Around the beginning of 2010 I saw an explosion of lists with various recommended WordPress plugins :

• Best 16 WordPress Plugins For 2010
• The 15 Best WordPress Plugins to Use in 2010
• 75 Best WordPress Plugins That Make Bloggers Lives Easier
• 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
• Best WordPress Plugins to improve the Security of your Blog

These are okay, but there are a few plugins that can really help boost things up for you. Following are some of my favorite plugins and recommendations for 2010 :

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins

1. SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin - The AllinOneSEO alternative.
2. SEO Super Comments – Index your comments as separate pages (thousands of added long tail pages).
3. HeadSpace 2 – Complete control over metas (overlaps with some of #1, complements #4, not recommended for WPMU)
4. Meta Robots WordPress plugin – All needed SEO tags (overlaps with some of #1, complements #3, not recommended for WPMU)
5. SEO Smart Links – ALinks reloaded. Auto internal and external linking
6. Hotlink 2 Link WordPress Plugin – Make it easy to link to your photos.
7. WordPress Global Translator Plugin – Make translation pages of your blog in any language (thousands of added long tail pages with real added value for visitors).
8. SEO Boost from Google 404 Plugin – Best 404 page possible.
9. WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin – Make the most of incoming traffic.

Speed plugins

• DB Cache Reloaded – Projekty – Using WPSuperCache? try this instead (not tested on WPMU).
• WP Minify WordPress Plugin – Optimize JS and CSS files (not tested on WPMU).

Making money plugins

The only real way to make money blogging is direct advertising. This is the best no hassle direct advertising plugin I know:

• OIOPublisher (aff, I bought this plugin, if you do direct ads, you should too)

Happy 2010.

So, following are some of my quick thoughts and suggestions on making first steps on online affiliate marketing.

I can understand the frustration, but ofcourse you already know that an affiliate business is tough to get started on. I had a look at one of the sample sites you set up and there are quite a few things you can improve on. One of the basic rules of the affiliate business is that the landing page should be as simple and clear as possible with a single visible clickable action. There are endless examples out there on how to set one up, but clearly you need to strip down the landing page and make some major changes in how you approach it. The affiliate site that you set up is more like a niche/brand blog rather than a call for action. Too many places to run around, too much text, too many confusing messages to the visitor, it's easy to get lost and give up.

Next thing you might want to consider, and I can't emphasize this enough, is tracking visitors on-site actions and performing ongoing A/B testing. You need to know what your visitors are doing on the affiliate landing page and what might improve conversion rates to get them to perform the needed action. Get your hands dirty with A/B testing to experiment with different colors, fonts, designs and you'll see immediate results in conversation rates and increased sales. It might be difficult to believe but simple things like the size, the title and the location of your "call for action button" could bring up conversion rates by huge numbers. One interesting case I can recall had to do with a friend using Hebrew changing the phrasing from a single gender male implied structure to plural gender-less call for action.

Driving quality traffic is difficult, but it usually involves some sort of investment in bringing in the already interested audiences through means of Adwords, Facebook and the likes. That does mean putting in money in order to generate money and finding out the usually long tail keywords that would cost you less but would bring you more sales. That's an art, and this is where the big players outperform newbies and win the competition over the lucrative niches. I suggest getting close to someone that knows the trade and getting a more personal insights on what this process looks like.

It is a challenge and I hope that helps a little with giving you direction on what to look for. It takes time and commitment to get past the frustrating stage. Good luck.

It's installed PredictAds on the search bar in this blog, so you can give it a try.

PredictAds looks 'young' and there are some minor glitches here and there, but the data they provide about searches within your site and the interface it's in is fantastic, and there are some money making opportunities for you on the side with the ads you may choose to show, but don't have to, on the bottom of the search suggestions (50-50 split). Using Google in-site search on most of my sites and blogs, I know that not many people use that feature there, so this may not be that much of a big money maker for either the site owners or the company. Yet, it's a nice little feature that has potential to grow into something nice, should they be able to push this hard enough. Right now, Goggling and Technorating the company, there's very little known about them, with no mentions from the problogging big boys, so they'd have to get some exposure in order to grow. I imagine once people learn about this service, many would decide to use it.

Here's what the main reports screen for PredictAds looks like:

There are some more advanced reporting with possible export to Excel.

It claims to support Hebrew and right-to-left, which for the average Hebrew blogger suffering from lack of potential monetization solutions this could be really nice.

If I were them, I would call and market it as something that's less about "Ads" and more about search-boosting, but they might also succeed with pushing this as an ad service.

Good luck guys, hope this works out.

The average daily unique visitors is around 550 and average daily pageviews is around 900. The blog went through a slight redesign.

The earnings stats are not very impressive. This month has been truly disappointing :

• Google Adsense - from 15.6US$ down to 7US$.
• Kontera - from 42.15US$ up to $51.69US$.
• Widgetbucks (still experimenting) - from 26.92US$ down to 3.62US$.
• Shoppingads (still experimenting) - from 4US$ down to nothing.

Report :

• Combined CTR went down from almost 7% to 5.21%.
• I'm not sure why, but Adsense, Widgetbucks and Shoppingads aren't getting any clicks. It's quite strange. The only ad network that works well - very well - is Kontera, which continues to grow.
• Total earnings are down from 90UD$ to 62US$, which is even lower than the first month's earnings.
• I'll try out new alternatives, maybe it's time for something different.

 Thoughts and comments welcome. Happy new year.

A few things happened during this month.

• The biggest one was the earthquake Google PR update that penalized Pay-per-post and Text-ad-links with a PR drop, sometimes going straight down to PR0. While some bloggers maintained that they suffered no major traffic lose, I've noticed how those PR drops impact the blogs they link to and their authority. Wispid's authority came from a few other problogs that got a PR drop from 5-6 to 0, and the traffic began to drop, showing 50-60% decrease in incoming Google traffic.
• The second thing we did is that we stopped submitting posts to social websites, which was a massive source of traffic that helped previously boost the blog to over 1000 daily pageviews. Why? we thought it was time to try other sources of traffic and it was honestly making us tired. But, we did incorporate some of the blog's post into other blogs through semi-auto related-posts entry, and so the incoming traffic switched from being mainly about Google Search and social submission sites to getting direct traffic from fellow blogs. It's interesting seeing the variance in traffic behavior and how those move around in the blog. Traffic is now about 450-500 unique a day with double+ pageviews. Subscriber count went down as well ...

The earnings stats are not very impressive, but they do - surprisingly - continue to go up (previous month compared against current month):

• Google Adsense - from 32US$ down to 15.60US$.
• Kontera - from 19US$ up to $42.15US$.
• Widgetbucks (still experimenting) - from 10US$ up to 26.92US$.
• Shoppingads (still experimenting) - from 4US$ stayed the same with $4.43US$.

Report:

• Combined CTR went up from ~%6 to ~7%, but ECPM went down. Total earning were ~90US$, up from 65US$ last month. With the traffic decrease and all the changes we made, that's not half bad.
• Less incoming Google traffic means less people clicking on Google Adsense ads.
• Kontera continues to do extremely well on that blog. I'm not sure why.
• Widgetbucks went up 250% and it has a lot to do with a small experiment I did using sexy Widgetbucks ads that seemed to attract a lot of clicks. There was a massive decline in earnings towards the end of the month, and I could only attribute it to the Widgetbucks announcement on ProBlogger that they're only receiving clicks from US-Canada traffic.
• Shoppingads just doesn't seem to work out. They've been having spam issues, their ads disappearing and reappearing spontaneously. I mailed them twice and on both occasions got an apology reply after a few days saying they're making adjustments. I don't know, it doesn't look good, but it might change.

-

Got some feedback or want to share your thoughts? I’m interested. Hopefully, more next month.

I caught a short but significant comment in the new Clear cut blogging blog mentioning the following:

Coffee makers are what they choose for my site if I let the MerchSense function crawl my page and automatically put up “relevant” ads. I have it set up with lingerie now so the CTR is higher but the RPC is lower. I hope they will get better ads in the future.

Initial response was "Oh, wow... they actually have ads for women's lingerie?" and after giving it some thought I went to have a look at what those ads look like and was extremely surprised to find the ads include hot and sexy half naked girls modeling the women's lingerie. Here, look at the following examples:

So, looking at the sites I'm involved with I tried to find one where I wouldn't feel too uncomfortable putting those up, and figured the Wispid experiment is a good place to give it a go.

Results are shocking. I'm now quite sure that folks clicking on those ads are not women looking to buy lingerie but rather men eager to have a look at sexy girls.

Although RPC did go down to about 20-40% what is was with the other products, CTR jumped up 8-12 times more than it was before (!). A small time time blog with relatively low pageview count now earns relatively high revenue from Widgetbucks because of those ads. It's kicking Google Adsense ass, that's for sure. Unreal.

There you have it - if you've got a blog that would tolerate this kind of Widgetbucks ads, I say - go for it. I think you'd be surprised how well those convert. If you do try it out - let me know how well it performed, I'm curious.

I figured that it might be interesting for some of you other bloggers to take part in this experiment and see how well we do, so I'd like to share October's earnings report with you. Mind you, this blog has only been running for about two months.

Here are the overall stats:

• Google Adsense - 32US$.
• Kontera - 19US$.
• Widgetbucks (still experimenting) - 10US$.
• Shoppingads (still experimenting) - 4US$.
• Adbrite (dropped) - 2.2US$.

Report :

• Google Adsense isn't performing that well, with relatively low CTR, and I'm guessing that this is related to the fact that the ads displayed are not entirely relevant. Because this  blog is about weird news and humor, the ads engines have a hard time making out the blog topic. Furthermore, the eCPM is very low, suggesting that there aren't many advertisers targeting those keywords in Adwords.
• But, surprisingly enough Kontera is doing much better when it comes to CTR, although Kontera continues to display much lower eCPM than Google Adsense.
• The recently added Widgetbucks and Shoppingads beta are doing soso, especially since it's a bit difficult to match products to this kind of blog, but, I admit it's doing better than I expected. Shoppingads has only been added a week and a half ago. One interesting thing to note is that this blog gets a lot of international traffic through translators, and Widgetbuck's widget doesn't show up on those pages. Widgetbucks - overall - is doing a bit better than Shoppingads is. There's something about those jumpy flashy ads that's attracting  a bit more readers to click.
• Adbrite was performing so badly, CPC and CPM, that I decided to drop it. Even with the family filter on and trying to self moderate what ads are added, I found the Adbrite ads to be a bit annoying and on of the spammy type that I think have absolutely no added value for readers.
• Overall, all programs combined are showing a CTR of about 6% and earnings of around 65US$, which I believe is okay for a new experimental blog, right?

-

Got some feedback or want to share your thoughts? I'm interested. Hopefully, more next month.

Bloggers have already complained about the fact that Widgetbucks includes an outoing link to their site with their widget, E.G.

<a href="http://www.widgetbucks.com" target="_blank">WidgetBucks - Trend Watch - WidgetBucks.com</a>

... and that they don't reveal how much actually goes to the blogger, but that does little to intimidate us bloggers that are always looking for another methods for making money and with a 25US$ signup gift, we had to give it a go.

Generally, the first obvious thing I should maybe share is that Widgetbucks isn't converting well on any of my content based blogs, running at less than a 0.5%-CTR. Yet, I'm willing to give that time. But, there are some weird things that are not quite there yet. For example, MerchSense offers the strangest things to some of the blogs. I'm not sure how MerchSense works, or if it does works, but the products displayed are no where near the keywords on the site. Another example, not being satisfied with what MerchSense was serving my sites, I went on to change to some category. But, thing is, I noticed after a while that revenue reporting changed as well.

Here's MerchSense in one of the smaller blogs :

Here's what I got a while after the category change:

Even with the MerchSense view, some stats are in red a few days following those clicks. While they were quick to implement a real-time display of stats - marking those in red, and changing those when category selection changes, makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Right now, Widgetbucks isn't looking very good, but, hopefully, this is just some beginners issues which would be resolved soon and maybe CTR will grow with time. If not, then it was just a nice experiment.

Select the ad type you want to display, Place the code given on your website, and Optimize things a little to get better targeted ads. 

But, somehow, most of my few bloggers and web-developers that I recommend Adsense to, come back reporting very low revenue even if their site is relatively popular. When looking at their site and ads the same problems keep coming up, and I keep referring them to all the points written in "The quick guide on how to optimize your Adsense ads", but there is one major mis-understanding that is usually a bit difficult to grasp. Here it is...

Some website owners and blogger overdo it, or simply put ads in places that do not convert to clicks. They figure there's no harm, maybe someone will click on those once in a long time and they'll own another buck or so, but that's failing to understand how the Google bidding system works - it will actually cause your total income to drop with a much lower eCPM.

Thing is, Google will place the highest bids for the keywords offered on your site. If you have 2 open slots, it will put the highest paying 2 ads it can find for you. If you have 20 open slots, it will put 20. Now, consider you're running a 4 ads banner in your footer where most chances are no body will ever read, Google might place your highest paying ads there, and the ads that pay less in the ad slots that users are more likely to click. So, it is possible, and very likely, that by having less Adsense ads on your site in the right places you'll increase your eCPM significantly. So, the key is finding the right balance between reaching a high CTR and a high eCPM. Note that link units are especially problematic as a link open up to a page full of ads which include both high and low paying ads.

Example for things you can try:

• Remove link units, use the same ad space to display one ad unit.
• Remove all ads that are under the fold or far away from the content.
• Replace Adsense CPC with some other advertising company, like Adbite.
  
• Track ads through channels to check both CTR and eCPM stats. Remove, replace or redesign the ads that are showing low CTR or eCPM.
• If advertisers are targeting your ads - remove an ad or two.

It so happens that a few times, once this week, the person I told this to found this hard to believe. So, I took a few minutes to search the web for posts about this and here's a quick collection of what I found to support this :

Less Adsense Ads Means More Money For You by Daily Web Ideas

I have done an experiment this whole week to test the theory that having less Adsense ads on your site gets you more money and I have found it to be true.

Make More Money With Less AdSense Ads by JohnTP

I removed the link units from this blog leaving just the 336×280 ad unit below the post title and within a few days my AdSense earnings almost doubled!

How to Make More Money from AdSense with Fewer Ad Units by Sabahan:

How to Determine Which Ad Unit to Turn Off?

Easy, if you are tracking your ad units using channels that is. Just remove those that do not perform well.

Instead of turning off certain ad units and giving up that inventory permanently, you could replace them with ads from other company. As you can see below this post, I’ve replaced the AdSense banner with another banner ad from AdBrite.

Less AdSense is more AdSense :

Let’s imagine there are fifty advertisers bidding for the keywords associated with your site. The higher these advertisers are bidding, generally the more likely they are to appear on your site. Therefore, if you are running a 468×60 banner, it is more than likely that the two advertisers that are appearing are paying the highest amounts to appear there (and consequently you are being paid the highest amounts for each click).

As you can imagine, as you place more ad units all those advertisers who have bidded lower amounts will start to appear on your site. Whilst you may be getting a few more clicks by adding more ad blocks to your site, you will invariably make less money for each click as you are now allowing advertisers who pay less to have access to your site.

Some more relevant Adsense tips are given by SEO-book's "Website Publishers: Learn How to Make More Money Publishing Less Pages & Showing Fewer Ads":

If your site is mostly an AdSense site, and you are getting a strong CPM, you might be able to make more by showing fewer ad units. Use the advanced AdSense reports to see if people are site targeting your website. If advertisers are site targeting consider pulling back one ad unit to see how that affects the CPC and CPM of the remaining ad units. Advertisers competing for less ad inventory should drive up the prices. If the gain nearly offsets the loss you are still ahead because you can replace that other ad unit with an affiliate ad, an ad for a branded advertiser, or an ad marketing your best content.

So, Adsense might be a bit more than cut and paste. Place Adsense wisely.

This is an extremely useful feature for two reasons :

• Builtin Drupal search is very heavy on database and query resources and this allows giving up the builtin search completely.
• Using Google's Adsense for Search you can monetize the search results. Those usually yield very high CTR since they're keyword specific.

-

From http://drupal.org/node/78997#comment-145784

Go through the google setup and create a page on your site using the full html filter and insert the code they give you. Your code may differ to mine dependant on options you chose.

<!-- Google Search Result Snippet Begins -->
<div id="googleSearchUnitIframe"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
   var googleSearchIframeName = 'googleSearchUnitIframe';
   var googleSearchFrameWidth = 650;
   var googleSearchFrameHeight = 1300;
   var googleSearchFrameborder = 0 ;
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
         src="http://www.google.com/afsonline/show_afs_search.js">
</script>
<!-- Google Search Result Snippet Ends -->

Put that newly created pages URL in the field where they ask you what page the results should be shown on.

Next, you need to replace the search box on your site with the one they provide you with. How you do this depends on the theme you are using. I'm using Fancy that uses the PHPTemplate engine. The code I need to replace is here:

<td id="menu">
<?php if ($search_box) { ?><form action="<?php print $search_url ?>" method="post">
        <div id="search">
          <input class="form-text" type="text" size="15" value="" name="edit[keys]" alt="<?php print $search_description ?>" />
          <input class="form-submit" type="submit" value="<?php print $search_button_text ?>" />
        </div>
      </form><?php } ?>

This is located in the page.tpl.php file in the theme directory.

Or you could turn off the search box within your settings forcing the newly added one to appear.

This would need a bit of tidying up but this is the code they ask you to insert dependent on the options you chose, again yours may differ but the idea is the same:

Note line 2. That's the URL of the search result page.

<!-- SiteSearch Google -->
<form method="get" action="http://www.sitename.com/googlesearch.htm" target="_top">
<table border="0" bgcolor="#ffffff">
<tr><td nowrap="nowrap" valign="top" align="left" height="32">
</td>
<td nowrap="nowrap">
<input type="hidden" name="domains" value="www.sitename.com"></input>
<input type="text" name="q" size="20" maxlength="255" value=""></input>
<input type="submit" name="sa" value="Google Search"></input>
</td></tr>
<tr>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td nowrap="nowrap">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<input type="radio" name="sitesearch" value="" checked="checked"></input>
<font size="-1" color="#000000">Web</font>
</td>
<td>
<input type="radio" name="sitesearch" value="www.sitename.com"></input>
<font size="-1" color="#000000">www.sitename.com</font>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<input type="hidden" name="client" value="pub-5006751382868565"></input>
<input type="hidden" name="forid" value="1"></input>
<input type="hidden" name="ie" value="UTF-8"></input>
<input type="hidden" name="oe" value="UTF-8"></input>
<input type="hidden" name="safe" value="active"></input>
<input type="hidden" name="flav" value="0000"></input>
<input type="hidden" name="sig" value="oxG6OMSGsV1OFRVy"></input>
<input type="hidden" name="cof" value="GALT:#008000;GL:1;DIV:#336699;VLC:663399;AH:center;BGC:FFFFFF;LBGC:336699;ALC:0000FF;LC:0000FF;T:000000;GFNT:0000FF;GIMP:0000FF;FORID:11"></input>
<input type="hidden" name="hl" value="en"></input>
</td></tr></table>
</form>
<!-- SiteSearch Google -->

 

But there's still a problem, detailed and fixed by http://www.techmag.biz/google_onsite_search_on_drupal :

Google Adsense search has introduced new on site search. Where the search results are shown in the same page. This breaks on sites running drupal cms.Both Drupal and google search uses q as the URL parameter. Drupal thinks the parameter q as the url to be shown to the user and hence shows page not found.To solve this we can use another parameter which will be considered by google as search parameter
Presently you text box code for google search will look like

<input type="text" name="q" size="20" maxlength="255" value="">

Replace it by the following

<input type="text" name="as_q" size="20" maxlength="255" value="">

Google considers 'as_q' as parameter too.That will solve your problem. Try search on this page to believe