The Amazon affiliate program now lets you create your own 'Deal of the Day' widget, that'll showcase one of their... take a guess... that's right, deals of the day. It updates itself, so it's one of those set and forget kind of things. Perfect for a lazy person.

There are a few different options and sizes you can play around with. The example below is designed to sit in a sidebar and is 160px wide and 400px high. Perfect for blogs.

If your looking for something different from the Amazon affiliate program go log in to your dashboard and give the Deal widget a look.

Looking for a way to wring a few more bucks out of your website? Here's an idea worth considering.

LinkBucks is a unique service that allows you to earn money from your out bound links. Let's face it, if a user is clicking on an outbound link on your site, they are leaving, you may as well earn a little from their departure.

Here's the LinkBucks hard sell taken from their website:

Web users: get paid to share your links

Every funny video, file, or web page that you've ever linked to is making money for someone. Linkbucks rewards the people that make the web possible by giving them a share of the advertising dollars that their links generate.

About Us

We aren't a fly-by-night or a startup -- Linkbucks was started in late 2005 and has been going strong ever since. We have never missed a payment, and have been a solid partner for our advertisers.

To be honest, I hadn't heard of them until a week ago, but sign up was quick, easy and free, so I figure they are worth a shot. I'm trialling them on a low traffic site at the moment to see how they go. In my opinion, LinkBucks would be perfect for any site that relies on outbound links for a bulk of its content. For example, imagine a web site that was basically an image gallery with thumbnail images that when users click on, are taken to the high resolution versions stored on Imagevenue or something similar.

Something like this:

...etc, etc... I'm sure you get the idea. Anyhow, LinkBucks allow you create single links (one at a time), multiple links or give you a script you can place prior to the closing body tag on your website that will automatically convert all out bound links to LinkBucks links. You can also specify URLs you want to exclude from converting which is useful if you have other forms of advertising on your site.

LinkBucks is similar to Ucash.in except that I prefer LinkBucks. One of the benefits of LinkBucks is that it features a greater number of options, however on the downside it only offers three levels of referrals as opposed to Ucash.In which goes down to 10 levels of referral.

A week ago I posted about my little Project Wonderful experiment. Basically I was wondering whether or not setting my ad spots to have a starting bid of $0.00 would have a positive impact upon my average daily bid rate.

When I started the experiment, the average bid rate for the preceding five days was $0.22. So what impact did this $0.00 experiment have on the average bid rate? Well, sadly, things dropped. For the past five days, the average bid rate per day has been $0.13. The top right hand ad spot has average over 1,600 page views per day over the same five day period. Clearly the experiment was a failure.

Sure, on the plus side it wasn't empty very often (if at all), but on the down side, sending someone away from my beautiful content rich and cognitively rewarding website for the princely sum of $0.00 is just bad for business. With that in mind, I've decided to mix things up a bit and reset the price of the ad spot. Minimum opening bid is now $1 $0.50 per day. I'll check back in seven days.

In other news, if you're an Australian, go join the Australian Survey Panel. You can get paid to do surveys and they may even send you free stuff.

Check out their site by clicking the banner below.

I have now officially made over $1,000 USD with PayPerPost. It's been quite a while since I took an opportunity on this site, largely in an effort to avoid the Google turkey slapping (which seems to have happened anyway), but I've been using it a little on a blog that I've basically just "whore'd" out to pay the bills. The irony being my "whore'd" blog got through the last page rank update unscathed, while this one took a bit of a dive.

I realised a long time ago that page rank is largely irrelevant, besides the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you see your sites page rank go up, the only other thing it's good for is that it means people are willing to pay more for a post or a text link. The idea of Google attempting to control what I do bugs me. Lets not kid ourselves, by penalising people for selling links, posts and advertising on their sites, Google are effectively attempting to control what you can and can't do. Worried about PageRank? Do what I do, switch of the little green bar in your browser and forget about it. Then carry on doing what you'd like.

Ranting aside, I thought I'd share this screen shot from my PayPerPost dashboard.

If you're scared of losing your PageRank, but want to take some paid posts either with PayPerPost or someone else like LinkWorth, I'd suggest setting up a blog that you aren't all that fussed about. Buy a cheap URL, install WordPress, and just start posting. Make it as interesting as possible, then start whacking in a few paid opportunities. Yes, most people would most probably consider it a shameful pimping of self, but unless those people can offer you a sweet $1K for very little output, then tell em' to get stuffed. If you do it right, a blog you pimp out can end up being a nice little cash cow that can help you fund a whole range of other web adventures. You've got to start somewhere.

Click here to go and join PayPerPost.

Click here to go and join LinkWorth.

Today I was searching for a way to monetize a top secret niche site that I'm setting up as a side-side project. Adsense isn't really an option, and the traffic volume isn't huge at the moment anyway, so it would be hard to make much via PPC methods. I decided to look into some affiliate programs that I hadn't previously considered. That's when I stumbled across this little gem, MoreNiche.

MoreNiche offers a range of "niche" products to promote, and might have something worth checking out if you are struggling to monetize a niche site. The major positive at the moment is the sign up bonus. Basically MoreNiche seem to be giving away a minimum of $15 for doing nothing more than signing up.

When you join you will automatically be awarded with a $15 sign up bonus. You then earn a further $30 for learning about online marketing. Why? It is all thanks to our Cash Activated Bonus System which is designed to motivate you and to provide you with starting capital to promote our merchants.

Source: MoreNiche 'join' page.

Another aspect of MoreNiche that is highlighted on the FAQ's page is that they basically approve every applicant immediately.

You will be automatically accepted into the affiliate network, so that you can promote the products straight away. You will be given unique identifer links for every merchant and product in the network - no need to wait days for your application to be approved!

Perfectly suited for the beginner!

They actually give away well over 20 eBooks devoted to a whole heap of topics that will teach you how to make money via affiliate money. These books are for real, they are free for registered affiliates and I've downloaded them personally no strings attached. If I hadn't seen it for myself I probably wouldn't have believed it. There's also a members only forum. In short, there's a butt load of free resources at your disposal, and if you can't learn something from them, then you probably already know all there is to know.

When you become a MoreNiche™ affiliate (for free) you get access to over 50,000 pages of information about marketing successfully online. You also get access to a quick start guide, which is designed to get you earning commissions within 24 hours.

Me, I can do with the $15 to put toward my goal project, so I just joined. You can call me an affiliate whore if you like, but I'm not an affiliate whore that has $15 extra in his pocket.

Code4Gold.com is one of the webmaster forums I stop in on every now and then. Today Dave, who looks after the Best Affiliate Programs blog, posted a number of questions regarding the ClickBooth network.

It seems to me that affiliates are so polarized and partisan on this program that they forget to include any details for those of us who are not affiliate yet.

Seeing as though no one seemed to have any answers for him, I thought I'd have a go at answering his questions. Please note, that these answers are largely based on my own opinion, with some help from the ClickBooth FAQs.

What type of advertisers does ClickBooth have? Are they general audience or adult related?

The mix of advertisers that ClickBooth has is similar to competitors such as Commission Junction and the Pepperjam Network, although the volume of advertisers is not as high as either of those two. » Read the rest of the entry..

If you haven't signed up to the Pepperjam Network yet you better hurry up and do so if you want to take advantage of $10 new affiliate sign on bonus. The $10 bonus is only available up until the end of July so you still have just under a week to apply to the network.

Why should you sign up? Besides the fact that the Pepperjam Network is one of the more promising and fastest growing new affiliate programs, there's ten bucks in it for you.

Join Pepperjam Network and Receive a $10 Sign On Bonus