I read about this over at 5 Star Affiliate Blogs, but the original post is at Affiliate Blog. I don’t know how he does his calculations, but he has calculated the top 25 affiliate programs at CJ by true EPC. The categories at the very least are not surprising, with financial at the top.

This kind of information can be very useful. However, you do also need to keep in mind that the top paying categories are more competitive, and therefore may be harder to get enough traffic for good results. It’s a decision each affiliate has to make about how competitive a term they want to go for.

My personal preference is to go for a balance. Some of my sites are in highly competitive areas. Others are not. My feeling is that just as I want to have a variety of income sources, I want to have a variety of types of sites that said income comes from. The basic logic is that if one category starts not performing well for me, I still have others to focus on.

Then there’s the other side of that logic, which says that I can’t learn to master everything, so I might perform worse by doing things this way. Jack of all trades, master of none, as they say. As I said, it’s a personal decision and one I’m comfortable with. Besides, researching topics is a big part of what I love about affiliate marketing.

Yes, I got everything done on time. It’s all taken care of. But as I said, I almost made a mistake.

I logged onto EFTPS today to make my payment. This is a great way to handle my tax payments, as it comes directly out of the account I choose. However, I had forgotten that you have to log in and request the payment by 8 pm Eastern the night before.

That’s right. Can’t do it today and be credited with making the payment on time.

Fortunately, I do read through these things, and realized that I would have to mail the IRS a check instead. So I dug out my preprinted forms and ran to the post office, long before the crowds for last minute tax filing got there.

There is a certain irony to this, so far as I am concerned… if I had filed electronically, the payment would be taken out tomorrow. I figure it’s actually going to take the IRS longer to cash my check because they have to get it through the mail. Kind of amusing that I’ll keep my money just a little longer this way.

You have to find some way to amuse yourself when paying taxes.

It’s getting close to the deadline! Not as close as it would be most years, since the deadline actually falls on Monday, but nonetheless, it really is time to get them done if you aren’t done already. You don’t want to have to spend Easter Sunday working on them rather than spending time with your loved ones.

As you may know, article submission is very popular. I submit articles pretty regularly myself, using an old version of Ezine Announcer I have on hand (the current version does not support article submission). However, even using tools it takes a long time to go through and submit articles.

Another tool I used was a freebie that submits only to Article Dashboard sites. This tool was a bit better, since all it left for me to do was click a few places and it handled the rest, including the login. Faster, but due to the number of sites, it still took a very long time to get done.

Now, I don’t know why I didn’t check this out sooner, but one of the sites I often submit to is iSnare. Well, I finally took a look at their article distribution service, and if it’s half as good as it looks, I’m not going to do this myself ever again!

Why? Because my time is worth much more than $2 an hour, and it only costs about $2 to submit an article using iSnare’s service. Even using submission tools it would often take me more than an hour to go through all the article sites I know of.

Now, obviously this is a recurring cost, while article submission software only costs once. But one important lesson to learn in business is when to let someone else do the work. Can I earn more than $2 by letting them do the work? You bet! We won’t even talk about how much frustration it saves.

They say it takes a few days for approval of each article before distribution, so I won’t know right away how things go, but I look forward to seeing the results.

But it still stung the last time Google updated PR and two of my sites zeroed out. No reason.

I looked today and was quite delighted that they got their PR back.

Now, there is only one reason why I care about this. Many people won’t do link exchanges if your site lacks PR. In fact, one of the sites had somebody fill out the form in its directory for a link exchange, but between when they filled it out and I responded, my PR vanished. So what did they do? Reply back to my acceptance of their link that my site needed to “grow up” and get some PR before they would link to me. Well, that’s one company I’m not interested in linking to. Sour grapes, maybe, since PR 0 sites do get a pretty solid review from me before I’ll link to them, to make sure it’s not for a reason, but if I think the site deserves the link, PR makes no difference.

It’s just so nice seeing my sites back where they belong. Actually, they both went up one rank, which is neat to see.

Now, for those of you obsessing over PageRank, remember that it is a very small part of how Google ranks you. Some say it makes no difference at all. It’s hard to tell since Google claims something over 100 factors matter when ranking your site. I figure it can’t hurt but it’s not the most important thing that I consider as I develop my websites.

It’s good to see Clickbank trying to be a little more user friendly for affiliates. It still has a lot of faults, in my opinion, but they are at least trying a little more these days.

My Marketplace is available when you login to your Clickbank account, beneath your daily stats. Clicking on it gives a list of recommended products that Clickbank thinks may go well with what you are currently successfully selling, based on your sales for the past 15 weeks.

I found some of my recommendations interesting. There are several products I absolutely won’t offer, but there are some good ones I hadn’t noticed too. This does have some potential, I think.

Clickbank has always had an interesting collection of electronic goods available, and now they are working on making it easier to find products to offer. What can I say? Now that they have competition from companies such as PayDotCom, they finally seem to be addressing a few of the issues they’ve had for years. There are several to go, still, but an improvement is an improvement.