Keyword Academy News: A New Brand, a Logo Contest, Affiliate and Job Opportunities
June 18th, 2009 | by Mark | Published in TKA News | 12 Comments
Court and I have spent the last couple of years together building our brand in the world of making money online. We enjoy it, and we’re not going anywhere (at least we hope to hang around if our audience and subscribers will have us for a few more years!).
At the same time, we’ve realized that there’s a whole world out there we’ve ignored - the world of the small business owner looking to find new customers and clients through the search engines. So we’ve decided it’s time to establish a new brand that gives us a chance to reach out to that market. We’d like to introduce you to SEO Educators (http://seoeducators.net - the site is under construction at the moment). SEO Educators is looking to help the small business owner that knows she could be pulling customers and clients from Google and Yahoo! every month, but doesn’t have thousands of dollars to pay an SEO firm to help her get ranked. Our goal is to give this kind of entrepreneur an SEO plan she can implement with the resources (time, money, and staff) she already has.
But the point of this post isn’t to sell you on SEO Educators, so I’ll stop there. You can check out the site in the next week or so when the copy is written if you’re interested.
So what is the point of this post? There are actually three:
1. Help Us Out with Our Logo Design Contest
Court and I are notoriously bad when it comes to design. Not only do neither of us have a shred of design ability, we can’t even really say what we like or don’t like in a design. Some friends of ours turned us on to 99designs.com. For somebody as design-impaired as me 99designs.com is an absolute heaven-send. In a nutshell, you sign up to run a design contest, write a brief about what you need, and then tens of thousands of designers have the chance to submit an entry in hopes of winning the cash prize you established at the beginning of the contest. Seriously, this is brilliant. You can read more about what 99designs can do for you here.
Court and I would really love to have feedback and suggestions on our logo design contest. Pop over and check it out if you like. We need all the help we can get.
2. Do You Have Access to Small Business Owners? Join the SEO Educators Affiliate Program
We need affiliates! 99% of our traffic is geared toward making money online, and we need to talk to small business owners. If you’re a web designer, developer, marketing consultant…or anybody else that knows some business owners, send me an email (mark[at]thekeywordacademy[dot]com) so I can get in touch with you about becoming an affiliate. We’re tentatively planning a lead-based affiliate program where your job will be to get people to reach out to us, and you’ll be paid healthy commissions when we convert those leads to clients.
3. Sales Experience? Become An Independent Sales Rep for SEOEducators.net
Some of you may know I spent four years as an inside sales rep and sales manager before quitting to work full-time with Court. I miss sales and I’ve looked forward to creating a product with Court that would give us the chance to partner with a solid group of independent sales reps who could take our product to market and earn a great living at it. We know there are quite a few corporate sales types out of work right now, and we’d like to give a good opportunity to a few people who want to make a full time living talking to small business owners about our SEO educational products.
Initially, we’re looking to work with three or four people who’d like to earn upwards of $50,000 per year as a rep for our business. Wow, did that ever sound like an MLM pitch, so let me clarify. This will be commission-only sales; you’ll be paid one commission if you prospected the client yourself and a different commission if we generate a lead and you make the sale. The reason I say upwards of $50,000 per year is not because we can make any guarantees about your earnings, or the number of lead you’ll get etc. I say $50,000 because we’re looking for people to work full-time on this, and I don’t think it would be worth it if you were going to make less than $50,000 for your trouble. Ideally I’d like to see our reps making in the $75,000 to $100,000 range.
As I said, I was in commission sales for years, so I don’t throw those numbers around ignorantly or lightly. If you have sales ability and confidence, get in touch with me and we’ll talk about whether this could be a good fit. I can tell you this would have been my dream sales job when I was in sales - working from home (or wherever I wanted) making as many sales as I decided to make, and not having an annoying sales manager bugging me all the time because he’s trying to beef up his bonuses. We’re looking for some independent spirits with the ability to explain value and close. Most people reading this just shuddered in semi-horror. We’re looking for the three of you who think that sounds friggin cool. Again, email me if this has any appeal at all to you and we’ll talk about the details.
And that’s it! Check out our logo contest, become an affiliate for SEOEducators.net, and let us know if you’re interested in an independent sales job.
Have a great one everybody.






