Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

Pamela Lund once said to me something like the day that Loren Feldman and myself are both in a room, the walls were going to cave in because of the noise. I haven’t met Loren yet, but his online stuff is funny, and he is quite loud and not afraid to speak his mind. But wait a second, I’ve been told the same thing!

I’ve been hearing wisps of this Audience conference, but really did not get it until I just read Shoemoney’s blog. It sounds amazing. I love the fact that it is intimate. I love the fact that there is no where to put your computer or write notes easily. I love the fact that is has some of the biggest and the best in the business, in the type of setting that will tilt them just a little bit and allow some of their juice to spill out in a different direction than the usual talks.

With Loren’s creativity I can only imagine what else he has in store.

Just the idea of Shoemoney on a theatrical stage if fantastic in itself. The guy is naturally very theatrical, and the setting is perfect for him. I just wish that Jeremy was going to sing too!

The event is very affordable, only $399. I honestly just clicked back to verify that is was that inexpensive and it is.

The Audience Conference is another wonderful example of what we can do when we don’t give a crap about badges, exibitor tables, or conference centers. I just love the idea of finding another unique way to connect the people to the speakers on the subject we all hold dear, the audience!

I just noticed that in addition to having Tech Crunch founder, Shoemoney and T.V. celebs, they are going to have things like a funky harp group playing as well. I love a good juxtoposition!

Not that most people would get it, but this event is literally historical in what it is doing.

I am actually quite excited, just to find out what happens!

Boy we are going to have fun.

We are sending out invites to sponsor today.

If you want to sponsor either as an individual, or as a company, let me know imediately.

I will be finalizing the t-shirt and card designs so need to sponsor logos now.

We are going to be having a fight club with Robert Drysdale the 6x world champ in Brazillian jiu Jitsu, and with Shawn Tompkins at his new home at the Tap Out gym. Shawn is running pro training for the big UFC guys, and we will be able to watch.

I am getting lots of e-mails about the poker tournament.

We are only going to have room for 100 players. My buddy Chris who runs the poker room at the Mirage has worked out a great deal for with me for us, and we are going to have cocktail waitresses serving free drinks to the players, and 200 of my guests from 8:00 to 2:00 a.m. on Thursday night of Pubcon. This is going to be off the hook!

The poker room is right next to CPK, BLT burgers, and the Deli, so we will have food and drinks.

I can only get in 100 players and 200 guests. There will be bracelets to identify you.

I am going to make you work for them a little, and do a little pre holiday charity awareness. It will just cost you a tweet if you are buying in as a player, and a blog if you want to get in as a guest with the open bar. Details coming up here, but don’t blink because I am going to post it, send invites to my list, and I predict they will be gone fast!

If you don’t sign up for the poker tournament in time, you won’t play. Sorry?

If you want to be part of the party, and don’t win a spot as a guest with the free bar, then you can still come, you will just have to buy your own drinks

Just watch this blog, and details will be announced probably within the next few days or early next week.

If you want to sponsor either as an individual or as a company, read this and hit me up.

I also may have a few surprises during my talks at pubcon, so you may want to come see what’s up for those too.

Since I put up the new poker theme this weekend we have had a nice stream of new sponsors signing up for the poker tournament. First thank you to each of you! Logos will go up below Azoogle soon!

The Epiar logo shows up best with a white background. The correct background is everything.

Why would you want to sponsor something?

Honestly is someone going to see your companies name on a t-shirt or a sign and go, WOW! and go buy that thing? Absolutely not.

On the other hand, are you going to start a conversation with someone new, or cold call a new client and say, Hi this is Jim Boykin from Hot Fudge SEO, We Build Pages, we do SEO, and build websites,and have them cut you off and say, “Hey Jim! I know exactly who you are! I see your company all over the place! Yes, that happens all the time. (Jim’s giving us a ton of dough this year!, but that is not why I am linking to him or talking about him!)

The Purpose Inc blog and events have gotten well known enough now, that I can say, hey this is dk from Purpose Inc, and people now say, “yah, the poker guy” or “oh yah, the beach party guy”, or even, “Oh yes, Shoemoney’s brother!” no joke.

This does not get people to sign up for clients, does not get them to come to my events, and it does not get them to sponsor my stuff, but it does open the door. It gets their attention, so the conversation can begin. Being a sponsor also says, our company is established enough, or at least funded enough to throw a little money around to help the group. The attendees to my events at least are very sophisticated and sit at my events, (like I do at others), making up balance sheets in their head to figure out how much this cost, or that cost, how much I brought in, did I make a profit or lose money. Neil Patel is shockingly good at this, and will tell you how much this or that event makes even if not one ever told him the inside data. (Neil bought me In and Out burger and some crappy Chinese Food once, plus his mom has fed me many times.)

What this means is that the attendees, at least of my events, know how much all this stuff costs. They appreciate the open bars, hot girls, or cool t-shirts and realize someone had to pay for them. They really appreciate the sponsors who step up for the events they love, and that will get you some favors when they are needed.

This only works if they love the event. If the event sucks, then being a sponsor of it will be noticed. Quite painfully you may be thought of as a sucker for sponsoring such a crummy event. Crummy events cost as much or more to put on than the good ones. If the person who puts on the event does not have their finger on the pulse of the attendees, they can drop a lot of dough on making something nobody likes.

So first off, make sure the event is cool, and that the attendees like them!

This is tough for new events. I have been discussing different ideas for a new event in the spring. Is it going to be a success? Well, so far my events have been big successes, but I know it will be a harder sell for sponsors for a new event. People in the industry already know my Pubcon Poker event and the thinktank are going to rock, so getting sponsors is relatively easy. Getting sponsors for the new event (if I have it) will be significantly harder.

So you’ve signed up! You’re a sponsor now! How do you get the best image? First off, comunicate with the person holding the event. and communicate early on. If you communicate to me early on, a month before the event, I have plenty of time to talk, and figure out the best game plan. If you try to discuss some aspect of the sponsorship with the person running an event during the week before or the day of the event, they will likely be right close to the point of being overwhelmed, and won’t have time to really handle your request properly.

Here are the things you should give the head of the event, and any other PR people long before the event begins.

1. The Money! This lets them know you are in for sure, and will make sure early planning includes your companies placement on any promotional materials, and space on the blog. When I did my blog redesign this weekend, I literally made out a list of who was going to sponsor, and arranged the space to allow for them.

2. Give them your logo as a nice big jpeg. Send them a jpeg much bigger than anyone could ever use. A jpeg is quick to work with, and can easily be made smaller. A small jpeg if you try to make it bigger will look pixalated and like 1995.

3. Give them your logo in an Adobe Illustrator compatable file. These are usually a .eps format. This means that the parts are seperate from each other. This allows the graphics person, usually me, to remove the background, change colors of different parts if necessary, or change the look. For example last year, when Epiar sponsored the poker tournament, Indeed to put their logo in a log of places. It is very cool, but the majority of it is grey. It is a cool logo, but it looks best in front of white. As a result of this when I went to put it on a black t-shirt, or on a photo which often has lots of greys in the background it would disappear. Luckily they had given it to me in an Illustrator format so I could modify it slightly so it would show up on a black shirt, or a grey photo background.

4. Let the person throwing the event know about your company. I love blogging about those who help me, whether they give me money or not, but especially when they give me money. I am so busy, to really understand your company it might take me hours of study. Even after that I could get it totally wrong. Make my job easy promoting you, let me know what your company does nice and simply. Ideally send me the one sentence version of what your company does. Send me a sentence of what you are trying to promote now. Send me links of pages you are trying to promote so it is easy for me to find the info, and put links to them. Even if I put no-follow links, the value of interested users going there is going to probably exceed any SEO value you would have gotten.

5. Ask what else you can do as part of the event to promote your product. I usually assume once you have kicked in your dough that you have tapped out what you can spend. There are often additional opportunities for you to make your product known, that I had not thought of before, but might require work and a small amount of money on your part. Examples of this is when Ruben of tweetfind sponsored this year he then emailed me and asked if he could bring a few tweetfind t-shirts to the event. I said of course. It doesn’t cost us anything, doesn’t really dilute the message of the other sponsors, since he is not going to be handing them out to everyone, but instead will sit there for those interested, and benefits tweetfind. Other options are putting custom sponsor outfits on the girls I will have there. It honestly doesn’t cost that much money for the outfits with the sponsors name on them, but takes a lot of time, is unpredictable whether the outfit will fit the particular model well, and there could even be a change in models at the last moment. So the clothing thing is cool, but requires a lot of time and unpredictability. I love sponsors who are willing to go through with it, because it looks cool in pictures, and makes the sponsor look cool.

Some of the facebook advertisers were selected to beta test the new facebook ads manager. I am sure there will be more changes before it goes live for  everyone, but here is a sneak peak and my initial impressions.

First a rundown on what’s not in there.

The biggest restriction for running facebook ads is still the speed of loading multiple new ads. This was not handled in the new beta. If you are not familiar with facebook ads, there are many, many variables. Even if you decide to test 3 different titles, with three different images, three different ad copy options, to three different age groups, in three different cites, you will have 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3  possible ads which means you will have 243 different combinations. Because the ad platform is all server based, each time you move to the next screen it takes up to a  minute to load, depending on the speed of your internet connection etc. So to run 243 ads will take you at a minimum 500 minutes, or close to 10 hours.

There are software programs that are sold that do this automatically, but the problem is that they are against facebooks terms of service, and they only allow a few variables, and have not allowed for the variables I personally want to test. There are so many demographic different variables to test in facebook advertising, that the options could easily be in the millions when you start adding them up. I am sure this will be handled in later versions of the ads manager, just not yet.

That being said the new ads manager is a huge step in the right direction. In the current ads manager, pre beta, once you have been running ads for a while, you will have pages and pages of campaigns. To navigate to find a certain ad or adgroup would require clicking through multiple pages looking for your ad, which could take a while if your pages are slow to load. Now there is a table of contents that you can slide up and down to find a specific group. You can also sort the adgroups by different variables to more quickly find the one you want. There is also an onthe fly search box to search for ad names that is similar to the search box you use to find facebook friends.

There are also selection boxes next to each campaign in the campaign view, where you can edit entire campaigns, multiple campaigns, or even every campaign, and with a few clicks can change all the daily limits, whether they are active or inactive.

There is also an easy way to change the name of a campaign from this screen which is nice to get them to alphabetize a  certain way, assign them a number to keep track of them, or even just to correct the errors you made when you created them.

The graph at the bottom still is a little counter-intuitive to me, in terms of how to scale it. Mine usually is off the scale and appears blank, and honestly I still have not figured out to use it.

One of the nice features is the ability to click on the top of the column, such as campaign, status, budget etc. and have all the campaigns sorted that way. One notable point of that is the ability to bring all the active campaigns up to the top where you can see them, and push all the deleted and paused campaigns, down out of the way.

Below is an image from one of my accounts.

Because of the massive number of variables there are to choose from when running facebook ads, and the fact that they keep adding on more and more, means that it is going to be a while before you will be able to easily manage all aspects of large numbers of campaigns. If you combine this with the fact that facebook is obsessed with quality, and a great user experience, it would not surprise me if we don’t see the ability to manage even most of the variables in large groups for a year or more from now.

Once you are inside a campaign you can also change the ad name easily without having to reload screens.

Once you are in the screens to create a new ad, the screens seem identical.

While I am stating my wish list, I would like to see a listing of possible keywords. I got the list of the top facebook profile keywords, but this obviously changes over time. I would also like to see a list of neighborhoods available.

This new facebook ads manager is a huge step forward, appears to work flawlessly, and will cut down the time of managing large numbers of campaigns dramatically. Facebook is doing an amazing job of keeping their software really clean, intuitive, and pretty bug free.

As a final note, take a look at the volume of searches for facebook advertising vs. myspace advertising vs. google advertising. While not a complete story, it does give some insight to the amount of interest in the subject.

If you need help with facebook ads, just give me a holler.

Words can not begin to describe this. Technically this was work. My favorite people in my favorite place, the ocean.

Dave Dellanave with his special friend.

Cameron Olthuis who arranged the surfing, provided the boards, instructor and enjoyed the ride!

Danny DeMichele was one of the surprise amazing surfers of the event. I have video of him just killing it. Eric Itzkowitz was also just amazing, video to follow one day.

The real stars of the surfing were Dave Dellanave and Jonathan Holloway (Jon show me where to link ) above paddling into the wave, and below dropping in. Jon and Dave just went for it like there was no bottom, no waves, no possibility of breaking their neck, just fearless!

This is me, dk. The board was too small for my dainty frame. Seriously. No really.

Todd Malicoat paddling into a wave. It made me so happy to have Todd out in the water. He is one of my early heros in the internet business world. He is a great natural athlete, and took right to this. Todd, let me also publicly apologize for how long it took to get you that software. It honestly is in the mail now I swear!

The leaders of the internet business world conducting a board meeting.

Remember, whenever you are trying to figure out how to handle a situation, just ask yourself. WWCHD? (what would chris hedgecock do?) On twitter that is #wwchd

Makes me honestly sad looking at these pics. Can’t wait till next year. Just imagine what it will look like for us to see these pics in 50 years.

This is life at its most perfect for me. Honestly, not drugs, no booze, no lies, no cheating, not even any competition. Just hanging with friends out in the wet and wild, warm water, warm blue skies. Truly a moment of enlightenment. More surf pics.

Google and Yahoo PPC is not my area of specialty

Dennis Yu came to thinktank. I got quite a few comments about how brilliant he is. His mind moves faster than almost anyone I have ever seen. He is a PPC wiz, promoting all kinds of stuff, and all kinds of companies.

Dennis’s company is BlitzLocal. In addition to local they do alot of work in the ppc area.

Their clients include companies like Quiznos, WWE, Analog Devices, Equifax, and some other major brands. They charge $5-10k a month in PPC management fees, but Dennis asked me to promote that they’re running a special for the next 10 days to audit your PPC campaigns for $799. You must be spending at least $10k a month on PPC to qualify. They look at things like ad group structure, negative keyword lists

Dennis says, Most advertisers have giant lists of keywords,  which create bloat and management problems. He told me that the average advertiser doesn’t know to seperate out their list of search keywords from their content keywords. Dennis said he has found that the proper grouping of keywords for search and content PPC is important. With content you are interupting the person, and with search, you are showing them what they are looking for.

I know from talking Ken Jurina from Epiar last year, who schooled me about negative keywords for the first time, that a massive amount of money can be wasted on large PPC campaigns unless you have the right negative keyword list.

The most sarcastic, opinionated, charming and most loved of all of the thinktank members is Aaron Chronister, also known as the Mad Hat. Aaron is a famous SEO, who has a few interesting tricks up his sleeve.

Aaron is my super hero for a few reasons. One of which was when he took the time one of my first years of pubcon to spill all the beans on how to do great SEO, while his competitor sat next to us. The part that made it so funny, was that his number one competitor was hearing all the secrets that Aaron was using to beat him, but the competitor was terribly frustrated because he was so intoxicated he knew he would never remember any of it!

Aaron also had one of the most entertaining, if not the most entertaining blogs on the internet, until he caved in to fame and fortune, and has put it on hold to finish his book. This is a real book, with a real publisher and the whole bit. The rumored title, literally rumored because I pulled it off another site, not Aarons is BBQ makes everything better. (I just want to rank for that term for a few months till the book comes out!)

Aaron became uber famous when his “pull it out of thin air one day before Christmas” bacon explosion became world famous. They unveiled it I think on their best BBQ in the world website.

Aaron also is not afraid to use gratuitous cheesecake on his blog, so since his site is not up, I am adding this pic. It has nothing to do with my story, except that Aaron is a bit of a hillbilly and I think this picture captures that viewpoint.

In fact Aaron and his crew actually took something like 4th in the world BBQ championships which is unbelievable.

So somehow I conned persuaded Aaron this year to make Bacon Explosions for everyone at thinktank. I had never eaten one before, but everyone who had ever even stood within 15 feet of one of these monsters said they were fantastic.

On my way surfing, I grabbed one off the grill, just to get some food in me and was stopped dead in my tracks. The thing was perfect. Forget sushi, salads, or anything else I have ever eaten. This was the most perfect concoction of pork making love to pork that I had ever seen.

You can actually buy bacon explosions online here. It would almost be worth getting my site banned from google for paid blogging if Aaron were to send me one of these things every week for a new blog post, hint, hint! (Just kidding Matt

So this thing is dripping down my throat, just unbelievable. I had made it almost to the sand, turned around and came back to get another one.

Around this time at the thinktank the sun had also just come out, and about half of us went surfing, and the rest dined on pig loving pig and had the time of their lives. We ate like 300 pounds of this stuff split amongst around 50 people. I think it worked out to be around 6 pounds per person.

Do you guys have any idea how much fun it is to have a blog like this where you can write exactly what you want? And know that the people you are writing this crazy stuff about are going to be totally o.k. with it?

Aaron, thank you for making the event even more special, and calorie dense that it allready was!

If you want to see more pics of the bacon explosion picnic, just pop over to the baconey gallery here.

I took a big risk on this one, and just barely pulled it off.

Personally I rarely pay attention even to the keynote speakers at the biggest conferences. Even when they are some of the brightest most famous people in the industry. The reason is, I would much rather get to ask them my questions personally, one on one, and in about 5 minutes get THE information I need. Gary V. at Elite Retreat was a huge exception to this, but then again he is one of the best speakers in the world!

So for the opening ceremonies I wanted to see if I could get this group to really interact without any booze. Not an easy trick!

Some of these guys like Neil Patel and Chris Winfield are ALWAYS up for fun, anytime, anywhere.

Others, I did not know if they would jump in or not.

My opening remarks literally lasted less than 2 minutes, and then the fun began.

The plan was to have a game of dodgeball in this Powerhouse park community center. I have been talking to Neil Patel about this for years, and was finally going for it.

As soon as I started to put the tape on the floor, security for the place told me no. Really? O.K., then we will just put the tape down upside down. No? Really? O.K. then we will use chairs to set the boundaries. Remember this is the first official part of the conference, and the first two minutes my plans are being squashed!

So we went for it!

Started off a gently, then within a few minutes was completely out of control.

So out of control in fact that security for the place told us we couldn’t do it anymore. (He was great and simply protecting a historical monument!) So with quick thinking, we moved it out onto the beach.

By this point, the nice florescent soft hairy balls that I had purchased at the drug store were all popped, and now a soccer ball had gotten into the game. I almost jumped in fearing a broken nose, or worse on the beach.

My mind remembers seeing one team get all the balls, with Dave Dellanave looking like a quarterback in a huddle. The next thing I see is every player on the team running at once against the opposing team, with all the balls hidden, and no one knowing who was about to throw the ball. That appeared to be the turning point of the game.

We have video of it, which will come out when we finally release Purpose Inc. the movie!

Then back to the community center for a game I created called Death Row. It deserves its own blog post, so I will hold off on it for now. But needless to say, after working 20 hours a day, two days in a row, the night before the thinktank started, myself, Fajar, Sarah and Alicia sat in my garage and invented a game called Death Row.

The end result of death row is someone facing a firing squad of 50 of their peers, and getting shot by 50 nerf darts at once.

John andrews put a new spin on optimizing a site.

The nerf shooting got totally out of control. I was surprised we never got thrown out on that one. I didn’t know exactly how it would all go down, but I did know that if you get a nerf gun inito the hands of 50 brilliant people, something was going to happen!

Shoemoney was gracious enough to get up and do the “Shoemoney Show”. I have never learned more about internet marketing than when I have sat in front of Shoe, and with no preperation he just talked. The legendary day he did this with me at Stratosphere was amazing. Sure enough he wowed the crowd. Jeremy stood up, very humble, very polite, and answered questions. As the questions rolled, and his answers rolled, you heard more and more laughter and enthusiasm. Since everyone was under NDA, Jeremy spoke very openly and frankly and literally answered every question he was asked. I of course asked him if you had $100 today and needed to start over.. He truly is a brilliant, brilliant guy.

While Jeremy talked my staff started roaring up to speed with snacks and drinks. While the guys sat they were handed amazing concoctions with California grapes. One of the reasons I do the thinktank exactly the week I do it, is the produce. I love high quality produce, and the middle of September is some of the best produce you will ever see anywhere, especically the grapes!

Chef Rasta set up outside, and when he realized some of the guys had arrived late and missed the crepes, he started busting out over $20 per pound prociutto de parma, imported from Italy for sanwiches. Some of the priceist sandwhiches ever made for our honored guests.

In honor of Bob Raines I did a little spoiler in what would otherwise have been a beautiful picture. Please make it next year Bob!

If you really want to see more, the rest of the thinktank opening ceremonies pictures are here.

Not an actual dinasour, but an actual turtle-rex taken from George Avery of GetAds creek.

The Best of The Web, BOTW, boys have kicked in big time for our beloved poker tournament. They did this before the exact set up has been determined, and before we have figured out whether it will be a charity tournament or a non charity tournament.

Greg Hartnet loves this tournament, and the tournament loves Greg.

The BOTW crew are true dinasours of the internet world, since they have been around since 1994.

Their company, and the culture around it has served as fertile grounds for many of the leaders in this field to find their roots and grow. When I first started going to the conferences, it was told to me by many people to just hang out at the BOTW booth. You will never find any pretentiousness there, and nobody is ever an outsider. Just throw on one of their famous t-shirts, and you are instantly part of the family.

If I set up any new site of any importance to me, to this day, I always submit my site to their directory, which is the original internet directory. If your site is quality, they will most likely accept you. If you get accepted, then you get a quality link, that is very relevant, and on topic, and good page rank.

For those of you who don’t remember, before search engines this is how you found stuff on the internet. I still have a lot of faith in hand reviewed directories, and expect a resurgence of them in the future. I don’t think a computer can ever determine quality and relevance the way a human can. Their newer blog directory rocks and is a great place to get links and awareness started for your blog.

I am grateful to Greg, Brian Prince and the crew there because from the first moment I announced doing an event, the first poker tournament, they immediately jumped in and offered whatever help, finance or otherwise I needed. They let me come to their parties, even before anyone thought I was cool, and are an incredibly tight, yet welcoming group of people.

Thank you again guys for making the first poker tournament possible, and during such a tight year for so many people, being so quick to step up and throw down to make sure the event we all love so much takes place!