Blogroll Builder harnesses the power of Google to search out relevant sites for you to link to your website. Using a simple 4 step process you can find lots of relevant and powerful sites to link to. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Set up the Search

Choose the search terms you want the plugin to use to search Google with. Your blog’s title, relevant keywords or general topic themes are all good places to start looking for links. You also set how many search results you would like to be displayed, which is helpful so you don’t have to sift through thousands of results if you don’t want to.

Step 2: Search!

Once you’ve decided what terms to look for, just hit the search button and Blogroll Builder does all the heavy lifting for you!

Step 3: Check the Results

At this point you can review the sites that have been found and choose which ones to turn into outbound links. From this stage you can view the website to make sure it is appropriate and relevant to your site and also edit the result entries to better suit your needs. This last feature is pretty cool as it allows you to trim the titles and simplify the links as you see fit and I am a big fan of anything that allows customization.

Step 4: Save the Links

In this step, once you’ve chosen the website(s) you want and customized the links to your liking you just have to save them and select which category to place them under. Just like that you’ve added some high quality links to your site, and since you choose which links you want you can add them quickly and in bulk, or slowly over time, whichever you feel is best.

What’s Included in the plugin?

The Blogroll Builder plugin actually provides a lot of value when you purchase it. You get a copy of the plugin (available as an instant download), free updates for life, free lifetime support should you have questions and an unlimited site license so you can boost the links of as many sites as you want. There is no “premium” or “platinum” package that you need to buy to get the lifetime perks, as those are all included in the $27 purchase price.

However, I have been in touch with the makers of the plugin and they are offering a special discount to AffiliateByNight readers. Anyone purchasing Blogroll Builder should use promo code: builder5 and receive $5 off the purchase price. That brings this valuable plugin down to a very reasonable $22, or less than a night out at the movies these days.

Over the weeks since, I have seen no change in the amount of offers I was being given and with the advent of the Cost Per Click (CPC) model that Sponsored Tweets released not too long ago and the service is going stronger than ever. There was still the looming cloud of the loss of API access, but Twitter clarified it’s stance recently that gave support to programs like Sponsored Tweets and so it seems that they will be allowed to continue operating as normal, which is fantastic news.

Sponsored Tweets is a really easy and lucrative way to make money online and leverage your Twitter followers into some extra cash. It’s great to see that the owners of Twitter see the value in Sponsored Tweets and are going to continue to allow it to use the API and let us make money taking advantage of it. If you aren’t signed up for Sponsored Tweets yet, now is the time to get into the game and join myself, Luke and the thousands of others cashing in.

As some of you may or may not know, Luke is going full steam ahead with opening his own craft brewery, a plan that has been over a year in the making and will be opening up in the fall of 2010. It’s an exciting project for sure, but one that has taken a lot of his time and attention and as such there haven’t been a lot of posts from him here. To keep up with the happenings of Baxter Brewing Company, you can follow them on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook and that will give you all the updates.

As for me, I was more than happy to take the helm at putting up posts here for Affiliate By Night, but as of late have had some computer difficulties that have made posting tough. The laptop I was using suffered a tragic hard drive failure and I lost a number of posts I had planned and it took me over a week to get it fixed. Once I got everything repaired, I had lost the entire drive and needed to reinstall a bunch of software (including Microsoft Word) and it’s just recently that I’ve gotten myself entirely back up and running.

So that’s what’s been going on and our apologies for the month long absence. The good news is we will be back to posting here about Affiliate Marketing and making money online, as that’s something we’ve been continuing to do. For the near future we are looking to get one post a week up here on the blog and hopefully you’ll find those as useful as our previous posts before the brief hiatus. Just a reminder that if you subscribe to our RSS Feed you’ll never miss an update from us here as we help you in your quest to make a realistic, part-time income online in your spare time.

As always, thanks for reading!

It’s no secret that I think developing a blog, building a brand and a community around it is a great long-term, more stable and more enjoyable method to making money online. I enjoy writing and sharing tips more than I do researching tons of keywords and constantly changing ad copy and all the other things that go into PPC/PPV campaigns and such.

With that mindset then, it’s easy to see why I think making yourself accountable to your blog, and each post on it, is a great way to build the base of your online community. If you are taking it seriously, putting effort into each post and checking it over that will show to your readers. They’ll no doubt be appreciative that you took the extra time to check your spelling & grammar, include relevant links and spice it up with a photo or a screen shot.

There are plenty of great tips on that list, and several I hadn’t even thought of. For those of you looking for just the list, here it is, although Daniel gives an nice write up on each one on his blog and a .pdf file you can print out and affix over your computer as a good reminder.

I think it’s a pretty solid checklist before publishing a post. Is there anything that you would add to the list, dear readers?

Many users just starting out advertising on Facebook are way to general with their targeting, myself included. I thought if I was going to promote, for instance a weight loss product, that targeting women, in the United States in the 20-50’s would be good enough. I mean, that’ss millions of users right there that could be seeing my ad! AWESOME!

Not so much. Being this general doesn’t give you a very good chance of converting a user and in fact, you are likely including too many people in your campaign. In order to get a higher conversion rate one thing you should look to do is combine interests and really invest yourself in the users environment. Getting the ad to blend several user interests (perhaps someone who “likes” the TV show The Biggest Loser and exercise, or yoga) would help you narrow your target audience and give you greater relevance to those the ad is served to.

From there you can split test different combinations of interests, mixing in Jillian Michaels, healthy eating, running or even try some un-healthy “likes” (fast food joints, bacon etc.) to see what specific groups you can hit on. If you tailor your ads to these different, more specific subsets of the larger demographic group you are looking to advertise to you will see an increase in your CTR and your conversions for sure.

By getting into the users world, blending their interests and making your ads very focused you can really make a killing on Facebook. It’s certainly going to be better than just blanket targeting huge, general groups of people (much like broad match on Google AdWords isn’t always a good idea) and seeing who stumbles into your offer. Be creative, think outside the box and get into your potential customers head. Chances are you’ll like what you find.

I really like his approach in this book. Instead of creating another “Make Money Online” ebook, he talks specifically about how to incorporate affiliate marketing into a blog and construct a money making blog. This type of long-term project with a steady payout down the road suits my style much better than the constant creation/tweaking of PPC or PPV ads and Social Media advertising. While this money is not instantaneous with Affiliate Blogging, it can become very lucrative and very consistent, as Zac expertly demonstrates to everyone.

Here is the table of contents for the ebook, giving a good overview of what information is covered:

1. Introduction to Affiliate Marketing
2. Blogging Game Plan
3. Going Live with Your Blog
4. Making Your Blog Profitable
5. Blog Monetization Tips
6. Taking Your Blog to the Next Level
7. Six Figure Blogging Interviews

The ebook is loaded with great content on building a blog, a brand and an income stream and Zac could have easily charged good money for this info, but he chose to give it away for free, which is a great reason to grab a copy. As an added bonus, he includes a lot of great interviews with other Six Figure Bloggers, like John Chow, Shoemoney, Brian Clark, Gary Vaynerchuk and others. They give a lot of great perspective and tips on how they built their blogs and there is a lot to be learned about blogging, writing and monetization.

For anyone looking to get started in affiliate marketing, blogging or for those looking to monetize your blog and take it to the next level I highly recommend Six Figure Affiliate Blogging. Best of all, the book is free to download and an informative read.

I say this because in this business, ideas that are working and become profitable are hard to keep a secret forever. Networks are pushing the same type of offers that convert well on tons of affiliates, millions of ads are served and in the increasingly Internet savvy world people quickly become blind to your ads. In order to keep seeing success you need to be able to innovate, both keeping your ads fresh and looking for underused or undervalued traffic sources.

One such traffic source that has been steadily improving is search traffic from Bing.com. While not as big a source of traffic as Google is, the conversion rate has been higher using Bing as of late and their traffic numbers are growing rapidly (likely on the back of their strong TV ad campaign). We have been seeing conversion rates as much as 10-12% higher on some campaigns as compared to Google traffic, and we have seen this type of jump in the past as well. So while you aren’t going to get the volume of traffic you might be used to, the quality has certainly been there and higher quality traffic = more money in your pocket.

Additionally, you are going to want to keep your ads fresh in order to fend off banner blindness from your target audience. I’m going to have a Facebook related post coming later this week about some targeting strategies to improve your results (blended targeting and deeper focus) but in essence you should always make sure to rotate your ads. Be that changing images, adjusting ad copy, changing offers or modifying your demographic you can’t afford to let your ads sit and run endlessly. Eventually they will lose effectiveness and erode your profits.

If you are seeing any of your campaigns stagnate or lose profitability entirely, try a new traffic source (like Bing) or try some adjustments in your actual ad. You might be surprised how some simple changes can pay big dividends for you.

Recently, in a continuing string of mildly irritating changes Facebook has altered the way the information you put on Facebook is displayed. Anything you put in the Music, Books, Interests etc. fields now needs to be linked to a corresponding Facebook page. For example, anyone who likes Harry Potter books is linked to the Harry Potter community page. While I find this change annoying and self-serving on a personal level, from an advertising perspective it can be very helpful.

These community pages are a hub of information on a particular subject that lots of people will be viewing and connected to, depending on the popularity of the subject. The page allows you to sign up and contribute to the content, as well as displaying recent posts on the subject from friends and globally. There are a bunch of opportunities to profit from this new arrangement, and I am sure many people are hard at work generating traffic, links and money from this. Here are a couple quick ways I’ve thought of.

If you like Harry Potter (millions of fans), for instance, you can post a status update containing an amazon affiliate link to a box set of all the books and it can get picked up and displayed as a global link on the community page that tons of people will see.

Continuing the above example, you can sign up to add content to the Harry Potter page and work in links to a fan site of yours on the subject, driving lots of traffic, or reviews of the books or movies you’ve authored.

Also, since the main content on a lot of these pages comes from Wikipedia, you can add relevant content to the Wikipedia article that will get displayed again on the Facebook community page and put in front of that many more eyes. Additionally, while some risk is involved here, you can get great Page Rank 4 -6 backlinks from Wikipedia by adding your website or blog to the “External Links” section of Wiki articles. Make sure to read the full post from Garry Conn on how to best implement this practice.

As you can see, these are just 3 quick ways to utilize the new features of Facebook to your advantage. Taking advantage of these things early is often the best way to get in the door and get established before everyone tries to do it so get cracking on converting all these newly linked to Community Pages.

iGoogle is a popular method for not only keeping track of your schedule but also streamlining your life. You can customize the page to have your email, google calendar (popular in it’s own right), RSS feeds, popular links and many other apps (weather, date & time) appear on the front page. It provides one stop shopping for organizing your life online and off. I was using this for awhile but decided that it wasn’t for me when I started using a shared computer and didn’t leave myself logged in all the time.

Smart Phones: It seems like everyone has an iphone/blackberry/droid/(insert awesome phone here) that does about a million things. As part of their multi-functionality many people have taken to using their phone as a means of recording their to-do list etc. I can’t argue with this as a means of schedule keeping, as I can imagine having one small device for all your phone/texting/scheduling/internet/music needs would be helpful. Given that I have always been miles behind the mobile phone cool wave I would estimate that I might give this a try when I get my first smart phone in 2015 or so. If you’ve got one, do you use it to keep track of your schedule?

Web based Programs: Instead of writing down your to-do lists and schedule on paper, there are numerous web-based programs that let you create lists and access them no matter what device you are using to connect to the web. I’ve used both Remember the Milk and Ta-Da Lists a bit as a means of managing my tasks, but stopped using both for various reasons.

I was using the Remember the Milk gmail plugin, which is was enjoying at first but after a while it became very buggy and was affecting the speed and layout of my gmail account and became more of a hassle than it was worth.  Ta-da lists was great for what I wanted to do (keep track of my life online, essentially) but I found that being without a smart phone or a laptop all the time gave me a number of occasions where I wanted to look at my to-do list when I wasn’t able to get online and that frustrated me.

This leads me to the current method I am employing to keep track of my schedule/to-do list that doesn’t require an internet connection and I can access anywhere.

Pen & Paper: That’s right, in this super high-tech world I write my to-do lists and schedule down in a small pocket notebook that I can carry around with me on the go if I like. It’s very old fashioned and low tech, but it works great for me. I get a ton of satisfaction from physically crossing something off the list once it is done, it strikes me as authentic to physically write stuff down and helps me remember on my own better as well. Also, I do so much stuff online it’s nice to write actual words down now and again even if I am not writing the next great American novel or anything.

While I may be very old school, there are plenty of other tech-ier options for those of you who prefer that method of doing things. There are a countless number of choices out there outside of the few I highlighted from my personal usage ; let us know in the comments – how do you manage your schedule?

If you are at interested in, or involved in, blogging then you have likely heard of Darren Rowse who runs the wildly successful blogging tips website Problogger. 2 years ago he and Chris Garrett teamed up to write a book on blogging, aptly titled: ProBlogger – Secrets to Blogging your way to a Six-Figure Income. It was a written as a step by step guide to help aspiring bloggers create, develop and promote profitable blogs for themselves. It was very well written and contained tons of great information about the many aspects of blogging.

Now, they’ve gotten back together and released a second edition of the book with some new chapters and lots of cool new info. Here’s some of the updates they’ve included:

• many many small updates and changes throughout the book. New examples, screenshots, updates of new tools, a few deletions of references to old tools, an update to our stories in the intro etc.
• removed a chapter on blog networks – things have changed a lot in this space and many networks are not hiring any more or have changed their models significantly.
• Chris added a significant chapter on social media and how it impacts and can be used by bloggers
• Darren added a case study chapter that goes through the first 4 years of his main blog – Digital Photography School. He works through how he launched it, what he focused upon in years 1-2 and then in years 3-4, how he monetized it and shares the secrets to how he drove significant traffic and income through email newsletters, social media etc.
• Bonuses – they are offering anyone who buys the book a series of bonuses (some interviews with successful bloggers, some extra teaching etc)

The chapter on social media and the case study of developing a blog over the course of 4 years are the two parts that have me the most excited to read and I am looking forward to my copy coming in the mail. Amazon has ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income – 2nd Edition or sale now, so grab yourself a copy today. You won’t be disappointed, as Darren consistently delivers high-quality content from his blog, to his blogging workbook, to his books.

Once you’ve read it, let us know how you enjoyed it in the comments section!