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Abandon Adsense … Everything you need to know to run your own credit card affiliate site

With Adsense lowering payouts and Adwords upping their strictness, and more and more advertisers moving to a CPL model, everyone who bought into the content site dream are now feeling the squeeze. If you’re in that boat as I see it you have three options:

  • (A) Ride your content site to its bitter end 24 months from now
  • (B) Fold up shop and get out of the internet marketing game
  • (C) Stretch your skillset and get into something where your existing strengths can be utilized

If (C) looks like the best choice to you, one of the best alternatives is turning to affiliate sites as a hedge. For anyone who has navigated the worlds of online education, dating, insurance, debt consolidation, and other affiliate verticals, you’ll know that probably the most accessible and established vertical in true affiliate marketing is credit card leads.
Setting these sites up is relatively simple and straightforward, but there are a few information hurdles you’ll need to get through to be able to do so. So if you’re planning on entering the affiliate space, you should definitely read:

The Credit Card Affiliate Site Setup Toolbox: 70 Essential Tools

The article walks you through the various available affiliate programs as well as as how to setup a site running them. I can say from personal experience that actually getting these affiliate program people on the phone and getting yourself integrated into their programs is easier said than done. CardOffers in particular is very hard to get a hold of. But this article will at least give you the lay of the land, and you’ll know enough to set up the sort of basic credit card reviews sites like the one this article is produced on. In addition, here are a few more regular reads for those who want to educate themselves on entering the affiliate world:

WordPress Hacks: Adding TinyMCE Editor to the Prologue Theme

[UPDATED: Please see my first comment before reading.]

In 48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress, the Prologue WP theme figured very significantly in the examples. Prologue, if you’re not familiar with it, gives WordPress users (both wordpress.com and self-hosted) Twitter-like microbloggging functionality. But out of the box, the theme has a very plain edit area (see image below), and adding links, images, etc., is tedious.

Fortunately, there’s a really easy fix to this problem: TinyMCE editor. TinyMCE is a Javascript-based freeware editor. If you have a recent version of WordPress, it’s the default “visual” editor that you get in the admin panel. Thanks to its easy integration features, we can use this as a replacement to the default HTML message editor in the Prologue theme. And you won’t believe how incredibly easy it is to hack it. I think it took me about 2 minutes, not including download and installation. I’m actually surprised that Automattic didn’t do it themselves.

How to Install TinyMCE

Installing TinyMCE takes three simple steps:

  1. Download the TinyMCE .zip from Moxiecode. (There is also a .gz file, if that suits you better.)
  2. Unzip the .ZIP file. You’ll get a directory called tinymce/.
  3. Upload this directory pretty much anywhere you want on your web server. I used the root. So as an example, I now have the directory http://filmscenic.com/tinymce/ on my FilmScenic site. Below that is the scripts/ directory, where the important code lives.

How to Hack the Prologue Theme to Use TinyMCE

It’s really quite easy to hack your Prologue WP theme installation to incorporate the TinyMCE editor on the home page of your site.

  1. Insert two lines of “script” code into your Prologue header.php file, just above the </head> tag:

    <script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript” src=”/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js”></script>
    <script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript”>
    tinyMCE.init({
        mode : “textareas”
    });
    </script>

  2. Change the src parameter’s URL value to point to the right path. In the code above, I’ve already changed the URL to be relative to the server root.

If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, just download this copy of the header.php file (for Prologue theme), change the extension from .phps to .php, and replace the original in your Prologue theme directory. That’s it, you’re done. Please note that this header.php uses the “Advanced” mode TinyMCE editor, as discussed somewhere below.

How to Use TinyMCE From Your Prologue-Based WordPress Blog

Believe it or not, that’s it. TinyMCE should work now. Refresh your Prologue site’s home page in your browser. If necesary, use F5 in Windows, or the equivalent for other systems, to do a “hard refresh”. You should see the simple default editor, as shown in the screenshot below.

How to Enable the Advanced Features of TinyMCE

Of course, you’ve probably seen all the great extra features of TinyMCE from within your WordPress admin panel’s editor page. You can get the same features and more for your Prologue site. The simple editor form that you’ll get from the steps above doesn’t even have a way to add a hyperlink to text, so that’s the least you’d want. Here’s how to activate the extra features.

Modify the code snippet within one of the script lines, as indicated in this Advanced Theme example.

tinyMCE.init({
    mode : “textareas”,
    theme : “advanced”
});

You’ll get something like the screenshot below:

If you need even more advanced features, there are additional examples accessible from the drop-down menu at the top right of the Moxiecode TinyMCE example page. I’ve used the “All buttons and plugins” mode at Filmscenic.com, as seen in the screenshot below. It probably has far more features than necessary, but I can always tone it down if there are too many options. In fact, if you study the Javascript code snippet for one of the more advanced modes, you’ll see that there are a number of TinyMCE “plugins” enabled. Just start removing plugin names and play around until you have the configuration you want. (Or you could actually read the TinyMCE wiki.)

Caveats

Some of the advanced TinyMCE modes take up more space horizontally than the Prologue theme is set up for. This may cause problems in browsers other than Firefox (the only one I use for development and blogging, but not for browsing). The edit area is sizable, thanks to the grippy in the bottom right corner, but you cannot make the editor less wide. So you’ll have to tweak your Prologue installation’s stylesheet(s) to fix the width of the blue background area – provided you don’t like the appearance. On the other hand, since only registered authors will ever see the editor area, it might not be a big deal.

Note

If you do any film blogging and want an account on Filmscenic, to build links to your site(s) or to that of friends, please drop me a Perf PM with your full name and other details (desired WP username, email address, site URL).

11 Skills That A Freelance Blogger Should Have

So you think you’re a good writer and you’ve read Skellie’s 10 tips for freelance blogging income, in which she says that you shouldn’t accept less than $50 for a 400-word post – even when you’re starting out. I agree that good bloggers deserve this (though whether they’ll get it is questionable). But are you a good blogger? What skills do you have that warrant getting $50/post?

Here are at least some of the “skills” (which include knowledge and activities) that I feel you should aim for if you want to be a consummate bloglancer and command the rates that Skellie suggests.

  1. Conversational writing style. This is a given, of course, but so many new bloggers think this is the only skill they need.
  2. Topical knowledge. Build a thorough understanding of the topic you’re writing about, else you’ll just be regurgitating. (Regurgitation can be purchased for far far less than $50/post.) If you’re still learning a topic, then at least start by offering your viewpoint.
  3. Analytical skills. The reasons for this are many – but one reason is so that you can read X other posts about a topic and produce one solid post from your viewpoint (with appropriate references). Question: can analytical skills be taught, or are they built up over many years?
  4. Building dialogue. Ability to build and maintain a dialogue – i.e., get visitors to comment, especially on a regular basis. (Though don’t get depressed if this doesn’t happen right away. Most visitors don’t comment, so without lots of traffic, you might not get responses. Ask friends to comment regularly, if you have to. Visitors are more likely to comment when someone already has.)
  5. Deep linking. An understanding of why deep linking is important to building a successful blog, and actually doing it.
  6. Building backlinks. Ability to build/ solicit/ induce/ seduce backlinks – especially quality links.
  7. Traffic building. Ability to build suitable traffic, either by promotion or by writing secondary articles – posted to other sites – that link to the main article.
  8. Web metrics. An understanding of web/ blog metrics, and the use of a good package, such as Performancing PMetrics or Google Analytics, to analyze visitor behavior and site performance, and to determine the effectiveness of activities #5-7.
  9. Socializing. Spend time “socializing” online, building up social media friends to help you promote articles. Suggestion: join the Hive.
  10. Being a watcher. Willingness to stay on top of the trends, by monitoring your niche. This helps you to
  11. Monitoring your work. How much time are you spending on paid work? Are you achieving your desired average hourly/ weekly/ monthly rate, all while still managing to have a life outside of work?

Do You Deserve A Better Rate?

Now, if you happen to have ALL of these skills (or more), and can successfully apply them, then you deserve more than $50/post. Though if you build only your writing skills, then you don’t. Plain and simple. (However, there are a lot of good bloggers out there. How many of you are actually getting $50/post gigs, let alone are finding them?)

I should point out that I left a comment on Skellie’s post saying that I felt her suggestion of asking for $50/post when you start out was unrealistic for most bloggers. If you’ll recall, I just wrote a post about leveraging your research to make the best of $10 and $20 per post fees. I hadn’t read her post at the time, but I’m not totally in disagreement with her. I strongly disagree with a couple of points, but I also strongly agree with most of the other points.

Can the Market Support Increased Article Rates?

The real issue is whether the online market can support that rate. Only two years ago, $10 was about the top rate. Then I’d heard last year from some people that $25-30 was standard, but only for experienced bloggers. A couple of very popular tech sites pay $100, but those posts are much longer than 400 words and typically require a fair bit of research.

Can the market currently support $50/post as a basis for qualified bloggers? I seriously don’t believe that’s the case. Having once been a struggling print publisher, I know the feeling of wanting to pay writers more (or anything at all), but also the feeling of whether I’ve got enough to pay the bills. I happen to know a lot of “successful” web publishers who’ll admit they really aren’t making all that much. Web publishers don’t have costs such as newsprint and printing, but there are other costs.

Now I don’t want to be all pessimistic. I do believe that the market will change, and that qualified bloggers will be able to make a good living, comparable to what many successful print freelance writers make/ once made. For the present though, you have to make the best of the work that’s out there.

All You Need is 1,000 True Fans … But …

Lot’s of people have blogged about ex-Wired-Editor Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans“ article. If you didn’t, I wrote about it yesterday. It seems like the central theme has been lost in some translations.

The core idea is that rather than trying and failing to gain mainstream success, if you have a smaller but more passionate following you can still make a living.

What a lot of people are overlooking is that doesn’t mean you only speak to 1,000 people. To get 1,000 “true fans” you are going to have to communicate with 10x or even 100x that number.

Think about it. What percentage of people who visit your blog actually subscribe? 5%? Fewer? So to get 1,000 subscribers, not “true fans”, just subscribers, how many people need to approach your site?

To get the pool of prospects you need to still cast your net. Experiment.

One of my current experiments is to give away a premium news theme to Twitter followers every friday. I don’t think for a minute every one of those followers will be a “true fan” or even engaged, but maybe a few will seek out more of what I do and like it. Point is you have to try these things to see what works. You can’t say “I have 1,000 followers so now I can rest”.

The idea does not at all take the pressure off promoting, just means that when you find your ideal prospect you have to absolutely delight and positively surprise them, nurture them, and make them as happy as you can.

You have to keep on doing the best you can because you don’t know where your next true fan might come from.

Practical Blogging Tips: Build Comprehensive Content

When was the last time you used a search engine to find information about something but didn’t find you what you wanted? Other people are probably running into the same problem. Have you considered creating the content yourself? Let me give you an example of a blog post that could be turned into comprehensive content.

A Starting Point: Image Gallery

Blogger Sunny posted a couples gallery for DWTS 6 – Dancing With the Stars Season 6 – at Popsofa. Whether you like it or not, this has become a popular TV show. I happen to like ballroom dancing, so I like watching this series. In my opinion, the 12 professional dancers each season are what makes the series worth watching, though some of the stars aren’t half bad (John O’Hurley was robbed in Season 1 – robbed, I tell ya.)

But a gallery of 12 pictures does not constitute “comprehensive content”. How do you turn the gallery into comprehensive content? You do this by adding a variety of other information that fans will be searching for, and linking to it all from the gallery (or a Season 6 index post, in an easy to navigate manner. (Just make sure that a link to the gallery is visible somewhere in a “feature box” or in the navigation bar, for the duration of the series. It’s your main entry page to the comprehensive content, and you want regular, incidental, and search visitors to be able to see it immediately – not have to search for it.)

The Missing Content: What Should Be Included

DWTS 6 launches Mar 17th, and there will likely be a lot of search traffic before, during, and after each episode. Build for that traffic NOW, giving yourself about 1.5 weeks to produce comprehensive, authority content about the series and about each celebrity participant for Season 6. Here’s what you could include, both now and during the series.

  1. Couples Gallery. Gallery of DWTS 6 couples, plus any alternate shots. (Popsofa’s DWTS 6 couples gallery uses the Fancy Zoom WP plugin, from WP Elements, to “lightbox” the gallery images. Though due to caching issues, you may not get the lightboxing effect.)
  2. Participant list. List of couple pairings, with links from each celebrity and professional name to their own profile page.
  3. Dancer profiles. Profile of each professional dancer, how many seasons they’ve been on the show, their background, and a pic or two.
  4. Celebrity profiles. Profiles of each celebrity participant, their background, their chances (ongoing, after each episode), what else they’re up to.
  5. Episodic analysis. Analysis of each episode, from your point of view.
  6. Couples synopses. For example, each participating couple would get a synopsis page that has video clips and commentary.
  7. Easy index. A handy index page that is visible on your home page for the duration of the series. (This could be the couples gallery page, or a “season 6” index page.)

Why Do It?

In total, you’d have at least 1 (gallery/ index) + 24 (personal profiles) + 12 (couples synopses) + 1 (Season 6 summary page) = 38 pages. Plus there’ll be the X episode summary pages.

That’s an example of what I’m calling comprehensive content that, if done well, can be evergreen. It could draw traffic to your site for the next several years. I did something similar for the Hell’s Kitchen reality cooking series, but dropped the ball by not including picture galleries and personal profiles. (Though it’s harder to do profiles on unknown contestants.) Still, every time there’s a new season, I get spikes in traffic.

The search spiders will be salivating at all your “authoritative” content, rich with text, images and video, and all focused on one keyphrase: “Dancing With the Stars”, as well as the keyword DWTS. And readers will very likely visit next season, to see what you have to say for season 7. Of course, you can apply this methodology to many niches or different TV shows, in case you don’t like ballroom dancing or reality cooking shows. One event to consider: the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympics in China.

Problogging Tips: Get Smart, Leverage Your Research

Do you blog for pay? Do you feel that you’re getting enough per post (or even per word), or that blogging pay generally doesn’t match the effort? Why not leverage your research time, as well as your writing? Read on.

The Dilemma: Low-Paying Blogging Gigs

A few days ago, someone posted a blogger job at the Performancing Jobs board, without a URL for me to assess it. But details on post length, frequency (sort of) and payment were given. An anonymous commenter showed a bit of math to show the effective per word rate, then added an angry few words: “what a rip off”. I responded with a “tsk, tsk”, then they responded back, along the lines of how publishers who offer low rates and the writers who accept them are reducing writing to a commodity.

The Hope: Bonuses and Revenue Share

In a sense, that’s true for the blogosphere. But there are some details that the anonymous commenter seemed to have missed. The job poster asked for at least one article daily (200-300 words) for $200/mth, plus performance bonuses and profit share “to the right applicant”. [If “daily” means 20 days/mth, that’s $10/post – a fairly standard rate for all but the most experienced bloggers.]
 
Giving the job poster the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume that they’ll honor the bonuses and rev share. I know of at least two bloggers who started at $100/mth for a minimum 3 (very short) posts per day and 50% profit share and are now each earning $3-5K/mth or more. They put in the time to promote, and it paid off. They have a full-time job that they enjoy.

Par For the Course: Industry Rates

On the flipside, there are popular and successful tech sites out there that are paying $100/post, but when you work out the per word rate, it’s not that impressive. Every publisher cannot be Playboy, who pay $1 per word to established, already well-known writers. The blogosphere is still a fairly young entity.

There are blog publishers who reputedly pay $25, $30, or even $50 per post, for 400-800 words (or thereabouts), for very experienced bloggers. But even I, who am a published author and writer and have 20 years writing experience (mostly technical writing, interleaved with coding and code documentation work), have a hard time finding those fabled rates – especially in a niche that I want to write in.

How Long Do You Take To Blog?

If you can find those $25+/post rates and actually deserve them, good luck to you. If you can’t, that does not mean you cannot make a living from $10 posts. The trick is learning to leverage your research. Here’s an example.

  1. You get a blogging gig that pays $10/post (400+ words), with a schedule of 2 posts/day, for a maximum 20 days/month. Total earnings: $10 x 2 x 20 = $400/mth.
  2. It takes you 30 minutes to write, edit and publish one 400+ word post.
  3. But it takes you two hours each day to browse your RSS feed reader (or check Techmeme, Megite, Popurls or some other niche monitor, or a social media site such as Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, Sphinn, Mixx.) That’s only $20 for 2+(2×1/2) = 3 hours work, or less than $7/hr. Not very promising.

Leveraging Your Efforts

What’s the problem? Here’s are some ways that you can tighten up your timetable. Use what suits you.

  1. Maybe 30 minutes is more than you need to write 400 words on a topic you know well. Even a slow typist at 50 wpm can produce 1000 words in 20 minutes, though if you want to spend time editing, you can probably get an effective rate of 500 words in 20 minutes. So that means you can produce at least 3 posts/hour, leaving more time for other work.
  2. If you are not writing newsy articles and can write a day or two ahead, you have even more leverage. Write as much of a week’s posts as you can on the same day, so that you’re minimizing weekly research time. This frees up that time to accept other work.
  3. Follow only the top blogs in your niche. That is, scale down the number of blogs you browse each day. Have bookmark folders such as “DAILY”, “WEEKLY”, “INFREQUENT” and “TO READ”. Or whatever works for  you.
  4. Use Google Alerts or something like this service.
  5. Leverage your writing. Can you get more work on similar blogs? At one time, I used to write for three VoIP/ communications blogs daily, producing 7 posts per day, at between $4-9 each, depending on the blog. Still not a lot per post, on average, but knowing that industry meant I could also occasionally accept bigger articles on VoIP for $150-300 each, as well as post occasionally on my own tech blog. The amount of research I had to do did not increase significantly. I had a similar deal for RFID posts, so my total earnings were enough for me to start working full-time from home.
  6. Don’t obsess. I admit it. I’m obsessive about my writing, but if you want to be an effective blogger and earn a healthy income without spending 12 hours a day, learn when enough editing is enough.

Increase Your Effective Rate

The basic principle is to increase your effective hourly rate. If you follow some of the tips above, you could push that $7/hour rate to $20-30/hr – which has been acceptable rate for freelance writers in the past, for all but very niche topics. You might also have some of the following “advantages”, which will reduce your monthly expenses and thus your income requirements. Though you might have to budget for a while.

  1. No car. So no car payments, gas costs, insurance, maintenance. Having at one time shelled out $1200/mth in car-related costs for several years, I know that this alone can force you to take work you don’t want.
  2. Working from home. I do have a car now, but those monthly costs total about $460, including gas, since I work from home.
  3. No spouse or kids.
  4. No serious debts.

For me, $1800-3300/mth in total blogging earnings (freelance and ad revenue from my blogs) was fine for the past two calendar years, though now that I have a car again and want to move back to Toronto, I have to work a bit harder. What income you’ll be satisfied with will vary with your needs, but if you learn to leverage your research and writing, it might be sufficient for you to build your experience and reputation so that you can offer content development to web publishers.