Never put all your eggs in one basket. This is a mantra that John has been saying for a long time, especially when it comes to monetizing your blog. There are countless ad networks that can supplement or even replace Google Adsense, so you shouldn’t feel restricted in how you make money online.

Seemingly acting as a competitor to Text Link Ads, LinkXL ordered this review to emphasize why they’re better. And the main reason for this? “All links [are] placed with a patented proprietary system that has no footprint to be seen.”

How Does LinkXL Work?

Although they may claim otherwise, LinkXL isn’t really a contextual ad service. Instead, advertisers can search through the marketplace of publishers to find specific pages where they want to advertise. And it gets even more specific than that, because they can select the exact anchor text they would like to have link back to their websites.

LinkXL is an in-text advertising system not unlike IntelliTXT and Kontera ContentLink. The difference is that the links served by LinkXL do not have a distinctive style; the paid links adopt the same color and underline scheme as backlinks that the publisher included him or herself. This stealth monetization is in sharp contrast to competing services that do the double-underline scheme. In this way, site visitors are not even aware that these are paid links in the first place. That is, unless the publisher discloses as such.

Note that the paid links served by LinkXL — which can be set as either nofollow or dofollow — are only placed within the content itself. They do not sell links in the sidebar or the footer.

Registration and Setup

To register as a LinkXL publisher, you’ll need to fill out a brief application form. There is no approval process, because as soon as you verify your email address, your account is good to go. This makes LinkXL very accessible for small publishers who may otherwise have trouble getting approved for link broker services.

After signing in for the first time, you’ll be granted access to the member area.

The control panel is reasonably straightforward with most of the navigation found along the left sidebar. When you add a site, you can set the default link price based on the Google PR of that page. You can also set the max number of keywords for sale on the page and specify the most appropriate category. A little further along on the wizard, you can also specify “hot” keywords. These can carry a premium price.

The easiest way to implement LinkXL on your blog is through the Wordpress plug-in. After uploading via FTP and activating the plug-in through your Wordpress dashboard, the only step remaining is to connect your blog with your LinkXL account. From there, you can choose where you want to sell ads too.

And that’s all there is to it. Installation was a piece of cake. Now you just have to wait for advertisers to buy your links. I’d imagine that dofollow links are more attractive, because they want that link juice, especially since it’s so cleverly masked.

Payment and Pricing

In terms of fees and payouts, LinkXL takes a 40% commission on all links sold. Competing services typically do a 50/50 split, so this is marginally better. Publishers are paid on the 10th of each month for all revenue collected during the previous month, assuming that their account balance reaches the minimum threshold of $100. Payment is available via PayPal or mailed check.

Too Deceptive For My Tastes

LinkXL is certainly not the first company to offer a paid link service, but they do have a few things that set them apart from the competition. Advertisers are able to not only hand-select where they want their links published, but also choose specific anchor text after the fact. There really is zero footprint, until a site visitor clicks on one of those links and finds themselves on a commercial site.

Although I realize this may sound a little hypocritical, I personally find that LinkXL is too deceptive for my tastes. How you feel on the matter is up to you.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP WITH LINKXL

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This post was guest blogged by Aditya Mahesh of BlogOnExpo, a social media site for “Make Money Online” and “Make Money Blogging” articles.

Zero to 500,000 in 40 Days

My site received 500,000 page views within 40 days. This is not a well established site that I have spend years working on or already have backlinks and traffic sources in place. It is a new site that I promoted heavily on social media sites, especially Digg.com. The following article will show you how I became a power user in Digg and successfully drove traffic to my sites using the social media site.

I first spent a few days looking over the structure of Digg.com and how stories are promoted to the homepage. Then, I found the perfect way to get 50% of my submissions to the homepage without breaking any of Digg’s TOS or even being unethical.

Shouting To Diggers

First, I would write a story that I thought would do well on Digg. This was usually a tech related story or something funny/strange/interesting. After I had my post submitted to Digg, I would use the shout feature to send the story to 100 of my Digg friends. These friends were the Digg users who digg hundreds of stories a day and look at everything. When you “shout” a story to these diggers, they digg it most of the time. I became friends with a number of these “big diggers” as well as a few other users who I shared content with and had developed a relationship. Then it became very simple. They would send me stories and I would send them stories using the Digg “shout feature. We would all digg only the stories we found interesting (not every story I received).

*SideNote: Its very important to note here that you ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY CANNOT SPAM. DO NOT send more than a shout or two a day and do not shout anything promotional in nature. Only shout quality content that Digg users like from a wide variety of websites (not just your own). If you Spam, everything you submit will be buried.

Don’t Just Summit Your Own Stories

However, because I submitted stories from dozens of sites (including my own) and the content I submitted interested the Digg.com audience, every story I submitted received 80+ diggs. Due to the algorithm, my stories often took 120+ Diggs to get to the homepage, and I reached this figure about 50% of the time. Whats more is that because I submitted interesting stories, my submissions often were the top submissions of the day driving 50,000+ unique visitors.

It is really that simple. To sum it up: Submit Quality Content, Make Friends of Digg, Send and Receive Shouts, and if you submit quality stories from all over the web instead of acting like a marketer only submitting your stories, you will do well.

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One of the best things about being a blogger is it gives you the option to do it from anywhere in the world. It doesn’t matter if I’m at at home in Vancouver or the apartment in Shanghai, as long as I have Internet access, I can log online and blog away. However, blogging is about more than just posting to a site. To be truly mobile, you need to free other things that can tie you down to a desk. Here’s how to go about it.

Store Files Online

The key to being a mobile blogger is to alway have access to your information. There are many ways to do this but by far the best is to just store your stuff on the Net. For example, I use to carry a lot of important files on a USB flash drive, until the day I needed access to it but forget to bring with me. Now, I store files online at a service like X Drive. X Drive offers 5GB of free online storage for your files, apps, photos, etc. If you need more space, there is a 50GB paid plan.

The nice thing about X Drive is if you have an AIM account, you already have access to it. Just log in with your AIM username and password and you can start uploading those most used files. Now you always have access to your files and you don’t have to worry where that USB drive is.

POP To GMail

For branding purposes, I recommend all bloggers get their own domain name with their own domain email. Instead of using yourname@Hotmail.com or yourname@GMail.co, you would use yourname@yourdomain.com and access it via Outlook or another email client. The problem with this setup is it limit you to checking emails on your computer. If you move to another computer or laptop, you can’t get at your emails. Sure, you can enter your email information into Outlook Express on a computer at a Net cafe but that opens up an another can of worms.

Fortunately, Google’s GMail service can check your domain email accounts for you. Simply go to the GMail settings and choose Accounts. From there, you’ll be able to enter your blog domain email information. Now you can read and reply to emails sent to yourname@yourdomain.com from any computer in the world. The only downside to the service is GMail limits you to a maximum of five POP accounts.

Google Docs Is Your Friend

Since discovering Google Docs, I haven’t used Microsoft Office for a very long time. The key difference between Docs and Office is Docs is online and accessible at anytime from any computer, anywhere in the world.

Docs also has a really nice collaboration feature so you can invite other people to help you work on a project. For example, my CES party invite list was done with Google Docs. Myself, Stephen Fung and Bob Buskirk all had access to the file to add and remove names. It made it very easy to produce a final invite list that was free of dupes.

Think Remote Everything

As I stated at the start of this post, the key to being a location-free blogger is to always have access to your key files and information. The above is just three ways to do that. There are tons more. Feel free to share your remote blogging methods. You know you got it right when you can run your business not just from your personal computer, but from any computer.

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