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UK Payday Loan Affiliate Network – T.UK Review

by Melvin · May 12, 2017

This review is sponsored by T.UK

I’ve reviewed a handful of payday loans affiliate programs in the past and one thing that’s always obvious with them is how much full of hype they tend to be. Perhaps it has more to do with how lucrative that industry is but we would still need to know if the network we’re going with is the real deal or just all about hype.

We were approached by T.UK for this review and you can read more about them in this review and see for yourself.

Zero Parallel Review – Payday Loans Affiliate Program

by Melvin · Jan 22, 2016

This review is sponsored by ZeroParallel.com

Affiliate networks strictly focused on payday loans aren’t exactly unheard of as there are actually lots of them since many years ago. Because of how profitable this particular niche is, they just keep springing everywhere which makes it hard to find which network is the reliable one. Zero Parallel approached us to make a review about them so we spent some time to see if they’re worth looking at for the payday loans space.

The Right Strategies to Save Money When Renting Apartments in the Philippines

by Melvin · Jun 3, 2015

This is a guest post by Jose Warren Sola

No matter where you live, your monthly apartment fees probably take the largest portion of your take-home pay. In addition, there are utility bills and other expenses that you have to consider as well. In a practical perspective, you want to lower the rental costs of your accommodation. However, with the tight economy, you are going to have little leverage in finding a cheap apartment that satisfies your needs. Nonetheless, you can always find a bargain. Prepare for your property search with the right strategies and you just might save some money on your next location.

Skip Brokers

Unless you live in a big city with a considerably high demand for apartments, like Manila, Antipolo, Davao, or Cebu, don’t bother involving an apartment broker. They will typically charge a commission fee that is usually a percent of the first year’s rent. Take advantage of the available range of apartment search tools and online property finding marketplaces to find a suitable accommodation match in just a few clicks.

Have Roommates

Having a roommate or two is always a great way of saving money on your apartment rent. Take advantage of sites such as sublet.com, roommates.com and iBilik.ph, as well as social media listings to find perfect roommates. Sharing rental costs with roommates is way much cheaper than renting an apartment on your own.

Additionally, you can save more on your apartment rent by sharing food with your roommates. You can buy groceries in bulk and split the bill. You can also resort to cooking your meals together. Cooking in bulk is generally less expensive than making a meal at a time, or eating outside.

Choose a Location outside an Urban Area

Although apartments within the city center may seem convenient and flashy, it doesn’t make a lot of sense if you will struggle to pay rent. Checking for apartments in the city suburbs that are within a commutable distance to your workplace or school will help you save a lot of money when renting apartments. You can use online property search tools, such as zipmatch, rent.ph and rentpad.com.ph to speed up your hunt.

Negotiate

Negotiating is one vital tip many people shun. Before signing a lease, try to negotiate with your landlord. Sometimes, if you are willing to sign a considerably longer lease, your landlord may consider reducing your apartment monthly rent. This will help you cut down on the apartment expenses and secure your accommodation for a longer time.

Skip Luxurious Facilities

In picking apartments, avoid properties with luxurious facilities that you may not need, such as a swimming pool or a fitness gym. This eventually adds up to your monthly rent, since you will be charged for their use and maintenance. Be practical in choosing properties and only consider something that you can afford in the long run.

There are also apartments that cater to the high- end market. As you will notice, these properties have appliances and interiors that are costly to maintain. If you can live with just the basic amenities, why pay extra?

Embrace Any Saving Opportunity You Come Across In the Market

One great way to limit your apartment budget from skyrocketing is to pay close attention to special offers in the real estate market. You will never miss deals, incentives and waivers with the right online tools available today. Besides, paying cash over credit for certain rent-related transactions can lead to certain discounts and offers. Consider all of these as opportunities to reduce your rental costs.

Bottom Line

Saving as much as possible when renting helps you reserve some cash for other move-in expenses. Unplanned purchases will often pop up out of the blue, especially when you are moving into bigger apartments. For instance, you will find yourself adding more furniture to the extra bedroom or buying more toiletries and supplies to fit the new bathroom. Such expenses will have a lesser bite on your budget if you can manage to save some money on your apartment rent.

LeadsGate Review – Payday Loan Affiliate Program

by Melvin · Feb 20, 2015

This review is sponsored by Leadsgate.com

Payday loans is one of the most lucrative niches and one that affiliate marketers target due to its high return on investment. This is also the reason why affiliate networks for payday loans sprout everywhere. But just like most profitable niches, most of them are just too good to be true and in this review, we will find out if LeadsGate happens to fall under that category.

48hourslogo – Small business logo design in just 48 hours!

by Melvin · Oct 1, 2014

This is a paid post and is written by Rick Mullenix of 48hourslogo.com

48hourslogo.com offers affordable online logo design for small businesses. There is no bigger detractor from businesses than a poor presentation. Everyone not only wants their business to look good, but look professional. This is why logos are so vital – they’re usually the first representation of your business someone will see. First impressions count, and you need to make sure the logo representing you speaks clearly your vision and goals to the viewer. It’s not only true for brick and mortar businesses, but so much more for online businesses.

Logo123.com (a sister site of 48hourslogo) can make sure you get a high quality logo by working with a professional. I’m guessing you’re thinking that it can be pricey, and you’re right. But it doesn’t have to be. You’re probably aware of different ways to get designs online. They have their pros and cons, each doing business a different way. For overall quality, value, and timeliness, I recommend checking out this site.

What is 48hourslogo?

Started in 2010 by a group of freelance designers, they had tried and seen the emerging crowdsourcing model with its benefits and flaws. With this new website, they improved upon the model with some unique twists, enabling budding entrepreneurs to better connect with experienced graphic designers. The way they handle crowdsourcing logo designs attracted designers from all over the world. To date, over fifteen thousand small business owners and entrepreneurs have taken advantage of this logo design service.

When starting a project, you will fill out a brief form and create a business owner account. The form has room for you to be thorough or brief, sharing information about your business name and nature, styles you are interested in, your audience, ideas and concepts you have, and any sample images you would like to reference. After that there are options to set your contest prize amount (minimum $99), making your contest Private or Featured, and adding some Participation Pay to reward participants (it adds a little incentive).

Once that is all decided, set your time (minimum 48 hours) and your contest will be live! Within hours you will begin to receive submission to consider. Rate designs and give feedback on changes you would like to see. Once the time is up, you can select Finalists to further tweak the designs, or select a winner. Once the contest is complete and the Logo Package confirmed, you completely own the rights to your new design.

Why Try 48hourslogo?

There are three major benefits I would like to mention. First, if you are hesitant to try them out, a contest can be started for just $29 down. This will allow you to see what submissions will come in and decide if you would like to finish the contest and pay the prize money. We are that confident that you will be impressed with our Design Community.

Which brings me to my second point: our Design Community is hand picked. We don’t allow just anyone with vector editing software to join. They are proven creatives, so you are ensured to receive more high quality logo designs to your contest.

Finally, our logo contests are all blind. This means that during the first stage, before you select any Finalists, the logo designers cannot see one another’s work. The result is that you will get more original ideas to consider, not copies and variations of your top ranked picks.

If you are small business needing a logo, I encourage you to come try out what thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide have discovered. Quality logo design doesn’t have to be expensive. You can find original and creative ideas for your business through 48hourslogo.com.

LeadsMarket Payday Loan Affiliate Program Review

by Melvin · May 1, 2012

This review is sponsored by LeadsMarket.

I usually shy away from reviewing or associating myself to any ‘payday loan’ related topics but when Leads Market approached me and showed me some press links and resources to their site, I decided that it wouldn’t be really bad to do a review for them considering they are an affiliate program and that I have been ‘sort of’ blogging into that space with this blog for quite some time.

Introducing LeadsMarket.com

Leads Market is a ‘new’ affiliate network that seems to be focusing more on payday loan offers. Their website, on first glimpse, suggests that they are a fully fledged affiliate network. They state in their homepage that they have other offers as well such as dating, mortgages, flowers, etc., however, some quick browsing would reveal that they seem to be more functioning as a payday loan affiliate program and nothing else at the moment.

Also if you go to their website, the title of their main page is ‘The Best Affiliate Internet Marketing Program’ which sounds like a bit vague to me since it seems to be there just to target a very broad keyword. The design of their entire website, while its clean and simple, looks somewhat generic to me. On the good side, it does present some good materials on their homepage and they also have an FAQ where you can read stuff to know more about them. Here’s a good look on their site:

Overall, the site looks somehow not complete yet, as they seem to be still working out on some other stuff at the moment. And that’s why they are primarily a payday loan affiliate program for now as I understand.

Benefits & Exclusivity

Just like every other affiliate network, they’re presenting some benefits and exclusivity in their affiliate network. One of those is getting direct exclusive offers from them. Leads Market runs offers that are ONLY available to them and nowhere else. As an affiliate, this is a good benefit since there would be less competition considering the specific offer you’re promoting is not that saturated yet.

Another benefit that they are promoting is the commissions. Leads Market claims that their affiliates get a ‘lion’s share of commission’. This is due to the fact that they are an advertiser themselves, not middle-man which most of the affiliate networks are. They also do what most networks do which is providing their top affiliates with payout bonuses per month.

Speaking of payouts, Leads Market has the standard NET 30 payout which means you’ll have to wait 30 more days from the end of the Calendar month. This is a bit long if you ask me however, you can structure a more flexible payout terms with them if you are one of their top affiliates. Payments are made via check, Direct deposit, PayPal, Payoneer and PayQuicker.

Lastly, just like other networks, they do provide top-notch support and good technology (e.g. tracking, creatives, etc.). Communication with your affiliate manager is very very important as every affiliate knows. The success of the affiliate somehow depends on the quality of the affiliate manager that he has. And with that, support plays a really really vital role for this. Hopefully LeadsMarket has experienced affiliate managers and dedicated support team to help you out on this.

Conclusion

I don’t have any first hand experience with Leads Market myself since I just recently signed up, and therefore I cannot really make any personal recommendations myself on whether they’re worth it or not. As I mentioned, they are relatively new in the space and do not seem to be that popular yet. A quick search for Leads Market will not even yield that much results yet for them.

While I may not be recommending them yet, I would highly highly suggest you to at least check them out, and perhaps signup and see if the offers are enticing enough for you to stay. Payday loans are usually high paying offers which are not that hard to promote considering that its mostly cost per lead and that the consumer just need to input some stuff and meet some minimal requirements in order for them to qualify as a lead. However, payday loans are also a bit regulated and there used to be and still there are lots of shady offers existing in the vertical. That would be a pretty good challenge for Leads Market to take in this regard since they are primarily a payday loan affiliate program.

So that’s it, feel free to check LeadsMarket.com and if you already have experience with them, feel free to comment below.

Does Directory Submission Still Work? Get Links Pro Review

by Melvin · Dec 10, 2011

Directory submission used to be one of the more popular link building techniques that people used to boost their search rankings. Back then, doing submissions was a must. However these days, many SEO experts seem to conclude that doing submissions isn’t worth it anymore. But is it really the case?

Well to help us answer that, let’s review Get Links Pro first, a company that does manual directory submissions and also other link building methods.

Get Links Pro Review

As mentioned above, Get Links Pro provides manual directory submissions and other link building services like blog comments, do-follow profile links, article submissions, local citations and etc.

Get Links Pro’s services start at $8 for 50 Social Bookmarks package and go up to $200 for 2000 Directory Submission package. They also provide a monthly type of directory package which costs a walking $25 for 250 monthly directory submissions. The owner told me that this monthly package was more popular than the other ones.

Overall, most of the categories are pretty flexible in which it allows you to choose from a small package up to a big package.

Aside from this, they also provide a combination of all of their services and this falls into their link building services. For this, they combined 5 different types of methods which help ensure diversity in link building profile. For example their ‘fantastic package’ provides 100 directory submissions, 50 article submissions, 15 profile links and 5 dofollow comments at an affordable price of $39. The higher end of these combinations is called the ‘Incredible Package’ which costs $1,455.

If you decide to go this route, I would suggest picking what’s suitable for you for the immediate moment. They have 9 different combinations for the link building service that you can choose from so if you’re just a small startup then obviously the cheaper one could work well for you. This is also ideal since links are coming from multiple sources which mean it’s much more diversified and less spammy.

Here is a screenshot of some of their link building packages:

Get Links Pro Website

If you arrive at Get Links Pro website, you can see that it’s a pretty simple and neat site. The navigation is good although it could be a bit confusing at the start. For example, you would initially think that they only do manual directory submissions since it’s the primary description on their site. Also, I think some packages could be named better like a ‘fantastic package’ for instance could be named as a ‘beginner package’ or anything that describes it better.

Another thing worth-noting is that most of their category-specific packages are not done efficiently (in my opinion). You will have to scan through a long generic pack of text before you can see the pricing and the content of the package. I definitely think that the pricing and packages should be the first thing seen when someone goes in there. The text can then come below that (like their link building services page. 😉 ). Lastly, I don’t think people would want to read a long text so it probably wouldn’t harm if they decrease the text, and get straight to the point.

Support and Other Miscelllaneous Stuff

As far as support, I think they’re just doing it fine as they have 5 “I’m online” live chats. Yes 5 different live chats. Seriously I’ve never seen any service or website that lists 5 different live chats that you could talk to so as long as these chats are for real, then I think it’s a big plus on their part.

Aside from that, I think everything is fine on their end. They have lots of pages (FAQ’s, About, Affiliates, etc.) so if you really want to know them more and the services that they provide, you can definitely spend some time reading about them first. Lastly, I think the URL structure on some of the pages is quite funny as it seems to be ‘rerouting’ some pages to a temporary link or something. A good example would be clicking on their logo (i.e. has some index.php?’parameters’ instead of just the main index url).

Conclusion

So is it still worth spending money on manual submissions? Specifically companies like Get Links Pro? My personal opinion is that directory submissions are still useful and if done correctly, it can still create a diversified link profile that can rank you well for certain key terms. In fact, I know some people that rely on this alone in getting their niche sites up in the search engines. But again, submissions must be done correctly and I don’t think there’s anything better than manual submissions like what Get Links Pro does.

So if you want to get ranked and you don’t have time to do it yourself, check out Get Links Pro. I’m sure there would be a package there that would suit your needs.