Ok now that we are done making fun of my wannabe Boston accent, how was the show? Well pretty much AWESOME!

This was my first time ever going to Las Vegas and I loved every bit of it. My friends and my wife will be the first to tell you I suffer from a moderate gambling problem. Not that I have ever bet more than I could afford to lose, I just am absolutely in love with everything about a Casino. I get such a rush being surrounded by the people all hoping to make their dreams come true and living dangerously with the thoughts that they might lose it all!

Travel

Hooters Hotel & Casino

I booked my flight almost the day after Affiliate Summit East 2011 in New York. I was traveling out of Manchester, NH to Las Vegas, NV on Saturday the 7th. I flew Continental airlines round trip here which was overall pretty shitty. I had actually ran into a family member who had two $200 certificates for Continental and gave them to me. This is the sole reason I picked them… Booked one way flights with each gift cert. Still got hit for some bullshit $25 bag fee each way, I knew in advance of this, just thought it was complete BS still.

As usual I waited until like 4 days before I left to book a hotel and all the good places were sold out for Sat/Sun decent rates. To make matters worse the Consumer Electronics Show was in Vegas starting the 10th so hotels got really expensive! I was contemplating staying at a nice 5 star and then changing my room starting Monday. In the end I just booked via Hotwire for the FABULOUS Hooters Hotel & Casino. It ended up costing $76 a night for a 3 Star hotel.

Now this place was exactly as expected. Cheesy as fuck. However it did have a small casino below my room and I was in my room for a solid 4 hours a night to sleep and thats about it.

When I got back to Vegas I think I will definitely try and book in advance to stay at the main conference hotel but overall I didn’t experience any problem at all with this location. Several times I opted to walk there to get some much needed exercise and it was directly across from the MGM. It was definitely more than acceptable for the price. I als0 ran into tons of other affiliates staying there (It is normally like $22 a night but was along the lines of $350 a night during CES).

On the way home on the 11th I ended up sitting next to an awesome guy from EWA Network who works out of London, so that was a really interesting flight. However on the connecting flight out of Newark we got delayed for 4 hours and then around 12:30AM in the morning were told the flight was cancelled. They put me in a hotel for the night. Overall it sucked, I was exhausted and just wanted to be home. To make matters worse at 6:40 AM I was back at the airport checking into security and realized I left my wedding ring on the sink at the hotel…now that really sucked!

Conference

The extent of my actual interaction with the conference consisted of this: Trade Show Floor walk through and closing Key Note. That was it. The tradeshow floor was great! It was much larger than in New York with more space to walk and nice tables all around to sit down if you had to chat with someone. I got a chance to stop by some of my favorite affiliate networks, see some new ones, and visit a bunch of my affiliate friends!

I had previously saw on Twitter that the Peerfly affiliate network was doing a little contest if you were wearing one of their shirts that they have been giving away for the last few Affiliate Summits. I rocked my ASE11 shirt they gave me in New York and stopped by to say hi to Luke my affiliate manager over there. They all loved that I was rocking a shirt and had me pull a card from a deck to try and win a $100 Caesar’s Palace chip. Unfortunately I pulled a ’7′ which one me a whole $1 chip! I swung down to the roulette table and tossed it on Lucky #7. It hit scoring me an additional $35 on top of the $70 I won with my money. Thanks Peerfly!

Mike Chiasson & Luke Kling from Peerfly at Affiliate Summit West 2012

Lucky #7 hits again!

The actual keynote from Shoemoney was pretty funny. One of the things I have always struggled in affiliate marketing with is the fact that I push some pretty messed up CPA offers sometimes. It really questions my morals in some niches. He had a few key points for us folks who “Exploit people’s passions for money”. This is only the 2nd keynote I have ever been able to attend and it was entertaining, not overdrawn out, and overall great.

The funny thing was I had went to the Consumer Electronics Show at the Las Vegas convention center earlier that day (courtesy of my friend Blake!!) and forgot my ASW pass at the hotel. They actually rejected me at the door for the keynote. I went downstairs and they wanted $50 for a new pass print out but after declining to pay and stating that I would rather just go downstairs and gamble more they decided to print me a freebie.

Parties and Meetups

The party situation in Vegas was CRAZY! Every night had multiple things to do! Sunday I hit up the AffPlaybook Mastermind session at the Palms Place penthouse. The event was great as always and more millionaires were probably groomed at that event than anything else during the show.

After the meetup David Ford from AffPlaybook picked up a limo for a bunch of us to swing up to the Adsimilis meetup at the hangover suite at Caesar’s Palace.

At the Adimilis meetup I got to briefly meet the whole crew, including my awesome AM Naomi, and reconnect with some friends I haven’t seen in a while! Please notice the classic Mike Chiasson maneuver of not planning for the night and walking around all night in a lame Red Sox t-shirt.

After the Adsimilis party a bunch of us grabbed some cabs and headed back to the Palms Place for the AffPlaybook meetup. A couple things to note, the AffPlaybook meetups have been GOLD for me. Its always been so relaxed that its nothing to jump into a conversion with new people. If you are a member of the forum its even more effective of a networking event because you can try and find who is who. If you are interested in signing up for the forum check out AffPlaybook.com!  Also as it turns out…I still suck at pool. Jeremiah Cooper from Wolf Storm Media kicked my ass with like 3 of my balls left on the table. That was kind of rough. Fortunately for me he declined my original offer of playing for $100 a ball.

LonelyPlanet and Me (aka the guys from Superbad)

The infinity style hot tub was so awesome I had to jump in!

The next night I was invited out to dinner by Vito and Flo from CPA Tank at the Old Homestead Steakhouse in Caesar’s Palace. Vito had a great crew of people going out to dinner. I got to meet a bunch of new faces and see some familiar ones! I even got to catch up with my account manager over at Traffic Vance, Jonathan Vogel, who convinced me to reinstall Starcraft II so that we can go dominate the gaming niche haha. Big thanks to Vito and CPA Tank for the good times and good eats!

Petite Filet, Aged...Yum

Dinner with CPA Tank

After the amazing dinner was finished up I met up with my friends Brian Evans and Sam Rusani to hit up the Affiliate Fight Night at Xtreme Couture MMA Gym by Clickbooth! We were all PUMPED for it!

Extreme Couture MMA

Extreme Couture MMA

Extreme Couture MMA

Extreme Couture MMA

Extreme Couture MMA

Although the venue was awesome the ultimate lure of this party was the fighting, and that fell short. I was expecting an amateur fight for sure, but this was not only amateur, but unsanctioned gym friends sparring was a more accurate statement. We stayed for the firs fight where the guys were wearing the heavier padding gloves and not doing any grappling. It was a one sided fight and although having exciting moments it was lackluster at best.

Props to Clickbooth for picking such a unique venue, but we left after the first fight and some of us headed over to the Ads4Dough, Dough4Hoes party.

This party was out of control. Unfortunately for us we got there so late there were no tables left and we had to settle for the typical white guy standing against the wall maneuver. Plenty of eye candy there and I even caught up with a few friends I hadn’t seen in a while. There were so many people at this meetup I could only imagine the bill. Big thanks to Jason and the A4D team for the drinks!

What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas!

There were countless things that happened that really don’t need to be repeated on the blog. Those of you involved, know what I mean!!

Unfortunately I feel like some of my connections might stay in Vegas as well. A lot of the coolest guys I met didn’t have cards on them so I picked up their first name as we chilled at an event but no idea how to reconnect. If I met you in Vegas feel free to friend me on Facebook or hit me up via email or twitter!

Special thanks to all my friends who I met up with that shared their industry news and tips with me through out the show! See everyone in New York?!?

Testing Time!

I used the same platform and same landing page as before to perform the tests. All prosper tests were performed on a low duty dedicated server. I was really only interested in viewing the Prosper202 stats but I figured it would be nice to compare to another platform’s speed as well. Even though the results show one way, I still opt to continue to use Prosper as my primary tracking platform.

Prosper 1.6 vs. Bevo Media

Prosper 1.7 (No Click Data Removed) vs. Bevo Media

Prosper 1.7 (ALL Click Data Removed) vs. Bevo Media

All in all you can see the Prosper 1.7 with click data removed is significantly faster. It topped my original benchmark by just under 7%. If you are focusing on redirect speeds I would recommend an immediate upgrade as the standard upgrade alone also showed a 6% increase in speed.

I’ve never cleared my Prosper202 click data before, some currently do it manually. It reported about 250MB of click data on this install. I was really thinking that it was time for me to wipe the SQL database and just refresh to really get my snappy redirects back, however in the end it seems they were just as snappy as ever and the click data deletion might not be as big of a deal as we all suspected. I still appreciate them adding it in though!

Anyone else get a chance to try it out yet?

Now I HATE spending money on a costume. I would much rather build my own, it shows creativity and usually some uniqueness as compared to having the same exact costume everyone else has. Unfortunately, being so trendy, I typically end up having the same diggs as someone else at a party who bought a mainstream costume.

Let’s Recap Past Years

Halloween 2010: Mike The Situation from Jersey Shore (w/ Snooki)

Halloween 2009: Mike The 70's Detective

Halloween 2008: Mike a.k.a. McLovin (People still mistake me for him on a daily basis)

Halloween 2007: Harry Potter! (Last minute costume...so ghetto.)

Halloween 2006: Bagman....after my other costume was too gross to wear again. (No idea why my friend has his pants down...)

Halloween 2006: Market Basket Zombie! Basically threw paint over my sweet Meat Dept. uniform.

Halloween 2005: Vampire Mike...lipstick...naw, cherry chapstick!

This Year

Alright so you can see the assortment of finely crafted antics of years’ past. So far this year I am torn between several but am completely open for suggestions.

The top contenders are:

Tron Costume!

Or…

Green Power Ranger!

So what does everyone think? I am open for anything!!

I’ve never worked with RON before but really heard nothing but bad news about it. Its essentially untargetted traffic that is ‘left over’ because no one else wants it. Since its so random you really can’t get too complex with what offers to pitch. I decided I would do the most logical thing and completely throw shit at the wall and see what stuck. I was going to write a fancy script to rotate in all kinds of banners and links but then saw a link on Luke Kling’s blog about Peerfly Banners.

Peerfly is an affiliate network that has a pretty HUGE inventory of various email submits. If you are interested in seeing what they got Click Here To Check Out Peerfly! What I really liked is that they have a few tools to help you out with campaigns. One of which was the Peerfly Banners program.

The Peerfly Banners program is basically a small portal that lets you select which offers you want to promote by selecting categories and then choosing what size banners you want. It then generates a javascript code that you can place on your page that will automatically rotate in all the selected category banners. This is AWESOME for placing on sites you aren’t sure how to monetize. You can easily let it run for a week and then see what people were clicking on and what was converting…INSTANT DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH!

I had the idea though to buy some cheap traffic and arbitrage it through this program. Now let me state that I have the nasty habbit of sharing ideas I get at like 3 AM after drinking excess amounts of soda at night on this blog. So sometimes things aren’t always pretty and clean, but the theory is there. I also have the problem that when things are small I typically don’t pay much attention to them. This campaign could’ve been optimized a bit more by adding some lander audio, some more PHP inserts, etc. Anyways, lets look at the landers I used!

Peerfly Lander 1 - Two Offers on the page with an exit option.

Peerfly Lander 2 - One Offer on the page with an exit option.

Peerfly Lander 3 - One 425x600 Offer, No Exit Option

What I basically did was offer 3 landers up. Each was pretty basic. The first one I wanted to play the numbers game, give the user a couple of choices. They basically got to pick one of the two banners and they also had an option to exit the page (Pssst. this was really another affiliate link trying to scavenge traffic). With the DirectCPV adware technology users can’t really ‘exit’ out of the page as easily as normal pop ups so I’ve had some REALLY good luck with ‘click here to exit’ options before. I am well aware that offering a user another option is typically not the best idea.

The second lander only had one 350×250 banner on it. I just wanted to try limiting the user’s options and see how that went.

The third lander had a single 425×600 banner on it and no Exit option at the bottom.

The Results

Well, after $52.43 in spend I should’ve received about 13,107 impressions. DirectCPV reported the full 13,107 where my tracking system picked up just over 8,000. So right off the bat I lost about 40% of my RON traffic. This could be due to multiple things but bottom line it was all wasted cash if I didn’t see any page loads from it. (*Note I was using Maxmind Geo Script and external Peerfly banners which may have slowed the page load down.)

The ‘Exit Option’ at the bottom of landers 1 & 2 had a 10% CTR on Lander 1, and a 7% CTR on Lander 2.

As far as click throughs on the actual offers go, I had 730 clicks (about 9% CTR!) spread over 180 different offers! I would say about 80% of those offers were email submits. Of those 730 clicks… ZERO Conversions!

I don’t attribute the 0 conversions to the network or the banner program, more simply the fact that most of the users were probably just trying to close the inner window popup and thought by clicking through it would. It was pretty common to see the same user clicking through on both offers when looking in my tracking logs.

What Sort of Traffic Was It?

When I was trying to do a bit of research I really couldn’t find too many people sharing details about RON traffic so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I ended up getting a ton of traffic from absolute shit sites that literally looked like they were bots just scraping keywords in different search engines. There was also a fair amount of porn in there lol. I extracted the full list of keywords and uploaded it in an excel list if you are interested in seeing them.

CLICK HERE To Download Direct CPV RON Traffic Keywords/URLs

Learn Anything?

Yeah, RON sucks. Seriously, 730 clicks over 150+ fucking email submits and not even one asshole entered an email address?!?

Let’s take a look at the local train station, Alewife Station in Cambridge, MA. I usually hate driving into Boston so I will drive to this station, pay the $7 to park my car and then the $1.60 to take the train to where I need to go (Usually Red Sox Games!). I’ve noticed for a long time how they allow multiple forms of advertising in the train station. These vary from standup posters, cool complex ones that form a flipbook style animation on the walls as the train drives by them, and standard posters within the trains themselves.

The problem with offline ads is that they are NOT cheap! They are often times significantly more expensive than online methods, you can’t target demographics as well, and no guarantee people will see or react to your ads.

Prices to Advertise on the Train

The MBTA uses Titan advertising to manage their rail advertising. Titan shot me over some rough specs upon request and the prices were pretty crazy.

“Rates can range from $2,750 for an 11×28 orange line program to $11,200 for a market-wide 22×21 program [all 4-week net].”

According to their flyers the Orange Line of trains has a daily ridership of about 154,400. I’m sure that is an accurate statistic since there are turn style counters at every entrance/exit. Now they didn’t really clarify exactly how many 11×28 signs you got to put on the Orange Line (1 of 4 Major Subway Routes in Boston) but a little more investigating shows that there are about 436 total inventory advertising spots in the train station. Roughly looking through the areas it looks like only in the larger locations will you see the same ad in multiple areas. Probably an upsell to that particular client to fill the space.

I will assume that the 11×28 poster will have a total placement of ’1′ unit at each of these areas. In the lowest placement area you will be competing with at least 11 other advertisers for subway rider’s attention. Not to mention often times different entrances/exits may make your ad impossible to be seen anyways.

Taking that out of the calculation they claim that 154k riders each week. Now the frequency cap for your offline ad in an ideal situation here would be a maximum of about 2 (departure and re-arrival at the station). Unfortunately what is actually happening is the subway is home to MANY commuters so I would average their actual exposure for about 70% of the riders to be about 10 views per week. This obviously can hurt us advertisers. We can’t have our same ad being displayed to the same user 10 times  can we? Well of course those ever popular ‘brand advertisers’ think this is a bargain, but direct response, this sucks for us.

Anyways, let’s take that out of the equation. Let’s focus on just the standard 2 views per person in an ideal world. Here is the actual math of an ideal situation.

Well damn. $0.31 CPM actually isn’t too bad now is it? The problem being that this is an ideal case and in NO way is it real! I would be willing to bet that the actual people who view your advertisement is WAY less than 154k a day and to be realistic I would wager that approximately 15-20% of the viewers are all under the age of 18. Which is in many ways out of our target demographics. Realistically I would guesstimate that if we were looking to get unique viewers and over 18 demo that the actual CPM would be around $0.91.

Wow, now $0.91 that isn’t too different than the recommended CPM of Facebook for the 18+ Bostonian crowd as seen below:

Facebook Boston CPM Bid

Obviously the suggested $1.00-$1.76 is a little pricey. FB will still deliver CPM traffic well under those prices.

Well Maybe the Quality Is Better?!?

I asked myself the same question but lets be honest. The reason why online ads work so well is our Call To Action is so easily available. With offline ads your Call To Action is no longer a click away, but instead a ‘phone call’ a ‘request for more info’ a ‘scan this QR code’ or ‘Find us on Facebook’. Lets see what everyone else is doing for CTAs on the train.

The checking account one has a pretty good bribe on it. Some of them have ‘Pull Away’ information which is pretty cool (except that a few are excessively high in the air for most people). The gin ad is just brand advertising so whatever. However most of them had their call to action being a QR code. This was the advent of helping offline ads bridge the gap of mobile and online however on the trains and in the train station…market research SHOULD be your best friend.

I commend all these advertisers and their hard spent dollars but have one Crucial piece of information to share.

Orange Line No Service

Conclusion

The advertising isn’t really as costly as the initial insertion orders would lead you to believe. Offline ads aren’t leveraged by many direct response marketers and there is huge room to grow this field. Most of the advertisers were either big brands looking for exposure or government funded groups (who clearly have money to burn) who must be looking to get their name out.

I think there is potential on railway advertising but definitely not using QR codes as your way to bring people online!

However lets do a little recap on how Affiliate Summit East was. I had mentioned in a post the other day that I went to ASE10 last year for like $75 (TOTAL!). This year was significantly different cash wise .

Months ago I had jumped onto an ASE11 group buy on PPV Playbook (Thanks again Lee!). I picked up a Platinum pass and a Silver pass. With the early discount/group rates the prices were like $679 and $79. I had planned on bringing my wife with the silver pass or maybe a friend. In the end I couldn’t find a single local person to go with me. I even invited some local internet marketers but no takers. As it got closer to ASE I had a few family birthday parties to go to and as much as I love hearing some good speakers I wasn’t about to pass up my nephew’s 4th birthday on Saturday. This meant that I wouldn’t be arriving into NYC until Sunday afternoon at latest. I had opted to take a bus in from Boston since my license is still revoked in NYC from ASE 2010!

Knowing that I had a few meetings schedule, a PPV Playbook event, and some other plans I really thought I wouldn’t make the most of my Platinum Pass. I threw that up on eBay for $999 buy it now and ended up brokering it to someone via PayPal for $800. So with just my silver pass in hand I didn’t attend a single session at the actual conference.

The Hotel

Booking everything last minute I went onto Expedia and booked a hotel at Algonquin Hotel Times Square, Autograph Collection. This was a 4 star hotel that was about 10-15 minute walk away from the Hilton where the conference was at. The average book value of the hotel was like $524 per night. I did one of those Expedia unpublished rate deals and got it for $134 a night with like $20 taxes. So although I had a slight walk to everything I ended up saving some green on the hotel room.

The hotel itself was pretty nice. They had some upscale piano bar style stuff going on downstairs and all the rooms were fashioned kind of like old school mobster style looking stuff from the FDR era. I would definitely stay there again for that rate!

A Different Sign on Each Door

The Hotel Room

The Meet Market

I despise the meet market. I really am not a fan of it but hit it up for just two things:

• Share A Sale party passes (they give these out at their table).
• All About the Cookies book. They had a promo running that you get a free ASW11 gold pass if you buy the book and all proceeds go to breast cancer! Double Win!

The meet market is always just too packed for my liking but it definitely seems like a cost effective way to have a presence without having to compete with the $50,000 booths during the exhibit hall.

The Exhibit Hall

The exhibit hall was top notch as always. I saw plenty of great companies there and got a chance to meet a few that I haven’t met in person yet. They had some really innovative things going on. One group actually had a Delorean car there. Actually it was (probably a replica) the back to the future car…Flux Capacitor and all!

Best Prop at ASE11!

Got a chance to see the #1 industry mascot!

The C2M guys had their usual keg. Some other companies had excessively large presences there. Like they literally had 10+ employees grabbing everyone. Others were very laid back and seemed not interested to talk to anyone, they were just kind of stuck there.

I really HATE talking business at the exhibit hall. If I approach you and I want to talk actual work, campaigns, working with you guys, I will, plain and simple. Often I am more interested in meeting AMs, owners, and staff and getting to know them. We can talk business after, this is my one chance in the next 6 months to build a face to face with some people. Some networks CLEARLY got this, others…nope. If you are badgering me for traffic, it probably won’t happen. If you are talking sports, telling me how your life is going, casually talking about your business, then I am probably going to remember you very good and recommend you to people when they ask if I know any good AMs to reach out to, or networks that might be able to help them, etc.

It really frustrates me when I approach a place to learn more about their actual business and they sit there like its the first time they’ve ever talked to a human. So many people had this look “oh god…a booth visitor…where are our promo gifts!?!” Damn at least have a smile and introduce yourself.

Parties

I gotta say this year was even better than last year for parties.

Sunday night I never made it to the Share A Sale barn dance like I had hoped. I was lingering around the PPV Playbook meetup til around 10 PM then Drew Goodman and I met up with the Daily Conversions crew at the Empyre Media Neon NYC party. We stayed there for a while before eventually ending up at some ‘classy’ club…

The PPV Meetup was awesome! I’m pretty active on that forum and it was great to put some faces to names. In addition I got to meet a few networks that were there. The Ads 4 Dough guys were really cool and everyone just kept telling me how much they love Chase. CPA Tank was representing there with Adam and the general Vito Glazers, two of the coolest guys I met the whole time I was in NYC. If you’ve never got a chance to meet with them I recommend it. They were dropping knowledge bombs like there were terrorists around.

The General Vito Glazers and Mike Chiasson at PPV Playbook meetup.

The Empyre party was packed but we were able to score an outdoor couch. The thing I heard everyone complaining about was the prices there. Not that I expect open bar at a lot of parties, but this one was just pricey even for NYC. When buying a round, the drinks were averaging about $20 each. Someone went to go pickup a bottle for our table and came back with a funny “Nevermind!” People were joking that the Empyre group must’ve struck a deal to get commission on the drinks and that was going to be their big night for the year. All the same it was a good time!

Monday was absolutely crazy. Brian Evans was hosting a dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse in NYC that was sponsored by Lead Cola. Last year Brian and I got the chance to go to this steakhouse and I was looking forward to having the food again for weeks. I’m a pretty plain eater myself, so if someone can do me a few sides and a steak perfectly, I’m in heaven! I have to say hands down, Lead Cola treated us EXTREMELY well that night. I got a chance to meet with Jared, Suha, and Amar from lead Cola. Amar started the night off by asking the waiter to bring 18 shots of Patron Silver to our private room.

Lead Cola Patron Party! Photo courtesy of Ian Fernando.

In addition to being taken care of by the fine folks over at Lead Cola I got a chance to meet up with some awesome affiliates! Big thanks to Brian Evans and Lead Cola for the great time!

After the dinner most of us grabbed cabs over to the Affiliate Ball. I had heard some really negative things about the Affiliate Ball and I was actually planning on attending the Clickbooth party instead. Before I knew it though Doug E Fresh was coming on stage. The venue was actually pretty sweet and we had a table right on the floor. Fresh was actually very entertaining getting the 95% male crowd to start popping. Pretty quickly Morgan Thomas arranged for some bottles at our table. With no lines back to the bar I really got a chance to do the white guy pretending like he can bob around in a crowd technique.

Afterwards we swung up to the A4D party but there was a wait outside the door. We ended up heading to another club that was like 2 blocks away from my hotel and so I decided it would be a good idea to call it a night and head home.

Unfortunately my phone had died at this point and after several drinks I was really struggling to remember exactly what street my hotel was on. Needless to say I walked down the wrong way and had to backtrack and went down the incorrect street and found myself surrounded by a bunch of rough looking guys. I casually tried to continue walking through as 4 fellows surrounded me and pulled the old arm stop to me. After some brief exchange of some not so nice words I ended up hearing a phrase that I had in the deep edges of my mind categorized as ‘Hopefully no one ever says this shit to you’. One of the guys put two hands on me and said

“Alright Nigga, let’s see what you go in those pockets!”

…was this really happening? Was I getting mugged? Now a sober Mike Chiasson probably would have used some intelligence and handed over the short change I had left in my wallet. However barely able to walk Mike had a different idea in mind. I was fortunate enough that as I rolled my sleeves up and got in this guys face and answered his threat with a challenge to throw down right there, that one of his buddies broke the situation up and proceeded to pull the “c’mon guys this nigga aint worth our time!” card. At the time all I could think of was ‘alright this guy is next’. Looking back on the situation I should’ve probably thanked the guy for saving my ass.

After they allowed me to walk past peacefully I walked right into my hotel that was like 50 feet away and proceeded to drunk tweet. End of night. I survived. Yes!

Overall

My Affiliate Summit experiences proceed to get better each year. It was great seeing everyone and I definitely look forward to ASW in January. Already booked my flights and got my pass.

Now I don’t know all of the reasons they are fighting for or what the exact outcome will be but I do have a few personal opinions to share before I get to the nitty gritty of this post.

1. I think unions are worthless. They are a remnant from the days or horrid working condition in the US and now only serve the purpose of protecting the weak. Someone who is good at their job doesn’t have to fight for it, plain and simple.
2. This isn’t to say that the people in the unions are worthless. Often times to work at an organization you might have to join the collective bargaining group and follow their rules whether you agree or not.
3. I DO acknowledge the fact that the reason why we have the benefits today is because of the hard work of unions in earlier years. I just believe things have gotten out of control now.
4. I really can’t grasp how the country could let unions tell a business owner (large or small) how they have to run their business with the threat of a strike.
5. I for the life of me can’t get WHY anyone would want to strike (ie: hates their company) instead of just leaving and finding another job. Obviously it can’t be that bad if you still want to work there right?

The Sides

You basically have 3 definitive sides here. You have the Verizon Union employees who according to my brief interaction are fighting to stop their jobs from going oversees. Verizon Corporate, this involves executive management and non-union staff who are still handling the current massive VZ networks. Independent contractors, these are many of the employees you see at the Verizon corporate stores, kiosks, installation providers, wireless stores, etc.

Although the only people really battling here are Corporate vs. Union, its important to see that the current struggle surely effects the livelihood of the independent groups as well.

Corporate

Corporate Verizon just recently began regional radio campaigns that feature question and answer style interviews. The one I heard on the ride home today featured two people discussing the current situation and these are some of the highlights (paraphrased).

• “Verizon is currently working with its talented union employees to negotiate a prosperous resolution to the current debates.”
• “Verizon technicians receive on average over $50,000 in annual benefits with an average salary upwards of $80,000.”

Obviously VZ is trying to plant the image that all of the people on strike are doing far better than most in these rough economic times. They are also trying to beat around the bush that they have thousands of employees who had walked out of the offices. They position the strikes and a ‘debate’ of some sort.

Corporate is doing a really bad job handling this PR nightmare but in reality…I don’t think they have to. I’ve spoken to numerous people who have Verizon services who had to place support calls in the last few days. Each person told me they were immediately warned it may take a few days (!!!) to solve their issue because of the current labor negotiations. However each person told me their issues were solved in a matter of minutes just like prior VZ problems.

At the same time Corporate is under a huge attack by people like Warren Buffet and others who are absolutely bullshit that the corporation hasn’t paid taxes on their billions of revenue.

The Union

A Verizon Store Employees Were Picketing Outside of. As you can see they were 30+ feet away as you can't even see them in this photo.

My interaction with the union was brief. I really wasn’t familiar with their purpose for striking but when I saw them outside a local Verizon wireless store picketing I HAD to stop and talk to them. All of the Union workers were EXTREMELY nice. They were a bit concerned when I asked to interview them. Mostly over the idea that I might write some slanderous comments about them it seemed. The local store had a police officer guarding the entry way while the protestors were about 35 feet or so from the entrance.

They where wielding signs and banners and were trying to gather support from the passing cars. I didn’t see a single person say anything to anyone walking into the Verizon store. To be honest I don’t even think they were facing that way while I was observing.

They informed me of some of the following (paraphrased once again all from different union members):

• We are fighting to keep over 20,000 jobs from being outsourced oversees.
• I need this job for me and my family.
• “We are sacrificing our pay right now to try and ensure our livelihood for years to come.”

Then there were some of the members who had more disgruntled views:

• “Verizon is evil, the executives don’t care about anyone but themselves.”
• “Verizon sucks!”
• “They don’t even pay taxes, and they want to get rid of all American jobs!”

Clearly the union doesn’t have quite a defined message. The only real thing that they all agreed about was that they don’t want their jobs to go overseas. I can respect fighting for that for sure! What I don’t get is the people who were so disgruntled who ‘hate’ Verizon. Why they would actually want to go back to work for someone who “doesn’t care for them”. To break it down a little further of everyone I talked to the females were much more clear with their issues while the men seemed divided and angry. Gender communication studies would be sure to recognize this as standard masculine traits. I’m sure if a woman was asking the questions rather than a male the results may have been completely reversed as far as genders go!

All the same I have to commend these union workers. Their flash mob like picketing at various Verizon locations is definitely letting the public know “Hey we are out here…and we need your support!” Typically you only see things like this on TV not at your local stores and kiosks! Their simple gathering and peaceful participation marketing is truely awesome way to spend their *off* days.

Will The Union Win?

Of course. Unions have won wars like this since the early 1900′s. Bottom line is the only thing worse than having 20,000 jobs go over seas, is having 20,000 angry people constantly telling everyone how much you suck for the next 20 years. As far as getting their message out, I think Verizon is clearly winning with their message dissemination but as far as picking sides its hard to turn your back on your neighbors and friends when you see them protesting together.

What do you think about the Verizon strike?

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

View from the Hilton New York's 44th Floor

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.

Carnegie's Deli Reuben

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.

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

With the grant my wife hopes to let 25 lower income families dance for free at her studio. This includes taking classes, paying for their dance wear, recital tickets for their families, etc. You can also also vote using your computer/facebook account. For full details goto:

http://www.refresheverything.com/spotlightdance

ALSO!

I am collecting power votes which are yellow caps on Pepsi 20oz, 2 Liters, and inside 12 pack cardboard boxes. If you have any feel free to comment the code of email them over to me. Those votes can help even more.