bbPress is the only forum, that I know of, that offers this out of the box. I thought for a while that I was stuck with that, which would have been okay if I did’nt want alot of cool features for my forums, but then I discovered a great mod for SMF that neighter vBulletin nor PHPbb seems to offer at the moment. The only solutions i could find for these platforms would carry some random numbers in the urls. And thanks to the great “package” section at the back end of SMF it only takes a few clicks to install it. The mod is called Pretty URLs and you can get it here!

First. If you want to start affiliate marketing you need to join an affiliate program. Most stores and many service providers online do have an affiliate program that you can join simply by filling out a form. Look for a link that says “affiliate program”, “webmasters”, “make money”, “partners” or something like that on the store or service provider’s website that you want to partner with through their affiliate program.

• Most affiliate programs do not require you to represent a company but a few do.
• Many affiliate programs require you to have a website but some don’t.
• Some affiliate programs are only avaliable for people in certain countries but most are’nt.

Alright let’s continue. When you have joined and been accepted (most got auto accept) to an affiliate program you can start promoting their products and / or services. When you do that you are affiliate marketing. Simple? Yes, kind of like checkers. Easy learn – hard to master.

When you are affiliate marketing you will only be payed when you refer successful sales or leads to companies. Luckily most of em pay great!

So, what’s the benefits of affiliate marketing?

The biggest benefit of affiliate marketing is that you can actively promote the advertisements you put on your website. You can even create dedicated websites to promote niche products. As opposed to PPC advertising like AdSense you can ask your visitors and convince them to click on your ads and buy the product. Another great thing about affiliate marketing is that you can choose your own products to promote. You can select the ones that pays the best, the ones with most advertising material, the ones that have the best looking website and you believe will convert your referrals into customers best. That is all up to you as a webmaster and an affiliate marketeer.

Having AdSense ads on a website is a great way to make money from it but you might not get as much of a profit as you were hoping for. Then it’s time to make some small changes to improve the profit. The most common way I see people use Google AdSense ads on their website is by not changing the default colors and just putting in 1 or 2 ad units. Then leave those ads alone and never try optimize them for maximum earnings.

To make money with AdSense you need to always keep track on what ads is performing well and what ads are lagging behind. Add a different channel to each ad to track the individual ad performance. That way you can easily see where you need to put your focus and improve your website earnings faster.

Know how to get people to notice the ads on your site. The way humans (at least those who read read from left to right) scan websites, and anything else for that matter, is from the top left to the bottom right – and images are eye catchers. Just this short piece of information should give you a lot of insight on where you where you want your ads to be. To get more clicks its crucial that you try new placements and color combinations for your ads. Don’t make too many changes at once so that you can keep track on the statistics and find out what’s working and what’s not for your website.

Since image ads are eye catchers you can afford to place these far away from where you got your main content and most your visitors attention will still be drawn to the picture. This makes image ads perfect if you can’t fit enough of the default combination of text and image ads close to your main content.

Here’s an example of where to put 3 AdSense content ads for maximum visibility

• One ad would go in the upper left corner to be the first thing that visitors spot on the web page.
• Then another one somewhere in the middle of the content.
• And the last one in the bottom right.

For the link unit ad to get alot of clicks you should eighter put it as a horizontal “menu” in the top center of your website or put it below the main navigation menu of your website.

Keep in mind that the maximum number of AdSense units is limited to 3 content ads and 1 link ad per page. You want to always show them all to generate the most money as possible from your website. If you can’t make it look good with all the ads you should not give up and try further until you got all the ads up and looking good. If you already got all ads up and want to make more money from them (of course you do) then try to integrate bigger ads!

More tips

Keep the AdSense units in colors that go well with the rest of your website. Find matching color schemes

No matter if 9 out of 10 links carry the nofollow property or if 10 out of 10 links don’t the value of the PageRank for the web page will not be affected. This clearly indicates that Google now actually will pay attention – at least a little – to nofollow links also. If they don’t then where is all that PageRank value disappearing?

The new way of handling things would mean that alot of popular blogs that gets tons of comments for every new entry they post would be penalized for having alot of links to their commenters websites. I don’t see any change in the actual rankings so far but you should stay alert as of what to do next. If we here at WMWeblog.com hear that alot of webmasters report a big loss of their organic Google visitors we will write a blog post about it here asap!

Here’s how to add the Drop Shadow Effect to Text with CSS:

p.text-shadow {text-shadow:red 2px 2px 0px}

This is how the text inside a paragraph with the class text-shadow looks like…

Explanation:

The property has 4 options. First you must specify what color you want the shadow to be, then how far right it should be aligned, then how far down it should be aligned and finally how much of a blur effect you want it to display.

Top 5 places to get Free Icons

DryIcons Free Icon Section
Updated about once a week with new free icons.

FamFamFam Icon Section
3 smooth icon sets for most uses. I’ve used these for the ZenPro wordpress theme.

Smashing Magazine’s Collection
35 free icon sets. Mostly consisting of neat big and glossy icons.

IconsPedia Collection
Many free icon sets totaling 2379 free icons!

WebToolKit4me Icon Section
Regularly updated with icons of which most a free.

List of DoFollow Webmaster Forums that’s worth it!

• Digital Point – Google PageRank: 4 and Alexa Rank: 284
  All kinds of webmaster topics
  All your posts on this forum will also link to your latest blog post.
• v7n – Google PageRank:5 and Alexa Rank:4′000
  All kinds of webmaster topics
• SEO.com Forums – Google PageRank:4 Alexa Rank:18′000
  SEO topics
  All your posts on this forum will also link to your latest blog post.

We are aware that ZenPro needs a fix and a new theme will be online soon with compability fixes to meet individual requirements out of the box without having to modify the code yourself.

Avaliable classes you can use with the ZenPro theme:

• category
• tags
• download
• preview
• info
• warning
• check
• link
• flag
• time