Here are some great monetization related posts that have bubbled up in my feedreader lately:

Vizu just launched a new service where they pay you to post polls on your site. You provide some basic demographic information for your site, and they will pay on a CPM basis for placing the poll on your site. This could be a great strategy for some of the quiz sites or even my friends who run a popular teen site, Kiwibox.com.

One of the blogs that I found off of the wickedfire forum has a good post about calculating confidence intervals for your PPC campaign performance. This is the best way to statistically prove if your initial campaign results are statistically meaningful, or if you need to continue testing your campaign. When I get around to building out the MonetizeTraffic tools section, I am thinking about a quick and easy interface to calculate confidence intervals. If you want to geek out on stats, you wikipedia has some good info.
I really liked this post on Earnersblog about combining blogger accounts with social bookmarking promotion to drive easy affiliate sales. The posts mentions using Bookmarking Demon to automate the bookmarking. The software looks very cool, but it is $97. To do it on the cheap, you might want to check out Delicioso which has less features but is free.

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.

Ringtones Experiment - BlueBobbo got tired of reading in all of the forums that the ringtone market is saturated, so he decided to run a test PPC advertising campaign. The results were surprisingly positive. I love test like this which dispel common myths. It just goes to emphasize that you would always be testing.

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

• It’s Easy. You can pretty much set it and forget it. Most of the parking services have landing pages with high click through rates, so you will not have to spend any time optimizing the site.
• Works with any domain.

Disadvantages

• Unless you have a huge domain portfolio, the parking services will take a sizable chunk of the revenue.
• For some domains, you may not be able to come up with relevant keywords that will pay well.

I have had some good luck with both DomainSponsor and Sedo. There is also a post over at WickedFire recommending a few other domain parking services and DNForum has some great posts on reviewing parking services.

2.) Redirect to Affiliate Programs. Recently, I have been experimenting with redirecting some of my unused domain names to relevant affiliate programs. For example, on CollegePower.com, I wrote up a quick little PHP script to redirect visitors to one of five scholarship programs on Azoogle and HydraMedia. I have also tried this with a few typo domains that are very well targeted to affiliate programs. I am currently redirecting Blinkco.com to the ringtone offers on Blinko.com. I am not yet ready to discuss my results with this technique, but I certainly see some potential here.

Advantages

• With well-targeted affiliate programs, this can be more profitable than parking services.
• With a simple redirect script, you can test multiple affiliate programs/offers on one domain.

Disadvantages

• Not all domains will have an affiliate program that is a good fit for it.
• You must remember to change up the site if the offer that you are running expires.

3.) Domain Resale. One of the best techniques I have used to monetize my unused domains is to resell some of my holdings. After I sit on a domain for a year or two, I usually consider reselling it if I will not start using it within the next six months. When selling my domains, I have had success using DNForum, Webhostingtalk, and Sitepoint forums. If you find the right buyer, you can get a good price for your domain. For example, I have sold techcoupons.com and webhostinglab.com for a few hundred dollars each. This was a huge return on my initial investment.

Advantages

• Lump sum of cash upfront
• Reduces your overall domain portfolio which can be good if your unused domains distract you from focusing upon your mains sources of revenue.

Disadvantages

• May require some time investment to find interested buyers.
• Obviously, you can no longer use the domain after you sell it.

4.) Build an Automated Aggregator Site. I do not have much experience with this, but I have seen unused domains monetized by setting up blogs that republish (scrape) RSS feeds from other sites. The scrapper blog is then loaded with Adsense and affiliate programs. I am toying with the idea of doing this on TheKnicks.com.

Advantages

• Ability to build audience and repeat visitors
• Potential for multiple revenue streams (ex: Adsense and affiliate)

Disadvantages

• Limited traffic from search engines because you will be penalized for duplicate content.
• Will take some time to set up site.

A domain name portfolio can be a great asset to an Internet marketer. I encourage you to build up that portfolio and continue to not be afraid experimenting with different monetization techniques on your domains. Even if your unused domains earn just enough to cover your annual renewal fee, you will be ahead of the game.

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.
• Have other lower value resources do mundane task (ex: get a personal assistant in India).
• Automate tasks as much as possible. If coding is not your specialty, I always recommend sites like RentACoder.

For some additional motivation, you can check out the 2007 goals of ShoeMoney and EarnersBlog. As for my goals, in 2007 I hope to:

• Increase company revenue by 20%.
• Increase my frequency of posts to this blog (2-3 posts/week).
• Improve the SEO on my core sites (20% increase in search engine traffic).
• Continue my experimentation with PPC advertising
• Write an ebook to promote an affiliate program

Good luck in 2007!

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.
• You can provide a logo to be placed in the lower right corner of the video.

Depending upon the payout rate, this could be a great way to monetize a video site. I could see sites like break.com being all over this. It will be interesting to see if people rip videos down from youtube using a tool like keepvid and start niche video sites with Adbrite video ads.

This is a step in the right direction to monetizing video content, and I will be very interested to see how the service develops.

Hat tip to Jon from WickedFire for posting the link in the forum.

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.

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.

Bluehat SEO has a great idea up on how to make $100 per day. He proposes creating some free screensavers and packaging them with the software from ZangoCash. Zango pays $0.45 per user download, so this could add up pretty quickly. The post very clearly lays out how you could get this up and running, and how to promote the site.

I probably will not be jumping on this anytime soon. Zango has a relatively shady past, including an large fine from the FTC. The idea is good for stimulating further thoughts. In the comments of the original post, people bring up some other good ideas such as putting URLs for sites with PPC ads on the screensaver.