This is a sponsored post of the popular webmaster resource Triple.com. My opinions were not influenced, as this is an honest review of the program.

Triple.com is a top-notch domain name, web hosting and webmaster resource website that has long been one of my favorite companies on the net. They have some great deals on domain names, cheap $4/month web hosting and great extras that can get your website online in hours. An official ICANN domain registrar, I’ve used these guys before and absolutely love the customer service. When they came to me asking for a review of the new affiliate program, I jumped at the chance to let you guys know about this great company in a constructive way.

With the brand new Triple.com affiliate program, marketers and blog owners like you and me can make some extra commission off of our readers and visitors. The referral system works in two different ways. The first branch is referring customers that buy the actual domains, hosting, security certificates, etc. You get a whopping 30% off of every person who makes a buy. The better leg (in my opinion) is the webmaster referral system, which nets you 15% of everything any other webmaster brings in. This means that you get 15% of all the business another webmaster refers… which can make for a nice payout each month.

Ethical Profits Made Simple
Let’s be honest, a lot of the affiliate networks out there have you pushing products on people that they shouldn’t be ordering in the first place. Those of you who own blogs already know the importance of reliable hosting and domain names. Those of you who are just into making an extra buck online can appreciate the need for reliable service that any website owner will inevitably face.

Forget these shady gambling, dieting or marketing packages that you feel unethical in promoting. Triple.com is a fantastic website with a great track record and a product that people need. Now with the Triple.com affiliate program, you can get paid off of customers buying real products and from webmasters referring interested business.

Efficient and Orderly Design and Payment Management
As a former web designer myself, I absolutely hate websites that are run on unprofessional scripts and unappealing designs. I really can’t say much against the Triple.com system. The primary website (the business end) has an awesome “Web 2.0” look to it that makes things easy to navigate and clean. In addition, the affiliate managing back end has just a few basic pages to manage your income. Sure, it would be nice to see some added analytical features, but all the options you would want are there and the payment tracking system is one of the best I’ve seen.

On top of the design itself, there are some great looking banners that will fit with almost any blog theme or website layout… so your customers will catch all your links and get you the maximum potential revenue. You get two referral links, one for your customers and one for your webmasters. Clean. Professional. Nothing else to say, Triple.com is a great looking website.

Payments and Restrictions
Now that you’ve had a chance to hear about the affiliate program and webmaster company, let’s talk about the restrictions and payment scales that are set up for you as an affiliate. First things first (and correct me if I’m wrong), Triple.com seems to be open to everyone with a PayPal account. So all of you international readers looking to make some affiliate money may have better luck with the Triple.com program than with a full-fledged marketing broker like Market Leverage or NeverBlueAds.

Payments are all processed by PayPal every month. The best part about this is that there is a super low minimum balance to reach withdrawal at $20. That’s just a few domain sales or one web hosting account. I would like to see them expand their reach out into giving checks and accepting other mediums of payment… but PayPal is definitely a solid start as a lot of people like the anonymity.

Bottom Line: Triple.com is a fantastic webmaster website with a great reputation in the industry. Their new affiliate program is an awesome way to make extra income on the side… with the potential 30% per sale and 15% per referred webmaster. A low payout threshold, quick and efficient pay processing and an awesome product you will actually enjoy promoting… Triple.com is a great new program that has my recommendation.

-The Net Fool

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This guest post is by Mattaw of Moneybites.com. Moneybites is a blog sharing tips, tricks and little bites about how to earn online, so check out his blog!

Video blogging seems to be gaining traction in the blogosphere. Everywhere I look I see video blogs pop up. Now this could just be me going crazy, but I do think there is a lot more interest in video posts.

So, I know you guys are all groaning thinking, “oh no, not another what you need to do to make good videos post”! Well, do I have a treat for you. This post is, in fact, not about what makes a good video but what makes a bad video.

What you should glean from this post is what mistakes not to make, so next time you’re making a video you can keep them in mind (and hopefully not make them).

Video and audio quality - This is my number one factor when looking at videos. Honestly if I can’t hear what your saying or having a hard time seeing you (due to static), I’m probably not going to be watching it again. If your audio quality sucks, get a better mic (and/or camera). In terms of video quality, if you’re making a lot of videos it’s probably worth investing in a decent camera (come on, they’re not too expensive).

Cutting together your video with a program also drastically improves video quality. Transitions or even just cleaning the video up using a program like Windows Movie Maker (it’s auto installed for all you PC users), or any of the other decent freeware out there will improve your watchers watching experience. The result is more people will come back to watch what you produce because it is simply easier to watch. I personally won’t watch anything that looks like it was made by a sixth grader (unless I’m at a sixth graders video presentation, then I might stomach it..).

Load time - Don’t self host your videos. Unless you have a server to be streaming videos off of I wouldn’t recommend doing so. Honestly, nothing annoys me more than a slow or partially loading video. If you self host your videos you can/will run into these problems. There are tons of good free hosting sites out there. Even if you want to get away from YouTube you can find another site that allows you to upload video (and maybe has a revenue sharing option for all that are looking to slightly monetize videos). A couple of these are sites like Viddler, Veoh, Revver, and so on.

Confidence - Not a lot of people want to watch the person with no clue what they’re talking about (unless for some reason they are very entertaining, so if you are very entertaining, disregard what I say next ). Speak on video with confidence. Video blogging is about being a good actor. Even if you are nervous, don’t show it. Confidence is attractive to a viewer when watching a video. By being confident it assures viewers that you know what you’re talking about (even if you sometimes don’t…. ) and gives them another reason to watch the content you put out there.

How the blogger looks - Unless you are the sleepy unshaven video blogger, you shouldn’t look like a sleepy unshaven blogger. Video blogging is also about putting in an effort to look decent (at least I think it is). If you look like you just rolled out of bed (like quite a few people that video blog do), it turns me off. If you don’t put in the effort to make yourself look good for your videos, why should I watch it?

Content (and this doesn’t mean you need good content… that is a given) - Is your content dry and boring. Video blogging is about putting a face to a blogger and giving a user a new experience. If I think that you’re just reading off a screen or piece of paper, I won’t be tuning back in. The moral of this story: vary your content. Do make it all about just the material. Perhaps use some comic relief or even just being somewhat personal can break the monotony of a lecture like video post.

So heed my advice, and don’t make the mistakes I outlined above! Hopefully you will all take my advice, produce better video posts, and subscribe to my RSS feed.

-Max

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As many of you know, last month I grossed over $2,200 in pure profit. $1,800 of that was from my personal favorite GPT (get paid to) website, SWATcash. I received a lot of questions with regards to how I was able to do this with an offer-completing website. As I had a very busy night and was unable to put together a longer post, I decided that I’d give you guys the payment proof from last months earnings.

Too many bloggers claim that they are making $X,XXX every month, and enver give you any proof. While you would typically just take people for their word, I feel like it is important to give readers the actual receipts every now and then to increase validity. Personally, I have come across dozens of earnings reports that I immediately felt were “creative” to put nicely. This would include people counting sales of blogs as a net income, when they actually put in a good deal of money into the upkeep of the website, and even certain people accrueing revenue that wasn’t actually booked. That’s an accounting no-no!

The Difference Between Accrued Income, and Hope
Since I have such a quick post today… I wanted to drive one point home… and that is the difference between accrued income and revenue that you simply expect to come in. A quick accounting lesson: accrued income is income that is earned by providing a service or selling a product, but has yet to be received. Basically, you are moving items onto your books that haven’t actually been realized gains yet. Does this sound suspicious? It’s not. It’s entirely acceptable as an accounting practice and is used all the time to make your books look a bit better for the time being.

Now that you understand what accrued income is, we need to separate this from the wishful thinking that many bloggers have been adding to their earnings reports every month… despite the fact that the sales aren’t at all closed. Essentially, if you signed an agreement to sell a blog on December 31st for $10k, you could move this to your books as an accrued income. However, many are adding blog flips and the like that they have not actually sold to anyone onto their books, citing sales that fell through or expected sale prices. Things like this are enough to trash the reputation of the “make money online” niche as a truly worthwhile industry… not a good thing at all.

On to SWATcash!
Right, so here you will see the big check I received the other day from SWATcash headquarters. They process payments half way through every single month… and never miss a beat. Just check out their payment proof forum for a great example of the payouts they are giving on a daily basis. I was able to gain such a big amount, largely because of income that I had been  accruing in my user account as unearned income. It was all just racking up value as “SWATcash” points, which is their credit-based rewards system, and I turned it all to gold last month. In addition to this change, I had a good deal of referral traffic come in, and a great amount of leverage that they rewarded me for from posting about the website and obtaining some of the highest Google rankings for their niche terms.

Lesson learned. Treat companies right, and they will reward you in the end with some great “financial aid.” I have been able to do this most viably with SWATcash, although other small companies have given me similar rewards for helping them along their way.

-The Net Fool

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One of the best ways to get traffic to your blog is by making a self-proclaimed link bait page. This is often done in a post, as I have done many times in the past. With a post, you can get a huge inflow of traffic to your blog just by pointing out something new that people find interesting. But while I already wrote about creating an effective link bait blog post, can you actually do the same thing in a link-baiting page?

Setting aside an entire page on your blog for the purpose of drawing traffic, boosting search engine ranking placements and signing up massive amounts of fresh visitors is easier than it sounds. I believe that every single blog on the net should set up their own dedicated “promo page” of sorts as an alternative to the homepage of your blog.

Why Is A Link Bait Page Necessary

Speaking in general, as bloggers… we can’t always be putting out our best stuff day after day. There are times when things break from the norm, and there are times when things get too informal or too professional. The lesson here is that people seeing the homepage of your blog for the first time might not get an accurate picture of what you do. The solution? Make a link bait page to give readers a sample of your writing and a reason to subscribe to your feed right off the bat.

The Method… Simplified
In making a link bait page, we don’t want to just throw up a page that has general non-specific information on it. We want something that is going to be as beneficial for us, as it will be for the viewers. What we need is a game plan.

What I recommend is first targeting your primary keyword phrase. By now, you should have your favorite phrase that you would like to rank highly on Google for. Using my new finance blog Bullish Bankers as our example, this phrase would be “investing ideas.” The advantages of using a link bait page, rather then just a post, is that it can be much more effective in creating a static destination to force through some killer Google ranks and really drive readers toward your subscribe page en mass. It’s a must-have part of any blog!

Link Bait Pages a’la Jim… A True One-Two Punch!
Once you have started your page, we are going to focus on boosting our Google rankings by linking over to it as much as possible. With a normal blog post, you can only do so much. With a page, we can literally dominate Google rankings.

Here is what I recommend for my one-two knockout punch:

• Change the “permalink” to your keyword phrase
  By making the actual URL include your targeted phrase, you are going to rank much better for the search engine results that you are seeking. A quick example? My BullishBankers.com link-bait page is located at “http://www.bullishbankers.com/investing-ideas/”, my targeted term!
• Use a catchy title that includes your keyword phrase
  If you haven’t figured it out already, the title of your blog posts is the most important thing in deciding where you will rank in Google results. When search engines poll for the best website to match a search term, the first check is in the title of said page… so we want our phrase right in there. It doesn’t have to be your target phrase alone though! The title on my demo page is “Top Ten Investing Ideas for 2008.” This is an example of a title that is catchy and useful!

What To Put On Your Link Bait Page!?
This is secondary in my opinion to organizing your search engine optimization, but equally important. Your content can literally be anything! It needs to be something catchy, easy to read and maybe even humorous. It should be a sort of easy to read sampler of the kind of content you have on your website, but not written like a typical blog post either.

Some suggestions:

• A List - Practical, easy to read and great for social media
• An Image - Or multiple images. Something funny or amusing
• A Joke - Humor works. Use it to your advantage
• A Cliff-Hanger - Something that poses a call for action, or a reason to read

No matter what you do, I feel that it is essential to include somewhere an option to subscribe to your blog’s rss feed or newsletter… or both! You need people to subscribe to your stuff, and there’s no better way to do this on a link-bait page. I decided to use an “above the fold” technique where I listed reasons that subscribing would benefit readers for free. Use what you have to offer to your advantage, free stuff is golden… so if you don’t have anything to give away, try to rub in that you have a free feed.

My Page is Done! … But How Do I Promote It?
Once you have everything good to go, it’s important to use your link-bait page to your advantage. Instead of linking to your main blog, why not link to your link bait page? If you have designed it effectively… it should be much more convincing than a look at your homepage to first-time visitors.

1. Linking Technique: Try to link to your page using your actual keyword phrase as much as possible. Google absolutely loves this, and for good reasons. If you have people linking to a page as “investing ideas,” with a url ending “/investing-ideas/” and a title “Investing Ideas” then you have yourself a first page result in most searches! The more people you can get to link to the link-bait using your keyword phrase, the higher you will rank.

2. Social Media Storm: One of the other effective ways to push an otherwise undiscovered gem into the spotlight is to use social media. I have seen tremendous success by having pages land on the famed Digg.com front page, and you can also increase all your rankings by using other programs like StumbleUpon or Reddit. Social media is good for more than just intermediate traffic, it can completely change the face of your website and link-bait page.

Essentially, we want to make our newly formed link bait page into our new homepage for anyone who hasn’t visited our blog before. The best ways to do this is to advertise it as your website when you link to you site from outside sources. Google likes individual pages a lot more than generalized website homepages when it ranks things in search engine results… so use this to your advantage!

Check Out The Bullish Bankers Link Bait - Investing Ideas

A big thanks for John Cow and his “Make Money Online” link bait page for being the basis for this project. As you can see, I borrowed and modified his subscribe image because I loved it so much and it fit with my design once I made some quick changes. This type of layout is very effective, because it presents a non-obtrusive call to subscribe on the top, and features some easy to read content on the bottom. I highly recommend using this approach, though there are many different ways to boost your SERPs and RSS subscribers using your link bait page.

-The Net Fool

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It’s Sunday, it’s the end of the week, and for the twentieth consecutive time it’s time… time for some link love!

This has been a busy week for sure, but I feel like I put out two solid posts in a row to compensate for an otherwise frantic week of work. I wound down my summer job with Aflac, and started prepping for college (I leave on Friday). I’m going to need to buckle down and get some big finances together… maybe I’ll rack up on some of Citigroup’s cheap sub-prime debt, eh? Okay, okay, enough economic jokes… let’s work through some funny, insightful and down-right clever posts (other than mine, of course) to wrap up the week ending August 16th, 2008.

• Net Strife - How to Tell a Cheap Kid from A Professional
• Zac Johnson - Split Testing With Facebook Ads
• Nicky Cakes - 5 Awesome Affiliate Program Rewards You’ll Never See
• Da Blogger - How To Write Paid Reviews that People Like
• The Germz - Massively Jump-Start your Website’s Traffic

I actually just stumbled across Net Strife today, and loved the post on purchasing freelance work. Zac Johnson had a really nice case study where he breaks down a “fitness” ad he ran on Facebook. Nicky Cakes came out with yet another amusing article. Da Blogger showed his best stuff with a how-to on writing paid posts that don’t make you seem like a jerk. Finally, The Germz brings up two really cool tricks to bump up your traffic in a jiffy. Great stuff that really had me thinking, so check them out!

Stock Market Update
We were up a nice 8% from the low hit on July 15th to start out the week, then reality started to set in. To be sure, this week was a consolidation rather than a reversal… which is actually a pretty bullish trends for the market. A “consolidation” period refers to a time when the markets trend sideways… up a bit now, down a bit then, and that’s just what we got with the S&P 500 Index up a massive 0.1% for the week. The real story for the week was the continued strength of the U.S. Dollar that dragged down commodity markets once again to the market’s cheers.

So what’s the deal with crude oil and other commodities? Really, there have been tons of bullish signs for natural gas and crude oil that would ordinarily send the price much much higher. However, people are sort of overlooking this as they continue to bet the currency markets (which interact and play into commodities). I think that this is still a strong market for oil and especially natural gas… so I made a BUY this week on Chesapeake Energy (NYSE: CHK), a company I absolutely love and snagged just under $45/share. I still love this stock anywhere under $48, as well as Noble Corp. (NYSE: NE) under $52.

Blogosphere
What’s up with Feedburner?! Once again, their connection with Google’s RSS Reader cut out, dropping me temporarily underneath the 500-level a few days ago. Because of this, I need to run another 500 SUBSCRIBER PARTY!!!! …… just kidding, sorry. But check out what IM With Joe had to say about all this, a blogger that I continue to link but still hasn’t shown me the link love in return, which makes me sad.

Jason from The University Kid hyped his money making technique all week, a post that he locked except for people that went out to get subscribers and links for him. Smart idea, and the post was great so check it out if you can. Besides that, I was actually FEATURED on a “treasure hunt” that took place on WildTreasure.com. Basically, they take pictures from around the net… and if you can find them you win real money, great concept so check it out!

What’s up with all this garbage about how you have to jump ship on the “make money online” niche? I don’t see any problem with labeling myself an MMO blogger, while others use creative workarounds like “entrepreneur” and “affiliate” to try and suggest they aren’t in the same business as everyone else. The flurry of posts coming about this have me thinking “what exactly is bad with MMO?” Nothing. And that wraps up an important message from Jim himself.

The Week In Focus
I’m going to do all that I can to get some creative posts up in a week that is going to be riddled with work leading up to my departure back to Penn State (among other things). I also have a web design project that I need to complete from start to finish in a few days, so that’s going to be rough. However, I am currently working on some linkbait pages to try and increase my Google Search Engine Rankings (SERPs)… so I’ll definitely get you guys a post on how you can increase your rankings along with me.

So keep checking back with The Net Fool dot com for some more material on how you can improve your own blog, how you can make some money on the internet, and an easy to understand explanation on what’s happening with the price of oil. Everyone’s talking about it, and most of them don’t understand how the industry works… so I want to get everyone educated to be informed voters, right?. Let’s hope for a rebound in natural gas prices so that I can make a lot of money! Stay BULLISH on the net!

-The Net Fool

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