When most people start out blogging, it is usually because they love to blog. Remember those days? Over time, you either quit or continue to grow as a blogger, and it is almost inevitable that at some point you will start to look into monetizing your blog. Whether you use Google AdSense, affiliate marketing, or direct advertising sales, there is nothing wrong with getting paid for doing what you love to do.  In fact in many ways, getting paid can cause you to work harder and up both the quality and quantity of your work.

One of the many problems with selling direct advertising is that it can sometimes be a pain to manage, and it often takes you away from what you love to do, which is blogging. It is kind of like small business owners who love their job, but hate all the paperwork and accounting that is involved with running and managing their own business.

Fortunately as WordPress bloggers, there is a solution available to us in the form of a WordPress plugin called OIO Publisher. This is an incredible premium WordPress plugin that will completely automate the entire advertising process on your blog. In fact, chances are that you have seen people using it (including many high profile bloggers), but just not realized this plugin is what they were using to control the entire process from their WordPress dashboard.

When you download OIO Publisher, you’ll receive a WordPress plugin and be able to get an API key for each blog you want to use it on. The plugin will create an OIO Publisher tab in your dashboard where you can manage your blogs advertisements (designate how many links, paid reviews, inline ads, banners, or custom advertising your blog will have available), create and manage an affiliate program for products or services on your blog from your dashboard, and even see statistics regarding your advertisements!  Possibly my favorite feature of this plugin is that you can even set the plugin to send weekly reports to your advertisers or place your statistical information into their marketplace.

The best part about this premium plugin is that it will just about manage everything for you for a one-time fee of $37.00. Once purchased, you then have access to use the plugin on as many blogs as you would like, as well as get access to their downloadable sales platform, marketplace, and all of the other features mentioned above!  You also get free updates each time the plugin is updated.

In my opinion, the value of this plugin heavily outweighs the low price, but if you’d like to see for yourself the plugin in action, I recommend you check out a demo of OIOPublisher and purchase your copy today. The demonstation allows you to view how it will look on your blog and how you can manage everything from your WordPress dashboard.

Depending on how many blogs you run and how many much time you spend practicing affiliate marketing, you have probably found that managing and tracking all of your affiliate links can often be very overwhelming.   All sorts of different affiliate accounts means a large amount of affiliate codes to manage and a lot of manual work getting them all into their proper place on your blog(s). 

There are a few different strategies you can use to manage your affiliate profile, but as users of WordPress, we are at a significant advantage because we have access to some great WordPress plugins.   There are a few plugins available that are designed to do something with your affiliate links, but I had yet to find one that really worked well and the way I wanted it to.   One that I tried even caused me some significant problems, requiring me to use a database backup.  

After all of my testing, so far the clear leader and only one that really worked well was the premium WordPress plugin WP-Affiliate Pro.  This plugin has a fee associated with it, but in my opinion it is totally worth it because it allows you to manage everything within your WordPress dashboard.  If you can up your affiliate income quickly, it will quickly pay for itself.

Here are a summy list of features I’ve thrown together based upon my experiences with this plugin:

• Control Your Affiliate Links From the Dashboard - With this plugin, you can instantly add affiliate links to specific keywords on your blog.  The plugin will search through old posts and update them with your affiliate links.  If you only want to do 1-2 per post, you can set it to only do that as well.  It is fully customizable from the WordPress dashboard.
• Tracks Your Affiliate Traffic - Each time an affiliate link is clicked, it is counted and will be displayed in real time within your WordPress dashboard.   This way you can figure out what products are working and which ones aren’t.  
• Masks Affiliate Links - This software will mask your affiliate links and also make it so people can’t hover their mouse over a link to see the destination.   The only way to find out is to click on the link.
• Customize Affiliate LInks - With this plugin, you can customize the look and style of your affiliate links to match your specifications.  This way you can make them stand out, use different fonts, or whatever you want to try to see what works. 
• Compatible with Other Advertising Methods - Whether you monetize your blog with Google AdSense or other advertising methods, this plugin is fully compatible.

So, as you can see, it is much more than your standard WordPress plugin.   If you’d like to see a video demonstration of these features, the authors have provided these two quick videos: 

• Video #1
• Video #2

You can also see the plugin in action on several top blogs that use WordPress, including affiliate marketing pro Zac Johnson’s blog. 

If you’d like to read more, I recommend you check out the WP-Affiliate Pro WordPress plugin page.

It has become quite the blogging trend lately to display your Feedburner subscribers. Some may think it is an ego thing, but really I think most people do this as a strategy to attract new subscribers. I know many people that auto-subscribe to any blog they stumble upon that has 500+ subscribers, so this is often a very good strategy for a blogger than has already built up a following. On the other hand, if you have less than 200 subscribers, it is probably best not to display the chicklet until you have reached the 200 subscriber benchmark. Otherwise it could have the opposite effect on your blog where people don’t subscribe due to your smaller following.

If you are someone that likes to display your subscriber count on your WordPress blog, but you don’t want to use the Feedburner chicklet, WordPress now has a plugin available called FeedCount. This plugin allows you to display your Feedburner count and style it to look they way you want it to look via CSS. Here is a sample of how the plugin can look with the right styling to blend into your theme:

I personally like the Feedburner chicklet just fine, and it is nice and compact, but I have to admit I’ve seen some very nice designs using this plugin.

If you haven’t heard of a sitemap before, now is probably a good time to start learning about them if you run a blog. A sitemap is a XML file originally created by Google for webmasters to use to create a “map” of their website.

A good sitemap is dynamic, keeping the freshest content at the top. This way Google knows to index any new posts or updated posts. Google’s spiders then use your Sitemap.xml file when they index your website to ensure they get everything new or that has changed. A sitemap also helps ensure pages get indexed that use JavaScript or Flash, but do not contain HTML links (without a sitemap, these normally would not be discovered by a search engine).

Eventually the Sitemap.xml file was adopted by Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com, making it as important for webmasters to use as a Robots.txt file to get their website maximum exposure and control what is indexed.

If you’re reading this blog, I’m going to assume you are a WordPress user. If you’d like to create a sitemap for your WordPress blog, look no further than the Google Sitemap WordPress plugin. This is the WordPress plugin I use for this website. When activated, it will create a sitemap on http://yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml and do all the maintenance work for you. You’ll want to then log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account and add your sitemap, or make sure your homepage links to your sitemap somewhere (usually the footer) so the search engines can find it.

For those that are curious what they look like, you can see what our sitemap looks like here. Are you using a sitemap for your blog(s)?