When I got home I had a TON of people to follow up with. Probably 99% of them I haven’t yet and still don’t plan to for another week, I’m just too busy. When looking at my stack of cards I gotta say, I really don’t remember a lot of these people. Now this is kind of hypocritical because I was too lazy to get any custom cards made for myself and I just rocked my ‘IT Manager’ day job cards. Realistically the cards don’t mean anything, I remember the people who gave them to me a lot more than I would the card.

Yet, as I was laying them out over my table peaking at them, a few caught my eye that made me think of the people behind them. I wanted to share those with you all and give kudos to them for their interesting card tactics.

SICKEST CARD EVER

Shawn Collins, Co founder of Affiliate Summit passed me this card at the New Comer meeting at ASE. Shawn’s card appears to be laser cut out of aluminum. It was one of the heaviest cards I got, and I distinctly remember Shawn pulling it out from a special hard case holder. This card has all his info, catches the eye, and in a jam could be used as a razor blade to gash someone. Way to rock an awesome card Shawn!

IS THIS A GIFT CARD? OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME?

The Convert2Media guys all had bad ass credit card replica business cards. These cards were very thick and heavy. They each had an embossed phone number where the credit card numbers would be and they even had their signatures on the back. This card definitely sticks out in a pile, but I’m not too sure if its because of its design or because you look at it really quick and think someone tossed you a giftcard.

DID YOU EAT THIS BEFORE YOU GAVE IT TO ME?

I love the Snackable Media cards. These die cut cards aren’t too out of the ordinary but it coincides with their theme and maintains part of their actual logo in the diecut. I remember laughing a bit when the guy passed it to me and I actually told him I loved the card!

MYSTERIOUS…AND A FREEBIE!!

Brian Evans from DailyConversions.com had previously blogged about picking up his new cards. His were cool as hell. They were kind of see-throughish but not quite. They didn’t contain a lot of info on it, email only but where it lacked in traditional business card info, it made up in marketing techniques. Each card had a URL on it for a FREE WEEK of Brian’s List Playbook program. Brian had intended for it to be exclusive to a lot of the people who were attending his ‘ask the experts’ session at Affiliate Summit but then I saw someone post the code all over their twitter feed and I think Brian figured he might as well open it up to everyone. If you wanted to get the free week you can signup with no credit card at http://www.listplaybook.com/promo/

SNIPING LEADS – LASER TARGETING

I was really expecting more of this but this person was the ONLY person I saw scouting leads at seminars. This rep from Ian Fernando’s Infinite FB product was outside Shoemoney’s Facebook ads soup to nuts seminar. She wasn’t being a jerk was just casually catching people on the way out of the session letting them know about Ian’s product. I give props to Ian and her for the serious targeting going on at ASE.

BEYOND BUSINESS CARDS

I met Jen Goode really quick at the new comer session and she passed me her card. I promptly (as any IT guy would) make a comment “You have a Linux penguin on it” upon which she responded “Its a Goode Penguin!!” We had a little laugh about that. I really love this card because it is crazy as hell and has plays on words through out. Jen’s title is casually printed as “Doodler in Charge”! Jen also hosted a ask the experts session about networking beyond business cards.

Day 1: Sunday August 15th

I left my house at 6 AM to head to New York. I was pretty worried I might not make it for Shawn Collins‘ new comer session but luckily I arrived at like 9:15 AM which gave me plenty of time to get situated for the session. As it turns out they had booked me at the wrong hotel and in my arguing with the hotel agents about it they upgraded my room, which was pretty cool since I already had a discounted rate. Upon entering the session area I quickly spotted Dave Cutter who I had previously chatted really briefly with on the ASE social network.

He was a really cool guy and we actually ended up spending a lot of time together. Meeting Dave was awesome because we both were 1st timers, we were pretty much equivalent in affiliate experience and knowledge, and both of us had similar personalities. I also met up with Andy Komach at the session and got to introduce myself to Shawn Collins and congratulate him on beating me in the ASE Nike+ challenge (only by like 30 miles!!).

After the first session Dave and I grabbed some street meat outside the Hilton and had some crazy guy start screaming at us. The guy literally stopped, gave us the finger, and proceeded to yell at us for like 30 seconds about how we are “FUCKING THIEVES, YOU FUCKING PRICKS, I HOPE YOU FUCKING DIE, YOU AND ALL YOUR RHETORIC BULL SHIT” haha. It was definitely a Welcome To New York kind of moment!

I was really hoping to catch a few of the sessions on that day but I got really distracted at the Meet Market and only made it to One session that day.

The Meet Market was cool but shitty. If I could do it over again I would just pass on the whole meet market thing and visit everyone during their exhibit hall hours. The market was way too crowded. It was cool though that it was a level playing field, so a lot of the smaller companies didn’t look shanty next to the people with the $40,000 booths.

Leaving the market I spotted Brian Evans from Daily Conversions and went to catch a session with him. The session to be honest was fairly empty but had a handful of catchy 1 liners for take aways. Brian and I hung for a while and made plans to hit up the NYC Affiliate Meetup w/ open bar at Touch (Sponsored by Affiliate.com). Around 5:30 we headed over to the club and found ourselves the first people there with one other local affiliate. There was also a random woman there who pretended like she knew what affiliate marketing was but really just RSVPd to the meetup event because someone sent it to her. Her exact words were “So what are we pre-gaming for?…Affiliate marketing…What’s that?”

After the meetup Brian had invited me to head over to the Ianteract Dinner that Ian Fernando & Kitara were putting on. Now this was really cool to get the chance to hang out with some of the bigger names in the industry. Of course we made the mistake of not calling Ian to heads up him about 1 more being at the table. Ian was really cool about the whole thing though and I definitely give him props for not making a big deal about it, he simply asked the waiter to swing over another chair for us and that was that. The dinner was amazing. I got a chance to hang with Ryan Gray, who had given me my ASE pass in the first place. The folks from Kitara were funny as hell and probably one of the friendliest bunch of people you could eat with. Ad Hustler was there and literally almost had me fall out of my seat with one of his lines. I got to meet Kris from Cash Tactics and we briefly discussed some glorious nerd talk about Starcraft II.

After the dinner most of us ended up at the Share A Sale rooftop party. The party was crazy packed and the drinks were flowing. We met a few other peeps up there and ended up leaving after having a few drinks and saying hi to a few people. Once we got back to the Hilton we met up with Ryan, Richard & John (the Super Affiliate Twins) and hung out with them and a few other people from Internet University. This was probably one of the best parts of the show. Everyone at the table at the sidebar was chill as hell and I probably learned more about affiliate marketing in the 2 hours we were there than I would’ve in any of the sessions.

Day 2:Monday August 16th

I woke up and was hanging a bit. I definitely shouldn’t have just crashed in my bed after leaving the bar lol. I missed the keynote from Frank Lunts, which everyone was raving about later. I have his famed book ‘words that work’ on audiobook and figured I could just crank that on the way home and be just as well off. Unfortunately my pass wasn’t good for any of the sessions on Monday so I checked the exhibit hall for a while and then went to a 1:00 appointment I had to go check out a time share.

Now I really had no intention of buying a time share in NYC but I had agreed to go on a tour of one to get a discounted rate at the Hilton. They had offered me a room at $380 a night once the conference rate of $220 sold out. Instead for taking the timeshare preview I got that lowered to $115 a night (SCORE). So I really couldn’t pass that deal up. Now at the timeshare I basically walked in told the guy that I couldn’t make any financial decisions without my fiance present. He agreed and let me go after 10 minutes. I walked out of there with an extra 20k in Hilton Honors points (2 free nights basically) and $150 destination cash (KA CHING).

I got back to the exhibit hall and got to meet a few of my AMs that I had wanted to stop by and visit with some gifts. I brought a bunch of Sam Adams’ Summer Ale 6 packs with me and brought one over to each of the affiliate managers I have that I expected to be at the show. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Summer Ale is a seasonal brew that fricken rocks and probably isn’t available in a lot of you far fetched states since it is brewed in Massachusetts. I thought it would be a good experience as I met a lot of these guys for the first time lol.

That night I took Brian and Dave out to Rothman’s Steakhouse and used the cash the timeshare people gave us to snag a great dinner. Later on we ended up hitting up the Hilton bar and then making our way over to the Neverblue party where YTCracker was DJing. The scene was pretty cool but it was a total night club atmosphere which doesn’t bode well for an industry that is 99% guys. YT was actually sounding pretty sick on the tables and I wanted to get a chance to meet up but we ended up leaving fairly early. Back at the hotel I ended up finding someone to go running with in the morning, so we hit Central Park up for a run in the AM. That was pretty cool.

Day 3: Tuesday, August 17th

Tuesday was pretty laid back. I caught the keynote early in the morning and I have to say I was impressed. I thought after the one session I went to, that Jim Kukral might not be all that exciting, but he was. He had a ton of inspirational stories and some really good case studies. He also gave out copies of his new book to everyone. After the keynote I got to meet up with Shock Marketer and we grabbed some lunch at Carnegie’s Deli. Shock was also cool as hell and had a ton of great tips for me. Not only that but for a guy in pretty good shape, this fellow can eat, check out the MASSIVE sandwich he put down at the deli.

After lunch I ended up walking to Times Square to see a few sites. I checked out the M&M Store and then went to Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Besides the Black Hole thing inside Ripley’s it was a Rip Off. The TV show was about 100x better than the actual place.

After I returned I checked out of my hotel and hit the road to head home. Sure enough leaving the parking garage I got pulled over by a police officer for not wearing my self belt! $130 ticket…thanks lol.

There was a ton of traffic on the way home and it took me like 6 hours to get home, compared to the 3 to get to NY.

I really can’t stress enough though how amazing the experience was. Everyone I met was extremely nice to me.

I also wanted to share a few tips for everyone who might get a chance to attend an Affiliate Summit.

• Don’t Feel Like You Have To Stick Around – Some of the things you think will be cool, won’t be. So if you aren’t feeling a session, a party, a meetup, just bounce and save yourself the time.
• Don’t Be Afraid To Talk To Everyone – I saw a ton of first time people who seemed scared as hell to talk to anyone. I am far from guru status but every major blogger I saw I stopped and said hello to and let them know what I thought of their writings and thanked them if I found their sites helpful. EVERYONE was more than grateful to hear feedback and to just say to anyone no matter if you are pushing $10 a day or $10k a day in revenue.
• Don’t Be Afraid To Get Personal With AMs – When I typically speak to an affiliate manager they are usually in the office or what not so I usually don’t dig into some more ‘taboo’ business topics. However in person when we are at a party I have no problem trying to get the dirt. I was asking most of my AMs what sort of bonus structure they get from my revenue, how much their top guys do, how many affiliates they supervise, how long they have been with the company, what their backgrounds are, etc. Every single AM I spoke to about stuff like this was more than happy to answer pretty much everything you wanted to know. That was cool as hell and I respect everyone for putting up with my curiosity.
• Don’t Stay In Your Room – Some of my best times happened just heading to the bar to grab a drink myself and striking up conversations. You don’t have to be a millionaire and buy out the bar to meet cool people.
• Get Sloppy….Not Too Sloppy – Personally I think hilarious times come out of complete drunkeness. Not everyone feels the same. So if you are hanging with people for the first time, try not to be the only hammered guy…no matter what you think, you aint funny to a bunch of people who are sober.

I have another post coming later this week talking about all the sick swag and gifts I picked up to. By far my best pickup was the scratcher card from the guys over at Qwik Media. At the show they were tossing out scratcher cards to win an Apple iPad. I didn’t win an iPad but I snagged $250 CASH. That $250 will go a long way on paying for my $130 seat belt tickets!

If you are interested in signing up for Internet University you can Join Here. The cost is either monthly at $99 a month (WORTH EVERY PENNY!) or you can also purchase it by the day for just $5!! (This option is available to buy for just 1 single day, ie: cancel after 1 day and $5 spend!)

So if you REALLY want to see How much money I made or lost in this campaign you have to go sign up! (YOU ALSO GET ALL OF THE SUPER AFFILIATE TWINS LESSONS AS WELL!)

Here we go!

(*before anyone calls bullshit I did edit my DirectCPV ad spend screenshot to delete all the other offers I currently am running…all numbers listed are 100% legit)

Hi everyone, I know there has been a lot of buzz and activity with the PPV area and a lot of people are starting to reference PPV attempts in their journals. I wanted to share with you an experience of mine from May of 2010.  I’m going to provide the offer I was promoting, the exact landing page I was using, and the exact results I received.

Unfortunately I waited too long to really dig these stats up and I can’t give you 100% precise numbers in reference to direct vs. landing page conversions but I can give you a pretty good idea.

You can first hand see some things that worked and some things that didn’t. Hopefully this post can shed some light onto some techniques that can be more helpful in PPV advertising.

The Offer
The offer I was promoting was called ‘Quality Health | Zip Submit’ and was offer 8594 on AzoogleAds. The offer converts when a visitor submits their zipcode information on a 1 field submit on the first page. The payout was $.95 per lead.

I picked this offer because it sounded VERY easy to convert on, and I thought it might be a quick sell. The offer basically tells people that they might be eligible to receive some free trials of things. I was planning on promoting on a pretty big site and so I did very little keyword/demographic research.

The Campaign
The campaign was VERY simple. It was being promoted on the network DirectCPV and was targeting two major URLs(well 4 really). The URLS were:

craigslist.org
craigslist.org/zip

These were the only two URL targets however I also submitted each a 2nd time and added a slash after them (ie: craigslist.org/) because DirectCPV for whatever reason counts that as a second URL and the bids can be higher/lower for it. If you don’t do this you can still receive traffic from it…so its kind of weird, I just always do it.

The root domain was obviously Craigslist, and the 2nd domain was their ‘For Sale/Free’ section. I picked this as a good bid because people were obviously looking for free crap anyways if they were there, so why not?!?

I bid $.03 as a max bid for each of these campaigns and I wasn’t the #1 bidder but still hit my max view that I set it to cap out each day. I originally started with $5 a day caps and moved up to $25 in my later testing before stopping the campaign (ignore the limits in the screenshots those were changed afterward).

In retrospect I should have bid just $.01 and I still would’ve hit my views from Frequency caps of others and such.

Tracking
I learned a lot about tracking from this campaign. At the time I didn’t have a Prosper installation or any sort of cloaking software so my affiliate network saw exactly where all my links were coming from.

I began to want to know if one of the two domains was converting more than the other. I edited my campaign within DirectCPV to change the destination URL (where my landing page was) to the following:

http://DOMAINNAME.COM/offerpage.php?subid={{vurl}}

That bit of code on the end of that url the ?subid={{vurl}} part created a variable that gets passed along to my site. The variable would be called ’subid’ and its value would = {{vurl}}. the VURL tidbit is a piece of code that DirectCPV replaces with the URL you are bidding on (this is unique to their system, each network has their own).

This would send someone to my website and pass on what URL they accessed that triggered my popup.

I then used to the following code in my PHP landing page. (*Note that although it was a PHP landing page, I really don’t know anything about PHP I just wanted to be able to pass that subid. I added this code and renamed it .php instead of .html):

<? echo $_GET['subid'] ?>

What this code did was place the ’subid’ value into my HTML/PHP code. So my full link looked something like

<a href=”http://jumplinkurl.com/?sub=<? echo $_GET['subid'] ?>>Click Here </a>

So it made it that my jumplink had the subid attached onto it. I could then look at my Azoogle stats and see what was converting and what URLs were not.

In retrospect I don’t recommend doing this. It makes it really easy for a network to know ALL your secrets I found it helpful and unfortunately I don’t know of any software that masks them for you to see what worked and what doesn’t without sharing it with the network as well.

Landing Page
I ran two separate campaigns where everything was the same thing except the landing page. One was direct linking and the other would go to a split testing landing page.

The direct link of the offer has since changed but you can get an idea of what it looks like now at
http://www.mikechiasson.com/images/iu/qh.jpg

My landing pages were all pretty similar and this is the one that had the BEST results. I was averaging a conversion 1 out of every 3.5 visitors who clicked through from this landing page.

SIMPLE HUH? I went with a reader misconception idea here to gain their trust. I basically took the EXACT craigslist template and made it my own…actually I literally went to Craigslist.org and saved the source of a page and just edited it lol. It took maybe 30 seconds?

Now what is important to understand that DirectCPV is intersital ads. This means that instead of it being a pop up it displays ontop of a webpage and alerts the user at the top that this is an ad. My goal was to really hope they didn’t pay any attention to the ad and that they just click through to the page.

THE RESULTS

The part everyone is waiting for.

Well here is the ad spend from my two campaigns. Now first of all, this was my FIRST PPV attempt and I thought it went well. It is slightly misleading because I funded my account with $100 originally and received a $50 bonus. So I was pretty ‘generous’ with my trials since I was working with $50 free.

I had a total spend of about $178 – $50 of the offer and I was in about $128 of my own cash.

Here is a screenshot of my Azoogle account this month (please ignore all the other offers they were basically where they sent non US traffic). I was only promoting this offer that month (well and I did a $20 buy on Facebook for that nail offer lol).

*DELETED 5 Lines of results text that you can see exclusively on my journal at Internet University!

*OTHER NOTES

It should also be noted that this PPV experiment was performed on a SHARED HOSTING option that I have with Dreamhost. I have since purchased a dedicated server for my PPV campaigns. In certain instances I noticed a VERY large drop off of what was reported from my PPV vendor to my Analytics results. You can read a quick case study about this at HERE . The lander I was referencing was my 15kb page, so I saw about an 87% view rate from what was reported by the PPV vendor. That still means that of my $178 ad spend 13% or $23 was completely useless to me. I credit this to people closing my page before it loaded.

I hope everyone liked this case study and I hope my openness of the offer/results/techniques helps us all get to where we are going! I would really love to hear/see what others have been working on!

And sorry if you think this was linkbait, I really did share 95% of the campaign, just if you want to see the full fruits of my labor you have to go check out the Super Affiliate Twins’ Internet University. It’s just $5 for a 1 day subscription!

Today I want to share an example with you about such a case I had with Direct CPV and their interface.

I had an offer that I wanted to run. Now whenever I want to try running an offer I will usually dedicate $10-$15 in throw up a PPV campaign with a quick lander or a direct link and target a mainstream website and blow through the traffic in a few minutes just to see if there is any chance that this offer might convert. I’ve had mixed results with this but it is truely helpful for anxious people who don’t want to wait to know if they are chasing a dead end!

This past week I was testing out a campaign and I really wanted to test out an offer so I fired up an old DirectCPV campaign that I had paused. I edited my landing page and tried starting it and just couldn’t get any views. I figured maybe since the campaign was old and had been paused for a few months maybe it needed to be reapproved. I submitted it again and it was approved but still not popping. The sites I had listed were www.facebook.com and www.craigslist.org . Now I don’t care what PPV network you are working with, these two sites are going to get hoardes of traffic (90% absolute shit traffic) but you can usually bid $.01 and see tons of traffic still!

Unfortunately my plan was not generating any pops of the pop up. I actually attempted to reach out to DirectCPV via phone. I managed to get someone on the phone who tried telling me it was probably because I wasn’t the top bidder on one. I even set my bid to max on one just to prove to them that that wasn’t the problem. The operator still tried suggesting that maybe there wasn’t much traffic. I explained how all the other networks didn’t have any lack of traffic and that this was a MAJOR U.S. target. They still tried saying ‘well maybe, what if, are you sure?’ and eventually said there wasn’t anything they could do for me.

A few hours later they actually emailed me letting me know that those 2 websites are on a ‘No Pop List’. WHAT?!? NO WHERE on their site or ToS does it say they don’t pop on certain sites…shouldn’t that happen when you approve/disapprove the target websites?

Needless to say they had no answer to that but they were able to provide me a list of No Pop sites. They basically seem to not pop on all major network sites. I’m sharing the list for a few reasons. 1.) It might save some frustrations from others some day. 2.) It is a pretty good resource to see what some high volume sites are that people were apparently targetting.

3tube.com
addthis.com
adinterax.com
admanage.com
admeld.com
advertising.com
alotsoftware.com
alpha.coronado.netdna-cdn.com
anrdoezrs.net
aol.com
aolgadgets.com
apmebf.com
apps.facebook.com
ask.com
bebo.com
bidvertiser.com
bing.com
break.com
cc-dt.com
chameleonsearch.com
chameleontom.com
cia.gov
clickserver.com
clicksor.com
cnn.com
comcast.net
commission-junction.com
coreggy.com
cra-arc.gc.ca
craigslist.com
craigslist.org
cyberdefender.com
dailymotion.com
dell.com
dhs.gov
directcpv.com
displayads.net
doubleclick.com
dpbolvw.net
earthlink.net
ezanga.com
facebook.com
fbi.gov
filter.adsimilate.com
filter.mycityfeeds.com
filter.oridianppc.com
foobar.com
ftc.gov
google.com
googlelabs.com
gorillanation.com
hit75.namiflow.com
iamwired.com
iamwired.net
infolinks.com
intactearnings.com
intext.net
investorsedge.com
irs.gov
jdoqocy.com
kontera.com
kqzyfj.com
lfstmedia.com
limewire.com
linksynergy.com
linksynergy.overstock.com
linksynergy.walmart.com
loudmo.com
maxmind.com
mcafee.com
mediajmp.com
metacafe.com
microsoft.com
mozilla.com
myspace.com
myyearbook.com
norton.com
orkut.com
orkut.com.br
popads123.com
qksrv.net
rcm-ca.amazon.ca
rcmp-grc.gc.ca
revenuegateway.com
rgjmp.com
rightmedia.com
rover.ebay.com
sexbankroll.com
tkqlhce.com
track.soundsearch.com
twitter.com
udmserve.net
usajobs.gov
ventivmedia.com
vibrantmedia.com
weather.com
wisevid.com
www.msn.com
www.yahoo.com
yolu.com
youtube.com
zedo.com
zenchakra.com

Funny enough is that I had actually 5 targets on this list that I had run campaigns on in the past that ended profitable! Guess I must’ve been on the right track a few times!

So how detrimental is this?

Well it stinks but its not horrible. I had been experimenting with a really cheap PPV traffic source and had found a pretty good niche with this one offer. Mind you I probably spent $100+ attempting to find profitable offers on the network. Ultimately I slightly tweaked this one and was able to be earning right about $100 a week with it. As you can see from my previous post, that is some good extra cash towards my goal! I could’ve potentially hit the $400 a month mark with this offer. Alas I was sending mass PPV traffic to it that resulted over the course of a month to about 40,000 hits with just 76 leads.

Was I rejected because of low quality or not enough conversions?

From what I was told the advertiser running the offer was kicking anyone sending PPV traffic out. The leads weren’t good enough quality. However my AZN Advisor also informed me that some companies pay Azoogle per impression (CPM model) as opposed to a CPA, even though they pay us CPA. This could very likely turn an advertiser’s expected web traffic into some trash PPV mass volume and end up costing them some cash so I can respect their decision for this.

What do I do now?

This was my BEST and only REALLY successful (in my mind) offer I had been able to promote, so I’m in a little pickle. Fortunately for me I was moving full steam so I still have a lot of energy and excitement to put fourth some other offers.

What about you guys, have you been kicked from any offers yet?

As a consumer I really don’t care how great and amazing your product is, I’m just not going to waste my time if I can’t atleast see a scrollbar or timer to see how long a video is going to be. I really love seeing that a video might be like 3-5 minutes long and if I don’t feel like listening to one part I just scroll through.

There are tons of successfully marketed products out there that don’t do this and I think a lot of them do REALLY well. I wanted to talk about this real quick after receiving an email from Mark Roth over at Offervault about a girl who makes $10,000 from her iPhone. They had a ‘click here’ to see link in the email. Sure I will watch it. Now I’m sure its interesting as hell but I immediately saw no video controls and closed the window. I simply refuse to waste some unknown portion of my life watching your upsell, sorry.

So lets hear from some of you. What do you think of using videos to make sales that don’t have video controls. Have you had good luck or bad luck?

10. You are 25, too young to be called old, to old to be called a kid.
9. You can successfully rent a car by yourself now!
8. Car insurance drops by a good margin! (Almost $50 a month for me! Granted I did also switch during the time.)
7. You can run for president in just 10 years!!!!
6. Everyone apologizes to you when carding you for beer.
5. You are in a new demographic, more likely to get free stuff for taking surveys!
4. You can’t get drafted by the U.S. Military anymore!
3. No one will look at you like an idiot if you get pregnant.
2. You can start gaining weight and just tell people to go to hell if they got an issue with it.
1. You only have 1 year left before you can continue hanging out with your friends who insist on trying out for American Idol each year!

So next time you think about being the big 25 remember, it aint that bad! If you want to reflect on some of the great challenges of being 25 make sure to check out The Definitive Dmbosstone.

So I read on and come to find out the challenge is all about running with this nike+ sensor thing. I researched it a bit and it looks like Nike came out with this little pedometer like tracking gadget that can sync to your iPod/iPhone. I actually saw this app on my phone once and was like ‘wtf is that?’ Anyways the little pedometer thing can be bought at most stores, I picked mine up at Dick’s Sporting Goods for $20. Then you need a pair of Nike running shoes…NOT just any regular Nike shoes. They HAVE to have a Nike+, pay attention to the ‘+’ plus sign on them. This means that the shoes have a little insert in the left sole that can be removed and make room for the pedometer chip. From there it can track your miles on your Apple product.

First of all this is simply genius. I’ve already talked to people who bought iTouches just for this and I myself ended up buying new Nike+ running shoes just for this. Good for them for making us go crazy for gadgets! Originally I bought the pedometer and was like “I aint paying for no damn new kicks to!” then I found this little sensor shoe pocket thing. It was like $5 and it velcroes onto your regular shoelaces. This worked great for what it was, but after running a few miles my feet were really hurting in my regular cross training shoes.

So I broke down and bought a pair of Nike+ running shoes and the rest is history! I’ve run over 70km in two weeks which is pretty good for someone who hasn’t run in several years. I’m currently in 31st place on the contest and gaining! I’m convinced I will make it to the top 10 by the time ASE runs around. Speaking of which if anyone wants to toss me a Silver Pass or something to ASE I will happily wear your logo on my shirt as I run the next few hundred Miles! The top leader (NO WAY I CAN CATCH HER) has like almost 600 KM logged.

WISH ME LUCK!

P.S. Damn you ASE for making me run for an hour each day when I SHOULD be running affiliate campaigns. However I do thank you for the 5+ pounds I’ve lost since running began!

Anyways I’ve had a few good things and a few bad things to say. One Volsh is 200% lying about their guaranteed 24×7x365 support. EVERY single time I have had a problem, which all times it was something on their end, their live chat was either offline or had one of the guy’s wifes sitting in front of a PC and she literally told me ‘Sorry not much I can do for you, call back in a few.’ Today when I experiemced a problem no one was answering their phone, no one was responding to support tickets, just a total f’n mess. I was pissed off the last time I had an outage with these guys and they couldn’t be reached and this time I was even more pissed. In their defense my server is CHEAP as fuck. The price of a Quad Core Intel chip with 4GB of Ram, 250GB drive, DirectAdmin panel is only $150 a month with 4TB of bandwidth. This similar setup was $250+ at ThePlanet and $410 at Rackspace. Secondly the server is blazing fast, waaay faster than my shared hosting (note this blog is still on shared hosting).

So back to the problem. I am getting no support and eventually email James, the president of Volsh, after 6+ hours of downtime. James calls me up like an hour later, apologizes like crazy saying that his support guy must’ve decided to take a half day while he was gone or something. Who cares, not my fault, not the first time their promised support has been no where to be seen. Anyways, James tells me that he was looking for a while to find what the problem was and eventually found that one of their techs took my entire dedicated server offline because they got a cease and desist letter from the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office. This raised several points of concern to me.

1.) How the fuck did Attorney General Martha Coakley and her minions of clowns find my host? The domain in question was a private registration and the server stats point to Volsh’s parent data center Turnkey Internet Inc. Now when I wanted to get some answers and Volsh was no where to be found, I called up Turnkey and they basically told me like 30 times that there is nothing they can do, I have to deal with my reseller. They cried and cried about how they would get fired or sued if they went to check a box for me that they were leasing, blah blah blah, I get it. So then how the hell did the AG’s office get in touch with Volsh if this is the case? Volsh is from my understanding, invisible here, unless those rat bastards at Turnkey turned me in! Which apparently means I should sue them?!?

2.) Why didn’t they email my proxy contact email with a cease and desist? I have in the past received comments from people trying to get in contact with me requesting permission to repost things, questions, etc. They simply fill out the proxy email that then forwards their questions to your real address without revealing you. So what gives the AG any special power to skip the norm of contacting the webmaster and went straight to a host.

3.) Was I in violation of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)? I registered the domain on the recommendation of an Indian friend of mine who is a sales person for an Indian SEO group. I then paid them to come up with copy. The site site essentiallys looks like a two page domain that is similar to a state’s website, please note it wasn’t a .gov site, just a state sponsored .com site. The site had several references to their actual domain if people were looking for it. Obviously the site I had constructed used likeness to the state’s site, I should have actually looked at the finished product but it was such a small task I just kind of assumed it was all set from the guys I paid to do it. I don’t know enough about copyright to know how much of a likeness or reference is allowed so I scrapped the site as soon as they called me, I really wasn’t looking to get into any trouble.

4.) Why the hell did my host shut my box down instead of calling me? First rule of etiquette is call your client before shutting them down right? I might say ‘fuck you they stole this content from me’ or I would’ve probably gone ‘OK I will change the page immediately.’ Either way I now know that if anyone called my host and said ‘Shut Mike down now!’ my host would probably respond immediately ‘OK RANDOM STRANGER HAVE A GREAT DAY!’ Honestly! What if I called up using spoof card to cover my number and just pretended to be something. That’s why most GOOD providers, request written proof, etc.

So here I am asking these questions and I reached out to a friend who actually had a copy of a cease and desist from the attorney general’s office from a southern state with almost identical ‘infringements’ as mine. It was a very generic one similar to what I had seen in the past. You basically get it and take down the site, and no one bothers you anymore.I’ve never had anyone go to my host to complain. When I told my friend about this he immediately started telling me to ditch my host because they are lying.

This comment puts me in a real debate. Is Volsh just that shitty that they make outrageous lies to cover up their horrible support? Or is Martha Coakley really hunting me down like a rebel gun seller?!? I really don’t have any idea but I am pretty pissed at both of them! I can’t really leave MA and ditch Coakley’s reign but I sure can and probably will ditch Volsh.

Shoemoney System

This is Jeremy Shoemaker’s big thing right now. It is essentially his tell all guide where he shares his secrets on how to succeed in affiliate marketing. The site boasts that there is little reading and a lot of easy to follow video. Now let’s face it, Jeremy definitely knows his shit. So if someone is going to show you how to succeed it might as well be him right? Well I have a few doubts and I really think they are warranted. First lets keep in mind that Jeremy also runs the Shoemoney Tools area on his site. So having a program like this is a great way to feed future users into that program. But we have seen this before… Like a year ago or so Jeremy had a program called the Shoemoney Xtreme Internet Marketing Guide. It was intended to be an 11 week program where you would sign up for free and get a PDF in emailed to you each week. I signed up for it, and it had some GREAT info in it. However that ended up dying out like 9 weeks into it or something. So…how long will this program last?

It basically costs $199 a month and it’s not like you can grind away and learn everything in a month. They only release certain videos after xx amount of days. They make the claim that this is so you can sink the information in. This makes sense, but for some of us, we don’t want to wait until month 3 to actually get to the level we might be on. For all I know Jeremy might get lazy and quit after month 6, who knows. I ended up signing up for a $5 15 day trial just to check it out and hopefully grab some of the promoted $2,500 in free advertising coups…only to learn that you don’t get those coupon codes until a specific lesson. Oh and they don’t actually clarify all the coups, so it might be like $100 facebook credit, and $2,400 Yellowpages.com credit. Anyways I’m planning on canceling before the trial is over. To me this method is just not worth the $200 a month to have limited access. It seems like it might be a great place to start for complete newbs though.

*Notes for affiliates. Shoemoney System is a listed product on Clickbank. If you link to your own affiliate hoplink through it you could essentially reduce the cost to around $100 per month. Also the Shoemoney Xtreme program is up and running again if you are looking for some helpful free info.

List Playbook

List Playbook is the new item from Brian Evans over at Daily Conversions. Brian’s product claims to perform one on one training to a very limited program. I’m not sure of the exact amount of people allowed in, but I want to say 20 at a time. In theory you could receive some extremely large amounts of attention and advice from Brian. Now some people might say “Brian who?” Although he is not exactly top of the list off Aff Buzz you can follow his blog for a little while and realize that he has some of the best advice I’ve read out there. His product is specifically aimed at Email List Building and Marketing and comes with a high price tag, $500 a month.

Now common sense dictates that a product like this is too much for some of us small players. However when you think price vs value in your head, you really have to question…”Damn $500 a month, this must be a good program”. I spoke to Brian the other day and he let me know he was filling his first group up pretty fast. Brian normally charges $5k to consult for a company so to get his knowledge for this price could be a real bargain. So if you have the $500 and want to see what it can get you, be sure to visit List Playbook.

*Affiliate note, Brian’s program currently doesn’t advertise any affiliate commission but I’m sure if you have traffic to send him he might be willing to work something out.

Internet University With the Super Affiliate Twins

Ok Gary and his cohorts are one of my new favorite blogs (see Super Affiliate Twins). They have been posting gem after gem as far as content goes on their blog. It has seriously opened my eyes to some marketing ideas I had seen or thought of but wasn’t sure how to get involved. They have now launched their own small group training program as well, called the Internet University. Now I am loving their marketing efforts on this. First of all they teamed up with John Volk to do a webinar to launch the event the other day. Anyone who doesn’t know, John has skyrocketed his subscriber and email list well over 10,000 users in the past few months with his affiliate marketing guide and quality blog posts. So teaming with a well connected guy like John was a great idea!

So anyways, John promotes the university and offers users a 20% off 1st month coupon. Mind you John in return probably receives a full month or so of commission, fair enough for a lead. But to top it off Gary has on his site the price listed PER DAY! I LOVE IT! This is mind tricks 101 everyone and I wouldn’t be surprised if his guru product does better than everyone elses! They plainly list the price as $3.22 a day! They don’t even mention the monthly cost lol, which is $99  a month. I really can’t get over how well I expect that to work out for them, who wouldn’t pay $3.22 a day for a product!?! I spend more than that on Soda most days.

*Affiliate note, the Internet University also currently has their own private affiliate program, you can sign up for it on their page if you are interested.

So What Will I Pay For?

Well like I said, I signed up for the Shoemoney 15 day trial and fully plan on cancelling. List Playbook is really relative to me right now because I have really been trying to build email lists, but the price is a little too high for me. Internet University is a hot item to me, I am going to sign up using the John Volk 20% off and give it a try for at least a month for a few reasons. One, John is sending me to the Playboy Mansion with Azoogle, so if I can get info I need and get him a little kick back, its all good. Two, the information I’ve gotten off the twins’ blog has already been worth the $100 in cash to me, so if anything I am just paying them back. Although I haven’t spoken to them to see if they are running a similar setup to Jeremy’s (ie: limited info at one time) I am willing to take the jump. I will report back on my progress.