I Joined PepperJam, You Can Too

After finding surveys, I decided there had to be other ways to make money online. Two other ways I made money online were through Amazon.com and eBay. (Though I would not join eBay until 2004). In both cases it was me selling used books online. While this makes for a very good income, it also is hard for me to make money from either Amazon or eBay due to my addiction of buying every book I see, and thus every penny I made off Amazon and eBay went right back into Amazon and eBay, with me bidding on more items than I was selling! I joined Amazon in 1997. Today, 12 years later, I am still active on both Amazon and eBay, however, I buy about 90% more off of them than I actually sell off of them.

My Amazon and eBay adventures however opened up a whole new world for me: web site building and affiliate marketing. Back when I joined Amazon, they were a fairly new and rather small company, looking for ways to expand, and I was one of their best and most active costumers, so when Amazon announced they were going to start affiliate programs, they sent me an email and asked me to be part of their Beta program to launch the test of affiliate marketing, all I needed, was a web site. Huh. A website. I didn't have one of those. Hadn't occurred to me that I could have one of those. I joined BlogSpot (a company that no longer exists as it was bought out by Google a few years later) and FreeWebs, and set out to making one website after another. I gained much of my online popularity a few years later when I joined WebRings and actually started promoting the 400+ websites I had ended up building. In 2005 I discovered ProBoads and what quickly followed was the creation of 13 forums. NaNoWriMo was found that same year. In 2006, I found MySpace and WordPress and was one of the very first Beta members of the new site StumbleUpon. By 2007, I had found Squidoo, MyBlogLog, Associated Content, and Helium. In 2008 I found FaceBook, SecondBrain, TagFoot, and AnswerBag. Between each of the big places, I was finding dozens of tiny ones as well, and before long I had more than 300 log-in accounts to keep track of and had a following of fans who were now calling themselves "EK's fangirls" or "EK's fanboys" and chanting the phrase "What Would EK Do?" resulting in T-shirts and bumper sticks stating: WWEKD?.

The odd thing about all of this was, while I was everywhere, had gained celebrity statues, and now belongs to such affiliate programs as ClickBank, Commission Junction, LinkShare, and a dozen or so others like them, I had yet to make a single penny from any of the affiliate programs. I was making money from Amazon, the original affiliate program that set me on my long road through web building, but had yet to see an actually PayDay from them, due to their minimum being set at $100 and their pay out only being 4% of the sale.

Than in 2008, I started hearing of a new place called Pepperjam. I kept hearing about how great Pepperjam was. Bloggers kept talking about how they use it to bring an income to their blog. Squidoo lensmasters started saying Pepperjam was bringing them in an extra income off their lenses at a rate of $400 to $5,000 per month.

I've tried dozens of affiliate programs like Pepperjam since 2003, and have yet to see a penny. Upon asking other members about these programs I keep getting the same answer "I had an account with them too. I never saw a penny either. I canceled my account and switched to Pepperjam instead. Now I'm making money every month." Okay. So, I haven't canceled my other affiliate accounts yet, but I have finally decided to go ahead a join Pepperjam. I want to find out if it really is as great as every one keeps telling me it is, and now I'm here.

I know what I can do. I can't just make a list, because, well, there just seems to be no point in doing so, and I can do anything unless I have a logical reason for it. Well, I was just looking at a few of the merchants on Pepperjam trying to figure out what I can do with them, when I realized that there are dozens of different types of banners. There are lots of different banner styles to choose from, and not every company has every size banner, and some companies have weird sizes no one else has. Than I had one of those light-bulb over head moments and realized I had a great excuse to make list of merchants now, not to make a list per say but rather to take a look at the different types of banners and how I might use them. Cool. Off to do that now.

This is by far the best size banner for use on Squidoo. They slide in nicely along the bottom of most every module, and they look great at the end of a guestbook. When you get to the end of this lens, take a notice of how I added one of these 468's to the guest book. They are big enough to attract the readers attention, yet small enough to not over power the page or compete with the words.



Likewise the streamline style of the 468 banner fits between paragraphs of your page so you can use them as borders to break up long sections of text. Do you see how I just added this one here right in the middle of the text, and your eyes were able to still move smoothly from one paragraph to the next, without being interrupted by the banner itself?

Here are some 468s again. This time showing how they look stacked. The 468 banners stack up nicly, so if you have several of them that complement each other you can stack them one on top of the other to create your own custom tower, like so:

The 250px square banner fits very nicely on Squidoo lenses. I think I like the 250px square banners best, because they show a nice colorful picture of the products on them and you can fit 2 of them quite nicely side by side on a Squidoo lens. Four all together, make a nice block-combo and would be a creative way to feature four different yet complementary companies.

Like the mini-banner, the square button seems a bit small and out of place for Squidoo lenses. It would fit quite nicely into your bio section at the top of the lens though. I think these look best when used in the side bar of a blog.

A big bold colorful banner like this one, would make a good topic for an entire Squidoo lens! You could feature the banner promenatly on the lens and than write a review about the company.



Than farther down on the guest book of the lens, you can farther enhance it by adding the matching 468 to the guest book, pulling the look together.

Tower banners don't look as good on a Squidoo lens, but if you stack several side by side they do look a little bit better. I think these would work best on a blog's sidebar rather than a Squidoo lens. Don't you?



I placed 3 side by side here and it doesn't look that bad. Just one though, leaves a big blank mess on your lens which doesn't look nice at all. Some of the towers really have nice pictures on them though, don't they? I like this one, but see how it looks on Squidoo? It leave a big blank space. Dead air. You don't want dead air on your lens. If you really have your heart set on using towers on your lens, you need to know the coding for floating words around images.



Let's see if I can remember how to float words around an image. I've done it before, so I know I can do it, but I've never tried it with an affiliate banner before so I'm not sure what will happen here. Now, I don't have enough words or lines of text to write here to justify adding yet another tower, so I'm going to use a smaller banner to show you what floating text around a banner looks like. So, if you want to float text, this is what it will look like.

I know a lot of folks signing up for these programs are not code writers or java scripters like me, so, I'll tell you how to write up this code while I'm here. It's a bit more complicated than basic html, but it's just as easy once you know what to do. Here's the HTML code to copy and paste:



<b style="background: #000000; width: 200px; float: left; padding: 15px; margin: 15px; font-size: 150%; line-height: 1.5em;"alt="Quote">PASTE YOUR BANNER CODE HERE</b>



A quick explaination of the code: the color #000000 (black) should be changed to #ffffff (white) if you do not add a background color to your lens. I have changed the background color of this lens to #000000 (black) thus in the code the background color must be black s well. I could just have as easily changed it from #000000 (black) to #FE2E2E (red) to match the boarder color instead of the background color, which I am going to do right now so you can see what I'm talking about.

You'll also notice that in this second one, I changed to word "left" to "right" instead, thus moving the banner to the other side of the page.

There will be some companies whom you will find have odd sized banners, that no other company has. Take these 360x185s for example. This is a banner size rarely used and rightly so, because it does not fit well on most standard web pages. This particular size was made with bloggers in mind, as it fits well inside the frames of most standard blog posts, but it is a bit too awkward to be used on a Squidoo lens.



And here is another odd sized banner, this one 400x400. While awkward and a bit overbearing, this size does fit well on blog posts, but leaves a bit of an overflow empty space when used on Squidoo lenses.

This is better. At least, it fits on the page. I still say it's too big though. I'm not a fan of the big flashing banners. As far as I'm concerned any banner over 300px tall or 600 px wide, is just too big and shouldn't be used.

I don't know what it is about pink banners, but I just like them. I always think pink banners look best of any banners, and you will see me using them more often than other color themed banners. PepperJam has no shortage of pink banners, so you can be certain they'll show up on my Pink lenses.

I'll add a note of warning here about several of the PepperJam affiliate member companies: Porn, sex videos, and M and X rated sites are members of PepperJam, and they are not always open about what they are! Always click on a banner, BEFORE you publish your Squidoo lens, to be certain that the site really is what you think it is. One "Friend Finder" makes itself sound like it's a pen-pal site, but when you click on the banner, it goes to a porn site selling X-rated videos! There seems to be a lot of these types of companies on PepperJam, so be careful and make sure you know what the company actually is, before you start linking back to it.