Toronto Affiliate Marketer & SEO Consultant Lorne Fade

Affiliate Summit 2009 Recap

I had to break this recap writeup into several posts because the trip was just too epic, and there was so many things going on all the time that I wanted to make sure nothing got left out. Although that might be hard to do considering the amounts of alcohol I ingested during my stay.

Well I made it back in one piece with a mild migraine a little bit of disdain for coach seating, but all in all no complaints since I didn’t end up in the Hudson.  So after touching down in Vegas, taking a cab from the strip to the palms, I was greeted by a sexy latina maid who obviously didn’t know she would be cleaning my room at the end of the week, and impromptu handed me a full bottle of Captain Morgan spiced rum.. A nice start to my trip Id say. From here I cruised to the strip, checked out the AVN porn convention, met kid rock (who’s girlfriend was undoubtedly checking my shit) and proceeded to stumble over to rain nightclub in the palms where I was zombified but still managed to enjoy the flaming atmosphere.

After my eventful Friday night, I prepared for the first actual full day, and the arrival of my fellow affiliates and networks.  I woke up late, then headed over to the Rio where not too many people had arrived yet, so I got into the 1/3 hold’em game and made a couple hundred before heading over to TGIF to meet up with a bunch of my fellow affiliate elites.  I was greeted by Eli from bluehatseo who insisted on hugging it out bitch, over the proverbial handshake.  Nick Mattern aka bbwolfe was shit wasted talking shit about some WP Plugin, and a few other guys from #cakes chat were there kicking the shit.  I pounded back a few drinks, then prepped for the Wickedfire pre-summit meetup.

Wickedfire Pre Affiliate Summit Meet Up (Tangy,Lacrosse_20, Me, Bryn)

After the initial meet-up, and meeting a lot of really cool people with money on their mind, I headed back to my room where I had to get ready to meet-up with HustlinGrind for my first night of mayhem. Suited up I strolled by about 100 people waiting to get into Rain Nightclub @ the Palms, where Paul Oakenfold was set to tear up the club. I was lead upstairs to a skybooth where the gold patron was already poppin and the party was gettin started.

Oakenfold Performing

Flames from above the dance floor

At this point the actual affiliate summit hadn’t even started yet, and I was having the time of my life.  The club was amazing, and I was already partying it up with some great affiliates.  I left the club early for an after party with some ladies who apparently didn’t want to stop because they had the insight to show us around town, and proceeded to drive us over to Studio 54 at 5am for an all nighter.

Definitely not a bad time for my first full day of ASW. Day 2 didn’t start until late partly due to the fact that I didnt get in until 7am.  So for the first full day of the actual conference I only really went for about half an hour, met some AM’s, got some free beer to fix the hangover, and made plans for that evening as it was already late afternoon by the time I was leaving the summit. About 10 or so of us were at the Rio waiting for a shuttle bus that took us to the Advaliant red rock mansion party, where supposedly 80 dancers awaited (yeah right).

entering the red rock mansion

Upon arriving at the red rock party, we were greeted by free cigars and an open bar, not a bad opener if you ask me.  As for the promised dancers, well they were nowhere to be found, and it was the usual affiliate marketing sausage fest.  I mingled for a bit, met some cool people, played some pool, and got my fair share of the open bar. I stumbled my way over to a couple poker tables they had set up only to find out they were playing for FREE?! (A giant WTF goes off in my head)

one of the poker tables

I proceeded to infiltrate the game and convince everyone to put $20 down, since no one wanted to play for more.  After much deliberation we got about 9 players in the game, and I was off and running.  I musta had luck on my side, because I played like a total donkey and somehow took it down. Around the time I was finishing the poker game, the man, the myth, the legend, Nicky Cakes showed up, too bad for him though, he brought his girlfriend.

From here I went outside to find the usual crew of hoodlums up to no good.  We decided we were gonna take a limo to Body English @ the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, which sounded good to me, since I was pretty drunk at this point, anywhere with girls would suffice. It also proved for a good photo opportunity.

eric aka tangy pimped out

lacrosse_20 & cracked content totally gone

me and mystery the PUA

I decided to convince Mystery the big pimp dude to roll with us, figuring his skills would surround me with glorious women all night, but boy was I wrong.  The guy decided to hang out with this one chick the whole night and didn’t share with any of us.  Anyway we got to the club, they said they were full until I demanded 5 bottles of goose, at which point we were promptly let to a private booth a couple booths down from E-40.  Pretty much everything at Body English was a total blur to me, all i remember is running around with a bottle of Greygoose and bringing girls back to our booth, total madness.

Once the smoke had cleared, the club was closing and everyone was heading their seperate ways, except for me, Rocco (ironlogik), mystery and his chick.  So we went upstairs to the 11th floor where there was an apparent after party in one of the suites. We somehow lost Mystery and his chick but wound up inside this private suite with a live DJ and a bowling alley, not to mention girls dancing on poles and total debauchery everywhere.  I cant remember much, but what I do remember was bowling a strike between some hot girls legs, somehow, and this is one of those stories that stays in Vegas.

rocco (iron logik) and some ladies

After getting back to the palms it was about 8am and I was shit wasted, I walked up to the roulette table and put $100 on black just to see if I could hit, I mean I had bowled a strike earlier and won a poker game piss drunk, I should be able to do this. But alas the casino edged me out when it bounced out of black into a red square at the last second, my signal to go pass out.

Day 3 rolled around and I finally made it to the conference around 3 in the afternoon, once everything seemed to be dying down, and after such an epic night i was simply taking it easy.  I hit the conference for a bit, grabbed some affiliate schwag, and then went to the poker tables to try and recoup my losses from the previous nights festivities. After a few hours and up a couple hundred I left the poker room at the Rio and met up with team Canada and shoe money’s crew for a limo ride to spearmint rhino, spared no expense.

Upon my arrival to the rhino we got a bottle of goose, and just lounged back and tried to resist the temptation to drop thousands of dollars on scantily clad women.  I find that if you just talk to the hired guns as if they are normal people, you can end up getting much more than a lap dance if you know what I mean.  Ten free lap dances later I got up to find everyone missing, cue the Vegas girls I had met down there to come pick my drunk ass up.  We made our way back to the palms where there was a shitload of people trying to get into the Copeac invite only party, of which I forgot to get an invite for.  After attempting to bribe the bouncer to let me up and failing miserably, I went to the playboy club for some drinks and more scantily clad women (of which there is no shortage in Vegas).  At this point a bunch of people were gathering to head over to XS nightclub which was apparently one of the hottest new spots in Vegas, I however was totally burned from the last two all nighters and decided to crash early, or else I wouldn’t make it through the next day.  And so drew an uneventful close to my night.

The last day of the conference allowed me to sober up a little bit from all the past days/nights festivities and recoup for what we actually came to Vegas for, networking with affiliates and networks.  I hit the floor early and made a point of talking to and meeting my AM’s from Neverblue, Maxbounty, Copeac, A4D and C2M.  Out of all of them, Id have to give C2M the nod for being the coolest, most down to earth network out there. With Ads 4 Dough a close second.  They dont bullshit when it comes to your offers, and they are straight up and will simply tell it to you like it is, something that has dissappeared in this industry.  So its nice to meet some real people in this industry that aren’t just money hungry and only looking out for themselves, because lets be honest here, none of those networks would be anywhere if it wasn’t for their affiliates.

After about 3 laps of the exhibit hall, and about 30 business cards later, I decided to call it a day, and headed back to my Palms suite to see what kind of trouble I could get in that evening.

So I signed up way back when they launched, status updates seemed like a cool thing at the time.  But then I totally forgot about that fleeting twitter account, and just earlier today came across a hilarious video entited “twitter whore“.

Now if watching that isn’t enough to turn you off twitter for the rest of your life, well… Either way, I decided I would log into my twitter account to brush off the cobwebs, and what do I come across?

Twitter was down:

So I’ve come to the conclusion that I think I am pretty much done with Twitter, that is unless something useful for it comes along and I can manipulate it in a way to make a profit.

Sort of a continuation of my previous post, Firefox has decided to take it one step further and attempt to set a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours, and if anyone can do it, Firefox 3 can.

They have setup an affiliate page in pretty much every language you can think of with banners like the one below, so if you haven’t already, click below and pledge your allegiance to Firefox 3, and help set a world record. And if you decide to sign up to their affiliate program over at spreadfirefox.com you can earn points for your efforts which can win you t-shirts, if thats your thing.

At the time of writing this they are at roughly 175,000 users who pledged to download on the release day, and firefox itself had been downloaded 562992952 times, finally people are pushing IE under the carpet.

So go ahead and pledge to download Firefox 3 and set a Guinness World Record. I voted but im pretty sure it will come down to what the superdelegates want.

Update:

Download day is today!

With the impending release of the newest version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, I figured it would be a good time to influence anyone who is still living under a shell to make the switch.

And while the official release of 3.0 hasn’t dropped yet, (due this Friday I believe), after using it for a few hours it looks like its the best browser yet. So without further adieu, here are 7 more reasons for you to switch from IE, Opera or whatever else you may be using like Lynx or Nutscrape.

1. More Secure

A big part of browsing the web is making sure you stay away from popups and virus’ that can make your surfing experience a living hell. Well now Firefox has allowed you to click on the site favicon to see who owns the site and to see if your connection is protected. Your identity verification is prominently displayed and is now easier to interpret.

2. Vast Performance Improvements

The latest release of Firefox has more than doubled the speed of their last relase, but perhaps the most staggering number is the 9.3 times it is faster than the Microsoft counterpart of Internet Explorer 7. So if you haven’t already made the switch, this fact alone is more than enough of a reason.

3. Smart Location Bar

Firefox 3′s address bar has a smart location bar so when you begin to type in a site or location, it will be able to interpret which site you are going to visit. The bar learns through repetition so the next time you type “Lo” it should take you to this site instead of Andrew Lo’s website.

4. Smart Bookmarks

The smart bookmarks function now allows you to place your bookmarks by how often you visit them. It will analyze your browsing habits and only show the most prevalent bookmarks sorted by “Most Visited”, “Recently Bookmarked” and “Recent Tags”

5. Improved Download Manager

The new download manager is much more streamlined so that you will never wonder where that lost download went. It will resume big downloads after crashes and it will also keep status bar info on your downloads without the need for the “Download Statusbar” plugin.

6. Add-ons Manager Easier to Use

The new and improved Firefox takes another step toward perfection with a vastly revamped Add-ons Manager that allows even greater extensibility with their extensions, which is one the main reasons I love Firefox. You can now search and install extensions/themes right from the manager pop-up box, without any need to visit publishers sites.

7. Overall More Useful & Intuitive Interface

On the first glance at Firefox 3.0 you can see right away that its about a million times better than IE will ever be, even with their oodles of money. The back button only appears if there is a page to actually go back to, and it is no longer on its own, it is now part of the address bar. Firefox 3 also enables you to increase the size of images and text, which can be helpful for those hard to read sites. There is stronger protection for phishing schemes and malware, as well as other tools that may compromise your computers security, and does so by checking against Google’s blacklisting.

All in all a very intuitive browser indeed. Not much else need be said, if you still use IE, well then your just ignorant. Do us all a favor and make the switch.

This has been a hot topic in the SEO world for the past while now. I want to drop my bit of wisdom and share from experience what I have seen and heard. Many say that site wide links are extremely harmful and that search engines such as Google are now penalizing sites for this. Others say it is very profitable as a simple link exchange across one site can provide you with hundreds or even thousands of good links. So what to think for this?

I personally have many site wide link exchanges and from this I have learned a few things:

• Do not get to many to fast! The age of your site and the age of the linking site is of ultimate importance here. You do not want to exhcange links with every site out there just because you can. Be picky and choose sites that have been in existence longer than 1 year, sites that have good SE rankings, sites with a decent page rank, and sites with like content.
• Think before you act! Research the site(s) you plan to request a site wide link from. See how they stack up against their competition. Make sure your link won’t be #196 on the site. Does the site provide legitimate and helpful content? These are just a few of the factors to research.
• Don’t always seek after site wide link exchanges! Just like you don’t always order the exact same things at a restaurant, don’t ONLY go for site wide links.
• Try to get some links on specific articles pertaining to your site’s content, try to get a single link in a visible area on a high trafficed site, and so on.

I hope this clears up a bit of confusion. Site wide links can be a very good thing when used effectively and in moderation!

So for this april fools, instead of rick rolling you fools into the next millenium I decided to do something different.

One of the best when it comes to April fools, has to be the internet giant Google. This year they decided they would let you search into the future with a neat little box that allows you to search for future sites, and the hilarity ensues.

And if you haven’t had enough Rick Astley for two lifetimes then Youtube made sure of that by forwarding all their featured videos on http://uk.youtube.com/ to the infamous video. Youtube also has the BBC documentary on penguins based off of the TV series “Planet Earth” im guessing.

Another winner has to be thinkgeek, who every year comes up with a selection of farcical products to enlighten their shoppers. Taking a look at their homepage today will show Super Pii Pii Bros, a game for the Wii where you would imitate urination, as well as an onslaught of other hysterical products. (ie. The USB pregnancy test.. lol)

ESPN also decided to join in the fun with a farce to play on the current political campaign, naming it “Election Deathmatch” whereas they poke fun at pretty much all political parties running for office, as well as the boneheads currently residing.

And if you still haven’t had enough April Fools jokes, you can signup with google’s latest venture to mars for sustainable development, coined “Virgle”.

Either way, enjoy the fun this April Fools day, and dont get sidetracked from all the jokes and forget about your real work!