June 2008 – Nate Whitehill

New Blog Design For My Biz Partner and UBD Designer, Matt Blancarte

I am happy to announce that my long-time friend and business partner, Matt Blancarte, has unleashed a new design for his personal blog, Matt Blancarte dot Com. I have known Matt since we were juniors in high school, so it is cool to see his new brand materialize online.

Matt has been working with UBD since its August 2007 inception, but he has been blogging since July of 2007. Matt’s blog focuses mostly on design, business, and personal development. Matt just posted a detailed write-up on the process and functionality behind his new design.

In addition to being UBD’s lead designer, Matt will be speaking on the “Blog Design Makeover” this year at IZEA Fest, a convention for bloggers and online advertisers. IZEA Fest will be held on September 11-13, 2008 in Orlando, Florida. In addition to speaking at the event, UBD will also be exhibiting at the event with a booth.

Several other well-known bloggers will be speaking at the event including Jeremy Schoemaker, Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, John Chow, Neil Patel and Michael Brito, among many other famous faces.

Head on over to Matt’s blog and let him know what you think of the new design. Congratulations on the new redesign, Matt!

T-Shirt Friday: Fat Man Unleashed

Thanks to Israel Lagares, aka Fat Man Unleashed, for sending me this awesome t-shirt.

Israel started Fat Man Unleashed in May of 2007 – a few months after I started my blog (January of 2007). UBD redesigned Fat Man Unleashed in October of 2007. Back then, FMU had only around 400 RSS subscribers. Today, Fat Man Unleashed has nearly 4000 readers! Talk about an online success story!

Israel recently started a social voting site specifically tailored to the health community called HealthRanker. HealthRanker has received mentions on many top blogs and is quickly becoming an authority in the social media circle.

Congratulations goes to Israel for creating two very popular and highly-trafficked websites! Make sure to check out Fat Man Unleashed and HealthRanker.

P.S. – The UBD Block Ad Plugin is here!

New UBD Website + Our First Plugin

I wanted to make a few quick announcements. First of all, my team and I have been hard at work redesigning the UBD site and fully integrating it into WordPress. I am happy to announce that this is now complete – our new company website runs off a single installation of WordPress.

WordPress serves as a great platform for not just blog content, but showcasing a portfolio, an e-commerce store, or even a forum. In the next few months, UBD will be releasing premium WordPress plugins, tools and themes that will help YOU use your blog more effectively.

Our First WordPress Plugin

This Friday (June 13th), UBD will be releasing its first WordPress plugin co-developed with the renowned WordPress developer, Alex King. Alex is one of the original contributing developers to WordPress and has authored many popular WordPress plugins, including ShareThis, Twitter Tools, and Popularity Contest.

We will also be releasing a free theme within the next week from the UBD design contest winner, Phillip van Coller.

What’s Up In The Blogosphere

Zac Johnson put together a comprehensive post that included pictures of many top blogger’s workspaces. I regret not being able to send my workspace pictures to Zac in time, but I finally cleaned up my desk and I posted a few pictures of my setup at the end of this article. You can read the article here: Affiliate Bloggers Work Space

I recently completed an interview with Mark Fulton from Dot Sauce Magazine. Dot Sauce is a well established blog that covers the tops of domaining and web development. You can read the interview here: Interview with Nate Whitehill, BlogDesign.com

Mike from Bootstrapping blog posted a well-rounded article on why blogging is essential for small business growth. Mike covers many important points about how a business can implement various online marketing strategies to stay one step ahead. You can read the article here: Small Business Blogging: 10 reasons why its essential to business growth

Paul just unveiled the curtains on his new private, super affiliate forum, Ubercamp. All I can say is that I have worked with Paul quite a bit in the past, and his knowledge and mastery of affiliate marketing is incredible. There is a tremendous amount of value in Ubercamp.

My Workspace Pictures

For those of you wondering what’s on the inside of my aluminum tower: Apple Mac Pro

Two Quad-Core 3.0GHz Intel Xeon processors (8 cores total)
8GB RAM
500 GB Internal Hard Drive
250 GB External Hard Drive
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT
Apple 30″ Cinema Display
16x double-layer SuperDrive
Mac OS X

On a side note, I’ve got some exciting announcements coming up this week. In fact, there should be a new announcement everyday this week until I leave for San Diego on Friday. Anyone else as anxious as I am for the 3G iPhone announcement a little later today?

Make Money By Promoting Free Stuff

There seems to be an unlimited number of ways to make money online these days. With so many different products and services to be affiliated with, how do we find a product/service that will convert well and be profitable?

One of the easiest ways to make money online is by promoting free products, such as magazine subscriptions or software trials. Just because a product is free does not mean there is no money to be made! Free products might also include things such as white papers, magazine subscriptions, or software. Depending on the product, a free product may convert better than a paid product.

Meet RevResponse

RevResponse is a new company that allows bloggers and affiliate marketers to provide their readers and audience with informative niche-specific resources.

The best part is that you can earn up to $20 for each payout. RevResponse allows publishers from all over the world to promote free product and earn money – you are not required to be a U.S. citizen. RevResponse pays its publishers via PayPal, but only 45 days after the end of the month in which the revenue was made. It would be nice if they paid out sooner than that.

A Wide Variety of Promotion Tools

Unlike Adsense and many other affiliate products, RevResponse offers many different ways to promote your offers including direct linking, flash or javascript widgets, email promotions and even through your RSS feed. You can see an example widget to your right.

Traditionally, the problem with monetizing widgets has been that even though they can be useful to readers, they do not produce any ROI. RevResponse aims to solve the problem with widget monetization by giving allowing publishers to provide informative materials while earning money.

RevResponse also allows you to display offers on a page which matches the brand and colors of your blog. You can see an example of my customized RevResponse page here.

Customize Your Promotions With Ease

Once you have been accepted into the RevResponse program, you can create interactive widgets for your blog in a few clicks. RevResponse offers a dynamic setup wizard which allows you to customize the promotional materials for your needs. You can then copy and paste the advertising code onto your site.

Earn More By Leveraging the Community

RevResponse strongly believes in doing whatever it takes to further open up the lines of communication between publishers, advertisers, and Account Managers. The RevResponse forum allows you to network with other publishers and learn what has and hasn’t worked for them. If you have a question or want to make a suggestion, you can post it in the forum. One thing I have been particularly impressed with about RevResponse is their professionalism and how quick they are to respond to my emails.

RevResponse believes in taking the good with the bad in effort to continually improve their program. In addition, if you wish for a more one-on-one experience, each RevResponse publisher is assigned an Account Manager.

Conclusion

Although RevResponse is new on the scene, it looks like they already established a dedicated community of bloggers and affiliate marketers. With an interactive widget creation tool, a wide variety of promotional methods, and a knowledgeable community, RevResponse appears to be a viable option for those interested in making money online.

I am going to experiment with a few RevResponse offers on my blog and I will let you know how responsive the revenues are, if you get what I’m saying. 😉