How do you monetize your blog?

Are you an AdSense maniac or an affiliate fanatic? Do you direct-sell ad space to advertisers like I do on Webmaster-Source?

Or are you part of a marketplace like BuySellAds, or a network like Casale Media or Doubleclick?

Or is your blog an ad-free zone?

Take a minute to vote in this poll (no registration, no hassles, just two clicks), and maybe elaborate upon your choice a little in a comment. We’d like to know.

I’ll start. I direct-sell 125×125 ads on Webmaster-Source mainly, and I voted that since it’s my largest source of blog income. I do have a single AdSense block that I haven’t been able to bring myself to delete (I’m halfway to another check again ), and I put the occasional affiliate link in, but mainly I try to keep to the 125×125s, which are noticeable enough, yet unobtrusive enough not to be a bother.

Okay, now it’s your turn. Vote in the poll below, and share what your solution is. (If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you’ll need to click through to the permalink to vote in the poll.)

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How would you like to gain a steady stream of quality traffic to your website? Traffic that won’t vanish in a few weeks. Traffic that will keep on coming for a long time.

Write a WordPress Plugin, or if you lean more toward design rather than coding, make a WordPress theme. WordPress resources are the ultimate linkbait. It may take you awhile, but it doesn’t take much work to get the traffic coming. Write a page about the plugin on your blog, submit your theme or plugin to WordPress/Extend, post a quick note to WLTC News, and submit to a few social bookmarking sites. It won’t take long before the plugin spreads through the blogosphere, netting you some incoming traffic, and some good links and mentions on other blogs. I’ve done this twice, with WP125 and GoCodes, and both plugins have really added a helpful boost to Webmaster-Source.

If you Google “WP125,” a good many of the 12,000+ results are related to my plugin, though I have to admit there are some scrapers and non-plugin-related posts in there. “WP125 ad” returns higher quality results, and 4.890 at that. Not bad considering the plugin is only a month and a half old…

Now I know not everyone has the skills to put together a good theme or a useful plugin, and therefore may not be able to make use of this tip at the moment. But don’t give up on this idea yet. Anyone can learn PHP, or pick up blog design. If you’re already blogging with WordPress, chances are you’ll be able to pick up said skills without too much difficulty if you put your mind to it.

As a designer, I’m rarely with a design for long. Not long after finishing a design, I start feeling an urge to redesign the site again. Give it a month or two and I’ll be playing around in Photoshop, making experimental mockups in what spare time I have. I have to force myself to not launch a new design too quickly.

I know I’m not the only one with this “problem.” Many designers are like me. Collis Ta’eed, co-founder of Envato, has admitted to never being happy with a design for long as well. And Adii, from the number of times he’s redesigned his blog recently, has a similar ailment.

Why? Why do I want to redesign so much? Is it because I’m never happy with the end result? Or am I just addicted to designing? I’m not sure. It’s probably both. Normally I’m not disappointed with a design, though they rarely turn out exactly as imagined, but I just…get bored with them. I want to experiment and try out new styles. I want to play with Photoshop and weave new code.

This seems to be something that plagues a large portion of designers, and other creative people as well. Have you noticed it yourself? Do you want to redesign more often than you should? Why?

This was my entry to Smashing Magazine’s guest author contest. It wasn’t published there, so I’m putting it here now that the coast is clear.

The popular social bookmarking StumbleUpon has long caused problems for users of thr Opera web browser. Their lack of a toolbar for Opera has annoyed them for quite some time now. There have been some less than perfect solutions in the past, as well as a very good solution — switch to Firefox — that a lot of the users probably don’t want to do.

Well, there’s another option out now. It’s called Opera Stumbler. It has most of the features of the official StumbleUpon toolbar, but in a menu up on the menu bar instead. It looks like a fairly workable solution, though I haven’t tried it myself yet.

I’m a card-carrying Firefox fanatic, and I couldn’t live without my Firefox extensions, so I doubt I’ll be seeing much use of this for my own purposes, but I know that quite a few of you use Opera (according to Google Analytics). Hopefully you’ll find this useful.

O’reilly Press puts out some really good tech books. So I grabbed Andrew B. King’s Website Optimization when I saw it at the library a few days ago. It was pretty good, though not my favorite of their books. I enjoy the ‘Hacks series (PHP Hacks, Podcasting Hacks, etc) more, but they have some other good books too.

Website Optimization is worth a read if you’re trying to get more from your website. The book covers several aspects of optimization. Search engines, loading times, conversion rates, and a little bit on accessibility. There is a heavy emphasis on Search Engine Optimization of course.

It’s a pretty good book, and is very informative, but I have to disagree with some of the SEO advice. The book seems to promote the idea of being stingy when linking to external sites, in an effort to hoard PageRank, linking reciprocally, and making use of the nofollow attribute excessively. Then the book goes and tells you that blogs are a good way to get more inbound links.

I can tell you that an attitude like that regarding links will get you nowere fast. If you want to get links, you must give them first. Link to things that you think will be of interest to your users. The sites you link to will then learn about your site when they find some traffic coming in from your site. Nofollow shouldn’t be used to cripple links you place on your site either. It should be for things like blog commenters’ posted URL’s, which weren’t added by you, and therefore you may not want to recieve PageRank points. As for reciprocal linking, don’t bother. Google thinks reciprocal linking schemes are generally of little interest to the end user, and are therefore discounted when ranking pages.

Other than my minor complaints about some of the linking advice given, it’s a pretty good book.

• Weekend Tip: Author Comment Styling In WordPress
• 10 Steps to the Perfect List Post
• 20 Free eBooks About Social Media
• Sneak Peak at ThemeForest - More information about Envato’s upcoming theme marketplace.
• The Why and How on Repeating Content on Your Blog
• Does WordPress Scare Your Clients?
• 27 Definitions for “Blog”
• Top 10 WordPress Theme Customizations - Ten sites with radically modified versions of publicly available themes. Just goes to show you that a free or premium theme can be a great starting place for a unique design.
• 7 Principles Of Clean And Optimized CSS Code
• 10 Adobe AIR Apps for Web Designers
• Blog Kharma

“Who is hosting this?” is a tool that lets you enter a domain name and see who hosts the site. Kind of fun to play with, and a useful research tool if you’re in the market for a web host.

The makers of the tool have put together a list of the Technorati Top 100’s hosts. That’s right, a list of the web hosts used by the top one hundred blogs on the internet.

The list kicks of with a chart showing the most-used hosts by the Top 100, along with some commentary, and follows it up with a complete list of the blogs and the hosts they use.

No surprise, Media Temple is the most-used one. Media Temple’s users are very loyal and numerous, and they’re famous for their quality service and support. So I’m not at all surprised that they’re sitting atop the chart.

Getting started with Twitter? Looking for some more people to follow? A lot of bloggers, like yourself no doubt, use Twitter too. Here are a few you may want to pay attention to.

Smashing Magazine

The most smashingest blog on the planet is now on Twitter. Find out about new posts faser than your RSS reader can keep up, see what the Smashing folks are finding online, etc. Follow smashingmag.

Tom Merrit

Tom is an executive editor at CNET, and co-host of the Buzz Out Loud podcast. Keep up with what Tom’s up to, and be alerted when Buzz Out Loud is streaming live online. Follow acedtect.

Sumesh

Sumesh’s blog Techzilo.com covers “software, internet and productivity tips.” Sumesh has been a tech addict for quite some time, and knows his stuff when it comes to blogging. Follow sumesh.

Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse is the ProBlogger. You know, the ProBlogger. If you’re blogging and havn’t heard of him, then you must be blogging under a rock. Follow problogger. Read the rest of this entry »

Running a large-scale blog can be a lot of work. If you gain a large readerbase, and are barely keeping up with writing posts, and managing others’ posts if you’re the editor of a multi-author blog, how are you going to find the time to do other things, like redesign the blog when the time comes? Or what if you just don’t have the skills to do something, like create an eye-catching design or code a custom add-on to the site.

Outsourcing, delegating, whatever you want to call it, somewhere along the line, you may need to find someone else to do some work for you. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend it in many cases.

I’ve been hired on a couple of occasions to do some custom PHP development for people in similar circumstances. People who needed something done for a web project, but didn’t have the skills or time to do it themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Prolific plugin author Joost de Valk has put together a WordPress plugin that’s simple in function and insanely useful.

Are you a member of Amazon Associates? Amazon’s widely-used affiliate program can be an effective way to monetize a blog, especially if the blog publishes book reviews, or something of the sort. However, it’s a bit of a pain to, when writing a post, traipse over to associates.amazon.com, log in, and go through the menus to generate an affiliate link, search for the product you want, and paste the resulting URL into your post.

Enter Amazon Auto Affiliate Linker. Install the plugin, tell it what your Associates ID is, and go back to blogging. Now you can skip the Associates dashboard when you write posts. Just go to Amazon.com to search for the book, and copy the URL to the product listing. From there you can use that ordinary URL in your post, and the plugin will automatically add your Associates ID when you press publish. Simple, I told you.