My Affiliate Journey

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Taking Advertising Space On My Blog Into My Own Hands
2007-03-10 17:14:06
After experimenting with AdBrite on my blog I have decided to take the advertising ?real estate? of my website into my own hands. While AdBrite had performed well on my other websites both for me and my advertisers, it is not the case with this blog. I was fortunate enough to get the feedback from majority of advertisers that have made weekly and monthly placements on my site in the past via AdBrite. The new ad system on my website will feature ads on over 500 pages of my website. You can find all the details here.
More About: Space , Advertising , Blog , Hands , My Own

$1.5 Billion Spent On Search Engine Marketing?
2007-03-10 17:14:06
According to to survey conducted by Search Engine Land, a site that attracts readers that control about 15% of the global market for search advertising, at least $1.5 billion is spend annually. I would guess that good number of those surveyed are affiliate marketers who drive traffic to their website using pay per click campaigns.
More About: Marketing , Market , Search Engine Marketing , Search Engine

Arbitrage Absue and Content Advertisig
2007-03-10 17:14:06
WPvideo 1.10 I just found this video over on David Olsen’s blog, and just could not pass without commenting. But I am doing so on my own blog instead, since the comment itself may be some what lengthy. While I appreciate the good intention of the author of this video, if you are a small budget PPC advertiser (like myself) Google does give a thing about you. While personally I would not mind if my ads would appear on these sites, as long as they provide real traffic I am fine with it. They make money, hopefully I make some conversions in sales and every one is happy. From time to time you will come across a site like this one (PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ANY ADS ON THE SITE, IT WILL COST SOME ONE’S MONEY), and if you have a content ads enabled in your AdWords account you may end up getting suspiciously high volume of traffic from this website. As I did about 5 months ago. This website delivered about 600 ?visitors? to one of my landing pages in 10 minutes and not even on...
More About: Content , Rage , Advert , Arbitrage , Absu

What is Kartoo?
2007-03-10 17:14:06
That was exactly what I asked myself today while reviewing the web statistics of my blog. Evidently my blog was found on Kart oo. Turns out it is a search engine that returns the search results in from of a map. I am not sure about efficiency of search results but it sure is entertaining. Evidently it uses Flash Player to show the results in a form of map. If you don’t have Flash Player you can still use an HTML version, but it is not nearly as fun as flash version is. You can search the web in seven different languages. You can also choose the default search engine to collect the results (Google is not on their list).
More About: What , Hat

BumpZee! Upgrade: Communities Become More Focused.
2007-03-08 23:11:02
How often did you join an online community or forum only to remain there as a ?new/inactive? member? I personally can easy come up with at least 10…. I visit Bump Zee! several times a day to read or participate in an ongoing discussion. After checking out the latest upgrade it is clear to me that communities within BumpZee! are becoming more focused (a missing aspect of many online communities and the reason #1 I am “new/inactive” member of so many of them). BumpZee! started with one community- Affiliate Marketing Community. Recent upgrade introduces additional SEO/SEM community, with many more communities on the way. If you wirte about Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, this new community maybe perfect for you. While communities within BumpZee! are focused around particular subjects, membership is open to everyone. If you are a blogger you may request an ?auto inclusion? option and if you write on topics related to your community, your posts w...
More About: Muni , Come , More , Focus

Wild Hogs
2007-03-08 23:11:02
If you are planing to take off from posting and business in general, ?Wild Hogs ? is a good one to see. Me and my wife saw it last night. We also are big fans of Fandango especially when it comes to new releases with long lines. Try it out! Buy purchasing online you save $.50 and do not wait in lines…. And if you use my link I will make a whooping $.10! Anyway, good movie!
More About: Wild Hogs

Are You Branding Your FeedBurner Feed?
2007-03-08 23:11:02
Turns out that giving your Feed Burner’s feed extra shine an flare is very easy. It took me about 15 minutes to transform my feeds landing page as well as e-mail subscription into a branded feed and a branded subscription. Here is what you need to do. Prepare two images to be used in your FeedBurner account both of the images have to be hosted on your server. Here are the images that I have used: Larger (248×65 pixels)   Smaller (200×52 pixels) Larger Image- I have used this to place it in header of the feed. FeedBurner recommends that this image is not wider or taller than 140 pixels, but you have some freedom when it comes to this one. Smaller Image- This one had to be no wider or taller than 200 pixel. No freedom here. If yor image is larger FeedBurner will not accept it. Upload the larger image somewhere onto your server. Sign in to your FeedBurner account locate the feed you will be working with the go to Optimize>Feed Image Burner. Provide the url of ...
More About: Branding , Your , Feedburner , Brand

Technorati And Benefits of Scheduled Posts.
2007-03-08 23:11:02
There maybe days on which you feel more inspired to write, and if you ever post more than 5 posts a day on your blog you may notice that Tech no rati is not always eager to keep up with updates on your blog. I have noticed that it is particularly true when time between posts is short. Of course this may not be an issue for you if your have good readership base and do not really care about whether or not Technorati has latest update of your blog. After a little experiment, I noticed that there is better chance of having your content updated on Technorati if the time between your posts is about three hours. If you are using WordPress scheduling your posts can be very beneficial. After you have written a post and are ready to publish it just edit the ?Post Timestamp? of your post, making sure to live ?Published? checked in the ?Post Status Stamp?. This can be beneficial to affiliates who use WordPress blog to promote affiliate products, where of course number of daily posts can be high.
More About: Schedule

Do You Squidoo?
2007-03-08 23:11:02
I just joined Squid oo today. Needless to say the first lens I have created is called Affiliate Marketing (please head over to give me some “star love”). I joined the Squidoo, to explore it’s potential of generating extra traffic to my website. Not until I have created the lens did I realize that you can earn money as well. Do you use Suidoo? I am just interested to hear what you have to say about it. If you Squidoo lens can use some link-love don’t hesitated to share it with me and my readers in comments (links in my blog comments do not have ?nofollow?). I am just looking for ideas when it comes to Squidoo so if you leave a link to your lens I will make sure to give it 5 stars. I would appreciate if you can do the same. Here is what I would want to know: Can Squidoo help your site in terms of traffic/ranking? Is it good for networking? Can you really make money with Squidoo? Other?

Your Comments Are Appreciated
2007-03-08 23:11:02
Today the number of comments on my blog became bigger than number of posts. I will not give away the numbers, since these numbers are nothing to brag about. Nevertheless as of today there are more comments on my blog than posts. To celebrate this occasion and say a special thank you to those who commented on my blog I have installed Top Comm ent ators Plugin. While I do not use ?nofollow? in my comments, I have decided to reward those who commented the most on my blog by placing their names/urls on my sidebar because my front page has the highest PR. Now you see the top ten of them in the sidebar and this post I entirely dedicate to all of them: 45n5 (21 commnets)- actually this number is not quite correct since Mark from 45n45 has made other comments using other name. Nevertheless he is on the top of the list. Not only he added much to things I posted on my blog, I also received some nice ?link-love? from his blog as well. So who is Mark? He is a superb blogger, excellent progr...
More About: Men , Comments , Your

Incoming Links and Yahoo! Badge
2007-03-08 23:11:02
I have installed Yahoo ! Badge on my site a while back, but had to take it down because I suspected it to cause some problems. Few days ago I decided to put it back on the sidebar of the blog. It’s available form Yahoo! Site Explorer. I found it very interesting that this time around the number of incoming links had increased of about 2,000 give or take few hundred depending on what time of day you are accessing my website. It can be purely coincidental but of course this number is welcomed. I have seen this widget on many websites and blog and of course I wonder if the owners of these websites had noticed an increase in number of incoming links? Just my curiosity for today. I have to say that although this number is about twice the number I get for incoming links within Google Sitemap account, the traffic from Yahoo! is almost next to zero.
More About: Links , Link , Ming

How To Write A Paid Review.
2007-03-08 23:11:02
Paid reviews can be quiet controversial due to the hype they may create. But if you would like to learn how to do it well and with great degree of professionalism I highly recommend reading Andy Beard’s article, a great example of paid review. Elsewhere on his blog he offers few but very important points to consider before accepting a paid review: Will your opinion be affected by the fact that you will be paid for writing a review? Are you unbiased toward the product or service you are about to review? If you are offering a criticism is it a ?constructive criticism?? While any one can come up with the points above, it is not so easy to put them into practice. If you look through the reviews that Andy wrote in the past, you can agree that he knows what he is talking about. To write this kind of review one needs to put in hours of research plus the time for compiling the review.
More About: How To , Review , Write , Paid , View

New WP Plugin: FeedBurner Feed Stats.
2007-03-08 23:11:02
When Mark at 45and5 has asked the question in one of his post about what would happened to your subscribers if Feed Burner went out of business. It can hurt! So Mark came up with the hack which allows you to get Feed Burner statistics without using FeedBurner on your blog. The idea was so cool that it even got attention of Eric Lunt from FeedBurner. Anyway, this lead to new plugin called ?Feed Burners Stats ?. After writing this I am heading over to download the plugin.
More About: Plugin , Feedburner

ReviewMe Affiliate Program
2007-03-08 23:11:02
Since some bloggers have already written and said things about Review Me affiliate program, I did not feel like I have something of value to contribute the the conversation. But today I have received an e-mail from PayPal which notified me that first payment from ReviewMe has arrived. While this was only $30 and most of it went right back on promoting this blog, this fact nevertheless gave me a boost to write a few words, which will summarize and hopefully help me to remember reasons I joined the ReviewMe in the first place. While there are so many opportunities for a blogger to monetize their blog, ReviewMe caught my eye due to the fact that the advertisers can not neither require nor expect only positive reviews by bloggers. This reason along can provide an excellent ground for unbiased feedback for advertisers as well as (in case of highly trafficked blogs) some extra traffic. But of course there is a temptation that comes with the territory. Once in a while you may receive a requ...
More About: Affiliate , Affiliate Program , Prog , View

What?s Up With Your URL?
2007-03-08 23:11:02
A fellow blogger Mark from Bloglyne.com have asked me following question: What ranking were you trying to get by registering your URL??? *grins* that has got to be the WORST URL name I have ever seen.(http://www.volodymyrzablotskyy.com) I think this is one of those ?loaded? questions. So bare with me since it may take me a while to get my point across. When I have purchased this domain, I was not an affiliate at the time and knew nothing about online marketing. It just sounded so good and self indulging to have my first and last name as a URL that I simply could not resist. Would I choose it now, probably not. Who the hell is going to remember this kind of URL? Am I sorry I chose this URL absolutely not. I have learned many useful things marketing this URL and it has become very sentimental to me. If you noticed that what title tags contain (?My Affiliate Journey?) for my website has nothing to do with what is found in URL. If you are curious enough try to search the big 3 (Google...
More About: With , Hat , Your , With You

ReviewMe Allows To Manually Update Your Blogs Statistics
2007-03-08 23:11:02
If you have not logged into your Review Me account for a while, now is a good time to do so. A while back I have complained that ReviewMe was behind on statistics for my blogs. Well, I am not sure if anyone one from ReviewMe have read my post, most likely not, but they now offer an option where you can manually update the statistics for your website. I was able to update them two times in the period of three days, but you can not update them more than once in a single day. In addition you can now set your own price as well. Great improvement by ReiewMe Team. ReviewMe is a website where any website owner can purchase a review of his or her website. While bloggers are offered a wonderful opportunity to monetize on their blogs, they are not required to produce positive reviews only. You can register up to six blogs in your account, but there are certain criteria your blog is required to meet in order to be approved. They are base on Alexa Ranking and the number of subscribers to your blog.
More About: Blogs , Blog , Your , Statistics

Ingenio- Pay Per Call Solutions
2007-03-08 23:11:02
After signing up for Ingenio affiliate program few days ago, today I had a chance to participate webinar presentation that helped me to understand better the product as well as to hear from panelists some very convincing testimonies about the effectiveness of Pay Per Call solutions. I was quite surprised to hear about average pricing of $2-10 per call, but in the course of presentation I learned that some clients pay $16-20 per call and can not ask for a better deal. How Does Pay Per Call Work? Many Internet advertisers can understand pay per click advertising. In essence pay per call works similarly. You place an ad and pay only when a potential client calls you. There are some extra logistics involve that pay per click industry does not need to worry. When an advertiser sets up a pay per call advertising as unique 888 number is assigned and when people dial that number they are automatically connected to advertisers phone number. Here is an example for search query ?florist, ny? w...
More About: Geni , Solutions , Solution

DoFollow Love Knows No Limits!
2007-03-08 23:11:02
Some time ago I was enlightened by fellow bloggers about ?follow?, ?nofollow? and the rest that goes with it. I am glad to have installed DoFollow plugin, since I consider most of my posts to be either ?buried? or ?dumped?, depending where do you come from. Today I have come across an article at Internet Marketing Tell All. The author is offering $500 in cash prizes, just beacuse he installed “DoFollow” plugin? Well, in order to qualify there are some rules. Whether or not you are skeptical about the entire idea, you have to admit that it is indeed a clever way to get link love flowing. So for that reason alone I am in! … Oh, just in case I do win, it will go to charity.
More About: Love , Limits , Know

Do Kontera Ads Bother You?
2007-03-08 23:11:02
Over the period of last few months I have been experimenting with Kontera advertisements on this blog. I have noticed that recently some of my posts contain 10 or more ads. The behavior of these ads remind me very much like SnapView which I took down from this site a while back. At this time ads are bringing me an average $.40 per click, but the total income from this site is not significant enough. What do you think, should I keep them or should I get rid of them?
More About: Other , Tera

What?s Up With Your URL?- Update
2007-03-08 23:11:02
As I promised in my post about weird URL of my blog, I am doing just a little follow up. Here are the results in Google for the title of the article. As you can see the page itself was not indexed yet but my blog shows up nonetheless. Heres is another example of the post I wrote about Yugster. Not only it is indexed, but it shows up in Goole for ?Yugster YouTube?. While this post was published few days later, I think it got indexed so quickly because of an incoming link from PRWeb. So there you go fellow affiliate, don’t sweat over ?keyword-stuffed? (I am just making this term up) URLs. The truth is it doesn’t matter that much. Besides if you promote merchant like Amazon, you will need domains in thousands to satisfy this myth. Get some quality links pointing your way and you will rank well for George Bush even if your domain says www.BillyClinton.com (It’s a joke, no political debates please!)
More About: With , What , Hat , Your , Update

Wordtracker: Measuring The Buzz Around Oscar Nominations
2007-03-08 23:11:02
Following press release caught my attention. Word tracker, a keyword research company that stores a database of over 300 million search terms that people have used over the past 90 days had published a list of searches related to Oscar nominations. Personally I can care less about the Oscar but I have experimented with Wordtracker in the past. Although I never was able to purchase their yearly package, which comes at $275.92, I managed to use their ?free trial? to set up my first ever pay per click campaign. I think my next purchase might just be their yearly subscription. You can give them a try for free. There is a limit to how many keywords you will be able to download. Great keyword research tool.
More About: Nomination , Buzz , Nations , The Buzz

Yugster Uses YouTube To Showcase Their Products
2007-03-08 23:11:02
Yugster, recently started to utilize video to showcase their products. According to a press release, since December 2006, when the company began to create videos which help customers to understand what they are buying, there was significant improvement for the website’s success. Company is planing to create VideoYugs for over 90% of the products available on their website. Yugster produces their videos in house utilizing YouTube , which in turn may drive additional visits and sales when videos are viewed by YouTube members. I wonder if time is coming that other merchants will do the same and if new types of promotional (video)-material will be available from the major CPA networks. There is a link initiative I would welcome, as probably many other affiliates.
More About: Youtube , Products , Show , Product

Rediscovering PRWeb
2007-03-08 23:11:02
In the past I have used PRWeb to a certain extent and have seen some wonderful results. If you have not tried press releases in your marketing efforts, I highly recommend to give PRWeb a try. There at two major benefits to use PRWeb as I see it. Initially, after your press release has been published you are very likely to get some highly qualified traffic, since PRWeb distributes press releases via channels or as they call them ?industries?. Although there is no certain way to measure ROI when press releases are involved, in some cases they have proven to be much better than pay per click campaigns. As the time pases your traffic associated with the press release will decrease but your press released is archived and if you consider PRWeb’s Page Rank, which stands at 7, you can continue to benefit from an incoming link. In some cases your press release it self can acquire page rank of 3 or higher. Depending on what other media outlets or websites pick up your press release, the...
More About: Ring , Cover , Over , Disco , Discover

Technorati Is Reporting Link From BumpZee!
2007-03-08 23:11:02
After welcoming its 300th member just few days ago, my favorite affiliate marketing community is closing in on its 400th member. Which I predict will happen by the time I wake up or some time tomorrow, with the rate it is going now. But there was something else that grabbed my attention today about BumpZee! Tech no rati is reposting an incoming link from BumpZee!, not from the blog though, from http://www.bumpzee.com/affiliatemarketing : Evidently this is a link from a entry that was bumped to BumpZee’s “home page”. Am I the only one seeing this? Is there a surprise in the making?
More About: Report , Port , Link

How To Write A Paid Review.
2007-03-08 05:10:01
Paid reviews can be quiet controversial due to the hype they may create. But if you would like to learn how to do it well and with great degree of professionalism I highly recommend reading Andy Beard’s article, a great example of paid review. Elsewhere on his blog he offers few but very important points to consider before accepting a paid review: Will your opinion be affected by the fact that you will be paid for writing a review? Are you unbiased toward the product or service you are about to review? If you are offering a criticism is it a ?constructive criticism?? While any one can come up with the points above, it is not so easy to put them into practice. If you look through the reviews that Andy wrote in the past, you can agree that he knows what he is talking about. To write this kind of review one needs to put in hours of research plus the time for compiling the review.
More About: How To , Review , Write , Paid , View

Incoming Links and Yahoo! Badge
2007-03-08 05:10:01
I have installed Yahoo ! Badge on my site a while back, but had to take it down because I suspected it to cause some problems. Few days ago I decided to put it back on the sidebar of the blog. It’s available form Yahoo! Site Explorer. I found it very interesting that this time around the number of incoming links had increased of about 2,000 give or take few hundred depending on what time of day you are accessing my website. It can be purely coincidental but of course this number is welcomed. I have seen this widget on many websites and blog and of course I wonder if the owners of these websites had noticed an increase in number of incoming links? Just my curiosity for today. I have to say that although this number is about twice the number I get for incoming links within Google Sitemap account, the traffic from Yahoo! is almost next to zero.
More About: Links , Link , Ming

Your Comments Are Appreciated
2007-03-07 17:09:02
Today the number of comments on my blog became bigger than number of posts. I will not give away the numbers, since these numbers are nothing to brag about. Nevertheless as of today there are more comments on my blog than posts. To celebrate this occasion and say a special thank you to those who commented on my blog I have installed Top Comm ent ators Plugin. While I do not use ?nofollow? in my comments, I have decided to reward those who commented the most on my blog by placing their names/urls on my sidebar because my front page has the highest PR. Now you see the top ten of them in the sidebar and this post I entirely dedicate to all of them: 45n5 (21 commnets)- actually this number is not quite correct since Mark from 45n45 has made other comments using other name. Nevertheless he is on the top of the list. Not only he added much to things I posted on my blog, I also received some nice ?link-love? from his blog as well. So who is Mark? He is a superb blogger, excellent progr...
More About: Men , Comments , Your

Technorati And Benefits of Scheduled Posts.
2007-03-06 05:07:01
There maybe days on which you feel more inspired to write, and if you ever post more than 5 posts a day on your blog you may notice that Tech no rati is not always eager to keep up with updates on your blog. I have noticed that it is particularly true when time between posts is short. Of course this may not be an issue for you if your have good readership base and do not really care about whether or not Technorati has latest update of your blog. After a little experiment, I noticed that there is better chance of having your content updated on Technorati if the time between your posts is about three hours. If you are using WordPress scheduling your posts can be very beneficial. After you have written a post and are ready to publish it just edit the ?Post Timestamp? of your post, making sure to live ?Published? checked in the ?Post Status Stamp?. This can be beneficial to affiliates who use WordPress blog to promote affiliate products, where of course number of daily posts can be high.
More About: Schedule

Do You Squidoo?
2007-03-06 05:07:01
I just joined Squid oo today. Needless to say the first lens I have created is called Affiliate Marketing (please head over to give me some “star love”). I joined the Squidoo, to explore it’s potential of generating extra traffic to my website. Not until I have created the lens did I realize that you can earn money as well. Do you use Suidoo? I am just interested to hear what you have to say about it. If you Squidoo lens can use some link-love don’t hesitated to share it with me and my readers in comments (links in my blog comments do not have ?nofollow?). I am just looking for ideas when it comes to Squidoo so if you leave a link to your lens I will make sure to give it 5 stars. I would appreciate if you can do the same. Here is what I would want to know: Can Squidoo help your site in terms of traffic/ranking? Is it good for networking? Can you really make money with Squidoo? Other?

Are You Branding Your FeedBurner Feed?
2007-03-04 17:06:02
Turns out that giving your Feed Burner’s feed extra shine an flare is very easy. It took me about 15 minutes to transform my feeds landing page as well as e-mail subscription into a branded feed and a branded subscription. Here is what you need to do. Prepare two images to be used in your FeedBurner account both of the images have to be hosted on your server. Here are the images that I have used: Larger (248×65 pixels)   Smaller (200×52 pixels) Larger Image- I have used this to place it in header of the feed. FeedBurner recommends that this image is not wider or taller than 140 pixels, but you have some freedom when it comes to this one. Smaller Image- This one had to be no wider or taller than 200 pixel. No freedom here. If yor image is larger FeedBurner will not accept it. Upload the larger image somewhere onto your server. Sign in to your FeedBurner account locate the feed you will be working with the go to Optimize>Feed Image Burner. Provide the url of ...
More About: Branding , Your , Feedburner , Brand