You may have noticed on this blog, either at the end of each post in the “about the author” sec­tion, or about halfway down the right side­bar, that I have a tip jar.

Peo­ple keep ask­ing me, “Do they really work?” You bet!

The tip jar is really a “buy me a beer or cof­fee” Pay­Pal dona­tion link auto­mat­i­cally inserted with the help of this excel­lent plu­gin. And since installing it about three years ago, I’ve been get­ting on aver­age 4–5 tips a month.

Some were meant to thank me for spe­cific posts, par­tic­u­larly my most pop­u­lar arti­cles. How­ever, I must add that the pas­sion­ate rants seem to get the biggest tips.

Nev­er­the­less, I never pub­licly acknowl­edged these peo­ple indi­vid­u­ally, and I didn’t really want to in case some of them would pre­fer to remain con­fi­den­tial. But I wanted to take a moment to say a big “thank you” to all of you who have sent a tip my way.

You guys are awe­some! I appre­ci­ate you.

Your con­tin­ued sup­port and loy­alty means the world to me.

A lot of peo­ple ask me what’s my blog­ging strat­egy. They want to know, for instance, how I post arti­cles, build a list, and drive traf­fic to my blog. More impor­tant, they want to know how I make money with it. Those are good questions.

The short answer, of course, is to keep offer­ing great con­tent. Fresh con­tent. Con­tent you find valu­able. Con­tent you believe may be of inter­est or value to your readers.

But here’s some­thing you might find surprising…

I don’t use my blog as a busi­ness model like some A-​​list blog­gers out there. Mak­ing money is purely a byprod­uct. Sure, I do have ads on it, inter­spersed through­out, link­ing either to my prod­ucts or to prod­ucts I’m an affil­i­ate of. But they are not focal points.

Granted, those ads do help to pay the bills, keep my blog alive, and incen­tivize me to con­tinue post­ing what I hope is valu­able con­tent for my readers.

But some peo­ple won­der how I drive traf­fic to this blog and build my list of sub­scribers. After all, I don’t adver­tise it at all with any paid adver­tis­ing — other than in my sig­na­ture file on some forum posts, or on my social net­work pro­files like Twit­ter and Face­book.

I’ve revealed part of my strat­egy in some courses, such as Suc­cess Chef Uni­ver­sity, which is our flag­ship train­ing prod­uct. I’ve also revealed it in a few inter­views I gave here and there. I’ve also revealed a hand­ful of them on this blog in the past.

How­ever, there are very spe­cific things I do to help me grow this blog.

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I often get requests from peo­ple ask­ing me what plu­g­ins do I use on this blog. Or, what are my favorite plu­g­ins. Some­times, I post about them. But these lists usu­ally become stale fast, because I test new plu­g­ins and change them all the time.

So I wanted to post an update and list some of my favorite plu­g­ins. How­ever, it was cum­ber­some to pick and choose which ones I wanted to post about because there are so many. So I’ve decided to do some­thing dif­fer­ent this year.

Using a plu­gin that lists all the plu­g­ins in use on a par­tic­u­lar blog (I’ll share that one with you in a moment), I man­aged to print a list of all my plu­g­ins in a sin­gle post.

How­ever, the descrip­tions you will read are those of the plu­gin authors. Some of them are poor and insuf­fi­cient. Oth­ers don’t explain how I use them specif­i­cally on this blog.

So I’ve also added a mini-​​description with addi­tional com­ments to each plu­gin to explain why, how, or where I’ve used it on this blog. I sin­cerely hope this list is use­ful to you. If it is, con­sider it a Christ­mas gift from me.

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After my recent push for Robert Plank’s Speed Copy Secrets copy­writ­ing spe­cial report on how to write copy in under an hour, I wanted to test a few other things from Robert, since he’s a gifted pro­gram­mer and offers some neat scripts.

(Actu­ally, I recently bought every­thing from Robert I could get my hands on, and so far I’m thor­oughly impressed. Specif­i­cally, his “Full-​​Blast PHP” and “Sales Page Tac­tics Vol­umes 1–3″ prod­ucts are fabulous.)

I’m test­ing just a cou­ple of Robert’s scripts on this blog, and early results are stun­ning. Let me share with you a few test results…

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One of the many tools avail­able that I absolutely love is Amem­ber from CGI-​​Central. Amem­ber not only man­ages my mem­ber­ship sites, it also han­dles dig­i­tal prod­uct sales, deliv­ery, and protection.

For instance, it pro­tects down­load pages, offers back­end sales and automa­tion, allows pro­tec­tion of “exter­nal” fold­ers and files, and it even comes with a built-​​in autore­spon­der. (And that’s just a par­tial list.)

I use Amem­ber with Word­Press for my mem­ber­ship sites, such as, for exam­ple, the all-​​new Suc­cess Chef Uni­ver­sity, among many others.

But Amem­ber does have its flaws…

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First off, this post is in no way com­pre­hen­sive. There are many dif­fer­ent ways to mon­e­tize your blog.

Of course, there’s sell­ing ad space on your blog, such as through the use of pay-​​per-​​click net­works like Google AdSense — which is the most popular.

But offer­ing will­ing adver­tis­ers to directly spon­sor your blog by buy­ing a post, an ad, or a link is one area that’s becom­ing increas­ingly popular.

Sites like ReviewMe​.com, PayPer​Post​.com, and Text​-Link​-Ads​.com are effec­tive in allow­ing blog­gers to get paid for sell­ing con­tent or links on their blogs. Basi­cally, these net­works bring both blog­gers and adver­tis­ers together.

Granted, this has been the sub­ject of a lot of con­tro­versy lately, par­tic­u­larly about dis­clo­sure. (And yes, all the links above are my affil­i­ate links.)

But what if you want to make money directly? What if you want more con­trol over how you mon­e­tize your blog? What if you want to make money based on sales (like an affil­i­ate com­mis­sion) and not just ad clicks or views?

Well, here are a few cool Word­Press plu­g­ins I found.

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I love read­ers’ ques­tions. And some­times, the same ques­tions keep com­ing up that I decide on post­ing a blan­ket answer on this blog to cover them.

I do this as a way to cre­ate con­tent for this blog, help my read­ers find the answers they’re look­ing for, and save me time from not hav­ing to answer the same ques­tions over and over again.

Prob­lem is, many peo­ple never find the blog post that answers their ques­tion, par­tic­u­larly if it’s old and sit­ting deep in the archives. And many peo­ple don’t take the time to search for it, because it’s work and it’s sim­ply eas­ier to con­tact my staff for the answer.

I thought about cre­at­ing a fre­quently asked ques­tions (FAQ) page. But I wanted a brain-​​dead easy solu­tion to be able to do this in a snap (much like post­ing to this blog), and offer more to my readers.

But also, I wanted one that would opti­mize my page for the search engines (where spe­cific key­words are included in the titles and ques­tions), and be easy enough for me to sim­ply answer ques­tions as I go along.

Finally, I found one…

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