I have been working with HydraMedia for a few months now, and my experience so far has been very positive. Their biggest selling point in my mind has been their strong affiliate support. My affiliate manager April is very easy to get a hold of via email or IM and she always has been able to answer my questions. The support at some of the other affiliate networks has paled in comparison to Hydra.

Positives

• Affiliate Support. My affiliate manager is in regular contact via email and IM, and she has been very proactive about suggesting offers that will work well for my methods of offer promotion.

Here are two good posts related to website monetization.

Making Money In the Mashup Economy – An interesting post over at GigaOm about how some companies are monetizing all of the mashups that you see springing up all over the place. One key take away is that many of the people selling tools and services related to mashups are the ones making money. However, there is a great example of hypemachine which allows users to sample music. They monetize the site via links to the apple itunes affiliate program and advertising sales. I could also see them selling feature spots on the homepage to push certain artists. This might be a bit shady, but it could be a nice way to make some money and the payment could be disclosed.

As someone who has been building websites since 1996, I have a small collection of domain names that I am not making use of. Over the years, I have tried a variety of methods to monetize these domains.

1.) Domain Parking Services. These services allow you to point your domain to their name servers and they show semi-targeted pay-per-click ads on the domain. The level of input you can have related to targeting varies for each service, but most let you provide some keyword suggestions.

Advantages

While browsing Valleywag tonight, I noticed a post about how social networking site TagWorld may be headed out of business. The scary thing is that they are still running an offer on ClickBooth that pays $.80 per signup. Over the weekend I was thinking about a few ways to promote this offer, but I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole now.

This is just another great example of how publishers should always do some preliminary research on a company before promoting offers. Myself and countless other publihsers have been burned by this in the past, and there is no shortage of  shady affiliate marketers. Be safe out there.

The first week of 2007 is coming to a close, so I thought it was a good time to provide some links to help you get motivated for earning more in the new year.

One of the blog posts which helped me to get into the right frame of mind was Quadzilla’s You are the CEO. In the post he emphasizes the importance of viewing yourself as the strategic leader of your company, even if your company is just you and your computer. This means you should:

• Focus your limited time on the high value tasks in which you specialize.

In the forums, I came across a leaked link to the new Adbrite Video Beta page. The system looks very impressive.

Key Features:

• An embedded player where Ads are shown in a text bar on the top, and float down in a pop up bubble that is 60 pixels high.
• The player has built in sharing capabilities similar to youtube, except when a video is shared the visitor is referred back to your site.
• Others can embed your video in their site, and the player will show your ads.