Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

Just scored the tickets. Unbelievably good tickets in fact. We will be 10 rows up over the floor, within a rocks throw of the octagon. Shawn Tompkins who a lot of my readers know personally will be there in the corner for Mark “the hammer” Coleman. Robert Drysdale, who is the 6x Brazillian Jiu Jitsu world champion will likely show up in someones corner, watch for him!

Shawn allready invited me and the wife to come by the Couture gym to watch the pros train and hang out. It will give me a chance to renew my connections, make new ones, and plan fun stuff for the future for you guys!

We will be staying at the Wynn, and get to have a little quality pool time.

Of course we will hit the wife’s favorite restaraunt, Red 8 for Dim Sum.

I will also be talking to some different casinos as to where we should have our charity poker tournament this year. Feel free to offer any early input on the subject.

The whole trip sounds like heaven.

I’ll try to get some fun pics and post them next week.

This should be quite a fight!

You may be able to help thousands or more people in Iran to twitter what is going on with their protests using free speech.

Change your twitter time and city to Tehran to protect the identity of Iranians protesting their government.

The short story is that last week in Iran there was a presidential election that was apparently very close.

There is now apparently a large amount of censorship going on in Iran of phones and internet.

Twitter in Iran is one of the few ways of getting info out.

The twittersphere is saying, that if you change your city to Tehran, and your timezone to Tehran, then you can help mask the identity of those twittering out their reports of what is going on.

If you want to follow along, watch this page for a while. #IranElection

The old government who has been in power is what you would expect from Iran recently.

The new presidential candidate, that these protestors support, is in favor of things like freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

If you want to help, change your twitter city to tehran, and your twitter location to tehran. If you want to help even more, then tweet about this.

Iran is very possibly the most powerful country in the middle east. The direction that things go there over the next week may have a very powerful effect on our daily lives in terms of our own personal and national security in the rest of the world.

Time to be a citizen of the world my friends!

Signing off, dk the jew, who is persian for the week. 🙂

On Friday June 12th at 9:01 pm pacific time on your facebook page you can choose a vanity url.

I have had facebook.com/purposeinc myself for a while for my facebook page, but had not announced it till now. If you are a fan of Purpose Inc., go fan me there, http://www.facebook.com/purposeinc

If you are too lazy to actually go there, here is a screen shot.

I just got an e-mail from Barbara Boser asking me if I could help make sure she and Greg got their name. I was like hugh? as I had not heard anything about this yet. I checked and sure enough facebook announced facebook usernames on their blog. Matt Mullenweg has spoiled me with pretty urls on wordpress, so I have always hoped that facebook could get better urls. This is awesome.

The blog says “Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters ….or a period” so we will not be seeing facebook.com/dk

You can only do this for facebook accounts that existed before May 31 of this year.

If you poke around you will see that some companies like Microsoft have already grabbed one, and some like apple/mac have not.

UPDATE – When the time comes, hit this page to do it.

One of the perks of being around the facebook, is that I have gotten to know their mystery person in charge of ad approval. This person has to juggle the needs of the advertisers to get their ads on the network while protecting the experience of the users, which is their highest priority. Of course in the background is the fact that if ads are not approved, then income does not come in to facebook. In an emerging platform like facebook, there is still massive growth and understanding taking place in this area on a weekly basis. Considering the fact that facebook ads are still in their early growing years, the job this person does is amazing! Remember for the most part at this time, the ads are being reviewed by a human being.

Just for the record I intentionally never ask for special favors on my ads. I just send them in and watch them get approved or disproved. In fact on one of my accounts I recently got a little e-mail explaining how a few of my ads were bending the envelope a little too far and were not being approved. Oops! They are really great people, and if you do mess up, you simply get an e-mail explaining what part of the T.O.S. you violated.

As users, the more your ads are quality and get approved the easier you make it for them, and believe me they apreciate it!

The ad approval process is not hard science yet on either side, and requires understanding while the process evolves. Facebook is very, very open to user input on what is working and not working, both for advertisers and for users.

Feel free to comment here with any questions or feedback for the ad approval team, or contact me if you are running into any big issues with this.

Bottom line facebook wants a wide variety of quality ads that improve the experience of their users.

Here is a series of questions submitted to me by my readers, and some written myself, answered by the person in charge of the ad approval area at facebook. Their identity kept private. 🙂

1. First can you give my readers the overall philosophy of what Facebook is looking for in ads?
The core of the Facebook brand is our user experience, and this experience is continually reinforced by our product’s distinct look and feel, functionality, and utility. Everything that exists within the site contributes to the overall Facebook user experience, including advertising. Facebook is committed to preserving our user experience by keeping the site clean, uncluttered, and free from intrusive messages. That is why Facebook Ads are a little different from other online advertising units. The look and feel of the ads is more like Facebook content and therefore becomes a part of our users’ experience rather than interrupting it. In addition, data in the ads is based on how a user’s friend interacted and affiliated with your business. Therefore, they behave more like the Facebook content users are used to engaging with on the site.
Facebook Ads allow advertisers to communicate effectively with their desired audience and are therefore more relevant to users.
Facebook Ads enables any marketer to easily and precisely reach the right people at the right time. With over 200 million active users sharing authentic information, advertisers reach their exact audience before they start searching. Advertisers can quickly create ads and target them to very specific audiences. It’s easy for advertisers to track their progress and gain insight into their ads with real time reporting.

2. In general, what don’t you want to see in ads?
Misleading ads are very frustrating for the user. For example, the text and the image of the ad should accurately represent the product being advertised. When this is not the case, not only does the user feel deceived and loses trust in the ad, but in the long run, the ad’s performance is affected too. If a user has a bad experience with an ad, they are much less likely to click on that ad or a similar ad again. This hurts both the user and the advertiser.
Deceptive and hurtful language are also detrimental to users’ experience and advertisers’ performance. For example, asking users ‘Are you fat?’, ‘Are you lonely?’, ‘Have bad acne?’.  Users often see ads like these as personal attacks and certainly don’t respond well to them.
Ad image has a rather significant impact on performance. Inappropriate or irrelevant images should not be used.  Advertisers don’t want to pay for clicks that don’t convert and users don’t like to be confused when clicking through an ad. When thinking about creating a high quality ad, be as transparent and relevant as possible.

3. What effect does the landing page have on approval?
Landing pages are reviewed through the approval process along with the ad creative itself. Even if the ad complies with all of our policies but the landing page doesn’t, we will reject the ad. For example, if an acceptable dating ad is submitted but the destination page has graphic images, we would not approve the ad. For more details on landing page requirements, please view section 2 of our Ad Guidelines (http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php).

4. Can you explain the time it takes for ad approval. If someone is trying to tweak different specifics of the ads, it can take up to 12 hours to get them approved.

Do you guys work on approvals 24 hours per day?
Our online sales operations team reviews ads as soon as possible and in the order that they are received. This can take up to 12 hours but is usually much quicker during normal PST business hours. Turn around times on the weekend are slightly longer than during the week.
If your advertisers use the ‘Create a Similar Ad’ option to make minor adjustments to their ad text (title or body), the ad is generally reviewed much more quickly.
5. What is allowed in capitalization?
Ads may capitalize entire words for emphasis, or capitalize the first letters of words in the ad text, but may not capitalize entire sentences or the entire text.
INCORRECT:
WINTER SPECIAL 50% OFF
WINTER is the BEST TIME to REJUVENATE SKIN and PERMANENTLY REDUCE HAIR!
ACCEPTABLE:
Winter Special 50% OFF
Winter is the BEST TIME to rejuvenate skin and PERMANENTLY REDUCE hair!

6. I noticed that if I submit 20 ads in a campaign it looks like it takes longer to approve, than if I just submit one new ad.
Ads are reviewed as soon as possible and in the order they are received.  There’s no relationship between larger ad groups getting reviewed slower or faster.

7. What can you tell us about your team?
The Online Sales Operations team works with all advertisers who advertise through the Facebook Ads interface (http://www.facebook.com/ads/create). The goal of this team is to help support, grow and retain these advertisers. The team is focused on compliance, supporting advertisers’ questions or problems via email, soliciting product and system feedback, and improving campaign performance through optimizations.

8. What direction are you guys heading in terms of ad approval in terms of automating it, and/or making more consistent?
We are working hard to improve our advertising products and system to help our advertisers reach users in an effective and meaningful way. We are continuingly revising our ad review process to be more scalable and consistent.
Since we launched the Facebook Ads platform in the Fall of 2007, we have used advertiser and user feedback to inform product improvements and policy changes. As a company, we are always striving to provide a great experience for our users and partners. As advertisers, you have significant impact on this experience. Our advertising policies help safeguard the experience on Facebook for our users while providing you with opportunities to engage with users and promote your business. As we work on automating more of the ad review process, we will look to our users to provide their feedback on the relevance and quality of ads to the advertisers themselves. Ad quality and user feedback have always been important considerations for Facebook Ads, and help determine what ads are actually seen by users.  In general, ads that receive negative user feedback are less likely to be shown to users, and may not even run at all.

9. I read that if your site doesn’t get a good CTR the first 2 hours, then Facebook does not show it very much after that. Is that true? How does your algorithm work to decide which ad to show?
Ads will be shown based on the advertiser’s daily budget, bid and targeting criteria they’ve selected. If an ad doesn’t perform well when it is first running on our site, it is likely that our system will determine that this ad is less likely to perform well in the future, and will display the ad less often as a result.
For any given ad unit, we select the best ad to run based on its bid and historical performance. Therefore, if you are not receiving as many clicks or impressions as you would like, we suggest increasing your maximum CPC or CPM bid. We also suggest making sure your ad is as relevant as possible by targeting your ad to the most appropriate audience. Your ad is more likely to perform better and continue running successfully if it is being displayed to the users who are likely to be the most interested in your ad and click on your ad. You may want to experiment with multiple versions of your ad text and targeting to see which one generates the best results.

10. Where do you guys get the list of available keywords? Where do you get the list of available interests when creating an ad?”
The site is indexed for keywords in profiles and we compile those words as options for our advertisers to target.  When you choose to target an ad to certain keywords, it will be shown to users who have included any of those keywords in the “Personal Info” section of their profile. This includes sections like Interests, Activities, Favorite Music, Favorite Movies, etc. Ads may also be targeted to a user’s groups or the Pages he or she is a member or fan of that are related to the keywords you select.

End of Interview.

If you have any questions not covered, feel free to leave them in the comments, and if I can get them asnwered I will.

In the internet world you better run with a strong pack. This doesn’t mean you follow 20,000 people on twitter, or are friends with 2000 people on facebook. It doesn’t even mean that 100 people comment whenever you write a blog. What it means is you need a core group of people, whether it is 3 or 30 that are there for you when you need it.

The smarter, more energetic and more aggressive this group is, the better.

My progress in the internet business and marketing world has come about almost exclusively because of my friends.

Sure I better know my stuff, so that when the moment comes I know what to do to tip the ball in the basket, like I did last week. But to be really successful these days on the internet you almost assuredly can not pull it off alone.

Recently I needed a favor, that  I knew would take a few hours, and needed to be done that night, by two of the biggest names in our industry. I e-mailed these two internet rock stars, who both then sat up half the night to get it done.

What did I give them back? Nothing. Why did they do it? Love.

You guys who are reading this, my friends, the ones who would feel comfortable calling me right now and asking me a favor, are my pack, and I am yours.

It’s a funny world, because some of them like Marcus I have spent no more than an hour total with him, but yet would be happy to help him in any way I could. Nic N Cher, have been helping me out before I ever met them, and I help them in any way I can, we live half way around the globe from each other, and have spent no more than an hour together total. Guys like Al and Slaven I have stayed up all night with laughing about the stupidest things in the world. People like Michael Sprouse, the botw boys,  and Alex the tweeter and others have also been huge financial support to the events we have all enjoyed together. I have heard Aaron talk once, spoke to him in person for 60 seconds, but can e-mail him at 3 a.m. and get advice not available anywhere else on the planet. Sometimes it’s things like Tony, who is always there to be a friend, or Sir Hermanns who hits it high on every level! Other times it is when someone like John, who at 2 a.m. the day before a talk I did gave me such undeniable insight into my audience that it turned another boring talk into something life changing for me. The list contains many more not listed above.

The ways you can help each other are infinite, but without getting help online let’s see you do anything. The help comes in links, diggs, advice, insider info and connections.

Without this amazing path of Pam introducing me to Neil, and Neil giving Shoe the thumbs up about me., and Shoe introducing me to literally dozens of the most affluent, successful (alex) and powerful people on the internet, it would have taken me another decade to pull of what I have done.

A link is an acknowledgment that the person digs you. A digg is a  nod of approval for what you’ve done. Getting your name dropped on the right blog gets you clients, recognition, and the money that follows. An introduction with a statement that you are smart, powerful, know certain important stuff or are connected, can move you to the front of the line, and literally past the velvet rope.

None of this works without friendship, none of this works without love.

Am I smart? I’ll let you decide. Am I well connected? You better believe it. My connections are infinitely more valuable than my knowledge.  There is almost nothing known about internet business that I can not find out in 20 minutes via twitter, a phone call or an e-mail.

On the flip side if you are my friend there is nothing I won’t do. I will stay up late working on something for you. I will drop everything to read your stuff, sphinn it, digg it, or link to it, or even write it for you and let you put your name on it ☺ If need be I will pick up the tab, and stand there for 12 hours with you standing on my shoulders so you can win today, the day it really counts.

The pack I run with vary from the ridiculous to the tough and edgy. Some of them walk right up to the edge, laugh and jump to the other side. But every one of them realize that nothing we do can get done without each others help.

Feel left out? Want to get inside? Feel you deserve it? Then prove it. None of these guys are elitist. Anyone is welcome, but at a price. If your not yet in, you better bust your ass to help the others until they accept you. To stay in, you better be willing to help at a moments notice those around you.

Watch someone like Michael Gray on twitter when he’s chatting with Rae. Any unknown can give him a tweet and ask him a question, and he answers. It’s like butting into a conversation between Robert Deniro and Angelina Jolie, and having Robert stop in the middle of the conversation to answer some junior college acting students question about character development.

So I toast all of you! And am here for you when you need my help, as I know you are when I do. For those of you who are running around without a pack, wondering why it is so hard to make it? You better find the right pack and figure out what you need to do to be part of it.

When you need help, ask.

Love you guys. Honestly do. Thanks for each and everything that each of you have done for each of us.

I wouldn’t trade this life for anything.

175 million active users, billions of friendships. That’s billions with a B.
The stats are straight up off the hook.  The full complexity of those relationships is unfathomable.

What started as a closed Ivy League system now has 175 million active users.  The fastest-growing demographic is those over 30, and the average user has 120 friends. There are 850 million photos uploaded every month. Then there are the applications that anyone can build to run on their system, fan pages, event pages, and on and on.

When you hit Google, you are looking for something specific.  When you hit facebook, you are just looking. Eyes are wide open, interested, and ready for something different. You don’t go to facebook looking to buy, you come looking to see what your friends are up to and to let them know about you.

You have no agenda, other than the fact you are up for something you haven’t seen before.

Hmmm… 175 million people, and you are catching them at that moment each week when they are looking to find out what’s new.

This creates some interesting opportunities for using facebook advertising.

I have always put the good of the world, and of my fellow man, as a high priority. This has cost me a lot of money over my lifetime, but it is the right thing to do.

I am happy to say that after meeting with executives and staff at facebook the guys and gals I talked to want the same thing. They put the user experience as way more important than cashing in a buck at your expense. I had a good talk with Andy Liu (buddytv.com, failblog.org) about this the Friday night of the Elite Retreat, driving to the airport to exchange my rental car. The fast buck has been the Internet marketers’ friend, but the long-term play is going to be with integrity and quality.

The Tuesday of the Elite Retreat, I had the pleasure of meeting with, learning from and advising some of the executives at facebook. The meetings took place at the Prolific Oven coffee shop in Palo Alto, (no ties, thank god!)_in the facebook headquarters scattered around Palo Alto, and walking in the rain on the mean streets of Palo Alto while sipping tea. It was way cool. I felt pretty important.

I got to meet with Tim Kendall, Jeff Iden, Don Faul, and Alex Schultz, plus some others that I was asked to keep off the blog.

I can’t disclose everything discussed, but we went over facebook’s quest to reach more unique advertisers and to offer more and more quality products to its users.

It was confirmed that the thumbs-up and thumbs-down by the ads actually result in real measurable changes for the advertisers. It was also confirmed that the interests you can target when advertising are taken not just from the profile the user sets up initially, but more and more from things posted on their wall.

They also confirmed that each and every ad is still reviewed by a human being, but long –term, their philosophy is to let the users guide the facebook computer as to which ads are appropriate or not. This eventually will hopefully result in Nancy Temple getting served ads from her church and related products, while Billy Boister gets hit with ads from the new club opening and the car show.

The really exciting thing is where this is headed. Google knows pretty much one thing about you as a user: what you are searching for right now.

Facebook knows a lot more than that. Facebook is very protective about the info of a particular user, even though their data is more or less public if you are able to view that users profile. On the other hand, facebook has the potential in the future to look at what a user is up to, as well as what their friends are up to and how these relate.

Imagine your friends and yourself are planning a trip to the river, to wakeboard. It’s all over yours and their walls on facebook. It also so happens that the Purple Doves are playing a free concert at the river, sponsored by Judy’s book, as part of their Green Energy program.

Facebook knows all these details. You and your friends have typed it onto each other’s walls for the world to see. Would it be inappropriate to show you an ad of the new hybrid SUV that can haul a trailer full of Jet Skis? That the SUV company promises that 10 percent of their profits will go to buy electric- generating windmills!

It can get even deeper than this, if you imagine things your friends are doing, that you don’t even know about. Taking into account social trends of what can be predicted you will be into in a week or two?

As a user, I would much prefer the ads I am shown each day to actually resonate with what I might like, such as a new Whole Foods location or a better surf report website, rather than trying to sell me Viagra or a new copier which I have no interest in.

If they showed me the new watch that Brian Norgard or Shoe just bought, it will have a have a huge effect  on me next time I see Shoe and see his watch. Facebook can know what watch Shoe buys, even before I do.

Facebook currently still has a small number advertisers compared to a network like google, with many of those advertisers selling the same products, to hundreds of millions of users. In other words, there is only a fraction of products being sold that could be.  It boggles the mind to think of what could be sold on facebook and how it could be done.

Will facebook’s ad revenues end up being bigger than Google’s? Everyone I have asked has said No, but I wouldn’t bet on that so early in the race.

I am deep into the facebook wave now and just starting my bottom turn. I predict that those who catch the wave now will have a good long ride, with the wave building in height for quite a while to come.

In the coming weeks, I will be doing testing of different strategies that will help both advertisers and facebook to increase bottom-line profit while benefiting consumers, and then reporting back to facebook with recommendations.

I’ll keep you posted.

On Tuesday I am going to Facebook.

There is quite a bit loaded into that statement.

I am going for actually a long list of reasons.

1. To make sure everything is smooth as silk for the Elite Reatreat “field trip” there on Thursday, with Magic Bus transportation provided by the ever cool Jim at We Build Pages.

2. To have some great food, and great meetings, with some truly first class people.

3. To become super educated on Facebook, so I can help them interface more smoothly with the internet marketing world.

4. To answer some questions they have for me on who the influencial internet business/marketing bloggers are, and whatever else they want to know from me.

5. To learn stuff to help with my own projects.

6. To stand in front of a tidal wave just before it hits.

I had a long talk with Michael Jenkins about this one morning last week. Michael is the Founder and CEO of Market Leverage Affiliate Network. Facebook reaches hundreds of millions of people each week. They also have more info about who each user is on a continental basis than any other site. They actually care more about the user experience than they do about making money. There was a lot more to this conversation that I am not at liberty to release, but boy oh boy is there a lot of opportunity here.

In no way would I imply that google has maxed out on their ability provide value to advertisers, but at the moment Facebook provides ridiculous value to advertisers if you can figure out how to utilize it properly. Jeremy, (Shoemoney) turned me onto this and we have been working on some early experiments on how to utilize facebook advertising for maximum value.

Recently I have been looking at what other medium has ever been able to be able to target demographically their users on such a wide scale. Answer? Nothing.

Google is cool that if you use adwords you can have a great understanding of their intent at that exact moment, but with Facebook you can find out if they like to dance, are 24 years old, live in Phoenix, and are in a relationship. Man if I had a romantic restaurant in Phoenix I would be spending everything I have on marketing to that group today for Valentines at my place.

The closest thing I have ever been to that had this type of detail is buying mailing lists and mailing to people, or e-mail lists. It is a huge difference because with those lists you are making assumptions about what the person is into, but with Facebook the person themselves has either said they are into that, or at least talked about it on their page.

The real future of facebook hasn’t even been unleashed yet. It will be when they fully develop their system for not only directing ads based on what the person is into, but also what their friends are into, and tying it in to whether their friends are allready users of a particular product or service or not.

Can you imagine if you were selling Zoomi Electric Bicycles and you could target a Facebook user who had 9 of his 45 friends allready riding Zoomi Electric Bicycles. Just imagine the ad saying something like,

John, C’mon allready!

All your friends are riding Zoomi Electrics to school,

why aren’t you!

And then it shows photos of his friends who allready ride them.

So maybe this is pushing it a bit too far, and impinging a bit on their personal privacy, but it really demonstrates the power that is available through their data.

Like I said in the beginning, one of the main reasons I am really excited to get to work closely with Facebook is that they actually put the users experience far ahead of their interest in making money. Long term this is going to put them I believe in a position that will be more powerful than even the mighty Google.

Shoemoney pointed my head to look in the right direction, and after my own studies and speaking with Michael, I can hear the rumbling. There are a few hundreds of millions of eyeballs, maybe billions? starting to look in this direction at our ads and we know more about each one of them than we ever have before.

I am putting myself right in front of that tidal wave right now, and looking forward to it breaking on me.

Stay posted next week, and you will hear more about what I learned at Facebook.

In case you haven’t heard of them, here is their site 😉

Two years back when I went to Pubcon, I desperately wanted to be on the insider invite list so I could get invited to the insider dinner with the big shots. At any of the internet conferences, there’s a series of private events that you probably won’t even hear about and very few people get invited to. I used to hear about these private parties and small dinners, and wish that I would be one of the people who got invited. I finally figured out how to solve the problem. Throw the dinner yourself.
Saturday, I had dinner with Todd Malicoat, Lauren Vaccarello, Rand Fishkin and Geraldine, Rand’s wife. We all got together, and I was going to take them to a new Mexican place in San Diego, and found out that they already had fish tacos, of which Todd Malicoat is a huge fan, for lunch. So, I talked to the concierge at the Westin and had them recommend a great restaurant, and off we went to Rama Thai Food.

Lauren started getting excited when reading the menu, so I let her along with Rand do most of the ordering.

The dinner was amazing, the crowd was brilliant, my wife, came along, and hilarious, amazing and funny stories exchanged for hours. By the time we’ve gotten up, we’ve been sitting on the table for about 3 hours, and it felt like only 15 minutes have gone by.

The great thing about dinners like this is that you get the chance to really become friends with leaders of the industry. It’s unlikely that you’re going to get the biggest names in the industry to want to come have dinner with you if you haven’t accomplished much yet, but by being a good friend, being helpful, and following the basic rules of being a person, being polite, and being nice, you can slowly gain friendships with people in the industry over time. You may be surprised who will accept your invitation.
One of the big secrets to all of this is keeping secrets. Things get disclosed to every one of these insider dinners that can cause different individuals a lot of effort and a lot of money. So, in order to be invited back a second time or have people be willing to accept the invitation a second time is to learn how to be quiet at the right times, and how to take the information that’s given to you and keep it absolutely private and locked away in a safe place.

The whole game of the insider information reminds me almost of a bunch of james bond type operatives. Little bits of information can cause people to make or lost vast sums of money. Sometimes the really big shots will give you little bits of info to help you in your goals.

Sometimes the big shots can use this info to gain advantage, stop someones action or work together to accomplish some amazing things.

By the way at this particular dinner, nothing got exposed except everyone’s propensity for repeating the same bad jokes over, and over and over again!

I’ve wanted to get to hang out with Rand a bit for a long time. He is one of the nicest, most positive people I have seen in the industry. By the way, if you ever need really high end copywriting done, Geraldine is brilliant with words. Some of the jokes she made were so subtle, so complex, and just fricken ridiculous that it blew me  away!
It’s amazing how when you look at the people at the top of this industry, you’ll consistently find the nicest, friendliest, and smartest people that I’ve ever met anywhere. It’s an industry that tends to reward brilliance, friendship and warmth. More so than in any other industry I’ve ever seen. The people who are on the inside help each other a lot and in fact, it’s very difficult to really be successful online, unless you have a circle of good friends.

I have gotten to spend the last two days at a way fun conference in sunny, (or rainy at the moment), San Diego.

Aaron Kahlow threw the Online Marketing Summit this weekend.

At first I was a little unsure about this event. After all it takes place in San Diego, and other than hearing about it once, I had never heard my circle of internet friends mention it.

It is very different than Pubcon, SES, or the Elite Retreat. I have found myself really digging it.

It is a nice size, with maybe 300 or 400 people I am guessing.

The weird thing for me was showing up for the Keynote and really studying the crowd and finding exactly 0 people that I recognized. If it was a room at Pubcon or SES or Affiliate Summit I might know 5% of the room, or at at least a few people.

There have been fun touches like Jamba Juice on the breaks and bags of pretzels and what not.

The nicest touch was tonight when after dinner I went to meet Rand Fishkin, his wife Geraldine, Lauren Vaccarelloand Todd Malicoat on the top of the Ivy, behind the velvet ropes and all that. The bouncers were hesitating to let me in and Aaron left his party and came down personally to make sure I got in. Very cool, very personal, and won’t be forgotten.

It was really interesting for me too to look at Aarons facebook page.

He has over 1200 friends with only 9 in common with me. Take Shoe’s facebook page with his 1500 friends, I have about 10% in common. It is simply a really different crowd.

The highlight for me of the conference was dinner tonight with Rand Fishkin, Todd Malicoat, Geraldine Rand’s wife and Lauren a brilliant SEO and tough street fighter (She did the fight club at the Couture Gym in Vegas!) We had killer Thai Food to die for!

The other nice surprise was hearing Tim Ash speak. He graciously ripped one of my sites apart in front of 100 people to point out how to improve the landing page. As he spoke, he imediately impressed me with his knowledge of landing page optimization. In a perfect example of marketing that could not ever have been purchased, but happened because of hard work, the following happened.

Sitting behind me was a guy who I struck up a conversation with after the talk. We realized we both train occasionally at the Couture Gym in Vegas, and that he had just had a lesson from Joey Varner. If someone has the guts to train at the Couture gym, it tells me a lot. It is the kind of place where if you are a poser or of poor morals, you will never survive. 🙂 You don’t have to be a great fighter to train there, but you do have to be respectful and polite in the presence of the great fighters who are there. This told me a lot about my new friend.

This guy behind me in the talk was sharp and quick and when asked told me about the online marketing company he works in and I believe directs. He went on to tell me that Tim Ash had come into their company to train the online marketing guys. When he was done the oline marketing guys applied what they learned to the clients sites. I asked this guy behind me what happened, and he said the clients results all improved as a result. He then told me that what Tim taught them was basically contained in Tim’s book Landing Page Optimization. Luckily Tim gave me a copy that is sitting next to me now. I plan on studying it immediately.

This was a perfect example of excellent marketing on every level.

Great event, and a bargain. There is definitely something for the novice and expert.

Aaron thank you for a great time!

Last week I had dinner with Michael Jenkins of Market Leverage, Chris Hedgecock a super star programmer, designer and marketer and about 20 other folks including Shoemoney at Switch, a new 5 star restaurant at Encore in Vegas.

When Michael, Chris and myself got up after finishing dinner, we looked at our watches and saw that 5 1/2 hours had passed.

We covered a lot of ground, and Chris schooled me good.

First we discussed business and travel. Michael told us the stories of climbing Kilimanjaro in Africa this year and also about another 23 thousand foot peak in Argentina. Michael proudly announced a new technology they are using on their site whereby you click what appears to be a regular link in green, and up pops a video that teaches you about that subject. In a way it what hyperlinks were originally designed for. You can see these “Green Links” now on the Market Leverage site. I will get to why I bring this up in a sec.

So I grew up in a very middle class family, but went to schools in areas with lots of gangs, drugs, massively mixed races, like a salad, and definitely was not in a family that was connected to politics. As a result of this I have been of the mindset of jumping up and down and screaming about global injustices, but never really have been able to do anything about it.

Chris on the other hand comes from a family where he got to meet a lot of the biggest politicians in the world, and a family where if they disagree, they do something about what is going on.

So I was telling the story of how I sat in a little diner in Lake Shasta eating breakfast a few years ago reading the San Francisco Chronicle’s story about how the U.S. was now torturing prisoners of war. I got really sad. I told Chris and Michael about how at that moment I lost my pride in being an American. Chris was on me immediately and told me how sad that made him.

Chris in his own way, and with his own words shifted my mindset to allow me to realize what a wimp I was being, and that something could be done about it. Wow. That’s right, we are a democracy, we can as individuals and collectively make change. Wow. Thanks so much for that Chris.

With my mindset changed, what then ensued was a discussion amongst the three of us about the constitution, the founding fathers, what could be done for the good with all this internet money, and the time and hours flew like feathers in the wind.

I have a good sense who reads this blog. You guys influence the minds of billions of people collectively through what we do online. This is it. This is the moment for our country. We are the guys who can change it. And that means you!

We have a new slate opening up tomorrow. A reset button, to power down and boot up again. It’s an American Defrag, Virus Scan, and reboot all taking place.

What is a recession? It is simply not enough production and commerce taking place right? What caused it? Overvalued homes? B.S.

It was beat up, demoralized Americans. It was Americans who as individuals feel responsible for losing at the global superbowl. One way or another a bunch of us got killed on 9-11. More of us have gotten killed in Iraq, and we have as a nation killed in Iraq. I am part of the responsibility of all of it.

I am an American.

Sick of it? Ready to do something? Ready to make a change?

How bad is the stock market anyway, one of the major factors looked at in evaluating the economy. The S and P 500 where most of my money has dropped back to 03 levels. Big deal. The stock market has always gone up and down and always will. But lets not sit at 03 levels any longer.

So how do we get out of this? I’m not talking a trick. I’m not talking about printing a bunch more monopoly money, or trying to feed a village with a stone. I’m talking that old Clint Eastwood, John Wayne Cowboy way. Where the town get’s together as a group and kicks some ass.

It’s time to stop trying to outsmart the next guy and and time to stop takeing without giving. What each of us needs to do is make enough loaves of bread, cars, homes, computers and whatever is needed, so that there is plenty to go around. If there is plenty made, then everyone can afford one, they buy, the money flows and the economy fixes itself.

I am sure Obama is going to do his best with social welfare programs and seeded money to try to jumstart the economy. But we can do it. We are America. We are Obama whether you voted for him or not. You and I know how to influence minds. We know how to sell.

We can get America to get off the couch tune out, and turn on! their computer and get to work.

We can sell, so why not sell success, hard work, the U.S. constitution, and good values to work hard and work ourselves out of this mess. Think Will Smith and friends at the end of Independence day.

If we work hard, produce our tails off, and market the heck out of our production the country could turn around in weeks with the stock market soaring!

So for me this is time. We have a clean slate, with no excuses. If we can elect a president, who of all things is Hawaiian, our country is capable of anything 🙂

So with no bullshit, and no rah no rah rah, would you be willing to help me and our new leaders get the show on the road? Blog about it, yell about it, twitter about it.

Are you ready again to be proud of your country, and proud to be an American?

Let’s do this thing! Let’s work hard and proud! Let’s go to sleep exhausted after working so hard all day. Let’s encourage the masses to do the same. Let’s be fair, and honest, and true to our own ideals.

That will solve it.

And if you wonder what I am trying to sell you?

Your future.

So if you give even half a rats ass about me I would like you to help.

I want you to blog about it.

I want you to write a blog so far out of your comfort zone it makes your chest thump and your stomach ache when you hit the publish button.

I want you to ask all of your readers whether they are a dozen or a million to work harder, be true to their ideals, and to tell their boss or themselves, I know the work day is done, but I am going to work a little harder and a little later to get the job done.

Could you blog about that for me? In your own words? With your own ideals?

Let me know when you do, and I will love you even more for it.

Peace and prosperity!

dk