Howdy!

In case you didn’t know, we are having a poker tournament!

The great news is that the Venetian is busting their behind to get us approved so it will be a charity tournament, and it looks like it probably will be. It will be up to the Venetian now!

The above is the final graphic for the poker tournament.

I and another designer have had our hand in it too, but it is 98% Dean!

Now we have to choose the colors. The graphic will go on the back, but these show it on the front. All American Apparel t-shirts.

Take a look at the options, and then I am going to ask you to vote.

In reality the colors will not be as bright, or as clear on a t-shirt.
This first one was olive.

This one is asphalt

This one is black.

This one is natural color.

This one was white.

NEXT QUESTION

Should we put this emblem on the chest?

THIRD AND LAST QUESTION:
Should the sponsors logos be down the arm?
This is just a fast crummy drawing to give you the idea.

Click Here to take survey
YES SERIOUSLY – PLEASE GO TAKE THE SURVEY – 15 SECONDS!

I would like us to all give a standing round of applause to the following companies for stepping up and giving us our beloved poker tournament this year.

Azoogle Ads hit it out of the park with what they did! They basically proved that even in a supposedly crummy economy, if you know what you are doing, you can deliver value to your customers and thrive! Good job Azoogle, and thanks so much for all the help! Without their help, we might well not have been able to have a poker tournament! Azoogle has some big surprises coming out in the near future, so keep your eyes on them!

Shoemoney, as the head of Fighters.com took the lead and was the first one to spearhead the poker tournament. He’s Shoemoney! He dipped into his sacred shoe, and all I can say is he has been very, very, very generous with us! From the bottom of my heart! Thank You!

We Build Pages stepped up too! They also asked me to pass on a huge chunk of their change to Heaven Can Wait, a really cool doggy and kitty place that keeps them from having babies, and keeps the extra ones from having to check out!

Neil Patel introduced me to his buddy who runs Epiar. They are a very cool company that does SEO, and have their own search engine. They have a really cool tool I was reading about that gives you a mess of negative key words to use when doing PPC and other aplications, that I am very curious about.They kick out like 10,000 negative keywords. Their stats on this are through the roof allowing wasted money on PPC to go way down! Without giving away some of the future surprises, all I can tell you is that Ken the president has a fantastic sense of humor.

Easy Tweets jumped in and signed up as soon as they heard about the sponsorships. I have been playing with the Beta of the tool, and it just makes a lot of tweeting easier. Hence the name! It is easy to use and self explanatory.

The Unique Blogging Design guys came through with this theme. What do you think? I spent an hour on the phone with Nate describing what I wanted, a few weeks later Nate told me to check my themes and blammo! There it was! They really pulled through to give the tournament the image and feel it deserves.

Michael Dorausch of Planet Chiropractic also kicked in for a final help to make the tournament even better. Michael is a great friend and a fellow chiropractor. I told him I just love to have the word chiropractic on the t-shirts!

Kevin K. from Chipotle is a man on a mission armed with killer burritos. I told Kevin we were having the poker tournament again. He just asked how many burrito certificates we needed. I smiled. He smiled. The next time I saw him he delivered a grip load of certificates for the winners. There are way over a 100!

Dean Yeagle, the famous playboy cartoonist is doing the graphic for us. I love it. I hope you do too! Huge thank you Dean! The guys (and gals) are going to love it!

The final supporter of the tournament is also the first, Best of The Web. Gregg Hartnet who started it pretty much invented the internet. Greg is an amazing guy who has been involved with a lot of plays on the internet, is a way, way cool, laid back guy, and is your friend even if you haven’t met him yet. Thank you so much bro, I am proud to have you part of it. He also fricken loves poker!

The charity portion of the tournament? We are currently pushing the Nevada Gaming Commission to approve the charity portion of the tournament. My hands are tied until this gets through. Then we have to get it through the Venetian Casino legal department. If it does not turn out to get approved in time to be a charity poker tournament, it will still be a tournament, with oddly more money left over for the purse! If you are in the mood to make a donation, I highly recommend Heaven can Wait, or the Xtreme Couture GI Foundation! Stay posted until the Nevada Gaming Comission and the Venetian sort it out!

Last year the only complaint we got was that there were not enough cocktail waitresses. I am currently working with the Venetian on a solution to this, so you can enjoy yourselves in the velvety comfort of the Venetian Poker Room!

It is going to be a mind blowing time in Vegas. I say to turn off the T.V., create your own economy like the people mentioned above are doing! Let’s have some fun, make new contacts, share new ideas, and creates some new value on the internet that no one has even thought of yet!

Some of the partnerships and businesses that have already come out of the Think Tank are mindblowing! There are is no shortage of opportunity out there for those who are ready to create things of value! Join me and the companies above in creating a new vibrant economy full of creativity, value, and most of all…fun!

I came across an interesting Digg analysis tool. It let’s you analyze your digg submissions and your friends list to figure out which of your friends are digging your stories and which are not. The tool also shows you who in the digg community consistently digs your stories. These are your fans, and people you want to add to your friends list, since they already have your back.

The tool is useful for those looking to find out where to invest their time, friendship and resourses on Digg. It also lets you quickly see who to remove from your friends list if they are not digging your posts and taking up your time, you can cut them loose like dead wood.

It is a raw tool, and doesn’t have any fancy graphics, but you can tell there is some hard core programming behind it. Don’t expect a fancy UI. It takes a minute or two to run its majic, and then you will be shocked when you see the results. Nope, no body paid me this to write this, and I have no financial ties to the site. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you how I found out about it either Check out the Digg tool!

A few things are now set in stone.

We are having the poker tournament, of course!

Here is a peek of the poker graphic. There is a whole girl there though, trust me! The drawing is done by Dean Yeagle, famous cartoonist and illustrator for Playboy Magazine. He is doing this graphic just for us and our poker tournament!

We are also having a FightClub taught by Shawn Tompkins, the fight trainer of Randy Couture, at Randy’s personal gym where he works out regularly. FightClub will be on the Tuesday of Pubcon at 2:45 2:15 in the afternoon, and over at 4:00 3:30. Apologies to whoever is speaking at that time.

The fight training will be in the same practical fighting skills used by real UFC fighters. It is going to be taught at whatever level you are at. Most of us are absolute, trip over our own toes beginners.

At ThinkTank more than one person said that the fight training may have been the best experience of their life. Wow! At the worst it is good exercise, and you will learn practical skills you hopefully will never have to use in real life.

Those on my mailing list will be getting the secret code to register later today or tomorrow for both events. Jump on it, as I expect both things to sell out fast. If you are not on my list, then let me know who you are and you just may get on my list!

The art for the t-shirts and graphics for the tournament is almost done. As soon as we get the last few sponsors wrapped up this week, we will be able to finish it.

We still may have room for a few more sponsors at the less expensive levels. Just get in touch if you are interested.

Hello ThinkTankers and others looking for a badass website that you can make money with at potentially a very low cost.

At the ThinkTank Rhea announced a competition where attendees were split into teams, and they had a chance to work with each other in building a site that would be auctioned off. We had a bunch of great prizes.

Here are the two sites.

Team Captain: Chris Hedgecock
nameyourownpriceforanything.com

Team Captain: Sebastian Schepis
zappisearch.com

These sites will be sold in 14 days to the highest bidder.

In reality what ended up happening at the ThinkTank, was that a bunch of the guys were so into other fun activities that they chose those instead. At any given second at ThinkTank there was a lot going on.

It just so happened that two of the teams had crazy, mad, massive experience, stay up all night for decades kind of programming skills. The two of them coded out projects that are actually amazingly impressive. If I had paid someone to code these I would have expected to pay a gripload!

Bidding will end on Sunday, November 2nd. at high noon, Pacific Time. The exact second it ends will be determined by me with my watch on my hand and not up for discussion.

A percentage of the proceeds will go to breast cancer prevention, a small percentage to Rhea for setting up the contest, a small percentage to me to cover the (three hundred?) bucks I spent on gift cards for the competitors to use. And the rest will go to the team captains. If the captains did all the work themselves, then they should just keep that dough. If other team mates helped, then they can divy it up as they see fit!

Payment will be due within 1 hour of the end of the auction. If not received by then, I will work my way down the list of bidders until a winner is found that can pay imediately.

To bid, just leave a comment below. Put the name of the site, either nameyourownpriceforanything.com or zappisearch.com, and a maximum price you will pay. If you want to bid on both sites, then leave a comment for each site, each bid. If a bid looks ambiguous, then I will skip it.

Both sites will be sold, each one to the highest biddder.

Anyone can bid unless for some strange reason it was illegal where you are and then you can’t.

That means that even the team captains themselves can bid.

As for the team captains! The winner will have their choice between $1,000 of either trademark or copyright legal services from Dana Robinson, a kick ass attorney! Or an $800 pair of custom made esquevel shoes!

Feel free to tweet about this contest, blog about it, or whatever else you would like to do.

I think both of these sites are badass and want to get these guys as good a price as possible!

Feel free to ask the designers questions in the comments below. You will get the software running the sites as well as the domain names.

Here are the programmers descriptions of what they are.

ZAPPI SEARCH

Zappi Search is a search engine that aggregates multiple data feeds into one search result page, which is monetized based on your search context. When you search for a keyword on ZappiSearch.com, you are presented with the top search results for:

Web – ZappiSearch.com results yahoo web search results
Shopping – shopping results for amazon – your affiliate link is embedded in, so you make money when someone clicks through and buys from amazon
Auctions – auction results for ebay – your affiliate link is embedded in, so you make money when someone clicks through and buys from ebay
Images – ZappiSearch.com gives you image search results from Yahoo
Video – ZappiSearch.com gives you video search results, aggregated by Yahoo
News – the latest news on your keyword, aggregated by yahoo
Blogs – the latest blog results for your keywords
Articles – the latest articles for your keywords from ezinearticles.com

Dynamic thumbnails are created from search results, so you can see where you’re going before you get there.

You can also see more results for each search type.

ZappiSearch is highly monetized. You can plug in several PPC ad XML feeds for the PPC ads at the top and the right-hand site of the search results – ZappiSearch will aggregate and sort the ads and put the highest paying ads at the top of the page. The ads you currently see are aggregated from 7Search, RevenuePilot, SearchAnyway, and SearchFeed.

You can also plug in your eBay and Amazon affiliate ID’s and make money that way.

You can also plug in any number of custom ads for any number of keywords – for example, the banner ads you see when searching for the keywords ‘mortgage refinancing’ are all affiliate ads from a CPA network.

NAMEYOUROWNPRICEFORANYTHING

It is basically an ebay niche store on steroids. A user can search for any product at any price. For example, a chargers jersey for $50 or less:

http://www.nameyourownpriceforanything.com/search/chargers+jersey/50

It is completely optimized for organic SEO, in both its simple keyword-rich code structure and url structure. In addition, each search that returns a result is added to the tag could and the sitemap for spidering. So this site has unlimited pages, each new search is potentially a new page. We use the youtube API to grab some related content for each search as well.

Monetization is through eBay’s Partner Network and Google’s Adsense.

Site Team Captains, feel free to ad anything you like below! Readers, ask questions, bid, and let the competition begin!

Jeremy just wrote a post about how to have a blog contest, and I still have some prizes here that were never given away at the ThinkTank.

SITE BUILDING CONTEST

We ended up with two great entries for the domain finding, and site building contest,

Name Your Own Price for Anything from Chris Hedgecock’s team.

Zappi Search from Sebastian Schepis’s team, Team Tumbler.

As soon as I get a good description from Chris, we are going to sell these two sites, here on my blog. The winning team captain is going to recieve the proceeds of the sale of their site (after expenses and charity donation), plus $1,000 of either trademark or copyright work by Dana Robinson the attorney.

What these guys did programming wise is absolutely amazing. So if you are looking for a good bargain, on a site you can buy, develop and monetize, take a look at them.

As anyone who knows me or reads my blog knows, I am a huge Chipotle fan, and they are huge Purpose Inc. fans. I am going to try a min contest here and see what happens. If no one else enters, then I will!

BURRITO CONTEST

Leave a comment below.

Tonight when I get home from work I will approve all of the comments, except for the spammy ones.

Based on the number of entries, when I get home from the chiropractic office, I will then generate a random number for this random number site. I will then count down from the top of the comments until I get to the number that was generated by the random number generator.

The winner gets a beautiful playing card from Chipotle, that can be turned in to any Chipotle location for a free burrito, salad or bowl!

If one of my foreigner contestants wins, we will place a burrito in a box and send it to you. (Just kidding). If a foreigner wins, I will announce it here, offer them the burrito certificate for their next trip to the U.S., and then go on to the next winner.

ThinkTank was non stop, never a break and the fun just kept rolling.

I have a whole slew of prizes left over for the ThinkTank attendees.

We still have the online contest to finish off too!

Stay tuned to this blog for details for the ThinkTank attendees about how they can win the fun prizes.

There are at least $5k+ of actual prizes still to be released!

Thanks for being patient.

We have now gone full bore on planning for the big poker event on November 13th.

Dean Yeagle, the playboy cartoonist is currently working on the artwork for the t-shirts and other give away stuff. It should be off the hook.

I am also going to get to work with the Unique Blog Design guys on a site redesign just for the poker tournament. I will be releasing info here about them as we go. It will be a great case study for anyone thinking of using Unique Blog Designs.

Pubcon is going to be soo much fun!

dk

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

- Thomas Jefferson

Forgive me if I create disagreements with anyone with this quote. Anyone who knows me knows that I work my ass off. Even if I look like I am having fun, throwing a big party, or spending a day surfing, it is rare that a week goes by that I don’t work 80 hours. I run a handful of businesses, two of which are doing fantastic at the moment.

If I don’t open my mouth now, I will have no one to blame if things get worse.

The financial markets you see on T.V. are simply that, stuff you see on T.V. As internet business folks, we are the masters of the pitch, or the spin, of showing news the way we want it to be seen. If you watch T.V. and think it is anything more substantial that what we read on each others blogs, then you may not really be paying attention when you watch T.V.

When I looked outside this morning, the same sun was still there, the same grass, the same trees. Nothing is really fundamentally different than it was a decade, or two decades ago. Maybe the pollution is a bit worse, the crowding is a bit worse, and technology has improved, but the basic rules still remain.

I just came off of a weekend hanging with a bunch of millionaires.

I’ll be the average ThinkTank attendee has lost at least $200k during the most recent downturn in the stock market. Did anyone at the ThinkTank care? Not a word I heard out of anybody.

What were they talking about? New idea, new implementations, new ways to help each other, and to help mankind at large.

See there is no such thing as a shortage of money in our country, or anywhere else in the world. And if for some reason the government doesn’t print enough money, then there is always something you can trade.

In fact last week was one of the best weeks I have ever had financially, even without the ThinkTank.

If you can’t find a job, then you can create one. And while you are at it, create a dozen more for your friends and those around you.

The internet is free to all of us. The internet itself has all the tools you need to learn how to program. I don’t know anyone who knows how to program in PHP going hungry right now

If you have trouble studying let me know, and I will point you toward how to learn.

Build some sites, hook up with Azoogle or one of the other add networks and make a little money. Go door to door and ask the local businesses if they would like a site that is number one for their city/profession in Google, and if they don’t know how, for a fee you can show them. Always plenty of stuff to be done!

Take a look at this image and you will see that over the past 100 years, the stock market has gone up and down and up and down, but long term has gained roughly an 8 percent per year increase. All my cash is in the stock market right now, as I consider stocks to be great bargains at the moment. Can the stock market drop another 20 or 30 percent? Sure. No biggie.

The fundamentals will always stay the same. If your skills are good, and you are willing to work hard there will always be work to do, and things to make. There will always be others who can make stuff, or grow food, who will trade with you. Even if every piece of money in the world burned up today, and all the computers were wiped clean, we would all just wake up the next morning and get to work.

The numbers clicking on T.V. are simply a wake up call for those who have not been following financial basics. Save money, work hard, take care of yourself so you can continue to work hard. And by the way, study. Study, study, study, study, so you can get better at doing what you do, and become better yourself.

Wherever you live, it is your country, create it into what you want it to be.

And what to do when they preach doom and gloom on T.V.?

Turn off the T.V. and go make some money, exercise, or teach a kid to read!

When you get back, nothing much will have changed.

The earth will still be flying through space at 18 miles a second. In face, face west, close your eyes, lean forward and feel the speed!

October 24th and 25th will be Scary SEO in Florida. It is near Halloween, so hence the “Scary” part!

I am proud and impressed with Dave Snyder for dong this.

Putting on an event like this requires a huge burst of confidence, because you never know if anyone is going to sign up! And whether they do or don’t you have committed to a bunch of money and time.

It sounds like it is going to be a very casual, small event focused on SEO.

My good buddy Pamelund, is going to make her public speaking debut there. I predict that a lot of people will be shocked at how incredibly deep her knowledge goes in SEO. Most people would have no idea that she spent years managing over a 100 people building and SEO’ing websites. She is mostly known for, “Wow, she’s hot!”, and then about 2 hours later the person is writing notes and asking her questions. I expect when she speaks most of the “guys” in the audience will quietly say to themselves, “wow she’s hot”. So tip to Pam, don’t say anything of significance until about 1 minute into your talk because they will still be checking you out.

If you knew Dave’s backstory, he has faced obstacles as big as the ones myself and Shoemoney have. I will let him tell his own story though.

There are a bunch of good people signed up for the event, it’s in Florida, and it definitely is not your typical SEO event.

It only costs $200 to attend.

Unless my math totally tanks it looks like they have room for about 10 more people.

Good job Dave! Rock on! And have a scary time!

Sorry for being so slow in getting the photos out.

It literally took us an entire day to clean out our storeroom of things we overbought for the ThinkTank. I had heard so many complaints about conferences where there was lousy food, not enough food, two drink tickets handed out, that we spared no expense to make sure we had wayyyyy too much of everything.

I am going to get out version one of the contact list today. Then when a few more names and contact info roll in, I will send out an updated one.

I will also get a group teleconference rolling soon.

Here is the first photo to roll out. It is Ryan Sessler of Sure Hits fight club. One of the most beautiful things about this event that I heard come up over and over, was the spirit of cooperation amongst the attendees. You didn’t see people with big egos, or a lot of trying to one up each other. In other worlds, Sure Hits and Epic/Azoogle are competitors. But at the ThinkTank they were buds having fun at each others events. We saw this kind of thing over and over. A lot of it had to do with the environment. There was a lot more fun stuff to do, than try to out business each other. Also, I think with many or most of our attendees being millionaires many times over, there is no longer any pressing need to compete with each other.