Pepperjam Network is one of the most progressive affiliate networks online today and a personal favorite of mine.   Back in Sep 2008 I wrote a short Pepperjam Network review covering some of the unique backend control panel  features of their affiliate network as well as a quick glimpse of their selection of niche clientele.  Today I just wanted to jot a quick note concerning their little known Blogger Incentive Program.

So what is the Pepperjam Network Blogger Incentive Program?

Most Pepperjam Network Publishers already know Pepperjam offers a generous Publisher Referral Program, which pays publishers from $5-7 for every new publisher referral:

However, you can also earn an extra $50/month from Pepperjam Network via their Blogger Incentive Program.

Pepperjam realizes the power of bloggers and has gone the extra mile to make being a publisher with them a little more beneficial.  The Pepperjam Network Blogger Incentive Program is an incentive program whereby any PJN publisher/blogger will receive $10 for each post you make that promotes Pepperjam Network or any Pepperjam Network tool.

So how much can you earn with the Pepperjam Network Blogger Incentive Program?

Publishers/bloggers are allowed to post 5 such posts a month for an easy $50.  No, you’re obviously not going to get rich off of the Pepperjam Network Blogger Incentive Program but it’s still a solid $5o bucks in your pocket every month.

So how does Pepperjam Network know you made a post?

Easy.  The only thing Pepperjam requires for you to do in order to receive credit for a post is e-mail bloggers[at]pepperjamnetwork.com prior to making your post to gain approval of the topic.  This obviously enables the Pepperjam team to eliminate spam.

So what else can I blog about with the Pepperjam Network Blogger Incentive Program?

Aside from reviewing the Pepperjam Network itself you have a slew of topics to choose from.  Check out the Pepperjam Network Blog for the latest news from Pepperjam or you may want to consider blogging about any of their clients to earn some easy side revenue with the Pepperjam Network Blogger Incentive Program:

Pepperjam Network Featured Clients

So what are you waiting for?  Pepperjam Network Loves New Publishers. Sign Up Today and earn an additional $50/month.

Well the day has finally arrived for affiliates and bloggers.  Last October the FTC announced that bloggers (affiliates) who offer endorsements must disclose any payments they have received from the subjects of their reviews or face penalties of up to $11,000 per violation….or just a stern warning letter.

This didn’t bode well with many bloggers but judging from the enormous amount of feedback the FTC has been pumping onto the Internet the past few months, it seems fairly clear they’re not on a proverbial witch hunt for bloggers.  After all, with millions upon millions of blogs online they couldn’t possibly enforce the rule across the web.

The new FTC rule is solely meant to help consumers make a more educated decision on what products or services they purchase from corporate sponsored bloggers, celebrities and social media venues.  I agree.

This is not a big deal.  If you’re a responsible blogger or affiliate this mandatory disclosure statement should be completely transparent to you.  In my opinion adding a disclosure statement to each paid post or even a page on your blog explaining sponsored posts or paid endorsements, only solidifies your credibility to your subscribers or site visitors.

However, before you even count the money on the table to write a review or endorsement, it’s your responsibility as an affiliate or blogger to get your facts straight first.  Start pumping out misinformed or incorrect information and you’ll tarnish your credibility faster than “The Mike O’malley Show” got canceled on NBC!

*For a full explanation of the new disclosure ruling please visit:

http://ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf

A side project of mine, Free Advertising Blog, has recently moved into the 4th natural search position on Yahoo! out of over 2.4 billion competing web sites for ‘free advertising’.  I thought that was pretty cool; so I took a closer to see how I was ranking on some other terms and noticed I was ranking on the first page for a slew of other search terms related to free advertising.  View screenshot HERE.

Over the last few months I noticed a decent increase in site traffic (along with some revenue) from this free advertising service:

Yep, nothing to quit your day job over but nevertheless a nice increase in web site traffic for virtually no work accept approving classified ads.  I figured this increase was coming from Yahoo! so I checked into the stats (like we all do) just a little bit more:

I have to admit I really wasn’t surprised to see that Google was still dominating Yahoo! in natural search referrals.  Even being positioned on the second page of Google is better than being listed on the first page of Yahoo!.

No sir, I’m not looking the gift horse in the mouth, it just never ceases to amaze me how powerful Google has become over the last 10 years it”s been online.  No competition.

Platform-A, http://www.platform-a.com, AOL’s digital advertising division, recently announced the launch of an affiliate marketing solution that links the buy.at affiliate network to the widget-based marketing tools of wildly popular Goowy Media, Inc.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years…Goowy Media, Inc. develops innovative online products and services that provide simple, intuitive tools for managing your digital life and expressing yourself on the web.  Their most popular products are yourminus.com and goowy webtop

This progressive move by AOL enables web publishers, like you and me, to generate additional revenue from a combination of affiliate, widget and viral marketing.  It will be exciting to see how Platform-A advertisers integrate/syndicate this new capability into their customized widgets for your blog, website, and even your desktop!  Very cool stuff indeed.

For more than a little while now I haven’t had too many good things to say about these blasted Widgets!  They seemed to just take up real advertising space and bleed my hard-earned web traffic.  However, I will gladly test these viral advertiser generated widgets out on my network of blogs/sites so my visitors and customers can snatch them up and redistribute them to the far corners of the Web.  Just think about the applications…MySpace, FaceBook, etc.

Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform-A states, “This solution combines the best of affiliate and widget advertising in a solution that benefits publishers and advertisers alike.  Publisher revenue potential, brand exposure for the advertiser, and potential conversions grow virally each time the widget is downloaded by a consumer.”

I agree Lynda!  Now this is what we collectively mean by the moniker Web 2.0 people!

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

I’m gonna get right to the point.  I think Technorati is pretty much useless, other than checking who’s linking to your site and research around specific tags and/or tag combos.  And that’s about it for all the frontend hype they throw at you.

After you run through their hoops of claiming your blog, adding all those silly little "WEB 2.0" widgets and crossing your fingers in hopes the anal W3C Markup Validation Service gives you the greenlight, what do you REALLY get in return from Technorati?  Let’s take a look.

Sheisty Indexing (at best) – I’ve had my blog(s) indexed in Technorati for a few years now and about 8 months ago I started to notice indexing problems.  Although I hadn’t changed anything on my blog the finicky Technorati spider decided to just stop indexing some of my blogs.  Well that just blows.

Nowadays Technorati indexing seems completely random at best.  Just take a look through their forums and you’ll see countless bloggers begging and pleading to get their blogs indexed.  I even submitted a few and it would work for a day and then crap out again.  So far this blog hasn’t been updated in ohhhh 34 days!

Minimal Traffic – Let’s face it, whether you primarily blog to make money or just share your knowledge/experiences you’re gonna need traffic.  Go take a quick look at your referral stats through your control panel.  This blog gets roughly 65% of its traffic from Google, 20% from Yahoo! and the rest through a slew of verticals.  Technorati brings in less than 0.8% of my traffic.  That’s a big whoopdy doo folks if your bad with numbers.  LOL!

Even Darren Rowse from www.Problogger.net recently did a study to see if even making the Top 100 List mattered on Technorati in his post: "Is Technorati Being Gamed".  Darrens blog at that time was in the #3 spot and he stated:

A quick visit to my stats packages shows that in the scheme of things it’s hardly caused a blip on my traffic radar. Technorati does drive a few hundred readers per month to this blog – but not a single visitor came directly from that the Top 100 Favorites page.

So why bother with Technorati from a traffic perspective?

Back in the day ( a few years ago) Technorati worked because it was focused on blogging.  However now with the overhyped "WEB 2.0" moniker on everbodys lips it seems they’re focused on trying to become a social media mogul.  Too bad Technorati you had a good thing going there for a while.

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

Understandably it took the Bloggy Network staff 35 hours to merge their two authority sites: Blog Top Sites and Blog Flux.  The end result of http://topsites.blogflux.com looks pretty good though and will be well worth the trouble.

-Ahmed, David, and Jacob, from the Bloggy Network state:

I would like to thank everyone for their patience – it was a rather complicated task, but I think we pulled it off well. We’ve grown 100% in the last 4 months, and look forward to generating a lot more traffic for your blogs (we just crossed 3 million hits out in the last month).

The integration of these two authority sites should significantly increase the speed of approval of the blogs you submit.  In addition,  if you are a current BlogTopSites.com webmaster, you DO NOT need to update the tracking code.

With over 77,000 blogs listed in their directory and growing it would be a good idea to submit your blog(s) today.  Sure, many people nowadays prefer not to sort through directories to find what they want….but the search engines do.  Using numerous free blog directories such as http://topsites.blogflux.com can dramatically increase your inbound one-way links and promote rapid search engine indexing. 

For additional blog directory sites please visit: Blog Directory and RSS Directory Submission

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags]bloggy network, authority sites, blog flux, blog top sites, blog directories, search engine indexing, one-way links[/tags]

Most every blogger by now is using or has at least heard of MyBlogLog.com.  But…in case you’ve been living in a cave for the past year MyBlogLog is basically a viral social network that enables bloggers to effectively communicate and establish relationships with one another by putting some simple code on their blog. 

It’s really a good viral marketing concept and has taken a firm root within the blogging community.  However….aside from gainig a little more viral traffic to my blogs the most important benefit to using MyBlogLog for me is the stats section.

MyBlogLog tracks:

• Where Users Came From
• What Readers Viewed
• What Readers Clicked

As an Adsense publisher that last one is huge.  Ad tracking offers vital information. It takes the guess work out of how the world spends advertising dollars. 

This feature allows me to test where the best Adsense placement, style, size, etc. for my blogs by how many outgoing clicks they get.   NO MORE CHANNELS OR WADING THROUGH BORING SERVER LOGS.  =)

And NO, using MyBlogLog with Adsense WILL NOT get your Adsense Account banned.  There seems to be an unhealthy fear of this in the blog-o-sphere.  Please READ THIS.

OK back to the info…..

Furthermore, you can filter this statisitc by looking at everything clicked, ads clicked or content clicked.  Here’s a quick snapshot of the of one of my blogs which reveals to me which ads are being clicked most:

You can upgrade your account(s) to Pro status which will give you real time stats tracking for either $3.00 per month or $25.00 per year.  Unfortunately though you’ll have to pay that fee for every blog you wnat to track in real time.  That’s not very cost effective if you run dozens of blogs though. 

There are a few cheap Adsense tracking scripts out there on the web like AdSpyTracker but if you’re running a blog I recommend just joining MyBlogLog for quick and easy Adsense tracking.

Affiliate Programs
Free Internet Advertising

[tags]mybloglog, adsense, adsense tracking, social network, blogger, blog, blogging[/tags] 

The affiliate management firm pepperjamMANAGEMENT (no. 293 in the INC. 500), has introduced its pepperjamBLOG.com, which is dedicated to search-engine marketing, online media, and affiliate marketing. The blog will include commentary from the management team of Pepperjam, along with guest bloggers, such as Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney.com.

For more information about pepperjam, please visit: www.pepperjammanagement.com.

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