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 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.

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:

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.

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: