Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

Wow! My wife and I just got back from snowmobiling all day in yellowstone. Buffalo blocking the road, an eagles nest, elk, geysers, steaming hot pots, snow, just flying down the road! A private guide! One of the greatest days of my life.

Love you all! Happy New Years!

Now for dinner and fun in a one horse town!

My wife and I are sitting in the middle of Eastern Utah in a snow storm snuggled up in a Fairfield Inn. Pretty comfy. I am not a master of driving in snow, and it was pretty intense driving up from Vegas.

When we got here the snow was blowing horizontally. I crouched behind the car and watched it fly over me in the light. It was a truly beutiful moment.

I wanted to take a minute away from my precious time with my wife to comment on this past year.

The internet business world, all you guys, have been so kind to me over the past year.

I even had people wait in line to talk to me and get a photo at Pubcon. Pretty flattering.

I know I will forget a lot of names, so I will only throw out a couple.

In order, I have been massively helped by The Webmaster World Gang, Danny Sulivan, Matt Cutts, Pamela Lund, Neil Patel, Jeremy Schoemaker, the BOTW crew, the Azoogle crew, the Ninjas, Epiar, and then all the rest of you too numerous to mention in my blurry semi concious state. I can not thank you guys as a group enough.

Purpose Inc. has become well known, and for the most part well thought of this year.

Target one completed.

I think we also helped our friends and sponsors a ton too which was very satisfying.

I honestly love you guys a lot.

In the future I would love to see us use our power as a group, this power we have to show the world information, and use it more and more to promote what is good and wonderful on this planet!

Merry Christmas!

dk and the purpose inc. crew!

A few weeks ago I spent the better part of two days with a gentleman who is one of the most powerful people on Digg talking about future business opportunity. I have also been meeting recently with a company who has just started doing millions of dollars in revenue per month. One of the largest affiliate companies in the world, is including my events as part of their budget next year. I also just set up an event for the Elite Retreat which will be one of the biggest interfaces between internet marketers and a huge online company this year.

But none of this meant anything to me until I won the Streko award.

Early last week I recieved a red velvet envelope, with an invitation inside. A man in a simple blue suit arrived in a limosuine and handed it to me personally. It was an invitation to the most respected and talked about event in the interent business world, the Streko awards. The man in the suit whispered that I was in contention for the presegious top 20 list.

When I attended the awards all the usuals one would expect were there. What impressed us all the most, was when Mr. Streko arrived, walking with a slight limp and a cane (recovering from a recent hunting accident in Borneo), he walked slowly onto the stage, looked into the auidience and cried. He then lead the audience on a 2 hour journey of his love for humanity, his personal quest for human rights, and his passion for saving the Borneo rainforest.

What held our attention so much was not just the amazing stories he wove so full of passion and hope for the future, but mostly the delicate and articulate language he uses. I looked to my left at Sugar Rae, who tilted her glass of champagne, a tear in her eye, and said simply, “hear! hear!”

Shoemoney and Aaron Chronister both utterred a chuckle when they met in the lobby, Jeremy wearing his new all white long coat with tails, white pants and whit top hat, and Aaron in his usual all black coat and tails, with his black top hat, one the negative of the other.

I kept my acceptance speech to a minimum to show respect to all of those who have helped me and supported me so much.

The evening ended with Pamela Lund singing Frank Sinatra’s I Get a Kick Out Of You, to a standing ovation.

As anyone who has won an Oscar, the Nobel Prize, or a Streko can tell you that it comes with a curse. It is a celebration of a lifetimes achievement. An honor so high that the only direction one can go is down.

Shoemoney campaigning for a possible place on the Streko top 20

So, I have enjoyed my moment at the top, and will now enjoy the plummet from grace accompanied by all of those who will hate me as a result of my award. As I grow old, no one will be able to rob me of the moment that Michael gave me by awarding me the P.W.D.S.

Thank you!

For a change, I am going to take some time off. My wife and I are heading north. It is pretty funny because she is from Norway, and totally used to the cold. I have no idea what to do. Once when she asked me to climb on top of a big snow drift, I asked her if it was possible to fall in the center or if it would hold me up?

The plan, still subject to change, is to drive to Vegas, stay at the Wynn a few nights, then head north. Off to Aspen, to ski/snowboard for half a week, then drive further north to Yellowstone. You can’t drive a car into yellowstone during the winter, so we have arranged for these cool snow cats that carry you in on. Their bottoms have skis and tractor belts.

Once we are in yellowstone, we have reservations for a few nights in these little cabins in the middle of nowhere. It turns out there are still grizzly bears in Yellowstone. I thought they were extinct. I am just imaging wandering outside the cabin at night with grizzly bears.

Then we have a private guide to take us on snowmobiles around yellowstone.

It will be pretty adventurous. The funny part is that you realize that hundreds of years ago, native Americans lived there, grizzlies, snow and all. The only way you could survive was with what you could find in the woods. They did have thermal ponds which they could use as jacuzzis which I am sure made it much easier to get through the winter.

We’ll see how the city/surfer kid does in the snow.

Stay tuned!

Joe Laratro get’s interviewed by Vanessa Zamora at Search Engine World.

Joe really taught me a lesson my first year speaking at Pubcon, when I totally bombed, and he showed me how to really get the audience’s attention.

In this video, Joe, a very creative online marketer, does a beautiful job of getting my interest by talking about my talk during Pubcon on local. In fact I didn’t even really talk, but you can hear Joe discuss it.

I have consistently learned that one of the simplest, most effective ways to get someone’s attention, and get links from them, is simply to talk about them. Linking to them gets their attention even more, (hint – hint).

Remember, most of us who are active on the internet have wordpress blogs that let us know if you link to us. Even if your blog has no value, no pagerank, you will still get someone’s attention if you link to them.

These guys have a blog on Scottish Whiskey as well as other types. I don’t even drink, so never would have found their new blog if they hadn’t linked to my site from their blend of whiskey stories. Their site has a page rank of 0, but I found out about them because they linked to me. Want to have someone famous know about you? Link to them! Then you will have people like Brent Chase, Neil, Shoe, and the most important pair in the internet marketing world know about you. Then, maybe they will link to you one day? Then one day, you might even be noticed by the real power player in the internet business world, Barbara!

Remember, once you have a bit of clout, (Page Rank) it costs you to link out to others. But when you have a blog that is garbage, it costs you nothing to link to others, and lets them know you exist. If you link to a specific page on their blog, they will notice it much easier, than if you just link to the blog in general, since it will show up as a comment that needs to be approved.

Want me to notice you? Might as well link to me! 😉 It just makes sense!

A plane crashed real close to my house today. Real Close. We didn’t even hear it take place.

It was pretty amazing. My wife and I were sitting at our dinning room table planning our Christmas vacation. We are going skiing/boarding in Aspen, and spending some other days exploring the Rocky’s.

So while we are sitting there discussing the trip, and making reservations, this poor pilot is crusing out over the Pacific with a bad engine.

The Marines airport, Miramar, where they filmed Top Gun, is around 2 miles from the ocean. Real close to where we live.

This pilot is out over the ocean and his engine goes bad. I believe he was flying an F/A 18 hornet.

He had taken off from an aircraft carrier and was on his way to the airport by my house.

I hear one of his engines went bad.

So you are flying this multimillion dollar aircraft and you have a few options. I don’t know if they were his options, or his seniors. Regardless of what he was told, it ultimately was still his choice, he was flying the plane.

He had the option of ditching the plane over the ocean, ejecting, and hoping he gets picked up. The ocean is currently around 60 degrees, and you can survive in it for I am sure at least an hour, if not a lot longer. I know because I go surfing in it frequently. The other option is trying to save the plane and landing it at Miramar. The downside of that is you have to fly over my house. 🙂

He chose flying over the houses and landing at the airport.

From what I heard he was aiming down our canyon, the same canyon I occasionally go mountain biking in. At some point, around a quarter mile from the beginning of the military base his plane hit the ground. He had ejected a way back, parachuted down and landed in a tree. His plane hit a house, and killed at least a few people. I still don’t know if I know these people or not.

Imagine the guy who made the decision, and what must have gone through the pilots mind. From the Navy website it sounds like the plane costs around 50 or 60 million. They must have been weighing the costs and risks of the pilots life, the pilots training which I have been told by jet pilots costs around 1 million dollars, the risk of life of civilians which is bad, and also bad PR for the military, the cost of the plane, and the probabilities of which of the outcomes would take place. Meanwhile all of these things are taking place, really, really fast.

From watching them, it looks like it takes these planes less than a minute to get from the ocean to the air field. Remembering the Blue Angels fly over our house, so close that you can see the condensation form off the wings, I bet takes them more like 10 seconds to make that flight.

So you have very little time to make a decision that could take your own life, the life of others, and possibly cost the government 50 or 60 million dollars.

In the end the pilot, and possibly his senior, decided to shoot up the canyon and try to make the airport.

They didn’t make it.

Came fairly close to my house too.

My condolences to the friends and surviving family of those killed. Happy to help in any way I can.

The poor pilot survived. Landed in a tree. I am guessing he is going to feel really bad about what happened. I might even know him.

Decisions sometimes need to be made in split seconds, and the results can be massive. I have found that the business decisions I make today, can have a huge effect on my business, myself, and my family for years or more to come.

In the internet industry we have a lot of power, and effect the opinions of thousands or sometimes millions of people.

As we get closer to Christmas may I invite you to look at what you are doing, and the consequences it will have months, years, and generations down the road.

Maybe make a change now, so when the time comes, you can avoid that last minute decision?

I’ve made some changes for the better because of this, and I enourage you to join me in helping to make this a better planet. 🙂

If all the text below makes you dizzy, follow the upcoming link to see pictures of your internet friends drinking with hot girls.

Summary of below:  Buy a Mac.

I am by no means a hard core programmer, but I have been using computers since you needed punch cards to enter the data. (pre-keyboards).

I bought my first PC around 1990, an IBM XT clone, then an AT, and then it seemed I got a new computer every year or more often.

It got to the most bizare crazy strange point when I decided I was sick of my computer crashing constantly, so I bought a brand new Dell, and then with the usual business needs whizzing toward me at a gazillion miles per hour, my new computer would not work, and I ended up on hold for over and hour, then to talk to a guy in who I couldn’t understand, only to have to send in my brand new computer.

Even after that I suffered through a few more PC’s. I got sick of my computer crashing constantly, and always needing to reboot which took three or four minutes.

I posted a thread at webmasterworld asking what people thought of alternating two machines, moving my data back and forth, and re-formating the hard drive each time and re-installing windows.

After the thread made the front page of Webmaster World, and the banter had gone on a bit, the Mac guys started speaking up. Their comments often went like this.

“Or just use a Mac”

At first I just dismissed their comments because real programmers don’t use Macs or Macs are more for artists or people learning computers. I am a real computer geek so need a real computer that can do complicated things! Like crash.

Then someone mentioned that a Mac has at its core a Linux type operating system. I knew that Matt Cutts used a Linux box, so I started investigating. Shoemoney told me that he uses a Mac. Then I started noticing that most of the guys I know, who are really in the know, use Macs.

So I went to the Mac store and got an Airbook.

I ran into a real snag trying to get it to run Windows, so left it sitting on the dinning room table for a few months.

Recently Outlook crashed and crashed hard. Apparantly the file size had gotten too big, but Windows would not let me open it to delete anything inside. After about 8 hours or work, I was able to figure out a way to handle the file. That was it, 8 hours wasted, “See ya Bill!”

Instead of trying to use Windows inside of my Mac, I just went to the Apple store a half mile from my house. When was the last time you went to a Windows store? I just bought the Mac version of all of the software I use. F the costs, let’s just get a machine that works.

The learning curve was a little painful. It has now been almost two months since I made the switch. The only programs that didn’t work easily were parallels, which was simply complicated to install windows inside of, and the Apple version of Excel called numbers. That program is beutiful with the graphics, but even with simple spreadsheets it can hang up and take 30 seconds to copy a set of cells from one place to another. So I ended up sucking it up and buying Office for home and students which works just great.

On average I bet I am getting well over 30% more done now on my computer, simply because I am not constantly fixing things. It may even be double what I used to.

You know how you will get a question about Windows and then spend the next 2 hours searching, and still never get it fixed, so you come up with some complicated work around using a freeware program you get on two cows? With Mac if I don’t know how to do something, I get on my bike with my Airbook in my backpack, and roll over to the Apple store. Some 22 year old kid with a mohawk and a pierced lip will smile at me and say, “Hi! Welcome to the Apple store”. I then bust out my Airbook, show him the problem, (It may be a girl with a pierced lip and eyebrow also), and then they say, here, just click on the Apple icon and then hold down the command key and press the smiley face! Then it works. In the words of Marcus Tandler that I have stolen lately, “Wow!”.

They have a genius bar that you can schedule an appointment for at no cost, and bring your problems to also. They got sick of me bringing so many problems there, so I was asked to sign up for one on one training. It costs $100 and you can get an apple geek an hour a week for a year to teach you private lessons on anything with an apple logo on it. I did manage to stump the guy on a few more advanced questions, but on my first lesson yesterday I covered so much material so fast in the same amount of time I would have been on hold waiting for someone at Dell to pick up.

One other amazing example is that I have decommissioned a few of my Windows computers the last few weeks. Removing a program in Windows requires opening a program to do so, waiting for it to populate removable programs, selecting one and waiting while the uninstall program for that program opens, then you click through removal options, only to wait while it tries to uninstall the program. Then you are greeted with an option of some of the files being shared and you can delete them if you want, but it warns you may crash another program in the future. Then when you are all done, it lists the files it was unable to delete because they were locked. And god only knows what still lurks in the windows registry when you are done that will crash your system in the future.

Want to uninstall a program in Mac? Click on the program. Hold down the Command key, and press delete.

I don’t know where Apple stock is at the moment, but I predict that in the coming decade they will dominate the market and it is too late for Microsoft to do anything about it.

Those were the words that Coach Tompkins said to me after the fight.

During the fight, the crowd kept breaking into spontaneous, RANDY!, RANDY!, RANDY! RANDY! chants. When Randy went down the last time, I started a lead of that chant, but my words ended up getting stuck in a lump in my throat.

Yeh, I got a knot in my stomach when Brock was pounding on Randy’s head, and a tear in my eye when the ref called the fight.

Three minutes later after taking a beating that would have sent me to the hospital or killed me, Randy was up, a smile on his face, a twinkle in his eye, thanking the crowd for their huge support, and making jokes about the fact that Brock is just, well, big! and that he could see those big ham hocks coming toward him!

Randy is a year older than me. How can I ever dare complain about anything or make an excuse about anything with him around?

He is a true champ, and I am so proud to be associated with him, his family, his coach, and his team!

I’ve never seen an individual who so deserves the name of champ. No matter what, Randy will always be the heavyweight champion of the world.

Congratulations to Brock for accomplishing the impossible. You have to give the guy credit, and a bow of respect for fighting and beating the unbeatable Randy.

My wife bought me tickets for my Christmas present, and even with the loss, it was one of the great nights of my life.

Here are pics from Thursday, two days before the fight, and from the fight itself.

Dave Dellanave meeting Randy the day before the fight.

Dave Dellanave met Ryan Couture, Randy's son.

Shoemoney remembers an old story with Frank Trigg that can not be told here 🙂

Dave Dellanave, Vinny and Junie from the Ultimate Fighter

Dellanave Shoemoney and dk watching the pros train.

Shoemoney Junie and Vinny

crowd couture fight

stadium crowd couture lesner

I ran into Joey Varner out in the lobby and bought him and his cute girlfriend drinks!

You can see Junie in the background with his hot girlfriend also!

I found Marcus Tandler (Mediadonnis) and friend!

Randy entered the ring with my buddy Coach Tompkins right by his side.

After the fight me, Rae Hoffman (Sugarrae), and Marcus Tandler connected in the crowd.

For those of you who don’t know her, Sugarrae is a famous internet marketer, blogger and SEO.

Me trying to get Rob to laugh!

Mediadonnis, Josh Haynes and dk. What makes it even more strange and fun is that Josh used to be a computer engineer.

gina carano with dk purposeinc

Coach Tompkins (Shawn) texted me that they were all meeting at Studio 54 so I shot over, and ran into Gina, Sam Stone, Junie, and a bunch of the other pros waiting at the bar next to it.

We went into studio 54, (Thanks Kim for getting us in!), which was a total madhouse! The crowd loves Randy, and just can’t get enough of him. Sam Stout was there, and you can see all the fighters just love to see each other and hang out. A lot of them live out of Vegas, yet they are still Couture boys all the way. Shawn is like a father to many of them.

Then on the way out, we ran into Mike Whitehead who you can never miss in a crowd! He introduced me to the cowboy who almost was in our poker tourney.

Heath Herring with dk

We then walked for a few million miles until we found the valet. We ran into Martin Kampmann. I never knew he was from Denmark. He sounds like he comes from Chicago, and has only been in this country for two years. Like everyone in the Couture camp, he is an incredibly warm and nice guy! He busted out his Danish in response to my wife’s Norwegian.

Then, back in San Diego, I was asked a couple of times by people today if Randy was going to retire now after that loss and his age. Each time I looked at them in disbelief and said, are you F-ing kidding me? He’s just getting started! 😉

The poker tournament, just like last year was fantastic and fun. Even though it was a little bit of hard work behind the scenes the players and guests had way too much fun.

Thank you Venetian for stressing and strugling with me to pull off such an amazingly fun event!

We had a non stop party that rolled until 3:00 a.m. starting Thursday night and ending Friday morning!

There will be more about it later, but tonight (Saturday), bleary eyed coming home from the Couture party after the fight, I am going to post a few pics then go to sleep.

The oddest moment tonight, was that after the after fight party, sitting with Martin Kampmann the pro fighter, and my wife in the valet, we figured out that Martin was Danish and had only been in the country for 2 years. I told him he sounds like he is from Chicago, and then him and my wife spoke in Danish and Norwegian to each other!

Look here to see more of Thursday nights poker pics!

At studio 54 in vegas with coutures
Wow