The following is a paid review for TylerCruz.com written and reviewed by Michael Kwan. It is completely of Michael Kwan’s opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having your site or product reviewed, please view my advertising page

The world of affiliate marketing is increasingly competitive, especially when it comes to some of the most popular and lucrative niches. Payday loans are one such example, because there is so much money at stake. And if you want to make money in this niche, there is a new player in the game that could put a lot of cash in your pocket.

Boasting that it offers the “best payday loan affiliate program,” LeadsMarket.com offers one of the largest marketplaces on the Internet to sell leads for payday loans. The buyers get their leads, the customers get their money quickly, and you earn a hefty commission.

Making Money By Offering Money

For the time being, LeadsMarket is focusing solely on its payday loan affiliate program, but there appear to be plans in the future for other verticals as well. If you take a look at the homepage, they are gearing up for offers in the flowers, mortgage, education, and dating industries.

Easily the most appealing feature that sets this affiliate program apart from the many other programs out there for payday loans is the commission rate. When it comes to the cash advances and payday loans, affiliates earn an impressive 90% revenue share. This means that LeadsMarket only takes a 10% cut. This is the revenue share you get right from the beginning without having to earn your way up to a higher tier.

Based on the Feedback of Real Affiliates

Rather than simply diving into things, the founders of LeadsMarket took their time to consult with thousands of affiliates to “understand what [the] best payday loan affiliate program should have.” From this, they developed ten guiding principles. For instance, they promise that each affiliate will be treated as a true long term business partner, that only exclusive direct offers will be promoted to affiliates, and that affiliates get the “lion’s share” of the “generous commission.”

The Dashboard

Powering the LeadsMarket engine is a proprietary technology called Optimo. This has a self-learning algorithm that is designed to optimize the distribution of leads and maximize revenue for affiliates.

Signing up for an affiliate account with LeadsMarket is very easy. There is just a single page form that asks for you name, address, phone number, and website URL, as well as the marketing methods you plan on using. You gain instant access to the dashboard, as shown above, but the account itself does not become active until it has been approved. In my experience, this happened within 24 hours.

As far as the affiliate dashboard itself, the layout is clear and easy to understand. The traffic report features front and center with basic metrics shown above it. There are pulldown menus to bring up other reports. Along the left side is information about your current balance and earnings, while up top is all the primary navigation.

You’ll also notice that every affiliate is assigned a personal account manager. This account manager can be contacted via email or telephone at any time. The “friendly affiliate concierge” brings a wealth of real experience him/herself and knows what it takes to succeed.

Creatives and Landing Pages

LeadsMarket is designed to give you as much flexibility as possible to promote the payday loans offer, as well as any other offers they may have in the future. This includes marketing via email, PPC, banners, mobile, pop-ups, and pop-unders. You can also promote via social networking and job listing sites, but you must first get the approval of your affiliate manager.

Digging into the creatives, LeadsMarket aims to provide as much support and updates as possible. This means you can send traffic directly to the websites via banners, for example, as well as integrate the form into your own website for greater optimization and control.

For instance, I can send visitors directly to a predesigned landing page and these leads could then be captured. You could easily embed these landing pages in iframes on your own custom URLs and domains so that you can hide your affiliate ID. There are also a range of text emails and banners of varying sizes, as seen above.

Reports and Payouts

Naturally, LeadsMarket is also set up to provide you with comprehensive reports and deep analytics. These reports are all provided with real-time data, allowing you to get information for specific date ranges and for specific domains.

This is relatively simple at the moment, because there is just the one affiliate offer on the table, but you will have the ability to crunch the report down based on campaigns when there are more. You can also group by date, offer, campaign, subID and domain.

The payout structure is fairly standard. LeadsMarket pays out on a net-30 schedule, meaning that you will receive your commission for the month of December around the end of January. You will need to reach a minimum of $100 in revenue to generate a payment. For now, it appears that payments are only available by check, wire transfer, and direct deposit, though the FAQ also mentions PayQuicker, Payoneer, and PayPal. Top affiliates can request a more frequent payment plan.

There is also mention of an affiliate referrals program where you earn a 3% bonus on all commissions generated by the affiliates that you refer, but the link in the dashboard for “refer a friend” simply directs me to the “create new campaign” page. Presumably, the referral program will be a new “offer” added at some point in the near future.

Conclusion

It is generally easier to sign up for a couple of affiliate networks and have access to the widest range of affiliate offers possible. However, this does not necessarily provide you with the most flexibility, the best affiliate support, or the most lucrative opportunities. And that’s why something more focused like the payday loan affiliate program from LeadsMarket might be a good fit as part of your overall Internet marketing portfolio.

The high level of support is welcome, the 90% revenue share is astounding, and the flexibility of promoting the offers is greatly appreciated. If you’re interested in getting into the payday loan and cash advance niche, this could be the way to go.

The following is a paid review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site or product, please view my advertising page.

With the US and European economy still down in the dumps, forcing companies to have to continue to lay off employees en masse, having to search for a job is a sad truth for millions of people these days.

Fortunately, there’s the Internet. While the traditional job searching methods such as the "Help Wanted" ads and local job assistant programs are still useful, you have to admit that the Internet is an invaluable resource.

ToTheGo.com is a brand new search engine that focuses on 3 elements: jobs, homes, and cars. It aggregates data and listings from various sources on the web and provides the results to you.

In fact, ToTheGo currently aggregates more than 3 million listings in the US.

While ToTheGo currently caters only to the US and UK, it plans on later extending the service to Europe, Asia, and South America.

This is great and all, but it does leave me to wonder where Canada is in all of this. Being Canadian myself, it certainly made me wonder while I was researching and testing out the site for this review.

Now, ToTheGo certainly isn’t the first site to offer search results from various aggregated sources on the web. So what makes them different from their competition?

In their press release, ToTheGo briefly addresses this by stating that their main strength over their competitors in their focus on user experience. They try to provide a clean design with unobtrusive advertising, simple navigation, and an overall simplified design.

And I would say that for the most part, they do succeed in that arena.

However, they do have a number of bugs that they need to address.

The Bugs

For example, on several occasions I received a timed-out JavaScript warning message:

Another example are the 4 "Property type" radio buttons on their Homes search tab, under advanced options, which appear to be returning and/or parsing results from the database incorrectly, as shown below:

The bugs and glitches on the site aren’t overwhelming, but when your main focus in differentiating yourself from your competitors is by providing a better user experience, you need to be sure to squash out these things.

The Search Results

The meat and potatoes of ToTheGo are its search results. Unfortunately, it appears to be lacking in that area.

I ran a number of queries before I was able to find any relevant results.

I started by searching for "dog walker" which didn’t come up with any results. But that wasn’t too surprising since a dog walker isn’t exactly a career.

So I searched for "dog psychologist" – nothing… "dog behaviourist" – nothing… "dog trainer" – still nothing! I then tried simply "dog" which yielded no relevant results.

Okay, so there appeared to be no careers directly related to dogs (apart from 1 job listing for a search for "canine" – Multi Purpose Canine Trainer - Southern Pines, NC, US), and so I ran several other queries.

Unfortunately, the next few queries, such as for "pastry chef" still yielded no relevant results.

In fact, the AdSense ads directly above and below the results were far more relevant (not surprisingly) than the ToTheGo results, as can be seen in the screenshot below:

This could actually be a really smart idea if you think about it though. Make a site with irrelevant results, mix in well-blended AdSense ads, and boom – high CTR!

To be fair though, ToTheGo did provide accurate and relevant results for some of my queries.

For example, while "veterinarian" returned no results in "Seattle", expanding that geological range to the state of "Washington" did yield 4 results, as can be seen below:

And so the site does work.

I’m assuming that the main issue is that ToTheGo simply needs to aggregate more data. Once they do this, I can see ToTheGo as being a very useful tool and resource.

In fact, one thing I really like about ToTheGo is their awareness of advanced search options. You can really fine-tune your searches (for jobs, homes, and cars) and use numerous filters, ranges, etc.

For example for jobs you can narrow down by salary, the date the job was posted, the distance from where you live, etc.

These are great features, however can’t really be utilized to their full potential until there are more listings in their database.

Not Just Jobs

I mentioned in the introduction that ToTheGo is a search engine not only for jobs, but also for homes and cars.

These other 2 areas function similarly to the Jobs search area:

Realistically though, ToTheGo definitely has a lot of competition. For job searches there’s Monster.com, for home searches there’s MLS.com, and for car searches there’s Edmunds.com.

If ToTheGo works on fixing their bugs and glitches, and drastically increases the size of their database and thus the size and relevancy of their search results, they will be in the right direction to competing with the big boys.

Православни икониThe following is a paid review for TylerCruz.com written and reviewed by Michael Kwan. It is completely of Michael Kwan’s opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having your site or product reviewed, please view my advertising page.

Smartphones and smartphone apps have been around for several years, but they have really exploded in popularity these last few years. Maybe you should thank the iPhone. Maybe you should thank the BlackBerry. Whatever the case, more and more people are accessing the Internet from their mobile phones today, so as an Internet marketer, you might want to look into a way to tap into this potential income source.

For WordPress bloggers, for instance, there are several themes that make your blog more mobile-friendly, but they can oftentimes eliminate several of the monetization channels you may have employed. Focusing completely on the mobile environment is Sponsormob. It’s a CPA network that very much recognizes the rise of mobile Internet use, putting you in the position to cash in on the rising number of mobile users.

Two Ways to Monetize the Mobile Web

In some ways, you could say that Sponsormob is pretty conventional as far as affiliate networks are concerned. They don’t do any CPM or CPC-based campaigns for affiliates. Instead, all of the offers are CPA-based, meaning that the mobile user needs to complete some sort of action — fill out a form, download an app, complete a sale, etc. — in order for you to get paid.

However, since the focus is on the mobile space, Sponsormob has to go about things in a slightly different way. That’s why there are two primary channels that you’ll want to explore. First, there is the publisher side. This allows you to insert advertising into your mobile web content. In general, this means that such things as ad banners have much smaller dimensions than their conventional web counterparts. This allows them to fit more appropriately on the smaller screen of an iPhone or Galaxy Tab, for instance.

Second, Sponsormob offers mobile monetization to app developers. This is quite different from monetizing a mobile-optimized website. Again, the monetization is on a CPA basis, so you earn a commission when you send a qualified transaction to the advertiser via your mobile app. For now, Sponsormob has SDKs for both Apple iOS and Google Android. They plan on adding more SDKs in the future.

A Simplified Admin Dashboard Interface

The application process for Sponsormob is fairly typical and, after submitting the requisite taxation information, you should get approved within a few business days. From there, you can log into the publisher dashboard to start making some money.

The starting page for the dashboard is quite simple, giving you at-a-glance contact information for your account manager. Making your way through the rest of the sections is done through the navigational links in the left sidebar. There’s actually a lot of content there for you, so it may take you some time to familiarize yourself with the interface.

There are sections for updating your account, looking for offer integration, reading your time reports, reviewing your offer reports, checking your source reports, and so on. All of this robust reporting should help to arm you with the information you need to optimize your ad implementation, both on your mobile sites and in your mobile apps.

How to Monetize Your iOS or Android App

Making money with your mobile site is not unlike the process that you would take to monetize a regular website, except everything is scaled down to the smaller screen. Your goal is still the same: send targeted traffic to the advertiser and bank on them making that conversion. Not surprisingly, the landing pages for the advertisers should be mostly mobile-optimized too.

Monetizing your smartphone app, on the other hand, is a slightly different endeavour. Yes, your goal is the same, but the implementation is different. That’s why Sponsormob has an SDK (software development kit) for both iOS and Android, as well as some basic supporting documentation and downloads to get you going.

In the case of Google Android, you’ll need to choose the banners you want to implement in your app, optimize their placement within the app, get your publisher ID ready, and define the zone ID for each of your apps. Then, you need to add the WebView object and perform the class integration. They recommend that you use Eclipse Android Layout Editor.

If this all sounds like Greek to you, then you may not be an Android app developer in the first place. There is significant code involved, not surprisingly, but those of you who are already familiar with app coding shouldn’t have too much trouble understanding how to implement Sponsormob ads. They have a helpful support desk if you need any help anyhow.

The bonus with doing the app development rather than monetizing a mobile site is something they call the Unlimited App Developer Fund. In short, you get double the commission earned through to April 30, 2012. They’re looking to “invest in the brightest developers available to help them grow and monetize their apps through our CPA network.”

Offers Available All Around the World

A big part of determining whether a relationship with an affiliate network is going to prove lucrative is to look at the specific offers that the CPA network has in its database. Well, Sponsormob has a lot and they’re all ready for your mobile monetization needs.

You can filter through the offers based on country, vertical, context, and cell phone operating system. You’ll also notice that each offer has either a cell phone or a computer icon. This indicates whether the offer is designed for WAP (mobile-optimized) or for the web. This mostly has to do with the dimensions of the creatives involved.

These kinds of filters are very useful, especially if you want to target one particular region or focus on a particular set of smartphone users. As an example, I use a Palm Pre 2 and I live in Vancouver. So, I took a look to see what offers were available to webOS users in Canada. The selection was huge, but they were all quite typical. You see the usual ads to “win an iPad” or to “get a ringtone.” There were also a few for tracking your kids or using a love calculator.

At a glance, you get the name of the program, the WAP/web indicator, the creative name, the release date, the EPC, and the payout. If you click on the creative name, you are taken to a page with the various creatives and their respective codes. If you click on preview, you’ll be able to see the same landing page as your mobile visitors when they click on the ad creatives.

Payout Structure and Affiliate Program

Sponsormob issues its payments once a month, but certain affiliates can request to have this frequency upgraded to twice-monthly or three times monthly if they prefer. There is a minimum payout threshold of 50 Euros and you can receive this either via PayPal or as a bank wire transfer. In either case, you need to provide a tax ID number and indicate whether you are subject to German VAT.

There is also a referral program in place where you get a 2.5% commission for all transactions generated by the new affiliate you refer to the network. This is also true of any new affiliates that your referral sends their way too and these bonus commissions are lifelong.

Conclusion

Smartphone use is on the rise and I don’t see this trend slowing down any time soon. From Windows Phone 7 to webOS, Apple iPhone to Google Android, more and more people are getting into the world of smartphones and this means that more and more people are accessing the web from a mobile device. It makes sense that you’d want to make dollars from that situation.

In this regard, Sponsormob looks like it could be a huge opportunity, especially for developers who are looking for ways to better monetize their applications. Just as you may have varying success with CPM, CPC, and CPA on your regular web efforts, the same is true in the mobile sphere. Other mobile ad networks tend to focus on clicks, so taking the affiliate offer avenue could prove lucrative for the right app in the right vertical.

The following is a paid review for TylerCruz.com written and reviewed by Michael Kwan. It is completely of Michael Kwan’s opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having your site or product reviewed, please view my advertising page.

There are many different tools out there that can help with your Internet marketing efforts. Some of these are designed to help you create more effective landing pages. Others may help you track your conversion rates, so you can optimize your campaigns. Others help with the search engine optimization side of the equation.

Another tool you can add to that list is LinkShiftr, an online service that promises to provide “better link management for Internet marketers.” It seems like simple enough of a tool, but it could also prove to be one of the more useful ones in your arsenal. After all, where would your toolbox be without a basic hammer and screwdriver?

A Multi-Pronged Approach to Link Management

LinkShiftr sounds straightforward enough. It is a tool you can use to create new links, redirecting traffic to the places where you want visitors to go. The concept of using redirect URLs is anything but novel, but LinkShiftr adds a few more options to the bunch.

For starters, a single shortened URL can be used to send traffic to multiple destinations. You can rotate through these multiple destinations quickly and easily, applying a certain level of weight to each one should you want to do that. Let’s say that you are trying to promote product XYZ, but you have three different landing pages.

You can set up a single shortened URL (using the lin.sh domain) that can distribute traffic to these three landing pages. Using the provided tracking pixels, you can then see which landing page is provided the best conversion rate while promoting just one link. A quick visit to the tour page and features page will give you a decent idea of what to expect.

Creating and Editing Your Links

The signup process is remarkably fast. Simply provide an e-mail address (it does not need to be verified) and an e-mail address. It will then redirect you to authorize a PayPal subscription and that’s it. You’re good to go.

Jumping right into the tool, you can then create your first link. It is here that you can name your link (campaign), choose the custom link alias (the part of the URL that will come after the lin.sh domain), and define your destination URLs. As mentioned earlier, each destination URL can be supplied with a relative weight. Want visitors to see one page more often than the rest? You can do that.

As shown above, lin.sh/mkwan will redirect visitors to my main site more often than my blog, which in turn is targeted more often than my Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Furthermore, you can go back and edit these links at any time, including their relative weights. This can prove to be very handy.

Using the earlier example with the one product and three landing pages, you can eliminate the two other landing pages when you find the one that works the best. All the while, the lin.sh shortened URL remains unchanged and all your marketing efforts using that URL can remain active. LinkShiftr also automatically generates a QR code, should you want to share the link that way.

A quick word to the wise: Save you created link after adding just one destination URL. This is particularly true when you want to choose your own vanity URL (the custom link alias), because if that alias is already taken, nothing on the page is saved when you click the save button. You could have wasted your time. In this way, I think it would prove very useful if LinkShiftr included an on-screen utility to check the availability of custom link aliases.

The Main User Dashboard

Your LinkShiftr account can theoretically handle an unlimited number of created links. What’s more, you can search through your campaigns, list them based on a determined period, and choose how many are displayed on the page at one time.

That’s the main user dashboard that you’ll see when you log into your account. At a glance, you can see your links, when they were created, the campaign names, the shifted link, the number of clicks, the number of conversions (you’ll need to place the tracking pixels on the destination pages), and so forth.

To get more in-depth information, click on the associated stats button next to the campaign of interest. You will then be shown a breakdown for that “shifted” link based on the destination URLs you have defined, providing information for clicks, conversion percentage, clicks over time, referring domains, countries, and so on. Marry this with something like Google Analytics and you’ve got a lot of valuable data.

How Much Does It Cost?

Yes, you could sign up for a free account with some other URL shortening services and get some statistical information to go along with your shortened links. However, you’ll have a harder time finding a free tool that can provide the same kinds of features offered by LinkShiftr.

There’s not a lot to it, but it’s great being able to rotate through destination URLs using the same shortened link. The link tracking is fairly robust too. One gripe I have, though, is that you can’t seem to use your own domain for the shortened links, relying solely on the lin.sh domain. This may not appeal to some folks who prefer to keep their branding consistent.

In any case, you can get a two-week free trial with LinkShiftr to see if it’s for you. After that, the PayPal subscription kicks in at $15 a month. Just like magazine and newspaper trials, make sure you remember to cancel this subscription if you no longer want to use the service!

The following is a paid review for TylerCruz.com written and reviewed by Michael Kwan. It is completely of Michael Kwan’s opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having your site or product reviewed, please view my advertising page.

Since this is mostly a blog about how to make money online, we’ve covered a few different venues to achieve that kind of goal. We’ve looked at buying and selling sites, for example, as well as a number of different affiliate networks. One area that hasn’t been explored quite to the same depth here is e-commerce.

More and more, new businesses are popping up with online-only presences. It’s just more cost efficient when you don’t have a physical office, a brick and mortar storefront, and a physical cash register. You exist online, because the barrier to entry is generally lower. However, this does not mean than it’s any less complicated.

Offering a single platform to manage multiple aspects of running an online business is BgBng, a so-called Enterprise Management Solution that is meant to be pronounced as “Big Bang” (with no relation to the popular television series). Will it give your e-business the advantage that it needs to get ahead?

An Enterprise Management Solution

Think about what you need to run a successful e-commerce site. You want to have good products, to be sure, but you also need good product management. You also want good customer support, good back-end reporting, and good fraud prevention. These are just some of the benefits touted by BgBng EMS.

Instead of going to several different online tools to manage these different aspects, you can avoid that disjointed experience by unifying them under the BgBng framework. Look at the product management screen above, as an example. When you add (or edit) a product, you can adjust its name and description, to be sure, but you can also manage its associated domain and industry.

That’s just the first tab. Moving through the different aspects of a single product, you find subscription options for example. This is where you can go beyond the “main” price of the product to offer a “downsell price,” as well as define the payment interval, trial length, and first payment price. Other tabs allow you to define the rebill SKU, write the notification email, and offer upsell possibilities.

Doing Everything Faster

Is BgBng complex? Absolutely. Because it replaces multiple tools, it is inherently complicated. However, because you don’t have to export and import data across multiple utilities, the idea is that you are able to do everything related to your business in a more expedient manner.

That’s the goal of this enterprise management solution. They want to help you get your campaigns up and running in under 48 hours. They want to help you with tracking your visitors, determining their physical location, the actions that they took (whether or not they converted), and the offers they viewed.

Going through each of the sections of the BgBng interface, you’ll find a great deal to learn and understand. This is daunting, to be sure, but so is running a business. Among the features included in BgBng are retention reporting, fraud detection, digital product fulfilment, user authentication, newsletter support and so on.

We’re taking a look at the “advertiser” part of the equation, but BgBng also has portals set up for networks and customer support too. This way, you can manage your part of the business, while offering a different set of tools to those who need them. The separate CRM portal could be great for the customer service team, for instance. You can take a few moments to watch the walkthrough video to get a better sense of what BgBng can do.

Newsletters, Networks, and Traffic Reports

Setting up your products, designing your landing pages, and soliciting your sales represent just one part of the equation. It’s also important to get as much useful data as you can so that you can optimize your campaigns and maximize your profits.

Not surprisingly, BgBng has many different reports that you can generate. Shown here, as an example, is an overview report for the conversions in the preceding week. You can see if you’re trending up or down on certain domains. Running through the tabs, you can generate similar reports for visitors, partials (people who started the offer, but didn’t complete the form), cancellations, refunds, and so forth.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, as mentioned above, that it can take quite some time to get used to BgBng and its interface. I went to the “newsletter” section under campaigns, for example, thinking that I might get something similar to Aweber. Instead, I found three different subsections: accounts, lists, and profiles. I can see the name of the list, but there’s no obvious place to upload a list of email addresses or compose the newsletter message.

Given the broad scope of BgBng, I think it would prove useful to small business owners if there was a “wizard” or “walkthrough guide” to help them get started with exactly what the tools can do and how they can best utilize them.

Integration with Other Solutions

Even though it’s largely marketed as a comprehensive package, BgBng also has an API so you can develop your own applications that make use of the data is manages. Similarly, you can get BgBng to work with one of their trusted partners, like ClickBooth and MarketLeverage.

From the perspective of an advertiser, this can prove quite useful. You can use BgBng to manage and develop your affiliate offers, but leverage the larger affiliate networks to help promote your offer. BgBng also works closely with Meritus Payment Solutions, PowerPay, and other payment companies.

The Price of Running a Business

Depending on your particular needs (and budget), you can choose from the three pricing schemes offered by BgBng. The standard edition still isn’t particularly inexpensive at $199 a month, especially since it does not include the fraud detection features. For that, you have to step up to at least the $399/month professional package. Above that is the $599/month enterprise plan.

All plans come with free setup and a free 30 day trial, so if you decide that this “EMS” isn’t for you, you can always cancel and walk away.

The following is a paid review for TylerCruz.com written and reviewed by Michael Kwan. It is completely of Michael Kwan’s opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having your site or product reviewed, please view my advertising page.

You might think that autoblogging programs like WP Turbo would represent a direct threat to people like me. After all, I make my living as a freelance writer and people hire me to write content; if they can just buy a program that does that for them, why would they still need to pay me?

Naturally, there’s a pretty big difference between automated blogs and sites that need a little more manual labor on the part of writers, just as there’s a difference between a professional concert pianist and a computer program that spits out a MIDI tune. And just like that analogy, there is still a place for MIDI music and there is a place for autoblogging. Should you lean in that direction, is WP Turbo the program you want?

What Is WP Turbo?

With WP Turbo, you have the opportunity to generate a nearly endless number of automated websites. You really can set it and forget it, because after the initial set up process, these “blogs” will be able to update themselves with new content at intervals of your choosing. These niche blogs are going to be largely based around keywords, so you’ll need content to fit those key niches.

WP Turbo is a premium WordPress plugin, so you will need to get your domains and install WordPress first. You’ll want to install and customize your themes too. After that, WP Turbo can be configured to provide new content from a range of different sources. By and large, this plugin will make for “resource” sites, as it is able to work as a lyrics site, a recipe site, a job board, a Twitter aggregator and so on.

What Content Modules Are Included?

As you can see in the screenshot below, WP Turbo comes with a number of different “content modules.” At present, there are 21 of these, but the developers promise that they will be adding more in the future. It is with these modules that you can pull the content for your autoblogging purposes.

The current modules are: Amazon, Articles, ClickBank, ICodes, eBay, Eventful, Flickr, Heyzap, IMDB, iTunes, Jobs, LinkShare, Musixmatch, Oodle, PressRelease, Recipes, RSS, Twitter, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo News, and YouTube. As you can see, the source material can be quite varied, opening up quite a few opportunities for a lot of niche websites.

For each of those modules, you can set up a posting template. Take the eBay module as an example. When you go to configure it, you enter your affiliate ID and the version of eBay you’d like use (e.g., United States, Canada, Italy, and so on). From there, there is a “content” area where you can define the template itself, using the “tags” that are available for that template. In the case of eBay, you can insert the post title, published date, current price, end time, thumbnail, description, bid count, and so forth.

How Do I Set Up a Posting Campaign

In setting up the campaign itself, you’ll first want to configure the modules and templates as described above. After that, you can choose to set up a keyword campaign, an RSS campaign, or an Amazon BrowseNode campaign. You can read through some of the items on the features page for more of an explanation.

Using the keyword campaign as an example, you choose the name, choose the keywords, define the post interval (in hours or days), and load the post template. It’s possible to define a brand new template here, but it’s usually easier just to load an existing one.

As you’d probably expect, it is possible to run more than one campaign at a time, checking up on the status on each of them through the WordPress control panel. Say, for example, that you are running a site that focuses on Ferrari supercars. You might have one campaign that pulls in Flickr images, another with Ferrari-related press releases, and yet another with Twitter mentions of the Italian brand.

This helps to create more varied content for your blog automatically.

How Do I Make Money with WP Turbo?

You’ll notice that some of the content modules are pre-configured for earning income, as would be the case with eBay and LinkShare. That’s straightforward enough with how you’d earn money. However, other content modules can be monetized quite easily too.

Here is an example that I’m using with my fighting games blog. I used the YouTube content module and set up a campaign with that. It pulls videos related to certain video game franchises and creates new blog posts for me with the video description and the embedded video.

To the left of the screenshot are the titles of five posts (in draft) that WP Turbo was able to create and, to the right is an example of what that post would look like on the site. There’s no monetization in the post itself, but I easily placed an AdSense banner in the left sidebar and there’s a private ad slot in the right sidebar. Just like running any other blog, auto or otherwise, how you choose to monetize is up to you.

Beyond that, you can also recoup part of the cost of the WordPress plugin through the affiliate program, which pays 35% for every referred sale.

Is WP Turbo Worth the Money?

WP Turbo currently sells for $149, which grants you a license key to use on as many websites as you’d like. This might sound somewhat expensive for “just a plugin,” but think about the kind of time that you’ll be able to save without having to manually update your niche blogs. It won’t replace a “true” blog, but it will help to create multiple passive income streams.

Does the price still sound too high? Well, you can enter “TYLER7562” in the coupon code area to get a 20% discount. Considering that you can implement the plugin on multiple blogs, you should be able to recoup the cost without too much effort.

The following is a paid review for TylerCruz.com written and reviewed by Michael Kwan. It is completely of Michael Kwan’s opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having your site or product reviewed, please view my advertising page.

When you want to achieve in just about any field, it makes sense to consult with the experts who have been there and done that. If you’re interested in a professional basketball career, advice from Michael Jordan is probably pretty useful. And if you’re interested in Internet marketing, consulting with the folks who have demonstrated real world success is probably a wise choice.

And that is fundamentally the idea behind the Direct Response Blog. It’s a site that has been set up to help you “crush your competition” and “build your own direct response campaign.”

What Is Direct Response?

Rather than cover all the different possibilities of making money online, rather than cover every aspect of Internet marketing, the Direct Response blog focuses considerably on online direct response marketing specifically.

Information is meant to be delivered in a “matter-of-fact way” that is “refreshing and leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that they are receiving information that, if put to use, will make them money hand over fist.”

Direct response marketing online is not unlike its offline equivalent; it’s designed to solicit a specific response (usually to buy a product) from the audience and provides a specific way for the audience to do so.

Who Is Rich Gorman?

The main man behind the Direct Response Blog is Rich Gorman, an entrepreneur who has been working in online direct response marketing for over ten years. He started out with online stores selling college sports products, moving on to the nutraceutical industry before forming GormanEconomics.com in 2009.

The goal of Gorman Economics is to develop sound ideas into viable businesses, proactively managing a range of direct response campaigns. And that is effectively the crux of the Direct Response Blog: to build and develop effective campaigns that can make everyone money. It likely helps that Gorman is well connected with all the big players in the industry too, including Zac Johnson, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Seth Godin.

What Information Is Posted on the Blog?

One of the articles highlighted on the blog is the one that lists an arsenal of tools used by Rich Gorman to make his money online. He says that “most of them are free,” but “all of them are indispensable.”

Among the list are tools for email marketing, search engine optimization, building and maintaining member sites, video production, mobile device simulation, upselling to current clients, and custom metal business cards.

The main blog is updated quite frequently with new posts going up every couple of days on average. Topics range from marketing blogs worth reading and customer support to media funding and how to gain the attention of top publishers.

Several of the post titles aren’t quite as descriptive as they could be and the posts might benefit from being more clearly broken down into sections, but the actual information contained within can prove quite useful to people interested in launching successive direct marketing campaigns.

Among the list of “must read” articles highlighted in the sidebar are posts on making millions on media buys, bringing in top quality leads, spending strategically, and embracing negative press.

How Can I Work with the Team?

Considerably the relatively small amount of advertising found on the Direct Response Blog, you have to wonder how they go about making money from it. Then, you might come across the Work With Us page.

On this page, the Direct Response team quickly describes the various services that it offers. These services are targeting the marketing folk who have offers they want to launch or “take to the next level.” The team says that it “specializes in turning ideas into multimillion dollar businesses.” They “know what works and aim to blow campaigns out of the water.”

It’s a little deceptive that the team has effectively given itself a “Marketer of the Year” award right at the top of the Work With Us page, but the portfolio of services is remarkably varied. It includes everything from targeted media buys to copywriting, email campaigns to legal advice.

I’m not personally doubting the quality of the services offered by the Direct Response team or how effective they are in what they do, but other prospective clients might. As cliche as it may sound, some appropriate testimonials (or better yet, full case studies) could help to legitimize what they do and convert a few more customers.

Teaching and Consulting from Experience

Rich Gorman speaks from experience. While I am not a big of the “busy” graphics toward the top of the page, the actual information contained within the Direct Response Blog is worth reading. It doesn’t really take the typical perspective of an affiliate marketer and how to make money promoting offers; instead, it’s much more about developing the right offers and attracting the right audience.

Whether or not you splurge on the consulting fees of the team is another matter altogether, but at least the advice on the blog is free.

The following is a paid review for TylerCruz.com written and reviewed by Michael Kwan. It is completely of Michael Kwan’s opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having your site or product reviewed, please view my advertising page.

Life isn’t easy. There are bigger issues like dealing with divorce and the passing of loved ones, but more often than not, the little things are what tip us over the edge. Sometimes, you just need somewhere to vent and you’ll feel better.

Aiming to provide you with such a venue is Common Struggles. This site provides “anonymous stories of everyday struggles,” offering a reminder that you certainly are not alone in dealing with day-to-day difficulties.

The Struggles of the Average Person

One of the biggest challenges faced by owners of content-based websites is coming up with that content. And then you have to elaborate on those ideas to create the content itself. Common Struggles takes an entirely different approach, in this regard.

Instead of being a website populated only by content written by the site owner, it’s a collection of content submitted by the online community. This “crowd sourcing” lends itself to a limitless number of voices, viewpoints, and stories.

In this way, you’ll be reading the short snippets provided by the average web surfer when you make your way through the Common Struggles archives.

As a Business Model

Common Struggles is not unique in taking the “crowdsourcing” approach to site content. You might be familiar with other sites like ICanHasCheezburger and DamnYouAutoCorrect. In effect, the site owners are able to capitalize on the “free labor” of the masses.

Sure, there could be some editing and formatting involved, but turning to the public for content is easily one of the most cost-effective ways to get original stories posted on your site. In this way, Common Struggles could have a lot of potential.

A big part of this is that the submission form reminds visitors that all submissions are completely anonymous. This helps to remove some inhibitions, as they can freely rant about anything without the fear of “getting caught” by whoever they may be ranting about.

Curiously, comments have been disabled on all the posts on Common Struggles. According to the site owner, this was meant to encourage people to submit their struggle stories through the official form instead of just commenting on the stories of others.

I’m not sure if I completely agree with this strategy. Oftentimes, the comments on posts can be quite different from the stories being submitted. Comments can help to build up a community and give the sense that the site is a busy place that people want to visit again and again.

How Is It Monetized?

Seeing how this is a “make money online” blog, it only makes sense for us to dive a little further into how Common Struggles makes money online.

Here is a snapshot from one of the struggles. As you can see, there is a Google AdSense banner across the bottom of the page. When you are in a main index page, there is also a Google AdSense block in the sidebar.

For now, those two placements are the only visible monetization for Common Struggles. Moving forward, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we were to see some more aggressive advertising in the form of in-text ads, sidebar text link ads, pop-ups, and more banners. It’s a delicate line, to be sure, as you don’t want the advertising to discourage visitors from coming back.

Success Depends on the Submissions

As a concept, Common Struggles holds some promise. Going with user-submitted content means that, given a decent level of traffic, you’ll always have a supply of content ready to go. The struggle, then, is determining what content is worth posting.

Based on the submissions that have been posted thus far, I find that Common Struggles hasn’t quite reached that level of quality yet. Many of stories are neither funny nor interesting. It also doesn’t help that there is no real “about” or “FAQ” page, so a lot of people won’t “get” what they should be submitting in the first place.

Having a page with some general guidelines will go a long way, but the eventual success of Common Struggles really depends on whether it can solicit a large number of quality stories. Without the viral nature of something like lolcats, Common Struggles will have quite the struggle ahead of itself.