I am now home safe and sound from ASW in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, I missed the beginning of the show, but the time I did spend there was of course fantastic.

Were you there? Yes? No?? Well, I will now take you there. Here are some photos I took in the exhibit hall, for your enjoyment:

As you can see, the Exhibit Hall was alive with the hustle and bustle of the internet marketing community.

Here I am with Mr. Ralph Ruckman, co-owner of Convert2Media, a network you should already know about, if you know what’s what. Yes, those are complimentary beers in the background. Yes, I took advantage of this.

And here I am with Mr. Daniel Bisacco, my AM over at Copeac (one of my favorite AMs…don’t tell anybody). Please forgive the goofy look on my face. I was just that happy to see him.

All in all, although my time at ASW this year was brief, it was definitely a success. After dropping business cards in so many bowls in the exhibit hall, it is now only a matter of time before the phone calls to alert me about my prize winnings start rolling in. Actually, some dude I was playing roulette next to at the Rio won a Macbook Air at the conference. He must have cheated and dropped two cards.

Last year, I traveled to Vegas with my buddy Lucas and his cousin who was visiting from Argentina. This year it was just Lucas and myself. We managed to have a pretty good time in Las Vegas, despite the cold weather and generally quiet time of year. We drunkenly did so well on roulette and blackjack that in total we ended up only spending about $90 on the entire trip. Including this bad ass suite at the Luxor and the overpriced room service on the table:

Yes, I am cheers-ing him with a shrimp.

Remind me to write off that 90 bucks.

See you in New York.

Whether you’ve got a real-live e-commerce site packed with products that you sell or you just have a bunch of shady affiliate sites selling other people’s crap, read on for info on a little known place to get a bit of extra traffic.

I’m not going to put the name of the site in the body of this post because I fear they will discover my ramblings and then perhaps get a little stricter on the site approval process. In any event, the site + submission page in question can be found here (yes I have it redirecting twice including a double-meta refresh because I’m that excessively paranoid and ridiculous).

It clearly states that they don’t accept affiliate sites…but guess what? Every affiliate site I have submitted has been accepted. Every site gets a trickle of traffic from that site daily from shop-happy visitors. If you know anything about me, you know the vast majority of my shopping sites are built with phpbay. The only sites I’ve submitted have been phpbay stores (and they’ve all been approved).

Once your site is approved, your listings are automatically scraped from your site and included in the index of the shopping site in question (that which we do not speak of). Phpbay listings seem to work fantastically.

If you don’t already own a copy of phpbay, buy it here through my link because you love me.

You do love me, don’t you? Or was that all just sweet talk?

Warning: Inspirational rant for newbies to follow.

Since the new year is upon us, and many of you have goals related to growing and expanding your business, I would like to take the time to go ahead and offer a few words of encouragement for those of you just getting into the game of building and profiting from your own websites.

Having been doing this for a couple of years full-time now, in my opinion I have discovered that the single most important element in a successful SEO strategy is simply time.

I started out more or less broke. In order to fund my new efforts, I turned to content writing. I don’t necessarily particularly enjoy writing, especially for other people, but it was a way to generate an income from home while learning and attempting to build my own business. It was also an invaluable way to gain insight on what successful webmasters were doing. Of course there are other ways to make a quick buck doing client work and learn the ropes, such as coding or designing, but writing just so happened to be the thing I was good enough at to make enough to get started.

Since then, many of my friends have become interested in what exactly it is I do on the computer that allows me to spend most of my time screwing around and blowing money on crap I don’t really need. Often times that interest has turned into questions that turned into them wanting to build their own online business. Out of all the friends and acquaintances I have that asked for my help to get into this affiliate marketing business, all of them gave up or lost interest relatively quickly.

It doesn’t happen overnight. I’m now in a comfortable position where I have several diverse sites generating passive income. If I were to take the month of January off, I would still have an income. However, that nice cushion wasn’t just handed to me. It took months of building and optimizing to get those sites to rank and start earning me $.

The short version of what I’m saying is simply don’t give up. You may not see results in the first month or even the first six months. Any webmaster worth his or her salt will tell you it generally takes 6 months to a year for a site to realize its true potential. I know it can be discouraging to work your ass off on something and still not feel like you’re making any progress a month or two later, but if you’re serious about it, you need to stick with it. The people that give up and fail and then post threads about how SEO is dead and all that nonsense are the people that don’t have the attention span or the drive to really make their business thrive.

In the real world of making money online, there is no magical Google Success Kit that will hold your hand and walk you through the steps necessary to build a successful internet based business. There is no get rich quick formula. Like everything else in life, you’re going to get out of it what you put into it. That said, there is still phenomenal potential on the internet and new opportunities pop up every single day.

We’re still living in the wild west of the internet era. With a little creativity and a generous dose of patience, you may very well find gold in them internetz after all.

I wish you all a prosperous new year. Take care of your families, work your ass off on your business, and please, keep an eye on your girlfriends.

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