Art.com and Allposters.com are moving to Commission Junction

Yes, it's true. I logged on to my account this morning and both sites are moving to Commission Junction. I've never had much luck with that program, simply because I don't seem to sell anything, but I am hoping that with luck and all the hundreds of posts with those two affiliates, and the 1600+ links I will be adding shortly, that I'll be able to sell something before they kick me out for inactivity. Fortunately, I can apply for other programs, too, and I hope that something will sell eventually!

So for now I will be redoing literally hundreds of links and hoping that I don't mess something up. As if I didn't have enough to do already!

Art.com has told me their former links don't work; however, I believe if you leave it all in place and use the Commission Junction auto deeplinker, that might work (if their pictures are still served from the same address after the change). If not, you can find the picture address, and use the CJ bookmarklet to generate a deeplink.

Art.com and allposters.com are also on VigLink, so it's possible if you have VigLink installed that will work, too. We'll see after the changeover!

Earn $65 (or more) Each Year on Amazon for Free

That's right, with a few minutes a day, you can earn more than $5 a month on Amazon.

How? This is the easy part.

Use Bing as your search engine.

Okay, it's a little more complicated than that, but not much.

1. Sign up for the Bing Rewards program.
2. Use Bing as your search engine.
3. Pick an Amazon gift card as your reward. (Yes, there are other rewards available, but Amazon is one of the most useful and easy to get.)

Now here's how to get to those gift cards fast:

Each day, open Bing on your browser.
First, you will see a little bar at the top that will have a badge with your points on it, like this:

(Incidentally, I started this on May 1st. It's May 25, so I will easily make my reward this month.)

Click on this badge and you will get a small sliding window that looks like this:

(For the sharp-eyed among you, this screenshot was taken at the beginning of my task, while the previous one was taken at the end of my task. So, yes, I did earn nineteen points today.)

You want to check this window first, because you will sometimes get double points for searches, but you have to click on the link to activate the double points. On those days you can get 30 points for searching.

At the bottom of the window you will see something like this:

Click on one of those little windows after the first two on the left: it doesn't matter which one. The window will change to a Bing search result about that news story, and the bar will move to the top of the window. You don't have to click on an actual search result to get the points. Just keep clicking on news stories pictures until you've clicked on 29 of them. That will give you your 15 points per day for desktop searches. (If you make Bing your default search engine, and you're online all the time, and you do this at the end of the day, you may have already earned your 15 points, but I do it at the beginning of each day, while I'm still too sleepy to do anything else, in order to make my waking-up time productive.)

If you look at the window which opened when you click on the badge, you'll see other activities you can earn for points. Just click the links, new windows will open, and you'll be good to go.

$5 Amazon gift cards are available for 525 points. But, if you're doing this every day, once you reach 150 points for the month, you'll receive Gold status and get a 10% discount on your reward:

and so, your $5 Amazon gift card will be only 475 points.

When you redeem, you'll get an email with a gift card code. You can simply copy/paste the code to Amazon and that will credit your account. The dollars in your account never expire, so don't be afraid to save up for something big!

So, to do the math, 15 points for searching, times thirty days, will get you 450 points. Add in 30+ more points for the other activities, and you will receive 13 (plus a few leftover points for the next one) $5 gift cards per year.

And yes, you can use your referral link (as I did above) to invite friends, and get some extra points. They have to reach Silver status (get 200 points) within 60 days, plus take the tour. You have to redeem something to get to Silver status; if you're smart, you'll redeem something for 20 points. Don't redeem your gift cards until you reach Gold status, because the discount is worth waiting for (a fifty-point reduction).

You'll notice I haven't mentioned mobile points. I can't get them to work, either with the Bing app or Safari mobile, and evidently many other people can't, either; searches I do on mobile still count as desktop searches. I have a new phone so I'm willing to try once more, but then I'm throwing in the towel. If you manage to get it to work, that's an extra ten points per day, or more than $35 a year extra in Amazon gift cards, which works out to a dollar every three or so days. Not exactly minimum wage, but it comes in handy for your Christmas shopping and those Black Friday deals.

One more way to earn points: with your Hotmail, Live or other Bing-affiliated email address, once a week you'll get an email with an opportunity to earn four more points by clicking the links in the email.

Happy searching and shopping!

Update:

Bing sent me a response. Mobile searches work only from phones, not tablets. I don't have an iPhone to test it out, but for Android, install the Bing rewards app. Make sure you are signed in to your account. Now go to the menu (symbol on upper right) and choose "Status." You will see the mobile equivalent of the sliding window (second picture above). Tap on "mobile search" and then search from there. Twenty searches will get you ten points. Yes, it's awkward but it works, and you'll satisfy your idle curiosity when you're away from your phone.

Someone with an iPhone please let me know if mobile searches work for you, and how you did it.

Adieu, Zujava!

Alas, another content site has fallen by the wayside. Zujava, which was a favorite of mine, is closing its site on July 1, 2015. I have to admit, I never made much money there, but I liked the format and the site.

I'm dividing up my content between InfoBarrel, HubPages, and Wizzley, depending on where I think it will do well. I will miss the camaraderie of the site and all the people (although I am sure I will find them again elsewhere), but I will be happy of the extra money. I just didn't get enough traffic to my articles there to actually earn anything.

Considering that I still have old eHow articles that I haven't yet republished, I really need to get to work, but first I have to finish the project on my own website. I also have to start moving other articles that aren't doing well, and update my article on 50 Ways to Make a Dollar a Day.

Now That Squidoo is Gone . . .

Perhaps your content has already found a home at HubPages. Perhaps you're looking to move it somewhere else. Or perhaps you don't know what to do.

There were all types of content at Squidoo, which was part of the problem. So let me try to help you figure out what to do with the content that just won't go elsewhere.

Naturally, long articles with fewer than one Amazon link per fifty words will do fine at HubPages. If you like HubPages (I do), there's no problem there.

If you have no outgoing links, you might consider Seekyt. They are nice folks, and have a nice platform and nice revenue share (70%).

If you have Amazon sales as part of your outgoing links, try Infobarrel. They allow one Amazon element (not link) for each two hundred words of text. However, your grammar, spelling, and writing will really have to be up to snuff as they are (rightfully so) extremely picky about content. Your content can't be a pure sales page, as was popular on Squidoo; it will have to be real content. For former sales pages, consider reorganizing your content, such as a how-to article with a list of supplies, or a comparison/contrast review of products. You can also have (within reason) links to other, related InfoBarrel articles, and two links off-site (links to sites such as Wikipedia do not count as part of your two-link limit). Remember, just because you wrote an InfoBarrel article doesn't make your articles related. For more information, check out the Newbies Guide (yes, written by yours truly, but approved by the community at large, and the owners of the site).

If you love widgets, such as the Amazon mp3 widget, consider your own blog. You can also add Apple or iTunes widgets if you have a PHG account. For example, a music article with a review of an album, and then the widgets for sampling the mp3s on Amazon, and buying them on iTunes, would be perfect for a self-hosted blog on WordPress.

For a combination of Zazzle, Allposters, and Amazon, Wizzley appears to be the go-to site. Unfortunately, Wizzley doesn't appear to allow videos, except for YouTube.

So good luck finding homes for all those articles (to be honest, there are still some old eHow articles I am trying to find new homes for)!

Update to HubPages

HubPages has recently updated their policy to allow one product per 100 words (the old limit was 50). While typically it's never a problem for me to write more, there are some times when it's just not possible to say 100 words about each of the supplies needed for a complex crafting project, or a recipe with exotic ingredients, but which is generally of the "dump everything in together and bake it for three hours" variety.

So what to do with all those hubs? Since HubPages allows two links to the same domain, or unlimited links to HubPages, the answer is to divide up those products. I have a chance to make even more sales this way. For example, I have a hub on using a formula to make cheesecake, rather than a recipe, so that you can have unlimited varieties of cheesecake without having a different recipe for each flavor. Now I can have a hub on uncommon ingredients to put into cheesecake, and highlight more spices and flavorings. Under each item I put why you might want to consider using it in cheesecake.

Another idea is to use the Listmania! feature on Amazon, which now allows up to forty products per list. Instead of linking to individual products on Amazon, you can link to the list, and your affiliate sales will still count. With my work yesterday I am up to fifteen lists, and more will be coming.

Of course, you can also set up a blog in minutes, and put a link to your blog, and an Amazon widget there, with your products in it. (I started this on my website in December, and I currently have created more than 450 Amazon widgets posted.)

No matter which method you choose, HubPages is still a valuable resource for earning passive income, and well worth the effort. Don't be upset by the changes; we simply must adapt, find more avenues to sell, and keep going!

And Yet Another Free Tool!

I have a big project in the works for the website for my day job (more on that later), and I wanted to schedule a bunch of posts, more than Buffer can handle. And that's when I discovered IFTTT!

IFTTT is a simple, free website that does very complex things. You have two channels, and a trigger on one channel performs an action on another channel. I've already written an article about the possibilities for article and website promotion, but you can also use it to promote your ebooks, art, POD stores, and anything else that you might think of!

Author in bookstore with sign that re... Mick Stevens

So instead of spending all that time promoting yourself, you can literally set it and forget it. Head over to IFTTT and start exploring all the possibilities, and see what you can come up with! As for me, I took a recipe that was on page about 15,000 in popularity. It's now in the top 200 pages, simply because of all the time I added it to promote things on my own web site.

Social Media

I just discovered a new tool for helping you get to fame and fortune . . . well, fame, anyway.

Tired of having to post (and remember) to click the button every time you want to share something, and what happens when you're sick, on vacation, otherwise occupied, or just plain forget?

"I'm sorry, Paige, but grades are bas... Matthew Diffee

Now there's a new free social media tool to the rescue—Buffer. Available both on a web page and as a browser extension, Buffer allows you to schedule posts to a single facebook page, twitter account, and google+ account simply and easily. You set the schedule for when the posts go out, and every time you run across something you want to share while you're on the web, simply add it to your queue with a few clicks.



See something that is more important than what you already have scheduled? No worries, just rearrange the queue. Easy, fast, and takes all the work out of scheduling posts for your content (you'll still have to find what you want to post, though).

I'm all for making my life easier with good, free tools, and Buffer manages to do that. Sign up today!