Another Great week!

We had 11 affiliates have record weeks, which is itself a record

Marilyn K. joined the First Lead Club
No affiliates made $1,000 or $5,000 for the first time, but a lot of affiliates made $100, $200, and $500 for the first time.

Each little milestone is important and I am extremely happy for two affiliates in particular who I know have worked hard and broke the $500 barrier for the first time last week.  Way to go guys!

The top payouts for this week were as follows (we are listing 6 once again to give props to #6 for such a great week…keep up the good work!)

$19,023.00

$14,948.25

$14,734.25

$13,420.90

$11,689.00

$9,125.83

Almost had 6 break $10,000 which would have been totally awesome.  Maybe next week?

Rob Wood has a great post on Jamdo about the top SEO blogs and guides for this year.

Jim Boykin, Andy Hagans, and Jim Westergren are his suggestions and I agree.  They should be great resources for keeping up with SEO throughout the year!
Check it out at Jamdo

The Grade A WebSite Tool is pretty cool.

Enter your URL and come keywords and it will give you a grade and some helpful information all in one place!
I found it to be helpful mostly for newbies to SEO but also to intermediates. Even one of our SEO experts found one thing to be pretty cool.

Check it out here

Sorry to post this so late, but Affiliate Summit really had us busy

Thanks to the great work of our CFO, Bob Klee, all payments were made on time, even with us gone!

We had 4 affiliates have record weeks and 2 join the First Lead Club
Congrats to the David G. and Easir A. for sending in their first leads.

One affiliate made a $5,000 payout for the first time!

Our top 5 payouts last week were:

$18,902.50

$15,203.20

$13,167.04

$11,789.40

$9,891.00

So we are finally back from Affiliate Summit!

I can only say that as always, affiliate marketing conventions are probably the best combination of fun and education that you can find!

First, Las Vegas is…well, Las Vegas. On Monday night we all went to the Ghost Room on top of the Palms Hotel and the view of the city from the 56th (?) floor was literally breathtaking.

Saturday night was the Affiliate Dinner followed by a private party at the Pure nightclub. It was so great to catch up with so many affiliates and affiliate managers and share ideas, experiences, and a few funny stories.

Sunday afternoon was the always fun booth set-up. Inevitably something always goes wrong with these things and it did this time again, but somehow we made it. That night we went over to the ShareASale party featuring a Sing-A-Long with their CEO Brian Littleton and a collection of affiliates and managers. Paul totally impressed me and the crowd by playing the drums and guitar and I and Michael Nunez of Suluta Management absolutely butchered Mr. Jones by the Counting Crows.

Monday and Tuesday were exhibition and classroom days. I literally met over 300 affiliates who are some of the greatest people I have ever met. I am constantly blown away by the creativity and dedication of you guys.

As always at these things, some of the best conversations came shortly before the sun rises and we are all exhausted, but this trip was well worth it and we are already looking forward to Affiliate Summit East in Miami!

You can find videos of the presentations and other stuff here

New to SEO or just need to know a certain unfamiliar term?

Check out SEO Glosssary

Scott Jangro rocks!For those of you who do not know of Scott, he

He has started a site called BumpZee that is so far one of the best (especially in its infancy) social networking sites for affiliate marketing. I especially love the fact that they have a compilation of many affiliate blogs (making it so much easier to keep up with the news).

Definitely check it out for yourself.

The second week of 2007 was a great week.

10 affiliates had record weeks and we welcomed 6 affiliates to the First Lead Club
Congratulations to:

Brian A.

Heidi B.

Ben S.

Ken D.

Roy H.

Angela D.

We had 1 affiliate break $1,000 for the first time, Michael B.

And one affiliate broke the $10,000 barrier for the first time!

Our top 5 payouts last week were:

$19,458.25

$14,654.00

$14,362.70

$14,045.50

$10,029.00

This is the first time we have ever had 5 affiliates over $10,000.  What a great week!

Despite the semi-creepy images on their homepage, so far the best tool we have found for checking broken links is Xenu’s Link Sleuth. According to their site Xenu’s Link Sleuth ™ checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets.

It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Additional features:

• Simple, no-frills user-interface
• Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors)
• Simple report format, can also be e-mailed
• Executable file smaller than 1MB
• Supports SSL websites (”https:// “)
• Partial testing of ftp and gopher sites
• Detects and reports redirected URLs
• Site Map

So check it out today!

For some reason of late I am quite the night owl. Odds are I will be a little late to the office later this morning but I definitely thought you should check out this post on Matt Cutts’ blog. It is hot off the presses!
It is late and I think you should read the entire post but here is an overview of some things that caught my eye:

- site:operator will now display regular listings above the supplemental listings.

- Google is continuing to improve the supplemental results with more frequent indexing

- While there is nothing wrong with supplemental listings, the tried and true method of getting out of the supplemental listings is the same as always - good links to the supplemental page.

- You may notice your rankings changing more frequently as Google is now updating every day or two now, rather than once a month or so.

What are your thoughts? Have you seen any changes in your rankings or anything to alarm your?

Last week was definitely a great start for 2007.

12 affiliates had record weeks..what a week!
Congratulations to our First Lead Club Affiliates (affiliates who sent their first lead this past week)Jennifer S.

Jonathan L.

Matthew K.

Razil R.

Congrats to the new $1,000 Club Members:

Todd C.

Rob W.

Our top payouts this week were:

$17,023.25

$14,230.50

$13,693.00

$12,450.30

$8,892.75

$8,859.00

I included 6 this week because there is a great “battle” for 5th place!

Overall, 2007 is shaping up well…

I found this a while back but did not have the time to test it until recently. I found it to be one of the best tools for adding keywords to your PPC campaigns.

According to the Keyword Tumbler web site:

Keyword Tumbler is a free keyword research marketing tool that takes your existing keyword phrase and generates multiple variations of it, simply by mixing the words in each keyword phrase around.

Why would you want to do this?

Well according to Amit Singhal, principal scientist at Google, a guy who really should know what he’s talking about, over 50% of the 200 million searches performed a day on Google have never been searched before!

And let’s not forget what Perry Marshall, author of the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords said at Carl Galletti’s Internet Marketing Superconference in June 2004: “Every combination of keywords that somebody could conceivably type in on Google is a market.”

Keyword Tumbler helps you build huge keyword lists in seconds!

So check out the Keyword Tumbler and see for yourself!

I am in the office today catching up on some work and noticed that we have two extra FREE tickets to Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas.

Do you want to go?

I will collect the name of all those interested if you will email me by this Friday January 12 at 5:00 pm Central Time. There is no contest, all you have to do is email me at matt [at] hometownquotes.com and I will draw names on Friday.

Hope to see you there!

Added Note on 1/8 - Affiliate Summit is officially sold out, so this may be your only way to get tickets!

Last week should be the last slow week for quite some time.

January, as I have said so many times, is our affiliates time to shine!

Here are the results from the last week of 2006:

Congratulations to our First Lead Club Affiliates (affiliates who sent their first lead this past week)

Robby K.

Nina E.

Mike J.

Gina Y.

Jonathan L.

Two affiliates fell just short of cracking $1000 this week for the first time, but hopefully they will make it next week!

Our top payouts last week were:

$15,964.20

$9,313.75

$8,430.65

$8,420.50

$7,496.50

Looking forward to a great 2007!