This Saturday, March 19th, I’ll be making the relatively short drive from LA to San Diego for the 2011 A4D meetup. Last year I only showed up for the day and headed back home. This time around I booked a room at the Hard Rock so that I may further maximize the experience (and avoid drank drivin).

I am excited to hang out with all you nerds. Especially Darrin and Matt. Matt is making my drive from LA look quite trivial since he is traveling across the pond from jolly old England.

Speakers this year will include:

• • Mike Powell
• • Zack Linford
• • James Craig (Facebook dating prodigy)
• • Rob Berkowitz
• • Kris Kibak (media buy master)
• • Smaxor himself

As far as I know, it’s not too late to RSVP if you’re interested. Click here to do so.

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 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.

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!

Wanna come? This year, because I’m so awesome, I have a full pass. Pretty sweet. But the fact of the matter is you don’t really need access to all of the educational sessions and all that jazz. Sure, you can learn a lot in those sessions, but an upgraded (aka more expensive) pass is required to get in. However, what makes Affiliate Summit truly great (and anyone who has been will tell you) is the networking opportunities that are nothing short of abundant. Especially if it is your first Aff Summit, all you really need is a silver pass. A silver pass gives you access to the exhibit hall (where network owners will swoon you). The exhibit hall is where the (daytime) action is. It is your duty to find out where the dang parties are each night (and I might just be able to help you with that)!

Let me go ahead and detail what a silver pass gives you access to:

• - Affiliate Meet Market & Exhibit Hall
• - Keynotes
• - Affiliate Summit Social Network

How much does this silver pass cost, you ask!? Well, if you had registered super early (before Oct 19th) it would have been $79. From now until the event, a 2010 ASW Silver Pass can be snagged for $149. And if you somehow forget to register altogether and show up like some sort of vagabond affiliate with no registration, you can get a silver pass on-site for $249.

Or….

If you’re one of the first 5 people to register using the following code: ASW10JACK (that’s my name, silly), you can get a Silver Pass for FREE! Register here at once.

Wahoo!

I look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas. I’ll be the one getting his stomach pumped by a showgirl and simultaneously TwitPic-ing it.

The reason Namecheap is such a favorite among webmasters (in my opinion) has to do with the following:

-Free WhoIsGuard with every new domain registration

-They don’t spam the shit out of you (like a different registrar that rhymes with BlowCaddy)

-They’re cheap, as the name implies.

One thing that sort of sucks, though, is you won’t be credited for sales generated using a promo code. Also, the tracking cookie lasts for 30 days, but you’ll only receive a commission for the first sale generated by each customer (15% of it).

Speaking of coupon codes, “SNOWNEEDLE” is the one you want to use for the month of December to get the discount on new domain registrations.

That is all.

Okay so I’ll try to make this brief. This is basically a very simple (and cheap) way to get a white label dating site up and running and earning you a few bucks on the side. I’ve got a couple set up that bring in about $50-$60 a month each that I’ve been meaning to promote off-line…just haven’t got around to it. Another $60 a month won’t make you rich, but it might cover your phone bill, you ungrateful bastard. And of course it’s very scalable. Check it out…

If you are unfamiliar with how white labels work, basically you set up a site that instead of directing to affiliate offers actually facilitates the sale of a product or service. It can help increase conversions dramatically since you aren’t bouncing your visitors all over the dang internet.

Dating Gold makes this process painless. If you’re not familiar with their network, they are the ones behind Amateur Match. Using their white label system, all you have to do is register a domain, point the nameservers to the ones Dating Gold provides you with, enter Title/Description/Keyword info, upload a logo, and boom, the site is live.

Once you’ve got it up and running, you will be paid based on a 50% rev share system. Every time someone new signs up, you get 50% (currently about $15). Even better, you get 50% for the lifetime of that new member. So each month that person renews their membership, you get another $15. Of course, some cancel in the first month, but then some stick around for a year or more.

Currently, there are two types of white labels available. The first is the standard geo-targeted local dating site, and the second is a cam site. There are a few theme options available and you can also customize the color scheme. Here is an example of one:

Getting Traffic
Originally, my plan with my sites were to do a bunch of off-line promotion and see how it does. The domains I used are somewhat “local” themselves. However, after being up for just a few months, they started getting traffic. The downside is, there is currently no way to track traffic stats. I can only assume the traffic is from organic search since I haven’t promoted the site anywhere and only dropped a handful of links to them. For whatever reason, some search engines seem to like these geo-targeted white label sites.

Obviously, the title and keywords you use will have a great impact on whether or not your white label sites pull any organic traffic. I’m not going to divulge what keywords I used, but they were somewhat broad dating terms that have a reasonable (but not super high) amount of competition.

Off-Line Promotion
Considering I haven’t even conducted this test yet, I can’t really encourage you to try it, but it’s something I’m definitely planning on getting around to. Flyer drops at sex shops/strip clubs, ads in the back of shady magazines, etc. Hopefully I’ll actually get to this in Jan/Feb when dating is hot and have some interesting data to share with all of you.

Goddammit, I was supposed to keep this brief!!!

In any event, EPN recently introduced four new programs: Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany.

Why is Germany in bold!? Well, because Germany is Ebay’s second largest market after of course the United States. This means that all sorts of untapped niches and microniches can potentially be exploited over in good old Deutschland.

Pic (sorta) related:

It also opens up some domaining opportunities if you’re thinking about registering .de domains. Although there is definitely competition in the .de domaining game, it’s nowhere near that of the .com industry. However, keep in mind that .de is the second most popular TLD in the world with an estimated six million .de domains already registered.

If you’re interested in searching for a good .de domain in any particular niche, here is what I recommend you do:

1. Determine the main keyword related to your niche
2. Use Google Language Tools to translate that word into German
3. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to check out how many searches that keyword and related keywords are pulling in [use exact match]
4. Snag a .de domain

Unfortunately, my most favorite registrar, Namecheap, does not offer .de registration at this time. Here are some alternatives (prices/currency conversions obviously reflect the time of this writing, don’t expect me to update this shit all the time!):

1. GoDaddy* – $17.99/yr (PayPal accepted)
2. iWantMyName.com* – $29.00/yr
3. EuroDNS* - apprx. $26.23/year (€16/yr plus €2 setup fee)
4. iDotz**- $19.95/yr
5. DomainDiscount24.com – $10.39 (€7.14)/yr
6. Joker.com – $9.16/yr
7. Europe Registry – $13.11 (€9)/yr

But I Heard You Have to Live in Germany to Register a .DE domain!?

Not the case, not the case. That myth is derived from the fact that the administrative contact on each .de domain registered must be located in Germany. Some registrars offer to act as the administrative contact on your behalf, thus circumventing this little bump in the road. However, some registrars will charge an additional fee for this (and some may not offer this service at all).

The registrars with the * listed above are the ones that include an administrative contact in Germany with your registration.

**Idotz.net will provide a German administrative contact for an additional fee.

The others either don’t offer this service or charge an additional fee (you’ll have to do your own research you bastard). Or you could just use your long lost cousin that lives in Germany as your administrative contact.

Only one I’ve used myself is GoDaddy (I know, I know). They might not be my favorite registrar but when it comes to international domains, I’d rather deal with their spammy site/terrible support and hopefully not have any further problems. Coincidentally, they’re also the only registrar listed above that I have an active affiliate relationship with. Weird.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that if you plan on building and optimizing sites for German traffic, it’s imperative that you have the site(s) HOSTED over there. Having your international sites hosted on IPs in the countries they are targeting helps a ton for ranking on search engines specific to that country. As far as which host to use, do your dang homework. As of now I use a UK host called Nativespace for all my European e-pillaging. That’s pretty close to Germany, right!?

If you aren’t up to speed with the new changes to the EPN program, some adjustments have been made that further restrict the types of promotion allowed. One major change is that it is no longer acceptable to drop your EPN links on ANY site that you do not own and have complete control over. This includes social networking sites like Twitter as well as free blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress.com. The only exception is if you obtain permission in writing from Ebay Partner Network prior to using these promotional methods.

As a precaution I’ve spent some time the past couple days disabling old links (the ones that I can) that were dropped on sites like those listed above. It’s a bit unnerving to think that although maybe only a handful of clicks are coming from these now illegitimate sites, it is still technically enough for EPN to show me the door. However…

The Bright Side

I’m not sure how exactly this works out, or if it just mere coincidence, but Google traffic on my PhpBay sites is way up. Like 110% up. Of course this is just the past week, so I’m not exactly counting on this being consistent. But I’ve talked to other phpbay site admins and I’m not the only one experiencing this phenomenon.

I’m only speculating, of course, but could it be that the high (and getting higher) barrier for entry to the EPN program as well as the harsh promotion restrictions has caused Google to attribute a little more credibility to phpbay/BANS type sites? It would make sense, since autoblogs and black hat type sites monetized via EPN are now few and far between.

After all, Steve Hartman and the folks at EPN have made it very clear that they are shifting their business model away from quantity and now trying to focus on quality. Wouldn’t it make sense that Google would make a slight algorithm tweak in response to these recent changes?

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking. But…maybe not.

Wisdom Nugget

Also, I’ve gotten some questions from folks asking about how I set up my phpbay sites in order to get a favorable Google ranking. That is a whole different post in itself, but I will say that I’ve seen a ton of them making the same mistake: A ton of phpbay results on the homepage.

When I first started building them, I wanted to of course get as many EPN clicks as possible, so it made sense that I should put clickable auction results on the home page to minimize the time visistors spent on my site and get them clicking through to Ebay as soon as possible.

I learned pretty quickly that that is a very short-sighted mentality, and in the long run you will do much better to have unique content on a pleasant looking site with user-friendly navigation. There is a lot you can do with phpbay to narrow down categories and provide a lot of value to your visitors. I know it sounds corny, but my EPN dashboard makes me feel a lot better about it.

So, keep the results off the front page. Yes, that is a protip.

All good things supposedly come in threes, so here are three that I recommend. Please note that these are NOT paid reviews, and I am not using any sort of affiliate links here. These are all products that I have used myself.

KBlinker – Link Management Utility

KBlinker is a great tool to better control and organize your links. It has an awesome geo-ip redirection feature built in that was a Godsend for myself. You see, I have my stink plastered all over the internet in the form of static links I have dropped over time. Many of these links still consistently bring in leads/sales. Problem is, a lot of them are on sites that get international traffic. If I have one link redirecting to an offer that only accepts say US and Canadian traffic, then those Australian clicks are going to waste. Most likely they are redirected to some completely irrelevant or lame offer (Webfetti, anyone?).

So instead, I have these links point to my domain that has KBlinker installed, where I have everything setup to re-route specific countries to the appropriate offers. Of course, it takes time to find relevant international offers and maintain the thing (since offers get dropped all the time), but at the end of the day, I’m making money off of international traffic that would have otherwise gone to waste.

Check out KBlinker.com to learn more about its capabilities. You can currently get a single domain license (which is all you really need) for $50.

Article Drip

One problem a lot of affiliates face when building sites and trying to get them to rank is of course link building. We know that Google likes to see your site gaining backlinks steadily and consistently, but it can be difficult to arrange it so that links appear (get indexed) gradually when you’re buying directory submissions or social bookmarking packages. If too many links appear pointing to your site in too short a period of time, Google may frown upon this.

Another issue we face is with article marketing. We know that having articles relevant to our niche posted on several sites with backlinks is a good thing. Trouble is, it can be very time consuming or expensive to come up with UNIQUE articles for the various article sites so as to get the most value out of those links.

Andrew Scherer was nice enough to provide me with a free review of his new Dripped and Spun Article Marketing Service. This service is a great solution to the problems detailed above.

All you need to do is submit your URL, title, keywords, etc, and you will have a unique article written for you and then slowly submitted to 100 directories over the course of a month. In order to make them unique, the article is manually spun using interchangeable keywords to make each article original. Since the article spinning is done manually, the spun articles actually come out nice and readable (unlike most of the auto-spun articles I’ve seen).

This service is currently going for $44.97 and you can order it here.

Twitter Snipe

Twitter marketing has really taken off in the past couple months. I even saw #Acai Berry as a trending topic the other day. Before Twitter gets ridiculously saturated with spam, there is still money to be made.

My approach to twitter marketing is a bit different than what seems to be popular, and this tool isn’t really conducive to it, but I’m sure there are a lot of you out there that can think of several ways to utilize it.

Twitter Snipe basically makes it a breeze to follow people that are likely to be interested in whatever it is you’re promoting. For instance, if you’re pushing a weight loss offer, you can enter the keyword “diet” and have Twitter Snipe automatically follow anyone and everyone who is tweeting that keyword. The fact that it is nearly in real-time is what I think makes this tool so powerful. Right when some young lady tweets about how she wants to try a new diet, like magic, there you are following with your interesting profile relevant to her current interests (and interesting links).

What sets Twitter Snipe apart from the other Twitter tools out there is that it has a very handy “unfollow” feature built in. I talked before about how it just isn’t appealing to have 10x less followers than users you are following. In order to weed out those who ignored your follow and are highly unlikely to follow back in the future, you can remove them all with a simple click of the mouse.

In order to use Twitter Snipe, you’ll need to install it on your own server running PHP 5.0 or above. Installation is pretty painless. A copy of Twitter Snipe currently costs $77. Get it here.

Alright, I believe that’s enough plugging for today!