The Holiday Season is fast approaching and with it comes the period when consumers let lose of their hard earned cash and send it in the direction of online and offline retailers. For affiliate marketers, this brings along a time when you can earn a lot more money compared to other periods of the year.

The other day I was reading through Search Engine Watch and came across an article, 3 Steps to Happy Holidays SEM Returns. One of the things that stuck out the most was the Retail Demand Curve For Holidays (2007-2010).

As you can see from the graph, there is a steady increase in impressions, clicks and revenue throughout October. As it moves into November, there is a marked increased and as it heads towards the tail end of the month, revenue shots up over 200%. According to ComScore, 2010 online retail sales for the 2010 holiday season reached $32.6 billion. This was a 12% increase on the previous year and some analysts are predicting that retails sales will increase by 12-14% this year. Whether or not it does increase, $32.6 billion is a lot of money that affiliate marketers can get a share of. Keep in mind that these figures as only for the U.S.

Some things that come to mind to get you thinking more about working on the holiday season include:

Marketing Plan – Put together a plan that covers the next 2-3 months and make sure that all of the important dates are on it. Upcoming dates of importance include Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and of course Christmas, just to name a few. You need to know what you are going to promote, how you are going to promote and when you are going to promote.

Pages – If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to get pages ready. Besides the usual to-do’s of content and keywords, one big thing that comes to mind is mobile optimised landing pages. More and more people are accessing the internet via mobile devices and if your pages aren’t mobile optimised, you could miss out on commissions.

Email Lists – If you have an email list, get holiday emails ready now so that you aren’t rushed to do so when the time comes to send them. VerticalResponse is good email marketing service that comes with a wealth of free resources to help you get the most out of your email marketing efforts.

Testing – A/B testing of different variations of your pages and email templates is a good idea as this will allow you to determine which one will produce the best results.

This is not a definitive list of things you can do to work on maximising affiliate commissions during the Holiday Season. The purpose of this post is to get you thinking more about what you need (if you haven’t already done so) to do to work towards a profitable season.

A couple of weeks ago, someone got in touch with me about a photo I took and posted on My Pictorial World, a small photo blog of mine.  His firm is working on a project so that they can cash in on the 2011 Rugby World Cup, which starts October 9.

As part of the project, they need photos of various items to do with the world cup and one of those items happened to be the RWC Countdown Clock, which is located in central Auckland. They did a Google image search and stumbled upon the photo I took which they seemed to like.

They got in touch with me about the photo and made me an offer (which was in the hundreds) for a copy for them to use on their publication. Unfortunately, the photo did not meet their requirements because they wanted one that was at least 300 dpi. I took the shot at 72 dpi, which is well below their requirements. They did ask for a copy of it to see if they could tweak it and make it work for them but they could only get it to 200 dpi.

This experience served as a lesson to take images at the best possible resolution. In the case of the countdown clock, I was limited because of the camera I had on me at the time (an old and simple point & shot).

From this and other experiences I have been through there are 3 tips that come to mind that may come in handy for people who take photos and upload them onto blogs/websites for the world to see. They are:

Take High Resolution Photos – make sure to take photos at the best possible resolution for the reasons above.

Watermark Images – besides branding your photos, a watermark protects your images from theft. If someone wants to use your photo, they would need to get in touch with you to make an arrangement for an ‘un-watermarked’ version. I use Adobe Photoshop for photo editing and watermarking.

Optimise For Search Engines – this is easy to do and could help photos rank well in for example Google Image Search. Search Engine Optimization: Your visual blueprint for effective Internet marketing by Kris Jones has a section on how to do just that.

You may end up in a situation similar to the one that I did and if it does happen, I hope you are in a position where you actually earn some money for your photos.

I have an exam on Saturday and should really be studying for it but I just got an email from Infolinks who just told me to dream on! When I saw the subject before I opened the email I was wondering what the? But as I read the email it became apparent what it was all about and I just couldn’t pass on the opportunity. In a nutshell, they are giving a few publishers the chance to live out their wildest dreams; on them!!!

All I need to do to be in on a chance is answer two questions and here goes:

1. what about Infolinks makes you happy?

Besides them being better than other similar services, they respond to questions or requests I have in a very timely manner. That makes me very happy because there are a few services or program providers out there who you will not get to hear back from quickly or even get a reply from at all (I won’t go into details about the bad experiences I have had). An example was when I emailed them out of the blue to find out about their affiliate program which I had read about but had no idea how to join. I not only got a response (from Account Executive Jamie M) a few hours later, it included my own personal referral link. That kind of service makes a big difference in my books even more so given that I am not one of those people that makes tens of thousands of dollars a month. They take everyone and everything seriously regardless of who you are!

2. What can Infolinks do to make you happy, really happy?

This question was pretty simple to answer. Since my crazy self decided to quit my job and go back to school  (and move cities in and amongst that) I have been dreaming about getting away from life for even just a couple of  days. Why? It has been a while since my brain (which seems to have turned to mush) has had as much of a work out as it’s had over the last three months. I’ve been tired, irritable and even wanted to give up! One thing that I have dreamed about doing for the longest and even more so now is hopping onto a plane and taking a short 4 or so hour flight to Rarotonga (Cook Islands). First thing I would do when I got there is just sit on the beach for a day or two and do nothing but enjoy the weather, my wife’s company (God knows she needs a break after putting up with me especially during exam time) and go for a quick dip now and then to see what the aquatic world has to offer. After that I would take in a few sights (time permitting) before heading back to NZ. The getaway would include no laptop and I wouldn’t even bother to turn on my mobile phone when over there and completely disconnected from the world.

There you have it, a nice and simple dream that would make a world of difference! If you haven’t already done so, sign up to Infolinks (and yes, this is a referral link) and see if you will be as happy with them as I am. Back to studying now!

Last week I was looking around for a solution that would allow us to share our printer and external hard drives wirelessly and the only things that seemed as viable options were a Belkin Home Base and a Belkin 5-Port Network USB Hub. Anyway, whilst I was looking around of the stores I visited, I came across D-link routers that had stickers on them that said something like ‘share a broadband connection and make money’. That caught my attention so I decided to look into a little more.

What Tomizone has gone and done is that they are giving people with the high-speed internet connections the chance to earn a little money. All that is needed is a compatible Wi-FI enabled router. Once you have that, getting setup is pretty straight forward. If you don’t have a router that is Tomizone enabled they have instructions on how download their firmware. Once that is all done, all you need to do is follow the setup wizard interface in your router’s admin interface and you are good to go.

Customers who want to access your Hotspot can pay for it using a credit card, PayPal or you can sell a voucher to them with rates starting from as little as US$2.50 hour passes for 60MB of usage. As far as getting paid goes, Hotspot owners earn 50% of all revenue spent on their network. Payments are made once revenue reaches US$30 (benchmarked to your currency).

Tomizone states on their site that “Security is key” in that their software keeps users away from your internal network so that you don’t have to worry about threats. They also have a free access for guests feature which gives regular users on your list free access.

Given that I don’t have a compatible router this is something that I have not tired out (but would have liked to). If you are looking for a hassle free way of setting up a Hotspot to earn a bit of money from, this seems like a viable option. I you are setting up a Hotspot from your residence this would work well if you live in an apartment complex or place where people meet. A lot of people are addicted to the internet and if you let it be known that there is a connection available for them to use you could earn a good amount of money.

Being a university student all over again, I felt the need to look around for something that could work for college/university students. That being said, I happened to come across a couple of services where students can sell their lecture notes and study guides.

Notehall.com and ShareNotes.com are two such services that operate in pretty much the same way. They provide a platform where students can get their hands on course material for a nominal fee. To be able to provide this service, they need to get their hands on relevant material that they get from students and pay them for it.

Notehall.com pays out $1 per study guide and $0.25 per lecture note downloaded. They also have a referral programme where you can earn money by referring friends to them. Students earning money with them are paid out via cheque or PayPal.

ShareNotes.com charges a 10% commission on every sale which means you get to keep 90%. To add to what they pay for notes, they give members rewards points for completing certain tasks such as downloading notes, posting notes and referring friends. Rewards points can be redeemed for items such as iPods and gift vouchers.

If you are a good student that takes good notes then you really don’t have anything to lose. If you have sellable material you don’t have to do much work apart from signing up and uploading your material.

Not every single college will be listed in their databases and one service may work better than the other for person to person. As time goes by they will add more and more schools but at the moment a number of people will be able to enjoy their services. The only thing that sucks for someone like me is that they are limited to the US. Maybe one day they will make their way to this part of the world?

Just about everyone who goes online is bound to do a search for something or someone and God knows what else and when they are doing their searching they turn to the big boys such as Google and Yahoo. Even though you can make money via Google and Yahoo’s various other services, one thing that they do not pay you for is using their search engines. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make money for searching because you can and here are a two sites that will pay you to search.

The first one, Scour which has been around for a month or so is a service that aggregates their search results from Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search but it gives you the option of seeing results from a single search engine. What makes this site different is the social interactivity side where you can vote and comment on search results.

As far as getting paid to search goes, users earn points for searches, votes, comments and referring friends as follows:

Search – 1 point
Voting – 2 points
Commenting – 3 points
Refer a friend – 25% their points earned

After users have accumulated a minimum of 6,500 points they can cash it out for a $25 Visa gift card which can be used anywhere where Visa is accepted. This makes signing up to and using Scour open to people all over the world and not just the US or Canada.

Scour has a clean and easy to use interface which when I gave a try didn’t give any problems. As far as making their search engine experience easier, they have plugins for firefox and IE with various other plugins and widgets to follow in the future.

If you do a bit of searching online you could make yourself a good amount of money for doing something you already do, all your are changing is who you do it with. They have a point’s calculator for number of referrals and searches. I chose a random number of 28 referrals at 4 searches a day which equates to $186.88 a year which may not seem like a lot but it is something that you wouldn’t have otherwise had.Sound like a good idea? Sign up here – Scour.com

The second search engine is Homepages Friends who spilt revenue generated from searches 50/50 with you. They have an agreement with Yahoo to be their default search provider so if you are already a Yahoo user you won’t really be switching from your current search provider.

Homepage Friends works with IE and firefox and you can either set it as your homepage or you can set a search box within browser. I tried to use the service but I did not find it very user friendly and there are a few issues that they need to sort out but this may be a result of their rebranding. They are in the process of changing their name from My Search Funds to Homepage Friends which will also bring changes to their site.

Out of the two, I would be more inclined to use Scour because of the issues I had using Homepage Friends. Try them out for yourself.

Credits For This Post – Winning The Web and Earn Money Online

Last week I did a Google search for ‘shopping online’ and the site at number on was grizzlynut.co.nz. This particular site happens to be run by the person who got me into blogging. Grizzlynut is simply directory (or list) site of online shops within New Zealand and international online shops that cater to people in New Zealand. There are so many online retailers especially in the United States that do not ship to New Zealand and if people really want to get their hands on whatever it is the retailer sells they have to resort to either looking for a friend to get it for them or use services such as BuyUSA which only adds to the cost.

Grizzlynut has been up and running for a while now and I got in touch with my friend to ask her how things were going with the site. She hasn’t done anything to it or thought much about it in the last year or so but it is managing to pull in about US$100-150 per month via Adsense and other sales. To some that might not be much but to others it a fair amount of cash coming in from a site that you don’t have to work on frequently.

A directory or list site is a great way of earning a passive online income. Most of the hard work that you will have to do is coming up with a GOOD idea for a list/directory, setting it up, getting it up and running and getting yourself known. Once all of that is done, it should only be a matter of updating it now and then and leaving it to earn you a good and steady stream of income.

There are a number of ways through which you can make money via the site. These include but are not limited to affiliate and pay-per-lead programs, direct advertising and pay per click programs such as Adsense, YPN, Bidvertiser just to name a few. As with anything else, it may take some trial and error to come up with a revenue earner that is a good fit for your site and brings in a good amount of revenue.

So, if you have a good idea for a list/directory site that you see people being interested in it may be a good idea to get yourself organised, put some information together and put up a website. You will have to spend a small of money on a domain name and/or hosting fees but that is nothing compared to what you could make. Do you have a good idea for a site?

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