My business journey with Todd Farmer and Eric Nagel started 4 years ago. After being in a Mastermind Group together for about a year, we presented at Affiliate Summit, Mastermind Groups Exposed:Success in Affiliate Marketing. What came of that presentation was Our First Joint Venture, Wine Club Group.

Our wine club review site has been so successful and educational that people asked us to follow up that Affiliate Summit presentation with one showing where we are now and how we got here. We’ll be presenting that in January at Affiliate Summit—Case Study: Drinking Wine and Making Money (The Full Monty).

But that wasn’t enough for us. Over the course of the last two years we had a new idea brewing…literally—brew.

Beer Club Reviews

This week we are launching a completely new review site, Beer Club Reviews. We took the same concept as our wine club site (reviewing clubs, taking pictures, making videos, etc) and applied it to beer. In part we were just a little tired of wine and in part we wanted to try some new things.

I should say *they* were tired of wine. I don’t even like beer, which makes this even more of a challenge for me. It’s the first time I have launched a niche site I wasn’t passionate about. However, I *am* passionate about the concept. And Todd and Eric are happy to be the taste testers while I do the research and education pieces.

In addition to that major difference, there is one even bigger difference. We decided to try out a crazy new gTLD. That’s Generic Top Level Domain. Instead of holding out for a “.com” or even a “.net,” we have decided to go with a “.reviews.” So our new site will simply be BeerClub.Reviews (that’s Beer Club dot Reviews). Easy to brand and even easier to remember.

I’ve been quietly building up our Facebook and Twitter content using Shareist while Eric and Todd have been reviewing a few beer clubs and writing blog posts. It’s a nice way for all of us to be able to contribute while focusing on our individual strengths.

We’re anxious to see how quickly we can get a .Reviews domain ranking. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t. But we’ll have fun trying.

Rebranding the Wine Club

In addition to our big beer club news, we have some minor wine club news. Everyone hated our www.wineclubreviewsandratings.com domain, and the days of keyword-laden domains are over. We had always had on the backburner a plan to rebrand completely as our “parent company” name Wine Club Group. Toward that end, we are moving the entire site to the wineclubgroup.com domain. No more tongue twister of a domain name (you’re welcome, Lisa Picarille). And more importantly, it’s a change to build the brand itself.

Eric did an AMAZING job of moving our entire site in less in faster time than I was even able to write this blog post. It will be interesting to see the impact it has on or traffic and conversions.

There are a lot of pros and cons to moving the domain, especially right before our peak shopping season. If you want to find out whether or not the gamble worked for us, you’ll have to attend our Affiliate Summit presentation!

I’m so excited about all of this because I am a total affiliate marketing geek and I love trying new things. By this time next year I hope to be singing the praises of drinking AND selling beer!