Bloggers - Getting Started Guide

A review is an article that a blogger writes about your product. We use the term "product" as a general term for anything you want to have reviewed. It could be a website, a service, or an actual physical product.

SponsoredReviews’ advertisers are paying for your time learn about their product/service, and write about it on your blog. They expect that you will help them increase sales by introducing their product to your audience. They also expect that you will link to their site according to their requirements. It is important that you read the advertisers requirements prior to doing the review. We will reject reviews that do not meet the advertiser’s requirements.

Step 1: Add Your Blog(s)

The first thing to do is add your blog to our database. This is done by going to the “Manage Blogs” tab then clicking on “Add New Blog”. You can see the requirements for acceptance as a blogger in our system on the "Bloggers' Policy" section below. You will not be able to bid on opportunities or sell reviews until your first blog has been approved.

Step 2: Add Blog Screen

Once you have entered your blog URL into the “Blog URL” field, our system will gather stats on your blog. You will then be taken to a page where we ask for certain information about your blog. Here are some of the key fields and some important information you should know about each field.

Desired Price - This is where you set your price. This price is what advertisers see when they browse through our blog directory. There is no negotiating on this price so make sure it is reasonable. It is important that you look at our suggested pricing. If your blog is priced too high (compared to the quality and the stats of similar blogs) we may reject it.

Blog Category – This is the main category of your blog. You can only choose one, but do not fret, if your blog has multiple categories, you can enter them into the Tag/keyword field. Our system utilizes a tag based categorization system. Any keyword that you enter that becomes popular will be displayed as a category in our system, and your blog will be listed under that category.

Blog Title – It is highly recommended that you add descriptive keywords to your blog title. “Joe’s Technology and Health Blog” will do much better then “Joe’s Blog”. Your title is all some advertisers will see. If they see a keyword that is relevant to their product, they are much more likely to purchase a review from you.

Description – You should use this section to “sell” your blog to the advertiser. Explain how many visitors you have, or show some great examples of posts you do.

Blog Tags/Keywords – As explained above, we use a tag based categorization system. You should use keywords that describe the categories of content you write about. i.e. health, technology, pets.. etc...

Step 3: Search and Bid on Opportunities

After you have entered your blog into our system, and been approved, you can start bidding on opportunities. Note: It is not necessary for you to bid on opportunities in order to earn money. Advertisers will also search through our blog directory and purchase reviews directly from you. With that being said, you can earn a lot more money if you are proactive about searching and bidding on opportunities. You can see the Market Place Level rules on the "Bloggers' Policy" section below.

We recommend bidding on opportunities relevant to your site first, as advertisers are more likely to accept bids from relevant websites. If you bid slightly below your “public” price, your bid will be noticed more. Our system shows the advertiser the difference between your public price and your bid price.

Once you have found an opportunity that you want to write about, you can bid on it by clicking on the opportunity name. Once you are in the opportunity details screen, you will see a box on the right side where you can place your bid. You can only bid on opportunities if your price meets the minimum price they are asking. In addition, your bid price cannot be higher then the price you have set for your blog.

Once you have made a bid, it is up to the advertiser to accept/reject/counter-offer:

1. If the advertiser accepts your bid you will be notified and you will have 7 days to complete the review.
2. If the advertiser makes a counter-offer you will be notified and you will have the option to accept, reject, or make another counter-offer.
3. If the advertisers rejects your offer you will be notified and all bidding will stop.

It is important to know that if the advertiser rejects your initial bid or counter-offer you will not be able to make another bid.

Some advertisers take a while to approve or decline a bid. Advertisers receive hundreds of bids from bloggers, so make sure your bid stands out. You will also get more acceptances if you bid on opportunities related to your site theme.

If your bid is not accepted or declined by an advertisers within a couple weeks, it will be purged from our system.

Step 4: When an Advertiser Purchases a Review Directly from You

Advertisers will often search for and purchase reviews directly from bloggers in our Blog Directory.

When an advertiser purchases a review from you directly, you are notified via email and on the homepage of your control panel. The item will be marked as “Awaiting Your Acceptance” on your homepage.

Step 5: Submitting the Completed Review

Once you have completed your review and double-checked your work, you need to submit the URL to us in order to complete the order. You can do this by clicking on the opportunity you are completing the review for (on the homepage).

Step 6: Getting Paid

We pay every 2 weeks for reviews completed in that 2 week period. We rely on your Paypal address being correct in order to send you payment. We currently only accept Paypal. We may consider other payment options in the future.

Payments by Western Union now available in Indonesia

We're excited to introduce Western Union Quick Cash as a new payment method for Indonesia. If you're located in Indonesia, you can now sign up to receive your AdSense payments in cash using the worldwide Western Union money transfer service. This payment method is quick, easy, and free -- that means no more waiting for checks to arrive in the mail or to clear at the bank.

A few things to keep in mind:

* Payments follow our normal payment schedule and will be available for pickup at your local Western Union agent the day after they are issued.

* You'll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name when picking up your payment. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please follow the instructions listed in our Help Center.

* Payments by Western Union are currently only available to individual payee names, but not to businesses.

* Payments must be picked up within 35 days of issue or they'll expire. If this happens, a payment hold will be placed on your AdSense account and the payment will be credited back to your account.

* Payments will be made in US dollars, but depending on your local Western Union agent, they may be picked up in your local currency.

Follow these instructions if you're interested in signing up for payments by Western Union. You can also find useful information in our Help Center about exchange rates and other countries where this payment method is available. We hope you enjoy using this new payment option in Indonesia!

Fontastic new options for your ad units

You've been asking for more control over the appearance of the ads on your sites, so we're happy to let you know that you can now change the font face of the text in ad units on pages in Latin-character languages. You can choose between Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces. Please note that while font options will appear in every account, they'll currently only be applied to ad units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters.

There are a few ways to customize the font face of your ad units. If you'd like to quickly change the font settings for every ad unit generated from your account, visit the 'Ad Display Preference' section of your Account Settings page to select a new account-wide font face. This will affect all units you've created in the past, regardless of whether you used the Manage Ads feature. By default, your ads are currently set to 'Standard AdSense font family', which we've found has performed well across browsers and displays.


However, you can also select custom font faces for specific ad units that you've created with the Manage Ads feature. When creating new ad units, you'll be prompted to select between the default 'Standard AdSense font family', your new account-wide font face (if you've selected one), or another font face. You can also change the appearance of existing ad units, by visiting the Manage Ads page of your account and updating your font choices for specific ad units. Once you've changed the font face of an ad unit away from the default, those selections will be maintained even if you change your account-wide settings later.


Just as with color and placement optimizations, we encourage you to test these new font options to find the best combination for your sites. For instance, you can try matching the font face of your ads to that of your sites. Enjoy the new font faces, and feel free to leave feedback in our comments field below.

My Top 7 Favorite Ecommerce Tools

When you make your living on the Internet, you sometimes forget that the resources you use every day (and take for granted) might rate an incredible discovery to anyone who doesn't already know they exist.

Whether they help you make money, save time, save money, or avoid frustration, these ecommerce tools and services rate my highest recommendation for anyone who conducts any form of ecommerce online.

ClickBank.com -

If you sell a downloadable product such as an ebook, report, or software, you can't beat ClickBank for processing credit card payments. Not only do they take the payments and send you a check twice a month, they also plug your product into an existing network with tens-of-thousands of affiliates who can sell it for you. Also, unlike a traditional merchant credit card processing account, ClickBank assumes all the fraud risk and prevents many of the "horror" stories you hear in connection with online credit card processing.

MySiteSales.com -

Since ClickBank only allows the sale of downloadable products, MySiteSales.com comes to the rescue for anyone selling a physical product or service. Offering a suite of integrated product catalogs, follow up autoresponders, advertising tracking, a secure server, and even limited-time coupon offers, this tool rates a "must have" for setting up and integrating a professional ecommerce solution on virtually any size website.

Aweber.com -

If you need an unlimited number of follow up autoresponders and the ability to send an email "broadcast" to all your contacts at one time, Aweber offers an excellent managed solution. Specializing in helping small to medium-sized Web businesses implement an effective email follow-up strategy without complicated software, Aweber gets our highest marks for service and dependability.

GoDaddy.com -

Cheap, reliable, easy-to-use domain name registrar that only charges $8.95 per year for each domain name you register. Godaddy rates cheaper and just as, if not more, reliable than any other domain registrar. They also offer a "private registration" option that allows you to keep your identity as the domain owner a secret from unscrupulous people who exploit domain name records to compile mailing lists, spam databases or worse.

FrontierPowerHosting.com -

Any successful ecommerce endeavor begins with a solid website hosting service. Nothing shuts you down faster than an unreliable web host because, the second they go offline, your business goes offline. I host one of my servers at FrontierPowerHosting.com because of great customer service and guaranteed up-time.

ClipArt.com -

Ever pulled your hair out searching for that perfect image, photo, or piece of clipart for your website? Once you exhaust the Microsoft collection on your computer, the next stop (if you want to find something fast) is Clipart.com. With thousands of images searchable by keyword, you can always find the perfect image in less time and without the worries of copyright infringement if you just pull something off the Web.

Google.com/Adsense/ -

Website got traffic but no making much money? Open a free account with Google AdSense and earn a commission any time someone clicks on any of the targeted ads. An excellent way to earn extra cash on virtually any website.

Concentrate on what's important

This is only my second letter in seven or eight weeks. Sorry about that, but at first I had no Internet connection when things went wrong with my satellite service (I'm now on wireless broadband)
and then I developed a quite serious illness which I'm slowly getting over.

If you want to, you can read more on my forum I reckon you should go there anyway, it's a great community.

Incidentally the forum posts are being indexed by Google, which makes it a good place to get links to your websites - as long as you've got something useful/interesting to say that is :)

Ok, I'll keep this relatively short because I'm still not feeling too good. But I hope that normal "service" has now resumed.





1. Concentrate on what's important...

First of all, it looks like I'm missed seeing a lot of new products since I've been offline.

When I visited my forum I saw a number of programs/software being talked about that I'd never even heard of.

And, do you know what? I didn't really care that I'd missed the products being announced.

There's probably nothing wrong with them. They're most likely useful. They're probably worth investigating.

But... remember this.

It's IMPORTANT to not get distracted with new things all the time. You could spend all your limited web time learning how to use
new tools, when really you should be focusing on improving your sites and your skills and your own business.

I remember David Garfinkel and Mark Joyner saying to me in Vegas that I should focus on what I'm good at (in my case writing).

And that's what you should be doing too.

Play to your strengths.

Work out what you're good at/what your main interests are and give them most of your attention and time.

Don't get sidetracked by everything new that comes along.

Write down your "online business" plan, even if it's only on one piece of paper. And work out the steps you need to take to achieve success with it. Doing this will help you focus on what matters, and it will clear your head so that you know where you should be spending your time.

Once you've mapped out your action steps you need to follow them. Don't make a plan and then not stick to it. Don't let anyone or
anything put you off. Go for it.

Don't sign up for every crappy new scheme that comes along. Don't buy every new piece of software or every ebook.

Do what works for YOU and use the tools that works for YOU.

And just go for it.






2. One of the smartest brains around...

I'm not sure if you've heard of him, but James Maduk is one of the smartest business brains around. He's been working online since 1995, writes monthly articles for Entrepreneur Magazine, and he's an expert at online selling.

Plus he's got more products on the market than anyone I know, even beating the prolific Marlon Sanders.

So why he's not amazingly well known in this field I'll never know.

I'm a big fan, especially of his member only site

If you'd like an introduction to his style and knowledge have a look at one of his free weekly webcasts, where he uses "internet whiteboard" technology to get his messages across.

And when you've finished watching and listening you might fancy signing up for his affiliate program which is looks like turning into one of the best around.






3. Free Amazon Tools...

If you're promoting Amazon's affiliate program here are a couple of useful sites which help you automate the process.

http://www.associatesshop.com/

and

http://www.addassociate.com/add_register.php

Associatesshop lets you add an Amazon store to your site and sell products of your choice, while Addassociates provides you with code which works much the same way as Google Adsense -
meaning it "reads" the content of your webpage and displays context related products.

Of the two I prefer Addassociate, but you can't use it on pages where you're running Google Adsense ads.

Anyway, they're both free and could be a useful addition to your sites.






4. Beginners Bit...

I get heaps of letters about how difficult it is to build a good looking website. But I get even more letters about the complexities of getting a webhost and uploading pages to it.

One simple way around this is to use Site Build It! (SBI) because it offers an all-in-one solution.

The mastermind behind SBI, Ken Evoy, has been really busy with SBI over the past few months, constantly adding new features and making it easier to use. I've owned SBI for a few years now and it's now a far, far better site building tool than when I started using it. And it was good then.

One thing SBI is ideal for is displaying Google Adsense ads.

To really make big profits from Adsense you need a lot of content pages. Using SBI for these sites makes sense because once you've got over the learning curve it leaves you totally free to
concentrate on providing that content. So you can quickly put out a lot more pages.

Plus the in-built tools help you keep that content on topic, which means that Adsense can read that your pages correctly and display relevant ads.

In fact Ken has put together a very good info site about using SBI with Adsense. You should spend a bit of time reading through it.

http://salesnow.sitesell.com/adsense/





5. Stuck for ideas what to build a site about?

Try reading Michael Holland's Strike it Niche.
It's a great place to begin.

Michael's done a great research job, giving you ideas for 70 different sites, and explaining just what you need to do to profit from each
of them. Reading this ebook should leave you dancing with enthusiasm.





6. As a follow on to the stuff higher up...


Do you ever feel like you're drowning in a sea of data?
Well you're not the only one.

I just checked out the online edition of The Guardian, one of the best UK daily papers, and found this report:

"There's a lot of data on our hard disks, and there's more accumulating by the day. The University of Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems has just updated its "How Much Information?" study. In 2002 we created over five exabytes of data, in the form of video, print, magnetic and optical media — an increase of over 30% a year since 1999. That's equivalent to half a million new collections the size of the US Library of Congress — 92% of which was on magnetic media, and most of that was on hard disk."

Google AdSense – The text link ad with clout

Webmasters place advertisements on their site to (hopefully!) help their web site visitors find additional information and products that are relevant to their site’s theme and therefore what those visitors came to their website looking for. Of course, it also helps if those advertisements also make money for the webmaster!

Unfortunately, serving advertisements online isn't always easy. Many advertisement companies offering the service of placing ads on our sites have managed to turn the advertisement business into one big mess. Thousands of sites are bogged down with non-relevant pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-ins and banners.

What happens to our sites if these advertisements rarely hit their mark? No matter how many banners and pop-ups we show about herbal remedies to our visitors if we run a website about car parts they will not be interested and they will never click on those ads.

Not only that, but this kind of untargeted advertisement can even have a negative effect on our traffic. Who wants to go to a site that requires us to close pop-ups every minute or for every page we view?

In order to have advertisements that are interesting AND relevant to our visitors there is now a program called ‘Google AdSense'.

Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant, text-based, un-obtrusive Google AdWords ads on our website's content pages and earn money.

Since the ads are actually related to what your users are looking for on your site, you'll have a way to both monetize and enhance your web page content. The program is free, and Google pays you for clicks on the AdWords advertisements on your site.

Google offers their AdSense program to just about all website owners. After signing up for the program with Google you receive code to enter on the pages of your site and Google will dynamically generate ads that are relevant to your own web site’s content.

Whenever a visitor clicks on one of the links in the AdSense ad on your site Google credits you with a percentage of money that was paid by the advertiser for that ad.

AdSense also provides us with the option to be selective in which type of ads we want to display on our websites making it possible to send our visitors towards a certain type of products.

To make it possible for everyone to integrate AdSense into their sites the program offers a wide variety of settings that allow us to alter the ads appearance.

The Google AdSense program is incredibly accurate. By stepping beyond the boundaries of simple keyword matching it has become one of the most prominent tools to display accurate advertisements. A list of keywords is still used as the basis of triggering ads, but complex algorithms now ensure that ads that are not related to your site’s theme no longer show up.


An AdSense service can be set up within minutes from the comforts of your chair and by providing your website's visitors with a certain amount of directed ads you can generate for yourself anything from a small to a sizeable income through the use of AdSense.

Adsense - 7 keys to empire?

There's a lot of buzz around about how you can make a quick and easy fortune using this AdSense course or that tool or this book.

And they show you their incomes from AdSense too (though not necessarily THIS month). Now, is it just me or is something a little odd in all this?

Say, I'm making $5000 - no make that $15,276 a month from AdSense on my sites. And now I'm going to sell all my secrets on how to do that for $67 or $97 or whatever.

So what happened, did I get all bored with my filthy riches and decide to become a philanthropist and sell stuff that makes me 15K a month for a pittance? Or is it something else?

Am I saying it's impossible? Certainly not. I know people who make that more.

But a little reality. Those people don't have 5 or 6 or 50 sites. They have maybe 500 or 3000 or more. Few sites make 20 or more a day. Very few. Average income is probably less than a dollar a day. So with 500 sites at a dollar a day, you've got your 15K a month.

Now the domain names cost you maybe $3500 to $4500. Then you need hosting and somehow you've got to build the sites and get traffic to them. There are excellent tools but the ones that will let you do this kind of thing in a reasonably short time are also very (very) expensive.

And you are continually dealing with sites that don't get indexed or get de-indexed or even get banned. Traffic today, gone tomorrow. Plus, if you're not real careful with those tools you may get an unpleasant letter from Google about a DMCA copyright infringement which could cost you your AdSense account.

You can make money, you can build an empire. But it isn't easy or quick no matter what you hear. And it really isn't a business. It's not a long run proposition, it's not stable. You need to keep creating more sites as older ones fail - or you need to be smart and use those AdSense revenues to build an enduring business.

You put up with this down to here, so here are the real 7 "secret" keys to AdSense.

1. The best performing AdSense type is the large rectangle. This has been tested over and over.

2. The best colors are blue for the link - surfers know that blue means click me. And darkish almost black and grey for the text and url. No borders. The same background as your page. Will it merge into your content? No, that's bogus. There are maybe 4 surfers in this galaxy who can't tell a Google ad when they see one. They are not going to believe it's part of the text. Wake up, OK?

3. Another format which is being reported to more or less work is the full wide banner type layout with text ads and images directly above the links. Try it and see if it works for you. Maybe it's a fad.

4. Keywords and related content are critical if you want targeted ads. If you want high paying clicks you need to target the costly keywords AND have content that supports the keywords.

5. You need traffic interested in the ads. Which means your traffic generation techniques have to be targeted not scattershot. You might hear that 1% or 1.5% clickthrough rate is OK and 3% is good. Nonsense. Really successful people get CTRs that are often well above 30%. Even with modest efforts you should be getting an average 6 to 15% CTR (per ad impression, not pages).

6. You have to track what you're doing and you have to test variations in ad layout, placement, color and related content to optimize your income. No one can tell you how to do it except the traffic coming to your site. If you don't test and track, you're flying blind.

7. You need to keep building new sites.

You are now a member of the AdSense Illuminati. Quite possibly you already knew all that. So why are you looking for something else? Really. This is all you need to start doing it.

Probably any course or book can help you if that's what it takes to get you moving and doing. Ultimately, no one can really show you exactly how to do it. You're going to have to learn the ropes and put in the time.

Like everything in life - the greatest traffic generator, the ultimate course or the super MLM opportunity, if it sounds too good to be true, then it is. There's no magic bullet, no ultimate secret to buy. There's no easy, painless, work free, certain road to riches (except, maybe, inheriting it and that can be very hard on the heirs).

Whatever you do on the net, do it wide awake and with your brain actually functioning. The final un-numbered key is that a technique, a shortcut, an idea that will make what you do easier, faster, or more profitable - one single tiny thing - is worth more than any book or course costs. One useable idea and you've gotten a great deal. If you learned something you didn't know or had forgotten, then it's worth much more than you paid. There may not be any magic solution out there, but there are useful concepts, techniques and ideas. You just have to see them for what they are, and then get busy and really use them.