Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

I've been using Shoemoney Tools for a while now, and I've got to say, it's a great program. Not cheap, but still very nice for someone doing SEO or affiliate marketing. His keyword tools generates a decent list, although it doesn't have search volume. But, as I've said on SEO 101 before, I don't care about volume - I want to rank for everything. ;) One of his coolest tools is a "Domain Marketplace". This is for domains that aren't currently registered that have .edu, .mil or .gov links. That's a great way to kick off a new project. I've seen some interesting looking domains, but only bit on one so far. I hope to buy more soon. I suggested they add a search function, and Dillsmack added that, which makes it very useful. It'll allow you to search for a word and it finds it in the domains that are available, so you can find something that's at least somewhat related to what you're doing. The keyword tracker is ok, but not amazing....

We have an affiliate that just started creating some content, which we encourage. However, they started bidding against us on Overture and getting quite a few sales from that. While it isn't a problem them getting sales, when it's sales that we would have gotten already (same keywords on Overture) it raises a question with me about the real value of this affiliate. The other question I have is this: would they be seeing enough traffic for it to pay off? Granted, these keywords are mostly under 20 cents per click, but even a 20% conversion rate means they need to make almost $1.00 per sale (if people are following their links in the first place). They don't rank in any of the 3 major search engines, so we aren't competing in that market yet, but they originally copied most of our homepage as their homepage and now they're paying for traffic that we normally buy. Sure, we can afford to get the #1 position back from them, but the real question is why should I have to b...