I cover a lot of topics and read a lot of blogs. Up until recently, I had them all in one folder in my feed reader. Then I broke them up into folders. That took some thought and until then, I really had no idea what all my interests are. After that two hour organizing session, a lot of things became more clearer. I saw what I liked listed by topic. After that, I was able to create a few filters for each of my blogs. Now, if I’m in commenting mode, I just go down the river of articles in each filter. I have only headlines showing and open all the links in my browser. It is training me on writing better headlines and opening the link in the browser means I don’t have to retype everything when I go to comment.

Like I said, I read a lot of blogs. Before that, I used to read a lot of books. I still do. A productivity expert would tell me to trim down. But I am not worried about information overload. It is not my goal to read every post on every blog that I subscribe to. It is my goal to always have a variety of posts to read, for inspiration, for ideas, for commenting on, and for submitting to social news sites. The more, the merrier and the more chances I will hit something that I really need to read or that slipped between the cracks.

I like reading good books. I like reading good books that no one else heard of even better.

So, I noticed a few gaps in my reading material, a few categories where there were only twenty or so posts to read. And I went looking for "top" lists to add to my reader.

• 40 Inspiring Writing Blogs that you Don’t Already Read
• Top 100 Productivity and LifeHack Blogs
• Best eCommerce Blogs and Information Sites
• Affiliate Marketing Blogs List

So now I will just go check a few of these blogs out and start adding new subscriptions. A list of affiliate marketing blogs was hard to find. You can find plenty of "make money" blogs, but I was looking for the pure affiliate marketing blogs. So, for you list builders out there, hint, hint.

This weekend I got off my butt and went down a list of things I wanted to get done.

• I built a list of blogs using the CommentLuv plugin over at my site Digital Product Review. I am just getting the final tweaks on the theme done and am ready to start getting a little more traffic. I figured this list would bring some. It only has 100 blogs on it now, but I have about 250 more links to go through, so look for updates. A large percentage of these blogs have an Entrecard widget, a second reason to check this list out.
• I put up another WordPress plugin project for bidding. It’s a simple one and I will be using it to check out developers. The plugin is a huge project, so I am getting it made piece by piece until it is finished, depending on my budget for hiring developers and my own time to add to it.
• I purchased and read The Lazy Affiliate Marketer. This is an awesome book for intermediate affiliate marketers. I finished reading it in a day. The blueprint I have used to make money through affiliate marketing is about 20% of the book. The other 80% is where I want to go. Plus I have some ideas to add to the book. So I will be writing a report expanding the book, adding a few more techniques and giving it away with future purchases. Look for the annoucement when I am done with the report.
• I did some work around the house.
• I came up with an awesome idea for my domain Dir23.com which is just sitting around collecting dust, but that is going to require some Drupal knowledge. The idea. I’ll wait until the site’s done.
• After my post about automatic related content, I have explored it more by playing around on my Squidoo account, just trying to find how many different feeds I could come up with to cluster around one concept. A laboratory of some sorts. The SimplePie plugin works great for WordPress, but it requires a little php knowledge. I have written some preprocessors for the plugin and noted all the code and will be writing a post about using it the day I make it live here, along with some ways to make money by using the plugin.
• That made me want to build a list of Squidoo-like sites: dofollow, the ability to add multiple feed and content sources, and no marketing haters. On the to do list.
• I have been questioning myself about post frequency for a while. The problem is that there is a lot of info on the subject and a lot of opinions. One thing I have noticed: work put in on posting and commenting on the weekends is usually less effective during the weekend. In other words, I get more mileage out of my weekday post. Another thing: I get a lot of comments on the post just before the last one I posted. I figured I will drop myself down to every other day posting for now, with a goal of 4 posts a week. I will have to discipline myself by timestamping post forward even when I can’t wait to publish. On the weekends, I will post a light post, most likely off topic. I write some long posts quite often. Those should be able to make it a couple of days and give me an off day for my other blog and projects. Plus, it’s close to the same amount of posts I have been getting in anyway. Might as well stop berating myself and make it the new rule. But I would like to hear opinions on the topic of post frequency because nothing has totally swayed me one way (daily posting or more) or the other (every other day or a few times a week).

And that’s about it.

If you know your niche, that’s basically all you have to look at when you are searching for ways to monetize a site, along with "how big is the cut".

I didn’t start in internet marketing. I started before I had a computer in my teens with "Make Money at Home" offers. I never fell for any of them enough to sign up, but I got myself on every list I could. I would get an offer and follow the money trail in my mind. I realized why most MLM products are so expensive. Because everyone and his brother gets a cut. I approached it from the mentality of someone just getting an entry level job and telling his boss, "I want your job."

Your Own Product

In my last post, I forgot to mention that probably the best way to monetize a site is with your own product. That way the only person who gets a cut is the payment processor. And with digital products like software and ebooks, there is no overhead once the product is finished, except for updates. Plus, if you sign up some affiliates, you don’t even have to cover the marketing. Of course, affiliates get a cut now. But it is much better to get 50% of the profit from 100 people promoting your product than 100% of the profit from doing all the work yourself.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs were the first way the average person could get online and start making some money and I bet that some of those people who signed up for the first affiliate programs are currently deciding in which one of their five houses they will be spending the summer in.

You have to investigate affiliate programs to see who gets cuts. With most digital products, only the product vendor, the payment processor and you get a cut. And usually the average cut you will get is close to 50%. Digital products are unique in that the break even point for the vendor who created the product could be only a few sales in, yet people are willing to pay $100 a pop years after he has paid off his house with the sales. Digital products solve problems.

Hard Products

With hard product affiliate programs, you have to go all the way back to the person that mined the silicon for the computer chips, but not always. Some markets, usually the type you see in MLM’s like herbal supplements, will give you the same cut as digital products. They no longer have to pay off everyone and his brother. Only you, the affiliate.

Then there are leads, which is a different animal altogether. You get paid a flat rate for someone to sign up for something. Usually they don’t have to pay anything to do so. And the cuts are harder to see, since the company paying you is playing the cell phone company trick. We will give you this phone, but at the end of two years, you will have paid us many times the price of this free phone. So they pay you the affiliate hoping to make it up in the end. And they always do. If not, the amount they pay you will adjust to make everything profitable.

You have to watch affiliate programs sometimes though. A lot of the products you can promote through Amazon can be promoted through each companies own affiliate program without Amazon taking their hefty cut first. But there is something to be said about the automation Amazon provides.

When we move to CPM (getting paid a flat rate for every 1000 visitors) and CPC (getting paid for every click), your cut really starts getting smaller.

CPM is Crap

CPM is crap. Let me repeat that. CPM is crap. CPM is for people that have so much traffic that they don’t know what to do with it, so they sign up for CPM programs because they don’t want to screw with it. CPM is the model of huge companies. If you are the biggest computer maker in the world, you can afford to make only $1 profit from each computer if you are selling a billion computers a year.

Let me put it in other words. If you have a site that can make good money from CPM, you are probably not reading this sentence. CPM is shotgun marketing. Throw hundreds of ads at the wall for cheap and see what sticks. I have been on the other side of this equation a few times.

You pay something crazy like $2 for every thousand visitors who see your ad which you think is a deal. Chances are that less than 1% of the people will click the ad. Of those people, you are lucky to get 3%. So by paying $2, you may only get one sale. The prices paid for this type of advertising is not going up. If anything, it’s going down as advertisers get more savvy with their money. Not every advertiser is a lawyer with 40% commissions to throw around. Some are like me, affiliate marketers, who still have other people waiting for their cuts after I make a sale.

And, of course, the company that these ads are generated by, (i.e. Adwords), get their cut too, with the average being around 50% of what the advertiser is willing to pay.

As a publisher, you feel like the pizza delivery guy who gets a 25 cent tip after delivering 100 pizzas to the Lions Club.

CPC is not much better

CPC is about the same, but sometimes you can pick some winning clicks by focusing on certain topics and subjects or by signing up for a new program where the advertisers are still throwing money away.

It’s about the same, because all the same cuts are taken out. And if everything were balanced, CPM and CPC would be the same price at the end. Holes get plugged. If advertisers discover that CPM is cheaper through a system, a bunch will move in that direction, which will cause the CPC ROI to increase and send advertisers in that direction. An endless cycle that results in a net balance.

The more people involved in an advertising system, the less room for runaway profits. New systems like AdBrite and Bidvertiser offer better CPC payouts compared to Adwords. I have tested them. But they are still in their wild west phase. Advertisers overspending in a system they are just learning. Not enough sites in the system to have real variety, so all the advertisers are bidding on the same limited amount of sites. These programs will either level out or fade away.

And Optimizers

Oh, my God. They had to take the cuts one step further. There are currently a few sites in beta that optimize your CPC ads for you, testing and running the most profitable ones. They are free in beta. But soon they will be taking their cut, about the 400th cut in that money line. Yes, they optimize your ads so you make more money and if you already make a lot from CPC it’s worth it. But if you have 100 subscribers, don’t bother.

And Masqueraders

There are few widget ads companies out there. I am not sure of their actual inner workings. I am planning a WordPress plugin and system that will take them out of the equation for bloggers who want to get their hands dirty. People are getting paid 30 cents a click on hard product ads. Better than Google, but not even close to the average 10% commission you can get from a sale.

Wild Cards

Paid reviews and text link ads are a different animal.

Text link ads have more value than just for advertising. They can actually improve rankings in search engines for the advertiser. Currently I think a lot of these are underpriced due to the "Google is going to find out" scare. And this is a game to be played by experts, not that I am at text link ads. I am just learning this one myself.

With paid reviews, you are also walking a fine line with Google also. And depending on who you go through, the cuts that everyone takes varies. But with newer sites, the promotion value of being in a system outweighs the cut.

When you are up to the "guru" stage, like John Chow, you really don’t need a program to go through. When the price for one post starts hitting the hundreds, you are not only getting paid to get the word out about something, you are getting paid because "you" got the word out about something.

If you can sway a lot of people and your word is trusted, there is a little slop. Yes, the person getting paid millions of dollars to plug basketball shoes can get a whole bunch of people to buy, but does it have anything to do with the shoes or the words he is saying. How much would the average no-name actor get paid?

That has to be a nice place to be though.

Follow the Money Trail

Like I said, that’s basically all you have to do. See who gets paid every step of the way and it doesn’t matter what the commission is, you will know when you are running around in a gerbil wheel for peanuts.