Mini-Review: Stomping the Search Engines 2 is being released on 4th September 2008. The package comes with 2 DVDs, one the original Stomping course, the second the new and improved Stomping the Search engines 2 course. As art of the deal, you’ll be getting their new magazine – the “Net Effect” with the course.

The original Stomping the Search Engines was an audio course, but a very good one.  The new Stomping the Search Engines 2 is a video course that is divided into 7 modules (and 36 videos), created by some of the industries biggest names.  Jerry West (exceptional SEO), Andy Jenkins, Sherman Hu, Dan Thies, Leslie Rhode, Don Crowther, Brad Fallon and others.

The videos are all well done, and cover a huge array of information including:

• Spam & Deception
• Short Term Strategies: Low-Value Sites
• Aggressive White Hat
• How Search Engines Work
• Understanding the SERPs
• Search Engine Crawling
• Search Engine Ranking Recipes
• Keyword Strategy Concepts
• Keyword Research & Discovery
• Mapping Keywords to Content
• Competitive Research
• Site Structure Concepts
• Designing for Crawlability
• Anchor Text & Link Reputation
• Canonicalization & Duplicate Content
• Using Redirects
• Improving Your Indexing
• On Page SEO
• Optimizing Page Structure
• Get Your BODY In Shape
• Creating Unique Content
• Robots.txt Tutorial
• Link Building Concepts
• Vertical & General Directories
• Link Targets & Link Bait
• Marketing & Promotion
• Improving Results,
• a lot more…

How good is Stomping the Search Engines 2?

The guys who created this course run the very successful, high-ticket Stomper Net facility (members pay $800 a month).  They therefore have thousands of Stomper sites to refer to in there testing, so the information should be good.  Added to that the quality of the staff that they employ, and Stomping the Search Engines 2 is without doubt the best SEO guide I have seen to date.  This course was originally created as a $497 ticket item, but they are giving it away for free in the hope you will subscribe to their excellent Net Effect magazine.

This DVD will not only teach you SEO, but will answer a lot of the questions you may have based on weird stuff you have seen happen to your own sites.

The Net Effect Magazine I saw was a pre-production version, but I can promise you that you wont be disappointed by it.  Exerts like Jerry West (SEO guru), Leslie Rhode (who I know as the “links guy” after using his amazing Optilink tools), Andy Jenkins, Sherman Hu (the “Wordpress” guy) and a whole stack of others, all contribute articles to the magazine, and the content really is a very high quality as you can imagine.

I cannot help but give this course my full recommendation.  If you want to learn SEO from the masters, get Stomping the Search Engines 2 .

There are a number of different things to look out for when you sign up for an affiliate program. Not all affiliate programs look out for their affiliates because to them you are nothing more than a faceless source of free traffic. Some of the way this is done are obvious, but others are less so. Here we expose certain techniques that you should look out for when deciding upon an affiliate program to promote.

1. Link to affiliate program

Popular amongst Clickbank affiliate programs, links to Join Affiliate Program or Make Money web pages are the quickest way for you to lose your commission after sending a visitor to a product page. A lot of visitors will simply sign up themselves and buy through their own link. They get a discount, the merchant makes his percentage, you get nothing.

2. Toll Free Numbers on the sales page

Toll free numbers on sales pages are a great thing for the merchant because the visitor has an extra way to part with their cash quickly and easily. However, most merchants (not all) don’t have anything in place to track phone orders to the referring affiliate. Because of this, you don’t get the commission you deserve from your referral.

3. Demo versions of software

If the merchant provides a demo version of their software product which can be bought after a trial period, does the affiliate get commission. In some cases yes, in others no. The best situation would be if the merchant provided you with your own demo version with affiliate link embedded, so that you could offer the demo from your own site. Then when the visitor buys throught he software, you get your rightful commission.

4. Affiliate banners on the merchants own sales page

This one is an annoying source of affiliate leakage. Some merchants have taken to joining affiliate programs themselves so that if the visitors you refer to them don’t buy their own products, they (the merchant) can make commissions themselves for the affiliate programs they are promoting. This way the merchant makes money on your referral - you make nothing.

When we look at affiliate programs to include in this directory, they must pass stringent criteria. These are designed to protect your affiliate commissions and make sure that you get paid for sales generated from your referral link.

These 4 criteria are essential to get listed in this directory:

1. No link to the merchant’s affiliate program on the sales page.

2. If a toll-free number is located on the sales page, there must be a way of tracking phone orders to the referring affiliate.

3. If there are demo versions of the product, there must be tracking in place to make sure that sales are assigned to the correct affiliate.

4. No Affiliate banners on the merchants own sales page, or other links that can take your referral off the merchant site without making a commission.

In addition, we will be looking at ways in which the merchants goes above and beyond to ensure affiliates are well looked after. This can include things like:

1. Using special scripts like Adrian Ling’s Easy Click Mate to prevent affiliates from merely substituting their own affiliate ID in a link on your page.

2. Providing marketing material - banners, promotional materials etc.

3. Having a two-tiered affiliate program structure - i.e. you make money on your referrals, but also on referrals of your referrals.

4. Recurring commissions on your referrals (more typical with some membership sites or web hosting companies that give you a commission every month for the lifetime of the customer you referred)

Are you tired of losing affiliate commissions because a merchant doesn’t do enough to protect your cookie?

How many times have you seen affiliate sales pages that have a prominent link to their affiliate sign-up page? This is a regular occurrence especially amongst Clickbank affiliate programs. Have you ever wondered why these programs don’t have great conversion rates (for you!).

Well, they may very well convert much better than you think. If you send a visitor to Merchant X’s sales page via your affiliate link (thereby setting your cookie on that visitors machine), but the visitor sees a link to join the Merchant X’s affiliate program on the sales page, a large number of visitors will simply sign up for the affiliate program themselves and buy through their own link instead.

The outcome of this is you are sending your hard won visitors to a site that makes you little or no money. What about the merchant? Well he or she is fine. They make the sale anyway and don’t really care which affiliate gets the commission as long as they make the sale. You keep sending Merchant X free traffic and lining his or her pocket, while you wonder why you don’t make any commissions.

Here is the scenario:

1. You do your keyword research
2. You build your sites
3. You pay for your hosting
4. You get good rankings
5. You send your traffic to merchant X
6. Merchant X makes it easy for the visitor to steal your commission
7. Merchant makes his or her percentage so is happy
8. Visitor buys at a discount so is happy

You make NOTHING and are very unhappy

The above situation is just one way that your commission is being leaked by merchants that really don’t care enough about YOU. There are other ways that we discuss on our affiliate commission leakage page.