Probably more people in this business are crazy about supercars, so I decided to do some supercar related posts too from now on.

What a better day to start than today when, finally, the replacement of the Murcielago was released to the press at the annual VAG pre Geneva press conference. The specs and name were already known for weeks, but to finally get the official info together with the pictures is just awesome!

So, what do you need to know about this car besides the fact that it looks awesome? Well, it has a new 6.5-liter V12 which delivers an astonishing 700 HP at 8,250 RPM and 690 Nm at 5,500 RPM. It has a brand new 7-speed ISR transmission which shifting times of mere 50 milliseconds. It does 0-62 MPH in 2.9 seconds and top speed is 217 MPH.

Look at that beast! What do you think? I want one!!!

Flying to Vegas for the Affiliate Summit West 2011 I was flipping channels on my private 55″ full-HD LED entertainment system 2.5″ in-flight entertainment system, when I came across a documentary about Zuckerberg. I think I missed most of it but I did learn some things that also featured in the movie. Zuckerberg being one of my biggest internet heroes back then, at that point already took some damage in my respect for him. Let’s just say the movie didn’t help him in that aspect.

When you watch ‘The social network’,  it is hard not to go on believing that he is a awkward, selfish, antisocial guy who really just stole the whole idea of Facebook from 2 of his fellow students. And we are led to believe that he is a cold hearted guy who puts money and success above everything else, and in the process of building his billion dollar project has no problems ditching his best friend and co-founder of Facebook. That being said, in the movie emphasis is put on the fact that he is very much influenced by Napster founder Sean Parker (who was excellently portrayed by Justin Timberlake, kudos!) in many of his private and business decisions.

So, where does it leave us now? What should we, viewers of the flick, have to believe now? Zuckerberg dismissed the movie as “a work of fiction”. In an interview he did he said that the small details were correct, like the clothing he wears, the fact that he has been dumped many times by the ladies and that Facebook started out as a way to get some sort of personal social attention. But the main plot was absolutely wrong according to Zuckerberg.

But based on all the facts we’ve seen and heard, and the fact that there is no clear evidence that he did NOT steal the idea for Facebook, were do I put him right now. I don’t know. Do I place him in my personal list of the world’s best entrepreneurs right next to Bill Gates, Steve jobs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page? No. Not for now. There are too many unknown factors to the whole Facebook legacy for me.

Besides that, Facebook is Zuckersbergs only project right now. Granted, it has no match in terms of value that has been created at lightning speed, but take Bill Gates, Jobs and the Google guys. They have all branched out to loads of products. Gates has Windows, Bing, Xbox and so on. Jobs has the Apple, Iphone, Ipod, Ipad, Apple TV, Itunes and numerous other things and look at the products Google rolled out in the last 10 years, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Youtube, Google Earth etc. I know they have been around longer, but I do like to challenge the thought of what Mark would be doing right now hadn’t he started Facebook.

So, now you tell me what you think. Is Zuckerberg a billion-dollar hit wonder who shouldn’t be credited at all, or is he simply a genius that should deserve all the respect in the world?

Here are some recent stats about Facebook you might find interesting:

At least, I really hope that is the case for the sake of the people who created this hilarious Volkswagen Commercial. It’s a “leaked” ad that was supposed to premiere at Super Bowl night. I think this is one of the best commercials I’ve seen in a while! That kid’s reaction at the end is just priceless!

Talking about the Superbowl. I think a lot of you, like me, are always looking for new ways to make money. But how cool would it be when the money just finds you without you having to do anything for it.

That’s also why I recently decided to put a lot of time and effort in building my first ecommerce store, which I will be writing about in a later post in detail. But the ecommerce project was my first drive to wander off the yellow brick road of PPC and dive into SEO.

I did have some basic knowledge of SEO, but I really got into it with one of the best courses I’ve ever done and I’m trying to get you guys a great deal on this as we speak, because it’s a MUST for anyone interested in SEO. So keep checking back for that!

The information I’m going to share right now is not from that course, but something I found out myself by accident more or less.

As we all know Google has some pretty good apps in their arsenal. One of them is called Google Alerts. And if your not familiar with it, then I suggest you read Google’s info on this first. Basically what it does is keeping you updated on any terms or phrases you put into it by notifying you by email when something about that subject pops up on the web. Not only is it fun to enter your own name, company name or your favorite blogger (ahem) into it and see where they pop up, but as I found out it can be used as an awesome SEO tool too!

So, on to the good stuff. How can you put Google alerts into good SEO practice. Easy peasy!

Say you have a page about the amazing Hawaii Chair (have you bought one yet!?) Although the name may suggest otherwise, this is actually an great working weight loss product.

So if you want to do some link building for this page, you want to target pages that have to do with weight loss, lose weight, exercise, that kind of stuff. So want you want to do now is go to Google Alerts and enter terms that are relevant to your page. So, in this case: weight loss, lose weight, exercise and so on. You can enter as many as you wish. But remember to use a new alert for every keyword. Also, make sure the ‘type’ is set on ‘everything’, ‘how often’ not more than ‘once a day’ or your mailbox will be flooded with alerts and make sure the ‘volume’ option is on ‘only the best results’. Only if you find that you get very few alerts you can turn this to ‘all results’.

Now, having done this will get you a notification every time your keyword shows up on a page on the big ol’ web. If you are really into it and you  have lots of time, you can dive into all those sites and see which pages allow you to place a comment (that contains a link to your site), because in the end that’s what we want, right?

But scanning all those sites can be very time consuming so there is a better way to easily find the sites you can post a link on to your widely appreciated page about the Hawaii Chair. Instead of just entering the keywords by it’s own into Google Alerts, you expand them by these keywords: blog, forum & comment. So you enter: “weight loss blog” as 1 alert, “weight loss forum” as 1 and “weight loss comment”.

This way your chances of finding a page that has the possibility of leaving comments have greatly improved. Of course you always stumble upon blogs and forums who have comments disabled or review each comment manually and rip out your link, or not place the comment at all, but that’s something all link builders have to deal with and there is not much you can do about it. But like always make sure you do not just put your link out there all spammy, but rather read what the blog or forum posting is about, and try to at least post a comment that is somewhat useful for other readers. This will also greatly improve your chances of having the comment placed, even with your link in it.

In this case of the “Hawaii chair”, of course put that as an alert in as well. There won’t be too many pages about this undervalued product, but if you are able to find any which allow comments then you have uber relevant content and having a link to your page here will help your ranking as well.

Only by using this method I’ve been able to reach #1 Google positions on very competitive keywords, so I can assure you that it works! It’s anything but an overnight thing, but if you put your mind to it and consistently keep building links on the pages you get delivered by Google alerts every day, you will have success!

Anyway, before the trip I was hoping I could do a in-depth blog post about the Summit about all the sessions, the people  I met from the business and all the new business I would bring home.

So, I’m afraid that’s not going to happen….. I think we made a little planning mistake. We planned our trip so that the Summit was almost at the beginning of our trip instead of at the ending like last year. So what happened was that we partied SO hard the first days and came home so late (it was the first time Vegas for 2 of us) that most of the Summit we were actually sleeping (SHAME ON US!!!). In fact the very first day we came home at 9:00 AM so the Summit was already open for a full hour. I felt so bad… We did manage to go there for a full hour though later that afternoon.

So, not so much info about the Affiliate Summit. Anything interesting else then you would like to share with us Gioom? Well yes actually. Some good and some bad.

First off, we started at the Aria hotel, located in the new heart of Vegas, the ‘City Centre’, the biggest privately funded construction in the United States. And my god, the City Centre is such a great addition to Vegas. It’s beautiful! Especially the Cosmopolitan hotel, it just looks stunning, inside and out! That’s where I’m staying next year for sure!

But the Aria was great too. Great room, but the most awesome feature must be it’s amazing ‘control the universe’ remote they had over there. It controls everything from the TV to the shades, airco, lights you name it. It was great fun when my buddy Hein was doing a nr 2 and I kept switching all the lights on and off, haha. (I guess you had to be there).

The room:

The most elite remote ever:

Then 2 days later we had to change hotels. Because of the CES, the AVN and the Affiliate Summit conventions there was no hotel who could accommodate us for our full stay (we did book pretty late). So our last 4 days we spent at the Planet Hollywood Towers by Westgate. Over there we had the 4 bedroom Penthouse suite and although the room itself was pretty amazing with a great view, HD beamer and bar, I would never go there again.

One being the fact that I had itchy legs all 4 days plus it looked like I had bite marks on there, so that made me suspect that they might have a case of  bedbugs going on there. Another of my travel companions had the very same problem. Some other problems that caused me not to go there again: the amplifier was broken on arrival, the desk clerks wear football jerseys without name tags (quite strange for a pretty expensive hotel if you ask me), my room wasn’t cleaned for 2 days despite having the ‘clean my room’ light on and finally when we had a guy sick with fever and all, there was nobody picking up the phone at the reception after 3 tries. So, will not be going there again.

Like I said, room was pretty amazing:

Now, the affiliate network parties are always a blast! Unfortunately we had a lot of parties to choose from, so we might or might not have seen the best ones, but it was big fun nevertheless.

First party was of Buy.at. A pretty new network in the US that originates from the UK. It is known as “Affiliate Window” over there and what I’ve heard of it, it’s one of the best, if not THE best, networks in the UK. We had a really good talk with Nick Cartwright, their brand sales manager and I’m definitely going to run some campaigns with them!

Anyway, the party was really good too, the location was just awesome! It was on top of “The Hotel”, owned by the Mandalay Bay. I really really REALLY didn’t like the outside glass lift going up some 58 floors, but it was well worth it because the view was nothing short of breathtaking:

The party was laid back but fun, unfortunately because it was not a closed party, there were a lot of weird people haning out there that came from the CES and had nothing to do with affiliate marketing, but despite that, we had a great time.

The next day it was time for the Epic Direct party. Besides the fact that it’s probably my favorite network out there, they are known for having THE best parties. I went to their Playboy Mansion party in 2009 and that was insane! This time their party was in the Blush, a very stylish club in the Encore. Great atmosphere, good people plus LOTS of gorgeous girls. Epic Direct keeps amazing me by having more beautiful girls at their party every time.

Unfortunately for some reason we forgot to take pictures of them, but instead I do have a picture of us hanging out with my affiliate manager Michael Boghosian

After that we were planning to go to Clickbooth’s ‘Black Card Party’, but when we came to the secret location, the staff told us that the party had moved but they had no idea where. Nor did we at that moment so instead we went somewhere else. Too bad we found out way too late where Clickbooth’s party had moved too.

As you can tell, we didn’t miss the parties, but it would be better if we had seen a bit more of the summit like last year. Next year we’re definitely going to do all the partying in the beginning so we will have more than enough time to hangout with other people in the business and do some more networking.

For all you non-believers I do want to post one picture that you can see that we were actually there:

And finally if you do want some real info about the summit, my buddy Jonathan Volk made a list of good recaps and you can find them here:

Ahustler
Ian Fernando
Riley Pool
Ryan Grey
Logan Tompson
Daily Conversions
Rohail Rizvi
Danger Brown
CDFnetworks
John Chow

It’s THE best place to meet other affiliates, make deals with affiliate networks, do some networking in general, but the best of all must be THE PARTIES! I cannot wait to get crazy at one of those wild parties! (and of course do some business in the mean time too! duhhh)

For now it looks like the club I’m going with will be going to the Buy.at Mixology Party @ the Mandelay Bay on Saturday, either the ShareASale “Under the Stars” party @ Tryst nightclub or the Ads4Dough party @ SpearmintRhino on Sunday (waiting for rsvp confirmation still but I kind of like that location!), and on Monday we have a LOT of parties to choose from but since they are one of my 3 favorite networks PLUS they always throw one heck of a party, we’re going to the Epic Direct’s Exclusive party @ the Blush.

If this week is going to be only half as fun as last year, then we will have a blast.

Time to get a couple of hours of sleep now, and then it’s off to the airport and off to Vegas!

If you want to connect during ASW11 then drop a comment or mail me at gioom[at]gioom.com!

I’m kind of ashamed because when I teach people about internet marketing or entrepeneurship in general, I always tell them to do what they believe in and stick to it. Never give up, no matter what!

Though that is very true and I’m a firm believer of that, you will now probably ask yourself ’so, what’s the deal with the blog that only lived a few months then?’.

Well let me explain. I didn’t setup this blog to make money. Off course it’s ultra super duber cool to make $25.000-50.000 per month like the big guys like Shoemoney and John Chow do, but that was never my intention (although I wouldn’t be hatin’ it!). I set this blog up last year because I think there are still many cool and ontold things going on in the marketing world that nobody is talking about. That plus I love sharing fun things like the funniest Youtube’s you have ever seen or just a really cool car.

Problem is, that exactly when I started this blog last year, my big ‘ol whiteboard was filled with 9 other projects that I was going to do in the coming months. Although this blog had a pretty high priority, I found out that the other projects took waaay more time then expected in the first place. Long story short; I took on too much too handle and I within a few months I found myself dealing with 10 projects that I could only spend so little time on, that most of them weren’t even worth the effort. They needed a lot of work, and I couldn’t give it to them.

So recently I decided to drop most of them and only continue with the ones that have the most potential in my opinion. This blog won’t certainly become a cash cow any day soon, but it’s one of the projects I like best, because let’s be honest, blogging is just a whole bunch of fun!

So, I make my promise today, and you can write it down if you want: from now on I will be posting again on a very regular basis!

That is, if you still want me too. If not, I WILL delete the whole website. I WILL!  Don’t test me!

Anyway, first thing I do when I get up in the early morning (not!) after finishing my healthy breakfast (again not!) is updating my spreadsheet with stats of the previous day. It’s really just a simple spreadsheet and I’ll tell you how mine looks like.

I’ve given each campaign it’s own page so that it’s always clear how that particular campaign performed on any given day. Then on that page you will see the dates of the month in the first column. The next columns are the expenses made for that offer on, for example, Adwords, Yahoo and MSN and/or Facebook and media buys. Then the next columns are for the revenue that you’ve created with that campaign. And in the final column I have my profit (hopefully) for that particular day. Then you add all the profits up at the botom to have a grand total for the month so far. I also made some very easy calculations for things like “average profit per day” and “estimated profit by the end of the month”. Then I have one summary page where all the profits of all the campaigns so far this month are presented and it also tells me what the estimated profit for the month is at that moment. If you like you could also import your stats from last month in this page and see whether you campaigns are steady, growing or falling.

Very easy stuf. Anybody with very little Excel skills can create this, but it’s SO important that you keep track. Seriously! It does not take me more than 15 mins a day, but I always exactly know how my campaigns are performing.

Now why am I telling you this? Because I got lazy! At one time I decided that things were going steady and I figured I didn’t need to keep track of my stats anymore. So for about 2 months I forgot about the sats and then I made a horrible discovery. I was performing like 20-30% less than the months before. Why? Just because I wasn’t aware what was going on anymore. One campaign completely went down the drain to a point where I was losing money. One domain that I was actively promoting was not automatically renewed so it was offline while I was still pumping money it and another campaign got Google slapped.

See, when you keep track daily you immediately see when something is off. Those losses would never have happened if I did my 15 minute routine for those 2 months too.

So that’s one big lesson learned, and from now on, if you weren’t already doing it, I want you all to start a spreadsheet like me and put your stats into that sucker! One tip: You might want to check out Google docs for this. This way you can view and edit your stats from any location, very handy!

Of course I understand that that course is not for everyone because it has its price tag. But do not worry now! If you don’t want to spend a penny but you do want to get extensive information on how to make millions online, we now have something for you!

Jonathan Volk is a very well known affiliate marketeer. This smart young fellow makes millions online, and he definitely knows his stuff. I’ve met him personally on a couple of occasions, and I have to say that besides he is a great marketeer, he is a REALLY great guy too.

And you will like him too, because he is giving away his ‘Affiliate Marketing 101 Guide‘ FOR FREE!.

This guide is full of tactics on how to make masses of money online. So if you are not getting this guide for free while you can, you’re definitely missing out! Check it out!

==> Jonathan Volk’s Affiliate Marketing 101 Guide

Now I wish there was an simple answer for this, but unfortunately there isn’t. There are so many ways to make money online, you just have to find the one that best suits you. When I started doing internet marketing 4 years ago I was extremely lucky that my very first campaign that I launched (which was a CPA campaign promoted with Adwords) was a instant success. If that hadn’t happened, I’m not so sure I would be where I am today.

One big difference with back then was that there wasn’t much information on internet marketing out there, you pretty much had to find out everything on your own. But boy, has that changed! These days there is a shitload of information available on the subject! Not saying that all of that information is very good, in fact, most of it is rewritten crap, but once in a while something spectacular comes out.

Now, if you haven’t heard of big time internet marketeer and famous blogger Shoemoney, you have been living under a rock. This guy makes a ton of money doing all kinds of marketing. PPC, SEO, Social Media, Media buys, blogging, you name it, he has done it. I met him at the Playboy Mansion party held by Azoogleads, and I can tell you, he knows his stuff!

Now what he did is take everything that he has learned in his career and made this info available to you! He created a course that is called the ‘Shoemoney System‘ and released it on January 26th. Unfortunately within 20 hours the system was completely sold out and it wasn’t sure if it would be open for the public ever again. Luckily I was among one of the first to buy it, so I’ve been enjoying his video’s ever since.

Getting back on the whole ‘getting started’ thing. I wish I could, but there is really no one better than Shoemoney who can teach you how to best get started from scratch! His video’s really tell the whole story! It tells you how to create accounts, get in touch with affiliate networks, how to setup campaigns, how to do social media, how to make money with Ebay and so and and so on… And this is only the beginning. As times goes by the course will get more advanced so that even the more die hard marketeers will greatly benefit from this course. I personally can’t wait for that!

Now the good news. Shoemoney decided to open his system to the public again today! So you can get in again, but be warned, it’s not going to be open for long again, so if you want to get in, you might want to hurry!!!

If you decide to buy the Shoemoney System (which you won’t regret), be sure to put your review in the comments. Looking forward to that!