I’m always excited when a month comes to a close because it presents me with the opportunity to look back at what happened last month. This is especially important because I have the opportunity to see how I’m doing in attaining my goals for my sites. In particular, I’m most interested in traffic and financial trends.

Traffic Analysis
In looking at site traffic every month, I go immediately to my AWStats server software to learn how succcessful I’ve been. . .

• Did each of my sites see growth?
• What kind of growth was it?
• Did unique users increase or decrease?
• Did page views go up?
• Were there any major strains on my bandwidth (i.e. was anyone hotlinking to images on my sites)?
• What keywords were most successful in drawing traffic?
• Were there any keywords that fell in the rankings?
• How did the sites fare on the different search engines?
• Did I start to make progress on any one of them?
• Did I begin to lose ground on another?

I haven’t been especially active in tracking the number of sites linking in, the PR of my pages, or my Alexa rankings, because I don’t find them to be anything I can really control. Since I focus mainly on organic growth for my sites, I let the links come instead of undertaking a true link building program. With quality content, the links come in naturally. PR is really meaningless IMO, and Alexa rankings are extremely inaccurate. I have two different sites . . . one typically will rank on a daily basis similarly to another one, yet one of the sites gets between 10 and 20 times the traffic of the other. The one with less traffic that ranks well on Alexa is popular with webmasters and others online – people who likely have the Alexa toolbar or other tools installed on their browsers. It amazes me that this has become one of the standards for monitoring traffic because it is simply so innaccurate.

In terms of blogs, I’ll also look at numbers from places like Feedburner (# of subscribers to my feeds), Technorati (# of sites linking in), and MyBlogLog (number of people who have joined my community) in addition to the basic numbers.

May was a good month! I saw growth in all areas and by all metrics. I can’t really ask for anything else, especially considering I no longer run any keyword advertising programs. I’ll just say that I’m serving many millions of page views a month across the board!

Financial Analysis
The first of each month is also important because it allows me to reflect upon the financial status of my company over the past month. Between direct advertisers, ad networks, and affiliate programs, I draw income from various sources. In any typical month I spend a good amount of my time focused on how I can increase revenues from one or all of these sources. Because of this, I’ve been able to create a company that has seen steady growth financially since inception (with a few minor flat spots).

May was a good month and I’m looking forward to see what we can pull off in June! I guess we’ll find out next month!

I was approached this afternoon by someone who was interested in promoting their real estate-related program to my site’s users. This advertiser wanted me to promote an online webinar and was willing to give me a commission for any sale made from people who went through the seminar and purchased their service. While the commission was fairly good, we felt that the odds of someone actually going through their entire webinar and then purchasing their product were not phenominal.

Choosing Between a Guaranteed Return and a Potential Greater One

We considered proposing a PPL (pay per lead) model to them, but felt that by doing so we were providing this company with tons of free branding for little in return. As a result, we decided that we would only work with them as pure advertises. They were welcome to advertise their program on our site, but would have to pay our full rates. If they generated any sales or leads, that depended on the users of our site.

What would you have done?

Do you go with the guaranteed advertising buy or do you provide free branding for someone on the remote chance that someone will go through all the steps (sign-up, webinar, sale) and buy their product?

In the best case scenario, we’d be able to charge for advertising and also get an affiliate payment per sale, but that isn’t ever going to happen. I tried to negotiate a few deals like that years ago and was simply laughed at. Was worth a shot, though!

Every heard of affiliate link cloaking? It is basically the practice of hiding affiliate links so your users don’t bypass them, and deprive you of a commission. Some people will argue that affiliate link cloaking is deceptive or unethical, but I’m still unconvinced either way. I thought it would be useful to dedicate a post to the subject and I hope you all find this to be helpful!

How to Hide Affiliate Links

There are now free services out there that do all the work for you, like AddMe’s Link Cloaker (which happens to be broken) or this one, and there are plenty of other guides and tutorials to help you hide your links. Last week, even the famous infamous John Chow gave a primer on hiding affiliate links. Another good post, called Cloaking and Ranking Your Affiliate Links can be found over at the Earner’s Blog. This post discusses one technique in particular that you can use to hide those affiliate links you’ve got on your website.

Is link cloaking ethical?

Should we tell everyone which links on our sites are affiliate links? I believe that most internet users aren’t very aware of affiliate linking, and probably wouldn’t care much either way. I look at affiliate links like parked domains. The majority of internet users don’t know what domain parking is and likely could care less, but will go to a parked site and click on a link regardless. I think the only way this will stop is if either the government or a major player like Google begins to clamp down on the practice.

More on Link Cloaking

• Dave Taylor writes a good discussion of link cloaking in his post Should I Cloak External Site Links? It covers a few different viewpoints on the issue and is a must read for anyone considering doing a bt of cloaking.
• Another good piece comes from Search Engine Land, and is titled Good Cloaking, Evil Cloaking & Detection. This article talks about different types of cloaking, and discusses which, if any are good and/or evil.
• Andrew Girdwood wrote a rant on cloaking, arguing that it is a sneaky and deceptive practice.

  What do you think?

  If you know of any other cool tools or posts on the subject, please share them with us!

Boy am I annoyed! I, like hundreds, if not thousands of others, was excited about the launch of ReviewMe last month. My first review request came in, and I followed all directions to the letter, posting my review of the company requesting it on November 23.

It is now December 18th. I have not recieved a check from ReviewMe yet!

I contacted the company on December 7th to find out how payment is handled and I was told after 2 emails that payment is calculated on the first of the month and will be sent out no later then the 4th of the month.

Did I Mention that Today is the 18th and I have not recieved a check from ReviewMe yet?

I wrote the company back on the 11th asking if I’d ever see my money, and was told to contact them if nothing arrived by the 15th. I have not heard back.

I’ve scoured the ReviewMe website and cannot find a contact phone number. I’m stuck waiting for them to email me back. Given the reputation of the site’s founders, I’d expect better service and support. Unfortunately, what I get is cold and impersonal service. The three emails sent to me have all been from “ReviewMe Support” – there is no one’s name affiliated with their support, and again, there is no phone number attached – just: support@reviewme.com.

I hope this is just an anomaly. Regardless, I highly recommend the folks of ReviewMe get their act together.

Anyone else waiting to get paid?

Making money with your website is easy, provided you’ve got good content and some traffic. I wanted to create a list of the various advertising networks you can use to generate some cash from your site or blog.

Top-Tier Pay Per Click – PPC

• Google AdSense
• Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)
• Microsoft AdCenter – Advertisers only???

Blog Advertising Networks

• BlogAds

• CrispAds
• Performancing Partners

Broad Networks

• Blue Lithium – CPM, CPC, CPA – Top Rated Network

Advertising Inventory Management Platforms

• 24/7 Real Media

• Advertising.com

Interactive Product Merchandising Networks

• Chitka

• ClickShare

Text Link Ad Networks

• AdBrite

• Text Link Ads

Top Tier Cost Per Mille Networks – CPM

• BurstMedia

• Casale Media
• ClickBooth
• ContextWeb – Contextual CPM
• CPX Interactive
• TribalFusion
• ValueClick – was FastClick

In-Text Advertising Networks

• IntelliTXT

• Kontera

Affiliate Advertising Programs – Cost Per Action (CPA)

• Amazon
• Azoogle
• Commission Junction – One of the best and most reputable
• IncentaClick
• LinkShare
• ShareASale

Secondary PPC Networks

• Pulse 360 – formerly Kanoodle

• Miva – formerly FindWhat.com

Additional Ad Networks – Untested and Unknown

• BidVertiser – bidding based ad marketplace

• BlueFN – CPA Network for Finance-Related sites
• Clicksor – contextual CPC network
• Directa Network – ads for Latin & Hispanic Marketplace
• eType USA – “premium” ad network
• ExpoActive – ad management network – CPC, CPM
• FluxAds – CPA (cost per action) a.k.a. affiliate network
• HyperBidder – Advertising trading marketplace
• – PPC contextual & trargeted
• InterClick – CPM ad model
• Mirago – PPC contextual – Based in Britain
• Oxado – Contextual ads – based in Paris
• Quigo – Seems to work with large publishers only
• Real Tech Network – CPM & PPC
• RevenuePilot – PPC & PFP (pay per performance)
• RightMedia – “transparent ad exchange” network
• SearchFeed.com – PPC
• TargetPoint – PPC – contextual ads
• TMP Express

If you’ve got any more, let me know. I’ll try and keep the list updated as new ones come around.

One of my new favorite bloggers, John Chow, author of the internet’s biggest google whores, recently inspired a take off, the internet’s biggest affiliate marketing whores over at StrayGeek.

What’s so special about all of these “whores” that people need to make lists of them?

They are some of the leaders in making money online with web publishing – they are entrepreneurs who should inspire you – they are getting really RICH!

The list of affiliate marketing guys:

1. Jon – Wickedfire.com
2. Darren Rowse – Problogger.net
3. Kieron Donoghue – UKoffer.com
4. Jeremy Schoemaker – Shoemoney.com
5. John Chow – TheTechZone.com
6. Neil Durrant & Paul Knapp – Submission Technology
7. Andrew Salmon – uSwitch.com
8. Simon Nixon – MoneySupermarket.com

The Google Adsense dudes:

1. Markus Frind: PlentyOfFish.com – $300,000 per month
2. Kevin Rose: Digg.com – $250,000 per month
3. Jeremy Shoemaker – $140,000 per month
4. Jason Calacanis: Weblogs, Inc. – $120,000 per month
5. David Miles Jr. & Kato Leonard – $100,000 per month
6. Tim Carter: AskTheBuilder.com – $30,000 per month
7. Joel Comm – $24,000 per month
8. Shawn Hogan – DigitalPoint.com $10,000 per month

This list is now several months old, and is likely many thousand dollars off, but it is inspiring! For all the details, read the full articles!

I went through some of the comments on these articles and added 2 more of these super marketers:

1. David Miles Jr. and Kato Leonard – Freeweblayouts.net $100,000 per month
2. Andrew Leyden – PodcastDirectory.com $30,000 to $40,000 per year.

I’m sure there are many others out there making just as much money. Lets all pay homage to these folks at the forefront of internet publishing, and maybe learn something from them!

After waiting for some time, we’re finally blessed with the new version of AzoogleAds “2.0″. Shoemoney posted about users first impressions of the new website and reporting system, while the Earners Blog does a great indepth review of this new release.

I’m not yet an affiliate, but I filled out their application (like 8 pages long), and hope to be accepted soon. I’ll keep you posted.