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The following is a paid review and is my complete and honest opinion. If you would like your own paid review on my blog please visit the advertise page.

At the end of March, I entered WinningtheWeb.com’s $15,000 blog contest and sponsored a free review for one lucky winner.

It turns out, I won an autographed copy of Kris Jones’ upcoming book about SEO. For those of you who do not know, Kris Jones is an online entrepreneur and he owns the popular pepperjam network.

As for the reason of this post, I would like to congratulate Derek Salyers for winning a free review on my blog for his site. Derek is the owner of a blog called Click Consultants. This blog focuses on helping you learn affiliate marketing, which is something that I am getting into.

On my first glance of Derek’s website, I was visually pleased. I am a big fan of orange and black color schemes (if you couldn’t tell already), and Derek has a phenomenally brandable logo. In blogging, you want to be as unique as possible, and the design and logo that Derek has definitely will do that job for him.

Derek’s theme is optimized for the first time reader, with an easy to subscribe button at the top center of the page, as well as popular and recent articles to the left and right of them. This allows first time visitors a fast chance to see the newest, as well as the most important stuff Derek has ever written.

Derek has monetized his blog with the standard 125×125 advertisements on the sidebar (like this blog), and until he sells his advertising it looks like they are affiliate network affiliate links right now.

Below the 125×125’s it looks like two columns, and it makes the blog look crammed. The one thing I regret when I had my new theme designed was that I should have just kept it at one sidebar. Just like my blog, Derek’s theme has too much sidebar room with the two columns and this results in having more than one post on the homepage have a completely empty sidebar.

Moving on from appearances, the content on Click Consultants appears well written. Derek has gone a completely professional route by having nearly 80-90% of his posts as professional as can be, with the only 10-20% being personal posts or blog contests.

Click Consultants has a popular affiliate forum, which boasts over 1250 members already who have made over 8750 posts. The forums are made to help beginners learn affiliate marketing, as well as help the median marketers improve their game. The cost of joining the forum, however, is $29.99 a month or a one time payment of $279.99. While a monthly charge is a huge turn-off for most people, the amount of money some affiliate marketers make is incredible. While I am a bit leery to fork out $30 because I do not know how much good knowledge is listed in this forums that can’t be found elsewhere for free. Shame the forum doesn’t have a few day trial for a dollar or two, as that would probably increase sales.

Well, if you are looking to learn affiliate marketing and want to give the $30/m forums a shot, I would love to hear if they helped you.

The following is a paid review and is my complete and honest opinion. If you would like your own paid review on my blog please visit the advertise page.

No, im not going to talk about the George Clooney movie, but rather about about a blog named Affiliate Confession.

Affiliate Confession is the brainchild of network marketer, Alan LeStourgeon. It is essentially a personal blog which takes a completely honest look at all of the issues surrounding making money as an affiliate marketer. In his blog, Alan gives his tried and true opinions about real ways to make money with network marketing instead of boasting about unattainable, unrealistic income like many other popular bloggers. Affiliate Confession is a blog for the regular Joe who wants to dive into earning money online legitimately, minus all the scams and immoral marketing tactics.

As of October 2007, Alan has successfully managed to build his earnings to a steady $2000 to $2500 per month. Through his hard work and dedication he has learned many of the tricks of the trade and passes them back down to you through his posts on Affiliate Confession.

Updated daily, the blog covers a broad range of topics including: advertising, affiliate programs, Clickbank, Commission Junction, eBay, ebooks, Google Adsense, MLM, pay per click, traffic and more.

Affiliate Confession holds frequent contests to reward its readers. The current blog contest which runs until February 18th is for a free bottle of Nubody Organic Health Multi-Vitamins, a $40 value. Entering the contest is a breeze; just subscribe to the Affiliate Confession RSS feed and add the blog to your favorites on Technorati.

Taking The 30 Day Blogging Challenge is one of Alan’s most popular posts. Here he proposes that serious bloggers need to challenge themselves by committing to making at least one blog post per day for 30 days straight. The 30 day challenge is just one of the many honest ways that Affiliate Confession helps encourage readers to get serious about blogging, getting traffic and ultimately earning a decent income.

Pros

1. The blog offers completely free advice, plain and simple. As a reader, you will not be scammed into buying ebooks or products that are misleading.
2. Affiliate Confession lays everything out there without the sugar-coating and lies used by greedy marketers whose only interest is making a quick buck off of their readers.
3. Since the blog is updated on a consistent, daily basis with informative posts, there is always something fresh and interesting to read.
4. Contests are friendly, fun and anyone can participate.

Cons

1. Like any normal human being with feelings and wandering thoughts, Alan does tend to stray off topic from time to time with posts containing personal ramblings and even healthy dining tips and recipes. These oddball posts are by no means a terrible thing (they are actually quite entertaining), they just have nothing to do with network marketing!
2. The design is crap. At first glance I saw that it was an unbranded free theme and my first impression was that it was yet another crappy blog. Affiliate Confession should have a professional design done if Alan wants to stand out as the blogger who teaches affiliate marketing.
3. Alan’s landmark posts are not visible to the new reader. My blog converts a lot of subscribers because they can quickly and instantly see my most powerful posts and how much they will benefit them. Even if a first-time reader visits my blog on a day where I have an off-topic post, they will still have a good chance at converting. On Affiliate Confession, the only landmark posts shown are the ones with the most comments, and that is only displayed on the bottom right of the footer! You should make a featured posts area above the fold in my personal opinion.

If affiliate marketing interests you, go check out Affiliate Confession.

In my previous post where I introduced Adtoll and showed you how you could use it to make money blogging, I had only just touched the tip of the iceberg. Today’s post is dedicated to showing you many tips that I found out while monetizing my blog with Adtoll.

Set your prices LOW
If you believe you should set your weekly advertising price at $20 (Example number), then you will have very little luck getting direct advertisers. The best way to get direct advertisers through Adtoll is to set a ridiculously low price that will negate any risk the buyer thinks he/she may run into. Instead of setting your price at $20, change it to $3-4 and have 4-5 rotating advertisement slots. The reason that selling many cheap slots is better is because your blog will show up highly in the Adtoll directory because the price is so low. This will increase your rating which means you rank higher in the directory. The more people that see your blog the more money you are eligible to earn.

Network Ads Suck
Unlike Adtoll’s competitor Google Adsense, their default ads (network ads) are not targeted and they are sold in bulk. You only earn around 3-8 cents per click when Google Adsense will pay you 3-30. If you want to truly optimize for Adtoll, you will need to directly sell your ads by yourself of through the use of the Adtoll directory. The high paying network advertisers are mostly gaming companies which get a very low amount of clicks (since this blog is about making money blogging) and are not worth a lot. This combination results in a lower income than you have the potential for.

Enable Discounts
By enabling discounts (it should be enabled by default), you have the potential to dramatically increase your earnings. Adtoll discounts allow you to save a lot of money for buying long term advertisements. If an advertisements price is $1, you will save 20% by ordering 3 months of advertising. In an advertisers mind, that is a great deal. This will also keep your advertisements all directly sold meaning it mutually benefits both parties.

Bargain Discounts on Mixed Market Arts
It would be stupid for me to not take my own advice, so I have decided to lower my prices even more! When I first started monetizing my blog, I charged $200 per month for the top banner at the top. When I recently switched to Adtoll, I lowered that price to only $80. Now I swear I am going crazy because I have just cut that price yet again.To celebrate my monetization experiment with Adtoll, you may now advertise in the premium spot at the top of the blog for only $4 per week. I have even enabled coupons on that already low price, meaning if you order a month at that super low price, you will save an extra dollar on top of that.

BEST OFFER: You may secure the premium spot at the top of the month for THREE MONTHS for only $41, which is less than $0.50 per day! If you act fast, you may now advertise on this blog for three months and only pay half of the standard cost for a single month!

If you are interested in the other advertising locations on this blog at a discounted price, please visit the advertise page at the top.

This Guest Post was submitted by Tracey Sands from Piggy Bank Pie Writing Services. Update from Collin: I am not a huge fan of ebooks but I do know that a lot of people still make a good amount of money from them so I approved this post.You’ve finished your first ebook. It’s a PDF, it has a cover and it’s been proofed. It’s sitting on your website waiting for someone to buy it… but no one has, what gives?

Newsflash; there are millions and millions of websites out there; no one can find your ebook. Once you realize that, you’ve just begun to start the journey of bringing traffic to your site. This is every website’s mission. So how do you do it?

ISBN
First thing, get your ebook an ISBN. An ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. By having an ISBN number you can advertise your ebook on a lot more sites. Plus your book looks more credible to potential readers. Getting an ISBN number is free in some countries, but does take some time. I recommend visiting The International ISBN Agency to find out how you can get your ISBN.

Google Book Search
Once you get your ISBN you can advertise your ebook to Google Book Search. Google has a book partner program where they allow you to advertise your book on Google for free. Which translates to more back links, and Google helping you get traffic from its search engine. If someone searches bread, and you have a book on baking bread, one of those search results will be the Google book.

PayLoadz + PayPal
Another site to be a part of is PayLoadz. This is a great site to use if you don’t want to deal with an email autoresponder. Plus it’s free up the first $100.00. It even gives you the html coding to add to your website or blog. And the best of all, PayLoadz goes nicely with PayPal, it won’t release your product till PayPal tells it, it’s okay.

Or, if you have your own autoresponder, use PayLoadz to advertise in their marketplace. This will bring you more back links to your site. And the more backlinks you have, equals more traffic, higher page ranking.

Lulu
My second last recommendation, besides the obvious of writing articles with back links to your website, is Lulu.com. One thing that is great about Lulu is it’ll give you a free ebook cover when you build your profile. Lulu is a site that allows you to sell your ebook online. They take a fee from every ebook, but help you advertise your book in their market place. And again, the more back links you have, the higher your ranking in the search engines.

ClickBank
The last way you can advertise your ebook is joining ClickBank. ClickBank will take a fee of like $50.00 for you to have your product in their marketplace. Once in the marketplace any of the numerous affiliates signed up to ClickBank can push your product for you. That’s other Internet marketers, helping to spread the word about your product. They get a percentage on every sale they make, and ClickBank makes a small administrative fee, otherwise the rest is yours. What’s great about ClickBank is, it gets you more clickbacks, and more people are out their selling your product. It’s a cheap way to get affiliates working for you.

Well I’ve given you lots of tools to start with, good luck in the advertising.

To get your own guest post on Collin LaHay’s Blog Marketing Blog, please check out the Guest Post page.