Great Buzz, Lots of Hype, and Buggy Registration Pages

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Over the past few months, I’ve been increasing my interest in affiliate marketing as it becomes quite clear how much money can be made in this way. I’ve already had some success with Amazon’s program, and I’ve experimented with some of the other big name programs.

One of the problems is finding reputable names that are easy for visitors to your site to recognize. PepperJam Network has created something of a buzz in recent months across the Make Money sphere with its appearance

So what is PepperJam Network?

I’ll just steal their words for that answer!

… Pepperjam Network is a 3rd party solution that provides publishers and advertisers with affiliate tracking, reporting, and payment technology, among other things. Pepperjam Network represents the next generation of affiliate marketing by providing all of the basics above, as well as a user-friendly Web 2.0 interface, communication tools (i.e. Pepperjam Chat), an educational resource center (The Pepperjam Knowledge Vault), and full and unfettered affiliate transparency (the Pepperjam Transparency Meter).

Why it might work for WordPress Bloggers?

I was searching through their blog looking for insight when I came across another posting that caught my interest: PepperJam StoreBuilder is optimized for WordPress:

If you are a Wordpress blogger and want to place products on your Web site using Pepperjam Store Builder™ all you have to do is build a store by logging-in to PJN HERE and selecting “Wordpress Optimized” before copying the code that you’ll ultimately place into your Web site.

That might be very useful, I thought. Not many bloggers have succeeded at turning their blog into an affiliate system that really works. In fact, WordPress isn’t optimized in that respect at all. But … that’s mostly because it’s designed to be a BLOG not a storefront.

What is a superaffiliate?

COO Mike Jones talks about where PepperJam is positioned and why you might want to consider joining.

On that basis, I’m preparing to give it a try. I’ve already signed up for the network. Let’s hope I can generate enough traffic to NOT get kicked off the network! See my targets are modest!

Now why won’t that page load? Here’s the one glitch with the system. Their registration page, once completed fails to load properly each time I tried. Now, Mike, just make sure the system works! Then perhaps everyone will be a little better off.

Sponsored Post.

Blogging Update: How many sidebars are enough to drive you crazy? and more…

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I’ve been looking at redoing my sidebars for sometime on InvestorBlogger. But the thought of doing that really strikes horror into me. There’s so much that needs tweaking. I have five blogs on InvestorBlogger Dot Com, and each of them has two sidebars. Worse: each of the sidebars needs multiple changes!

SideBar Changes: Adsense, Stats, and more…

I’m planning to remove the Adsense from all of my blogs to get impressions back to zero. It’s obvious from the number of clicks, payment rates and so on that my Adsense account has been targeted as ‘underperforming’, or to use Adsense’s euphemism “smart-priced”. I’m not sure what’s covering that phenomenon, but once I reduce my impressions to zero, I can begin giving them a test to see what the source is. Right now, my publisher code is spread across numerous sites.

Financial stats are outdated by more than a month. In fact, in September I easily broke through US$12K earned since I started blogging online! I have now averaged a little under US$500 per month, and recent months have edged towards US$600 in all, though the past two months or so have been weak. But I’m not keeping up with the ads, so I need to find some way to tame the information.

Trimming one sidebar, and standardizing the content much more would also help, as each sidebar appears different. This also makes trouble when widgets need to be pulled. I typically add as much to one widget to cut processing time, so I have to hack the HTML code in each text widget to make sure things are okay. It’s a bummer if I didn’t tag the code properly! I can’t find it! Right now, I need to move the BlogRush code because the BlogRush Project hung up its shoes (not surprisingly).

In future, I think I’m only going to have one major sidebar on my blog, likely on the right. It will it make finding things much easier! But there are other changes afoot.

InvestorBlogger and DollarTravels

I recently merged all my blogs into one ’superblog’, and created URL redirects. I figured it would be much easier to manage one superblog than numerous mini-blogs and each blog would benefit from the ‘traffic’ juice, thus gaining more exposure. The results have been pretty mixed: traffic is up, but I noticed a couple of things that give pause for thought: the sub-blogs are much stickier than the original blog itself; the original blog is ’somehow’ lost … and some traffic is not clicking through in quite the same way. I also preferred having an automatically updated blog. Wordpress MU isn’t much fun. Many plugins just don’t work properly. Some of my favorites cause problems for search engines by not working properly.

It seems that I’ve underestimated the hits on traffic to InvestorBlogger as a result of the Google Spank last year. My blog has failed to gain any appreciable increase in PR since then, and advertising revenue has not increased much since then. Some advertisements are sold, but many are not. This all-in-one strategy hasn’t really worked as it has also undermined mini-blogs by not providing a more focused and more ad-ready audience!

So, it looks like I’ll be reestablishing some of the original domains with the original content sometime soon, as well as adding one or two more. InvestorBlogger will remain but minus some of the financial content. It *could* be that InvestorBlogger in its current form is now reaching the end of its useful life: but then I thought that last year, and, if anything, content and traffic are 100% better. So who knows? It is clear that some refining of InvestorBlogger’s focus is becoming necessary at some point.

Quotation: Mark Cuban

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If you are going to trade stocks, you just have to follow one rule and remember one thing. That rule is always have a definite knowledge advantage about the company you are trading, and always remember that every stock transaction has a sucker, and you have to know whether its you or the person on the other side of the trade. No one buys a stock from your, or sells one to you knowing they are leaving money on the table.

Mark Cuban, the BlogMaverick, posted at The Stock Market is for suckers.

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