If you still haven’t got your Affiliate Summit West 2010 tickets yet, you might be shit-out-of-luck. A friend says a gold pass (list: $549) has closed at about $975 on eBay, and a silver (list: $149) is at $475. If you find that the event is a must-attend, then get a ticket early next time. And if you don’t use it, list it on eBay.

–

I’m moderating a session on “Effective Social Media Techniques” (Sun noon – 1pm) with panelists:

• Brett Tabke (founder of the Webmaster World forum and the Pub Con conference)
• Rebecca Kelley, social media director, 10e20
• Keith Plocek, social media manager, Mail.com

I’ve had a look at Brett’s presentation and it’ll give you techniques to more effectively brand and market yourself over Twitter. Keith gives an insight into the content publishing machine inside Mail.com and Rebecca will be giving tips on how not to be a social media douchebag.

The other activities I recommend going for include:

• Meet market (Sunday, noon-6pm): This is like a swap meet for affiliates. Lots of good networking with fellow affiliates and the smaller merchants/networks.
• Tradeshow (Mon-Tues): This is the main exhibition hall and the big networks will be here. Be sure to arrange a meeting with the network owner/affiliate manager ahead of time.
• Video marketing session with Ros Gardner and Jeremy Palmer (Sun 3-4pm): Video still hasn’t taken off in a big way yet in the affiliate space, so if you get in early, you’ll avoid having to buy the video marketing courses if they’re the big trend in 2011/2012…
• Product datafeeds (Mon 1130-1230pm): Helmed by Scott Jangro, this should be a great session
• Facebook Advertising (Mon 2-3pm): This should be an interesting session since Plenty of Fish’s Markus Frind will be on the panel. Perhaps he’ll talk about his PoF self-serve ad system either during the presentation or during the Q&A?
• SEO site clinic (Mon 330-430pm): with Graywolf, Sugarrae, Greg Boser and Michael Streko
• Women of SEO site clinic (Tues 1130am – 1230am): Kate Morris, CShel, lyndseo and Kristy Bolsinger

The conference track looks like it’s got a number of SEO, social media and blogging sessions and fewer PPC, PPV, media buy sessions.

The best learning/networking has taken place at the parties and meetups outside of the conference/tradeshow.

You can check out the list of parties which have been posted by Missy Ward.

Note: You should wear dress shoes and pants to get into more posh places like the Palms. More than a few affiliates have been turned away for wearing sports shoes, jeans to these places. A collared shirt might help too.

If you haven’t RSVPed to the parties, you might want to do so soon. A couple of them have 200-300 strong waiting lists, so unless you have a beeline to the network owner/organizer, you might not be able to get in.

–

Meeting tip:

For the most productive meetings, lunches work better than dinner for me. Most affiliates will be in work mode at lunch, while they’ll be in party mode after 5pm.

–

Will you be attending Affiliate Summit? Post in the comments if you will be and I’ll keep an eye out for you.

If you’ve been on any of the make money online “guru” mailing lists, you’d have received a series of warm-up emails for Amish Shah and Jay Style’s Magic Bullet System which launches tomorrow (Monday 11 Jan) and from the preview videos released so far, it looks like an automatic CPA money making system, but is it the reality? Is it all it’s cracked up to be?

Here’s my somewhat insider’s look on the situation.

I was in the same internet marketing mastermind with Amish and Jay about 3 years ago. Then Amish had been working on his Hexatrack PPC management platform which he was using to run his own campaigns. It was brutally effective and he’s come on the calls going into detail about how he’s killed the last offer he’d been promoting.

Fast forward 3 years, and $250,000 later, and some of the core components of Hexatrack have been developed into the Magic Bullet System, which resulted in a $5,000 workshop in California last year with a number of practising top affiliates, copywriters and conversion experts delivering the sessions. The seminar has been productized into the Magic Bullet System which will combine webinar style training, together with the video recordings (about 20+ hours) from the session.

–

What’s been happening thus far?

Amish and Jay have roped in JV broker Mike Merz to round up JV partners and Frank Kern who’s developed quite a reputation for stellar product launches. In case you weren’t aware, Frank has been responsible for kicking off the “Dog Training” training products, tattoo-related products and monetizing a host of other niches.

For those in or familiar with the pick-up artist niche, Frank (together with his cousin/brother-in-law Trey) helped Neil Strauss AKA Style (author of seduction/pick-up bestseller The Game) develop and launch his “Annihilation Method” series of Pick-Up Artist home study course.

Frank has since gone on to work on a couple of other big Continue reading →

If you’re headed to the Affiliate Summit West 2010 (in Las Vegas)  for the first time (or even if it’s your 3rd or 4th time), you might want to take note of the following tips to get the most out of the experience.

Note: If you haven’t registered yet, be sure to get your Affiliate Summit passes now and use the code “ASW10WEE” (good for 10% off any type of conference registration). Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins just told me over instant messenger that summit registrations will close in the next 24 hours (or less).

Tip #1: Get your summit pass, book your hotel, confirm your travel arrangements if you haven’t yet. Official room rates are $169/night at the conference venue, the Rio, so you might want to get rooms at the Wynn or the Encore at that price point or marginally higher.

Remember the event is from the 17th to 19th, that’s next week, so don’t make plans during that time.

Tip #2: Confirm your meetings, parties and one-on-one meetings ahead of time. I’ve been sending out emails, twitter direct messages, IMs to set up calls, confirm dinners and parties. There’s likely 2-3 great things happening during the same time slot every day, so you’ll need to prioritize.

Also if you’re planning to meet someone – your affiliate manager, a fellow affiliate or a potential business partner – be sure to get their cell, arrange a breakfast or lunch meetup. Although the event isn’t the largest, having a couple of thousand people at the same venue means you might go 3 days without bumping into them.

Tip #3: Get in early. Las Vegas’ McCurran Airport is notorious for delayed flights due to turbulence, and I’ve spent 1+ hour circling over the airport and missed the entire Meet Market one year. If possible, fly in on the 16th (Saturday), and relax before the event proper, that way you’ll be fresh instead of doing a Keanu Reeves-style Speed rush to get to the conference venue.

Tip #4: Sleep is a rare commodity. Expect to get little sleep during the conference, especially if you’re like some of the party-deprived affiliates out there. It’s not unusual to crash at 3am, then start your day at 10am (you could sleep through, but what’s the point?). That means you should avoid working all night on your Valentine’s/tax campaigns and have a good night’s sleep before the conference.

Tip #5: Stay the course: Although it’s a 3-day conference, the event picks up momentum around the evening of day 2 (Monday). If you’re not staying through till Tuesday evening (or staying over till Wednesday morning), you might be missing out on a lot of fun. Watch for fellow bleary-eyed affiliates at McCurran on Wednesday morning.

–

Although it is quite a pain to fly 20 hours each way from my home in Singapore, it’s worth making the once a year journey. Will you be there?

Last week, PPC.biz’s Barman tweeted a Wired article about the video content creation strategy of Demand Media, which holds lessons for marketers: bank on the first mover advantage hard, especially if you want to grab market share and mind share.

That’s not to say that you should put out the poorest quality stuff you can just to get a campaign out the door. But on the internet, speed accounts for a lot, but not everything. (Just ask Windows about their Vista operating system or Apple about their Newton PDA).

The lesson here is if you’re the first in the space, whether it’s with FB ads, MySpace MyAds, or the recently launched Plenty of Fish (PoF) self-serve ad system, you’re going to have leeway and freedom to see a period of fat profits (together with a bout of accompanying frustration with broken features, tracking).

An affiliate has said of PoF’s ad “I could shit diarrhea more consistent than PoFs traffic” alluding to an ad which reported 3,000 impressions, 500 clicks, though the network stats reported 60 clicks.

At the same time, other affiliates are reporting Continue reading →

Unless you’ve been sleeping at the wheel, the last couple of weeks have been turbulent ones for many PPC affiliates, especially Adwords users. There’s been a spat of account bans (as discussed in my internet marketing forum), and even though Nick Fox told Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz that suspended Adwords advertisers can send an email to initiate an “appeals process”, the anecdotal evidence suggests that aside from canned email responses, affiliates suspended from Adwords can do little more than post a bitchy post on their blog, or create a complaint thread on one of a number of public and private marketing forums. So is this the beginning of the end of PPC?

It’s easy to go the Fox Mulder route and assume that they’re out to get you (which isn’t paranoia if someone is really out to get you…). I think it has to do with the natural process of evolution. Let’s look at search engine optimization (SEO) for a second.

Remember the old days (ie: the early 1990s) when SEO meant you stuffed Continue reading →