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The following is a paid review and is my complete and honest opinion. If you would like your own paid review on my blog please visit the advertise page.

At the end of March, I entered WinningtheWeb.com’s $15,000 blog contest and sponsored a free review for one lucky winner.

It turns out, I won an autographed copy of Kris Jones’ upcoming book about SEO. For those of you who do not know, Kris Jones is an online entrepreneur and he owns the popular pepperjam network.

As for the reason of this post, I would like to congratulate Derek Salyers for winning a free review on my blog for his site. Derek is the owner of a blog called Click Consultants. This blog focuses on helping you learn affiliate marketing, which is something that I am getting into.

On my first glance of Derek’s website, I was visually pleased. I am a big fan of orange and black color schemes (if you couldn’t tell already), and Derek has a phenomenally brandable logo. In blogging, you want to be as unique as possible, and the design and logo that Derek has definitely will do that job for him.

Derek’s theme is optimized for the first time reader, with an easy to subscribe button at the top center of the page, as well as popular and recent articles to the left and right of them. This allows first time visitors a fast chance to see the newest, as well as the most important stuff Derek has ever written.

Derek has monetized his blog with the standard 125×125 advertisements on the sidebar (like this blog), and until he sells his advertising it looks like they are affiliate network affiliate links right now.

Below the 125×125’s it looks like two columns, and it makes the blog look crammed. The one thing I regret when I had my new theme designed was that I should have just kept it at one sidebar. Just like my blog, Derek’s theme has too much sidebar room with the two columns and this results in having more than one post on the homepage have a completely empty sidebar.

Moving on from appearances, the content on Click Consultants appears well written. Derek has gone a completely professional route by having nearly 80-90% of his posts as professional as can be, with the only 10-20% being personal posts or blog contests.

Click Consultants has a popular affiliate forum, which boasts over 1250 members already who have made over 8750 posts. The forums are made to help beginners learn affiliate marketing, as well as help the median marketers improve their game. The cost of joining the forum, however, is $29.99 a month or a one time payment of $279.99. While a monthly charge is a huge turn-off for most people, the amount of money some affiliate marketers make is incredible. While I am a bit leery to fork out $30 because I do not know how much good knowledge is listed in this forums that can’t be found elsewhere for free. Shame the forum doesn’t have a few day trial for a dollar or two, as that would probably increase sales.

Well, if you are looking to learn affiliate marketing and want to give the $30/m forums a shot, I would love to hear if they helped you.

Luis Pereira over at Stumpedia asked me to do a paid review to follow up my original post about Stumpedia. By the looks of it, he has added a lot of changes, but for those who have not already experimented with this people powered search engine, I will start with the introduction about the site.

Stumpedia is an interesting twist on conventional search engines - it relies on user participation and submission to provide search results rather than sending out spiders to crawl websites. The site is one hundred percent powered by the people that use it.

Stumpedia works by letting registered users submit links to specific search queries. When you perform a search, the page that subsequently appears gives you a simple, instantaneous way to add a link and description. These links are then reviewed by other users and can be given a positive or negative rating. Their ranking in search results is determined by this system of peer grading. While this submission process is great for interaction and can potentially provide more user-friendly results, it has potential for abuse and is wholly dependent on the community for quality control and content - much like Wikipedia. It’s a hit-or-miss system.

Since it’s still a fairly new service, Stumpedia only has 450 users and 2,800 links. There is practically no competition for keywords (there are seven results for “blogging,” for example) so if you submit your website to relevant keywords you are almost guaranteed to remain on the first page of the term for a while. A few minutes of registration and submission can have beneficial effects on traffic in the long run.

In addition to getting new viewers, Stumpedia’s links are “dofollow” and thus have SEO benefits. You can get dozens of backlinks to your site easily.

Overall, this new service is an interesting foray into a new kind of search engine. While it’s not close to dethroning Google anytime soon, it has its individual merits. The interactive search results, traffic potential, and backlinks are solid reasons to check Stumpedia out.

To benefit the early users, the site offers the ability to see the top activity in the last week, month, and year. As of the time of this writing, my blog is currently the 7th most popular link on the site. If you decide to check out the site, consider giving my blog a thumbs up.

All in all, the site is incredibly simple without a layout and the logo isn’t too amazing. Upon first impression, I thought to myself, what the heck is with the yellow guy in the logo? It doesn’t really make the logo look any better, and definitely doesn’t add anything to the site. The site really just boasts about the service, rather than the user interface. I am not a big fan of the name, as it is an obvious combination of “stumbleupon” and “wikipedia” and branding wise, it gets confusing when you are hearing it for the first time. When I first saw it, I immediately read it as Stumbleupon because that has been branded in my head for a long time.

In Stumpedia’s current state, it is EXTREMELY susceptible to spam. Unlike going the wikipedia route of removing bad content, the only choice the user has is to give the site a thumbs down. However, my blog has 8 thumbs up and 1 thumbs down, and is ranking above a site that has 8 thumbs up. This tells me that the thumbs down feature is completely useless, because I would rather have a thumbs down than someone not voting at all.

Another spam problem occurs when a user submits his own site to hundreds of different keywords. An example I see that occurred today is:

firefighter linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 56 minutes, 3 hours ago
fire linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 56 minutes, 3 hours ago
Structure fire linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 56 minutes, 3 hours ago
Search and rescue linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 56 minutes, 3 hours ago
Firefighting linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 56 minutes, 3 hours ago
California news linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 57 minutes, 3 hours ago
wildfires linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 57 minutes, 3 hours ago
wildfire linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 58 minutes, 3 hours ago
wildland fire linked to http://calfirenews.com/ by rocdad1 - 58 minutes, 3 hours ago

As far as I can tell, a search for “fire” shouldn’t bring up that website.

In conclusion, I can honestly say that I don’t see anyone ever using this service in it’s present form. The only beneficial use for it in my opinion, is that you can hook a few new visitors and build a few new links. Unless a more professional system is put into place to actually bring up better use results, this website will never be more than a spam haven.

Well, assuming that over 90% of my readers own websites, go ahead and submit your own link to rank for whatever term you want!

The following is a paid review and is my complete and honest opinion. If you would like your own paid review on my blog please visit the advertise page.

In the past few weeks, I have done a lot of conference calling with my friends over at Datepad.com, and there are two things I have learned from it. The first thing I learned was that a LOT of work gets done when you have a weekly phone call with your team to see what everyone has done and what improvements can be made. It makes doing business over the internet as close as it can be to working as if you were three feet away from your team. While conference calling is incredibly useful for small (and large) businesses, it does have one downfall. It is incredibly expensive and can rack up a serious bill at the end of the month. Lucky for you, todays paid review is a startup that hopes to change all that. The site that is being reviewed today is called AffordableConferencing.com.

Affordable Conferencing allows your business to have a conference call with a large (or small) number of people all connected to the same line, much like having your entire staff in your room. By getting everyone together, you can get a lot of work done in less time, and a lot of unique ideas get thrown out that wouldn’t have been heard if you talk to your staff on lets say, instant messengers.

Affordable Conferencing is prominent in offering a very personalized service, and fitting all of their customer’s needs. The company offers many different ways to get your audio conferencing the way you want it. They stride in being able to set you up in 5 minutes for your teleconferencing needs. The owner, Tom, is a down to earth guy and has continually offered me his phone number so that I may talk to him in person if I wanted to. This one-on-one service is what sets the powerful small startups from the ‘big companies’ that take weeks to reply to a simple support email.

The three main products that Affordable Conferencing offers are Econo toll free conferencing, a flat rate conferencing solution, and “Sunday School” teleconferencing. If you have a large company with around 250 employees, a monthly flat rate can get you the bulk price of only $1 per line per month. The weird thing is, if you get MORE than 250 lines, the price per line actually goes back up to $1.50 each, so it is incredibly expensive for a few lines, and for a lot of lines, but it is normal pricing for 250 lines. That seems a bit off in my mind, as you would think if you had 1000 lines, you would get them at a really bulk price of only $0.40-60 each instead of increasing the price from $1 each to $1.50.

Good Things

1. It is easy to use.
2. You can have it setup within 5 minutes.
3. They offer a direct line to call for support.
4. No overage charges.
5. Cheaper than a lot of very large conference calling providers.
6. They focus highly on customer support.
7. No advertisements other than the product.
8. Very brandable name, easy to remember.

Bad Things

1. For many small startups, $0.09 per person per minute is expensive.
2. If you have more than 250 lines, you lose your bulk benefits.
3. The site is an ugly “sales” page, rather than a nice looking site.
4. The right side is hard to read. Lots of information in a one inch column.
5. If you have 9 or less people, you can use a free alternative like Skype.
6. The $0.09 a minute is in ADDITION to your actual cell/phone bill.

Tom asked me if I could give him a little plug, and here is Tom’s quick 5 second pitch:

Conference Call ’til your heart’s content - Get your entire group on the phone at once! Sell more, get more accomplished fast!

In a nutshell, if you have 9 or less employees it is a wise idea to use a free internet alternative like Skype, but if you are a larger corporation it might be more affordable to consider getting flat rate conferencing.

The following is a paid review and is my complete and honest opinion. If you would like your own paid review on my blog please visit the advertise page.

Today I am going to review a site called Green Eggs and Planet. While an environmentally focused (green) blog is a bit off-topic for an internet marketing blog, I accepted it for a paid review because I believe everyone needs a bit of information on reducing carbon emissions. Green related topics are going to be very popular this year and even have an effect on voting polls for the presidential campaign. At the current rate, our planet is dieing because of all the pollution we give off, and so bringing blogs like Green Eggs and Planet in the spotlight will hopefully be step one into educating more people about helping the environment.

Improving your lifestyle while contributing to the cutback of pollution can be a process that anyone can adapt to. For instance, ever consider where all your garbage goes when you throw it out? I must admit, I personally have not, but while reading some of the articles written by Green Eggs and Planet author Matty Byloos, I am beginning to reconsider the approach I take throughout my every day routine in order to cut down my negative impact on the environment.

If you can, take a moment to marvel at the various tips, videos, and articles that Byloos’ blog outlines. “Green” is a key topic in today’s world, from studies being performed to uncover if global warming is actually an issue, to new methods aimed at recycling to cut down on client change.

The posts which focused on the impact our actions as humans have on animals really stood out for me. Think about it this way, if the money spent on war was instead used to find new advances on cutting down our eco-emissions, maybe these animals would not be living in the hazardous conditions they are currently in.

Byloos updates his blog quite often, with two posts on some days while missing a few days here and there (sort of like my blog). Byloos could make more money with his blog by using advertising networks like Adsense, which generally pay a lot of money for green topics. Byloos frequently posts products that are eco-friendly, from natural and organic products for your pets to beauty products for personal use.

Pros:

• Various categories and posts to choose from
• Multiple sections dedicated to specific topics, such as green travel or even organic foods
• Layout colors match targeted purpose of blog. Design sticks to the name, its green!
• Articles really get you thinking on the issue of global warming and pollution
• Brandable name
• More content than advertisements

Cons:

• Footer with links to outgoing sources is poorly laid out
• Footer has a weird design to it
• Footer’s white on green is hard to read
• Advertisements could be arranged better
• Search box seems awkwardly thrown in
• Posts on homepage are snippets, kinda annoying
• Widgets on the sidebar seem cluttered
• Navigation at the top could be better

All in all, Green Eggs and Planet is a unique environment (green) blog, run by Matty Byloos, who is a search engine optimizer like most of my readers, and I have no doubt he will build upon his blog and increase his profits. If Byloos uses any of my recommendations I think users will be able to navigate around his site easier, which will result in more pageviews, readers, and ultimately more money.

If you are interested in Green Eggs and Planet, consider subscribing to their RSS feed.