Sociable – You might see some little icons at the bottom of posts in WordPress for various sites such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, Technocrati, Digg and many others. These are all social websites where users participate in finding interesting things to share. What could be better than having them share your content? Can you say more traffic?

WordPress Download Monitor – Have an Ebook? Would you like to make a bit of extra cash with it? Want to know how many have downloaded it after they have paid you using the ArePayPal plugin? Just use this handy plugin to upload your ebook. Track the downloads and secure it to members only.

Google XML Sitemaps – This is probably the most absolute handy plugin you could install. It is a definite must have for any WordPress blog. Configure it once you install it and your pages and posts will be added to the Google directory search much faster than if you waited for Google to crawl your site. Sometimes only hours from the time you post to the time people find you through the search engine.

WP-Affiliate – Affiliate marketing is always a touchy thing. People can just copy the link and remove your id to deny you any commission. This can happen easily if someone uses an iframe to display your site and some software to just swap their affiliate id with yours. Users are also a bit more inclined to click on a link that doesn’t have an affiliate id. This plugin will allow you to add links that will redirect to the actual link without the user knowing until they are already there. It will also help you with your Google page ranking as Google looks for those affiliate id’s and off site linking. This works great with affiliate programs like Clickbank and Commission Junction.

With a little work you can have a healthy number of revenue streams with your WordPress Blog. All while providing great content for your readers.

What many people want along with WordPress is the ability to earn a small amount of income from their efforts. Some are happy with even a couple of dollars a month while others are looking to earn thousands a month.

Now, you have probably already followed some of my advice to use WordPress to make money online but you haven’t yet found some of those plug-ins that will help you earn some money in the mean time.

Let’s go over a few of the plug-ins that could be useful to you.

Are PayPal – A great plug-in to monetize your website. Secure some of your posts with this plug-in and have your users, not only register, but pay a small fee to view the content of a post. This can also be used in a page instead of a post. That way you can make your post, point to the page for the content and have the user commit to a small fee to read the rest of the exciting news you have to offer. You can also set it up so that a subscription can be made to allow users access to your paid content. It uses PayPal, so you will have to have an account if you don’t already have one.

AdSense Manager – A great plug-in for those who want to use Google Adsense or other networks. Adsense Manager supports AdSense, AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Commission Junction, CrispAds, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN and WidgetBucks. Place one of the ads in various positions on your pages and posts.

WP125 – This is a great plug-in for small 125×125 banner advertisement manager. Allow advertisers to place a small banner on your website. The WP125 plugin can help you manage your ads more efficiently, leaving you with more time to write new posts. The plugin adds a new “Ads” menu to the WordPress admin, featuring submenus for tweaking display settings and adding and removing ads. Lots of features make this plug-in a must have for your website if you plan on selling advertising space.

AdRotator – While not quite as easy to use as WP125, this allows you to include any banner in a random rotation. Simple to run and add new banners. You may need to modify some of your template code though. And, unlike WP125, you will have to pay attention to when the banner expires. Use this for your affiliate banner ads instead of paid banner advertisements. Use the WP125 for those.

Amazon Showcase WordPress Widget – Add a widget to your website with items from Amazon.com. It requires you to have an Associate Id. Just add your id to the configuration and pick out things to promote. A commission from the sales will be mailed to you once you reach a threshold for payment. This is a great way to promote products and make a little money at the same time.

With these suggestions, you can earn a small to large income depending on your traffic. They are easy to install and configure and will more than likely add to the usefulness of your WordPress blog.

What exactly did Google do?

They increased the fees of advertising in the Adwords program to the point that it wasn’t really profitable to use the advertising if all you were doing was pushing people to a splash page and then redirecting them to the actual sales page.

Yep. That’s right. They penalized affiliate marketers for doing what they do best. Creating traffic for a product where they gained a commission.

It would be nice if Google actually penalized other forms of marketing in the same manner but they didn’t.

It also affected may other legitimate websites. Some to the point that it made advertising with Google extremely difficult and expensive.

A new tool, Google Goggles, tries to help SEO Specialists and website owners by providing a tool to mimic what Google sees and rank your pages accordingly. Hopefully increasing your chances of lower advertising fees by showing you what to improve or change.

Not only does it allow you to know in advance if your campaign will be a stinker, or a goose that lays golden egg. It even makes specific suggestions as to what to tweak, in case it determines that your campaign won’t fare as well as you had hoped to, so you can, in actuality, still make it profitable right there and then! – Google Goggles

I can’t say for certain that this tool will be the end of “Google Slaps”, but it definitely can’t hurt to give it a try if you are using Click Bank for your affiliate marketing.

Those who use these free services are using what is called “Bum Marketing”. It is the cheapest form of traffic you can manage to get for your product.

There are several ways to get “Bum Marketing” to work for you.

Forum Signatures:

Probably the least effective method of marketing you can use but you can actually get some links. Most forums allow you to add links to your signature. This allows you to place your Clickbank link or link to your product within your signature that is seen in each post you make.

Some forums will generate more traffic than others. It is best if you place your link in forums that go along with the niche you are trying to promote. The more you participate, the more your signature will permeate the forum.

Social Websites:

There are several social websites out there. Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, Squidoo and more. All of them are free. It just takes a bit of time and a email address to get your own social page. If you already have one then it would be just a matter of writing a bulletin or blog post about your product with a link to the product itself and send it to all of your friends.

While most of the social websites are not designed to sell a product or direct people to another website, you can do this with Squidoo. They want you to make pages to sell your products. They want you to make pages to direct people to your own website. They even rate the pages you create. The higher the rating the more people you get to see your Squidoo page. Obviously this leads to more people either purchasing your product or visiting your site.

The other sites depend on how many friends you have and how many might click on your profile looking for something else entirely.

Blogs:

Two major blogs you can use are Google’s Blogger and WordPress. Both give you the ability to create your own blog without having to come up with your own website or domain. Creation of an account and Blogs is quite easy. Both offer templates that you can use to customize the blog with or you can come up with your own template.

Just make a good strong post about your product. Try not to make too many links to your product. Both Blogger and WordPress search for and shut down Blogs they deem blatant advertising(spam). Convince your readers that they need to click on the link to proceed to your Affiliate link or product and make a purchase.

Articles:

While it might sound easy to create an article it is not always so. Some articles take a bit of thought. Especially if you have specific rules that you need to adhere to in order to get it published. You want to stick to those rules so that it will meet the standards that are required and so that people who are searching for content on their websites will pick up your article and publish it on their website. Obviously the better the article the more people will use it for content.

Many article publishers would rather you do not place many, if any links to your product or affiliate site in your article. Some will allow you to place those links in your signature. Either way it is probably best to just place a link to one of your Bum Marketing sites instead of directly to your affiliate link.

There are several places you can submit your articles. EzineArticles and GoArticles are two of the better places to get your article published. There are also websites you can subscribe to in order to get your article published to literally hundreds of article websites.

An example of an approach to Bum Marketing would be to find your niche that you want to promote a product on. Something you might know quite a bit about. Visit Clickbank or your other Affiliate for a product to promote. Create a Squidoo lense for your product. Create a blog on either or both Blogger or WordPress. Remember to make any links to your Squidoo lense site. Not your product.

Lastly, you would want to write a good strong article to promote your product and either point to your Squidoo lense or to your Blogs and publish it on EzineArticles first, GoArticles second then maybe your list of article directors third.

If you would like to know more about Bum Marketing or how to use Squidoo Lenses to your advantage you can check out Sherry Han’s Bum Marketing Course and Squidoo Queen . Both are great resources.

Many companies make a living doing just that.  Optimizing websites for people who can’t figure out how to do it or just don’t have the time.

Of course, there really isn’t all that much information freely available on how to optimize your website.  Nor is there information on what the search engines are looking for when they crawl your website to rank it to begin with.

One of the main things that everyone agrees to now is that the content of your website actually plays a large part in where you rank.  Especially on  Google.

One of the things that people do to help their page ranking is to place meta tags in the header section of the website.  It used to be that you found a bunch of keywords you wanted the crawlers to use and you would place them in the meta tag keywords.

I’m happy to oblige, at least in the case of the meta keywords tag. Now supported by only one major crawler-based search engine — Inktomi — the value of adding meta keywords tags to pages seems little worth the time. In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead. – SEW

But there is consensus that the description tag is still worth it’s while.

You might want to take some time to look at SearchEngineWatch.  They have some good articles on how to optimize your site for crawling by the search engine bots.