Today’s free attire isn’t exactly a shirt, but a beautiful Pashmina Scarf from Sealed with a Kiss Designs instead.  Sure, I could have concocted the scarf into a tube top kind of shirt, but didn’t want to scare you all (just the thought scares me myself).

Sealed with a Kiss Designs / SWAKdesigns.com offers exciting trendy Womens  Plus Size Clothing sizes 1x to 6x (14 to 40) with Free Worldwide Shipping!

SWAKdesigns has an affiliate program at ShareASale and is proactively managed by Deborah Carney of Team Loxly.

Note: the beaded earrings I’m also wearing were handmade by Liz Ababon of Team Loxly and are available for sale for only $7 at Shop7.com.  I picked red to go with my Husker attire!

I recently spoke on the “Affiliate Marketing Blogging Secrets” panel, part of the Monetization track at Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas with….

Jim Kukral, Moderator
Brian Littleton, President of Shareasale (shown in pic with me)
Angel Djambazov, Managing Editor of Revenews.com
and Todd Sawicki, stepping in for Ben Huh from ICanHasCheezburger.com.

I’ve had several people since then ask me for a list of the “tools” I mentioned that I personally use on my sites.

Many of my websites use the Wordpress platform, therefore I incorporate a lot of WP-Plugins (as I haven’t taken the time to convert to Thesis Theme yet).

Link Cloaking – I use this to mask my affiliate links, and it automatically adds the “nofollow” attritube. There is also NinjaAffiliate which is more robust, but is not free. Someone also mentioned SkimLinks.com, but I haven’t had time to experiment with them yet.

I also like to import content from my other sites that aren’t powered by Wordpress and my Twitter status updates into the sidebars of my blogs, therefore I use the Aggregate Plug-In and Twitter Tools. More recommended Wordpress Plug-Ins.

Speaking on monetizing my blogs, my main source of income is generated through affiliate programs, but I also generate revenue through additional sources, such as…

Chitika – The organic traffic visitors that I receive via Google Images generally aren’t looking to buy anything, so Chitika is cool in that it only shows relevant ads to the keywords they used to search with that pay per click.

List Building – Collect email addresses on individual post pages. I use AWeber to create hover pop-overs (usually unblockable), sign them up to receive the RSS feed via email, and set the thank you to a CPA offer (ie MarketLeverage Email Submit).

Affilistore – I have played around with this free downloadable script to make datafeed stores. If I can make a website with it in under an a hour, I’m presuming most others can as well. I downloaded datafeeds pertaining to my niche from ShareASale, changing my user id and re-uploaded to my new site. The only “marketing” I’ve done is adding the website and it’s sitemap to Google Overview and watched the sales come in.

Banner Ads – Since most people do not actually click through a banner, I prefer to shy away from CPA and CPC offers, but instead sell banner space or use a banner network such as Glam Media or TodayShow Network that pay per impression.

Google Adsense I presume everyone already knows about Google Adsense? Chloe Spencer from NeopetsFanatic.com fully monetizes her website with only Google Adsense.

Chloe was on the panel before mine “Are You Getting the Most Money Out of Your Blog as You Can?” with Dave Taylor, Tim Jones and Chris Pirillo, which was similar to our panel.

Some people wrote blog reviews about our panel, including Ms. Babble and Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media. I think our session was too “basic” for them and aimed more towards newbies.  Can’t please ‘em all.

Personally I think twitter has helped my “company” (aka websites) tremendously. The only way it has maybe “hurt” it is that sometimes I get distracted reading other tweets and their links that follow, thus making me unproductive!

Read how Twitter can help drive traffic to your websites, too!

I attempted to take a pic of today’s Free Shirt, courtesy of LinkScape via DailyBooth.com, but since the writing is backwards and hard to read, I had my daughter attempt to take a pic of the back of the shirt…

… which isn’t much more legible. It says “SEO!!! Moz – 30 Billion Pages devoured and still hungry!”

So what is LinkScape?

Linkscape provides link data never available before on over 54+ billion URLs across 230+ million domains.

Looks like they need up update the number on their shirts!

So I decided to use http://kimarketing.com as my “URL to Analyze” and “Run Basic Report” and here is the score badge it generated (I just ran a free report, but you can upgrade for more indepth statistics)…

I chose that domain first, just because I had a problem with it getting blocked by filtering software. Scott Jangro helped me find the root of the problem and blogged about it on his new site, AffBook.com – definitely a good site to bookmark about affiliate marketing.

*Yes, I know my office is a pit. I am slowly in the process of making room for a Treadmill Desk like Tricia Meyer uses.

MaxBounty.com is one of the first CPA networks I joined back in the day, and they were also one of the first ones to send me a free tshirt to wear on my Free Shirt Friday posts.  Shame on me for allowing their shirt to get lost in my huge tote of shirts waiting to be featured. But the wait is now over!

MaxBounty offers both in-house managed campaigns and merchant campaigns. My favorite campaign with them right now is Publisher’s Clearing House. They are located in Canada, but I receive a monthly check from them in US Dollars every month on time, which is the best benefit of all. They also offer real time statistics, sub-id reporting and 2-tier referral income. So if you’re not an affiliate yet, sign up now!

People always ask me what I do with all the free shirts I receive after I wear and write about them, as I can’t possibly wear them all. I actually do keep and wear some of them (my fave right now is “Can’t Stop Rockin“). My family gets first dibs on the shirts they want in my “free room”, then my friends.  I also advertised “free promotional tshirts, while supplies last” during the citywide rummage sale here last week, and they disappeared like hot cakes!

Want me to show your free tshirt some love? Beam it over.

Dave Cynkin just posted on Facebook a discount code for an additional 20% off registration prices! Click here to Register and use DISCOUNT CODE: FB20 at checkout. Hurry, code expires 9/14/09 – and I’ll see you there!

Heather from BC gave me this fancy smancy green IZEA tee while in the blogger’s lounge at last month’s Affiliate Summit in NYC*.

IZEA is a social media marketing company and the world leader in sponsored conversations. They operate a network of over 250,000 bloggers and 25,000 advertisers around the globe.

SocialSpark.com, my favorite IZEA property, is a blog marketing network that connects advertisers with bloggers through an online marketplace. I personally have taken several “opportunities” that include Pay-Per-Click (can be promoted via Twitter and Facebook),  Sponsored Websites (that put hover ads on your websites), and Blog Posts (that I fully disclose are being sponsored).

I think Social Spark is not only profitable, but fun (and I wish they had an affiliate/referral program).  Yesterday I took an hour to review a few opps and ended up writing two blog posts about what I learned on those sites. Most posts require 200 words which isn’t hard to come up with.  Considering the price paid for post varies from $5 to $300 per post (mine were both somewhere in the middle of that), it turns out to be a pretty good hourly rate!  Plus I added new unique content to my sites, so it was a double bonus.

Check out BenSpark.com’s SocialSpark Saturdays for great insight on how to most of out of SocialSpark. You can join me on his “I’m Not A Famous Blogger” Crew.

Recently IZEA also released Sponsored Tweets that matches tweeters with advertisers.  This is the best “get paid to twitter” program I’ve seen thus far as you can review and accept or reject the tweet that that the advertiser would like to send out.  Some advertisers even let you write your own tweet. I will decline a tweet if the “ad” doesn’t fit my audience, as I don’t want to risk losing valuable followers if they think I’m spamming them. But if an advertiser wants to advertise a shoe sale via Twitter to my @shoeaholics followers, everyone benefits! Sign up at SponsoredTweets.com.

*I also got to meet Ted Murphy, Founder/CEO of IZEA, while in NYC.  Watch for a “Famous Tongue Photo” in an upcoming post!

Next month, I’ll be attending my first Blog World Expo. And not only will I be attending, but I’m speaking in the Monetization Tract with Missy Ward, Scott Jangro and Brian Littleton talking about “Affiliate Marketing Blogging Secrets”.  See who else is speaking on the monetization schedule posted by Tim Jones.

So, I’ve booked my trip to Las Vegas!  I found it cheaper to fly Allegiant Air from a closer, smaller airport than making my usual trek to Omaha. I decided I’m staying at the Las Vegas Hilton* since it was inexpensive and within walking distance of the Convention Center.

I hope I receive my Poken in the mail that I won from I WearYourShirt.com and PokenZoo.com before my trip so I can “high four” everyone there!

Are YOU registered for BlogWorld yet? Or you can take your chance and win a free BlogWorld pass from John Chow!

*I applied to the Hilton affiliate program managed by Converseon.  I replied to the “Your Application Has Been Received” email asking how long it would take for approval. Reply was “2 – 5 days”.  After 8 days, I replied again asking. Reply “You should be approved next week.” Not cool. I ended up booking my stay through Hotels.com where they are offering up to $100 Rebate! And I’m still not approved for the Hilton program.

First I thought I’d try out my new XShot that I won from @BenSpark. Never mind that I didn’t realize you had to set a timer on your camera to actually take the picture, and that I have no idea how to do such on any of the three digital cameras in our house.  But I was willing to google and figure it out.

Well, that plan of action didn’t happen because none of the cameras would even turn on – all dead batteries with no new ones to be found.

So, I decided to play with my new netbook that has a built in camera. It’s not the greatest of quality, but what do you expect for only 1.3 mega-pixels…

So without further ado, today’s shirt is courtesy of AffiliateBenchmarks.com.

AffiliateBenchmarks is the affiliate research division of NETexponent. We design and execute affiliate marketing research with the purpose of increasing industry education and providing useful data and statistics to the affiliate community.

The results and analysis for the AffiliateBenchmarks’ 2009 study will be available next month on AffiliateBenchmarks.com. I, as an affiliate, personally participated in the analysis by taking their survey earlier this year.

*Now that I have this post written and ready to upload, the kids are also now home from school. They told me I should have stolen batteries out of a remote!  And that one of the cameras doesn’t even need batteries – it charges via USB.  Too late now.

I let my daughter pick out today’s featured free tee from my now overflowing box of free tshirts.  She is a huge soccer fan so it didn’t surprise me that she picked this one from WorldSoccerShop.com.

World Soccer Shop is the world’ premier destination for soccer gear. Shop soccer jerseys, soccer shoes, soccer t-shirts, soccer equipment, and more. Gear for World Cup 2010, Champions League, Premier League, MLS, Serie A, Bundesliga, FIFA Federations and more.

WorldSoccerShop.com offers an affiliate program through AffiliateFuture.

Want me to wear your shirt? Get the scoop.