In typical OffWhiteHat fashion, I traveled to Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit, partied the entire time, and did very little of anything that could be construed as business if I am ever audited for the expenses.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to show up until about 2am Sunday night (Monday morning), so I missed all of the awesome festivities that night. I did however do some gamblin’.

On Monday, I met lots of interesting folks in the exhibit hall and saw some familiar faces. Among some of the coolest peeps that I can remember were the awesome possums from W4 and Audi from Convert2Media who kept the Blue Moon flowing. Here is the one and only photo I took in the exhibit hall, which I feel captures the essence of what was going on at the C2M booth:

Blue Moon!

The Affiliate Ball

Monday night was the night of the Affiliate Ball at the Crown Theater in the Rio. It would be my very first Affiliate Ball. For whatever reason, in past years I have found myself at other events while Affiliate Balls were going on. As the Affiliate Ball conflicted with the party at the Spearmint Rhino hosted by Ads4Dough this time, I was torn. Ultimately, my desire to relive my youth prevailed, and we headed to the Affiliate Ball eager to see the headlining act…none other than Nelly himself.

Darren, the man behind the event, was kind enough to give VIP bands to myself and mah woman. These bands gave you access to the VIP area that had free booze and a little more breathing room.

There were a couple openers, including Wickedfire’s own RobHustle. He did a bang up job. We took a photo together after at some point. I hope he posts it, and I hope my hair looks good.

I didn’t even notice when Nelly had taken the stage. At some point I looked up from my drink and was like, whoa, Nelly is on stage. He performed just about every song you can remember of his and then some. This was surprising as many were speculating that he would only do like one or two songs. The crowd, however, did not seem particularly impressed. While there were some very psyched people at the base of the stage, I got a vibe from the rest of the place that they were just not that excited. I guess internet nerds are too cool for Nelly. Whatever. I thought it was awesome.

Here are some pictures taken in there. Quality isn’t the best, as I still insist on pretending that my Blackberry is a real camera:

Me and mah woman

Josh Ziering aka Enigmabomb & me

Nelly on stage

From there, the lady and I gambled a bit at the Rio. As soon as we got two fresh drinks, we headed to the car, where she was in charge of making sure they didn’t spill while I drove us back to the Mirage.  At the Mirage, more gambling and much more drinking occurred. Also, sandwiches.

Unfortunately I didn’t even make it back to the conference the next day. It’s no fun when you have a 4 hour drive ahead of you. Maybe one of these years I’ll fly.

So, yeah, that’s about it. Affiliate Summit was fun as ever. I only wish I would have got there earlier.

Oh, almost forgot, one more pic:

Told you it would come out in the dark, bro

Howz about a little update?

Just yesterday I returned home from a pretty dang fun New Year’s (and then some) trip to London and surrounding areas. It was quite wild, if I do say so myself. I was in the company of a dear friend of mine who actually has a nifty travel blog. His adventures are generally much more exciting than mine, so if you’re into that sort of thing, you should check it out.

Here are some choice photos from my journey (taken with my high-tech Blackberry Bold 9900):

Me in Picadilly Circus

Happy New Year

The hustle and bustle of Cardiff, Wales on a weeknight

Goin' home (business class cause I'm a srs businessman)

Now I only have a couple days to rest before I must drive out to Las Vegas to do further irreversible damage to my body. This will be my fourth consecutive Affiliate Summit West. Crazy how time flies! Seeing as how I didn’t book my hotel until last night, I’ll be at the Mirage. Room number available upon request (send nudes first, plz).

See you there!

Well, finally some good news from the Ebay Partner Network. I don’t want to even talk about the upcoming shift to “Quality Click Pricing” because it’s just going to upset me. Perhaps I’ll have a future post all about optimizing your phpBay sites for the new system, but first I’m going to have to figure that out for myself!

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!?

That’s right. Nickycakes is notorious for doing cool shit. Why, just last year he gave out a thousand bucks to folks in his IRC chat for participating in a silly game. He’s probably the only person that gives stuff away just for the hell of it in this business.

Check out this new post on how you can win a TV that Nicky simply doesn’t need. You’ll need to follow him on Twitter to participate, that’s the only “catch”.

Good luck you free loading bastard.

You may already know that I love me some Wickedfire. I just thought I’d post here in case you haven’t stopped by that Gay Webmaster Forum lately, because there is a pretty hilarious thread dedicated to Warrior Forum “guru” Kim Standerline that you don’t want to miss. Will this result in an epic forum war? I sure hope so.

Well, I am home and safe and sound from Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, NV. There are still trace amounts of booze in my system but I am sober for the most part.

To be honest, I probably spent about an hour at the actual Summit. If they really wanted me to be more involved, maybe they shouldn’t hold the thing in the most distracting city in the world. I spent the vast majority of my time drinking and swearing like a sailor as well as donating large amounts of cash to various casinos.

Sunday and Monday night were the highlights, due to the fantastic open bar events. Traveling with my partners in crime, Lucas and Franco, we headed out Sunday night in search of this mysterious “Red Rock Mansion”. Here we are attempting to hail a cab. Lucas is the seemingly already drunk one drinking that disgusting Miller High Life, and I am behind him.

Thanks to our awesome cab driver, Ritchie (from Long Beach!), we managed to find the Red Rock Mansion. Actually also thanks to Crack who got the address for me. The venue was in a residential neighborhood and pretty low profile from the street.

So, when we finally got there, we were greeted with complimentary cigars. What a nice touch! Here is myself and Franco living the life with our cigars and some sort of grey goose concoction.

I got to meet lots of people that I know from Wickedifre/Cakes Chat, which is awesome. More than I can really remember actually. Something about free booze makes me drink at an absurd pace. I kinda feel like we left this party prematurely, but my gambling itch just needed to be scratched. Since we had got Ritchie the cabby’s phone number (since we knew we wouldn’t find a better cab driver), we called him and had him come chauffer us over to Fremont St (old school Vegas!).

After Fremont St robbed me blind, we drunkenly stumbled into some foreign non-Ritchie cab driven by a woman, and headed back to the hotel.

Monday I popped into the convention to see what was going down, and also to snag a bunch of beers from Max Bounty. I should probably sign up with them now…I’m sure I’ll get around to that. Tangy was hanging out at the Shoemoney exhibit thingy. He appeared to somehow be equally as drunk as he was the night before. Impressive! No pictures though. After all, I had just rolled out of bed and had yet to do my hair.

I heard a lot of people talking about how they were burned by Copeac and didn’t get an invite to their fancy exclusive party at the Sky Villa Suite at the Palms. I had no hard feelings towards them, however, mainly because I was invited. Heh! However, I really wanted to show Lucas and Franco a good time. Lucas is a great designer, but doesn’t have much to do with affiliate marketing. Franco hardly speaks English (he is visiting from Argentina). How was I supposed to get them in?

Well, pretty easy. We just strolled in around 9:30 and hung out. Thank you everyone for your kind hearts and hospitality. Here is some documentation of all the fun we had:

I probably should have taken more pictures. If anything, it would probably jolt my memory and help me remember all the stuff that happened that I’ve completely forgotten about. There are still some folks that I didn’t get to meet in person, but hopefully next time I won’t be so preoccupied with abusing my liver and more proactive in the meet and greet department.

Until next time…

Since I planned to head to this year’s western Affiliate Summit with two of my cohorts who are considerably less interested in the summit and substantially more interested in the debauchery of Las Vegas as well as the deep weekday discounts, I was not able to arrive at the start of the conference yesterday. However, fear not, I will be leaving in a matter of hours for Sin City.

My suitcase is open on my bed, half packed, and my cat is resting comfortably on top of my clean clothes. Oh, to be a cat.

With all the free passes that were going around this year, I decided that the best method of obtaining a pass to ASW would be to snag one of the freebies. It is for this reason that I am relegated to my Silver pass. There are some restrictions that come along with having such an economy pass, but none that I feel will remotely affect my experience (at least not significantly). After all, networking doesn’t happen in panels. It happens in bars. Preferably the “strip” variety. Yes, I’m talking about bars on the strip.

I will surely report upon my return on Tuesday.