This week has just been about different planning for me. Different planning to make money in different revenue streams. I am focusing on several niches with several ideas. I hope some of them pan out!

If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 200 entrecard credits.

As of late a lot of my articles have been about affiliate marketing. I plan on doing several more that way. What is your favorite affiliate network?

Since I posted about Pepperjam and eBay yesterday, I figured  would do a few more posts about different affiliate networks that I use. Today I will be letting you know a little about the Hydra Network.

Hydra Network

Hydra is a great affiliate network with lots of different types of offers. Looking at today, they already have 5 brand new offers to run. There are plenty of offers from incentivized to health and education, even strictly UK offers.

My Favorite Offers

It all depends on your niche, but of course my favorite offers have to be freebie or free sample. I’ve mainly used other networks for my free offers, but with Hydra’s bulk of them as well as different types, I am beginning to try that out.

The two offers that have been best for me are:

Best Home Security = $15 per lead
Kaboom Neverscrub Free Sample = $9.50 per lead

Referring to Hydra Network

It’s important for a successful affiliate network to have a good referral program. Looking at the Hydra Network affiliate program I am pretty impressed. A few other networks offer 2%, $2, or $5 per referral. Hydra offers 5% for every referral, the highest I’ve seen.

For every referral you will receive 5% of all the campaigns your referral runs with Hydra. The one who referred me has already earned $2.50, and I’m just getting started.

Any other questions about the network, please leave your comments below.

Start making money with Hydra!

I have mentioned the Pepperjam affiliate network several times as being one of my favorites to earn money with. They have good affiliates, feature pepperjam ads, and now, have a new partner, eBay.

Make Money with eBay

I have never been an eBay affiliate before, so I am excited to start. Pepperjam announced on it’s blog that eBay has joined the network.

In the post they outline a few highlights as well as information. You can make up to 75% of the transaction and an additional $35 for every active user your refer. To qualify as “active” I believe they have to bid and/or win an item from eBay.

That may be a little tough for some sites, but if you are running something that is very niche, it will be right up your alley. By offering deep linking, you can pick any auction you want to link to, even your own! You could basically get paid for promoting your own auction.

Bringing in a big fish like eBay is another step in the right direction for Pepperjam. They are real contenders as one of the best affiliate networks.

It’s not too late to sign-up to Pepperjam!

Optimizing your website for search engines can be vital when you are trying to get consistent traffic to your site. Building links to your website is an essential part of SEO.

Blog Directories

A cheap and easy way to build links any blog or website is to list them in directories. This often leads to one way links to your website which is very beneficial to you. You may not get much traffic from the directories themselves, but instead from the search engine visitors. I don’t find directories as important to blogs like this one, however if you are looking to build a specific niche blog, it can be crucial to your SEO success.

You can find a list of 40 free blog directories at Mikes Money Making Mission, just to get you started. These directories have page ranks from 7 to 0. Each directory is different, some may not be right for you.

Get Listed at Bloggeries

One directory not mentioned in that list is Bloggeries. Bloggeries main page is a pr6, that is basically a one stop shop for blogging. There is of course the directory, as well as the forum and blog. The blog consists of reviews of all sorts of blogs, you can see ours here.

The Bloggeries Directory has the front page as a pr6, with categories all with different PR. The higher the pagerank, the more powerful the link to your website is (that generally holds true).

To be listed you can pay $34.99 for a permanent regular listing, that includes three deep links to your website or blog. Or you can have your website/blog featured, for $49.99 annually.

We just got listed in the Bloggeries directory. Make sure to vote for us.
Earn Money Promoting Bloggeries

Rob from Bloggeries is a great guy to have in your corner. He’s all about helping out bloggers and opens his forum to everyone, as well as his directory. He’s looking to help bloggers earn money with his new affiliate program. For everyone you refer to the directory, you will earn $20 per directory “sale”.

On top of that for every affiliate you refer, you earn $5 per every sale that they make.

The affiliate program was just announced a few days ago, so you can get in early and refer some other bloggers into your tier. Sign-up now to get approved and start promoting.

New month, new contests. Check out the latest and simples ones…

$75 Amazon Gift Card

Gather Little by Little is running an easy contest where you have the chance to win a $75 Amazon Gift card. Subscribe to his RSS feeds by mail and you are in. Don’t forget to send him the “secret code” you’ll find at the bottom of each post in the feed! Ends today! Hurry up!

A 1GB iPod Shuffle

Win great prizes (over $403) from from ConchoLakeAZ.com and ConchoValleyCC.com: a 1GB iPod Shuffle, free advertising space, entrecard credits, books and original artworks. Earn your points by writing a post about the competition, subscribing to their RSS feed and completing daily tasks.
Ends on July 4th.

Cash and Entrecard Credits

Three cash prizes from Shauryadeep: $200 (+ 1500 EC), $100 (+ 900 EC) and $50 (+ 500 EC). You have many options to join this contest: subscribe to his RSS feed by email, write a post about it, leave comment on the site.
Ends on June 20th.

f you’re looking for blog contests, if you want to promote your own competition, don’t forget to visit About Blog Contests!

We’ve been busy here, working on several new blogs hoping to hit the Google SEO jackpot. In the meantime we’ve been doing our best to keep updated here. Make sure to check out our latest posts if you’ve missed any.

If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 200 entrecard credits.

Entrecard was great for a while. I used it everyday, I purchased items, I advertised on blogs. However, now I barely use it. Do you still use entrecard? What is your favorite thing about it?

We’ve found 5 ways to make enemies online, something I wouldn’t exactly recommend. By doing so our ‘enemies’ have found a way to get us penalized by Stumbleupon which has resulted in a huge traffic loss. So why don’t we play nice for a while and make some friends.

Respond to Comments

If you can treat your readers like you already know them, that is recipe for an easy friendship. When people leave comments you already have their name (usually) and email address. This allows you to either contact them on the comments, or directly.

Perfect for a quick email, thanks for the comment, by the way… [insert plug]

Utilize Sites Like MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog was essential in growing our network and readership. I used to spend a lot of time building up our MyBlogLog group.

Now there are plenty of other networking sites you can use. The most popular one now seems to be twitter. Everyone is twittering everything they do. Its a great way to get to know people and make friends online.

Submit Links to Social Media

Not your own links, users in similar online communities as yours. Instead of trying to ‘take out’ the competition, give them a boost every once in a while, they may do the same for you. If I find someone submitting some of our content, I usually always end up some comminucation with them as well as social media friend requests.

Link to Fellow Bloggers in Posts

There is nothing better than finding out someone liked your post enough to link to it. So why not show some of your favorite bloggers that you value their content and link to it. You can even make a round-up link post and link to several of your favorites.

Contact Anyone and Everyone

This one is kind of tricky. Some people can do this very well, however sometimes it comes off as spam. I can almost always tell when someone is just mass producing contact emails and it’s a huge turn off for me. I appreciate the time it takes, however to me, it’s spam. Isn’t email marketing spamming?

Instant Messaging

Getting someone on instant messaging (IM) can be a powerful way to network. After writing about Networking with Bloggers on Instant Messaging, I gained several new bloggers on my buddy list. That was just with writing about it.

Contacting bloggers through IM is the easiest and in my opinion the best way to network and make friends online. It’s very informal, so it’s easy to talk to people you don’t know.

How have you been able to make friends online?