If you haven’t heard of Drip Feed Blasts (DFB), well then thank your lucky stars that you read my dang blawg. This is one of those tools that a handful of SEO’s are using the dickens out of, but most are hoping to keep quiet so that it doesn’t get adopted by the bumbling retards of the SEO world and subsequently become worthless. Since we all know only the elite read my blog, and the folks from places like Warrior Forum think this place is immoral and far too realistic, it is of course safe for me to promote DFB here.

Those of you who hang out at Wickedfire (the true WF) know about Guerilla. When he’s not schooling people in political/economic debates, he drops golden nuggets of wisdom. He is one of the people behind this awesome new service. If you are growing impatient, you may check out the DFB sales thread on WF…but only if you promise to come back here and read the rest of my post.

What it Does

Ever heard of Xrumer? Of course you have. You already know that it is a somewhat pricey link spamming utility, famous for leaving buttloads of pharmacy type links (not exclusively, of course) on forums all over the internet. Some traditional white-hat SEOs (read: bitch niggaz) frown on this software because they believe it is a one-way ticket to Google purgatory. You already know how I feel about link blasting.

The trouble with Xrumer is that the learning curve is a bit high. Another problem is that, well, you have to use it yourself. F-that, right? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a service where you could just enter your URLs with varying anchor text and schedule it to run daily? Dang…that sure would be nice. But where the shit are you supposed to find such a utopianistic service?

Tha’ts right, DFB. What a smarty pants you are. The DFB interface is about as easy to use as it possibly could be, and it allows you to blast 500, 1000, or 2000 links per day (depending on your subscription level). Pricing is $49/mo, $67/mo, and $99/mo, respectively. Anyone who has ever paid for a single Xrumer blast already knows what a ridiculous value that is. You can create different blasts to run on different days, and you can combine blasts to run together. You can mix and match URLs and anchor text to your heart’s content. I haven’t seen a truly valuable link building service like this available in a very long time. Get it.

Support
Phenomenal. There is a forum where the creators of DFB not only respond to questions, but also contribute valuable SEO tips and strategies.

Pinging
DFB does currently include their own in-house pinging service, but it is still being worked on and isn’t yet 100% functional. In the future I hear there are plans to release a custom pinging solution within DFB from the creator of MegaPinger.

What is this MegaPinger You Speak of?
It is exactly what it sounds like. If you need to ping a ton of URLs, you need MegaPinger. It has proxy support, unlimited URL support, and can support up to 500 threads at once. That’s a lot of support.

Wait Why do I Need to Ping my URLs?
Whether you are building lots of backlinks with DFB, manually, or with some other automated system, it is a very good practice to ping the URLs that contain your backlinks in order to get them indexed efficiently. MegaPinger is by far the best and most cost effective way to do this. Currently you can get a lifetime license for only $27.

I like to browse forums, read blogs, etc, after I’ve had a few beers and am relaxing (which I guess is like 70% of the time). This issue has been bothering me and I want to address here on my blog. I will keep this one short, I swear on my bad ass chair.

Every time something like Scrapebox is discussed or any link blasting utility (I use the word blast specifically because I will be reviewing the mother of all link blasting services very soon), this topic comes up. No matter how many times it is spelled out, the hesitant, pussy-footing SEO’s out there will just keep asking the same questions instead of doing some testing of their own. It’s almost like they thrive on getting contrasting feedback and marveling and the mysteries that they’ve created in their minds. It’s not that complicated. So, in response to the most common question I’ve been seeing…

Is it safe to build a shit ton of links to my money sites?

If you are hung up on the idea of blasting links directly to your money site instead of laundering that precious link juice through web 2.0 sites and the like, I’m cool with that. If you’re paranoid about it, just answer the following questions: Is your domain at least 12 months old (or so)? Do you have diverse backlinks already (that means different kinds of links, silly)? If so, the risk of receiving a “Google slap” (as you are so fond of saying) is minimized. And guess what? Worse case scenario, if your site is slapped into oblivion, it will come back in a couple months. And it is likely it will come back stronger than before. Sure, there are really sneaky ways to sabotage a competitor’s site, but building a ton of links to them isn’t really one of them.

As countless people have highlighted before me, if it were that easy to de-index and basically destroy a site by spamming inbound links, then everyone would be doing it to each other (at least in competitive niches). It simply doesn’t work like that. Aged sites (I use the term loosely) with a good amount of links pointing at them are not that easy to dethrone. And don’t you dare ask me exactly how many links a “good amount of links” is!

And you know why those new sites are de-indexed so quickly? Cause the vast majority of new sites suck balls and don’t last longer than a year before the webmaster fails to pay the hosting bill or ultimately doesn’t renew the shitty hyphenated .info domain.

Have Balls

Or ovaries, whatever you please. You’re never going to get anywhere in this business if you’re not willing to take risks here and there.

Stop Asking Questions

Seriously. I know I’m basically talking to myself here because the people that know what they’re doing and are destined for success are in total agreement with this post and don’t even need to read it while the rest of you are wondering why I’m such a raging, ranting alcoholic.

True, no one can give you a definitive answer to all your inquiries about the mysterious Google algorithm. But if you keep blatantly ignoring the advice from seasoned SEOs who deal with this stuff on a daily basis…double-u tee eff?

I’m sorry to get my rant on like this. But, shit, you know, I needed a new blogpost so they could move me up higher on Affbuzz!

After Eleah from AKMG threatened me with bodily harm, I decided to check out Meetup202 in Marina Del Rey on Saturday.

Highlights:

• • Riley Pool
• • Q+A with Smaxor from A4D and Nana Gilbert-Baffoe from Tracking202
• • Eleah’s dog, Chilli Bean
• • Beer

If I hadn’t been so distracted by the beer and Chilli Bean, I would have thought to take some notes and then plagiarize the helpful info from the speakers here on my blog.

Riley gave a detailed report on how to go about contacting high traffic websites for media buys and what pitfalls to avoid. One point he made that I thought was worth repeating is that you should NEVER take a webmasters word for their traffic stats. Use compete.com and similar sites to get your own info and request analytics reports (if available). Webmasters that run Google Analytics can go as far as adding another Google account with limited permissions so that you can go in and check it out for yourself. Reports can also be exported and emailed as PDFs. If you’re going to drop a bunch of cash on a media buy on some random site (or non-random site, for that matter), I don’t think its unreasonable to make such a request. I digress…

Jason (aka Smaxor) and Nana took questions from the crowd. As I was 3 beers deeper at this point, it gets sort of fuzzy. One good point that Smaxor made, was that his company was built on a foundation of blackhat SEO. Even though they have moved on to much bigger and better (i.e. less shady and more profitable) things, he pointed out that a lot of big online companies that started out with little capital used blackhat SEO to get the ball rolling. I get a lot of IMs and emails from people asking me how to make a buck with limited resources…and I think this is something that might be motivating for those people. Blackhat SEO is a “cat and mouse game”, according to Smaxor, and one that of course isn’t a very sustainable long-term business model. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do a little automated search engine manipulating to scrape a few bucks together at first.

Anyhoo, here are a few pictures:

Eleah’s beautiful dog, Chilli Bean and myself enjoying the refreshments.


Riley Pool (apparently immune to my sexual advances), Eleah Portillo, crazy-eyed Chilli Bean, and yours truly.


Some of the beers I put away.

All in all, I’d say it was a success.

If you’ve logged into Adsense recently, you may have noticed the following alert:

If you go into your “Adsense Setup” section and choose “Allowed Sites”, you will see an option that lets you block all of these external ad networks, block individual networks, or allow all of them (default). For those of you who are constantly on the lookout for new places to buy traffic (and fear the backlash of such an inquiry on Wickedfire), this could be a pretty handy little list.

Here I have copy + pasted the list (sort of), and even gone above and beyond the call of duty and hyper-linked each one to its respective site. Well, most of them. Keep in mind that many of these companies only deal with big clients, sizable media buys, etc. However, some do offer CPC advertising, such as Chitika, AdPepper, Pulse 360, etc. Also, I should point out that I’m not endorsing these networks in any way, as I have only used a handful of them personally. Now, without further adieu…

Google Certified Ad Networks (as of July 8th, 2010):

• •Adchemy
• •Invite Media
• •Specific Media
• •Turn
• •[X+1]
• •OwnerIQ, Inc.
• •Adconion Media Group
• •Adtegrity
• •AudienceScience Inc.
• •Dapper Inc.
• •Dedicated Media
• •FetchBack
• •LucidMedia
• •NetSeer Inc.
• •NextAction
• •QuinStreet, Inc.
• •ReTargeter (used to target users that have already been to your site/lander)
• •RichRelevance, Inc.
• •Teracent
• •ValueClick, Inc.
• •Atrinsic
• •Brand.net
• •BrightRoll (video ads)
• •Chitika
• •Collective Media
• •XA.net (formerly CPM Advisors, Inc)
• •DataXu
• •Datran Media
• •Dotomi
• •Efficient Frontier, Inc.
• •InterCLICK
• •Media6Degrees
• •MediaMath
• •OpinMind
• •Quantcast Corporation
• •Rocket Fuel Inc.
• •Semantic Sugar, Inc. (aka AdRoll…another good place for re-targeting)
• •SoMR Networks (targets news/sports/business sites)
• •AdBuyer
• •TellApart
• •Traffic Marketplace
• •Triggit
• •Acxiom Corporation
• •Advertise.com
• •Ad Pepper
• •AdReady
• •AOL Inc
• •Burst Media
• •Xtend Global Media LTD
• •Goodway Group
• •Innovation Interactive
• •Cyberplex, Inc (Parent of CX Digital. No idea if they actually sell traffic. Corporate mumbo jumbo).
• •Didit
• •Announce Media (again, no idea if they actually sell traffic)
• •Media Innovation Group
• •Omnicom Trading Desk (Resolution Media)
• •VivaKi
• •AppNexus
• •Epic Advertising
• •AccountNow, Inc. (Does not sell traffic, as far as I know. Don’t blame me, blame Google!)
• •People Media, Inc
• •Bizo (business targeting)
• •EchoSearch
• •MaxPoint Interactive
• •Mpire (AdXpose)
• •Pinnacle Dream Media
• •Pulse 360
• •Radius Marketing Inc.
• •Reply! Inc. (local traffic)
• •Veruta (more retargeting)
• •Criteo (aaaaand more retargeting)
• •Infectious Media
• •The Exchange Lab
• •Mixpo (video ads)
• •Mexad
• •Adnetik
• •AdJug
• •ClickDistrict
• •DSNR
• •Hurra
• •Cossette Communications (parent of Magnet)
• •Pennyweb, Inc. – DBA Ybrant Digital (AdDynamix, really)
• •Spongecell
• •Lotame Solutions, Inc.
• •OpenX Technologies
• •Red Aril, Inc.
• •Redux Media Inc.
• •ShareThis, Inc. (Works with Doubleclick, not sure why it’s on this list)
• •TubeMogul (video ads)
• •HTTPool
• •DQ&A
• •Bid Alpha
• •iPonWeb (Not traffic brokers. Their presence on this list baffles me.)
• •Mediaplex
• •Forbes.com
• •AdKnife (mysterious new company)
• •AdConion
• •Veremedia
• •Schnaeppchenjagd GmbH (Hope you speak German)
• •Struq Limited
• •Next Premium (No idea who this is or where they are located online. Sorry, Charlie.)
• •Interactive Media Sales
• •Return Media BV (Who???)
• •Next Performance
• •IDG Tech
• •Zillow
• •WinBuyer Ltd
• •SinnerSchrader Deutschland GmbH (Sprechen sie Deutch?)
• •Underdog Media
• •ID Media
• •WPromote
• •UpValue GmbH (display, video, mobile)
• •Alcance Media Group (Hispanic market targeting)
• •MyThingsMedia (retargeting)

Please not that the list was pruned of some duplicates (i.e. Adcompany UK, Adcompany EU, etc) and also some Google properties.

I hope you get buttloads of use out of it.

I came across a thread on Wickedfire recently where someone was asking about how to go about getting lots of images for a site without much of a budget. Of course you could just steal them, but then you risk the content owner finding out about it and hassling you. Another problem is that Google will see them as duplicate image content and won’t rank your images in their image search. Here is a simple workaround I’ve used plenty of times in the past.

TinEye – Reverse Image Search is a site you may be familiar with. It’s basically a site with a huge index of images that you can use to cross reference any particular image and find out if it exists anywhere else on the internet. Many stock photo owners and webmasters use it to see if and where their images are being used. However, most of us just use it to find additional pictures of those special hot chicks that captivate us on forums, 4chan, etc. Of course, it hasn’t come close to indexing the whole web, but as far as I know it has the largest index of image-searchable images around and it’s super easy to use. I don’t know how exactly their image detection algorithm works, but I know how it doesn’t work, and I’m pretty confident that Google uses something similar to identify duplicate images.

Let’s use this silly cat picture as an example:

If you look this image up on TinEye (url: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth-original.jpg), there are a whole bunch of results, as it has been published all over the internet. In my initial testing, I tried converting images to black & white to see if that would make them appear unique, but as you can tell by running a search on this image: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth_bw.jpg, it is too smart for that.

My next experiment was mirroring the image, and voila, it works. Check out this horizontally flipped version of the image: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth-reverse.jpg. Do a search and this here website should be the only one in the index for that particular image. All I did was flip it in Photoshop. If you are a Photoshop noob, you just go to Image > Image Rotation > Flip Canvas Horizontally. I’m sure most photo programs have the same capability. Some are probably even easier than others. However, Photoshop has a sweet batch function that you can use to automate the flipping of your images.

Of course, for images with text and special circumstances like that, this technique may not be the greatest. But yawning cat pictures? The best!

Anyway, now you have a way to steal lots of images, make them look like unique image content, and make it super hard for the people you are robbing to find out. Neat!

PS This is probably illegal and I totally don’t think you should do it. This is all hypothetical.

Edit: I forgot to add that this method won’t work on images that are nearly symmetrical. There needs to be a significant degree of variation to the flipped version, like with the cat example above.

Okay, the title is a little dramatic. This new change at EPN hasn’t as adversely affected everyone else as it has me (as far as I know). But it did make my daily clicks drop by like 200%. I will now tell you why, on the off chance you have the same problem.

A while ago, I made a post containing some tips and tricks to customize PhpBay, which is a fantastic wordpress plugin used to display eBay results that you should already have. In that post, I mentioned editing templates.ebay.results.html to make your entire listing results clickable (not just the title or title/image, but the whole shabang). I am making this post on the outside chance that either you made/found a similar code, or by the grace of God you got the code from this very site, making me personally responsible for your misfortune.

I can’t even remember where I got that code. I think I may have stole it from Radio, creator of Auction2Post. If it wasn’t him, I have a feeling whoever it was is going to remind me soon! Anyway, it worked great for a long time.

Then one day I get an email from Wade over at PhpBay telling me that Ebay has decided they don’t want affiliates using 302 redirects on their sites anymore. PhpBay was using 302 redirects by default. Why did Ebay make this seemingly trivial request? Well, apparently some affiliates were having their 302 redirect links indexed with Ebay’s content on search engines. In other words, a user executes a search query on Google, sees a result they like with a URL that points to your site, but when they click it, they are just forwarding (through an aff link) to that result on Ebay. Ebay didn’t like this. And unless you own Google, you are basically dropping rover links on a 3rd party site, and that is a no-no.

Okay, so Ebay wants 301 redirects. This will tell the search engines that the content found on the other side of that affiliate link belongs to Ebay. Fine with me. Being the upstanding and incredibly quick working man that he is, Wade over at PhpBay quickly investigated what changes needed to be made to the plugin in order to adhere to these new terms.

It ended up being a very small change to one file, the file known as auction.php that sits in whatever directory you happened to install WordPress. I opened a beer and began updating every single one of my sites. I then played TF2 and fell asleep peacefully around 7am.

OMG Where Are My Clickz!?
The next few days my EPN dashboard graph thingy looked like the world’s tallest and simplest roller coaster. Needless to say, I was alarmed. I quickly began creating EPN conspiracy theories in my mind (and on message boards).

I feel like this story is getting long-winded and dramatic so I’m just gonna cut to the chase:

IE will NOT pass the referring URL to a new window with Javascript!

Freaking Internet Explorer. And as we all know, the masses still use the browser that was conveniently pre-loaded for them on their PC. If you navigated to my old post which contains the modified template.ebay.results.html code, you will see something like:

added in there. This was the culprit. Only non-IE visitors were managing to click from my site to eBay. People using IE would click a result, then be taken to a blank page on my site where they would scratch their heads and then immediately forget my site ever existed.

Solution
Since I’m just a retard that steals other people’s code and can barely make a blog post, I had no idea what the hell to do. Luckily, my coding wizard friend Ryan looked into it for me and found an extremely simple solution to fix this.

Follow these super duper easy steps:

1. Open up the new Auction.php file in your favorite text editor (Notepad2 is a good one)
2. Scroll down to line 35, and find the string: $referer_approved = false;
3. Simply change “false” to “true” (without the quotes, duh!)

And like magic, the javascript links will work again.

Will eBay Care?
How in the heck should I know? If anyone at the eBay Partner Network is reading this, please feel free to respond. Also, did I ever tell you how beautiful you are?

Hey Wait a Second, Why do you Need that Javascript Crappola Anyway?
Well, that’s a valid question. I guess I don’t, really. But I really like making the entire listing clickable. I also like the fact that when a user hovers over the link it doesn’t show the URL at the bottom of their browser. I’m not ready to part with those two things, as I feel they improve the performance of the majority of my sites. I am also fantastically stubborn and didn’t want to revert to “default”.

My birthday is tomorrow, so I’m gonna start drinking now. Bye!

Don’t act like you don’t want to know what I’ve been up to. I know you do.

Friday (weekend starts on Friday, rite??) I took a little trip up the 405 fwy to Santa Monica to have lunch with Nicole and Leah from W4. In case you didn’t know, W4 is a newer affiliate network comprised of a bunch of awesome folks, many of which came from Hydra. Truth be told, I never cared much for Hydra. Actually I found them to be downright rude, at times. But it seems like the good people at Hydra went elsewhere (such as W4) and the evil ones stayed behind. That’s the only conclusion I can draw.

I had the tri-tip sandwich and some Belgian beer called Allagash. It was pretty delicious. We spoke of all things Internet. Afterward, I got a chance to meet with W4 co-founder, Jason Durant. He then gave me a large briefcase full of cash and instructed me to create this blog post. Okay not really but I did get some pens and even some sweet W4 sunglasses. I meant to take more pictures but somehow this was all I got:

Anyhoo, they’re really good people and you should probably do business with them. Here is my affiliate link again in case you missed it.

Later that night I went to a friend’s house in Long Beach and don’t remember much of what happened there.

Saturday, I got my Scrapebox on. If you haven’t heard of this phenomenal tool, thank your lucky stars you read my blog. Some folks don’t like the fact that people like me are blabbing about this tool because of the fact that it is very awesome and could easily become much less effective if too many newbs started abusing the hell out of it. It’s basically a comment spamming utility…but it is so much more. I’m not going to get into the specifics of it. Just trust me, it rocks. If you have no idea what you’re doing, I don’t recommend you use it because you could very well end up harming your sites by using it incorrectly. But for the more seasoned SEO, this tool is a Godsend.

Saturday night I went and saw my old guitar teacher play at some seedy bar downtown. Loved it.

Sunday was a bit of a lazy day. Some of it was spent at the coffee house, some was spent with good company skipping rocks and smoking weed admiring the Pacific Ocean. Here is a camera phone pic I took:

Then I came home and started making a blogpost to schedule for this morning, pretending as if I actually wrote it now and not Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what I did last night, because I do not know. Not yet, anyway. Does that make sense?

Speaking of Monday…Monday gets a bad rap. 9-5ers can’t really fully appreciate Mondays. Trust me, they can be pretty sweet. I could go on and on about what I like about Mondays, but a little punk band by the name of NOFX already did that for me. Indulge me, if you will, and check out the following song entitled, “Thank God it’s Monday”.

Happy Monday!

This is pretty much as white hat as it gets. Or at least as white hat as I get, in any case. It is also incredibly effective. I’ve been implementing this technique for a few weeks now and the results have been phenomenal.

You can’t beat relevant, authority links. You just can’t. Especially if they’re do-follow/one-way links. Of course, reciprocal ones aren’t so bad either. So, what’s the best way to get them? Well, you could of course simply email the webmasters of sites that you’d like to have a link on and ask. In some cases, this will work. It usually helps to be polite, throw in some flattery about their site, and maybe offer a link back in exchange. But, depending on the niche, you’re going to have varying degrees of success. Despite your advanced charm, some emails will still be dismissed. I’m going to teach you a simple method to drastically improve the success of good old fashion link-panhandling.

What You Need
Aside from a computer, the Internet, and your incredible powers of persuasion, you will need to install this Firefox plugin.

What You Do
Step A: Find a juicy site or blog in your niche with high PR and tons of inbound links. Ideally something ranking for a keyword you’re trying to dominate (or maintain). Do they have a links page? Perhaps a blogroll? If yes, proceed to step B.

Step B: Navigate that mouse of yours to your Tools menu in Firefox and select “Check Page Links”. This will activate that new plugin you installed. You will see the progress at the bottom. If there are lots of links on the page, it may take a couple minutes. Go roll a cigarette or perhaps get briefly involved in political debate on Wickedfire. When you come back, you will notice all the links on the page have been highlighted. Proceed to step C.

Step C: Look for red and yellow highlighted links. These links are the problematic ones. Most webmasters don’t have time to check their blogroll often and are usually linking to a few dead sites. Every now and then the plugin will mistakenly mark a working site as a problem site, so in the name of being thorough, we’re going to manually check these. Open up a notepad document so you can catalog the URLs that are broken. Make a list. Proceed to Step D.

Step D: Find the email contact for the site. Create a new email. Proceed to Step E.

Step E: Now it’s time to sweet talk the pants off these bitches. Let them know that you are so-and-so from yourspammyasssite.com. Tell them you were browsing their links and happened to notice the following links are bad: badlink1.com, badlink2.com, badlink3.com, etc. Casually mention that Google tends to frown upon dead or broken links, and it can often hurt your search engine rankings when you are linking to resources that don’t exist. After all of this, mention that if they feel that your site is relevant, you would appreciate it if they would consider linking to you.

I Dunno Dude, This Sounds Like Too Much Work
How dare you. First of all, Rome wasn’t built out of hay, okay? When you shoot out a handful of these emails, you’ll see how well it works. Every single person that has responded thus far has agreed to give me a link. One-way links. One site even gave me a paid spot for free, out of gratitude (for six months). Of course, not everyone has responded. In all likelihood, some emails are probably never even read. That’s just the nature of the game. But it is still very effective and very much worth it.

And if that doesn’t convince you, I’ll have you know that within the past couple weeks I have moved onto the first page (not quite #1, but getting there) for a keyword I had been targeting for a long time. A highly competitive keyword that gets 90,500 searches/mo, according to Google (yes, exact match). I attribute this sudden success to the links I’ve acquired in this short period of time.

You want that SEO money? Hmmm? Do you!? Wanna sit around all day playing video games and drinking Mtn Dew while your sites keep making you money? Well you gotta do the leg work first. Stop reading my whack ass blog and go try this. You may send me gift baskets later if you’d like.

A Dark Twist
Sorry. Thought I was done blabbing. Not the case. It just occurred to me that you might be able to dirty up this method. I don’t really like advocating squeaky clean white-hat SEO methods because they make me feel like a square. So I’m just going to throw this out there.

Let’s say you have a site outranking you for a particular keyword. One of the first things I do in this situation is figure out who is linking to them. You can do this easily by using Yahoo! Site Explorer. Now, for the sake of this example, let’s say you determine that ABCsite.com is linking to your competitor, XYZsite.com, in their blogroll. This would work best with a site with a lot of links. You would use the method detailed above, everything the same way. Find the broken links on ABCsite.com, and contact the webmaster with a humble request to have your site included. Only difference is, in this case you would casually interject your competitor site, XYZsite.com, into your list of broken sites, after listing 3 or four legitimately broken/dead sites.

The idea is to trick the webmaster at ABCsite.com to not only add a link to your site, but remove the link to your competitor’s site, after you’ve convinced them that it’s a dead link. Perhaps after the webmaster sees that the first two or three links in your list are in fact dead, they will assume the rest of your list is accurate. How devious. What’s the worst that could happen? If the webmaster notices the link is in fact still good, he/she will most likely just assume it was a temporary outage or a simple error.

There. Now I feel off-white again.

So, basically, I went to the A4D meetup in San Diego on Saturday, left for Vegas the next day, spent four days and three nights in a drunken stupor, and now here I am trying to remember what happened on Saturday so I could squeeze a blog post out of it.

First of all, if you wanted to go, you should have went. The lineup alone should have indicated that it would be a very valuable experience. That said, I didn’t even stay for the whole thing, and I took the liberty of a 30 min lunch break right in the middle of the thing (look, if I was any sort of professional, I’d have a real job).

Luckily, I managed to take some notes. I’m not sure if I was taking notes because I thought I was going to forget the info I was receiving, or if I just felt compelled to because people around me were. Using these notes and my hazy memory (I was actually drinking during the meetup as well…this blog is really more or less a cry for help), I will now attempt to go over what I saw.

First Speaker: DK from Purposeinc

Seemed like a nice enough guy, but was visibly intimidated by the room. Maybe he wasn’t expecting so many aff marketing pros to show up. He referenced info he had “got from Shoe” a couple times, which was enough to make half the room take him less seriously. He also went into detail about testing creatives for Facebook ads, showing case studies with different creatives and what sort of CTR each one got. Trouble is, only like $7 was spent on each test. With people in the room spending five figures a day on FB alone (if not more), this seemed a little silly to me.

To make matters worse, towards the end of his presentation he casually mentions that he has NDAs in place with Facebook. This was in response to Jason inquiring about shadier methods of getting ads approved. Although he wasn’t willing to suggest any new tricks or system manipulations, he seemed open to the discussion. “Anything said at this conference will not leave this conference by me”, DK reassured us. But, still, c’mon.

Although I wasn’t impressed with his Facebook know-how (or conflicts of interest), I must say that DK knew his shit when it came to local campaigns. It was evident that local was his strong suit. Probably why he saved it for last.

Hagan – Talkin’ ‘Bout Leadgen

I liked this guy. At first it seemed like no one was paying attention but eventually they realized he knew what he was talking about and settled down. The gist of Hagan’s presentation was about how continuity offers are no longer sustainable, and how leadgen is the foreseeable future of AM.

He had a nice little breakdown of how to presell offers based on payout that I think might be helpful for a lot of folks, especially the nooblings. Here is that breakdown in a nutshell:

- Low Paying Offers (Email/Zip Submits, etc) – Direct Link
- Medium Payouts (Insurance, Edu, etc) – Short forms/bridge pages with a short pitch, big call to action.
- High Payouts (Mortgage, that kind of jazz) – Long pitch, very few calls to action.

He also offered a list of books that he thinks affiliate marketers should be familiar with:

1. Ca$hvertising
2. Simple and Direct
3. Blink
4. Extraordinary Popular Delusions

MikeTPowell on PPV

After I stumbled back in to the Legends conference room, having just enjoyed a tuna melt at MaryJane’s Cafe in the Hard Rock Hotel, Mike was already well into his presentation on running PPV campaigns. My notes started getting short and vague at this point. One point that Mike stressed repeatedly is that you absolutely must use a landing page when running PPV, regardless of the offer. If you think about the nature of PPV traffic, this makes a lot of sense.

The Lawyer

There was a surprise appearance by Rob Berkowitz, a senior associate attorney at Coast Law Group, a firm that A4D works closely with. Rob went into detail about how we are all 100% guilty for stealing images and ignoring trademark laws, and how we will all pay dearly for it one day. He seemed like a pretty nice guy, though. For a lawyer.

The Rest

I swore on a bible that Nickycakes was carrying in his back pocket that I wouldn’t disclose any of teh bigg secretz. Same goes for Smax and Dr Ngo.

Guess you better come to the next fucking meetup!

<3

First of all, if you haven’t already, you need to read this post, which was the inspiration and the foundation for this method I still currently use to build links. And I’m not the only one doing it.

Trouble was, after I read that article, I was left feeling sort of confused still. How do I take a womens shoes site (or something like that!) and turn it into a piece of useful software? Well, one answer is in the title of this post, now isn’t it!?

Screensavers are usually in either one of two formats: .exe or .src. If you don’t already have the software to compile screensavers, you might want to “buy” some. I’m currently using a program called “Screensaver Factory 5 Enterprise”. If you already have some images, you can literally build and compile a simple slideshow screensaver in about 30 seconds. In the womens shoe site scenario, I would probably put together a nice little slideshow featuring the most sought after womens shoes. By default, the program adds little fancy transitions and what not. Not that they really matter too much. If you really want to get maximum benefit, you might want to watermark your images with your URL (yes, people actually download these things).

Distribution
Now, you’ve got your screensaver. It is time to distribute it. Just about every software download site has a submission area. At this point, if you’ve never authored/distributed software before, you might be thinking about outsourcing this part. Well, that’s not entirely necessary, thanks to a little something called a PAD file.

What the Shit is a PAD File?
I’m glad you asked! PAD stands for “portable application description”. Basically, a PAD file is an xml file that exists on your server (or wherever) that contains all the necessary information about your software such as size, version, links to download and more. The idea is that instead of having to manually make updates all the time when things change with software (like updates), you simply update one PAD file and the sites offering the software usually poll their PAD files regularly for changes. Now, the beauty of using the PAD file is that most of these software sites that accept submissions will ONLY ask for a link to your PAD file because it already contains all the information they need. This means your time spent on each site is quite minimal.

I Can Haz PAD File?
Yes, you can. I use a simple utility called PadGen that you can download here to create my PAD files. Keep in mind that not all fields are necessary so don’t spend all afternoon on it. Just get the important ones covered. Some sites do have requirements about what information needs to be contained in a PAD file before it is accepted for inclusion or review.

Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that you need to include your URL to the site/page you’re promoting in your PAD file.

How ‘Bout Some Sites?
Of course. I live to please you. I’m going to give you some master list of software sites that will accept your useless ladies shoe screensavers, but I will give you a few. They really aren’t hard to find, and there are tons of them. And of course many of them just scrape data from the other ones so there are plenty of links to be had, here. There are also distribution services in the business of charging you for distributing your software, but I don’t think they’re necessary for this sort of task. Now, about them sites…

1. Softpedia.com
2. Windows7Download.com
3. FreeDownloadManager.org
4. DailySofts.com
5. PCWin.com
6. FileBoost.net
7. FreeWareTown.com
8. Files54.com
9. A ton more…get your Google on

Alrighty. Have fun. Please don’t take my method (which is obviously just an interpretation of Eli’s Method) and run it into the ground. Thank you.