if they have an affiliate program.  If so, you could be one of the first to use it, which could mean a great start for you because you may not have much competition.

Once you’ve decided on a few possibilities, take the time to investigate the seller and their program. I don’t mean just look at their site, but look for reviews about the program. You don’t want your visitor to leave your site happy, only to become upset with the result of the other site and their service. There are way too many great affiliate programs out there to saddle yourself with a bad one. Just because they may offer a high commission does not that they are worth it.

The Design. Once you have narrowed it down to one or more affiliate programs, then you begin putting the links in your website. There are a variety of things to consider. Sometimes it would be appropriate to make the affiliate link look less like an advertisement and more like just a simple picture or text link. Usually this means blending the text link colors with the surrounding parts of the web page or putting the picture or banner near other pictures of similar size. Other times, you may want to be upfront with your visitor that this is an affiliate program. If you point out that the money from them buying via the affiliate link would go toward this, their favorite website, or toward a great cause, then they may feel like buying through you as apposed to going direct.

Presell the products. That is when you “warm up your visitors” to the idea of considering the product that the seller sells. You do not sell the product to the visitor, that is the job of the seller. It is your testimony or opinion that the visitor wants. Then they decide to investigate the offer by clicking on the link. Your job is done, until next time.

Unlike the example I am setting right here, do not bother trying to sell others on the idea of becoming an affiliate. There are thousands of sites out there already trying to do that right now. Instead, sell the product to the customer, not the idea of becoming an affiliate. In other words, create about the various products and then sell those via your affiliate links. If you have a trusting audience for your site, they will consider your opinion as an endorsement of the product. This goes back to my point that I made in the previous paragraph, that being, ‘don’t sell something that you wouldn’t use yourself’, better yet, ‘don’t sell a product you haven’t used yourself’.

Be creative. Don’t repeat the same old methodologies of other sites. That’s not to say that you should reinvent the wheel in terms of designing a website or page in an efficient or logical manner. What I mean is; try to make the experience of visiting your site memorable or at least worthwhile. The preferred thing is to have the visitor come back again and maybe even tell a friend. This may include interactive things on your site, such as games or web-based tools for them to use.

Already selling your own stuff? If you have your own products to sell, affiliate programs can be a great way of increasing the types of products available without increasing your own expenses or taking up room with inventory. You could then direct your customer to the other businesses that compliment your own.

Go get em tiger! Rawr!

Tags: Affiliate by reviews
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