Affiliate Summit 2008 West Wrap Up

My thoughts on Jason's thing, all the other things and the PPC Ask an Expert session I hosted.

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Commission Junctions EPC Demystified?

I've been doing this about a year, and never did quite get CJ's EPC. Earning Per Click?? NO F---in way it is generating $230 per click! (I would think to my self)

Well turns out that is earnings per 100 clicks (or so I was told at Affiliate Summit).
It kinda makes sense in the sick twisted way CPM makes sense.
CPM (Cost Per 1000 Hits -- 1000 = Roman Numberal M)
EPC (Earnings per 100 -- 100 = Roman Numberal C)

So.. EPL = Earnings Per 50? LMAO

Ok so anyways, this is useful in setting your starting PPC. (Price Per Click -- Normally Pay Per Click... but w/e)

Lets say a program on CJ has earnings of $235 EPC.
This would mean they make 2.35 per click on average.

Say the payout of the offer is $55.

We now know how to get the conversion rate.

(If my math/logic is wrong tell me)

100 Hits Results in $235 in sales
$235 / 55 = 4.27
Which means 100 Hits Resulted in a 4.27% conversion rate (sounds about right...)
Lets cut that in half. (cuz I think conversion rates and things like that are ALWAYS inflated by merchants -- and it helps boost profits for me by giving me a different goal to reach for)

So now I have my conversion rate of 2.135%
Multiply That by the Earning Per Action (in this case $55)
$55 * 2.135% = $1.17425 (pretty decent starting price....)
Now I cut it in half
$0.587125

My starting bid for this offer would be around 60 cents.
And then I would adjust up or down once I had my own statistics.

Now an easy formula.

EPC = Earning Per 100
CPA = Cost Per Action
PPC = Starting Pay Per Click (Adjust later)

PPC = EPC/CPA/2/100*CPA/2

And if you play around with the math you can drop out the CPA

PPC = EPC / 400

I'll be revisiting this since it looks too simple.

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Man Is My Wife Awesome

We are eating dinner (which she made for me while I was laying in bed - watching tv). And she says "You know what? My Ideal Night Right Now Is To Play Rock Band With You And Then Watch Stargate SG-1 Till We Pass Out."

I suppose I should attach a picture or something... hold on, let me get one.

Here, we were in France and she thought this thing was cool.

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Crazy Things Affiliate Managers Do

Seriously. I get the weirdest emails. But sometimes I get absolutely great emails from Affiliate Managers.

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Clickfraud class action lawsuit and yahoo lowering min ppc

Well guess what I got in my email.

Yup, anyone who advertised on Miva, Lycos or searchfeed may be entitled to credits (or a refund, I'll have to read harder when I am awake)

Some lawyers made over a million dollars to make Miva and company refund traffic that people can claim was fraudulent. No word on how to prove your fraud traffic. They just have a form for you to submit how much traffic you got that you paid for that you think was fraudulent...

I think this is crazy. I never had a problem getting a refund from these guys when I asked for one. Somehow the lawyers and so on are making off with some nice coin while everyone else is filling out a form... *sigh* Well I better check the details on my history with these people and see if I can get some credits out of this....

I'll look at the details later and post more if there is anything worth talking about.

Oh yeah.. something about yahoo no longer requiring a minimum .10 bid on search (if you have a good quality score). LOL, only for search though. I rarely pay that low for search anyways.. Their content network is still stuck at a minimum .10 (good for them.. the content network isn't that great anyways. may as well charge more for it... WTF.. lower the min on the content network and raise the min on search... higher quality should cost more.. )

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Affiliate Summit Day 3 - Video (cuz I am tired)

After fighting quicktime and much searching I finally found a solution. The camera records in big quality MPEG1 Muxed.. quicktime pro can't shrink/convert them down without loosing the audio, thus.. no sound.

Solution Free Software From Apple: MpegStreamClip

Ok, now that I have won that battle, time to post a few videos.



A Bunch of Affiliate Summit Pics and Descriptions can be seen on flickr here.

Blue Man Videos.. from the Tao Party







I met a bunch of awesome people, I'll try and get specific in future posts..

Ian, Mark, The SOB Guy :), Shay (From Isreal--dude you have a site for me to point to?), David, and of course the famous people.. Shawn, Jim, John, Amit, Wil (always a fun speaker to listen to), Andrew, (I am sure I am leaving someone out, sorry if I did)

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Affiliate Summit Day 2 - Notes From SEO Session

Build my own DMOZ?

SEOMOZ blog is good

Speak at Colleges about your expertise for free (they will link to your site)

Meta Descriptions Tag ( Put offers in it.. like Free testdriver or whatever) dont waste time on keyword meta tag
meta tags are low in importance

meta keyword will/may apply for adsense/contextual ads

Yahoo Search Assist is better then google's
MSN AdCenter Excel Plugin cool

Do Keyword research before you write the content

Make "How To" videos (real, helpful videos) that are good you will get links...

Wil - Good Speaker he loves MSN's adIntelligence :)

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Affiliate Summit Day 2 - Notes From Domain Session

GeoTarget Domains..
CityNameAuto.com (for example)

Check the latin market

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Affiliate Summit Day 2 - Notes From Keynote

Notes From Keynote:
-KeyNote (unimpressive speaker, but I found one good ides from it)
How to do well
1) Find Spammy Site
2) Make a non-spammy version

When asked about what kind of affiliate marketing he doesn't think is spam. He said:
I like ads to be labeled ads, and said in the same breath "I don't know alot about your industry." (when talking about affiliate summit) If he doesn't know much about the industry, why is he telling us we are garbage?

Hey! I won $100

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Affiliate Summit Day 1 - Meet Market, Parties

Wow, quite a day. Spent several hours at the Meet Market (where you stop by everyone's desk to say hi and get to know people)--this is different from the booths and so on that all the exhibitors will have tomorrow. I met a ton of people there, traded cards with everyone. I had a few meetings already scheduled through contacts I made with the affiliate summit confab networking thingy.

The ShareASale party was a blast. I meet a lot of the "famous" guys in the industry. I'll post daily pics for a while when I can. But right now, I am finally tired, and am going to crash.

Today was essentially running around saying hi to people I don't know and finding out what they do and just trying to be a nice guy. It was the first time I have ever had to go and network at an event. Usually in the past I was just the tech guy and others were the networkers. It was a first for me and I completely enjoyed it.

My guide to networking (at a networking event--this won't work at, say the movies):
1) Find someone who isn't talking to someone else (they will usually be standing around looking-- sometimes they are looking for a friend, other times they are just lonely)
2) Say Hi, I am John (use your real name, duh) and shake their hand.
3) Ask them what they do.
4) Care what they do, and just chat with them about it. (If you don't care it is obvious-- you can't fake caring about people)
5) Ask them for their card, trade cards if it is appropriate.

Where else can I talk about subjects such as Snow in Minnesota, whether a guy with my same name looks like me (our noses are identical), Why the US and Iran have issues with each other, the finer points of industrial printer drivers, ways to drive PPC traffic, European affiliate marketing, video chat and holy cow.. so much other cool stuff I am probably leaving stuff out. Anyways it was fun, and much thanks to shareasale and everyone who helped in hosting it.

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Affiliate Summit Day 0 + Hotel Room Tour - Rio

Well other then a bunch of twitter activity not really involving me (not that I didn't try), not much happened. I did meet Alan Weissman of MyNursingUniforms.com by accident. Ended up meeting Durk Price of eAccountable.com as well. We talked for about 5-10 minutes. Nice people. (They said they liked my "handwritten" cards better -- Alan thought it matched my personality... I hope he meant that as a compliment :) )

The "Early Bird" event was a total bomb. I suppose I should have brought a sign or posted my cell number. I did eventually get it out on twitter, but twitter has been running 15+ minutes behind on the aws08 feed, so most people (I think) came and left. You would be surprised how many different groups wanted to meet in the lobby at 5pm.

I did a walking tour of the Rio. I almost bought a ticket the Penn & Teller's show, but I read a lot of bad reviews online so I decided to save my $85.

I had the cheapest tasting $35 steak I have ever had at the American Bar & Grill here. At least I am full and the service was excellent. (The line for the buffet was crazy, so I picked something else)

Here is a tour of my hotel room:



Oh yeah, last night I got to bed around 3amish. Rock band is a sleep killer. (Plus I got blisters from the drum sticks)

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The Business Card Looks Better

Ok, the new cards are here. I now have two different cards for Affiliate summit. The other cards are described here. The new cards look kinda plain, but they are less embarrassing :)

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Hillary Is Not To Be Out Done...

These videos are a riot.

First, the Obama one (this one isn't really funny, but it gives a reference for the others):




And.. The McCain Paradoy




Hillary (as usual) is in a class of her own with 2 videos...

This is by far my favorite, it is so corny you can feed yourself with it.






Not to be outdone, somone wants to win the corny award. (They come in a close second)

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Dumb Idea For Business Cards

Ok, so I am going to Affiliate Summit 2008 in Vegas in a week. I thought I'd try and be creative and make some unique business cards for handing out to people.

I researched all sorts of creative ideas. I looked at the plastic cards (more then I want to spend), the see through cards.. same. and so on.

I settled down on what I thought would be a neat idea.

See how it looks like I just grabbed a card and hand wrote all of my information? What a neat idea! Yeah, it looks kinda pathetic and sad.

Is it unique? Yes
Will it get attention? Probably not, they look like trash. When I first opened the box of cards I though, WTF?! Someone wrote All Over My Cards!!... oh wait. This is my writing. Man does this look bad... Even worse, I put a slight gradient on it that makes the card look old and dirty. LMAO (you have to see these things in person, the picture above doesn't do them justice).

Oh look, I found coupon for 25% off my next order... With rush delivery I'll get them the day before I leave.

I'll bring the new cards and these and let you decide which is better.

As a bonus, I suppose I can enter all the business card contests twice.

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Affiliate Summit Public Calendar

I am testing a public Calendar with Google. The link to the right has all my planned Affiliate Summit activities. In theory it will make planning on meeting with people a lot easier. Click on the big Google calendar button to the right and check the weekend of Feb 23-27th.

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