How I Went To Affiliate Summit East Last Year For $75 (TOTAL)

With Affiliate Summit East 2011 coming up in a few weeks I found myself in a similar position as most conferences I attend. Deep in the hole and no hotel room booked yet. With this year’s current expenses already well over $1,200 without a hotel I got to thinking about how awesome of a deal I got last year.

So lets see what happened last year with all my various discounts and freebies.

Transportation

I live in Massachusetts so the drive to New York City was right about 4 hours. As you can see by the mapquest description to the side it was also about 210 miles away. My eco friendly auto gets about 34 MPG. This means round trip I was going to use about 12.5 gallons of gas. I also hit some tolls while driving up but I really can’t remember the exact amounts. I did have to pay for parking which I think was like $50 a night. I arrived early Sunday morning and left around 3:00 Tuesday afternoon.

Total Transportation Costs
Gas – $46.25
Tolls – $10
Parking – $100

Sub Total: $156.25

Conference Pass

Last year Ryan Gray tossed me a freebie Gold Pass to hit up the summit. I had planned to upgrade on site to the Platinum pass which would’ve been an additional $600. At the registration area I was told it was too late and then after a little smooth(…read awkward) talking the staff agreed to let me upgrade for the difference. Of course what I didn’t realize is they were talking the difference in actual purchase price vs pass value. So since the pass was a promotional giveaway its purchased price was $0. In the end I was offered the opportunity to purchase the platinum for $1100 which I declined. It really didn’t make sense to me why the on site staff would’ve opted to decline an additional $600 in revenue at that point. All the same I ended up walking out of registration with the gold pass and kept my wallet with an extra $600 in it.

Total Conference Pass Costs – $0

Hotel Room

When I called to book my room at the Hilton New York, the hotel the summit was held at, all the conference discount rooms were booked. The difference in cost from the conference rate vs standard was like an additional $300. I opted to then and there ask the operator what sort of deals they could offer me, any marketing promotions, etc. The operator basically laughed and said no. Then said to stay on the line for a quick survey…

When the survey came on I spoke to a woman who was trying to get me to give her some demographic info and eventually pulled the “CONGRATULATIONS! We would like to offer you a free stay at a Hilton hotel in Orlando, FL!” … Ok lady lets dance. I told her I had no intention of going to Orlando in the next few years and said the ONLY place I plan to travel to this year is New York. After a lot of back and forth the woman revisited her previous demographic questions. “Sir you had said you earn over $250,000 a year…by chance do you earn over $500,000 a year before taxes?” Haha WTF kind of question is this?!? I joking replied ‘as long as everything goes according to plan yes’. She then told me I qualified for a promotion in New York City.

The condition would be that I had to go look at some new timeshares in Manhatten and I would get a discounted rate. Sweet, done deal. When I showed up to the Hilton NY we discovered that the woman had actually booked me at the Hilton Times Square… Welp that sucked. However they made it right and upgraded me to the 44th Floor of the Hilton NY which is basically a timeshare/executive suite area. The suite was awesome and they had an open breakfast bar and dinner open bar each night on the floor. Total cost for 2 nights…$129 (Super score).

When I went to look at the timeshare I immediately told the guy that my fiance couldn’t be there since she was at home opening our new dance studio (which she was). He quickly realized that this wasn’t good news for him and bluntly asked me “Could you make the decision to put $100,000 down on a timeshare today without your fiance’s here?” I told him no and he promptly ushered me out to the reception desk to reschedule. *I saw others stuck in these little cubicle rooms for like 2+ hours lol. I was supposed to reschedule but I just told the woman I had finished with him. They thanked me for my time, passed me some info, and gave me 20k hilton honors points and a $200 gift certificate to participating local restaurants (BONUS!). All in all I was out in 15 minutes.

As a side note…if you are going to pay $1.2 Million for a two week timeshare in Manhattan, with an annual maintenance fee of $10k….well sir you have WAY TOO MUCH FUCKING MONEY!

Total Hotel Costs – $120

Food

With a combination of street meat and local restaurants I really enjoyed all my food in NY. I hit up Carnegie’s Deli with Shock Marketer which was awesome. My buddy Brian invited me to a dinner event hosted by Ian Fernando and Kitara Media (granted no one told Ian about the +1 but he kindly pulled a chair in for himself lol). Food was perfect, the company was great. Used the restaurant card from the timeshare showing for an amazing dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse with a few affiliates. Lastly I had a few of my day job contacts in New York that I had to meet with so I took them out for some lunch and brunches while I was in their territory. Really once again I spent next to nothing for going out so much.

Food Total – $125

Drinks

Pretty much everywhere I went was open bar. I picked up a few tabs in the hotel lobbies when drinking with friends but besides that it was mostly tips more than anything else that I was paying for.

Drinks Total – $175

Other Items

While cruising the conference floor I stopped by to say hi to my friends over at Qwik Media. They were handing out some promotional scratcher card items. They tossed me one and it was worth $200. Thanks again guys!

While at the conference I was able to meetup with a company that still owed me a small sum of cash but had been not answering emails/phone calls. When confronted they promptly got me $300 that they ‘had been meaning to transfer this to you…’.

While leaving the conference I got tagged for a seat belt violation in my car. This was as I was pulling out of the parking garage. This was a $100 ticket that I never paid so of course its like $250 now or something and I’m still refusing to pay it. Since I refuse to pay it I won’t mark it up as an expense just yet . Also please note, I find it completely disgraceful that New York is completely littered with homeless folks and people constantly walking up to you harassing you for money but the cops find it more important to try and grab visitors who bring in money to the city for seat belt violations. Well played New Yorks finest…

Other Items Total – +$500

Grand Total

$76.25, cheapest conference attendance ever! Combine that with reluctantly saving $600 on the pass upgrade and it was a pretty sweet trip.

Blam Ads! vs. Google Adsense Experiment

Like a lot of people that do marketing, I have my ways that work best for me. One of the few things that I don’t pretend to be good at is SEO. Bottom line I am too lazy to work at it, it bores me, and I’m too cheap to pay people to rank for me. However somewhere along my travels I was grinding on too much soda and was up late at night and spotted a low competition niche and decided to crank out a site for it. So I made some lame long tail ‘.com’ ending blog, did like 3 pages of half ass content and wrote about 5 blog posts. I think I commented on like 5 other blogs to try and grab back links and that was that.

A few months later I was pretty excited to be ranking #2 for my main keyword that got approximately 5k search a month (according to Google).

I was originally running some weight loss ads on the page and eventually switched over to Google adsense ads being displayed on the page. In case you live under a rock, those are part of Google’s content network where other’s ads would then display on a CPC basis on my site. After running the adsense for a few months the cash really wasn’t piling in (not that I expected it) so I jumped at the opportunity to work with ‘Blam Ads!’ to try putting a content locker on my site.

A content locker basically is one of those annoying popups that appear internally on a page until you complete a required action. The actions are usually like filling out an email submit or filling out a survey. The payouts are usually a lot less than you would find at Blam’s sister company EWA (both are long time sponsors of the blog, thanks Ryan!) because the traffic is ‘incentivized’. Its pretty easy to guess that quality will suffer under those conditions.

I had a few issues with the content locker but since this site really wasn’t ‘BIG’ I figured it wouldn’t hurt. You can see them below.

The Myths About Blam Ads!

• Hinder User Experience - I really didn’t want my users to feel like I was trying to ‘use’ them. I then looked at my site and remembered that I hadn’t touched it in about 5 months and proceeded to lock away.
• Piss People Off – I was also worried that people in niche forums that previously would link to me occasionally might just start bashing me. I never saw any negative comments though to be realistic.
• Hurting My Rankings – I had heard that part of what effects your ranking in Google is how long the user is on the page/bounce rate, etc. I was really suspecting Google seeing this code on my page would hurt me. This really didn’t turn out to be any issue at all. The code goes at the bottom of the page in most cases anyway and is a .js insert that will load dynamically so search engine crawlers really don’t seem to care.

The Results

Ok so a few disclaimers here. 1.) I approached my Blam Ads! AM at the time and when I was going to content lock this page up he basically told me he didn’t think this niche would perform well. He suspected that people wouldn’t be willing to complete and offer for this specific content. 2.) When I started working with Blam my site was already being ignored by me and although traffic was starting to suffer its rankings went from a stable #2 to main keyword to bouncing between 3/4. It is currently ranked #6.

Full Stats

Here you can see the full comparison of the traffic as it came in during the dates for each experiment.

Although I really liked the idea of using the content locking gateway to help monetize the traffic to my site it definitely didn’t seem be a viable solution. Its a definite possibility that I could’ve split test some more offers or gateway designs to try and optimize. I’m confident that on my particular site, that a well placed AdSense theme could turn significantly more profit here than it did with its current setup. I do suspect that if you have the right content on your site Blam could definitely be the better choice. I suspect that content that revolves around downloads, tutorials, and media would work very well.

Not that I reached out for much help, but any help from Google would have been of course non-existent. Blam on the other hand always seems to be practically waiting for me to ask for help. I had the fortune of working with Dan Wolfe over at Blam who was always eager to get me to push more traffic any way I could. If you decide to work with Blam I definitely recommend requesting to work with him.

This particular experiment is very small of course. I wouldn’t pretend to know what the outcome would’ve been on a larger volume site. I do think though it gives you a good idea of the basic results you could experience yourself given similar conditions.

Is BLAM Ads! Just Not For Me?

After letting this experiment go on for a while it seemed that this definitely wasn’t going to work for me. I reached out to the Birdman Ryan Eagle himself and asked exactly what is the best use for the content locking gateways. Will they work on any site….should they replace Adsense?

“BLAM Ads monetizes sites that Google don’t monetize well, sites that get mass amounts of traffic from less-than desirable demographics. As you stated  above, sites based around downloads, video content, fan sites, movie related sites always work well. The larger websites use it as an appendage to traditional ad networks to supplement their income and protect more valuable areas of their site also very successfully. Long story short: if you have a micro-niche website that has advertising that can actually pay, I suggest using it as a supplement rather than a replacement.” -Ryan Eagle

An Email Server Admin’s Guide To Getting Your Mailing Lists Delivered

Although email marketing has never been my thing, I would like to some day really crank things up in that arena. I was reading a thread over on the IM Grind Forums about ‘Avoiding SPAM Filters’ with your email lists. It got me thinking that the majority of people probably don’t get to see some of the back end stuff that sets up rules for SPAM on large enterprise lists. So today is your lucky day as you are about to learn some lessons and pickup a few pointers on how to get past spam filters.

Typically when you have someone who manages a spam filter you are talking about a corporation or large company. Often times personal users with their cloud services like yahoo, gmail, msn, etc. already have built in spam filters that are largely way more complex and better than the corporate users. They can do this with Bayesian filtering which lets your filter ‘learn’ spam trends. So when gmail receives 10,000 bizopp emails a second, they can learn pretty quickly which emails to flag.

So why exactly do corporations have various different spam filters? Well the main reason is that its a growing problem, and no one has the end all solution. Some companies  might use a Lotus Domino mail server with Lotus Notes clients while others use Microsoft Exchange with Microsoft Outlook clients. There are literally dozens of email server configs and just as many spam solutions. Personally I’ve worked with about 5 different spam protection providers in my IT career. Everything from cloud based filters to old linux desktops doing the filtering. I’ve even relied strictly on the email server’s capabilities itself.

Why Doesn’t The Email Server Just Block Spam?

Depending on the amount of spam you receive in, it can literally cripple your email server. I’ve had mail server crash on me and be qued up for days at a time just trying to reject all of the spam. Although this can still happen to a spam filter itself under certain loads, at least the mail server could still deliver external mail and allow internal mail without delay if something like that happened.

The Barracuda Spam Filter

So the current packages I have been working with are products of Barracuda networks. I really like these now because they are pretty much completely hands off. I have it synced to my active directory accounts so I don’t need any manual updates, and it always downloads daily updated from Barracuda itself. Definitely a pricier option but so convenience to be this easy.

Here is the main control panel

As you can see since bringing this box online in January it has taken a beating. My server has received over 1.75 million emails, upon which only about 105k or so were authentic non spam based. Imagine sorting through that huh?

If you go into see the default Spam Checking area you can see the following setup. Please note 99% of the people configuring something like this would leave all the defaults here unless they experience a problem.

The default ‘BLOCK’ command for the Spam Filter is ’5′. So if your email rates over a ’5′ it automatically gets deleted…too bad for you. The ‘Quarantine’ is disabled here only because these are global settings and by default the quarantine is set to user settings. The ‘Tag’ feature would append a name onto the title of the email so the user knows it may have spam. IE: If the email title is “Check out these girls yo” it might change it to “[SPAM?] Check out these girls yo”.

Needless to say your goal is to have a smaller score for better chance of delivery. Most commercial mail service providers, like Aweber, provide a way for you to have a good idea of the score. Aweber utilizes Spam Assassin which is a really popular measurement on a lot of linux boxes and will definitely be pretty close scoring across the board, but DON’T RELY ON IT! If it says ’3.5 you are good to go’ that means redo your email because it will probably get picked up somewhere as spam.

Can We Sneak In Images?

I see this all the time where people will just embed an image with tons of text in it. A lot of time spammers on Craigslist do this. Unfortunately those days are gone in email as well. Barracuda and most other providers will actually scan your images for text and flag you on spam for it. I don’t think Aweber does this though, so just because it might say you are safe, doesn’t necessary mean you actually are! By default this is enabled on most filters.

Well I Can Still Have Good Text And Get My Affiliate Links In Right?!?

Yikes you really are a sucker aren’t you? Here are a couple things you need to understand. Not only can email domains get blacklisted but so can regular URL domains as well! For example in the last 2 days I received almost 6,000 emails that weren’t blocked as ‘spam content’ but were blocked because they contained a URL that was blacklisted. Let’s look at the example below. If interested you can download the full list here.

So if you send an incredibly designed email with an affiliate link or redirect from ‘zomgarticles.com’ you just completely blocked. An easy way to see if you are blocked would be to go lookup your domains in various blacklists. I prefer to use Barracuda’s BRBL service just because they typically aggregate from Spam Haus, Spam Cop, etc. You can check your own domains out at www.barracudacentral.org/lookups/domain-reputation. Below you can see what happens when we query for ZOMGarticles.com.

In the image below you can see a few of the emails that got blocked for having URL’s on the list. Its a shame because some of them are actually pretty well written.

Hmmm Maybe I Can Just Use URL Shorteners?!?

I don’t blame you crazy email marketers for thinking like this, but this is an even bigger risk. Aweber had an awesome article released the other day about how using shorteners are bad. I recommend reading the full article at www.aweber.com/blog/email-deliverability/link-shorteners.htm however I will copy and paste the real meaty chart they did up for us here.

I think the most itneresting things here are that Bit.ly is flagged on one blacklist and goo.gl and is.gd are actually whitelisted by some! BTW being on a national spam provider’s whitelist is basically the ultimate for email marketing delivery. Goodluck getting on there though!

Ok After 1.5 Million Spam Messages You Must Know Everything Right?

One of the benefits of running a spam filter and email server is that you can view everything. Not that I do too much email marketing but if I ever wanted to build a list about credit reports…well I just query my filter for ‘Credit Reports’ I can see what sort of emails are coming in. This gives me an EXTREME advantage to be able to see what sort of emails people are sending out. See below a quick query and the results.

Even better though. I can just query to see everything that got by, so I know what I could pretty much replicate!

Damn This Post Is Long…Is It Over Yet?

Ok ok. Lets wrap this post up already. Bottom line, we all know that we can’t be too spammy but most MSPs don’t actually show you half the crap that might block your mails from reaching the list. Hopefully you learned a few tips from seeing the sort of crap I have to deal with and seeing how you can avoid being caught by the filter.

As usual I received no compensation for this post or any products mentioned herein, however I am an active user of both Aweber and Barracuda products. Note that they each sent me t-shirts. Holla!

Who Else Is Signing Up For The Internet Marketing Grind?

Today the Internet Marketing Grind [aff link] opens up for users to sign up to their private forums. These private forums have kind of been a big thing the last 18 months or so as it seems a new one pops up each week. As someone who has a day job, I personally love forums because it is an area for me to lurk like crazy whenever I am bored. In addition though you get several benefits to joining a private forum.

 

• Exclusivity & Community – Often times a forum will limit its membership base so that if you don’t have some sort of referral or early entry…you just can’t get in. In addition the pricing weeds out 99% of the assholes you are going to have to deal with on public forums like WickedFire.
• Access to Experts – Almost always forum providers of any caliber will have some sort of expertise that they now grant to you as part of your membership. Nothing is better than now having some multi-millionaire who responds to my texts immediately to guide you in an unfamiliar area.
• Elite Content – If the forum you are going to pay for has no elite content that you can’t find elsewhere. Ditch it, you are not going to get your money’s worth.
• Sharing of Elite Content – On good forums, the community feeling is so tight, that others are willing to contribute their own niche expertise to offer everyone even more value for their money.

Back in May of 2010 I got a chance to join Ryan Gray’s Internet University program. As a fledgling of internet marketing at the time, I can honestly say that the program he ran with Richard and John was awesome. It definitely taught me everything I needed to know and then some. Ryan’s ongoing help afterwards was priceless as well.

I remember when I was doing my first direct site media buy the guy wanted a reference. No sooner did Ryan offer to vouch for me saying that I was an active advertiser on one of the largest wrestling entertainment sites in the world that he runs. Those kind of credential perks, you just can’t get anywhere else.

Not only have I experienced tremendous amounts of success but friends I made along the way have as well. I remember convincing one of my close Internet marketing buddies to join around the same time and how excited he was about 3 months later texting me, “I JUST HAD MY FIRST $1,000 DAY!” Those are the kinds of stories we all want to tell but most don’t get to achieve.

Looking at the overall content already in their community forums is crazy! They over all kinds of categories of affiliate marketing: Advertising, Pay Per Click Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Cost Per View Marketing, Lead Generation Arbitrage, Monetization Tactics & Strategies, Merchanting, Call Centers, CRM’s, Payment Gateways, etc.

You will probably literrally pick up years of knowledge in days of being a member.

Their cost is $77 a month which is very reasonable especially compared to some other popular forums out there. PPV Playbook (Which I HIGHLY recommend) is $67 a month and StackThatMoney forums are $99 a month. Unfortunately neither one of those forums have a huge network owner like Ruck specifically running it!

Bottom line, I’m signed up for the Internet Marketing Grind community. I didn’t even think twice about. I know from experience how awesome Ryan is at running a community and I think its obvious to everyone that Ruck can make you a millionaire. I encourage everyone to sign up, see you there.

*DISCLAIMER: I wasn’t asked or paid by anyone to write this post. I did however supply an affiliate link in the above (where noted) that I stand to gain a commission on if anyone signs up through. I was drafting this post before I saw an affiliate option anyways but threw it in there for an extra change. To be honest I don’t even think there is dollars related to it right now. If that’s not your thing feel free to sign up with a non affiliate link HERE.

Affiliate Summit East 2011 FREE Passes for Massachusetts Affiliates

Boy do I have an opportunity for all you Massachusetts affiliates. This TUESDAY, May 24th 2011 there is going to be an Affiliate Summit Meetup in my town of occupation, Fitchburg, MA. In fact the actual meetup will be taking place in a conference room that yours truly has taken many a beatings by management critics and the likes, at my day job.

So here is the deal, I have a few Affiliate Summit East 2011 Gold Passes that were gifted to me by the good folks over at Affiliate Summit. The Affiliate Summit is taking place August 21-23, 2011 in New York City. If you didn’t order your passes yet, well that sucks because the price just went up since you missed the deadline. However you are lucky that with my gifted passes I will raffling them off to affiliates who want to attend the Massachusetts Affiliate Summit Meetup on Tuesday. So if 2 people show up…well you both get a pass. If 10 people show up, you get to battle to the death for the golden tickets, or I suppose we could just draw names.

The retail on these things is like $549, so if you live in Massachusetts or New Hampshire area you should probably get off your ass and come hang out.

I Hate Boston, Do I Really Need To Drive Into Boston To Hang Out?

Nope. Fitchburg is like 40 minutes west of Boston. Considered to be North Central Massachusetts, parking is free, and traffic will be significantly less than Boston.

Do You Have A Guest Speaker?

Nope. No speaker for this meetup, just a casual event to come and talk shop. I’m more than willing to show some tips and tricks if the attendees want but I didn’t line up some guru to come pitch a product to you like at 90% of affiliate meetups.

Cost Any Money?

Nope. Free all the way around. Just show up and hang out. I’ll even grab some sodas or something.

Do I Have To Attend To Get A Pass?

Yes. I’m only going to give the pass to actual people that show up.

I Have To Work On Wednesday!! Will I Be Out Late?

Not necessarily. I scheduled the meetup until 8:30ish but if anyone wants to go grab a drink or something after that time I am down but feel free to ditch at any time.

OK I REALLY WANT TO GO! DO I NEED TO RSVP?

YES! I have limited seating and if I had to I have larger facilities we could go to but would need to know in advance. Right now the event should be PRETTY SMALL (like if you show up you have a 200% chance of winning a pass). So if you are interested just hit up this Facebook Event page and say you are attending. If you don’t have Facebook email me and let me know, mc [at] mikechiasson dot com.

CLICK HERE TO RSVP

On a side note. I already have my trip planned for ASE 2011. If you are going hit me up and we can meetup.