While I can’t say that I promote dating much, the Promote Dating site is filled with tons of useful tips, tutorials, and information on the dating affiliate scene. I know I picked up a thing or two that I’ll be trying!

I do a lot of blog work, both for myself and clients. As such, I’ve ended up trying out pretty much every tool, software, and script related to blogging. The majority I throw away, while others have proved themselves invaluable to saving me time, making me more money, or just making blogging much easier. (Plugins mentioned are for the Wordpress blogging platform only)

Free Adult Blogger Tools

1. Windows Live Writer - I have tried a lot of remote blogging tools, because the last thing I really want to do is log into a bunch of Wordpress and Blogger blogs to do updates. I have tossed aside all but one - Microsoft’s Live Writer. This nifty piece of stand alone software is in its third part of beta testing and has a ton of great features to make posting to my blogs easy. It supports remote posting to most major blog platforms, easy tagging, timestamp editing, image handling, image uploads, pinging, and pretty much everything else you could ever want in a remote blog posting software. To clear up any confusion, I use this on my handwritten blogs - it does not do anything with RSS.

2. Custom Wordpress Install Zip - You can save yourself a little bit of time on every Wordpress install by putting together your own custom zip of plugins and themes you commonly use. This works well if you have a ton of plugins that you don’t want to upload after the fact, and it’s especially useful if you aren’t on a host with one click installs.

3. Thumblogger - is a free hosted blog service with a rather interesting blogging script that I like a great deal. Plus, it’s the brain child of Twan, who is an absolutely amazing, brilliant person with lots of free tools that are quite helpful (as you’ll see reading down this list).

4. Blog Submitter - I don’t tend to link outside of my network on my blogs, but Twan’s directories are the one place I’ll always submit to. Part of it is because they are all nice PR, but the other part is because he made a submitter that makes it quite easy to get listed.

5. Jace’s List of RSS Feeds - Jace is the man to go to for all things RSS - and this is his list of great RSS feeds from sponsors. Go sign up under him and get some great feeds for blog content!

6. Related Posts Plugin - This neat plugin shows a list of related posts under each post (or wherever you put the php call). This might not sound like much, but Related Posts does a few helpful things at once for your blog. First, bounce rate is decreased on individual posts pages because the visitor sees related posts that will keep them reading on the blog. Second, this promotes better internal linking and traffic flow within your site. Pretty damn nifty, eh?

7. Google Sitemaps Generator Plugin - This plugin creates a google compatible sitemap, as well as pinging the webmaster tools service so that you can provide an easier crawling experience for Googlebot.

8. Gallery 2 Blog - This is another great service by Twan that allows you to create and feed your own RSS feeds. It’s simple to use - all you do is import a list of FHGs. The script will generate thumbnails (that look pretty nice, I have to say) and will allow you to set up a specific template for the blog posts. Then you can just go through, add some sentences to the default descriptions, and send the feed off to populate your blogs. It can automatically feed Thumblogger blogs, but the feeds are compatible with most RSS parsing software.

9. Social Poster - This is not a social bookmarking auto poster, but what it does do is help you submit a lot easier to the various adult social bookmarking sites out there. While I prefer to keep my own list of social sites, this can be helpful if you’re just starting out.

10. All in One SEO Plugin - I used to use 5 separate plugins for making Wordpress SEO friendly out of the box. Now, I use one - this plugin is great and you don’t really have to do much more than activate it.

11. Ping O Matic - There are lots of different pinging software out there - but I’ve always just used Ping O Matic to hit the standard list up. I tried refining a ping list a long time back, but except for one or two places it was mostly useless.

There are probably some that I am missing, but it’s rather late at night so my brain isn’t working completely. :)

Paid Tools for Adult Bloggers

While there are a plethora of free tools out there, some of the most useful ones are these paid tools. As a disclaimer, yes there are ref codes (why not put them in?) but feel free to strip them out if you really want to - all of the following are products I heavily endorse and want to support one way or another.

1. Hosthead - I love them. I love them for the amazing dedicated server they have me on, I love them for the near instant, quality support they have been giving me for almost a year now, and I love the fact that I’ve had no downtime other than that which I have caused myself. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to test loading and download speeds off a few of my sites - I’m more than happy to show anyone how great Hosthead is.

2. kaktusan’s Scripts - This guy has made a ton of very neat, time saving scripts that will help you out in your blogging travels. You can find full information on his site, as going over each of these would take up a bit too much space here - but needless to say, I use and love them:
Blogs Automator
Blogs Organizer
Links Organizer
Rocket Pinger
Gallery Scraper
Feeds Observer
Site Organizer
Tradezilla

3. SEO Book - Now, I’m not usually one for buying ‘guru’ books or anything like that. But the SEO Book (and site) is chock full of great information on all things SEO. That and I like books that get updated all the time.

Hopefully this article helps you out in your search for great blogging tools. I’ll update it once I’ve figured out what I’ve forgotten exactly.

I’m on the boards way more than I should be, but hey, at least I can do something useful and keep track of the latest sponsor promo threads for you. :)

Perfect Gonzo - To celebrate the launch of MILFthing, we are paying $100 for every Credit Card sale to MILFthing for 24 hours on Friday September 7th, 2007 starting at midnight Eastern Standard Time.
Adult Paymaster - ADULT PAYMASTER IS PAYING $50 FOR EVERY $4.95 TRIAL SIGNUP EVERY FRIDAY. That’s right! We’re not just having one special payout day. Starting September 7th, we’re paying affiliates $50 on $4.95 trials each and every Friday through the end of 2007.
Shapcash - 100% Revshare promo this weekend
Deecash - $50 PPS + 60% revshare on top 5 exclusive sites
Badgirlbucks - 100% revshare Aug 31st - Sept 7th
Tasty Dollars - $25 PPS + Rebills on Sept 8th and 9th, Sept 1st Console Payouts permanently bumped to 95% intial, 60% rebill.
Python - Sept 8th and 9th - $75 PPS on all HD sites
Dollarmachine - Last $55 PPS Niche Weekend
Thrillbucks - Signup before Sept 1st for 90% revshare for 90 days

You have probably heard that the best monetized blogs contain many different types of revenue streams. This is true in both mainstream and adult, and the reason is simple - you don’t want to put your eggs all in one basket. In addition to two or three main sponsors per blog, I’ve been looking at the many revenue streams that can be added to an adult blog (I’ll get to the mainstream ones once I have explored that side of the Internet more).

• Dating - This is one of the most common revenue streams I see on blogs. This is a non compete upsell that complements most porn blogs well - try to go for programs that allow you to target onto niche pages in order to get the most out of your traffic interested in dating.
• Webcams - This is another type of non compete upsell that is commonly used on adult blogs.
• Celebrities - Even niches that have nothing to do with celebrities, people are absolutely retarded over searching for their favorite celebrities, especially celebrity sponsors that show off their favorite skin shots.
• Sex Toys - While general sex toys work best on targetted sex toy traffic, advertising masturbation sleeves and other male sex aids are an effective non compete upsell.
• DVDs - Some people are really stuck on having a physical product in their hands. You can appeal to these types by offering a link where they can find DVDs.
• VOD / PPV Theaters might not rake in huge commissions at once, but they’re a great long term solution for monetizing traffic that simply refuses to pay monthly membership fees.
• PPC - There are quite a few ppc services that allow you to further monetize your site by selling clicked traffic.

There are very few mailers / newsletters that really get me hooked. I’m hooked on blogs a bit too much, so I imagine that might be part of the problem - I’m just too used to reading via a feedreader. I was going around a mainstream webmaster forum when I saw a reference to Nicheaday.com. This handy daily email presents a proven money making mainstream niche, includes the monthly searches for the term, AND includes 1,000 related keywords.

If you do make use of Niche a Day, don’t forget that Sultry Services also offers mainstream copywriting services.