The holidays are a great time to sit back and relax with family and of course catch up on the latest monetization ideas floating around the web.

I’ll be spending some time in the air as I head from Charlotte, NC to see my family in Connecticut, and I have downloaded a few shows from WebmasterRadio.fm that look interesting. WebmasterRadio has weekly shows hosted by some of the big players in the affiliate marketing/SEO/web business game. I have only listened to the SEORockstars and Net Income shows so far, and I always feel like I learn at least one thing from each show. You can download mp3s, so it will be perfect to fill up my ipod for the trip.

I will also be catching up on some blog reading. There was a good thread at Wicked Fire about which blogs people read. I am going to check out some of the ones mentioned that I had not heard about. I was also very pleased to see Monetize Traffic listed by a Wicked Fire member. Lately, I have been using the keep new and clip book features over at bloglines to save posts that I want to go back to in the future. The holidays are the perfect time to go back and review anything like this that you have been holding onto for a while.

Good luck getting ready to earn even more in 2007.

I was going through a few posts over at the wickedfire forums today, and I learned about the AutoBlog plugin for wordpress.  This plugin allows you to specify multiple rss feeds and it will automatically parse the feeds into posts on your wordpress template. The plugin can even put the posts into wordpress categories if the rss feed is set up correctly.

Using this script will not help you generate much organic search traffic due to Google’s penalty for duplicate content, but it is a great tool to quickly build out content for a site. I own a few domain names that I am not currently using. Right now, I monetize the type in traffic via Sedo,  but I think I could do better using autoblog for content and adsense/YPN for monetization. I will give this a try on my parked domain for the knicks and post my results on this blog.
If you are looking for similar plugins, you might also want to check out feedwordpress and smartrss.

In Part of Getting Started in PPC Advertising, I mentioned that it is always a good idea to sign up with promo codes so that you can test out a system without losing any money. Paul Allen (not the famous microsoft guy), has a good post up where he lists a new discount codes from Ask and looksmart.

I had not heard much about a looksmart PPC program, and I was excited about the $300 in free credits until I read a review of the program over at AU Interactive’s blog. I would proceed with caution on looksmart. The Ask program looks interesting. I have read some posts on digitalpoint questioning the quality of their traffic, but with a .05 minimum bid, I am willing to give it a try.

A while ago, I covered BlueHatSEO’s blog post about an idea to earn $100 per day from promoting screen savers bundled with adware.  Earnersblog just put up a great post about how the author earned $200 per day promoting Casino affiliate programs with an ebook. He basically wrote an ebook about a roulette strategy and encouraged readers to try out the strategy by signing up for an online casino via affiliate links embedded in the book. He distributed the ebook via p2p sharing and ebay promotion.
I think the idea is worth consideration. I really like that:

• It is a unique idea. This is a different angle from the people who are selling ebooks and people pushing affiliate programs via websites.
• Great Promotion Technique. I find promotion of a new idea to often be the most time consuming part of a new venture. Using ebay is an excellent idea and you can tap into a huge resource of other people re-distributing the ebooks.
• It keeps on giving. After the initial investment of time writing the ebook and planting it within other ebook distribution packages, the ebook will continue to float around the web and earn money.

I am not sure if I will be writing any ebooks in the near future (maybe I will have my assistant in India write a first draft of one) but I am intrigued by the idea. It is always helpful to feed your mind fresh ideas like this.

I have come up with a new method which I hope will help me to become much more efficient at making money online. A few weeks ago, I signed up with a company called GetFriday to provide me with a personal assistant in India. To get things started, I signed up fro the 10 hours per month package For $95. The hourly price can go as low as $6.25/hour based on the number of hours in the package.
Shobana, my new assistant works from 9AM to 6 PM Pacific Time, and I can contact her via email or an 800 number. She has a college degree, and her English is very good. So far, I have had her work on a few task such as entering data from various websites into a spreadsheet for me. I used this information to populate the mysql databases for one of my sites. This is work that I would have done myself in the past. It is a huge help for me to be about outsource these manual tasks so that I can spend my time working on more important tasks.

Some of the jobs that I may give to my assistant are:

• Data collection. I have a few ideas for some databases that would be worthwhile to build.
• Approving term papers and essays. I have an old database of a few thousand papers where 30% of the papers are junk. I will have the assistant find the good papers and post them to my free essay site.
• Collecting royalty free images to build free screen savers. I am still kicking this idea around, but it may be a modified version of this screensaver monetization technique.
• Content Creation. I cannot see having her writing for Monetize Traffic, but Shobana may be very helpful writing basic content for some of my other properties.
• Research. I am sure I will be able to think of some topics that she can help me to research.

Hopefully, having an assistant will help me to get more done. I will keep you posted on my experiences.

This week I began my first venture into purchasing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines. I am monetizing the traffic via a variety of affiliate networks. This traffic has been the first large chunk of traffic that I have sent to Hydra Media, and I have to say that I have been quite impressed with the performance of their offers.
My first few learnings from my first week of PPC advertising are:

• Make sure you sign up for PPC advertising with special offers. Using coupons from the digitalpoint forums, I was able to get $50 free advertising on MSN and $75 free advertising on Yahoo. The free advertising has allowed me to bet with the house’s money while I am optimizing my campaigns and getting the hang of the systems.
• Typos are your friends. When I created my initial keyword lists, I entered a few typos keywords by hand. Then I started using typo generators to come up with all sorts of permutations for my keywords. In aggregate, typos can bring a good volume of traffic and very low keyword prices.
• Read, Read, Read. The wickedfire and digitalpoint forums provided some great background. I also found some interesting posts on the MindValley Labs blog related to techniques and statistics related to optimizing PPC ads.

From what I have been reading, it appears that many of the big search engines have or are starting to crack down on affiliate marketing via PPC. I will continue my experimenting in the area because it is an interesting space, and it is something that I do not know much about yet. As always, I will continue to post more of my learnings.