I’ve been really busy lately working on my affiliate sites. I’ve been really taking time to get to know the visitors of each of my sites and understanding their needs and how I can make each site better for them.

Part of making my sites better is understanding the needs of my visitors and how I can provide them with the content, information, and products they need. When searching for products and affiliate programs there are a number of networks available to let you offer just about any product available.  You can even sell products from Walmart if you want! One affiliate network that I’ve been really liking more and more is the Pepperjam Network.  The number of merchants are slowly growing in Pepperjam’s portfolio, but what makes Pepperjam so darn cool is the number of inovative ways they offer to affiliates for getting products into their visitors hands.

Pepperjam has the standard banner and text ads you can sprinkle throughout your site.  But Pepperjam also has a few other cool tools for you to use as well.

They are currently beta testing a new program called  inText that delivers merchant products linked automatically to relevant keywords appearing in your site content which is matched to the advertiser’s ad. Right now the only merchant in the beta is eBay, however I’ve tested it and it works great. You can adjust the number of hyperlinks in your content and how you wish to have the hyperlinks appear, i.e. underline, double underline, etc.  It’s a great way to sell without selling.

The next program is PepperjamAds.  PepperjamAds are a lot like Google Adsense where text based ads are placed on your site through a small widget.  The widget can be sized to any of your standard banner sizes and customized to the look and feel of your site. The big bonus is that PepperJamAds has the potential to pay better than Adsense.

Another really cool program Pepperjam offers is called PJN Store Builder.  It’s been around for a little while and I really don’t know why it hasn’t gotten more attention. PJN Store Builder allows you to create entire pages based on merchant products you’ve singed up for.  Its a really great way to quickly build store pages for you blogs or sites and begin making money in a matter of minutes.

And if all of that isn’t cool enough, how does $10 bucks sound? That’s right, Pepperjam will pay you $10 whenever you sign up to be an affiliate!  That I don’t know how much faster you can start making money online than that!

Man there have been some really cool plugins coming out lately that are just making our jobs so much easier!! Whether you’re a blogger or affiliate marketer some of these plugins provide the extra functionality you need to turbo charge your site!

So whats one of the most important things you can add to your site to help you create a recurring income stream?   Thats’ right, an email subscription form!  The sad thing is a lot of Affiliate Marketers don’t have an email form on their site.  But with MaxBlogPress and their new plugin for WordPress called the Optin Form Adder this is easily fixed..  This cool new plugin allows you to create an email optin subscription form to your site or blog.  It’s really great for folks who are a little shaky on adding html to their site.  This plugin creates all the code needed for your email form and inserts right into your site page or post. If you use Awebber or are considering it, it works like a charm.  Check out MaxBlogPress Optin Form Adder, it rocks and and best of all its free!

Next up on our list of cool new plugins is phpBay-Search2Post.  This plugin does require phpBaby to be installed however it’s amazing for an ebay affiliate.   phpBay-Search2Post replaces the built-in search function of WordPress.  Anytime someone searches for a keyword phrase,  phpBay-Search2Post will create a new post or page based on that key phrase and populate the page with a list of ebay products for the phrase. Now you can have content generated dynamically on the fly for every search.  Thats right, phpBay-Search2Post is auto content generator creating pages based on exactly what your visitors are searching for!  Now that rocks! This one cost a little bit of money but it’s not too bad, only $15 bucks. If you use phpBay this is a very handy addition

Finally one last amazing plugin I saw the other day was Caffeinated Content.  This little plugin can totally populate your blog with content, comments, images, everything!  It will even back date posts to whatever date you choose.  It pulls relavent content from Yahoo answers, YouTube, and article directoies. In a matter of minutes your empty blog can look like its been around for years.  Now of course all of this content will be duplicate content and be very careful of plagerism. But you can rewrite each post before it gets posted to your blog. If you don’t rewrite the articles, you need to make sure every article keeps the original authors links or you will be violating copyright. I personnally havent purchased Caffeinated Content yet. But I saw it and thought it was pretty amazing. The cost on this is $46 (with coupon code IDEAL40OFF) so I’m not sure I ready just yet to break out my wallet… but I sure am tempted. The only thing I would recommend this for is to possibly seed your blog with some syndicated content or place holder content and later add in your own unique content.  Or if you are testing a new layout this maybe very helpful.

As alot of you know I don’t promote anything that I’m not using.  From time to time I don’t promote things here that I do make a commision off of (afterall I am in affiliate marketing). But I don’t promote it if I havent purchased it myself and highly recommend it.  None of the above links are affiliate links and I’m not being compensated for this post in anyway.  I just thought these plugins looked cool and wanted to tell you about them.

If you use any of these plugins or check them out, let me know. Leave a comment and tell us all what you thought! thanks!

This is one of the coolest ideas I’ve seen and I really don’t know why anyone hasn’t thought of it yet. If you’re wanting to keep visitors on your site longer (and who doesn’t want that?), give your visitors something fun to do while they are there. Add some cool games to keep them entertained.

With HeyZap you can embed directly into just about any web page, blog, WordPress.com, Blogger, etc. They offer 3 different screen sizes to accommodate your page layout. There’s even a WordPress plugin to add a game to the sidebar of your WordPress blog

For the games, they are multiple categories of games to choose from. They offer Sports, Shooter, Strategy, Puzzle, and more. Give it a try and see what it does for your retention.

Do you think adding games to your website will help retain visitors to your website or blog?  Leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts?

heyzap.com – embed games

Well, its kind of a sad day today for me. I want to tell you all that I’m no longer recommending BANS for building web sites.  BANS, or Build a Niche Store has been a great little script that was my first introduction to money making affiliate marketing.

BANS for anyone who doesn’t know was a great script that would allow you to quickly build an entire ebay affiliate site in a matter of minutes. Google it seems is really out to cleanup what they call thin affiliate sites and has been de-indexing sites who use products like BANs to build these ebay affiliate sites.

There is good news though for anyone who has ebay affiliate sites or has experienced getting de-indexed by Google.  What I would recommend is to replace your BANS sites with WordPress and PHPBay.  PHPBay essentially does the same thing as BANS however it add additional functionality to hide your affiliate links so that they appear to look like they are links from your own site.  Plus when you switch over to using WordPress (which is free) you get a much better way to publish, monetize, manage and optimize your content.

Have you felt any of the rath of Google with your BANS sites?  Have you made the switch to WordPres?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Joe