I probably spend about 1-2 hours each day driving and where I used to listen to music, then later switched to listening to news programs like the BBC, I’ve since switched to listening to podcasts a couple of months ago.

Why listen to podcasts? I personally would absorb more information out of a book, especially since I like to mark them up, but a podcast is a good way to multi-task, especially if you’re short on time and a great way to find something to do while you’re driving, exercising (I’m shooting for at least 2 hours of exercise a week to fight the flab), or while cleaning my desk or doing paperwork.

My personal preference is to go for programs with useful content, although I do like the occasional “talk radio” style podcast with hosts who are doing a “Seinfeld” (ie a podcast about nothing…) but generally that doesn’t take up more than 5% or 10% of my listening time.

If a podcast contains very good information, I’ll make a mental note to go through it again and take down notes.

Here’re some of the podcasts which I listen to and might be useful for you:

• Lisa Picarille and Shawn Collins’ “Affiliate Thing“: A great weekly topical podcast, Lisa and Shawn usually have a number of industry experts on their show and cover the latest shows.
• Sam Harrelson’s Affiliate Fortune Cookies: This is a new project which Sam has recently started up and it follows a “22 minute” (refering to the program length) daily podcast (5 days a week) format . It’ll be interesting to see Sam keep this up and perhaps make reference to it during the Social Marketing panel that he’ll be moderating at Affiliate Summit West. (Especially since the session synopsis reads “With almost 50% of Internet users now creating and sharing their own content, this new medium is changing how markets operate and how companies communicate with consumers.“
• Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney’s Shoemoney Show: Jeremy hosted the Net Income show which featured interesting guests and where Pepperjam’s Kris Jones talked about doing seasonal PPC campaigns based on UGG boots and the American Idol television series to great effect. The latest show continues the tradition.

In addition to these, I buy quite a number of information products on CD or MP3, and also have utilities to rip DVD videos into MP3 tracks, so finding more audio material to listen to isn’t an issue.

If you’re looking for more audio podcasts, you might also like to check out the SEO podcasts on WebmasterRadio.fm. I spoke to WebmasterRadio founder Daron Babin (AKA SEGuru) last week and he mentioned that a number of new programs are in development.

Linda Woods’ (CEO and President of Partnercentric) new Affiliate Marketing Insider podcast looks interesting.

Shawn, Sam and Jim Kukral have recently launched/re-launched Geekcast.fm which will be a podcast aggregator of sorts.

For more podcasts, check out:

• Listing of podcasts on Shawn Collins’ iPod
• Carsten Cumbrowski’s Podcast Directory

Will you bring your affiliate income to the next level by promoting PJN affiliate programs?

More on that shortly, but rather than repeat the information that other bloggers have highlighted, you can read write-ups and view videos at:

• Shawn Collins’ Pepperjam Network intro and video
• David Lewis’ Revenews preview/review of PJN

Having been an early tester for PJN since its beta stage, I’ve seen the fledgling network (with a great pedigree) go through its early development stages, but the questions for most affiliates is: Does it deliver on it’s promise of an “Affiliate Marketing 2.0” network?

With about 100 merchants under its belt and have recruited a number of star Super Affiliates to promote its programs, Pepperjam will be focusing on building up its merchant and affiliate support and promotion efforts in the coming months. You can likewise expect to see an impressive booth at the Affiliate Summit West next month.

I’ve spoken to Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Director Robyn Jones a number of times about the affiliate programs they’ve managed and you can see many of these programs, previously listed at Commission Junction and the other major networks now offered on PJN.

I have faced a number of issues with affiliate cookies not lodging correctly on some of the major networks (with sometimes less than enthusiastic support in pursuing these lost sales), and PJN’s affiliated-focused approach means that you have a higher chance of ensuring that your marketing efforts are accurately compensated. (eg. less “lost” sales).

The panel to search for merchant programs and get affiliate links is similar to other tier-1 affiliate networks, as is the ability to tag Sub IDs to your links for better tracking.

I believe the design of the program has a lot to do with Pepperjam head honcho’s experience as a PPC marketer and incorporates a number of PPC-friendly tracking and analytics features.

One of the interesting features of PJN is the ability to create a customized widget, known as pepperjamADS.

Smarter and more sophisticated affiliates will be able to select and rotate merchants and create a changing widget on their blogs or content sites.

Think of a more user-controlled Google adsense block on your sites, featuring merchants you select. The performance-based nature (pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale) of the payouts means your potential return on investment (ROI) will be at least 10 times higher than what you might expect from a comparable contextual pay-per-click advertising program.

Note: This payout is only going to give you these returns if you spend some time doing appropriate strategic marketing to match appropriate offers to your traffic profile, rather than the “fire-and-forget” nature of Google Adsense, AdBrite, Yahoo Search Marketing or other contextual type ads.

In my eyes, Pepperjam has been really strong in recruiting merchants in the lifestyle/fashion niche, such as fashion lines from Kimora Simmons (of BabyPhat Fashion/America’s Next Top Model fame), Nelly, Beyone’s Dereon and other lines.

If you’re running a mass entertainment/lifestyle website, you’ll have ample tools at your fingertips to monetize effectively.

–

What I’m interested in looking at will be the included and constantly evolving datafeed capabilites form the merchants. If you’ve worked with XML datafeeds, you’ll know that they’re not the easiest data to work with, unless you’re using a script to process the data, or a service provider like Asif Malik’s GoldenCan.

So it’ll be interesting to see how smart affiliates are going to create shopping and catalog sites from the datafeeds.

–

Additionally, PJN has an education/resources area, for new affiliates.

This is a great idea and something I had mentioned would be useful to include some time back:

At the moment it’s mainly outgoing links to blogs, forums and paid affiliate training (like Affiliate Classroom).

Over time, it’ll be great to see some of the PJ team develop in-house training resources because I think the “software” training materials are probably just as important, if not more important than the “hardware” feed generators, widget code and analytics.

—

The Bottomline: Having a new affiliate network entrant always means more choice for affiliate marketers, and the test and mettle of the network will be proven as affiliates promote the programs and check that leads and sales are being tracked accurately.

Also with PJN entering the arena, it means that sales going through their system will go past adware detectors, like the ones built into Windows and third party adware software like Spybot and AdAware which have flagged tracking cookies from the major affiliate networks as “potential security threats”.

If you are in a consumer-related niche, eg lifestyle, entertainment, fashion, you’d want to monetize your traffic more effectively with PJN’s merchants as it’s going to give you a higher ROI compared to contextually-targeted advertising systems.

–

If any, one grouse I have with Pepperjam’s in-house affiliate recruiting system (to recruit sub-affiliates) is that it’s a flat $5 payout per lead, unlike the typical 2% – 4% commission that a number of the other networks are paying out.

Granted it does go up to $7 per signup once you hit a high number of sub-affiliates, but it’ll be nice to have a recurring overriding commission to provide an incentive to groom those you recruit.

==

To sign up for PepperjamNetwork, check out:

–> The PepperjamNetwork Affiliate Network

Unlike the past Affiliate Summit where I found myself hiking from Harrah’s (which has great prime rib) to Bally’s every morning, I was determined to get lodging at the Rio where the summit will be held.

Having said that, here’s some summit survival tips:

• Take the bus if you have time and like to see the city. It costs about $6 for a 1-way ticket and stops at most of the major hotels. It does take a little time to get around though because it stops at quite a number of hotels.
• Wear comfortable walking shoes as you’ll be pounding the show floor if you’re diligent about meeting merchants and networks (I only got through about 25% of the booths the last time round because I was talking to and got waylaid by people as I was walking around).
• Carry a backpack if you don’t want to be lugging your schwag all over the place. Especially if there’re booths giving out Plasma TVs, Xbox360s and Nintendo WIIs (I think most of us can go out and buy one, it’s just the ultra competitive streaks in every motivated affiliates that comes out when it comes to competitions…)

With that out of the way, and a 15 hour plane ride (I’m taking a direct Singapore-Los Angeles flight on a brand spanking new Airbus A380 this time) ahead, what’s in store at Affiliate Summit?

The fun begins before the event starts.

Anik Singal and his Affiliate Classroom team have organized Affiliate Classroom Live, a 1-day workshop for affiliate managers on Saturday 23 Feb. What’s more it’s free…Places are very limited though, so check out:

–> Anik Singal’s Affiliate Classroom Live

Chase the workshop with Brook Schaaf’s Affiliate Dinner. Expect to see a guest of honor. Expect to see the guest of honor roasted…What fun!

Is Affiliate Dinner a ponzi scheme? Here’s the answer…

—

So day 1 of the summit kicks off with the “Affiliate Meet Market” from noon to 6pm. I missed this the last time because of a delayed flight, but I’m arriving a day early to make sure I am able to take part in the meet-and-greet and associated networking.

Here’s the floorplan for the Affiliate Meet Market. (PDF format)

–

Day 2 kicks off with Jason Calacanis’ keynote.

With Jason recently refering to “Affiliate Spam” “polluting” the search engines at the Paris Le Web seminar, you can expect some fireworks during the keynote.

–

One note about the presentations that follow. An overwhelming number of presentation proposals were submitted, with the result that about 4 presentations are simultaneously ongoing during each time slot. In many cases, you have great sessions going on at the same time.

I checked with Shawn and he mentioned that the sessions will be recorded and available for viewing later.

I’d suggest prioritizing your favorite sessions and making a beeline for them. In some cases I can see the majority of the crowd gravitating towards ONE session…

Forewarned is forearmed…

I’ve listed some of the sessions I personally am interested in attending:

As I’ve been doing a number of podcast and vlogging (video blogging) lately, I’m keen to check this session out.

I met Buy.com’s Melissa Salas last Feb at ASW, and she present a pretty great show for Buy.com over at Buy.Tv.
(As of last October, on the BuyTV MySpace page it’s mentioned that “BuyTV was just informed that it has been picked up for local programming via Time Warner, Cox, Charter, DirecTV, Echostar, Dish Network and others – Sunday mornings at 11:30am PST”)

And you have a panel of other video marketing/video blogging folks on the panel.

–

Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds is always a popular presenter, and I’m looking forward to checking out his presentation ahead of his session.

—

Day 3 kicks off with an “Ask the Experts” session:

I’m keen to talk to Heather Paulson about her new Paulson Management Group company.

A little later in the day, be sure to check out:

A media panel chaired by Revenue Magazine’s Lisa Picarille. Besides myself, you’ll also see Jim Kukral, Anik Singal and Valerie Stevens on the panel.

In parallel with the media panel is the Super Affiliate panel:

With the likes of Pepperjam’s Kris Jones, John Chow, Zac Johnson and Amit Mehta in attendance.

And if you’re not already torn between two or more sessions, consider that later in the afternoon, you’ll have the ABestWeb panel:

With AbestWeb’s Haiko De Poel, AffiliateCrew’s Chuck Hamrick and Team Loxly’s Loxly AKA Deb Carney in attendance.

In the same time slot you have the social marketing panel:

With a Who’s Who of the blogosphere/social media space, like Sam Harrelson, Tris Hussey, Stephanie Agresta among others.

I would point out more highlights, but my fingers are worn-out from all that typing, so you might like to check out:

–> Affiliate Summit West 2008

Here are the tag rules:

Here are the tag rules:

• Each player must post these rules first.
• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write about their eight facts on their blog.
• At the end of your blog post, choose eight people to get tagged, list their names, and link to them.
• Don’t forget to contact them telling them they’re tagged. Also, point them to your blog post so they know what to do.

Here’re the my 8 “facts”:

1. Payouts don’t tell the entire story. If an offer doesn’t convert, even at $150 a lead, it doesn’t do you any good.
2. The Affiliate marketing big guns are using PPC (PayPerClick) traffic to drive traffic in great volume to their sites. Check out Gauder Chaudry’s PayPerClickFormula and blogs from PPC Super Affiliates like Shoemoney, Amit Mehta, Kris Jones and Geordie Carswell, Andrew Johnson, Shawn Collins’ Affiliate Tip and Aojon’s Affiliate Marketing Blog among others if you want to gain the competitive edge.
3. Knowledge is going to be your biggest weapon and who you know is going to be a big part of it. I like visiting and more importantly, contributing to forums like the WickedFire Affiliate Marketing and 5Star Affiliate Marketing Forum. Once I get a number of projects off the ground, I plan to get more involved in ABestWeb. If you haven’t listened to ABestWeb founder Haiko De Poel’s “Affiliate Marketing Today” podcasts on WebmasterRadio from back in 2004 and 2005, you’re missing out.
4. Join a quality CPA network. Do your homework, check network reputations with other super affiliates. Make sure you have a great affiliate manager supporting you. Besides giving you marketing tips, they can help bump your commissions once you start generating quality leads. I like Copeac (Danielle Iovino), AzoogleAds (Erin Hughes) and MaxBounty (Jessica Dagg). [If you join as part of my affiliate network through my links. Drop me an email and I’ll help you get started].
5. Internet Marketing is more about “Marketing” than merely the “Internet”/tech side of things. You need to be able to establish rapport, build relationships with merchants, affiliate networks and fellow affiliates. If you’re a prima donna, you get relegated to the “has beens” once your numbers drop. Build bridges, create connections to key players in your market. Do whatever you said you’d promise to do. [Many marketers fail on this point…]
6. Constantly add value in whatever you do. If you’re looking for the quick fix, or a shortcut to bumping your affiliate revenue, you can probably game one of the sites out there and get a blip on your commissions for the month, but it’s not likely to be long term. Focus on building a long term business and it’ll continue bringing you income even when you’re not tending to it (which was the original intent of starting a business, wasn’t it?)

Ok, I better add 2 personal “bits” to conform to the meme.

• I grew up mostly in Singapore, which is a small diamond-shaped island about 30 miles long and 50 miles wide. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not in China, but rather in the proximity of Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Singapore was a British colony in the 19th and early 20th century, so our education system is British-based. Planet Andrea AKA Andrea Schoemaker remarked that I spoke like Austin Powers the first time she met me.
• I like country cooking. There’s nothing better than biscuits and gravy, grits, hashbrowns, farmers sausage and Texas BBQ for me. [I head over to the local IHOP and Waffle House for some chocolate pancakes whenever I’m in the US]. Mudpies and Cold Stone Creamery ice-cream rank up there too.

The meme stipulates tagging 8 (yes, that’s EIGHT) people to propagate the meme further, though I’ve noticed that most folks have been tagging 4…

My tags go out to:

• Reformed Black Hat Marketer Howie Schwartz
• PPC Super Affiliate Geordie Carswell
• Content Guru Matt Sherborne
• MyBlogLog Community Manager and Fellow Blogger SleepyBlogger Robyn Tippins
• Instigator Blogger Ben Yoskovitz
• Traffic King Ross Goldberg
• Internet Marketer Rachel Rofe
• 5Star Affiliate Linda Buquet

You might’ve received a notification about the site targeting Baby Boomers and “Generation Joneses” last week.

It appears to be a fairly “mass” campaign, rather than a targeted one because I’m clearly a “Gen Xer” (born between 1965-79).

Although guys like Shoemoney, PepperJam’s Kris Jones, Gauher Chaudhry and Amit Mehta do really well with PPC traffic to CPA offers, I’m thinking that building a dedicated niche community helps you get better leverage out of your lead generation efforts.

With Gauher’s background in information marketing, I’m sure he’s one of the frontrunners in putting this process into action.

This requires a paradigm shift, from going beyond just a product-based focus to a demographic/psychographic-based focus.

Just imagine BoomJ providing a variety of finance-related, health-related, biz op-related offers and you can see that the potential for revenue multiplication is very high.

It goes beyond providing an offer, to building a relationship, and that’s where the opportunities show themselves.

WebProNews’ Jason Lee Miller has mentioned the start of the Niche Network Era. Some might say it’s a revolution, but perhaps it’s more an evolution of the social community idea kicked off by the behemoths like MySpace and Facebook, into something that’s financially sustainable and self-sufficient.

It’s more than just collecting warm bodies, it’s turning into a real business.

I can identify with her sentiment that: “I’m wondering (aloud I suppose) if I’m the only one who finds the typical disjointed, rambling liveblogging posts are of any real value to offsite readers?”

Here’s my take:

It’s nothing to do with whether the blogging is live or not.

It has everything to do with your content and your presentation.

As an example, look at presenter Nicole Eggers on WebProNews.

Nicole Egger, WebProNews video news update presenter

Besides being very easy on the eyes, Nicole presents WebProNews updates throughout the day.

What makes readers continue to come back is the amount of useful information they get within the 2-4 minute video broadcasts.

No medium is perfect however, and when Nicole first presented in early February, she received negative feedback for her Southern Drawl (She’s from Kentucky). [Alister Cameron’s noted when she first started presenting early this year “Yahoo has high hopes for Panama” and posted “WPN’s Nicole Eggers is gorgeous. Pity she can’t speak properly“. See Nicole’s replies].

So how do these two seemingly disparate topics (Robyn’s qualms about LiveBlogging and WPN’s Nicole Eggers video broadcasts) match up?

The key is this: Content.

It’s a constant refrain. but Content is King. (and Queen, and the Prince, and the Princess too).

If you have tried live blogging and it’s fallen flat on it’s face, it likely had to do with the two factors: content and presentation.

Rambling blog posts frequently point to a lack of organization, or an overly emotional, rather than an intellectual approach when presenting information.

To contrast the two approaches, the emotional approach could be something along the lines of:

• I am at SES New York
• I met lots of friends here and made loads more
• I am having fun

It would not be as informative as say:

• I am at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas
• I met Shoemoney who whispered that hosting pages at ____ website can significantly boost your Google quality score and bring you easy $0.05 clicks
• I met PepperJams’ Kris Jones and he mentioned that the factors in almost all successful affiliate marketing campaigns lie in your ability to ___ and ____. And for the best payouts and highest conversions, the offers at ____ affiliate network are second to none.

See the difference?

In the case of WebProNews (WPN), content and your presentation are key again.

Readers who read this post and head over to check out Nicole’s broadcast today [Judge Rejects Webcasters Appeals] will notice that she’s neutralized her Southern accent a little. (and I didn’t think it was necessarily fair to come down so hard on her when she first appeared. Compare the quality of your own blog posts now, compared to when you first started blogging).

Will you continue visiting the WPN or continue live blogging as Robyn mentions?

There’s no question actually, quality content will always win.

But increasingly, spam marketers have been bombarding the social networking site, such that there is a toggle to view messages only from members of your social network (and cut out messages from non-members (potentially spammers).

MyBlogLog obviously views the matter seriously enough to take further measures.

Witness the latest salvo:

I was in the midst of posting messages to PepperJam’s Kris “Mr Pepperjam” Jones and Robyn Martin‘s MyBlogLog profiles. [To comment on the latest Meet the PepperJam Team video]

There’s now a daily message cap of about 20 messages sent per day.

[Check out the MBL blog post “Spam-a-lama-dama” for details]

In my opinion, MyBlogLog is one of the most, if not THE site, for white hat social marketers.

Having a quota on messages you send out will hurt you if you’ve:

• A large network
• Used MBL as your mode of communication with your community

On the other hand, will this anti-spam measure hamper spam marketers?

Well, they might create multiple profiles, and multiply the 20 messages by the number of profiles they create.

So it would eventually hurt legitimate users more than spammers.

I think the key here is looking beyond just the technology.

For social traffic strategies to work effectively, there has to be a human governance element involved. Which is the major pitfall of the “web2.0” traffic products out there now.

If your answer to create traffic is just to game Digg, del.icio.us, MBL is just to bank on technology alone, you’re doomed to fail. Or occasionally create blips of ultra bursts on your traffic charts.

Does that necessarily build a community? Or build a list of prospects?

Possibly, but I’d think that incorporating the human element will create a complete system, rather just give a 50% equation (based on technology only…).

[And to prove my point, I’m in the process of developing a social traffic system incorporating organic elements. Being holistic is important because there are just too many ‘incomplete’ products out there!]

For MyBlogLog and similar sites to succeed, the developers need to look further to incorporate a trust, credibility, or some form of reputation, that eventually ties into your message or posting quota.

If nothing else, take a page from the reputation systems incorporated into many of the forums across the net.

I was looking through my blog and got tagged by Dawud Miracle for the Goal Setting meme originally started by Alex Shalman and have gone through eMom Wendy Piersall (winner of the recent Elite Retreat ticket)

Having taught life skills and goal setting specifically, I’ve noticed that many don’t include the following criteria: goals have to be:

• Specific: Include a measurement, so you’ll know when you’ve achieved it (a net worth of $x million, rather than merely “really rich!”)
• Time Specific: You need a timeframe. Theoretically we could all be millionaires, even if we’re earning just $1,000 a month. The problem is that at that rate, you might need to work till 305 years to achieve it. So goals don’t mean much without the time factor.
• Realistic: I use a “reality check” factor. If you’re a complete computer idiot, and you’re gunning for $1 million in your first year in Internet Marketing and you can spend 30 minutes a week on this. You might get slammed hard against the wall when you meet Mr Reality.

There’re other criteria too, but I’ll spare you the gory details.

So here’re my goals:

Goals:

• Professional Goal 1: Develop and have ready for launch one of my products by end June 2007. Shooting for 10,000 units sold by Dec 31st, 2007.
• Professional Goal 2: Launch and build a 1,000 strong social community by Dec 31st, 2007
• Professional Goal 3: Achieve a net worth of $5 million by December 31st, 2010.
• Family Goal 1: Continue to work on growing my family to 3 kids by 2009 (I’m 33% there…)
• Family Goal 2: To spend at least an hour of quality time with my wife every evening. (We’re both usually working on multiple projects at the same time.)
• Financial Goal 1: Grow my finances by 10% each year.
• Personal Development Goal 1: Spend at least an hour boning up on my IM knowledge each day.
• Personal Development Goal 2: Spend at least half an hour sorting out and outsourcing the paperwork each day. (It never ends…)

If you choose too, you can set goals dealing with the social, spiritual and other aspects of your life too.

Continuing this meme, I’m tagging:

• Michelle MacPhearson
• Michael Ono
• Richard Ball
• Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker
• Kris Jones

Keep the ball rolling, guys…

Though the results lag real time searches by about 2 months, they’re good for getting an indication of search volume and related searches for given keywords and keyphrases.

In the past few weeks, there’s been speculation that with the launch of the new Yahoo! Search Marketing (AKA Panama), the Overture tool might be taken down for good.

[Incidentally, Pepperjam head honcho Kris Jones gives a good overview of Panama with his post: The New Yahoo Search (aka, Panama) Looking More & More Like Google Adwords ]

While there’s no official word from Yahoo!, it looks like traffic to Overture, while dropping since the disruption in the service sometime around mid December 2006, is still very robust.

So it was a little surprising that the Overture tool appeared to be up when I accessed it a short while ago, and ran a keyword search.

Which was a little surprising as the tool appeared to be down when I tried to access it.

In the interim, the WickedFire folks have been compiling a list of other keyword research tools. This’ll be no doubt useful if Overture is eventually removed.

Among the tools I’ve looked into, Wordze seems to be gaining popularity.

Thanks to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward who conceptualized Affiliate Summit and have been grown it from strength-to-strength at about 200 participants in the first AS in 2003 till more than 2,000 at the recently concluded ASW.

It was a great opportunity to meet up face-to-face with a number of the online marketers I’d been reading and talking with over the past few months like ShoeMoney, Scott Jangro, Kris Jones, PlanetAndrea, Jon Fisher from WickedFire and Joe Whyte.

Becky “Webmoxy” Ryan was a friendly and intelligent person to talk to (even though I was deep in thought and seemed to have unintentionally ignored her when she called out a few times).

Maura, Robyn, Andrew Wee at the Pepperjam booth

Shoemoney’s assistant Nicole

Webmoxy Becky Ryan

More surprising still was the fact that a number of affiliate managers and affiliates whom I hadn’t met prior to ASW mentioned they enjoyed reading this blog.

Blogging can be a solitary affair and it’s comforting to have face-to-face validation (which gives a human face to the otherwise clinical awstats’ 6000+ monthly uniques).

Although I missed them, perhaps I’ll have a chance to catch up with Super Affiliate Ros Gardner, BlogKits founder Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson and SleepyBlogger Robyn Tippins at the next event. I heard Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis had to leave Sunday evening for school, so I probably missed them by a hair.

What I greatly appreciated was the opportunity to meet Mike Krongel and his team over at Copeac. They threw a killer party for the WickedFire folks over at the Caramel Loung in the Bellagio.

It’s a great opportunity to have met up with WickedFire founders Jon and Brandon and WF members like John “I like c**k”, SEO_Mike, chrislingle, lerchmo, jDog, DruSam, Surly, Kaveman, Smaxor, Jon Warass, ExEngima, Rick.

Mike Peters from Software Projects had some interesting stories to tell too.

I’ve been listening to some of the post-ASW buzz and one of the issues I’ve heard is that the workshops didn’t provide good information.

I think the major element of a ‘summit’ is to share ideas. And given the time constraint of a 1.5 hour session, I’d doubt it’s fair to compare AS’ workshop sessions with Elite Retreat or other multiple day workshop focused on a single topic like SEO or list building.

I had the opportunity to speak to merchants making their first foray into affiliate marketing and they seemed to have got basic information to follow up on their efforts.

The biggest benefit of ASW is ‘being there’.

And ShoeMoney has rightly pointed out that the best exchange of ideas takes place after the workshop, in the bars and restaurants after the sessions end. In a more relaxed environment, you have an open exchange of ideas and trading information on what works and what doesn’t.

And herein lies the rub, Internet Marketing has more to do with relationship building and personal contact, than just the technology aspect that people generally get obsessed about.

Online marketing is more than composing the best Web copy, or optimizing your landing page or PPC campaign.

If you don’t have grassroot supports from your peers, whether it’s getting feedback on something you’re implementing, or even working together on a project, you can still succeed, it will just take a much longer time.

You can, of course, read about ASW and other events from this blog, though in the long run you’d be missing out on some great networking opportunities.

Affiliate Summit East will be coming up later this year.

Will you be there?

Attendees from the first ER paid $4,500 per head to attend the exclusive event.

The upcoming second ER to be held on 19 and 20th March in San Francisco is raising some hackles with its $4,950 price tag.

I’ve often heard the question on the forums and a number of Internet Marketers have been asking me this question:

Is it too much?

And often I hear the gripe that paying $4,950 which works out to $2,500 per day over the 2 day workshop is too much.

I think there’s a major problem here.

And the problem is with the person asking the question.

See, I have been doing business consulting and training and managing start-ups for the better part of 10 years.

I’ve almost never looked just at how much something costs, because that’s only half the equation.

What’s more, ok, I understate it here, what’s of the utmost importance whether you should invest in the opportunity is your return on your investment (ROI if you want the jargon).

If you spend $1,000 on an investment, what would you like to get out of it? $1,050? $2,000? $10,000?

My personal benchmark has always been to get a minimum 10 times return on my investment.

If I were to spend $5,000 on an opportunity, I’d expect to get at least $50,000 back in net profits.

So the question is whether Elite Retreat is overpriced?

Looking at this issue rationally, value is a function of your return over your investment (Return / Investment).

This are the two constraints on the issue:

1. The investment is fixed ($4,950)
2. The return is not fixed.

The return is determined by what you want to get out of the event.

Speaking to Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) on the sidelines of Affiliate Summit West, he mentioned that one of the ER participants from the first workshop was now generating $2,000 a day.

Ok, I’d admit that I didn’t nail Shoemoney on whether it was gross or net profit. But even assuming a worst case scenario that it was ‘only’ a 50% net profit, that’s a cool $1,000 a day, or $365,000 a year.

On a $4,000 investment.

So the issue now is whether the ER trainers will be able to deliver on their objectives to bring you to the next level.

This time around, they’ve assembled a cast of trainers comprising:

• Shoemoney (Search Engine Marketing, Branding, PPC, and Arbitrage)
• Kris Jones (Affiliate Marketing and Search Arbitrage)
• Lee Dodd (Community Building and Web Real Estate)
• Aaron Wall (Search Engine Optimization)
• Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse (Blogging and Monetization)
• Neil Patel (Social Media Optimization, Reputation Management, and Viral Marketing)

So between them, I believe they have most of the bases covered. I’d think that if you were more concerned about topics like domaining, copywriting, product creation, which aren’t specifically covered in the presentations (although some of the speakers have experience in these areas), what you can do to ensure your own success is:

1. Do your preliminary research beforehand
2. Do the necessary testing
3. Compile all the questions you have and bring them to ER.

Talk to the panel of trainers and fellow participants and do whatever it takes to get the necessary knowledge to get yourself to the next level.

I’m sure that even if they aren’t able to directly address your query, one of them will be able to direct you to resources to get the information you need.

Will going to ER provide the magic antidote to all your burning questions and make you an overnight millionaire?

Not likely.

Neither will signing up for a myriad of courses, or buying a million dollars worth of ebooks.

What will bring you the success you desire is the determination, perserverance and most importantly, effort, to move yourself one step closer to success.

Obviously, Shoemoney and his team have planned a roadmap for Elite Retreat to make it a major initiative this year with sessions planned in Orlando (May), Chicago (July), Phoenix (Sept), Dallas (Nov).

Should you consider investing the $4,950 for the event?

Only if you see yourself investing the effort necessary to bring yourself $50,000.

You can also read some of the related posts by:

• Kris Jones
• Neil Patel
• Shoemoney
• Lee Dodd
• Aaron Wall
• Darren Rowse

For more details, you can visit the Elite Retreat website or call PlanetAndrea at 1(800) 888-8151.

What’s his prediction of this year’s search trend?

“With Google’s quality scores coming into play, small and medium businesses with PPC budgets of less than $2 million, will see their prices increase, while conversions decrease”

Landing pages being one of the key determinants of quality scores.

Smaller search engines will provide lower quality opportunities, and result in a number of search arbitragers leaving the market. But the success ones will see an increase in their earnings.

pepperjamSEARCH’s Kris Jones and Andrew Wee

We also talked about the evolution of e-commerce since the fallout of 2000.

Having covered the fallout of the dotcom era’s leading lights like Lante, Organic, Scient and @McKinsey’s Internet Accelerator, I noted that the wave of SEO/SEM in recent times has become more bottomline-focused, rather than merely a global branding exercise.

It’s been encouraging to see many of the industry’s experts since then either go at it alone or form many of the new 2.0 SEM/strategy companies.

For those who’re new to the industry, the status quo will be accepted and taken for a fact.

But those of us who’ve been around since 2000, the evolution of the industry as epitomized by the success of events like Affiliate Summit, serves as a vindication for continuing to work at it.

Top row: Spot the guy who traded the giant red paperclip for a house?

That’s me in the top row, 2nd from the right.
In Tino’s own words:

There are dozens of social networks that bring the blogosphere together, with Technorati and MyBlogLog being two of the biggest. I wanted to bring a whole bunch of bloggers together on one page. 2000 bloggers to be exact!

Lots of familiar faces among the 300 listed there.

Top row: 4th from the left, Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) holding his $132,997.94 check from Google

Bottom row: 3rd from the left, Kris Jones (Pepperjam), Jim Kukral (Blogkits) is right next to him

Also spotted in the mass of bloggers are:

• Robert Scoble
• Matt Cutts
• ProBlogger Darren Rowse
• Todd Malicoat
• John Chow
• Chris Sandberg
• My buddy and forum specialist Ryan Chua
• Japanese “Cash Quest” babe Kumiko Suzuki

and a host of others.
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One thing I’ve noticed is that there’re quite a number of blogs hosted at WordPress.com and Blogspot.

If you’re a recreational blogger, I believe it’s ok to host it at a free site.

However, if you see yourself as a serious blogger/SEM/SEO, and you are building a brand and PageRank and backlinks to your blog, would you really want to host it at a free blogging service?

Granted, it’s free.

But if web hosting costs you $100 a year. Don’t you think your branding is worth at least 10 times that?

You could potentially (and I know of cases) of bloggers losing their free domains because of a violation of the terms of service (whether deliberate or inadvertedly), a perceived ‘excessive’ attempt at monetizing their blog, ‘excessive’ traffic coming to their blog.

I’d suggest two steps to “professionalize” your blogging efforts:

• Get a domain name. NameCheap.com is my preferred domain registrar.
• Get low cost, reliable host. I especially like BlueHost.
• Go with a hosted WordPress blog. BlueHost provides a one-click idiot-proof install of WordPress through it’s comprehensive control panel.

It’ll enhance your blog longevity.

For more information on Tino’s project, visit:

–> 2000 Bloggers

• You can make huge money, if you’re skillful, especially if you’ve traded in equities, mutual funds and the like.
• Luck plays a huge part too.
• It can be quite fun
• If you think this is a complete waste of time, just remember that it started out at PlanetAndrea.

One last minor note: It’s all fake money. But who knows, just like the “Game gold” phenomenon on the MMPOGs out there, you might start seeing eBay auctions if this thing takes off.

As everyone knows, Internet Marketers (whether you’re focused on SEO, SEM, blogging, arbitrage affiliate marketing, product creation, domain trading, or one of the things some of you have emailed me about and asked not to mention) tend to spend on average 16 hours a day in front of the computer. (Unless you’re Cameron Olthius and only spending 14 hours a day in front of the computer: Personal Resolutions for 2007)

So to break the monotony of Internet Marketers engaging in another game of minesweeper, solitaire, tetris or tagman, there’s a new game in town. Here’s the brief:

• Alexadex is a stock market-like trading game.
• You start off with $10,000 and have to work your way up. (fake money).
• Money is made, and lost, by trading shares in websites.
• The value of the shares changes once a day, during updates, and there is a maximum amount of shares for one site, so you might not be able to buy the site you are looking for every time.

The rest of the rules aren’t too exciting. But despite it’s noble intentions, I think this is a thinly disguised way for SEMs to bet on Alexa rankings (‘investment’ learning ambitions aside).

So like any astute gambler investor, I immediately invested all my funds and I’m now officially illiquid.

Here’s where I put my funds:

Chris-Hooley.com: I put my money on Chris at $35 a share and bought about $4,500 because he’s a swell guy. And also because his shares are fairly inexpensive. And given his past history, I’d say the prices have a good chance of tripling in value.

I invested the balance of funds into myself. Although at $95 a share I’m fairly pricey, I think it’s a good investment because as the blog owner, I’d easily be able to hack the system unlock shareholder value.

Left with about $40, I decided to be a nosey parker and snoop around.

Shawn Collins’ Affiliate Summit.com will see more traffic as January 20 approaches. That’ll be when Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas will kick off. And as the time approaches, expect to see more traffic at the site. And if you haven’t got your ASW ticket yet, head over to the Affiliate Summit website.

At $135 a share, it seems pricey, though there’s a definite possibility of upside.

PlanetAndrea has a monster of a spike in her traffic. If I could short the stock I would because although there is a possibility of her price increasing, the odds are for a correction downwards. At $85 a share, they’re a little pricey too.

Pronet Advertising: Neil and Cameron’s site seems to have a drop in traffic, but there’s a definite series of peaks and troughs. At $130 a share, there’s lots of upside potential and worth an investment, especially since they look like they’re in a trough at the moment.

PepperJamBlog: Another nice find here. At $27 a share, Kris Jones is your “go to” guy if you’d like to see a 5-fold return on your investment. The peaks comes with some regularity (about twice a month), so you can sit back and wait for them to come along.

Yahoo: For fun, I checked out the top ranked Alexa site which happens to be Yahoo. At $272,500 per share, I won’t be buying any soon. Maybe one day…

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If you’d like to join in the fun, head to: AlexaDex

• SEO/SEM

Shoemoney put out a tasty post and buzzed industry contacts with the hypothetical “Would you hire Matt Cutts? If you had to come up with a dollar figure to offer him what would it be? What would his job title and job description be?”

A number of informative and insightful responses from the likes of Kris Jones (CEO PepperJamSearch), Patrick Gavin (CEO Text Link Ads), Greg Hartnett (Best Of The Web), Christine Kim, Rand Fishkin (Owner SEOMOZ), Jason Calacanis (Former CEO Weblogs INC & AOL Exec), Neil Patel – CEO ACS Web Consulting, Danny Sullivan, Aaron Wall – SEOBook

Here’s the link: Would You Hire Matt Cutts?

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• Blogging

Robyn Tippins looks at the backlash from the bloggers perspective from the proposed acquistion of Performancing’s assets by PayPerPost (as mentioned earlier PerPerPost Acquires Performancing Assets). The PPP and Performancing deal nixed? Good thing or bad thing?

Here’s the link: Pay Per Post and Performancing Deal Nixed
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• Affiliate Marketing

Has Click Fraud been blown out of proportion? Jon F gives his perspective and gives his fix to the solution. The fact that he filed his post under “Industry Bullshit” will give an indication of his straight up, in your face perspective on the issue. (I’m looking forward to checking out his session together with Shoemoney at Affiliate Summit West)

Here’s the link: Click Fraud – The Overrated Internet Killer

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• Social Traffic

Social Marketer Michelle MacPhearson is back. Having given birth to a beautiful son, Colum, expect more social traffic tips from Michelle this year. I learned quite a bit from her about social traffic generation last year and will be expecting more good things from her this year.

Here’s the link: 1 Day Old