LeadPress, the premier builder of search engine optimized Mortgage Lead Generation Websites for Mortgage Brokers, Loan Officers, Net Branches, and Lead Aggregators, just launched an affiliate program. If you are interested in promoting LeadPress and it’s products you have a chance to earn up to $249 per lead for life time license. The subscription options pay affiliate commissions in a form of a 50% of the plan’s price plus 10% of recurring monthly commissions.

Who is behind LeadPress?

LeadPress is the brain child of Trace Richardson, a well known blogger among real estate professionals. Trace is a licensed Real Estate Broker in the state of California. His experience in online marketing, social media and lead generating industry serves as assurance that if you join the LeadPress affiliate program, you will receive an unsurpassed attention from the founder himself should you join LeadPress’ affiliate program.

I would also like to to take this opportunity to congratulate Trace on the launch of the affiliate program. I very proud to consider him my friend and wish him and LeadPress much success! Well done!

Disclaimer: This post is entirely my personal opinion.

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

Not so long ago LeapFish.com lunched their own affiliate program. LeapFish is a search aggregator that displays the results from Google, Yahoo, MSN and some other websites. They strip down the sponsored ads from the search results provided to them via APIs by Google, Yahoo and MSN while inserting their own ads instead. Ad can be purchased on LeapFish.com for a set price with 5% yearly renewal fee. According to LeapFish the average price per keyword is $1,499:

Is LeapFish Affiliate Program Promoting The Wrong Product?
It appears the LeapFish affiliate program is aimed at gaining traffic to their website and the sale of keywords is left to often overly aggressive sales executives- which in my opinion is a mistake. It sends the wrong signal, in my opinion, that LeapFish.com is really in desperate need of traffic and exposure (see my take on their linking payola below). According to their FQA an affiliate will make $0.05 for each search performed through a search widget provided by LeapFish. As I pointed out in my comment at 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Forums to LeapFish affiliate manager, I believe LeapFish should have linked their affiliate program to the sales of keywords instead, it would have helped them on the following levels:

• eliminate partially or completely the need of sales executives
• saving money spend on hiring and reimbursing the sales executives.
• finally at 5%-10% commission, it will automatically make LeapFish one of the most competitive affiliate programs out there, if they had a product worth buying that is.

LeapFish Affiliate Program Will Suffer From Bad Reviews
In my opinion, LeapFish.com did not go far enough nor were they sincere in apologizing for overly aggressive sales person who committed click fraud trying to “scare” potential client into advertising with LeapFish. While LeapFish reacted by firing the employee, the LeapFish blamed TechCrunch for misrepresenting the entire event and treating LeapFish unjustly. The problem with a such bad publicity is that many affiliates will pass the opportunity to make money with LeapFish once they learn about the above described click fraud fiasco. Many affiliate marketers use extensively the pay per click advertising across major search engines themselves and the click fraud episode will serve as a huge turn off for many of them.

The true irony about this is that, according to Spyfu, LeapFish started to run pay per click campaigns in June. It contradicts their sales pitch that “the prices on PPC have skyrocketed therefore you need to advertise with LeapFish”.

LeapFish Affiliate Program is Nothing More Than a “Linking Payola” scheme
Their affiliate program seams to be focused on “linking payola” as their search widget code contains a SEO friendly link back to their search engine. Since I am not an affiliate with LeapFish, I do not now if removing the link or at least adding a “nofollow” attribute to it is against their TOS. It is my opinion that the best way to gain incoming links is to provide services that your clients and/or users will rave about.

LapFish Search Widgets Might Be Misleading To Visitors
The search widget may confuse some of the visitors, . Many websites integrate search box for the purposes of searching their own website- one of the reason I have implemented Lijit on my blog. The LeapFish widget issues no warning before taking away the visitors to LeapFish.com search results page. If you have two search widgets one to search your own website and another is to search LeapFish it may get even more confusing.

LeapFish Affiliate Program’s Payout is To Small To Attract Affiliates. Will Mac Air Giveaways Do The Trick?
Considering the pay out of $0.05 (five cents) per search performed, I am skeptical that any average blogger will be able to make $500 or more per month. LeapFish is trying to get new affiliates by holding a contest at the end of each a winner will receive a Mac Air (note the amount of astroturfing done on Twitter by LeapFish management and employees). While this incentive may attract some affiliates, in my opinion LeapFish’s plan is rather shortsighted- I see many bloggers and website owners taking the search widget down after the contest is over. Unless of course giveaways become regular.

Leaders in “Make Money Online” Niche Will Never Endorse LeapFish Affiliate Program.
Not sue if I would ever get involved with an affiliate program offered by a meta search engine. But to be honest I have never heard of one before. Personally I am always excited to learn that a company’s marketing plan includes affiliate program. LeapFish, in my opinion, introduced their affiliate program too little too late and had been scarred beyond hope by the feedback resulting from high pressure sales methods- some of those contacted by LeapFish sales associates compared conversations to the episodes from the movie “Boiler Room”. I seriously doubt that Shoemoney, Problogger, Zac Johnson, Ian Fernando, John Chow, Jason Katzenback or any serious affiliate or internet marketer will start promoting LeapFish any time soon. The giveaways can generate some temporary interest, but much more is needed to keep their affiliate program afloat- a product worth investing into.

Over the last few years I have tried several different solutions that allowed me to create affiliate websites featuring thousands of products from my merchants. Two of my favorites so far were a) WordPress Datafeed Import Script – a script for WordPress that allowing you to import merchants datafeeds creating a blog post for each product and b)AffiliSotre- a stand alone script that also allowed you to easy create affiliate websites using datafeeds from your affiliate networks and merchants.

One of the big tasks associate with both above mentioned scripts was the preparation and cleanup of datafeeds before adding them to your websites, since every network has their own way of formating their datafeeds. Needless to say when I came across Datafeedr- I was sold immediately.

If you are inexperience programmer like myself, Datafeedr maybe the way to go. It does however require some basic knowledge of WordPress and it is not free, but good folks at Datafeedr are rather confident about their products and offer a 30 days money back guarantee.

Since the Datafeedr is the most expensive solution I have used so far. I will spend considerable amount of time writing about my experience with this plugin, it’s features and even their affiliate program. While I am immensely impressed with some Datafeedr features, there are few features I would like to see improved or added.

If you would like to read more about my experience with Datafeedr- make sure to subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter.

Increase Your Affiliate Earning Potential With An eCommerce Online Business

If you’re an affiliate marketer then you understand the fact that the more products you have to promote, the better commission cheques you’re going to receive at the end of every month.

If you’re used to promoting one or two programs at a time, it’s time for you to explore a new option which will allow you to increase your profits more than you ever thought possible.

The world of internet commerce has created more opportunities for affiliate marketers than any other program ever has – the opportunity to have an entire ecommerce online storefront, full of products you can make commissions off of, all based in whatever niche you choose!

Building Your Own eCommerce Online Store

Having your own ecommerce online store is actually much simpler than most people think. A way to build an affiliate ecommerce store is by using data feeds. Data feeds make it possible to display products from one or more merchants in the same web site.

Data feeds are similar to the RSS feeds used by blogs – an ecommerce store set up by a traditional offline business will place descriptions, pictures, and prices of their products into these feeds, and then affiliate marketers can incorporate these feeds into their own ecommerce store and make a commission off of each product sold.

You can either build your own online store, or you can utilise the services of an ecommerce solutions company like Datafeedr.com who will walk you through all the steps and support you as you get your online presence built.

We recommend using the services of an ecommerce solutions company when building your ecommerce online store, simply because they already have all of the software in place to set up your data feeds.

Data feeds are the lifeblood of an ecommerce online store, as they are the ecommerce software that adds new products for you to promote to the site. Adding products manually to your ecommerce online store is certainly possible, but it is a very time consuming process.

Data feeds take all the guesswork out of adding new products to your ecommerce online site, making it easier for you to make better profits with a wider selection to offer your visitors.

What Are You Waiting For?

There’s never been a better time to build your own ecommerce online store, full of products that you could be making generous commissions from for every sale.

The folks at Datafeedr.com have millions of different products that you can choose from for your ecommerce online store; and are ready to help you get your web site up and running in no time!

Watch the video at Datafeedr.com and see how easy it is to set up your own affiliate data feed stores.

My friend Mark from Digital Product Reporter is at it again, coding and having some fun…. This time with WordPress of all things. Who knows maybe he will come around to fall in love with the best blogging platform out there.

Mark recently have release a neat little eBay plugin for WordPress, and I think eBay “junkies” can appreciate it. I have not been an affiliate with eBay until I got my hands on Mark’s plugin so I will probably offer no opinion on how this plugin can be improved.

Once installed on your WordPress, plugin pulls in the latest auctions from eBay by keywords specified by you. It displays the eBay items starting from the auction to end the soonest. Once an auction is completed it moves the item is replaced by the next auction in line. So on many levels this is a sort of “set it and forget it” plugin- as it continues to do the work for you without you giving it any attention.
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