Google Affiliate for Blogger

Google announced a new program for Blogger blogs with a Gadget for "Advertise Products." If the blog has an active AdSense account, writing a blog post that contains copy for an available advertiser will result in the "Advertise Products" Gadget appearing with the option to add it to the blog.

From the Gadget, the available advertisers will appear. Select one, then publish the blog post. For blogs without an active AdSense account, an AdSense account will need to be setup. All of this can be done from the Google's Affiliate Publisher page.  

After signing up for the Google Affiliate terms and conditions and setting up your AdSense account, the Advertise Products gadget appears in the right sidebar when editing or writing a post. Clicking on the Gadget opens up a search box and window where advertisers are displayed based on the content of a blog post.

Twitter Ads for Small Business

American Express gave me a free $100 credit to use for Twitter advertising and I'm trying it out on my Twitter account @bobology. Two ads are possible, one promotes me as a follower and charges for each new follower, and the other promotes a specific tweet and charges for each click on the tweet link.

I selected the metropolitan areas in California where I offer my live classes, to see if promoting classes will result in any additional publicity. This is a test run before I start offering online video and audio classes available for purchase when I get my material in a Web deliverable format.

So far in just a few hours I've collected a few clicks on my tweets, and gained some new followers. I'll have a report on the stats and costs as I go along and provide updates.