Cut back on expenses, start spending money more wisely, but a big piece of living through a recession is learning to seize this opportunity, through online affiliate marketing.

You can easily make an additional $1,000 per month, all in your spare time.

Local Affiliate Marketing

Businesses are looking to retain current clients, and cut back on any and all marketing expenses, because the most obvious area to cut back in any business is marketing. You don’t see a direct benefit, and hope you can continue to rely on the brand of the business and current customer workflow.

The beauty of online affiliate marketing, is its the answer to every businesses’ problem. They need new customers to survive, but only want to pay for customers, not impressions or exposures or sponsorships.

How Does It Work?

Online affiliate marketing is a simple transaction, and works like this:

- A local cosmetic dentist is looking for new clients. They have cut back on advertising in the local paper and on the radio, where they were spending thousands of dollars, and seeing returns months later

- A marketer like myself can offer these dentists the ability to pay for new client leads. I set up lead sites, like I have for Florida Loan Modifications that educate consumers, and collect contact information (a lead).

- The dentist then pays me for these leads, often $20 or more, and so the process begins

How To Get Started?

To get started with online affiliate marketing, it’s really quite easy. You just need to start a new site, and start writing stories. You can use iContact to collect names, and once you have a steady flow of new signups, start reaching out to local businesses and offer them your services.

So at $20 per lead, and 3 leads per day, that’s more than $1,000 per month, which isn’t bad for something you can easily do on your spare time.

Spending the past 12 months developing my blog, I’ve learned a lot when it comes to how to optimize Adsense placements, and I wanted to share some of the best tips I’ve learned.

Easy Adsense Placement Techniques

Place Your Ads Inline

As you can see from our sister-site FinancialPlanr, if you want to have users click on your ads, you need to make sure they’re seeing them. If you’re not sure where your users are clicking, and where their mouse activity is, you can use a piece of free software called ClickHeat. As you can see, all of my activity is in the main left pane.

Place Linkunits As Menu Options

The key to getting users to actually want to click on your ads is to make them useful. Placing linkunits at the top of your page creates directly relevant content available for your users. To see it in action, head over to FDIC Loan Modification.

Prior to finding this out, I always thought the linkunit was a worthless ad piece, but now I’ve found that this ad-size has the best returns for me.

Hopefully these tips are useful for you, if you enjoyed this post, please hit the Stumble button, we definitely appreciate it.

Entrepreneurs have to make some tough decisions this Holiday season, amid the worst recession we’ve probably ever seen. If we cut back too far, we’re going to lose valuable employees, and when the economy comes back around, it may take us an extended period of time to ramp back up.

However, if we don’t cut-back, the company could suffer, and there may not be any business at all.

So what is an entrepreneur to do? How can we cut costs, effectively?

7 Easy Cost Cutting Measures

The President-elect has told us we need to be prepared to living lives of efficiency. Recycling, reusing, and re-inventing ourselves is the motto of the 21st century.

Instead of layoffs, employers are looking for ways to keep the company intact, employees happy, and business expanding. Hopefully these examples below will help you in your business.

4 Day Workweeks
This can be a real blessing for parents struggling with daycare. Plus, who wouldn’t like to work less than they do now. This shaves 52 days off your payroll, and can make your employees happy as well.

Extended Holiday Vacation
At the end of the year, not much work gets done on the 24th of December and on New Years Day. If you don’t already, give your employees these days off as an un-paid vacation.

Spring Break
Unpaid vacation sounds really menacing until you get to take off for 1 week in the middle of May. Finding creative ways to give your employees time off can help assuage the negative thoughts surrounding unpaid vacation. These breaks will have your staff rested, and ready to come back to work.

Voluntary Salary Reductions
If you have every employee volunteer a 1% reduction in salary, it can save the company a large amount of money, and won’t cause a huge material affect on overall morale.

401k Matching Hiatus
Yes, retirement planning is important, but keeping employees paid is also a priority. Create a deal with your employees. Suspend 401k matching for 1 year, with a promise to restore payments at the end of the year.

Turn Off Your Computers
This is perhaps one of the most overlooked. Simply turning off computers and monitors everyday can save huge amounts on your electric bill. Configure the power settings to power-down all monitors, and PCs so you can have the process be automatic.

Eliminate Overtime
Paying 1 1/2 times salary for overtime work is typically an example of efficiency that can be improved. Eliminate overtime, let employees go home early, and you’ll get more productive employees that work 2x better when they’re not overworked.

Sure, employees are any company’s greatest expense, and also their greatest asset. I’m not suggesting that you are wasting your time, thus costing your company money, but rather that your company is not getting the most out of you, by not maximizing your efficiency.

So how much money is your company wasting?

Salary X Unused Time = FAIL!

Let’s say you make $50,000 a year. This would be a nice salary for anyone not in the Bay Area, and you work only a 40 hour work week.

That’s $960 per week or $24 per hour.

For a typical work-week, if your company was able to get 5 more hours of productivity out of you, they would make:

5 x $24 per hour = $115 per week

$5,980 per year

You Gotta Spend Money to Save Money

So if we can get 5 more hours of productivity out of our employees, we can save our company $6,000 per year. If you have a company of 20 people, that’s $120,000 per year, which is quite a nice cost-savings.

During a downturn in the economy, it’s small steps like these that help the good companies survive and the weak fail, and when the economy starts turning around, these strong companies can now flourish.

So Where Can We Find These 5 Hours?

Dual-monitors are proven by Microsoft to be one of the best ways to improve your productivity.

If you assume you’ll spend $1,000 on dual-monitor setups for your employees, you can easily pay for this capital expense in about 2 1/2 months, plus it’ll make your employees a lot happier.

Let us know any tips you have for improving employee productivity.

The key to increasing CTRs and delivering higher overall CPMs is generating compelling, interesting, and targeted advertising for the user.

Location plays a huge role in delivering relevant advertising, so how does it all work and how can publishers take advantage of it?

Why Knowing Where …Is Half The Battle

Tthe implicit assumption of most marketers is that more is always better, particularly when more means more data points about who’s browsing a Web site, what they’re doing there, and have done previously online. Sometimes, however, it can be more relevant to focus not on what consumers are doing — but on where they’re doing it from.

How Does Location-Based Targeting Work?

Basically providers go and map the infrastructure of Web servers set up all over the world and map where IP Addresses have been allocated. We’re talking about over two million addresses in the database. The data is constantly changing, because IP addresses are subject to enormous flux. Up to 10% of them can change every month and even more if a telecom company is acquired.

So, as an example, say a customer is searching for shoes. By using IP geo-location data to situate exactly where they are, a shoe retailer can localize its landing page for each incoming visitor. Another customer example is a newspaper which uses reader location to customize their news and ad content. If you log in from Massachusetts, you’ll get the Red Sox score first — not the Yankees score. And news, weather, and the store locations of advertisers can be localized based on where a particular person is logged in from.

This particular publisher has 60 DMAs they serve, from Boston to San Francisco. Not only can they geo-localize targeted content, but they are able to sell local advertising to national advertisers granularized by metro market.

We have an agency using geo-data to do promotional campaigns for a Lasik Eye Center that has multiple locations. Whenever someone comes to their Web site, they’ll get information relevant to their location. They’ll be referred to the centers nearest them for contact and also only see advertising that complies with the state laws applicable in their geographic location.

What’s In The Future For Location-Based?

Looking forward, another important area of application will be mapping Wi-Fi IP location by routing Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers to triangulate precise location. This type of marketing would of course be permission-based. But as you can imagine, the potentials for customizing content based on the Starbucks location someone is connecting from can be enormously valuable not only to marketers but to consumers who get truly relevant information.

Taken from an interview on Mediapost with Kerry Kangstaff.

So living in a college town, we’re used to getting numerous parking tickets, tickets for speeding on bikes, getting your car towed, and parking boots. At the University of Florida, if you rack up 6 or more parking tickets, they finally put a boot on your car.

So about a month ago, my girlfriend Stephanie and I were going to the pool on a Sunday morning to try and get some sun. So we stopped by Panera Bread, and as usual, the parking lot surrounded the place is swamped, so we parked in the Crispers parking lot. About 15 minutes later, we come out of Panera Bread to find a parking boot on our car and a nice 250lb man coming our way asking us, “cash or charge”.

Looking at the cars next to us, we can see that pretty much all of them had gone to Panera, and subsequently gotten a boot. Not wanting to give in and pay the $75, I decided to stake out the parking lot for the next 30 minutes, telling anyone who parked in the lot to get back in their cars and park someone else, because they’re going to get a ticket. So after saving about 5 people, and costing the “boot man” about $375, he calls the Police.

The Police were more than understanding of the ridiculous nature of the booting, and said the only remedy we as boot-owners had was to get a note from Crispers, Momo Yaki, TCBY (they were closed), stating we had the privilege of leaving the premises of their parking lot to walk to Panera Bread.

You see, the Crispers parking lot was virtually empty, with nobody wanting to eat sandwiches at 10am, so there didn’t make much sense in Cripsers trying to preserve their open spaces for more customers. The same customers that went to Panera Bread for breakfast, also go to eat at Crispers, it simply was the wrong time of day.

An Unhappy Customer Tells 10 People About Their Experience

So after talking to the Crispers manager for a good length of time, and explaining to him that I am going to tell 10 of my friends about getting a boot on my car, and they’re going to hear that you, as Crispers, were responsible for this, they will never come back to your restaurant. After about 15 minutes, I think he finally got the point, and I made him a proposition.

If I buy a gift card from him, he’ll write me a note saying that I can have permission to lave the premises, and hence the boot comes off. So I paid my $10 for a gift card, and instead of being insanely mad at Crispers, they are now my savior.

A Happy Customer Tells ..The Internet

So in this situation, Crispers was able to turn me around, and make me an even more loyal customer for them. They helped me fight the tow companies (who doesn’t hate them), and now I’m talking them up on my blog.

Do you have any unhappy customers? They are definitely going to speak on their unpleasant experiences dealing with you, however, if you put in the effort, and are able to provide a solution to their problems, they will be your best clients.

At Grooveshark, we have a number of users who fought us tooth and nail on all sorts of issues, who blogged all sorts of nasty things about us, and through great user-relations, and relationship building, are now some of our biggest advocates.

Webmasters either make money via CPM (cost per thousand) advertising, CPC (cost per click) ads or some other combination of link-placement, CPA (cost per action) advertising networks.

So for the majority of webmasters, unless they’re on CPM networks, they’re not making much money from your visit. So for me, being a webmaster, I know the time and energy that goes into a site, so when I’m on their site, I make sure to subscribe to their feed and also check out their sponsors.

For the most part, you can find some quality advertisers, providing services that you may be interested in (you are, after all, reading the content on their site).

So the next time you’re on a site you like, will you courtesy click?

The idea here is to gather the collective intelligence of PC users to help build a smarter, better machine. We’ve integrated all sorts of tools to help create a platform for ideas, including Grafitti, so you can draw it.

FM is working with Asus and Intel to promote their new crowdsourced project, with the goal of inspiring communication in the web-community.

In the past, it’s been noted that Intel has tried unsuccessfully to create a discussion and form a voice in the digital world. Let’s hope this effort goes better for them.

For more information, please see John Battelle’s blog.

The best place to introduce a new product: Japan. The worst place: China.

Broad scope
For the study, Gerard J. Tellis, director of the Center for Global Innovation and professor of marketing at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, and his co-author, Deepa Chandrasekaran, assistant professor of marketing at Lehigh University, looked at data for consumer household products over 50 years and across 31 developed and developing countries. To rank the countries, they created an “innovativeness metric” based on the time it takes for new products to take off in a particular country.

Why Is Japan The Best?

Regional differences could be a factor and he [Gerard Tellis] explained that this could be because the evaluation was done on a national level, not on a regional level, and that his next study with Ms. Chandrasekaran will look at just this. “Within the U.S., I would expect the coastal areas to be more innovative than the interior. I don’t know if that would match the blue states vs. the red states that they have in political science, but that is a testable hypothesis that we are going to attack next.”

For now, the study can save marketers “a lot of time [and] get quick results,” contends Mr. Tellis. “This ranking of countries tells you which to launch in first.” The authors also recommend a “waterfall” approach to launches, staggering them from one country to the next, and they created a hazard model for the study to determine how many years it will be before products “take off” in a national market.

Mr. Tellis noted that globalization has not made the world flat — products take off in different ways, and this is especially important to keep in mind in an economic recession when resources are limited and competition is tough. “Having this knowledge is more important than ever before because you can’t be extravagant,” he said.

Startups Launching In Japan First?

So are we going to see a lot of startups doing a soft launch in Japan? For the most part, this would be an interesting strategy. Assuming you could launch in English, this would give you an initial market test, and hopefully allow you to build traction and start earning some revenue.

Then, when you take your start-up to the States, you would be ready to go.

What do you think?

These are some of the best advertising techniques I’ve used to help me build my website in a very short amount of time.

Not all of these tips will be helpful to you, but if you pick up even one best-practice from this list, consider it a success.

If you have found this collection helpful, I would be extremely thankful if you Stumble! this post, as a small sign of thanks– and in the future, I hope to reciprocate the favor.

All of these tricks are tips I’ve learned from running my own blog. While my traffic is still quite modest, at around 15,000 uniques per month, I have only been using this domain for 4 months, and in my short time I have already had a frontpage Digg which drive more than 33,987 uniques to my site over 3 days.

In the past month, I have had 3,361 uniques from Reddit, 8,519 uniques from Stumbleupon, and 3,193 uniques from Google.

50 Tips To Drive More Traffic To Your Blog

• 1. Install All in One SEO Plugin so you can optimize your blog for SEO search.
• 2. Optimize your blog for a given set of small keywords. For this blog, I am optimized for “startup blog, andrew wise, start up blog, start-up blog.” All of these keywords you’ll find my site on the frontpage. It’s a small number of keywords, but these are the topics of my blog and where I want to drive incoming traffic.
• 3. Install the Stumbleupon toolbar, and start stumbling. Once you’ve built up a good profile, with complete information, start stumbling all of your articles once they’re published. Until you have a userbase that will do this for you, you need to start the work.
• 4. Make friends on Stumbleupon, stumble their articles, and join their sites. Don’t push people, but you’ll find if you’re friendly to them, they’ll reciprocate.
• 5. In your reading settings on WordPress or blogging platform, don’t limit your homepage to just the most recent 3 or so stories. Push that number to around 15. Including more stories will allow you to include more keywords related to your SEO optimization.
• 6. Check your site’s ranking on Google Rankings, it will tell you how many times your keywords appear. The more the better, obviously there is a limit on the benefit it provides.
• 7. Write original content. Sure, it’s great to be the mouthpiece for the blogosphere, but you need to generate your own content. Plan to write one original post per week, we call them authority posts (to prove you’re an authority).
• 8. Write opinion pieces. If you’re working a full-time job, you don’t have time to crank out original content all the time, so put a spin on what’s in the news. Take a stand on an issue. If you go counter to what everyone else is saying, you can often get recognized and highlighted on posts.
• 9. Write what you know. Talk about your life, your experiences, what is and isn’t working for you. This is what people want to read about, just look at Howard Stern’s success.
• 10. Cultivate a community. Talk to your readers, ask for their input, and write about issues that they want to hear about. Are they not telling you anything? Look at your most popular posts, and continue writ ing more like those.
• 11. Start a blogroll. Ask people who are commenting on your blog to trade links. People always reciprocate on blogrolls, so just be polite and ask for the link-back.
• 12. Check your traffic stats daily. Seeing a huge traffic spike is a huge motivator, it just makes you want to get up early and crank out more great content!
• 13. Showcase your best articles. Put up a popular stories list on your sidebar. When new visitors come to your site, you want to increase their time on the site, so give them your best.
• 14. Install the related posts plugin. In addition to showcasing your best posts, you want to give people an opportunity to check out similar posts as well — at the end of the post.
• 15. Watch the daily Google Trends it will show you what is popular in that day, and give you an idea for new stories.
• 16. Determine where your biggest traffic source is, and pump all of your efforts into driving more traffic from that. Whether it be Google, Reddit, Digg, etc.
• 17. Install Adsense, and make it the lifeblood of your blog. At the very least, your blog should pay for itself. So if you have hosting, look to make enough money on Adsense to pay for your hosting efforts.
• 18. Write your stories for your readers. Think about the questions people would be asking, and write your titles and descriptions for those readers, and what questions they may type into Google.
• 19. Write everyday. Even if you only write a quick note saying what you’re doing today, it is important that you maintain a schedule, and posting everday should be your schedule.
• 20. Look for your top performing stories on Google. Once you identify them, find out what keywords are driving the traffic. Go through and re-write the story to include more references to that keywords or better clarification within the story.
• 21. Ask your readers to support your blog. Ask them to Stumble articles, like this one, Reddit, Digg, etc. Thank them for their support (thank you!) and let them know you are the reason you write.
• 22. Comment on other blogs. Find the other big names in your vertical, and build a presence. You can network with them and gain insight, and you can also introduce some of their readers to your site.
• 23. Include your blog link in your email signature. You send a lot of emails everyday, and this is a great untapped marketing channel.
• 24. Build up your LinkedIn profile. Just like your email, you can promote your blog on LinkedIn.
• 25. Go on LinkedIn answers. People post a lot of questions about blogging, your particular area of expertise, and this is a great way to network and build up your authority.
• 26. Be the pre-eminent authority. Whatever you’re writing about, your goal should be the #1 source for that information. Gadgets? Politics? Startups?
• 27. Go the extra mile. When writing this list, I could slack off on a couple of points, but I would lose the effectiveness of the entire post. That little bit of extra effort is what’s going to make your blog sticky for readers.
• 28. Share your “trade secrets”. Let’s be honest, ideas are one thing, and execution is another. Don’t be afraid to share your personal practices for business, life, etc. nobody is going to replace you, you can only hope to get better by opening up a dialogue.
• 29. Open a dialogue with your readers. Ask an open-ended question and try to stir up conversation or discussion with your community.
• 30. Extend the conversation of your blog to FriendFeed or Facebook. Comment on your posts, or try to engage in discussions with other people on posts.
• 31. Write response-posts. If someone make an inflammatory post in the blogosphere, write a response. You can gain a lot of traction from their readers, and make a name for yourself a thought-leader, not just a follower.
• 32. Feature a poll on your site. What stories do you want me to write about? Are you going to buy the new macbooks? Engage your audience, and get them involved.
• 33. Constantly self-promote. If you have a poll on your blog, mention it throughout the week. Remind users to respond, post, comment, etc. and help market your content.
• 34. Ask your friends to read your blog. At the very least, you should be able to have your parents or girlfriend reading your blog. Their feedback can be helpful when you’re first starting out, and are feeling like nobody cares.
• 35. Install MyBlogLog. It’s the widget in my sidebar that shows the most recent visitors to your blog. Seeing new faces everyday makes me feel like I have a community and am reaching people.
• 36. Set a goal for yourself. For me, I want my blog to be able to pay for my iPhone 3G bill from AT&T. The bill is about $60, and I’m about on that target.
• 37. Be prepared to revise your goals. If you’ve met your goal, you need to set a new goal. And to do this, you need to take the time to write out the steps to meet this new goal. Each additional step takes more and more time.
• 38. Enlist more people to write on your blog. The hardest part about running a blog is writing everyday. While this can be the most rewarding, it seriously inhibits your ability to grow. Bringing on a reader to write for you can help you do more promotion, marketing, etc.
• 39. Hold a contest on your blog. Ask some of your favorite websites if they can donate any prizes. Then hold a contest on your blog to give away their wares. Everyone wins, and it’s a good intro to selling advertising.
• 40. Build up a heavy RSS client feed. I have 137 blogs I read everyday, and this gives me plenty of ammunition for new blog posts.
• 41. Create a favicon for your site. I’ve been tweaking mine, and now have a nice big W as my favicon, for Wise Startup Blog. It makes your site look more professional and put-together.
• 42. Always respond to comments on your blog. Make sure your readers have their voices heard. Start a dialogue in your comments. There’s nothing better than having 16 comments on a post.
• 43. Use plenty of pictures. For marketing tools like Stumbleupon, people LOVE pictures. Include them in every post, and make sure to optimize their size and alignment.
• 44. Find the best template/design for your blog. I have been through about 5 different templates on Wise Startup Blog, and now I think I have a good setup, although I’m sure this will change again soon
• 45. Create cool icons for your stories. If you look in my sidebar, you can see I made 125×125 graphics for my stories. It makes your site look more professional, and increases the chances someone is going to read your work.
• 46. Use your blog as your username. Whether it be on Disqus or Flickr, you want to constantly be promoting your site.
• 47. Register your domain for more than 1 year. Google penalizes sites that will expire within the year. Renew your ownership on your domain, and you’ll see better rankings in Google.
• 48. Make it easy for users to subscribe to your blog. Include an RSS feed icon in an easy to find place on your blog, and also an email subscription option (I actually need to add the email option back to my site!).
• 49. Do post recaps. If you had a particularly good week of writing a lot of really popular stories, do a recap. Tell your new readers what they’ve missed. You can also do a post-roundup of all your best posts.
• 50. Read as many of these articles as you can. You can always learn new things, just keep an open mind and keep experimenting. If something sticks, keep doing it, if it doesn’t stick, drop it and try something new.

So for those of you looking to become one of the premier, best websites on the Internet, I hope these 50 how to tips have helped you. Remember, marketing and advertising your blog starts with being active everyday, no matter what.

And for those of you who made it all the way through the list, I thank you!

I hope these strategies will help you in driving more traffic and building the readership of your blog, and remember, if you liked this post, please Stumble!

Building a high traffic blog doesn’t happen overnight, it takes months and sometimes years of working everyday, and putting everything you can into your blog.