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.

Ever since discovering Disqus, I have been keeping an eye on their product. For some periods of time I have used their commenting system across my blogs – yet for some reason or another would revert to WordPress‘ default commenting system or try other services like Intense Debate. I have more than few complains about the speed of their plugin – one of the main reasons I would stop using it.

But things at Disqus have changed. Not only they gained a powerful ally in Andy Beard, whose opinion is respected and valued by the thousands in the blogging community, they have also dramatically improved their product from the time I last tested it.

If you are dissatisfied with the you current commenting system on your blog, here are my two cents on why you should seriously consider using Disqus on your blog.

• Disqus allows your readers to comment using their Facebook & Twitter Credentials.
• Disqus allows you to reply to comments via e-mail.
• Disqus allows you to manage multiple blogs from one account.
• Disqus integrates well into Blogger.com powered blogs. If you share my sentiment, you probably do not comment often on Blogger- their native comment system needs some major overhaul. Using the Disqus on blogger can probably increase users interaction via comments.
• Finally Disqus folks at Diqus are really paying attention to what other people are saying about their services. They also seem to be implementing things gathered from the feedback from users.

In the past I often questioned using a third party commenting system. Now I am becoming more and more convinced that Disqus is actually one of the very few systems capable of providing real value to it’s users.

I doubt anyone from 1 and 1 Internet will ever read this rant. But if you do, this first two paragraph should be sufficient for you to discover why I think you are the worst hosting company in the world. It will only take 5 minutes of your time.

You suck not because you sent me to a collection agency- it was never my intention not to pay you, canceling my credit card was the only way to insure my hosting account with you will be canceled. I knew you are going to send me to collections, you have made it clear in our phone conversations. You suck because you failed to satisfy a potential client who was willing to pay you $1,200 a year for indefinite period of time. This potential client also was your affiliate, but no longer do I wish to promote your products. In fact I will use every opportunity to tell my colleagues and friends about my experience. You guys need to get your act together and at least make an attempt to show you care about your clients.

Now the longer version for rest of my visitors. I have to point out that this issue has nothing to do with the quality of their services or their hardware, it is about complete and utter failure of their customer service side of business.

Back in December, I was faced with an urgent need of a dedicated box, which actually proved to be a false “alarm” since my shared host handles double amount of traffic now. I decided to give 1 & 1 Internet a try. One thing worried me at the time of moving my websites to 1 & 1- their MySQL version was older from what my current shared host was using. With some hesitation I went ahead and ordered the dedicated box. I was impressed by the attention of a sales rep with whom I spoke on the phone. That was the only time I received any attention from them by the way. So I went ahead knowing that I would have to spend considerable amount of time and effort to work around the issues of exporting MySQL databases and reverting them to the older version. At the end it proved to be beyond my expertise and my patience. After a week of unsuccessful attempts I decided to cancel my account being fully aware that I will have to pay an extra set up fee associated with set up fees- if I stayed with 1 & 1 the set up fee would have been waved. I was also assured in the conversation by the sales representative that I should have no problem to cancel my account. So I did. I logged into my account and canceled my plan. Little did I know that in order to cancel your dedicated hosting plan with 1 & 1 you need to fax in or mail in the cancellation request and it is impossible to cancel your account online.

One month went by – I noticed a charge to my credit card but did not make an issue out of it. I just presumed it was the set up fee. Another months goes by another charge. Call to customer support reveals that I did not follow the procedure properly in canceling my account- it was canceled only partially the domains but the dedicated box. You see 1 & 1 has fine print in their TOS- a nice way to say that your customer is always wrong. There in the fine print it says that you can’t cancel your plan without faxing such a request with your signature to 1 & 1. No kidding! It took them 5 seconds to process my card via their websites at the time of the sign up….

I called several other times in attempt to speak to a supervisor or some one who had an authority to help me. Guess what, never got to speak to any one like that. I felt that their customer service people are trained to dump you once you ask for some one in the higher up position. I also Tweeted to my friends on Twitter and they tried to refer me to people they knew at 1 & 1- but all my efforts seemed to run into an endless circle of one person passing me onto another. The end result? The 1 & 1 Internet send me to collection agency since I canceled my credit card after I was charged three months in the row for the service I never used and in good faith believed to have canceled it.

In my opinion 1 & 1 is the worst web host I have ever caame across and I am sure I will never consider them in the future.

Since some time in 2005 I have been developing a good (but so far “online only”) relationship with Matthew Brown and blogger form United Kingdom. While benefiting greatly from his friendship, I certainly feel that I did not give back enough.

I can’t describe the feeling I had when I learned that Matt has been in search of his son for the last 5 years. Needless to say that I also felt ashamed it took me 4 years to find out about Matt’s heartache….

In September 2004, Matt saw Jono (Jonathen) for the last time. Jono’s mother made a decision (on the value of which I rather not dwell) to take him away from his father and his other relatives. Jono is about 9 years old now and I pray and hope he is well taken care off in spite of the terrible decisions adults may have made on his behalf.

As Matt mentioned in one of his blogs, you only six handshakes away from every person in the world. It is in light of that I am writing this post…

Jono, if you ever come across this post, you should know that your dad is looking for you and is trying to tell all the world how much he loves you and how much he misses you.

To every one else who may come across this post, please help spread the word about Jono. You may learn more about him by visiting the For Jono website created by his dad Matthew Brown. If you are a member of Facebook consider becoming a fan of For Jono page and share it with your friends. Every little help matters. Every little help is a big help. Every little prayer is a big prayer.