Adsense only allows you to have 3 blocks of their ads on of your webpages. So, sometimes with larger sites you need additional sources of income. I  usually run 5 or 6 cpa advertisement programs along with Adsense. I mix them  up of course so my website is not all ads.

Recently though I have been looking for an additional ppc program when I came upon Chitika. Chitika is a great program if you  have search engine traffic from the United States and Canada. You are only served their ads from traffic coming from United States and Canada reaching your webpages via search engines.  Their pay per click for me has just been a little under what Google Adsense pays. So there is defintely a lot potential to make big money  from Chitika.

Their ads are great and very attractive to surfers. I ad them in addition to adsense especially since I really do not want 3 google ads on one page. The less ads in my experience you have from Google the better paying ads you are served at the top.  Having Chitika along with adsense can make you even more money by allowing you to optimize Google Adsense.

I am really happy with my experiences so far from Chitika. I will have to review it longer to get a better review of their performance over a longer period of time.  If you have any experiences with Chitika I would love your feedback.

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Local listings truly only work if you have an actual business that caters around local retail and services.  It is of course important to have a good landing page and accurate contact information on your local listing otherwise any work put into local marketing will be worthless. But , now lets assume that you already have a listing up and want to start ranking higher.

The first thing you must do if is fill up your profile with lots of content and relevant keywords.

Upload as many pictures as Google allows.
Upload as many videos as Google allows.
Fill the title with keywords you want to rank with.
Fill your description sections with as much content as you can with keywords related to your industry.

Make sure you have all information about your company’s policy, hours of operation, and payments etc etc

Get your site reviewed ! Have customers leave you positive reviews , the more the better. Also if you have not already make sure you visit other local listings sites and fill out a profile and have them reviewed by clients. Sites such as kudzu , yahoo local, yelp all show up on your Google Local listing reviews.

Having reviews is so important in any local marketing campaigns  I have seen a lot of people fill out profiles or buy advertising on superpages, kudzu, etc and not have any reviews. Reviews are why people go to these sites , they want to know if your company is legit. Reviews are pretty much word of mouth and word of mouth is the best traffic  you can get.

Add a coupon , adding a coupon can attract new clients. Google loves this and makes  you stand out.

Try these tips on how to improve your local listing and watch the leads come in. Sometimes it takes a while for the results to appear. I have waited a couple of months for a listing to finally appear at the top. Depending how competitive your local market is for your store or service is will depend on how high you rank.  Getting these steps done will definitely help your business.
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So, today, I’d like to review these 14 plugins, and tell you how exactly you could benefit from using them. Please do try them out and let me know your opinions.

AdSense Manager

AdSense Manage is a cool “All-in-one” plugin that serves the purposes of putting up AdSense on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets, which really cool, because you don’t have to visit AdSense control panel every time you need to generate an ad code for a new block.

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AdSense-Deluxe 2

I can remember when AdSense deluxe used to be the best Wordpress plugin for AdSense publishers having Wordpress blogs. Offers a similar functionality like AdSense Manager. You can add code blocks and assign tags to them, which you can paste anywhere in your blog, including within post content. Has features to globally control all your AdSense ad blocks from the control panel.

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All in One AdSense and YPN

I bet most of you who can’t be bothered to put up AdSense in everyone of your posts would really dig this one. All in One AdSense and YPN, automatically inserts AdSense/YPN blocks into all of your blog posts – on the fly. One of the better AdSense I’m using right now.

Download Now

Ozh’ Who Sees Ads

Who Sees Ads is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, depending on user defined conditions. You can manage ads in your templates or within posts and pages. You can define different criteria for displaying ads for different people. As in regular reader, search engine visitors, first time visitors and so on.

Download Now

Random / Rotating Ads

Google AdSense, affiliate ads, banners, images, flash, text, etc… you name it! This plugin can rotate any kind of an ad anywhere in your blog. It’s great if you want to rotate your affiliate banners and YPN ads in the middle of all the AdSense blocks. And there’s no limit for the number ads you want to put up for rotation.

Download Now

Smart Ads

Some of you might not want to complicate the whole “AdSense thing” on your blog. For those you, Smart Ads automatically inserts advertisements like Google’s Adsense above and below your post content. These advertisements are only visible when viewing a single post. It comes with a pretty simple setup and usage.

Download Now

Google AdSense for Feeds

Automatically put AdSense on your feed. If Feedburner AdSense ads are not working out for you or if you’re not using FeedBurner to serve your feed, this could be the next best thing for you. Install it, set the settings, apply your publisher id and you’re done.

Download Now

More from Google

The More from Google plugin, also allows you to specify a search term for each post. This search term is used to create a link at the bottom of your post linking to search results for that term. This encourages your readers to Google for related articles, without leaving your site. Helps you earn more money from “AdSense for Search”.

Download Now

Add Post Footer

Adds a post footer for all your blog posts. This is not a plugin that is totally dedicated to AdSense. Instead, it let’s you set a default footer for all your blog posts so that you may put everything you want in the footer plus, some AdSense ads. A simple plugin with a simple concept, I’d say.

Download Now

Ad Integration

Provides a simple interface for you to just add Google AdSense to your blog posts. Not a very usable plugin compared to AdSense Manager and a couple of others, but keeps stuff simple, and supports virtually any ad type.

Download Now

AdSense Integrator

This plugin was developed to insert and manage your AdSense ads, based on the last Google rules and AdSense updates. Something like the Ad Integration Wordpress Plugin, but dedicated to serving AdSense ads only.

Download Now

AdSense Under Image

Here’s something for those of you who run photo blogs. AdSense Under Image insert an automatic AdSense block after the first image appearing in the blog post, for all of your blog posts in the blog. With a lot of images, adding AdSense can be a hassle for all you photo blog owners. This plugin simplifies that.

Download Now

Googmonify

Some thing like AdSense deluxe, offering the same functionality. Googmonify lets you insert Google AdSense ad units into your posts with easy to use tag sets. The cool part is that you can set up ad tracking to have an accurate bird eye view of how your ads perform.

Download Now

WP Tag Ads

Display Google AdSense ads based not on your post content, but your post tags. This help you put more relevant ads into the post content and in turn, make more money as a result. If you currently do section targeting on your blog, this can especially helpful for you to automate the process.

Download Now
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I made an attempt to make this list a practical one, not trying to push in the other 101 link building tactics that you wouldn’t find useful in today’s Web 2.0 SEO world.

And you will find 3 categories here – first, Innovative Link Building Strategies will house the best strategies that hadn’t been exhausted by people. Not-so Innovative Link Building Strategies are worth a shot, but might not work as well as the first. And the last, Bad Link Building Strategies that can possibly hurt you houses some strategies and practices you should probably avoid.

So, Enjoy!

9 Innovative Link Building Strategies

Build a useful Firefox extension, and have a support page on your site for it’s users. The initial effort might be a bit hard but with an innovative idea, it can really pay off. Be sure to build a plugin that your specific niche finds useful.

Add Technorati tags to your posts. I have developed a tool called Technorati Tag Generator which will simplify this process.

Create a good Squidoo lens. Squidoo lenses tend to rank really well in search engines and also pretty easy to monetize as well. But it’s important that you create a good informative lens to maximize the SEO value passed through links back to your own blog.

Review not-so-well established affiliate products. It’s really easy to gain a higher place in search engines for these product. And these pages will perform well in SERPs when people are searching for product reviews since there’s not that much competition.

Comment on much smaller blogs in the same niche. Some of these bloggers will be willing to collaborate with you and frequently link to your blog to show their appreciation.

Write about startups and link to them. These companies often have news pages where they acknowledge the people who talked about their product. I myself had gained links this way with a few startups like Plurk and Woopra.

Collaborate with other bloggers to promote each other. The progress can be slow but effects can be really rewarding. In a few weeks, all of the blogs in the circle will equally gain search engine exposure.

Create Wordpress themes. Well, you actually must have some designing and coding experience to do this, but the results are just phenomenal! If you are ready to make an initial investment, get it easily done by a freelance designer.

Compose linkbaits. There’s a whole community of bloggers wanting to link to you. Composing a linkbait that other people perceive as “good quality content” is not the easiest thing to do, but it’s one of the best.

11 Not-so Innovative Link Building Strategies

Gain social media exposure. Some social media sites pass out dofollow links on published content and links on personal profiles. Be sure not to exploit them because there are hordes of loyal members in them that can take you out before you spell S-E-O.

Do some dofollow blog commenting. But be sure to contribute well constructed non-spammy content to that blog to avoid being stamped as spam. At all costs, refrain from providing classic two word appreciation for the article.

Submit your feed to RSS directories. You can pretty much gain a few backlinks from these with minimal effort. The SEO value passed through these is not the best around, but still good.

Do press releases. These are very much like one-time article submissions. But they are picked up by search engines and treated with relative importance so, the initial effort might not hurt.

Do guest posts. There’s a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this. Some bloggers think that doing a guest post on a PR6 site is really good because they’ll get a valued link to their blog. But it’s the exposure and the other few hundred links that you’d get to your blog from the large readership of that PR 6 blog that counts.

Run blog contests. Everyone does it, and it has guaranteed SEO effects. The exposure to your blog and gaining new readership are just two of the by products of running a successful blog contest.

Do forum posting. Again, this is a debatable subject. But the added benefit here is that these links can pass enormous amounts of traffic as well as some SEO value.

Do article submissions. The effect of this is debatable but, it has some effect alright. Some say article directories are on the way out and it’s not entirely untrue. It takes a lot of time to compose articles and submit them, not to forget.

Request reciprocal links. Keep your reciprocal links to a minimum and don’t include a “links page” within your blog/site that would contain links to dozens and dozens of other sites. A few sitewide links that are relevant to your subject matter would be just fine.

Submitting your site to link directories. Contrary to popular belief I think this method is on the way out. It can consume a lot of time and because pages are so full of links, they don’t actually pass that much value to the site it’s linking to.

4 Bad Link Building Strategies that can possibly hurt you

Submitting your site to Link farms. It’s widely accepted that planting a mass number of links in single page has demeaning SEO consequences. Putting up a link farm on your own site is more damaging.

Interlinking sites on the same IP. If I have 5 sites being interlinked to each other and all of them are in the same server, with the same IP address, they would pass no/very low SEO juice.

Buying up a massive number of links at once can hurt you temporarily. It’s best to increase the number of links to your site while maintaining a natural link profile. Going from0 to 500 links overnight can really hurt you.

Blog Spamming. When you’re spamming wordpress blogs, it’s be really easy for you to get blacklisted with your e-mail and domain name after a few bloggers marking your comments as spam. If that happens, most of your comments on wordpress blogs and other sites that use Akismet would be treated as spam.

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You see, ever since blog networks came out, big spenders had always been going for blog networks. It is much easier to handle a lot of blogs under one co-ordination other than co-coordinating the whole thing with a lot of independent bloggers. So because of that, big advertisers would slowly trend towards blog networks over time.

And the ones that don’t? Well, most of them are having their own affiliate programs going for them. I mean, see, if you pay a blogger $50 to run a 125×125 banner ad for a full month and if you’re not entirely sure of that blogger actually giving you a good ROI, why not go for an affiliate program? If you pay $25 per new signup, the blogger who can deliver more signups will obviously earn more than $50 and the company is not going to pay for blogs that pull up misleading blog stats and don’t deliver what they ought to be delivering right? It’s lucrative to both publishers and advertisers alike!

And guess what! If they can’t make the initial investment to run their own affiliate network, they can join a network like Pepperjam that would do the job for them, including click tracking, payout handling and so on. Running an affiliate program for a product had never been this easy. And what’s more attractive than a $25 per signup affiliate program? A lifetime revenue sharing affiliate network, of course. More and more bloggers tend to dig this option and there are now a lot of affiliate networks giving publishers lifetime revenue. Something that a monthly advertisement can not bring to the table.

So at the end of the day, what I can see is that unless an independent blogger is a prominent face in a specific niche, going can get really rough for him or her. It’s survival of the fittest you know. But as a direct result, internet advertising field will be subjected to unprecedented growth. Less fraud, and foolproof Return-on-Investment means that advertisers are virtually willing to throw their money at you, if you can deliver the results.

So, if your private advertisers are disappearing by the week, it might not be all bad.

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But it’s amazing how many people fall into this trap day after day – not quite knowing what the consequences are. And as someone who had experienced them first hand, let me tell you that they are not so easy to go through with.

What is Google Sandbox?

SEOs believe that when you do ‘certain things’ that would necesarily mess with Google’s algorithm – like gaining a lot of links in a relatively short period of time for a new site or an established site, the site would be sent to a sandbox where it will be spending some time, not getting traffic from the relatively high traffic keywords that you might be targeting.

A thing that many SEOs do is to start a brand new sites and order large chunks of new links from other sites through a test link marketplace right? Well, this “sandbox” had been very successful in preventing SEOs doing just that. Simply said, this is a mechanism to reduce the weight of the “might-be-paid-for” links that a site gains.

It’s debatable how much time a site would spend within this sandbox, but most SEOs believe it to be 6-8 months. Not something that you want to be sent into right?

How to prevent/minimize the effects of Google Sandbox?

1. If you’re already in the Sandbox, patience is the key. Don’t try ordering more links because you will ultimately be left in the No man’s land longer by the search giant.
2. Try maintaining a natural link profile. Don’t order too many links too soon. When you get around 1000 links within a single day for a brand new site, anyone can see something fishy is going on there.
3. When you’re starting a new blog, register the domain as soon as possible and set up a temporary home page. Then, link to it from another site that is already indexed in Google. This will ensure that by the time you get your whole site online, it will already be in the Google’s index.
4. If you should go ahead and buy links, make sure you put quality before quantity. It’s better to get a few good quality links than a lot of high quality links.

Avoid this one when you can. It’s quicksand in there you know.
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Well, over the past few days, I’ve been trying out the Pepperjam Store builder. And I have to give it up for Pepperjam – they have done it again. Without a doubt, it’s the fastest,and the most convenient automatic store builder I ever used to promote affiliate products!

Pepperjam Network has hundreds of advertisrs and together they open up gateways to millions of products that you can sell on your blog and make a commission from. Not to mention, your niche might probably be covered within these millions of products. You can build these product feeds according to any criteria – limiting your listed products in the store that you’re building to the keywords of your choice. Refining your store to make it more niche specific? – Not a problem.

What got me most was the fact that their claim on “any store can be built virtually within 30 seconds”., and I had to test it out to beleive it! And now I do. Their 4 step initialization process was darn easy that it indeed took me less than 30 seconds to build my first store. Oh and they ahve an onine demo to show you around too.

So, if you’re into affiliate marketing, I don’t believe creating a virtual online store for your blog can be easier than this. Though I’m not the biggest fan of the Pepperjam Store interface customizations, it’s something that affiliate marketers would definitely find interesting.
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So here’s where the magic is. Networks like Shareapic.net pays publishers to upload their own pictures, host them free of charge and get paid whenever these images are viewed. For an instance, if I was running a photo blog which was getting a lot of image views, I’d host my images at Shareapic.net and post the thumbnails on my site. When the user clicks on the thumbnail, he/she is taken to the Shareapic gallery which has the original image, that can be viewed properly.

And when that happens, I get paid for the number of image views. Ah, I almost forgot to mention that Shareapic earns money through the advertisements they display alongside the original image. But, not to worry, it’s not that much big a deal, and many users will not get distracted.

If you’re running a photoblog, then hosting your images at Shareapic will save you some bucks on your bandwidth expenses and will get you some bucks from the traffic you refer to them. Genereally, their rate is 22 cents per 1000 views, which is not that bad., and is higher than any of the other networks that I researched.

But, you don’t have to have a long-running photo blog to earn some decent cash this way. You can simply start a nich photo gallery on a simpole web page or a blog. For an example, summing up the whole process in a few steps;

1. Do some keyword research on the words ‘pics’, ‘pictures’, and ‘photos’., and select your niche. Let’s say I selected the phrase “house pics”.
2. Now I need to get some house photos. I don’t necessarily have to have a lot, but more the better. For this, I’d search around the net for some non-copyrighted content or do a Creative Commons search on Flicker.
3. After this, I would set up a wordpress blog, divide my pictures into 5-6 categories and make a post on each of the categories.
4. I’d be building a different ShareAPic gallery for each of the categories and pasting the code for the thumbnails, so when the user clicks on the images, he/she will be taken to the ShareAPic site.
5. Do some link-building and wait for Google to index the pages – and I’m done!

One thing I wanted to note here is that niche picture sites/photo blogs have relatively less competition in search engines so you need not do a lot of SEO to get them ranked.

Suppose you hit a niche where you get 1000 hits everyday, which is easily doable. And let’s assume that each user will check out a minimum of 5 photos. (Some of them will be there to download the whole gallery) So, you will be having 1,000 x 5 = 5,000 minimum image views per day, which will earn you (5,000 / 1,000) x 0.22 = $1.10 everyday, on auto-pilot.

All for this, for a few hours of work… So I guess that’s not a bad invertment, is it?

Image Credit: cobalt123

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Things are almost back to normal and I will be starting to post on ROCKFUSE regularly from now on.

One of the main reasons that I have not been posting much is because during the past few days I’ve been engaged in writing a blog seo e-book., which I’m planning to give away as a free download to all of my subscribers – new and existing. The book is a refined, improved version of the articles I’ve published on this blog, and a few articles I wrote exclusively. It mainly focuses on beginners in the field of blog marketing. But anyone reading the book, I believe can learn a few things about seo.

Download it with the blog-seo link that will appear at the end of this or any other post of ROCKFUSE that is in your feed reader or e-mail client, as displayed in this screenshot.

And also, about the Referral Contest, I’m almost done with the process of validating the entries. Winners will be notified within this week. Thanks for your patience.

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So, how exactly can you optimize you blog design to get more visitors? (Image Credit: Draggin)

Making the Blog Header as convincing as possible

I  believe that the blog header in any blog plays the biggest role in giving out a first impression. And of course, first impression does the most when you’re trying to sell something.

As you can see, in ROCKFUSE, I have reserved a considerable amount of real-estate for the blog header. This is because I wanted to outline and highlight every major thing that I wanted my blog visitors to know in their first visit.

It is important that you give your visitors a clear view of your blog’s niche and what you blog about, in the most convincing method possible. So, I find it important mentioning a few pointers in the blog header that truly says what you blog is about.

However, the downside of nice blog headers is the amount of bandwidth it takes and the increased page load times. Of course, this can be improved to a certain extent if you just follow a few optimization tips.

Having the e-mail subscription form

More than half of my blog’s subscribers are e-mail subscribers. Which is really good. Why? Because, they have a solid subscription to ROCKFUSE and they are easier to be tracked.

I find that reserving the extra space needed to have an e-mail subscription form really pays off. It gives a straight-up impression that the visitor should subscribe by e-mail. And not to forget, some people barely have any knowledge of what RSS is so it’s really important you play it safe offering an e-mail subscription form too.

Of course, some would argue that having a simple button guiding you to the subscription form is enough. I do not disagree. But trust me, you’ll see better conversion rates with the extra effort you put into integrating a subscription form to your design.

Constantly reminding people to Subscribe

This really works. You may have seen the banner below all my posts. “If you find this post useful, why not subscribe?”. This can really get you those one-time visitors that came to your blog accidentally from a Google Search.

As if the subscribe buttons on my blog ain’t enough, you might say. True, but the secret of asserting something is to assert it until it registers in someone’s mind. Why do you think they run the same advertisement on TV multiple times?

Why Subscribe Section

I haven’t done this yet, but I do plan to in the future. It’s just a small simple page titled “Why Subscribe?” that people can click through and in which you can present your case – Why should you exactly subscribe to my blog.

I have talked to some bloggers who had great success with this. Basically, you should tell your audience the benefits of subscribing to your blog, in the minimum amount of words possible. Might seem like a bit out there, but, yeah, it works.

You really can’t expect all of your visitors to read that page. But, you have an opportunity to convert a good number of people that do.

Making your blog’s content more accessible

Although a good part of this article is focused on getting subscribers through methods that are merely assertive, the ultimate question at the end of the day – that a subscriber might ask is, how can I possibly benefit from subscribing to this blog? When that question is asked, you have to agree, so little can you justify with having an e-mail subscription form or a good blog design. People do not just subscribe because your blog design rocks right?

I believe the word I’m looking for is ‘content’.

Just think, of all the times you actually subscribed to a blog, have you ever done it without going through the blog’s content, or at least the most popular posts? At the end of the day, subscribers are after content and if you don’t deliver what you should, you will not convert new subscribers, nor would you keep the existing ones engaged.

To serve this purpose and this purpose only, I’ve done a few major things in my blog. I have put my categories on the top alongside the popular posts, and I have used excerpts in the homepage to make sure I can display more recent posts. And these things are really easy to do provided that you have some html/php knowledge to play around with your template.

I guess at the end of the day, you can’t sell anything without showcasing what you are selling.

Technorati Tags: rss subscribers e-mail subscription blog design optimize blogging
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