The show is coming up. Please find a preview article from DNjournal.com:
2010 T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Las Vegas Preview: Our Interview With Show Promoter Rick Latona
By Ron Jackson
There have been many landmark shows in the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. series since it began in October 2004. The upcoming show at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas January 21-23 promises to be still another one as the Rick Latona team takes over production of the U.S. show for the first time.
Learning Search Engine Optimization (SEO definition) is critical to your websites success. If you get naturally ranked in the Search Engines, you will have lots of traffic flow your way from the major engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.). If you would like to learn all of the basics of SEO, we would highly recommended that you pick up a copy of Aaron Wall’s SEO Book prior or in the early stages of your site. The book lays SEO out in simple terms, giving any reader the basics of SEO.
Sorry for the absence, but future posts will make up for it, we promise!
We recently came across a theme for Wordpress called Thesis – If you have thought about using Wordpress or building a website you should start here (unless if you are a developer, who has a ton of time on your hands, then you are on your own). The Thesis theme fills a void that is left between developers and casual Wordpress users who have a basic overview of HTML. On one side you can be a developer and manipulate Wordpress to however you would like and on the other side if you are not, you are limited to the basic look and feels that developers create with their templates. This is the first time that we have seen a theme fall into the middle – if you know basic HTML, you can tweak the attributes of the the theme in minutes to have the theme look and feel the way that you want it to. Thesis is the predecessor to Cutline and we must say blows it and any other Wordpress themes that we have seen out of the water. The secret behind the Thesis theme is the flexibility that is provided by using the OpenHooks plugin (which comes as part of download package).
The highest paying affiliate programs online, in terms of dollar amount earned per conversion, are primarily related to the finance or travel industries. Finance affiliate programs include credit card offers, ranging from $20 to $120 per approval, student loan offers, and home loan offers. Travel affiliate programs include both flight sales and vacation packages.
Making money from a site or blog in these industries only requires a small readership. Even with an approval rate of .5%, one hundred readers a day can garner more than $1500 a month from credit card applications.
Our advice is to focus your blog or site on a niche within the finance or travel industry. For example, low interest college student credit cards or summer vacation packages. Here are some examples of affiliate programs within each high paying industry.
Finance Affiliate Programs
NCS Reporting – NCS Reporting provides access to affiliate programs for major credit cards and other finance products. Reporting is pay-per-click based and pays several dollars per click for targeted traffic.
Performics – Performics, which is part of Doubleclick, provides affiliate programs for all major credit cards with payouts ranging from $20 to $100 per credit card approval.
Driver Loans – Driver Loans is a lead generation site for auto financing loans. Average payout is $9.60 per lead.
Next Student Affiliates – Provides student debt consolidation and loan referrals. Pay outs start at $100 per validated application.
Travel Affiliate Programs
Orbitz – The Orbitz affiliate program is managed through LinkShare. Commissions from $5 to $30 can be earned on various travel products.
Travelocity – The Travelocity affiliate program is managed through Commission Junction.
The highest paying affiliate programs, in terms of percentage, on the other hand, are mostly digital goods. These include ringtones, wallpaper, music, ebook and software affiliate programs.
Highest Percentage Affiliate Programs
Thumbplay – Thumbplay pays out $8 per lead, or 200% of their monthly subscription rate of $3.99.
Amazon – The Amazon mp3 program will pay you 10% for digital mp3 sales. When it was first started, the percentage was 20%!
We have created a static page that we will continually update with the highest paying affiliate programs. Our goal is to eventually create a list that ranks affiliate programs by both performance and payouts. If you know of any other well paying affiliate programs please let us know. We welcome your comments and feedback.
Traffic exchanges and traffic building tools have been around since the start of the Internet and are now popping back up in the form of nice looking “Web 2.0″ “Widgets.” If you understand how to navigate, these traffic exchange tools can help to bring users to your site. Today we will discuss two services that we are going to try on this blog and will update you as we gain more experience with them. As always your comments are appreciated either below, or contact us.
Both services publish your RSS feeds; one handles the syndication by mixing your feeds with other members feeds (and distributing via third party blogs) and the other is strictly your feed, but you are responsible for syndication. Both services are also trying to create a destination for Publishers on their own websites as a place to come to pick up free content.
The first service is called Blog Rush, which can be seen on the right hand side of Cwire.org. Blog Rush aggregates several participating publishers RSS feeds and displays them on publishers websites who have embedded the Blog Rush widget. Blog Rush’s easy to use back-end tracks how many times their widget is shown on a publishers site and gives publishers a credit in that amount of usage. Those credits are automatically applied towards the publishers own content appearing on other web pages. If a user clicks on a link on the widget, the user is brought to the publishers web page. Here is a link to a page that has a video on it that better explains it.
The Blog Rush service allows you to earn credits for both displaying the widget and getting other blog users to sign up. Some bloggers so far have only received a few clicks for every thousand displays of their widget. However, it is possible that these users are more valuable since they will be coming from targeted links on blogs similar to your own. We will provide an analysis of our results with Blog Rush in a later post.
The second service is called Spring Widgets, which allows you to syndicate your RSS feed (without having to share the space), but you are responsible for your own distribution. This service is great if you have a feed that you feel your users would want to display. Unlike Blog Rush, there is no aggregation model and no built in distribution.
Yahoo! has been trying to catch up to Google for sometime now, specifically in the area of advertising revenue. CWire recently gave the Yahoo! publisher contextual link platform a try on our site. This platform has some interesting features that may give Google a run for their money and is an excellent alternative to Adsense for monetizing your website or blog.
The Yahoo! Publisher platform gets a 10 for ease of use. That along with the ability to use other publisher interfaces is a major plus for blogs like CWire. For example, you can easily submit your website for inclusion into Yahoo!’s search engine and you can also easily submit your feed for inclusion in their RSS feed directories. These tools are all under the heading “Drive Traffic” – you cant beat that!
Yahoo Publisher vs. Google Adsense Summary
For Publishers: The only downside to Yahoo! publisher is that there are simply not as many advertisers as there are on the Google Adwords platform (which means that ads may not be as relevant to your pages). However, several anecdotal studies by blogs have show that the payouts are competitive to Adsense. For Advertisers: The flip side to the above, is it may create a buying opportunity if you are looking to advertise your site or service via purchasing keywords. In fact, Yahoo is currently offering advertisers a $25 credit just for signing up. If you have ever thought about buying keywords before, this may be the time to do it – or at least give it a shot!
Note: Do not use BOTH Adsense and Yahoo Publisher on the same pages of your site/blog. Their terms of use strictly forbid this!
In our never ending quest to make cwire a great resource for internet entrepreneurs, we are proud to announce two new tools to the cwire website.
Internet Monetization Calculator – Although the math is not too complicated, we created a simple tool that allows you to compare the different ways to monetize your website (CPM, CPA & CPC) and allows for you to calculate potential earnings.
Thank you for visiting CWire.org, a resource for web developers and entrepreneurs. We encourage you to add our page to your RSS Feed and subscribe by sending your email address to info at cwire dot org.
If you read the recent article in the New York Times, you are most likely interested in the following:
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