People are willing to pay for online content. In fact, the "Online Publishers Association" said that pay-for content is emerging as a hot revenue model. Business content, personals/match making, and entertainment are the hottest niches. But even smaller niches, like DVD authoring, sports coaching, marketing services, and dieting are producing profits.

You can sell subscriptions for online content with your own membership site. Selling online content by way of a password protected website has become big business. Not only is it fast to set up, but the start-up and running costs are minimal. Work from home entrepreneurs and big businesses alike are tapping into this new-found revenue source.

One of the great things about starting a membership site is you can take your hobby, specialized knowledge or profession and turn it into a profitable business. Your challenge will be finding exclusive content. You can start it part time but it will likely develop into a full time business.

Planning for and setting your site up for auto-responders, automated sign-ups, credit card processing, automated cancellations, etc is all part of a successful membership website. Starting and running a membership site can be a lot of fun and very exciting, however you need to know what’s involved in setting one up, and then managing it effectively.

This whole process can seem a bit daunting. However, as complex as this seems, many companies offer a low cost, easy-to-use software solution. This makes it possible for almost anyone to start and market a membership site at a very low cost.

TIP:

Set up your own membership site easy with the Micro-Membership WordPress Plugin

If you want to make your blog a success, there are several important factors you need to pay attention to. One of these factors is your sidebar, which you can use to optimize your blog, market and/or monetize it.

Below, I listed a couple of my favorite sidebar-related WordPress plugins.

Widget Logic:

This plugin gives every widget an extra control field called "Widget logic" that lets you control the pages that the widget will appear on.

This way, you can optimize your sidebar and display certain widgets only on the homepage, or only on single post pages, the search results or archive pages, or a combination of pages.
 

KB Advanced RSS:

The KB Advanced RSS widget gives you more control over how the feed shows up in your sidebar.

• Decide which RSS fields to display (as opposed to the default RSS widget, which limits you to link, title, and description)
• Decide how to format the fields (it doesn't have to be a list if you don't want it to be)

WP related Posts:

This WordPress plugin provides multiple options to show the via tags related posts of a post.

It contains a sidebar widget that is only visible when viewing a single post and displays a list of posts that are related with the current post via the tags.

It is also possible to insert the list of related post in a post via a placeholder. You can also embedd the list of related post in template files to add it to the bottom of each post page.

MaxBlogPress Optin Form Adder:

This plugin allows you to create optin forms to match your blog’s look and feel in just 4 easy steps.

(In fact, MaxBlogpress offers many more, very useful WP plugins – most of them free. Go check them out.

WP Listbuilding Plugin:

WP ListBuilding Plugin is a revolutionary new plugin that allows you to create eye-catching, subscriber sucking optin banners that stick to the base of your blog and virtually force your blog visitors to join your list!

MONETIZE YOUR SIDEBAR

RAPBank plugin:

Use this plugin to get RAP Bank Products listed on your WP blog simply, easily and with flexibility by placing a block of RAP Bank ads in your posts, pages, or sidebar 

The products listed on RAPBank pay out up to 100% commission instantly.

MaxBlogPress DealDotCom Widget:

Using this plugin, you can easily put DealDotCom’s deal of the day at the sidebar of your wordpress blog

The nice thing about this plugin is that it will automtically show the latest deal every time a new deal is on sale.

DealDotCom offers you 35% commission of the profit and 15% commission on the 2nd tier.

All in One Adsense and YPN:

All in One Adsense and YPN is a Free and Open Source WordPress plugin which is able to automatically insert google adsense ads or yahoo publisher network (YPN) ads in to your posts on the fly. It doesn't matter if you have 1 post or 100,000 posts, it will insert your ad code into all of them automatically.
 

OIO Publisher:

Control your ad space with the OIOpublisher ad manager. Sell advertising on
your blog or website and keep 100% of the revenue. (Fully template based, so easy to set up)

Coupon Code for April 2010:  BLOOM-OIO125
(Changes every month – contact me for the new code)

I've used a lot of different affiliate marketing methods and find one of them to be the most effective.

Article marketing is cool, except the article directory gets to keep all the ad revenue and they are getting more particular about what articles they accept.

Review sites are OK, but does anyone really trust the reviews they read on those sites anymore? Most people know by now that review sites are just disguised sales pitches and aren't honest reviews.

Social media is fun, but it has its limits. It's more about socializing, less about doing business. Sure, you can make connections there but at the end of the day the lion's share of your profits likely isn't coming from social media. Social media sites are not the most important place on the web.

So what is?

Your own blog. In my opinion, there's nothing like having your own blog, especially if you use WordPress. WordPress makes blogging much easier and more effective.

Your blog is your castle. YOU get to decide which content to put on it and don't have to wait a week for someone else to approve it.  YOU get to keep your ad revenue. If you use Google Adsense, however, chances are it's more like Google Adcents. And don't get me started on Google slaps.

That's why it's more effective to promote affiliate products on your blog rather than rely on Adsense. Affiliate commissions have a much higher payout than ad clicks.

One option is to have a "blog sponsor" section in your sidebar. Place ads here (preferably with eye-catching graphics rather than just text) that link to select affiliate products and also your own products if you have any.

Another option is to occasionally write a blog post that promotes an affiliate product. The posts should contain solid content in addition to the sales pitch. Write the post as if you were talking to a friend so that it doesn't come across as too sales-y.

Don't forget to have an opt-in form on your blog so that you can collect the email addresses of your blog readers. You can occasionally promote affiliate products through email to your list. You should also send out emails that contain helpful, engaging content. You can use your blog posts as content but you should also use original content in your emails too. Mix it up.

There's one type of affiliate marketing that I highly recommend and that's the WordPress Affiliate plugin that automatically inserts professional-looking ads for Clickbank products in your posts.

Top 25 Twitter cartoons from across the Web compiled by Chad Richards of www.socialyst.net

Yesterday morning, when I visited my JV giveaways site, I found a couple of big, scary eyes on a black background staring at me. Above them, a piece of text telling me the site had been hacked…

Since I never had experienced a hack before, I didn’t really know what to do. To be honest, I always considered hacks to be something that only happened to other people. I instantly realized this was the price to pay for being so shortsighted.

Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad. It appeared someone had renamed my index-files in several folders and put his own index.htm file in place. I was able to solve the problem by deleting all new files and re-uploading my original files. You can’t imagine how happy I was that I had learned my lesson from all those previous server problems, and kept a backup of all my online files on my hard drive…

TIP: How To Backup Your Sites

From the thread I posted at the Warrior forum, I learned that the hacker probably gained access to my site through one of my WP installs. It appears WP is not secure at all and that there is nothing wordpress.org can do to stop the hacks.
The only way to secure your WordPress installation is to do it yourself or hire a WordPress Security Expert, which will easily cost you over $100.

Fortunately, I had a WordPress security tool sitting on my hard drive somewhere. WordPress Secure Pro was released a couple of months ago and protects your WP installation by blocking access to the admin area for every IP, except yours. I remembered I had installed it for one blog, but hadn’t bothered to set it up for all my blogs. After all, I was convinced I wasn’t going to need it…

I did a hard drive search and quickly found the zip-file. Then, I put everything aside and installed it on all my blogs. While doing this, I wondered why I hadn’t done that in the first place, considering it takes only 5 minutes to set up the entire protection system…

I hope I will remember this lesson the next time I decide not to take precautions, because I think something will never happen to me anyway…

For all you WP bloggers out there: don’t make the same mistake I made. I was lucky… things could have been a lot worse – I don’t want to think about what could have happened if this hacker really wanted to do harm. Protect your sites, specifically your WordPress Blogs, with all means possible.

To make sure money is not an issue, I decided to make WP Security Pro available to you for only $5. Believe me, your piece of mind is worth a lot more than that. To grab your discount, you need to visit the page through the link below*. (*Please note the sales page will say $10 – You’ll see your discounted price when you click the order button)

Get ‘WordPress Secure Pro’ For Only $5

I’m not really the type of person that has ‘idols’ – and the word guru is enough to give me the chills. In fact, there are very few people I actually follow in their daily or weekly actions. I rather take things as they come. Successful products and brilliant ideas often come from people you’ve never heard of before, while I’ve seen more than one so called ‘big name’ deliver a product that wasn’t worth even a single dollar.

So I try to keep an open mind and try to not to get influenced by a marketer’s name when I look for info or check out a new product.

There’s one exception, however…

Ever since I first laid my hands on one of Robert Plank‘s eBooks (I think it was ‘Sales Page Tactics 3′), I’m a huge fan of his work.
And with me, loads of others.

His PHP- and Java script guides all sell like hot cakes, and the same goes for the scripts he creates. In just a few years time, he has sold thousands of products. Of course there’s the ‘name fame’-factor: he sells hundreds of copies of his ebooks and scripts, just because they have his name on it. But there’s a good reason for that, since what he delivers are quality products – every single one of them!

Several of my own products – 1-2-3 Dimesale, Panic OTO and Framebrander were based on scripts published in his ebooks (Thanks, Robert!).

But enough about Robert, I don’t want him to get all snobbish…

 What I actually wanted to tell you is that Robert recently released two new scripts/WP plugins that can really help you to boost your (blog) mailing list.

Action Optin allows you to stick email subscription forms on your blog/sales letters that make sure people won’t be distracted and click away: when people click the submit button, your form disappears and is replaced with a customizable thankyou-message. You can see it in action on this page. This tool comes both as a PHP script and a WordPress plugin.

Action Comments is a WP plugin that allows you to:

- place a checkbox underneath the comment form. It’s already checked, so after someone leaves you a comment, they have to uncheck the box to stay off your list. Chances are if they are taking the time to leave you a comment, they’re already hungry for information.

- show an "alert" box to get people to sign up. The comment form looks like a regular blog comment form, but when they try to submit that comment, an unblockable JavaScript box pops up on the screen and asks if they’d like to sign up to your list – with whatever message you choose.

This plugin works with any autoresponder service.

If you are trying to build your list, these scripts are definitely worth to check out!

Just a short post to let you know about a free video I just bumped into.

It was created by fellow marketer Albert Hallado to explain how you can track your blog traffic using Google Analytics.

I won’t go into the importance of tracking your traffic here and now, ‘cos loads has been written about it already. I just wanted to show you the video.

(I couldn’t add it to my post, so you’ll need to head over to Albert Hallado’s blog to watch it)

I hope you will be able benefit from this info!

Blogging is hot again! No wonder, since your blog can be vital to your success online! In this post, I won’t go into the importance of having a blog, ‘cos many have done that before me.
I’d rather give you some  free tools & resources that will help you to make your blogging experience fun and easy.

In between all my other projects, I’m working on a new concept for my homebase and blog. I started from scratch, which allowed me to go out and look for the best and most interesting tips, tools and addons. And I found loads!

Don’t worry,  this isn’t just another list with the same old ‘must-have WP plugins’. Not even a top 10 of some sort. You can find thousands of those all around, like here and here. I just want to share with you those sites and tools that have really enriched my blogging, but are almost never mentioned by others. In my opinion, the sites and tools below deserve way more credit than they actually get.

Here we go…

MaxBlogPress
At MaxBlogPress, you can get some great free and easy to use plugins for your blog. I adore their Favicon plugin,Psychic Search and the brand new Max Banner Ads (allows you to add & rotate banner ads in your blog – anywhere), but my absolute favorite is the ‘Stripe Ad‘ plugin, which adds a non annoying, text-ad rotating bar at the top of your blog.

More cool plugins can be found at the site!

FCKEditor For WordPress
I can’t understand why this plugin never shows up in the lists of must-have plugins. Basically, it replaces your standard WP editor with a fully equiped WYSIWYG editor. This makes formatting your posts piece of cake. This little tool has really fired up my blogging!

What Would Seth Godin Do
By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 5 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.

TweetMyBlog
A brand new WordPress plugin that makes it super easy to combine the powers of WordPress and Twitter to drive massive amounts of traffic to your blog.

I didn’t install the following plugins yet, but I fell for their features:

Faster IM Opt-Ins
Add an attention grabbing opt-in form to your WordPress blog in 5 minutes!

WordPress Magnet (not free)
An easy to use WordPress Plugin designed to get people to leave comments on your blog by giving them an incentive.

Easy Ad Block Generator (not free)
This widget lets you easily add a variety of ads to a block, and position it ANYWHERE on your WordPress sidebar on ANY WordPress theme.

This list will grow longer as I continue to design my new homebase/blog!