While I was helping a friend of mine to discover new revenue stream for her car related website I decided to search for “anything” car related that could bring affiliate earnigns (the site was already covered from PPC program and banner sales, so we needed something “extra” that would still blend with our site, be useful to our visitors and yet generate profit as well). It was a coincidence that in the same time I was approached by Daniel of T3Leads and letting me know about their latest platform and all the features included.

The sign up process was very clean and neat, it had a phone verification (on which you could choice from two options to be verified, via phone call or text SMS to your mobile phone). Within few seconds I already had my code sent to me via SMS and I could input the numbers in the registration form to be verified. You get to verify your phone after you have verified your email, which I think is a very good thing especially for advertisers as T3Leads makes sure that real and serious publishers are accepted in their program.

Once logged in I saw a very clean white panel with blackish menu bar and drop down options, which facilitate the navigation throughout the panel without having to wonder which way to go now.

In the top right section you get presented with 3 tables of information’s, your user information and current total earnings, the second table displays your earnings of today, yesterday, last week, previous week and last month, so you can compare and see how your affiliate efforts are doing and how much money you are actually doing in a glance, without needing to go through reports (of course you can do that too if you want to see reports for different periods). The last table, and not the least is the info of your Account Representative, full name of A.R., email, phone etc. So in case you need help, you got all the ways to contact your A.R. right in front of you.

But lets get back to the sweet part, the tools that you get with T3Leads Affiliate Network.

Banners research & tracking ID

Just as with other affiliate networks that you might have been you get the regular options to create aliases (which are tracking IDs) to better track each of your campaign. Once created your aliase you can then head over to the banner search form, which lets you chose banners based on different specific features you like, such as;

• Banners based on category niche (such as payday loans, auto insurance, students loan and much more)
• Banner types: static rather then animated, textual banners rather then flash banners or you can simply select all
• Banner shape
• and banner size

I am specifically mentioning these features as it is a great time saver, a feature which I haven’t seen with other affiliate networks. I can simply chose the options that I need and get results of ONLY those banner types and sizes that I have chosen, so i don’t have to scroll through hundreds of banners of different sizes.

Integrated forms to your site

This is the part that I loved mostly and that would have fit perfectly for my friends car related site, the forms. As soon as I saw this I was already imagining a new page with one of these already made forms that have everything integrated, from A to Z. No need to send visitors to a different site and show them the form, show them the firm directly in your site and keep your visitors in your site.

Currently T3Leads has 8 form templates, from easy 1 step forms (longer format) to 2 steps or even 3 steps form (much shorter format). Which can be easily generated through a javascript and even easier integrated as simple as copy/paste within your page template.

Create an entire & powerful affiliate website

This is the tool option that mostly like with T3Leads, you can create and entire affiliate site based on a CMS that T3Leads will provide to you that is;

• Easy to install – no time wasting and wondering what to do
• Easy create unique content and publish it to your site
• Hundreds of professionally designed templates to attract more leads and generate more revenue on your T3leads vertical (design matches your niche), pre optimized for the search engines, simple lead/money magnet CMS

The only thing that remains to your part is creating content and advertise your website (yeah, would be cool if they did even that heh?). You can see more benefits you could have as affiliate in T3Leads affiliate solutions page.

Earnings with T3Leads

The earning options available with T3Leads varies from the quality of leads generated as it is described in the Lead Programs page, were you can earn from a low $4-7 EPL up to $14-25 average EPL.

I haven’t yet integrated T3Leads on my friends site, as we are preparing the content and everything and most likely we will use the form (so we have to make it suit well in our site and blend) but I liked the platform and wanted to share it with you guys.

The only affiliate link you will find in this post is the banner bellow, so if you decide to sign up with T3Leads through my affiliate link I will appreciate it.

Wouldn’t you want your AdSense panel to look exactly like the Google Analytics panel, with all those fancy graphs where you can see your earnings performance, where you can filter out channels and compare them too.

Google AdSense New Dashboard Panel

Exactly, this is the first news coming out from the Google AdSense team, and I will get to the second one just in a second, lets first take a look at the new dashboard. Other then a new design, the new dashboard has much more features. As mentioned earlier, you can compare channels and see how the are performing, you can see which channels perform better and even see in a graph how your performance is improving while you are doing your A/B testing of your ad sizes and position.

You can filter the ads, and see the performance of your chosen ads over a day, week or a month period and see if you are doing better or your stats are crawling. Chose to see only channels from certain sites or multiple channels and compare them between, see the estimate earnings, the clicks, the pageviews and all the other useful information’s we already have with the old dashboard on AdSense but displayed in a graph as well.

I sent a beta test request to get accepted as well through this URL so I could personally test out the new interface and see if it has also included the that lovely “Create annotation” option as well as it has in the Google Analytics so I can mark the days where I make new changes and see how these new changes perform. If you want to see some screenshots the folks over at mytechquest have published some basic screenshots.

New Google AdSense Ad Formats, Wouldn’t You love Some New Formats?

I don’t know about you, but until now I have had to limit my designs to suit ad formats well on sites where I use AdSense only to make money online. And every time I had to hold back on an idea just because ads would not fit well there I felt like “arghh why the don’t have some new ad formats” .. i guess Google can read my mind too, of course I am just kidding. Anyway, soon to come ad formats are the next 960×250, 300×600, 728×300, I have seen similar ad formats being used…but I just can’t remember where I saw them.

Here is a cool video the Google AdSense team has created regarding the new ad formats, and you can see more videos over at Google Watch This Space

Have you had the chance to work with the new Google AdSense dashboard or to test out these new ad formats?

Whenever I build the site I use a similar strategy, however I tend not to build the websites for AdSense only and I have some specific criteria that I do follow and one of those is that the site must be somehow related to products and that have a decent market but it doesn’t have to be to saturated. But from the other site, it is also a good strategy to build a few mini sites that would bring some income to pay the bills or even to fund the “main” sites economically too. Since these smaller sites purpose is not only informative but as well to generate a decent income and mainly from AdSense it has to;

• Have a decent search volume – means it there are people showing interest for this type of product/information
• AdWords advertisers should BID a certain amount per click – usually I track down those that have over $1.50 USD per click or even $2 per click
• The site should also be also product driven – in case it shows successful and exceeds my expectations I could then integrate more programs to generate even more revenue

Researching High Paying Keywords for our Niche site

Now that we have got a clean view of what type of site we want to build and that we have a clue on what market we want to build our site what we should do is perform a search based on the main keyword so we can find a more specific niche keyword in the market field that will have a high enough PPC bid. In this example we will use as main keyword “car” and with the use of the Search-based Keyword Tool (or rather, SKTool)we will try to dig deeper and find the perfect keywords for our site.

Once landing in the sktool homepage we see the form as in the above image. Insert you main keyword in the Word/Phrase field and hit the Find Keywords button. Sktool will then perform a search and display results of suggested keywords for our main keyword together with monthly search volume data, competition, suggested PPC bid and some other information’s as shown in the bellow image.

Now that we have the results and keyword ideas based on our main keyword all what we have to do is click on the Suggested Bid tab (which is highlighted in the above image) to organize the display of the results from the highest suggested BID result to lowest, you might also want to align the same results based on monthly search volume to make sure you chose a keyword that does indeed have a decent search volume otherwise we might be just wasting time building a site over a keyword that nobody searches for. You might also want to use a SEO software to perform an analyse over the competition for a certain keyword, check the market samurai review, a seo software that I strongly recommend.

With our results in front of our eyes all what we have to do next is check through the list and find some keywords with decent search volume, that has advertisers bidding over that keyword and make sure that the competition over that keyword isn’t too strong so we can get the site in the top 10 rankings and if possible by just using the free & effective internet marketing strategies so we keep our investment as cheaper as less as possible.

Expanding your site based on other high paying keywords on the same niche

We have our main keyword, we have checked the competition and everything looks good enough for us to jump in and build our site. But don’t rush, the next step you should do is perform yet another search on the keyword you have picked and find other keywords that are related to that niche so you can expand your site based on other high paying adsense keywords on the same niche, drive more traffic and of course generate more revenue.

In the following article under the make money online category I will write on how to check the competition for certain keyword and ways we can expand our site by integrating relevant programs to generate more income, so don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed (it is completely free, but you already know that) and get updated when the article gets published.

OIO Publisher Coupon for October 2009 – TERRA-DNSEO Buy Now for $37

Once you have created the account, apply coupon code TERRA-DNSEO and you will receive immediate discount of $10 on OIOPublisher plugin.

Why you might want OIOPublisher?

• Easy to install, with just one click like all normal plugins
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• Affiliate access to other users, let others advertise your services for you and give them % of your earnings

All those features included with OIOPublisher can really make your online orders much easier to manage. You can create channels, sell different type of advertisement (banners, videos, links etc) or you can even easily customize it and use it as billing software for your services by setting up flat rates or recurring payments.

For full features of this lovely plugin please visit OIOPublisher website, do not waste time purchase this plugin within the month of October and use coupon code TERRA-DNSEO to receive $10 discount.

I do not know if this is something new or old actually, but today when I logged on my adsense account I did notice a link that was telling me that now I can link (integrate) my AdSense account with my Analytics account. In either case this is a great feature as it would give more space to webmasters to optimize their content, learn more about their users how did they found their website and how do the visitors actually interact with webmaster’s content, it also can help you optimize your website design and even optimize the position of your AdSense ad blocks.

That does sound cool doesn’t it? Actually it sounds incredible you would say, but hold on a second, we are talking about Google here, the master of “gathering data” and turning those data into cold cash for them.

It kinda turns out that this great feature you have dreamed about has a bad side too no? Well for sure it can help you learn more about your website, your visitors, your content, your design and even helps you to make more money online by optimizing all possible aspects of your site, but it also…in a legal way you give access to Google to actually share, compare AND use your traffic stats data and possibly classify AdWords advertisers on how much they are actually bidding on a keyword and on which sites would they get displayed too (The higher bidders on more traffic sites?!). Does it make sense to you? For me its crystal clear and personally I do not have anything against all that as it can’t turn worst, but it could definitively turn into better if your site grows.

However, lets leave the “presumptions” aside, for those that are interested to integrate their Google AdSense with their Google Analytics account, as always, Google has already thought about making a video tutorial for that (even tho it is too simple to be guided by a video).

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After I read that post on Paul’s blog I decided to signup under his account and give it a try even tho I had doubts about this kind of “stuff” since always. In addition I referred a friend which at the same moment was complaining that he has nothing smart to do at the moment, told him about bux.to and that he could make some extra money online instead of boring me off on MSN.

Couple months later, my friend had reached $10 with bux.to and to not waste more time he requested the money to be transfered on his AlertPay account so he would not be wasting any more time if it wasn’t something legit. What made my friend to request the money at this point instead of waiting to increase his earnings were some rumors he had heard about bux.to not paying his publishers..

Since the day he told me he made the request have passed 2 months. In meanwhile, another local friend told me he had requested to be paid since 3 months now but not even a cent sitting on his AlertPay account. At that point it crossed my mind that bux.to might just not be a way of making money online, but rather like an entertainment website where you can waste some of your time in a different way then watching a blank screen.

No matter what friends have been telling me so far, I have decided to check this one by myself, before I was checking bux.to rarely, maybe 2-3 times a month, now I want to reach a certain amount (at least $18, $4 more missing) and request the money to see if my friends stories are true or there is something shady going on with users from less developed countries.

I can’t speak much about bux.to from personal experience at this time, nor about sites with similar schemes as I have always considered them as waste of time, but I would love to hear your story about bux.to or other similar sites as bux.to and what your experience has been with such sites.

If you want to know if bux.to is going to send me the money or not subscribe to my RSS feed or have the posts delivered to you via email.

Well for my luck I was wrong (phewww), the email was announcing that Google AdSense was going to retire their referrals program since the last week of August and all the referral codes starting from the last week of August were not going to display a thing.

Naturally they did not closed the doors to more revenue for them, actually they gave an alternative..the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network which will operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States.

Another news is the next one

AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.

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The result was total failure, just little over $10 for several months with Kontera and the poll results just convinced me even more that the traffic I was sending away from seo optimization blog for those cents was not worth, end results…removed Kontera.

I do personally like inline ads, similar to Kontera, and I don’t find them disturbing my browsing experience on other sites so I tried to find a new company that can take over Kontera’s place. However I ended up with AdBrite.

I have to admit that AdBrite’s CPC up to date is way much better then Konteras, tho it has some points that I don’t like either such as

• I feel the advertisers database is a bit low
• not much of control over the color of the inline ads
• payout is via checks only

However, there might be even this option enabled, but so far I have not found it (raises an eyebrow) and the payout method is really so old style. I first hesitated to sign up with them because of the payout method, I believe another optional payout (maybe PayPal) would incentive more users to sign up with them. What i do like tho is the CPC (cost per click) which is 5-10 times better then what Kontera used to pay me.

Aside the inline ads with AdBrite you can chose different type of advertisement, textual links, ad banners or even full page. However those options are something I have already excluded from using here at dnseo.net. The fullpage ads are really annoying and when I endup surfing on them I really feel disturbed, the textual links is something I have since always avoided and will avoid, not because of Google but because I feel like to keep the site clean from that perspective and way of making money (maybe in feature I don’t know) and if I would want to replace the affiliate banners on this site then I will certainly sell them privately (already have refused a good amount of proposals) but thats when I can organize my time a little bit better.

However, I would like to hear your opinions and experience with AdBrite if you have used them in the past (or currently).

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Sometimes it is hard to find the proper plugins which you might want to use in your blog, I can’t remember when I first started how many plugins I had to download test them and pick those that mostly suited for my needs. What made my research more easier were websites that had posts similar to this, listed with a nice amount of plugins which users could download and use.

However I have now compiled a short list of plugins (which I have used and some I still do use) that can make your blogging experience even better. Bellow you will find a list of plugins separated in categories, SEO Plugins, Browsing and Entertainment, RSS feed plugins, Advertisement Plugins (related to make money online) and social bookmarking plugins. Hope this will turn useful.

SEO Plugins

Of course I have to give precedence to the SEO plugins first. You can also find my previous list of recommended seo plugins for wordpress, however let me compile the list again.

• All In One SEO Pack
• SEO Slugs Plugin
• Related Posts Plugin
• XML Sitemap Generator
• Textual Sitemap Generator
• RSS Footer For Scrapers

Social Bookmarking Plugin

There are different social bookmarking plugins out there and you can just be embarrassed which one to chose. Whoever I prefer more plugins that don’t invate the site and keep the layout clean.

• Alexa King’s Share This
• Apostolos Social Bookmarking
• AddThis Social Bookmarking

RSS Feed Plugins

The value of a blog actually lays on RSS readers (the regular readers which actually say that this blog is worth reading, we are reading it daily). However you need to remind them that you do actually have a RSS feed in your blog some times, and with these plugins it will be easier to get started.

• FeedSmith for FeedBurner
• Notify Uncofirmed Subscribers

Advertising Plugins

Not all of us start a blog to monetize it, but all of us end up doing that sooner or later. Here are some useful plugins that will help you monetize your blog by placing advertisement (private ones or as PPC publisher).

• Sell Ads Privately
• WP Ads (Rotate your ads)
• AdSense DeLuxe
• Got Banners
• Monetize Your Feed (Feed Footer)

Browsing and Entertainment

With the bellow plugins you can assure that your visitors will have a better browsing experience and make it easier for them to reach you.

• WP Page Navigation
• WP Polls Plugin
• Enhanced WordPress ContactForm Plugin

If you find this post useful, feel free to stumble, digg or bookmark on del.icio.us this post for feature reference. You can also subscribe to my RSS feed and get updated whenever a new post is published.

This latest poll I placed about Kontera and if it does annoys the readers had that destiny of equal results. The visitors of the blog voted 50% Yes it annoys and 50% no it doesn’t annoy them while reading the articles.

Even tho there is 50% of readers that say it doesn’t bug them (and personally me it does not bug when another blogger uses Kontera ads) I have to think twice about keeping them or not, since there is also a good 50% of readers that don’t like Kontera. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I will remove Kontera ads just because my readers don’t like them (even tho it is a valid reason), I had actually intentions to remove Kontera ads for several reasons…yeah I know, Money.

The Kontera Poll Results

[poll=2]

The money that Kontera pays me (especially per click) is really not worth bugging the 50% of the voters of this poll. There are few reasons why i should remove Kontera

• PayPerClick is too low
• Losing visitors of the blog for few cents
• Annoys half of the readers

Unfortunately I can’t come up with a good reason why I should keep Kontera ads but I will take another week or so to decide if I should remove them or not, so don’t get surprised if one day you will no longer see the Kontera ads in this blog.

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