Being in the internet marketing game we are always on the lookout for products to make our lives easier. This can include ebooks, themes, software programs, membership sites or WordPress plugins. With this in mind, I decided to write up a post on the products we actually use and recommend.

1. Ninja Affiliate

I love this plugin! What it does is add affiliate links automatically to keywords in your posts. You simply add your keywords and affiliate links in the backend on your WordPress dashboard and Ninja Affiliate will automatically add affiliate links to those keywords wherever they appear on your blog – for both old and new posts. So you don’t have to spend hours adding affiliate links to every blog post you write. Just add once in the dashboard and they are automatically added to both old and new posts.

You also have the option for nofollow links, and to choose how many links you want in each post. It also provides statistics so you can see how many times the links have been clicked on for each keyword. If you take a look at the links in this post, most of them apart from the internal links have been added automatically by Ninja Affiliate. I don’t have to add them every time I create a post. This saves me a heap of time.

It can also cloaks the links so that they don’t appear as long affiliate urls but instead they look like internal links.

Highly recommended!

Click to read our full review – Maxblog Ninja Affiliate Review

2. OIO Publisher

If you want to make money from advertising on your blog then this is definitely the plugin to go with. It makes the whole process sooo much easier. The initial set up is all you will need to do and once done everything is handled for you. You simply have to approve the ads with a few clicks and the ads go up automatically on your site. This is a bargain for the price as it will save you a heap of time doing it all manually.

Click to read our full review – OIO Publisher Review

3. Affiliate Organizer

We have used the Affiliate Organizer for years now. It is the one program I use on a daily basis. What this program does is store all of your user names and passwords. But that’s not all it does, it has a calender function to include upcoming events and tasks; a category to store websites including DNS settings, ftp settings, passwords etc; a section to add affiliate merchant details, a category where you can details for forums that you have signed up with and even a section to keep track of tasks you’ve outsourced. I really couldn’t live without it.

Click to read our full review – Affiliate Organizer Review

4. Flexsqueeze Theme

This would have to be my favorite theme at the moment. I know everyone raves over the Thesis theme but I much prefer the Flexsqueeze theme. It is so much easier to use and is perfect for the type of product review sites we use. It allows you to create a full page review without the sidebar displaying. So there are no distractions for the reader to click away. They stay focused on the review and click on the links in the review. The developer of this theme made it so easy to change colors, the blog width, the header and footer and pretty much anything else in the theme from fonts through to the background color so you can make the theme look completely unique with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Read More…FlexSqueeze Theme

5. aWeber

aWeber is a must have for anyone wanting to develop a email list. We have been using aWeber for a number of years now and have had no issues. Their pricing goes up with the more subscribers you get up to the maximum of $130 a month if you have 10,000 subscribers or more…but then if you have that many subscribers you should be able to easily make the money each month to cover the fee. If you can’t then you are in the wrong business.

You can create unlimited email lists, send email newsletters using their templates or your own, create autoresponders and more.

Read More…AWeber

6. The Best Spinner

I’ve never been a fan of spinning articles only because the spinners I have used in the past have been pretty pathetic in terms of creating a readable article. This one is different. It’s not called The Best Spinner for nothing – this is really a quality product and produces really well spun articles. It probably takes about half an hour to spin a 400 word article but from that one article you can get up to 100 other articles. This one is definitely a winner with me.

Read More…The Best Spinner

7. ReviewAZON

This is a great plugin for anyone wanting to promote Amazon products. We use it to a limited extent in that we only use it on blogs we aren’t currently working it. It is just a way for us to quickly get content on our blogs so that they stay active. For our reviews written from scratch we don’t use this plugin. Even so, if you want to get content up fast then it really is an excellent program. What ReviewAzon does is allow you to create product pages in minutes using the content from Amazon. You can literally create a blog full of content in just a few hours.

So there you have it, 7 products that we use regularly that we would recommend to others. What are your thoughts?

Read More… ReviewAzon

FINALLY RELEASED - Our complete guide to making money online by promoting Amazon products. Head over to the AMAZONIAN PROFIT PLAN website for all the latest info.

Well it’s been a while since my last post. It’s not that I’ve been busy…it’s more the fact that I couldn’t be bothered writing for this blog.  Sounds bad doesn’t it? But when it comes down to it, this blog isn’t how we make our money. In fact, it makes us nothing at all except when we write up a review for something (which is few and far between) or when someone pays for advertising space.

For now, this blog really is just a way of expressing my views of this online business I am in and also provide advice to others who are wanting to make a living online.  So I personally don’t want to have to feel forced to write every day for it simply to keep the traffic coming in order to make sales.

But not only that, I find this business model for making money online quite time consuming. It also requires consistent action in order to maintain the momentum and quite a bit of networking in order to build a following.

In contrast, I find that the model we use to make money online is so much easier and once set up requires minimal work.

For instance, to get this particular blog up and running to a level of making a consistent income I would probably need to do the following on a consistent basis:

• leave blog comments on other peoples websites
• leave forum posts
• tweet regularly
• regularly post on Facebook
• write at least one blog post a day
• network, network, network!
• regularly post to my email list
• check RSS feeds on a daily basis (something that I don’t do at all by the way)
• write guest posts
• work on JV’s

That to me is a lot of work.

On the other hand our model requires the following:

• find a product in Amazon
• do a bit of keyword research
• write up a really good review for that product and post to one of our blogs
• get traffic to it

The difference between the two is that the first model requires consistent effort (usually daily) whereas the second model requires a one-off amount of work. The only consistent work involved with this is getting the traffic and even then once a level of traffic is achieved we don’t have to worry too much about it.

So we can take a week off and not do any work without it affecting our business. In fact, we can take a month off because the pages we have set up already get traffic and don’t need constant work to maintain that traffic. Obviously we can’t neglect those pages totally but the work involved with maintaining them doesn’t have to be done on a daily basis nor on a weekly basis once the traffic is there.

When it comes down to it, you only need a handful of good pages to make a full time income online. We have individual pages that consistently make over $500 a week and that is without ongoing effort on our part. So we don’t need to blog consistently or leave blog comments or check RSS feeds or post regularly on forums or Twitter constantly. All we really need to do is get traffic to our top product review pages and that really is just a handful of pages per website.

I’m on a mission at the moment to simplify everything we do. I want the The 4-Hour Workweek lifestyle…who wouldn’t?…but the only way we are going to get that is to consistenly analyze what we do to see what is working and what isn’t and then refine the process.

What me and Wanda do is get out the butchers paper and write down the tasks we do on a regular basis. We then go through each to see whether each task is actually worth the effort. For instance, at this moment in time we don’t see the value in spending hours a day on Twitter. It brings in minimal traffic for the amount of time and work that is involved. So you’ll notice the Twitter account for this blog has been pretty quiet these days as has the rest of our Twitter accounts. That’s not to say that Twitter doesn’t have value but for us it’s too much work for the results we are getting.

So what about you? Have you thought about the effort you put into your online business? If you are new to making money online then obviously you are going to have to do a bit of work before you see results but what about those that have been online for a while. Are you actually making any money for all the work you are putting into it? If not, then you need to step back and look at exactly what tasks you are doing on a daily basis and see if they are getting you the results you desire.

Yesterday I was having a think back to when we were really struggling to make a living online….and actually it wasn’t that long ago. And as I was thinking about it, I wondered why it took us so long to start making a decent income.

We had been working really hard on our websites on a daily basis for over two years but were nowhere near to making a living from it. In fact the only thing that kept us going was knowing in our minds and hearts that this would eventually work if we put in the hard yards.

As I thought about it, I realized that it wasn’t just one thing that finally did it for us – instead it was a series of actions that got us to where we are today. They are what I call ‘massive action’ tasks (you’ll know that phrase if you read or listen to Tony Robbins).

In other words, as we reached a stage where we could see that the amount of input wasn’t reaping the rewards, we changed our tactics and instead of continuing to do the same tasks everyday, we took massive action to take us to the next level. Now we are by no means experts at it, and really at the time we didn’t even equate what we did to taking massive action….we just arrived at the conclusion that we needed to do something extraordinary if we were going to make this work.

I love the saying – “If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always got.” This happens a lot with people trying to make money online. They continue to do the same things day after day and wonder why they aren’t getting the traffic levels they want or the income they are trying to achieve. If you really want to leap ahead of the rest, then you need to take massive action.

Here are just some of the things we have done in the past that have taken us to the next level in our internet business:

1. Added massive amounts of content – At the time, we had read about two guys online who were adding something like 20 posts a day. We knew 20 posts were just a little beyond our capacity so we decided on 8 posts a day for one of our product blogs. That meant we had to each write 4 blog posts each a day. I did all of mine over the weekend. I think Wanda staggered hers over the week. It gave us a lot of articles to write but we did it.

The effort paid off and the result was that it made a big difference in the amount of traffic to the blog and a huge difference in the amount of  our affiliate sales.

We didn’t end up doing it forever – from memory I think it was a couple of months and then we started to reduce the number of articles steadily over a period of time. The funny thing was that the traffic didn’t decrease – it stayed at a steady level and continues to increase as we add content at a more manageable pace.

2. Changed the Quality of Our Content – We have a lot of blogs and a lot of content, but I can say with all honesty that a good proportion of our blogs have a lot of rather inferior quality content. This is because at the time we weren’t really thinking about our readers but more about making a dollar. When we changed our focus to providing more value to our readers, we noticed a huge difference in our income levels….and I mean huge. This was a major turning point for us. You can read a little about how we write our product reviews here.

3. Concentrated on Less – What do I mean by this?  Well we focused on only one or two websites instead of 20. This made a big big big difference….I know that’s a lot of ‘bigs’ but I need to emphasise the importance of this one. When we were working on all our blogs, we were really spreading ourselves too thin. It just wasn’t effective for us. The trick is to focus on one thing until it starts making you money, then and only then do you move onto the next thing.

4. A Change in Thinking – I think this one was a key ingredient for us. We needed to change our attitude to things particularly in relation to making money online. I remember us having a discussion about why we weren’t making the income we wanted and we came to the conclusion that the only people who make money online are those that tell other people how to make money online.

Well we know that’s not the case now but that was our thinking back then. After all we were working ourselves to a frazzle and getting nowhere, so that must be the reason. We all know this is a fallacy and product sites work extremely well, thank you very much.

5. More Time for Ourselves – It was at this point that we also started to work on ourselves a bit more rather than just the business. This meant that we started to take time out to exercise and to spend part of our day listening to self improvement cds like that provided by Tony Robbins. Funnily enough, the more time we took for ourselves, the more productive we were in our internet business.

Don’t let anyone tell you that making money online is quick and easy. For the majority of us it’s a hard slog. But there is plenty of opportunity for everyone and that is why we want to share our story with you in the hope it will encourage you when it seems that things won’t ever improve, just hang in there it will get better.

Just remember to:

• provide quality information for your readers
• look after yourself, physically and mentally

…and really believe that you can do – because you know what – You Can!

Since revealing our Amazon income to both our family and friends (and to the world), we have noticed a change in the attitude of those around us.  And although the change is a positive one it revealed to both Wanda and I just what our family and friends thought about our online business.  We have since found that at least some of them didn’t believe we would achieve what we set out to do and others were even rather cynical about the whole thing.

Don’t get me wrong, they were supportive but in the back of their minds they really thought that we were just playing around and that we would never make a full-time income from it.

This is a common problem for people who work online. It’s understandable really as the majority of the population use their computer for communicating with friends and family on Facebook, playing games, watching videos on Youtube, doing a bit of research every now and then, and maybe buying a few things on eBay or Amazon, whereas for serious bloggers the world of the Internet is a whole different story. For us, the Internet is our life and we have no problem with sitting in front of that computer from dawn till dusk if we must to achieve our goals, and get our blogs generating the income we want.

And this is where the problems can start. Your family and friends may not see your time online as being part of what you need to do to build up your business.  It can be difficult making them see that although you work from home the same criteria applies as if you were going to the office. They may constantly interrupt you during the day and your friends may pop in unannounced and expect you to give them your full attention or  ring you and talk for hours. You really have to be strong and keep the visits and calls short.  Make it a policy that you will set aside time during the week when you will go to lunch, or have people around for coffee and a chat. That way you will establish a work schedule that gives you free time to spend with your loved ones that keeps interruptions to a minimum. And as much as we all love to spend time with family and friends you need to set guidelines for your working hours. If this sounds harsh remember what your goal is.

The fact is, until people see the results of your online business they really aren’t going to take it seriously. And it’s not their fault really – there are thousands of scams on the net and it seems as though the most common thinking is that you really can’t make money online.

So  don’t be discouraged if you find that your family and friends do not support you in the way you would like. Remember it may just be  a case of ‘show me the money’ before you are taken seriously.

Let’s face it, regardless of what some of the so-called guru’s like to tell us, it’s hard work building up an online business and there are times when it seems it would be just easier to give up, especially  when you don’t see the monetary results. So having the support of family and friends  makes a huge difference to keeping you on track.  Mind you, not having support can also be beneficial. After all, if you are constantly being told that you won’t ever be able to make a living online you may just find the drive to succeed to ultimately prove to everyone that it can be done.

We’ve mentioned in the past how a turning point for us was when we started adding Amazon affiliate links to our websites but I’d like to expand on that a little so that you can see the true potential of their affiliate program. I’d also like to share exactly how much we make on Amazon – or at least how much we made this month to give you an idea of what you can achieve.

So where did it all begin?

Last year we were struggling as affiliate marketers. We had over 20 blogs but were only making around $500US a month. After we took out expenses and the money we paid for a writer, we were left with pretty much nothing. We really needed to get to the next level if we were going to live the dream of working from home on a full-time basis.

One of the sites we were working on at the time was a website that provided reviews of products. At the end of each of those reviews we would provide links to different online merchants so that our readers could find the best price. But since, at the time, we were thinking of the money first and our readers second we never added Amazon as an option despite the fact that it would have benefited our readers as Amazon have some of the best prices. So why didn’t we add them?…because we saw that Amazon only pay 4% commission and we didn’t think it was worth it. After all we were getting around 8% from other affliate merchants.

Now Amazon do pay more once you start selling more but at the time we didn’t think we could sell that many items to increase our commission. Talk about limiting beliefs, but you have to remember that prior to this we were using merchants from CJ, Shareasale and Linkshare and to see a sale a day was quite exciting – to see 2 sales a day was amazing and 3 or 4 sales a day would have been a major celebration.

Thank goodness we started to focus on our readers because when we did we realised that we needed to add Amazon links in order to provide them with better buying options. So we did just that to about 10 pages of that site.

Two days after adding the links, I checked Amazon stats and was quite surprised when I saw 11 sales. I also realised that we had already jumped to the 6% commission level. I didn’t get too excited though as I really thought it was just a fluke. I even remember telling Wanda that it was probably just one person who went on a shopping spree. I definitely wasn’t expecting to see any further sales.

But then the next day I checked again and we had 9 sales, the next day 3 and the day after that 12…I started thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a fluke after all.

You can see the results here in the table above.

We were pretty amazed since we weren’t used to that many sales in one day, let alone continuous daily sales like that.

The Benefits of Amazon

The main benefit of using Amazon is that they know how to convert. You just have to get your reader there and Amazon will do the rest. Even so, you shouldn’t just rely on Amazon to do all the work for you. We noticed that when we reworked a few pages to provide more indepth reviews for our readers that conversions jumped through the roof. So make sure you provide value too and then let Amazon do the rest.

By far and away the best benefit of Amazon is that although you might send your readers there for one thing, they generally tend to look around and often they will buy the product and other items or they end up buying something completely different.

For instance, if your site is all about dog beds and you provide a link to Amazon recommending what you think is the best type of dog bed, the reader might go to Amazon and decide not to buy the dog bed but because Amazon has so much to offer, something else may get their attention and they end up  buying other unrelated products.

And believe me when I say that this happens more often than you think. If we take our stats for instance, for November, 524 of the products we sold were products that we recommend. The remaining 1768 products that sold were products that we didn’t recommend and in fact in a good majority of cases they were for products that were not related in any way to our blog topic.

How to Use Amazon Effectively

The best way to use Amazon is to use text links within a review of a product. Don’t bother with the widgets or the banner ads – they won’t be anywhere near as effective. Use text links and your click through rate will be much higher.

So How Much Did We Make on Amazon This Month?

This is the bit I am sure you have been waiting for but since a picture tells a thousands words I have added a screen print of our Amazon stats for November 2009. The results are for four of our blogs but most of the money is coming from one site…probably about 90% of the income. We haven’t worked much on those other 3 blogs and until we do they will continue to make a minimal income.

Notice that we have hit the 8.25% commission level. This is because we have sold over 1571 items – the more you sell the more commission you get up to a maximum of 8.5%.

It will be interesting to see how we go in December with the build up to Christmas.

And Finally…

Just remember that with anything you do online, that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in the one basket. We use Amazon quite extensively and highly recommend them but we also use Google Adsense, CJ, LinkShare, Shareasale, Google Affiliate Network, Clickbank and more. So that $14,000 + from Amazon isn’t our only source of income this month.

Well we can’t stop smiling at this months Amazon earnings and here is the link if you would like to add Amazon to your website.

Update:

Due to popular demand, since writing this post we have written and released the Amazonian Profit Plan e-book.  This e-book  provides you with a step by step blueprint full of in-depth, highly detailed information on making money with the Amazon Associates Program

An eBook is a great way of making money on the internet and you don’t need to have a website to do it. Nor do you need to actually sell the eBook to make money from it.  So how do you do it…well in a nutshell, it involves you writing a short ebook preferably about a topic you know about and distributing it for free around the internet.  It doesn’t have to be long – 10-15 pages is enough. In order to make money from it, you add multiple affiliate links to different products within the ebook.

Here’s how it works…

Step 1: Choose a topic that you have an interest in

The best eBooks are written by those who know what they are talking about. It will also make it easier to write if you have an interest in the topic. Having said that however, there is no rule that says that you need to know the subject to write about it but it will take longer because you will need to do the research for it first.

Step 2: Find products to promote in your ebook

There is no point spending hours writing an eBook only to find that there are no products to add to it. So before you start writing, you need to find products that you can ‘sell’ in your eBook that relate to your topic. You can choose products from Clickbank, CJ.com, Linkshare.com, ShareaSale.com, Amazon.com or any of the other affiliate networks. These companies are all free to join and offer thousands of different products and services that you can promote. Clickbank is a good one to start with as they don’t care whether you have a website or not.

Once you know that there are plenty of products you can start writing.

Step 3: Start Writing

This is not as scary as it sounds. If you have a flair for writing then you will probably have no problem getting started but if the last thing you wrote was a report in high school then you might find it hard to get going.

The easiest way to write an ebook is to break it up into sections first. For instance, say we decide to write an eBook on dog training. We might break it up into the following sections:

1. Introduction
2. How to train your dog to sit
3. How to train your dog to come when called
4. How to train your dog to shake hands
5. etc, etc

Once you have the main sections you can then provide the content. Always leave the introduction till last as it will be a lot easier to write.

Here is a really good tip. Start out with dot points. Don’t worry about making it read right at this point. Just jot down as many things as you can think of for each of the sections of your ebook.

Once you have the dot points then just expand on each dot point with sub-dot points. Before you know it you will have lots of content.

Now you just need to structure those dot points into coherent sentences.

If you really don’t want to write it yourself then pay a professional. Elance is a great place for this – it is full of writers willing to work on your projects and you would be surprised at how little it costs.

Step 4: Add Affiliate Links

Once you have completed your ebook you will need to add affiliate links. You can add them within the content itself where appropriate or add them at the end as a list of recommended products – or both if you like.

Step 5: Convert to PDF

Before you distribute your eBook you will need to convert it to PDF. There are a number of free versions available on the internet that are simple and easy to use. Ensure that once the document has been converted that you check to ensure that it has formatted the content correctly and that any links within the document work correctly. Some converters work better than others but we recommend one of the following:

• http://www.freepdfconvert.com/default.asp
• http://www.doc2pdf.net/

Step 6: Proofread Your eBook

There is nothing worse than reading a document with multiple spelling errors or bad grammar. Make sure you run a spell checker over it and read it through thoroughly yourself. Better yet, get someone else to do it for you. The more people that look at it the better so get your family or friends to help out.

Step 7: Distribute Your eBook

The next step is to distribute your ebook. Here are some ideas:

- email websites that relate to your ebook topic and tell them they can send out your ebook to their email list if they have one or they can use it as a free giveaway to encourage people to sign up to their newsletter.
– submit your ebook to ebook directories – there are plenty of them…just do a search in Google
– create a Squidoo lens, Hubpage (hubpage.com) and attach your ebook to the page so people can download it.
– submit to forums

And if you found that your ebook turns out better than you expected and you  might just be able to sell it rather than distribute it free them sign up with Clickbank.