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.