One of the most popular ways of earning money online these days is by creating your own blog. When I first started building blogs back in the day when AdSense first came out, it was difficult for me because most of the topics that interested me enough to blog about on a regular basis were just not good AdSense type content. I would come up with all kinds of funny creative fiction blogs and stuff that I wanted to do, but whenever I would place the AdSense code on my pages (and other contextual relevant affiliate programs) I would see ads come up that would not interest anyone who was surfing my blog. At least it wouldn't interest enough people regularly to make the blog financially worth my time. Plus the fact that I was ghostwriting this blog for someone made it a little more complicated too. I would be paid a salary, plus a percentage of the affiliate revenues. So I had plenty of motive to see the blog succeed revenue wise.

I found out quickly, along with everyone else, that for ads like that to be successful, the content of the blog has to be very niche oriented and tightly targeted. For example, if my blog was all about gun prevention and eliminating guns from our society, then context ads would likely start displaying ads that show guns for sale and gun accessories etc. That obviously wouldn't work very well, I would make no money. That is just one example of how the content of the blog can directly interfere with the ability of that blog to promote contextual advertising.

So at one point I had a topic I really wanted to blog about. I think that this fact is notoriously under appreciated. If you hold no special interest or at least have some knowledge of the topic of your blog, then you will likely not keep it going. Blogging, like other forms of writing, is very hard work. It takes many, many hours of typing and other tasks to run a blog; even more so with a successful blog. The only way I could get myself to dedicate that kind of effort and motivation on a consistent basis would be if I had some sort of a passion for the topic. Otherwise, the urge to put the writing off for a day, or two, would win over my desire to write about the topic.

I have seen so many blogs go up, start off good, then one day the author just stops updating and that's it. You never hear from them again. I don't have to ask what happened, I already know most likely. Almost every time I see one collapse it is a blog that has a very dry topic, or the blog owner made a good topic dry because it wasn't a passion of theirs. Either way you get the same dead results.

So I was faced with some decisions. I knew I had to write a blog that suited my interests, but I also knew that I couldn't use contextual advertising. So the next logical step for me was to use affiliate links throughout the blog. The time it takes to sign up for all the affiliate accounts, as well as just finding the right ones, is amazing. I tried to get as many different affiliate accounts as I could. At my peak I think I had about 200 affiliate links throughout the whole blog, spread out amongst 20 different affiliate accounts. At the time I was using Wordpress, the free blog software program. That program is amazing, easy to use, and easy to enhance.

Once the blog started actually making money from the affiliate links and such, I started to realize how impossible it is to keep track of the performance of all the affiliate accounts and links in one central place. Each account has it's own stats program, none of them are interlinked. I wanted to be able to do a few things, and do them easily:

• Track and analyze performance of all affiliate links on the blog

• Be able to make changes site wide to all affiliate links and codes

• Replicate the same control over all of my blogs

Of course I wanted to be able to do other things with the affiliate stuff as well, but those were the main ones. I went onto Elance to create a project for a programmer to write a custom software program that would handle everything I needed. The lowest quote I got was $900.00. To say the least, I was surprised. There was no way I was laying out that kind of money.

Then I got lucky. My friend called me up to tell me he had found this new program called WordPress Affiliate Pro and I had finally found a plugin/program that worked. You see, even after you sign up for every affiliate account, you still have to implement all of your affiliate links throughout your blog. If you have say 10 different affiliates you want to promote, maybe you have 5 for electronics and 5 for appliances, then you would want to distribute links to those affiliates throughout the site on certain keywords or pictures. Doing this manually really sucks, after a while I just lost motivation to do it all, but when I got WordPress Affiliate Pro I was able to implement so many more affiliates programs and links throughout my Wordpress blogs.

WPAP will automatically plant your referral codes throughout your Wordpress blog by using keywords, pics, media, whatever. This plugin basically monetizes your blog in a way that you could never do yourself manually, you just simply would not have the time. It also helps you keep track of different referral campaigns to let you decipher what is working and what isn't.

I would most pick up this plugin, it is worth every cent. They have a money-back guarantee as well if I am not mistaken. If you have a Wordpress blog and you are monetizing it, then you cannot do without this plugin.

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