Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

I have been spending a lot of time lately learning the affiliate marketing industry. It all started with my famous selling of a Slap Chop. In my talks with big wigs in the affiliate industry both affiliates, and companies, it has been presented as a challenge the fact that when you crack the code on an affiliate offer and get it to back out (be profitable), the affiliate company can get all the info. The problem with this can be that if the affiliate company can see exactly what you are doing, then they have the ability to compete with you on what you found to be successful.

Eric Itzkowitz the famous San Diego Internet Marketer, has been working on a solution for this, if you are sending the user to an intermediary word press landing page, before hitting the final merchants offer page. It Cloaks the Affiliate ID, so you don’t get ripped off.

Eric made a wordpress plugin, easy to install, easy to use, and easy to learn, and free so that you can gather all of the info yourself of what is working, but not let the affiliate company or the merchant get any tracking data.

Here is how it works.

When you are using Google Adwords, you append the destination URL with a ?kw=

This tells google to automatically append the url with the keywords the person was searching for when they hit your ad.

When the customer hits the wordpress landing page, Eric’s plugin, PPC Keyword Tracker, captures the keywords that google passed on to it.

Eric’s plugin randomly assigns a number to that keyword, that is passed on to the affiliate company instead of your real keywords. Eric’s plugin then becomes the decoder to let you take the tracking numbers that converted, and see which keywords they came from.

It looks easy if you are doing testing, and then if you are doing some volume, you can export it in excel to do more complex analysis.

I have been so busy living, that I have barely had a chance to write.

Vegas was 4 hours of sleep a night, playing poker with Andy Liu till 5 a.m. at the Wynn, interview by Shoemoney, catching up with Carrot Top in the restroom, making a girl disappear on stage, Randy Couture finally winning again!, fighting Robert Drysdale on stage at Pubcon, my staff just killing it again (GO JENNY! GO FAJAR! GO ROSEANNA (EVEN THOUGH YOU STAYED HOME)), GO SEASIDE CHIROPRACTIC, GO PURPOSEINC!, going up on stage to speak on internal linking with Todd Mailicoat, Aaron Wahl, and Dixon Jones, and having Aaron Wahl not show up! (Actually worked out cool, because I had to step up with Aaron gone and Aaron is still my SEO hero!), watching the drama unfold on Shoe’s blog, my server getting full just as I was about to publish like 100 photos, hanging at X/S with Seattle’s tech entrepreneur’s, and Andy Liu’s way cool friends, with their posse of super hot friends, playing poker with my wife in the poker room while Will Farrell was playing a few tables over, a girl storming out of the poker room yelling at Neil about showing them $200, and of course Neil showing how to give a lap dance! and it went on, and on, and on…

Felt like one of those Vegas movies, except this time it was for real.

More posts and pics to follow.

Each and every one of you who talked to me, or came to one of the events, or watched me speak,

I LOVE YOU!

I just had so much fun, and can not thank each and every one of you for the massive support and fun.

Linkworth just pulled out the stops, and in the last second chipped in a big roll of bills for the poker room party.

I ran into Matt and Ron from the Linkworth crew in the exhibition hall, and after 4 minutes of catching up, they asked how they could help.

Linkworth sells links.

I asked them if they wanted to chip in X number of G’s and just a casual, sure, no problem, they were in.

There was no contract, no negotiation, just some great guys wanting to help us all have a better poker tournament, and supporting Purpose Inc. with our activities. Love you guys and thank you!

In a week online where a lot is being said about trustworthiness and honesty, Ron at LinkWorth told me that he would kick in a big contribution to make our Poker Tournament better, and sure enough by the time I got home a check was waiting for the sponsorship. It was once told to me that if you want to gain someones trust it is as simple as saying you are going to do something, and then doing it. Well Ron did that 🙂

Thanks again to all the sponsors, guests, fighters, celebrities, hot chicks, smart chicks, staff, dealers, managers, Brett Tabke, magicians, and my wife! who made all of this possible.

P.S. Latoya Jackson if you see this, I am so sorry I did not offer you my condolences about Michael when I saw you, I was just being too star struck at the moment. 🙂 I loved Michael and I grew up with Tito living just up the street from me. So love and kisses to Michael, and I am so sorry about what happened. 🙂

Everyone is now welcome to sign up for the poker tournament if you can get a seat.

The blog requirement is now removed for new sign ups.

Go here to sign up! Sign up for Poker Tourney – Guest – or Fight Club
Now room open for players, guests at poker tourney – free drinks from 8:00 pm to 2:00 am

fight club with Robert Drysdale 6X world champ in Brazillian Jiu Jitsu also open for more registration.

Full information here, but no longer need to blog to get in.

Follow these steps to get in before it sells out as a player or guest. Both get free drinks on Nov. 12th  from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. Mirage hotel.

Here is sign up but read blog first! or you may lose your seat. 🙂

1. BE INVOLVED IN THE INTERNET BUSINESS INDUSTRY, OR A PUBCON ATTENDEE.

Requirements, 21 or older, either a Pubcon attendee or involved with Internet business stuff. If you are a total NOBODY, don’t know anyone, junior webmaster, coming to your first Pubcon, this tourney is especially for you!! (All Mirage rules and laws apply and supersede my rules :)).

2. PICK A CHARITY YOU LIKE

It can be totally your own pick, any charity at all.

Here are some recommended ones if you can’t think of one.

Missy Ward (boob master) and I will be raising money for the National Breast Cancer Foundation. Breast cancer sucks. My friend Chris Parham, doctorate in engineering, M.D., and getting his radiology degree and some of his buds invented a way to take mamograms (boob x-ray) with something like one onethousandth of the radiation. This new method of doing mammograms is way safer than the old way, (even though the old way is still a good idea), gets better pictures of cancer when it is smaller and starting, and will save probably thousands of lives per year. With early detection, and proper surgical techniques, breast cancer can be caught and cut off at the pass before it kills. Study up here how to do a self breast cancer exam, and hey! Guys can learn too! ?????

Two of my favorite charities are:

Criminon that gets into the worst prisons in the world, and works to help prisoners get off drugs, change their viewpoint on crime, be productive, and help others. The success stories speak for themselves.

Here is another one that really hits home with me. With the white man’s exploitation of africa, (I’m kinda white and brown at the same time 😉 and the fact that man is originally is probably from Africa anyways, I think we still should help out there till they are up to speed with the rest of the world.  Samburuland is an area with gentle, lovely people, who get hit pretty hard by droughts. Also the elephants walking the same migratory trails as the people could use a drink now and then as well. Wherever The Need, who I have checked out pretty well, are raising money for this way bitchen project. Dig some big fricken holes along the path of the river, that fill up when it rains, and provide water during the dry season. This happens naturally already, but they are just kicking it up a notch. This will help the nomadic people and large game at the same time.

Or use any charity you like for this!!!

My note on charity. I am all about the teach the guy to fish thing. My goal in any charity is to help others to help themselves. That is why when there is a company like Azoogle, We Build Pages, Train Signal, or even Shoemoney himself, I will do a ton to help them because they help so many other people. Helping the strong who give to others is a very high leverage opportunity with high ROI 😉

3. WRITE A BLOG ABOUT THE CHARITY

Write about the charity. If you don’t have one, go set one up at wordpress or blogspot. Write whatever you like. Draw a little attention to something, that someone is doing in the world that you dig and makes the world better! John Chow has drawn attention to Africa. Jim Boykin, who sponsors the crap out of the Purpose Inc pubcon events, poker and otherwise, EVERY SINGLE YEAR! also supports lots of other charity events, here is one of his blogs on one of the charity fundraisers for Ronald Mac Donald house. Some of the heavy hitters have even gone so hard as to create their own bad ass organization to raise money for good causes on an ongoing basis, including Graywolf who consistently promotes other good charities like this fundraising party sponsored by Best of the Web. If you check Sugar Rae’s site,  you will find she promotes her charities at the bottom right of every page! Lauren Vaccarello is always involved in some way in virtually every internet marketing charity event you will come across.  In fact it was her who carried the money bag while me and Dave Snyder acted as the muscle. And then there is Marcus, who has taken helping through charity to a whole nother level, not just donating money, but rolling up  his sleeves, and his machete 🙂 when needed!

4. PUT ONE OF THE POKER TOURNAMENT GRAPHICS IN THE POST

Pick any one of these, any size. If you understand capitalism, then put one with the sponsors on it. If you are a total socialist, or just like the look better, then use one without sponsors on it. Here are a whole bunch of sizes available for you!

5. EITHER PING BACK TO THE COMMENTS SECTION BELOW (NOT REQUIRED) OR LEAVE A COMMENT BELOW LINKING TO YOUR POST.

Obviously I looooove links! On the other hand, links are not required. Just leave a comment below so I know that you wrote your post on a charity. If you link to this page I will allow the ping back to show up and that counts. If you register, and you are not listed below, your registration may be reversed. Once all spots are taken, there are no more. 🙂 Unless you’re name is Alex and you founded one of the largest Affiliate companies that rhymes with Google and I will allow you in.

6. GO REGISTER EITHER AS A PLAYER OR A POKER PARTY GUEST AT THE TOURNAMENT

Click here to register as either a player or a guest. Players need to pay the buy in fee to get in. Guests are just that, guests. You can also pay and register for the fight club training with the 6X world champ in Brazillian Jiu Jitsu if there is space.  All the other events are open to everyone with no sign up. Once the tournament fills up, you can register for free as an alternate. We will go by the alternate list, quickly reading it off that night to fill the seats. If you are not there and waiting when your name is called, you will not be playing. If you pay and don’t show, no refunds.

7. Show up at the Mirage Poker room at 7:30 November 12th

the night of the tournament to check in. Those not checked in by 7:45 will lose their seat to an alternate on the list. This is a real poker tournament, the real deal. First place will be over $4k, plus a custom poker table by Custom Poker Tables.com, plus a bunch of free Chipotle certificates, plus other stuff. In the prize pool will also be a chocolate fountain for first out, a couple nights free room at the Mirage. If you have something of value you want to donate, hit me up! We will probably pay down to 10th place.

FULL DISCLOSURE

Only read if you are bored. 🙂

No refunds under any circumstance.

Purpose Inc. events at pubcon are sponsored by the bad ass sponsors listed above. When it all shakes out Purpose Inc. either lose money or make a profit on the whole thing depending on the year. The sponsorship money for the poker tournament, only covers poker tournament expenses, and no profit is made. The sponsorship money for the other events may or may not make a profit! LOL This year due to administrative snags the tournament is not a charity tournament. All money that goes to the buy in from the players goes to cover the pot, the Mirage’s expenses, and maybe a little left over for t-shirts but probably not. 🙂

Boy we are going to have fun.

We are sending out invites to sponsor today.

If you want to sponsor either as an individual, or as a company, let me know imediately.

I will be finalizing the t-shirt and card designs so need to sponsor logos now. 🙂

We are going to be having a fight club with Robert Drysdale the 6x world champ in Brazillian jiu Jitsu, and with Shawn Tompkins at his new home at the Tap Out gym. Shawn is running pro training for the big UFC guys, and we will be able to watch.

I am getting lots of e-mails about the poker tournament.

We are only going to have room for 100 players. My buddy Chris who runs the poker room at the Mirage has worked out a great deal for with me for us, and we are going to have cocktail waitresses serving free drinks to the players, and 200 of my guests from 8:00 to 2:00 a.m. on Thursday night of Pubcon. This is going to be off the hook!

The poker room is right next to CPK, BLT burgers, and the Deli, so we will have food and drinks.

I can only get in 100 players and 200 guests. There will be bracelets to identify you.

I am going to make you work for them a little, and do a little pre holiday charity awareness. It will just cost you a tweet if you are buying in as a player, and a blog if you want to get in as a guest with the open bar. Details coming up here, but don’t blink because I am going to post it, send invites to my list, and I predict they will be gone fast!

If you don’t sign up for the poker tournament in time, you won’t play. Sorry?

If you want to be part of the party, and don’t win a spot as a guest with the free bar, then you can still come, you will just have to buy your own drinks 🙂

Just watch this blog, and details will be announced probably within the next few days or early next week.

If you want to sponsor either as an individual or as a company, read this and hit me up.

I also may have a few surprises during my talks at pubcon, so you may want to come see what’s up for those too. 😉

Not an actual dinasour, but an actual turtle-rex taken from George Avery of GetAds creek.

The Best of The Web, BOTW, boys have kicked in big time for our beloved poker tournament. They did this before the exact set up has been determined, and before we have figured out whether it will be a charity tournament or a non charity tournament.

Greg Hartnet loves this tournament, and the tournament loves Greg.

The BOTW crew are true dinasours of the internet world, since they have been around since 1994.

Their company, and the culture around it has served as fertile grounds for many of the leaders in this field to find their roots and grow. When I first started going to the conferences, it was told to me by many people to just hang out at the BOTW booth. You will never find any pretentiousness there, and nobody is ever an outsider. Just throw on one of their famous t-shirts, and you are instantly part of the family.

If I set up any new site of any importance to me, to this day, I always submit my site to their directory, which is the original internet directory. If your site is quality, they will most likely accept you. If you get accepted, then you get a quality link, that is very relevant, and on topic, and good page rank.

For those of you who don’t remember, before search engines this is how you found stuff on the internet. I still have a lot of faith in hand reviewed directories, and expect a resurgence of them in the future. I don’t think a computer can ever determine quality and relevance the way a human can. Their newer blog directory rocks and is a great place to get links and awareness started for your blog.

I am grateful to Greg, Brian Prince and the crew there because from the first moment I announced doing an event, the first poker tournament, they immediately jumped in and offered whatever help, finance or otherwise I needed. They let me come to their parties, even before anyone thought I was cool, and are an incredibly tight, yet welcoming group of people.

Thank you again guys for making the first poker tournament possible, and during such a tight year for so many people, being so quick to step up and throw down to make sure the event we all love so much takes place!

The Mirage hotel has graciously allowed our gang of misfits to decend upon their lovely hotel and casino on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2009 at 8:00 P.M.

The poker tournament has grown so large, and brings with it such a moving party, with last year literally hundreds of people who either showed up to play or just to play 🙂

If you want to rub elbows with the top SEO’s, internet marketers, website owners, and social media experts, this is the place. It is the relationships you develop here that will allow you to get the real internet marketing secrets in the future.

Keep checking this blog as Pubcon 2009 approaches, but it looks like we are going to be setting up our own poker room for the event, as we can not longer fit inside their regular poker room.

Before this can actually be a charity poker tournament, I need to get approval from the Nevada Gaming Commission. As I am sure you would guess, having a poker tournament with real money flying around legally, has an enormous amount of regulations attached to it.

After doing some research I found a charity that if they will give us permission, I would like to get behind this upcoming holiday season. They are called the Blind Center of Nevada. One of the super cool things they do is run an online electronics business, which takes old electronics, computers and monitors, cameras and the like, makes sure they are working, and then sells them on e-bay to support their center. To date they have made around a million bucks this way. This supports the center which trains these guys and gals in skills so they can be out in the regular work force.

Historically blind people for the most part have had assembly jobs, or other repetitive jobs that were less intellectually demanding. Through their program they allow blind people to new technology that allows them to do things online, that previously was impossible.

Anyone who knows me well, gets that I like to support those who are busting their buts to help themselves and others. This group takes that path by teaching visually impaired people job skills, and then in their own institution allowing those individuals to apply those skills to make money to run the institution.

If you give a few thousand dollars to feed people, that money will be spent in a day. A group like this, since it is already making some money themselves, can leverage a donation to help many, many, more people in many ways for years to come.

The poker tournament should be a great time. EVERYONE IS INVITED! I would love you to blog about it, and put up a poker poster on your site, and make sure EVERYONE  who is part of pubcon knows it will be the best of the pubcon parties!

We are now accepting sponsors for the event also. The money is going to a good cause, so open up those pockets!! Contat me at dk (=at=) purposeinc.com if you are interested.

Feel free to grab a poker poster that is the correct size for your blog and use it on your site.

I am a twitter user as purposeinc, occasionaly tweet, am proud of my 454 followers vs. the 221 people I am following, but haven’t used it to try to really make money yet. For me, like most internet marketing it is a big game, and fun, sometimes the good money rolls in, but mostly I like making big changes and helping people and companies out.

I was over at David Brim’s internet business blog, catching up on what he is up to, and came across his article on twitter 101 guide for business. It made for a good read.

Once of the concepts he brought up, and I have heard this from some of the huge companies that I have consulted for, is simply the concepts of watching for your industry or company to be mentioned. I looooove, doing reputation management on the internet, otherwise known as squashing a$$h:)les, and after watching some of Shoe’s tricks on reputation management have become a huge fan of it, and quite skillful, inventing many of my own highly effective tricks 😉 (Ping me if you need some high end help on this!)

So, as many of you know I crack a lot of backs each day, and am constantly testing different online marketing for my chiropractic office. I’ve even had patients now, with no training, get hired to become full time twitter users for companies. To top it off, this week I got a call from Jeremy Hermanns, internet marketer to the stars,  needing a little assistance with a project for one of his A-list celeb clients that involved twitter. Now this really got me thinking about twitter!

I know people are getting a ton of followers, but what can the blue whale do for a chiropractic office? So I went to search.twitter.com and searched for chiropractic to find the thousands of tweets per day that would involve chiropractic. Of course the first thing I find is Michaels account @chiropractic so I scrolled down to see what else I could see.

During the past day, in all of twitterland, there were only a few mentions I could find of chiropractic that seemed natural by people discussing it. The majority of them were twitter spam of the kind that I would imediately unfollow the guy.

When we heard Gary V. of wine library spoke at the Elite Retreat we watched him create content like a madman. No kidding, minutes after his talk, he was answering e-mails, twittering, and online with his masses. He told us that quantity of content, and truth in content to him were far, far more important than making sure each post was perfect before letting it loose.

In fact when I read some of the celebs twitters, you can tell they are written by someone else. On the other hand, I love seeing someone twitter where you can tell it is the real person, with all of their quirks, flaws and opinions. Can that make a small business money? Let’s see what we can cook up. Can a local chiropractic office, scan twitter for all the tweets of locals with back pain looking for a chiropractor these days? Not yet. But blink our eyes and the world will change again!

GUEST POST BY DENNIS YU
Dennis runs Blitz Local, a company dedicated to helping local businesses get real customers in through their doors. Yeh, Dennis is competing directly against some of my projects. Why would I let him guest post? He’s a good friend, a helpful guy, and that’s how we roll. 😉

The cynics would add a 4th C for “charlatan”, given how poorly companies selling local Internet advertising are performing. However, that overlooks how hard it is to deliver new business to local service firms and how new this market is– more on that in a bit.

I recently met the CEO as well as the founder of yodle.com, a fellow company in the local space– stand up guys, I must say. They have 6,000 clients– way more than BlitzLocal.com, but not as many as ReachLocal.com or WebVisible. There are 6 million small businesses in the US that are at least a quarter million dollars in revenue, so 6,000 is only 1/10th of a percent of the market. Nobody has even a percent of market share.

Recently, Yodle has been hit with some criticism for aggressive sales techniques. They have 110 full-time sales folks who call lawyers and doctors repeatedly. Though perhaps irritating to some prospects, the model is quite effective in generating sales. And Court Cunningham, their CEO, tells me that they are 2 weeks away from hitting profitability.

They want to be the #1 brand and you can’t hit that growth curve by word of mouth. In 2-5 years, small business owners will go with the recognized brand– and Yodle wants to be that brand.

Some challenges:

• Internet searches are low, but growing— You face a chicken and egg problem. People aren’t going to search online for services unless they know such services exist online. Rural areas or geos with low broadband penetration will often have no businesses online for a given category (“cosmetic surgeons in Enid Oklahoma”, perhaps). The concept of search requires that people know it exist to ask for it. Thus, advertising dollars and consumer sophistication go hand in hand. The market is early.
• Clients want new business generated, not clicks— Don’t tell me how many hits my site got. I want to know how many referrals my site generates. Calls generated is a better measure than clicks, but not as good as confirmed clients. Advertising companies such as ours cannot control whether a prospect will no show for an appointment, but we can try to target what search terms are more indicative of a good lead.
• The market is not educated— “Sales” alone won’t work, since you have to educate the client about how to operate their site, to answer the phone quickly and effectively, to use email marketing to drive retention, and to set realistic expectations on what Internet marketing is capable of. How much do I need to spend and what I can truly expect to generate in new business– not clicks or calls?
• nascent technology platforms— The beauty of search is that based on the search term, you already know what the searcher wants and where they are in the process. If they are looking for “denver liposuction“, then you better show them exactly that– content on Denver Liposuction. If they want to know the side effects of liposuction or the pricing for such procedures, you better show them a different set of information. Most of the local internet advertising companies send users to the same page, no matter what they search on. At up to $10 a click, that’s a lot of waste.

BlitzLocal doesn’t believe in first mover advantage, which is the “winner take all” philosophy. This type of thinking is that whoever reaches critical mass first in a market will win. Yet Yahoo! pre-dated Google in search, Friendster pre-dated Facebook in social networking, and the list goes on…

We don’t see the other players as “competitors”, since nobody has a dominant position or has even developed a bulletproof platform. Rather, we are together trailblazing in this developing market– working to educate clients about what is realistic about Internet marketing and that it’s not turnkey. Clients have to put forth effort to reflect their unique selling proposition on the web– and that must come from them, not us. And together, our group of companies must develop best practices on generating quality referrals for our clients. Judging by the churn rates in our industry– up to 90% in 6 months, according to the recent Borrell Research report, nobody has it figured out yet.

It’s easy to decry the “end of the yellow pages“, but the reality is this is years away and a slow death. It may be a few years before consumers are getting smarter about seaching online for local services and doing so in sufficient volume. The question for companies such as ours is when to really step on the gas for marketing and to what extent we can rely on aggressive outbound sales versus working towards an awesome product.

Back to clicks, calls, and clients– it’s easy to do the first part, medium difficulty to generate calls, and very hard to generate clients. If local Internet marketing companies are having trouble doing it for themselves, then caveat emptor on whether they can do it for you.

There’s no denying the potential of the opportunity in local.

If you want to get in touch with Dennis, you can reach him at: [email protected].