We would like to welcome our newest sponsor TNX.net one of the fastest growing text link brokers on the net at the moment.

Many of you will already be familiar with TNX from their Digital point thread offering free text link ads. But for those who are not their service they are a traditional text link broker offering advertisers a way to affordable get their links on multiple web sites indeed they go so far as to claim for as low as $11 a month you may get up to 10,000 static links to your website!

Like many link brokers TNX are concerned with Google recent and highly talked about Paid Link war, though they believe they have a series of tools that will help even the most paranoid person out there. Sadly for publishers they still use Google PageRank for their many metrics something that I suspect they will be changing very soon.

Finally for all those of you interested in cashing in a different way TNX have an affiliate program, this system is based around their TNX Points but can be cashed in, in a variety of ways and are worth checking out if you are looking to diversify particularly if you also want to use their advertising services.

Why don’t you think about becoming a community friend its a great way to reach out just like tnx.net have done. So everyone please welcome TNX Payment Blogger latest community friend.

Well I got a little laugh when I ran a few of my sites through Talklinkcentre Paid Link detector thanks to fantomaster for pointing it out. Scarily the detector managed to completely miss any paid links and instead decided that links to Feedburner and Google were clearly paid for.
To make things worse they use scary statements such as

Paid Or Not
These Links Are Useless To SEO

Which is complete tosh, from what I can tell they simply decide any link with anchor text and is not a nofollow is a “paid link and or useless” but they did get me thinking how would I create a paid link detector?

Elements of a paid link

Lets start cooking to identify a paid link we need some tell tell signs such as;

• A dofollow full juice link
• Off Topic
• Associated keywords - sponsor, advertisment
• Neighbourhood checking
• Link viability

Walk with me,
So the first check is to see if a link is a full link i.e no use of the nofollow and that the link is external, this would be followed by some sort of relevancy check, and magic keyword check, this would leave us with 2 piles of links one lot we know or suspect are evil, the other we just suspect, so we then check each link against a list of known offenders looking for a match.

Getting into the logic

This is all pretty simple now isn’t it?

The two sticky areas are Link relevancy and the Evil keyword matching list, you see what is a relevant link? if I am writing a computing blog is an Apple an irrelevant term? We could perform some amazing Latent semantic Analysis (or swallow a really big thesaurus) to determine relevancy but could we get it anywhere near close enough? Without some sort of relevancy engine how would we know which links are paid for or not. Google and the other search engines must have this cracked (note that was a sarcastic comment) so let us ignore this small problem and go to the second one our Evil keywords. This is far more straight forward we simply look at anchor text, heading or div container that has terms such as Advertiser, sponsor,click here etc. Once we have amassed our list we pass our links and the surrounding code through them, just to be sure we better also have a flag system for terms such as Page Ranks as people who discuss such things must be selling links.

Ultimately when it comes to developing our paid link detector script we have hit a large problem without some sort of relevancy checker, and a huge database of known offenders we will be unable to catch those evil paid linkers damn. We could harness list where we do know their are offenders such as the Pay per post market place or Text Link Ads but certainly with the Pay per post we could get ourselves into a bit of hot water did the buyer pay for a link or a blog post or we could ignore this small problem.

How would you go about creating a paid link checker, the above is one idea its up there with writing “all those who have paid links please step forward” line but perhaps you could do better? maybe you think the guys at talklinkcenter got it right and if its an external link it should be nofollowed just in case?

Please note their was a certain level of sarcasm in this post, you may also note using the above diagram to try to create a paid links detector will not work nor will it help you take over the world.

Blogs are the hardest sites to monetize, but yet when it comes to wordpress there is always an automated solution for you In today’s post we will write about the top wordpress plugins that you may use in order to earn money from your wordpress blog.

Using adsense with your blog

Adsense never worked well for my blogs - as they are all tech related and people know how to avoid those ads - but for many bloggers adsense is the best earner. One of the best plugins for this task is the Adsense Deluxe plugin which gives you the ability to have different ad placements/colors on each post and decide what ads to run, etc.

Besides adsense deluxe there are other plugins for adsense too. Here are a few:

• AskApache Firefox Adsense will display Firefox adsense ads only to users that don’t have firefox
• Shylock Adsense Plugin gives you the ability to display more ads to the old posts and less to the new ones. This way you will not bother your regular readers
• If you are a refresh geek, then Adsense Earnings is the best plugin for you, as it will display your adsense earnings in your dashboard
• In case you want to share adsense revenue with your co-bloggers, then Author Adsense Plugin is exactly what you need.
• You can also use the Adsense Manager Plugin, which actually generates code automatically and allows positioning of ads with Widgets
• Who Sees Ads, will help you create some rules regarding who is viewing ads and who is not. This way you can display ads only to search engine visitors, or only to non registered users, etc.

More adsense earnings

If you want to earn even more, there is a great plugin from web 2.0 announcer which uses a unique revenue sharing system to help you make more from adsense. The web 2.0 announcer monetizer plugin will display links to the top stories from the web that are related to your blog, and in addition you’ll get half of the adsense pageviews in their site. This way you can earn money for giving cool content to your readers.

Amazon affiliate program plugins

Another cool income source for your blog could be Amazon. But if you are lazy like me you would like to have a plugin that will add those ads automatically, right? Well there are a few plugins that help you monetize your wordpress blog with Amazon. Here are a few I know :

1. Amazon links pro is a plugin that according to its author is a contextual solution for Amazon as it is displaying ads relevant to your content.
2. The Amazon Wishlist plugin will display your wish list at amazon to your blog. I know this is not actually a monetization method but a free book or cd is always cool, right?
3. TicTap Contextual Ads is probably the best plugin that I saw for Amazon (haven’t tested it yet) This plugin will display contextual ads to your blogs with Amazon products, and what I really like about them is their unique style (check the site to see what I mean)

Selling links: Do it yourself

If you followed the tips we gave you for selling links without the help of middle man companies, then it is probably the time to install the WP Text Ads plugin. I have never used this one, so if you want to read a review check this post from proBlogger.

Sponsored posts: Do it yourself

As you know there are plenty of services that act like a middleman for sponsored posts in your blog. Services like ReviewMe have marketplaces where advertisers search and order sponsored posts to your blog and they get a big cut of the sales.

If your blog has traffic maybe this is not required, so if you think you can do this yourself, you can use a plugin like WP BankRoll. The plugin is integrated with the Paypal IPN system, so it is a great solution, and the best is that there is a free version too.

CPM/CPC ads: Do it yourself

Now if you think you can sell CPM or CPC ads yourself, the first thing you need is a great piece of software to automate the process and have your clients confident that everything is working well. To have this result I would definitely suggest you to install OpenAds (formerly known as phpAdsNew) and then use WP OpenAds Plugin

PayPal Donations

Another way to make some extra money with your blog is offer paypal donations. If you think this monetization method can work for you, you can try the above plugins:

1. EasyPayPal Wordpress Plugin
2. Buy Me a Beer - PayPal Donation WordPress Plugin
3. Paypal Donate

Monetizing your feeds

Personally I am not a fan of this monetization technique - as feeds are supposed to used in order to get visitors back to our site - but if you are, here are two plugins you can use:

1. Feedvertising by text link ads has a plugin for feed ads for wordpress
2. The PostPost plugin helps you display CJ ads to your feeds

More monetization options

Do you want more ways to make money? Bellow are the rest plugins that you can use to make money from your wordpress site:

1. The DealDotCom plugin will help you earn more from this new - and promising affiliate program.
2. If you are registered with Chitika’s affiliate program - which by the way is great for sites that have product reviews - you can use [CA] Chitika, a plugin that will automate the whole process
3. On the other hand if you prefer to display BidVertiser ads, you can use the Bidvertiser wordpress plugin. Bidvertiser for me was the one of the worst cpc programs I ever used, but that doesn’t mean that it wont work for you too.
4. If you want are affiliated with CafePress then you definitely have to install the CafePress WP plugin

The new version of Open Ads 2.4 is released today!

This is our first stable release of the new codebase and a huge milestone for us. I’d like to thank all inviduals in both the Openads v2.3 private and public beta cycles

Those of you who have not already installed and played with the latest version… You are missing out on the best Openads adserver yet!
source:http://blog.openads.org/09/openads-24-stable-released/

Its been in beta for a few months and we have covered its predecessor a week or so ago.
The good news 2.4 is packed with loads of great features.

Including:

• Capability to serve billions of ads per month
• Smoother campaign delivery and prioritisation
• Easy integration with leading applications: Track Google and Yahoo! clicks
• Enhanced targeting and campaign management
• Better reporting capability

You can compare the versions with this handy comparison chart.

Of particular interest at least for me is ‘Agency Level Management Login’ having scalable permissions for users is great if you are running advertisements on multiple blogs and sites for many clients.

What’s more its still free!
You can grab your copy from the download site

AuctionAds announced a $25 bonus to all the new publishers that will sign up with them.

I guess this is a great opportunity to check their program. In a few words - for those who are not familiar with AuctionAds - AuctionAds is a CPC network that uses eBay auctions to display relevant ads in your site. The best thing about them is that they pay through PayPal so I guess it worth trying.

Minimum payout is $50 so you still have to do some work before you get your cheque though and auction ads is one of the fastest growing networks out there with every man and his dog desperate to get accounts.

Perhaps the smarter money therefore is in ebay affiliate marketing itself maybe a future post but for now if you haven’t already get along to AuctionAds and Sign Up for your $25 bonus!