If you work for a large business, you might be getting free trainings, seminars, tools and resources, that is great. If you are a small business owner, you might be trying your best to improve yourself by reading books related to your field, following industry blogs, and even entering executive education programs. These are all good.

In addition to all of these, what if you had the chance to attend a “Introduction to Statistics” class at one of the top universities in the world such as MIT or Stanford, would you take it? How about the accounting class that you’ve never taken seriously at school, but now, you know how important it is to know the fundamentals of accounting. Would you like to attend an accounting class and learn the basics from one of the top accounting professors in the world?

There is absolutely no excuse not to improve yourself with all the opportunities internet brings us.

Here are my top 5 favorite online learning resources:

• Academic Earth: One of my favorites. Academic Earth brings us absolutely free video courses from some of the top universities in the nation. Academic Earth currently offers course videos from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA and Yale.
• Open Course Ware by MIT: Maybe the tuition was too expensive or you simply weren’t accepted. You don’t have to worry that you couldn’t get an MIT degree anymore. MIT opens up its classes by Open Course Ware. Go catch a class now and get the great education you’ve always wanted.
• Yauba: Yauba is actually a search engine, but it does a great job bringing you the great learning resources.
• Itunes University: Apple’s Itunes University is currently offering over 200.000 education videos and audio and growing.
• TED: TED is my all time favorite. Nothing to add to TED, simply; “Ideas worth spreading”

Do you use any other great online learning resources other than the ones in this list? I’ll be happy to add your favorites to this list if you share them in the comments.

After the huge success of Zappos.com, many internet startups are trying to follow the “best service” rule. But, is it really that easy?

By working with many ecommerce companies along with my own company, I have witnessed in first hand, how hard and costly it can be to try to run a company with great service.

Business planning and forecasting is the key before implementing an important service decision. Most of the business owners are pretty good at forecasting. Before implementing a new service option such as free overnight shipping or a 365 days return policy, it is not rocket science to come up with all the variables, and forecast how this new policy will impact your business both financially and from other aspects of the business.

Before getting all excited and adding more costly service options, many business owners don’t think about calculating the cost of unethical customers. Let’s talk about a real life example.

An Unethical Customer Gets a Free Replacement for a 15 Year Old Sweater with Land’s End Lifetime Guarantee

Megan Writes In: A friend of mine had a sweater from Land’s End that she’d had for about fifteen years. It was getting pretty old and beat up simply because of normal wear and tear. A few weeks ago when she unpacked her winter clothes, she found that one sleeve had finally worn off the sweater. she called up Land’s End and complained, invoking their lifetime guarantee. They sent her a replacement one – not exactly the same, but pretty similar. She was quite proud of this “free” sweater. I was less than impressed. What do you think about this?

Read the full story here if you are interested in the details. There are literally thousands of customer stories similar to this one all over the web, some true and some not.

How to Calculate the Cost of Unethical Customers

When Zappos.com started offering “Free Shipping Both Ways”, don’t you think that they were smart enough to guess many customers would purchase several pairs of shoes, try them and send the ones they don’t like back? Of course, they were and they did their homework. In business, in order to implement a new rule you might need to sacrifice from another one. If you will offer free shipping both ways, you have to forecast the cost as accurately as you can and implement it into your price matrix.

Especially with new business rules, without any historical data, it might be hard to forecast these types of cost. Your regular return rate can be less than 2%, but with a policy update such as free shipping both ways might increase your return rate to over 10%. If you are implementing a policy update to your customer service which might bring in high cost, you might seriously think about gradual implementation. Instead of offering the new service policy to all of your customers, start offering it to small groups of customers from different demographics, and calculate your cost with a smaller data group.

When to Say NO to Unethical Customers

Even the companies with best customer service offerings have limits and rules. Do you think Zappos.com never say NO to a customer? Of course they do.

When dealing with customers, you have to come up with business rules and train your staff appropriately. Let’s say, if a customer returns over 20% of the merchandise within a given period, one of your customer specialists should call the customer, and try to resolve the problem on the phone. Be fair, offer all the warnings to the customer, but when it is time to draw the line, don’t hesitate to draw the line.

Even if you do your best, you can never satisfy all of your customers. Some of the customers are very hard to satisfy and some are simply taking advantage of your policies. Sometimes, there’s a very thin line between the unsatisfied customers and the customers who practice unethical methods to take advantage of your service policies.

The correct step is to make the right business decision at the right time to say NO to unethical customers and move on.

Have you ever had an unethical customer you had to stop offering your services? I’d love to hear your stories.

This is the 3rd session I am attending today and live blogging.

Presenters at SEO Site Clinic:

• Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae, Inc.)
• Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Services
• Michael Streko, Owner, Streko Media LLC
• Chris Pearson of Pearsonified

Important Notes from the SEO Clinic Session:

• Rae Hoffman of Sugarrae, Inc. is giving an example from their site TheBinocularSite
• Michael Gray is mentioning Quarkbase.com
• Chris Pearson mentioned the “The Blender Guy” example for getting free backlinks

Experts are reviewing ShopforMuseums.com (somebody’s site from the audience).

Audience is asking some kindergarden level SEO questions . I think experts are kind of disappointed.

There are some really funny examples going on, OMG. Why would people pay and come to a conference about affiliate marketing without even knowing the a,b,c’s of the industry?

Anyways, amusing session is continuing…

Link Building Tip of the Day

Be creative to get tons of quality backlinks.

Tips about Article Directory Submissions

You can submit the same article (without re-writing) to many article directories, but it’s a good idea to change the titles and the article summary. It helps a lot with article marketing. Keep in mind, best way is to have unique articles for each directory (article spinning anybody?).

3.40 pm: SEO Experts are reviewing Cooking.com.

Experts agree that the html is not clean, and they talk about the importance of clean markup. Also missing alt tags for images is a problem.

SEO Site Clinic session is over

This is the second session I’m attending at Affiliate Summit, and it is” Creating Lasting Publisher and Advertiser Relationships”

The session will be starting in 5 minutes…

Presenters:

• CEO & Founder of of Cashbaq, David Lewis
• Steve Schaffer, Publisher, Offers.com
• Chris Symons, Senior Account Manager at Travelocity.com
• William Martin-Gill, internet marketing dept. director of eBay

Steve Schaffer of Offers.com has started the session with a few Q&A.

• Steve is talking about the types of publisher business models in general
• Types of Actions in affiliate marketing.
• Three Primary Business Relationship Models; In-house programs, Affiliate networks, sub-affiliate networks
• Commission Rates & Cost/Order Stats
• Retailers spend more per new customer in other channels compared to affiliate channel.
• Steve believes affiliates are getting underpaid for what they do.
• Performance marketing works, because the merchant decides what to pay per lead, and the advertiser makes his/her decision.
• What’s the right amount to pay to affiliates? Some companies do not do their homework.
• Performance marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry (estimated over 3 billion dollars.) Steve believes, this does not include lead gen. This is interesting data. I will dig into this more tonight
• Steve starts the introductions for the presenters

William Martin-Gill, eBay, head of internet marketing

• Importance of relationship with affiliate marketers.
• Compensation. Some of eBay’s smaller affiliates are some of the top affiliates (due to customer quality, etc.)
• Face to face communication with affiliates is very important
• eBay has an affiliate day where day invite top 50 affiliates and do a whole day conference. eBay wants to get the top affiliates feedback as much as they can.
• William is talking about the message boards (forums) on eBay. He thinks, they have a love & hate relationship with message boards. It is understandable with the high level of censorship on eBay message boards.

David Lewis of Cashbaq

• Talks about how Zappos.com has recently terminated relationships with all incentivized affiliates. (not cool for cashbaq)
• Importance of relationship, and listening the affiliates
• Prefers communication with affiliates via email
• We don’t like seeing flashing banner ads (cashbaq is not a casino site).
• We prefer to communicate via phone with the larger affiliates.
• Good tip here. Don’t let affiliate networks get between the advertiser and the publisher. Communicate with your affiliates no matter what

Chris Symons of Travelocity.com

• Importance of relationship between Travelocity and the affiliates. He mentions contacting top 50-100 affiliates to get feedback

1.50pm Steve Schaffer of Offers.com talks about the importance of increasing conversion rate for merchants.

William is talking about eBay’s dynamic payment structure for eBay Partner Network ACRU’s (newly registered users).

Very important note for me: William Martin-Gill said; eBay is working on perfecting their system, so they can pay more to affiliates who bring in traffic from product review type sites (also mentioned the quality word). I will have to clarify this with William after the session.

Second session is almost done at Affiliate Summit.

This year, instead of taking offline notes, I have decided to take all of my notes right here at kirtok.com. This is going to be my first live blogging event. Let’s see how this will go. (I will be adding pictures and videos later on).

It’s 12.08pm, and the first session of Affiliate Summit is starting in a minute.

Mike Allen, President of Shopping-Bargains.com will be presenting, and I believe Kris Jones of Pepperjam will be managing the session.

Dynamic Shopping Session Has Started

After opening remarks by Kris Jones, Mike Allen has taken the stage.

Important points from Mike’s Speech:

• Creating a brand and equity as an affiliate marketer
• Using ready to use tools or creating and customizing your own tools
• Deliver something unique
• Continue to innovate and try out new things
• Failing is part of this game

Anthony Bajoras of AffiliateReporting.com Takes the Stage

Anthony is the CEO and co-founder of Affiliate Reporting.

• Managing multiple affiliate campaigns, networks, traffic channels, etc. He’s talking about the importance of statistics in affiliate business
• You have to be able measure and understand what is working and what is not working in affiliate game.
• How important it is to analyze the data in depth
• Measure Everything (PPC, SEO, Channels, etc.)
• Review Often… (3 minutes a day at least, do it more often if you are serious)
• Use the right tools that fit with your affiliate business.
• Listen what the data tells you. That’s something I always mention to new beginners.
• Inaction is costly Cool wording. Take action !!!

12.31 pm: Anthony is done with his presentation, Kris asks a couple of questions to Anthony about his affiliate software.

Sal Conca, Senior Media Manager of Net Exponent takes the stage

• Talking about understanding the needs of the affiliates before serving them
• Content is king. Social Media, reviews, podcasts, blogs, etc.
• Duplicate content problem for product feeds. Content syndication is different than duplicate content.
• Affiliate Managers are teachers. Constant communication and education is the key to affiliate manager success.
• Quality of Orders from affiliate manager’s perspective. This is the key to a long term successful relationship between publishers and advertisers.
• Importance of conversion rates. Testing significant changes for success.

12.40pm Kris is asking a question to Sal for additional tips to advertisers about optimizing product data feeds for search engines.

Sal is explaining the importance of customized feeds, and helping the affiliates for taking the right route.

Jessie Jones, CEO & Founder of PopShops.com takes the stage

• She’s worked for Expedia.com and Microsoft before starting PopShops.com
• She has started building niche sites and needed to automate the process, and decided to get her own tool built.
• She’s started PopShops.com to help her build niche websites, it wasn’t planned as a business (a software/tool to sell)
• She’s giving an example. Search Google for “Budget bridesmaids” and see an example of a PopShop store.
• Do you have an idea? Launch ASAP. You can build on top of it later on.
• Focus on A/B Testing

12.50pmKris takes the stage back from Jessie Jones. I will be adding pictures and videos later on today.

Kris is starting the Q&A Session

• Question to Jessie Jones about number of external links on a web page. Jessie mentioned the importance of following Google guidelines.
• Question about a PopShops.com API. Jessie says, you can integrate popshops with wordpress via API or use a plugin.
• Presenters are talking about both free and paid tools available to affiliates in the market.
• Anthony Bajoras talking about how important the passion is in affiliate business
• Mike mentions the “low hanging fruit”. Go for it first, then harvest the rest of the tree later on
• Sal Conca says 80-20 rules applies to affiliates if not the 90-10 rule. There will be top affiliates and others, just like in any business.

Last question was taken…

I think the session was ok for beginners in affiliate marketing, but unfortunately I didn’t take anything out of the session.

I totally understand that Affiliate Summit and similar conferences usually focus on beginners, but IMO, there should be some advanced and in depth discussions.

It was my first live blogging. I will be live blogging, during the Affiliate Summit East till tuesday evening. I will be adding pictures and videos later tonight.

There are so many books, articles, blog posts, tools and software out there to help you increase your productivity. You have to do your research and find the tools you really need to increase your productivity.

I won’t try to teach you anything, instead I will share How I Quadrupled My Productivity in 30 Days, briefly.

Finding the Bottlenecks In Your Workflow

For each individual, the bottlenecks will be different. You have to start finding the constraints and the bottlenecks in your workflow one step at a time. Get a pen and a paper, and start making a list of all the bottlenecks that slows you down.

There is no out of the box solution for increasing productivity. Everybody needs to do their own homework. You cannot solve a problem unless you know exactly what the problem is.

This is exactly what I did. I have found the main constraints during my daily workflow, then went out looking for the right solutions.

Main Constraints I had that Kept me From Increasing My Productivity

After making a huge list, I picked the top 2 constraints I had. These are the bottlenecks that kept me from increasing my productivity.

1. Starting to work on a project without properly and visually planning it.
2. Losing so much time with forgotten passwords, and bookmarks

I Knew My Constraints, It was Time to Find the Right Solutions

I started with my #1 constraint:

Starting to work on a project without properly and visually planning it.

My #1 constraint was thinking about a great/cool idea and jumping on the development part without visually and properly planning it.

I was doing my research, taking my notes usually in Google Docs, and delegating the project to my staff right away.

Something was missing…

And it was; Mindmapping. Without proper, and visual mindmapping, it was hard to see the big picture for most of the projects. A good friend of mine has recommended several solutions for mindmapping.

I have started using Flowchart.com which is a free online flow chart and mindmapping tool. There are some better, paid solutions out there which might help you create better mindmapping diagrams. I have been testing some of them and will update this post if I find a better solution.

But for now, Flowchart.com has solved my problem and it is 100% free. What can beat that?

I’m so glad I have started doing mindmapping before starting a new project, even tiny side projects.

It was time to find a solution for my #2 constraint.

Losing so much time with forgotten passwords, and bookmarks

I have tried so many tools, firefox addons, software and websites for organizing my bookmarks. Always, there was something missing. I didn’t know what it was. Also with increasing number of membership sites, emails, websites, hosting control panels, etc. I was having some serious problems with managing my passwords.

I’m always the skeptical guy when it comes to my passwords. I didn’t want to upload all of my passwords into a 3rd party software.

Until it became impossible to manage all of my passwords.

Then I have found the dream solution (after several recommendations from friends) called Roboform.

I have no idea how I’ve managed so many passwords, bookmarks and forms without Roboform for so many years. I have gained so much time otherwise I’d be losing with this piece of software. I’m using the firefox plugin and the USB version of the Roboform now and I’m absolutely loving it.

Even though I’m using the paid version of Roboform and it’s well worth it, you can simply keep using the free version for good (with some limitations I believe).

It is Your Choice to Quadruple Your Productivity or Not

Whether your constraints are similar to mines or not, take some time out of your busy schedule, identify the constraints that keep you from increasing your productivity, and start finding the right tools and approaches to overcome your productivity problems.

Since the day I’ve started doing affiliate marketing, I have never purchased an affiliate marketing education course, product, or an ebook. (but I have received many review copies from several gurus/experts without asking for it).

I have received several recommendations from friends I trust, but after reviewing some of the sales pitches, I didn’t feel like buying any of them.

Internet marketing information product niche has become a huge market and I have nothing against this market getting bigger every day.

The problem I have is;

Most of these self-claimed gurus don’t tell you the truth. They have one and only one goal; To sell you their information products.

It All Starts with The Learning Process

When I was first getting into online marketing, the resources were limited. It was pretty hard to find quality, solid information about internet marketing.

But, now this has changed. You can find tons and tons of information on the net for absolutely free. Like everything else, internet marketing has its learning process.

If you are a total newbie to internet marketing, you have to start reading blogs and forums to learn as much as you can.

Some people are self-motivated, and they can handle this themselves, but for some, it’s a harder process. So, if you feel, buying an affiliate marketing introduction ebook will speed up your process, go ahead and buy it. But with careful research, and study, you can find almost all the information online for free, just keep in mind.

When You Need Support

While learning internet marketing, you are usually alone. Sometimes, you can get frustrated. If you are much used to team work, I understand. Some of these affiliate marketing courses come with private forum accesses, and 24/7 support line, etc. It’s definitely not for me, but if it will help your learning process, you should buy it.

Stay Away Signs Before You Buy an Affiliate Marketing Course/Product/eBook

1. Quick & Easy Cash: Almost all of these courses will promise for quick and easy cash. If you are a newbie, there’s almost NO way of making quick and easy cash with affiliate marketing. This is also true with any type of internet marketing. Nobody owns hope, but everybody has hope. So, these self-claimed gurus will use the hope factor in every sales trick.
2. Almost No Work Required: If you want to be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to work harder than anybody around you. There is absolutely no way that you will start making money right away without any work. After you get pretty good experience, you can always get into JV projects, hire people and only manage things. This is a different story. But for newbies, you need to be ready to work 24/7. So, if any of these affiliate marketing courses promise millions of dollars without any work, run as fast as you can.
3. Outdated Information: Some dude gets lucky, makes a few thousand dollars with a trick, and when his trick starts dying, he writes an ebook. In affiliate marketing, trends are extremely important. Most of the affiliate courses out there will teach you outdated tricks and trends. For ultimate affiliate marketing success, you need to be on top of all the new trends before the everybody else, plus, you need to be the one who sets new trends.
4. Over and over again (scaling): Most of these gurus who sell these affiliate marketing courses will promise you that if you can start making money with their tricks, you can duplicate what you do, and do it over and over again. I love this slogan; “over and over again”. They never tell you, you need people helping you to do it over and over again. Every new website needs traffic, organic or not, you need to work extra for each new website. So, it’s not a magic trick to duplicate what you have already done successfully, but it is time consuming. So, it’s not easy to duplicate what you did over and over again.
5. Fake Testimonials: I’m tired of seeing fake testimonials. One of the new courses sales page had a video of an elderly guy (the guru says his student) talking about how he does an absurd amount of money by working a few minutes a day. FAKE, FAKE, FAKE. Stay away if you see testimonials like this one.

Just like I said, these gurus spend their valuable time to create these affiliate marketing courses. So, I have no problem with them charging for these courses. Probably, some of these gurus deserve more than what they charge. But, the affiliate marketing space is flooded with these courses, so if you want to buy one of these courses, be very careful with the “stay away signs”, and do your research before you buy.

I and many other successful affiliates have succeeded in affiliate marketing without the help of affiliate marketing information products. But, I also have good friends who are very successful in affiliate marketing and they have tried many affiliate marketing products, ebooks and membership sites when they were newbies.

So, it all depends on you. Can you succeed in affiliate marketing by working 24/7 without the help of these affiliate marketing courses or not? You are the only one who will make the right decision. Good luck.

I had the feeling that affiliate marketing would be the next big thing for me and for the internet advertising. Later, it was proven… Affiliate marketing was the next big thing for me.

Lately, I have been getting involved more in affiliate marketing industry, and trying to network more often with fellow affiliate marketers and networks. During these networking events, I have been meeting with many smart people who are new to the industry and just getting started with affiliate marketing business.

I am a huge believer in the benefits of networking and helping the newbies. I help people without asking for a return or favor. It might sound too naive, but this is a part of my character, and I’m glad I have this in my genes. As much as I would like to help all the newbies in affiliate marketing, my crazy busy schedule doesn’t let me to be flexible. Therefore, I have decided to share almost everything I know about affiliate marketing via my blog posts. I am also planning to add videos and screencasts.

Let’s start with the mindset I had when I was first starting affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Mindset

I was already making money online when I first got involved with affiliate marketing. Whether you are a newbie in the online game or not, you can be successful in affiliate marketing if you have the right mindset.

Most people fail making money online because they are lazy. Making money online is not rocket science. You have to start by setting your mindset. Please take a few minutes and read this blog post I’ve written some time ago about failing to make money online.

Get rid of all the excuses you’ve had before.

If you are total newbie in affiliate marketing, and still trying to understand the basic logic behind it, please spend a few minutes reading this blog post I’ve written about CPA Arbitrage. It’s the basic introduction to CPA marketing.

If somebody is trying to sell you an ebook promising a 4 hour work week, and millions of dollars made online, pass the opportunity and save some bucks.

If you are a newbie to making money online, there’s absolutely no short way to success without working hard, I mean really hard work. But if you work, and keep improving yourself, affiliate marketing is one of the most rewarding professions I have ever found.

You have been doing research and reading about affiliate marketing for a while, or maybe you have already started testing some campaigns, or you are a full time affiliate marketer making a great income. The question is; Do you have the right mindset to take it to the next level?

Ask this question to yourself, and come up with an honest answer.

When you read success stories of affiliate marketers, see the pictures and videos on their blogs, you only see the final outcome. You don’t see the countless sleepless nights we put into work, you don’t understand how much we sacrifice for ultimate success. If you have been in online game for a while, probably you know what I am talking about.

While doing your research about affiliate marketing, you will get a good feeling about it. You have to make sure affiliate marketing is right for you. This is extremely important, you have to be happy and love what you do to be able to become a huge success story.

Love What You Do

It doesn’t matter what you do for living. Unless you love what you do, you will NEVER become the most successful person in your profession. Affiliate marketing is no different than other professions.

You have to get excited, and love affiliate marketing, PERIOD. If you treat affiliate marketing as a regular job, you might still make lots of money, but in the long term, you will never be one of the most successful people in this field.

Life is short, do not spend your life working on something that doesn’t get you excited.

If you get so excited with affiliate marketing, and can’t even sleep sometimes working online, you are absolutely on the right track. You can become one of the most affiliate marketers in the world.

Let’s talk about how you can be more productive with setting up goals and self motivation.

Setup Goals

Setting up goals with affiliate marketing is more important than anything. Setup both short term and long term goals. Trust me, setting up goals will keep you targeted and motivated. If you have a next level dollar amount goal, write it down on a paper and hang it everywhere.

Setup meaningful goals, if you are a newbie and if your first goal is $10.000/Day net profit within 30 days, it’s not a goal, it’s a dream.

Short and long term goal examples for affiliate marketing:

• I will launch my first campaign 30 days from today
• I will increase my net profit per day from $100 to $150 within 3 weeks
• I will make $6000/month net profit after taxes within 6 months and quit my day job
• I will work at least 5 hours/day on affiliate marketing
• I will buy a Porsche within 24 months
• I will hire my first employee within 3 months
• etc. etc. etc.

Depending on your age, situation, financial condition, schedule, time etc. you can setup the right goals for yourself.

Setting up goals is the most important part of self motivation. And self motivation and hard work will bring financial freedom to your life.

Big Secret in Affiliate Marketing

Everybody is in search of the big secret for ultimate success in affiliate marketing.

I will one more time repeat what other successful affiliate marketers have been saying for years;

1. Read, research, be on top of every new trend in affiliate marketing world
2. Don’t wait, and test whatever you learn. You will fail many times, but testing is the route to success.
3. Back to #1

You can be a successful affiliate marketer by doing the things above. But to become the best in what you do, especially in marketing, you have to be different. You have to learn the big secret:

Thinking outside the box is the key and the big secret to become a successful affiliate marketer.

Do you want to follow the latest trends in affiliate marketing world, or do you want to be a trend setter?

This whole article might sound like a motivational speech, but you will understand the importance of setting up your mindset first when you get really involved with affiliate marketing.

How Do I Qualify to Give You Advice About Affiliate Marketing?

Simple answer is I don’t.

I am not a guru nor a super/uber affiliate. I’m just a guy who happens to make more money with affiliate marketing in a month than most of the people make in a year with a regular job. I work at least twice more than any regular person who works a 9 to 5 job.

This is my personal blog, I write what I want, and I share my personal experiences. So, take it or leave.

But if you are a hardworking person, who is also serious about making money online, I will be happy to help.

Spend some time on researching and reading about affiliate marketing and make sure this is right for you. I have written this post to let you know that setting your mindset is the most important part of the road to success in affiliate marketing. Take it as a motivational article and laugh about it, or take it serious and start thinking about it now.

I will be writing about affiliate marketing and online marketing more often. I will get into details, share some case studies, and will try to help you succeed in affiliate marketing business. Thanks for stopping by, and please leave your comments. I love reading your comments.

We have met Michael at Azoogle’s office around 3.30pm, then some other affiliates started coming in around 4pm. We have spent some time in Azoogle’s kitchen chatting with other affiliates and met some smart people.

Then, we had a chance to meet Epic Advertising’s CEO Don Mathis. He also had a surprise drawing for a free ticket to Azoogle’s Playboy Mansion Party. After the short meeting, we have headed out for happy hour in Manhattan. Azoogle was a great host and had bunch of food and drinks for the whole night.

Our final stop was a bar in the city where Epic Advertising COO Charles Nowaczek was playing with his band.

It was a great event. I met many affiliates and affiliate managers. Here are some names I still remember after several drinks;

Kyle Paterson, an affiliate from New Jersey, great guy, we have talked bunch of things through the night.

Jon Fisher of Wickedfire.com, met him first time, seemed like a very nice and quiet guy.

Kyle Antoian, we have met with Kyle last year during the Adtech but never had a chance to catch up. Kyle is a great guy, if you do email marketing, you should contact him for some exclusive offers. We will drink Turkish Coffee together soon (p.s. Kyle is the guy eating the wings on the video).

Tim Antoian, Kyle’s brother, who’s also an affiliate manager at AzoogleAds. It was nice meeting you Tim.

Brett Lofgren, Epic Advertising SVP, Global Ad Sales. It was great meeting and talking to you Brett.

Moufid Al-Joundi, Epic Advertising Director of Distribution Development. It was great meeting you Moufid.

Wes Downey from PublisherRev and his friend David. It was great talking to you guys.

And my affiliate manager, Michael Boghosian. We had fun, we should definitely get together soon. Thanks for having us yesterday.

I have also met several other great affiliates and affiliate managers.

AzoogleAds was the first affiliate company I’ve signed up with when I was starting affiliate marketing. They have been so nice and helpful since day 1. I’d highly recommend AzoogleAds to anybody who’s getting into affiliate marketing.

Some Pictures from the AzoogleAds Publisher Appreciation Day

My affiliate manager Michael Boghosian and me

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Michael Boghosian, my brother and business partner Volkan KIRTOK and myself

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Another great guy and affiliate, Kyle Paterson and myself

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Party Time

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Thanks to Azoogle for hosting a great event and having us.

Why are the early adopters, such as myself, get annoyed about increasing number of new users? The answer is simple; Twitter spam is increasing with a tremendous speed as well.

How many contacts (friends & biz contacts) do you follow in real life?

You can keep in touch with a limited number of people in real life. Depending on the person, it can be 10, 50, 100, maybe 500. It’s already a huge problem trying to follow the tweets of hundreds/thousands of people you follow on Twitter. But twitter spam I’m talking about is not the spam you receive from your followers, or from people you follow.

What is Twitter Spam and Why will it be the end of Twitter Phenomenon?

Here’s a great example of twitter spam. On April 12th, I have tweeted and said:

Lately, I was seeing so many spam looking ebook ads on twitter and I was simply complaining about it.

After my tweet, I have received 2 identical replies from 2 seperate twitter users (spammers) looked like this:

Above is an automated Twitter spam reply with an affiliate link inserted. This is big time annoying. Basically these spammers either use Twitter Search or use some paid twitter spammer tools and target specific keywords. Since my update had “affiliate marketing” keywords, they automatically reply me with their spam message and link.

This is called Twitter Spam, or Interruption Marketing.

But when I started doing little bit more research about the Keyword Based Twitter Reply Spam, I have found out that well known online marketer, best selling author, and a social media expert! Guy Kawasaki is one of the many Twitter Spammers who uses and endorses these spam tools.

In this video, famous online marketing guru Guy Kawasaki happily endorses and recommends a twitter spam tool called twitterhawk.

Way to go Mr. Kawasaki. You have a great reputation online and I know it will take quite some time to bash it, but you are on the right track.

If you would use a similar tool, it would be spam, but if the person who uses it is Guy Kawasaki, then people might call it “Keyword Based Direct Marketing on Twitter“. I love this made up term . Since it’s Guy Kawasaki spamming, many blog posts are already written to support him and similar twitter spam tools. Alltop is Guy Kawasaki’s twitter account mentioned in this post.

This tool recommended by Guy Kawasaki might be used with goodwill in rare situations, but it clearly shows that many online marketers including Guy Kawasaki are using this and similar tools only to spam twitter.

Guy Kawasaki is one of the smartest online marketers I’ve ever seen. I’m sure, sooner or later, he will accept what he is doing right now is spamming, but will it be too late?

Keyword Based Direct Marketing or Spam?

If you are not clear about the answer of this question, please read Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing, then you will understand why this type of interruption marketing will bring the end to Twitter phenomenon.

Let’s put it in a simpler form. A friend of mine and I are having a coffee at a Starbucks. We are making a conversation, and a guy at the next table is interrupting us on every single sentence. When I say “Should I drive my car or rent a car this weekend for the ski trip”, he jumps in to the conversation and says “You should rent a car at blah blah company”. I ignore him. Then my friend says “She’s planning to buy a new pair of jeans after our meeting”, and the guy again interrupts and says “XYZ Jeans running a sale on women’s jeans”. Now think about tens, hundreds, even thousands of people interrupting our conversation and adding their sales pitches without our permission.

How many interruptions will it take for us to walk about and find another coffee shop? Is this going to be the future of Twitter?

On this post, I have only talked about Twitter Keyword Based Search Reply Spam issue, but if you like to read a more through post about the twitter spam topic, here’s a great post called Ten reasons why Twitter will eventually wither and die…. You should also check out Stop Twitter Spam Blog if you are interested in the topic.

What is Twitter Doing to Prevent Search & Reply Spammers?

On august 2008, they said they were making progress on spam, then couple of weeks later they have announced that they are turning up heat on spam.

This message is to Evan Williams. I love twitter, and I hope it will have a great future. But if you want Twitter to survive and be a part of our daily lives in the future, you definitely need to focus on monetizing Twitter and stopping the spammers on Twitter. Good luck with these and I hope you will succeed.

Follow me on Twitter and send me a reply @AhmetKirtok about your thoughts on Twitter Spam (Please no spamming via reply ).