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Today, I am reviewing the affiliate program of a Search Marketing company called LoveClients, which offers a huge array of SEO/PPC/SEM services packaged into a monthly subscription. This is a fairly new affiliate program, and with some pretty big payouts, it may be a very interesting opportunity to jump aboard early.

Payouts

Let me start with the LoveClients affiliate program itself; the payouts start out at 50$/month for the life of a referred customer. There is a great performance incentive, where once you hit 50 signups, you will start earning $60/month, and once you hit 100, it becomes $75/month, always recurring for the life of the customer. You can also refer new affiliates for 20% commission on their sales!

These payouts are pretty huge, but as I’m sure you know, the search engine market is extremely competitive and may not be easy to break into, especially on smaller budgets, but read on and I’ll be talking about a few neat ideas you can use to market this program that won’t break the bank!

Affiliate Tools & Stats

The affiliate area is actually quite impressive. It is a privately run affiliate program, but has many of the features a network would provide. The sign up process is quick and painless, and they manually approve accounts within 24-48hrs. Once approved, you are given access to a variety of marketing materials, such as banners and page peel ads.

Now here’s where the LoveClients affiliate program really starts to shine. First of all, they have real time stats, which is a must for closely monitoring your traffic/conversion rates. In a competitive industry like this, where paid clicks range in dollars not cents, this is key. Another great feature is that you can send potential clients to any page on their site using their deep link generator. Now you can more effectively pre-sell your referrals and send them to the page that converts best for you.

They also have a couple of pretty cool features such as CommissionAlert and CommissionStats, which are Windows programs that can keep you up to date with your affiliate stats without having to constantly check their site.

Support

As far as their responsiveness, I have been in contact with them frequently in the past, and they are quick to respond. I am sure they will reply to any questions, comments, requests or concerns in a prompt and timely matter.

They are also taking requests for new marketing materials should you need them.

Marketing Ideas

Now as promised, I’ve got a couple of ideas on how you can market this program without having to outspend the big boys. First, if you yourself are interested in SEO, you could create a few pages to rise up the search engine rankings for some slightly long tail SEO terms. While these may be competitive, even a top 50 ranking could earn you some good credibility and referral power. Relate your skills to those provided by LoveClients, seen here.

My second (and better idea), is to take a more “offline” approach. Perhaps you can get some freelance jobs creating websites for local businesses, which later you can introduce them to the power of search engine marketing, and refer them to LoveClients. By taking a pro-active stance by meeting with many business owners in your town/city, you could not only make some commissions with LoveClients, but really you could be starting a website development business of your own!

These are just a couple of ideas really. With a high quality affiliate program having big payouts such as this, it’s definitely worth thinking creatively to find new ways of marketing it!

So in conclusion, while this is still a fairly new affiliate opportunity, it is growing rapidly and already has a very well run program set up and ready to go. I definitely suggest you sign up today, and give it an honest try. There is plenty of money to be made in this hot industry, and the LoveClients affiliate program gives you a great opportunity to do so.

Note: This is a paid review; however this has no bearing whatsoever on any of my opinions or conclusions.

Picking a good domain name is pretty important, as it will permanently define your site. It’s one of the only things you can’t really change without starting all over again (SEO wise). Putting some thought into registering the best domain name possible is definitely worth while. Here are some pointers to consider before getting started.

Branding vs. Keyword Based Domains

These are the two main classes of domain names, and both have their benefits. You can occasionally find a good mix of both in one name, but those are becoming rarer and rarer.

Branding: I would recommend a “branded” domain name for those who wish to become big and well known. Examples include Google.com, Amazon.com, even Yimto.com! A good branded domain name would be something that is easily memorable; a name that if someone arrived at your site and really liked it, would be able to remember it, and tell their friends. Short is good, but long can be ok too if it’s catchy.

Keyword: A keyword based domain can be really useful for mini-sites, or more “one time visit” projects. What I mean is, search engines will give you more credit with a good main keyword in your domain, so people may be able to land on your pages easier/cheaper. But, these domains can be a bit long and unmemorable, so having them come back can be tougher. Many keyword domains are already taken, so chances are you’ll have to settle for a longer name with an extra word or two.

Domain Name Length

Pretty obviously, the shorter the better, for two reasons; first because it’s easier to remember and more concise, second because in PPC, you will have more characters to space in your display url, leaving more keyword room.

The beauty of a branded domain name is that it can really be anything, I’m pretty happy with my 5 letter domain name that you can actually say out loud, even though it isn’t a real word!

Domain Name Extension

Again, a .com domain name is top of the pecking order, only for the fact that it is the most well known extension, and therefore earns more legitimacy/respect in the eyes of the readers. A .net or .org can substitute, but always shoot for the .com

There can be benefits to using other extensions though, for example a .info can be dirt cheap, and only cost you 1 character in terms of url length. Then again, very few people know of this extension, so it is very poor in terms of memorability.

Dashes or no Dashes?

Personally, I think dashes can work ok in a keyword based domain, but will really hinder any sort of brand building. Say I were talking to you on the phone, and I wanted to tell you about a site called super-action-time.com, I probably would forget to mention the dashes (or be too lazy to say them haha), and you would probably end up at superactiontime.com, wondering what the heck I was talking about.

For keyword domains though, with the priority on SEO and PPC traffic, it’s not as much of a problem, but still does lengthen the domain. Whether it’s worth it or not depends on how bad you want those keywords

PPC is a whole different ballgame when it comes to choosing keywords. Compared to traditional SEO, where LSI allows you to rank for many related terms, with PPC you must target specific keywords and that is all you will rank for. So choosing the best keywords that are laser targeted to your campaign is crucial, now more than ever with the quality score algorithm.

That means you want to build tightly knit keyword groups with a relevant destination for many keywords, which gives you better quality score and cheaper clicks.

Building those keyword lists can be tricky though, but I’ve found a pretty neat way to do it yourself. Right now, I’m not subscribed to any major keyword service like Wordtracker, so I’ve been using the Google Keyword Tool, as well as the Wordtracker free keyword tool to gather some basic data.

They do provide you with good ideas, but the keywords you get from these are pretty much all over the map, and not practical for starting an effective ad group for PPC. They can show you some of the good short tail keywords that are getting a lot of traffic, but to generate long tail keywords, they are pretty much junk.

However you can take the short tail keywords, and adapt them yourself to create your long tail keyword possibilities. Take this for example, say you want to sell dog clothes as an affiliate (I hope not though lol), you search up “dog clothes” in the Google Keyword Tool, and get a bunch of semi-related dog clothes keywords.

Here, I see a lot of prefixes: small, large, fancy, luxury, wholesale etc. What we are going to do is generate many different permutations of target keywords using the tool at PermGen.com to create prospective long tail, low competition PPC keywords. You could enter in all of those adjectives into the first word list. Then, in the second word list, include dog, and a list of many dog breeds that you can find anywhere on the net. Finally in the third list, you could enter many different kinds of dog clothes, like sweaters, boots, muzzles etc.

So in the end, you will have a huge list of longtail keywords like luxury poodle sweater, fancy terrier boots etc. etc. Very long tail, but easy to group together, for example, ___ terrier boots, luxury poodle ___.

You can do this with as many combinations of words as you want. Now throw these back into the Adwords Keyword Tool, or better yet a Hexatrack campaign, and you can determine whether it is worth going after these markets.

Many people say that long tail keywords in PPC are dead because of quality score, but I’m not sure I believe that. I don’t have my own conclusive proof yet, but from all the information I’ve read about how to get good quality score, it shouldn’t be a problem at all with tightly knit long tail keyword groups. I’ll definitely bring results to you as I experiment further with this.

[Update:] Jonny has graciously offered a substantial discount for my readers, read on for more details or click here!

The Guru Assassin is a new membership program developed by Jonny Andrews, a very successful online entrepreneur. I’m sure you could call Jonny a “guru” himself, but the guru assassin ecourse isn’t about beating gurus, it’s about joining them. Basically, the ecourse focuses on dissecting the entire process of developing a successful business online from start to finish.

It takes a bit of a unique twist here because all of the lessons are delivered in video format. Now honestly, I have never really been a fan of video, since I prefer reading to listening, but Jonny does a good job here. He has a very personable and likable attitude, as well as an optimistic delivery. Even though it may be a little harder to absorb the material, he will pass his positive mind frame onto you. (Just watch his intro video to see what I mean)

He does include some downloadable materials with many of his videos, like a pdf file he uses in the video for example, and that’s good. Loading a video many times just to re-find information would be pretty annoying in my opinion, and this helps some. I think he may be wise to provide transcripts of his videos as well in the future, to make it easier to find information with say a ctrl+f search. Either that, or very detailed outlines of the videos, so that you can jump to specific parts easily.

Right now, this program is still in it’s earlier stages, but it’s growing quite quickly. I’ve had access to the membership area for a couple of weeks now, and the number of videos has almost doubled in this time. Some of the topics include money management, tools of the trade, finding niches, time lines, market research, sales pages, buyer psychology, SEO, and location targeting.

Jonny makes himself extremely available, in fact, this is one of his selling points. He wants to provide members with exactly what they want, and frequently reminds us that members can email him anytime, and he will make videos about topics suggested.

You might think since this membership program is still in the early stages, it might be worth waiting for more content to appear, but really, you may have a great opportunity here. As one of the newer members, Jonny will be much more accessible to you, and your questions will surely be answered. He is also arranging a lot of different content as well, such as conference calls and discussion forums.

Of course, at the same time, as the program is in the early stages, there isn’t the most content, and for the price of $97 per month, it may be a bit steep for some people. It’s definitely growing fast though, and as each video is 15 to 90 minutes long, I think it’s worth the cost.

Special Offer: Save 20% off your monthly rate! Simply enter the following coupon code when signing up: 144765820
Note: You must sign up through my affiliate link for this code to work.

Luckily, you can actually get a free 7-day trial to see for yourself what it’s like, and I highly recommend it. You’ve got nothing to lose, and a lot to learn So take a look, and see if you like this format!

Pros:
- Video format may appeal to some
- Positivity is contagious
- Accessible “teacher”
- Frequent updates

Cons:
- Video format may not appeal to some
- Would like to see transcripts or video indexes
- A bit expensive (New coupon code really helps though!)
- New program

The Yimto Verdict: In The GREEN!

The free trial and awesome coupon code puts it over the edge, give it a try for yourself!

Today I’ve been absolutely swamped in landing page reading materials, most of it from this gigantic compilation of articles found here. There are some good tips here, although I think it’s a bit of theory overkill, since really there is no perfect landing page for every niche. That’s why once again, testing and experimentation is key to success.

What you might want to do when starting to make a landing page for a new niche is look to your competitors for general ideas on what kind of basic landing page seems to be working well, whether it be something fancy, basic, list building, sales driven, etc. Then you can use some of the tips in those articles to tweak and refine these ideas into some nice new landing pages.

Of course, it’s nice to have a good base to start with, but to truly get the best results, you’re going to have to test a lot. That’s where split testing comes into play; this is when you have two or more versions of the same page, and have visitors sent to each to find out which page converts the best.

I just found this great tool called Google Web Optimizer, which can help you split test for free! Funny enough, I’ve been in the internet marketing community for a long time, and I’ve heard of at least 5-6 paid solutions before just recently finding out about this… Maybe free options are a secret

Anyways, I haven’t had any time to test it yet, but it looks great. It offers classic A/B split testing, which is definitely the best way to start. This lets you simply take 2 separate pages, and feed your traffic to each 50/50. This should be used to test 1 variable, like a different headline for example. You can get very accurate results with this form of testing.

The other way you can test, one that I’m not as familiar with, but have seen products charging $177 for, is by multivariate testing, which will change many different aspects of a page. It’s more complex, and takes more page views to see definite results, but could yield very interesting data faster.

Like I said, I haven’t really used it much yet, but I know how important split testing can be, so I just had to share this little gem with you guys. I’ll definitely be implementing this with new landing pages I’m working on, and bring more results in the future.