I have been so impressed with the work these guys have provided that I wish I could give them more projects. Since I am booked up with client-work right now, I thought perhaps I would let some others know about their services instead.

Roman Mottino manages a group of PHP Coders and website designers down in South America. He is one of the many contractors I have hired through www.rentacoder.com to work on my own projects, although now I deal with him directly.

You can reach him by emailing:
mottino
at
gmail
dot
com

Tell him Everett sent you.

Even if you don’t make huge profits from offering an affiliate program you should still have one. Here’s why:

Believe it or not, there are sites out there that make money selling other people’s products. And Believe it or not, some of these are comparison shopping websites. The people who own these sites are more likely to advise their readers to choose the product that they get a commission on instead of your product.

Even if yours is clearly superior.

When comparing two products, they may even go as far as to bash your product or use verbiage in such a way as to make your product seem inferior because they want the visitor to choose the other one. It comes down to simple economics: they don’t get paid if the user buys your product, but they get paid if the user buys your competitor’s product. …so you can’t really blame them for being a little biased.

There is nothing you can do about this other than start your own affiliate program and give these people a reason to promote ‘your’ product over the others. After all, it is their website and they have the right to leave off certain features when comparing two products. And it isn’t slander for them to say they prefer one over the other. In-fact, the review can appear to be very even-handed, while still leaning toward the product or brand that the webmaster wants you to buy. Here is an example:
Lana’s Eggwhites VS Eggwhites International

The above is a brand comparison between the two main distributors of liquid egg whites as a dietary protein supplement. Both products get four-stars, but notice that only one of them gets the “editor’s pick”. Also notice that the editor has tried one of them and not the other. Which one did the editor try and recommend? Why, the one with the affiliate program, of course! In-fact, First Page Fitness even has a landing page to capture searches on liquid eggwhites. And which brand of egg whites do you think we’re promoting as “the best” on that page? I’ll give you a hint - one has an affiliate program, and the other doesn’t.

Want more examples?
If you did a Google search for water filter reviews, or air filter comparisons you would find no shortage of websites promoting one product over the rest.

The danger isn’t necessarily that you lose that particular sale. The danger is that by NOT having an affiliate program you are motivating thousands of affiliate webmasters out there to give your product a poor review so their readers will instead choose to buy a different product - one that DOES have an affiliate program.

That is why I suggest to all brands that they have an affiliate program for reputation management.

Want more information about starting an affiliate program? Click here.

I received an email today telling me that Ipower Web is having a sale on hosting plans. Not only do you get a free domain name, but you get your website hosted for either one or two years for $4.95 a month. That’s almost half the normal cost!

I AM an affiliate of IPower Web, but I am an affiliate with lots of companies and don’t feel the need to blog about their deals. This just happens to be a REALLY good deal with a great host so I thought I would let me readers know.

Go get yourself a free domain and hosting for $5 a month here.

If you have been wanting to get a website and have just been on the fence about it, now is the time. There are all kinds of free wordpress themes and free website templates out there so you don’t even have to pay for the design.

Thanks to Dosh Dosh, I found a cool new Word Press Plug-in today called What Would Seth Godin Do, by Richard Miller.

You may remember my post a few days back about how SEOs and Marketing folks are going to be encouraging their visitors to use Google products because of the Google push toward search personalization this week. If not - read this. How clever of Google to do this, as it will spawn massive growth in the amount of people who use their tools, since every other site out there is going to jump on the train.

Now you may notice a box above my blog post that encourages you to subscribe to my blog using Google Reader. This is the WWSGD plug-in mentioned above. It should stop showing after only two visits, thereby not annoying anyone all that much. However, it will always show up for those who do not accept cookies, which may or may not be a significant portion of our readers.

So I ask the question: Does it annoy you? Can you even see it?

I know this isn’t what the plug-in was meant for. It actually defaults to “subscribe to my RSS feed” but I changed it to specifically encourage the Google Reader button. We’ll see how that works out…

I wish Gary Ruplinger would go “hide under a rock” somewhere and stop distributing this crap. And he’s probably going to be pissed off when I rank higher for his name than HE does because of this blog post. But that will just go to show any potential “client” who watches his video that what he offers is not going to get them “top search engine rankigns” or anything near that:

Thanks to Greg Boser for sharing this video about Mr. Ruplinger and his “services”.

Hey Niel, what do you think about this?