Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

In what is possibly the biggest news to hit the internet in a decade, Avelyn for the first time rode her bike today without training wheels!!!!

And word on the street is, she has stopping down pretty well as well!

After work tonight, deuces and I decided to go surfing. I had heard there was phosphorescence, which is when there is a certain type of algae, that lights up when disturbed. It is very rare, and only happens every year or two. A few years ago, Jo and I had gone to see it in the evening, and watched the waves break with little bits of light, almost a sparkle. It has to be very dark to see it.

Well, tonight it wasn’t as dark. In fact the only reason we could go night surfing is that the La Jolla Shores Hotel has bright lights, which light up the surf enough, that you can go surfing if it is not too big. The down side is that you can not see the wave until is it about 4 feet away. A few times tonight, we were talking and got slammed by a surprise random wave.

We parked my truck, easy to get good parking since it was night!, and walked to the water. It was a lovely night, a little overcast, and fairly cold. With this years Boz wetsuits, (Go Harry!) we were toasty warm.  I kid you not, these are THE BEST wetsuits in the world, and very affordable. This years suit, is this new super amazing Japanese fabric, which literally feels like you are wearing pajamas, and lets in almost no water. I can duck dive, and it feels like a dry suit.

Well Deuces and I were in up to about our stomachs, and I hear her scream, I look down and scream myself! What I see is that as our legs are moving through the water, it looks like someone has a blue flashlight, and is shining all around them under water. Fricking blew my mind. We start splashing, and laughing, and gushing surprise. She jumps on her board and starts paddling.

Every arm stroke made a splash of this dramatic blue color. I have a picture on this blog, that was taken by Ana Phelps on a different night, which actually shows the color when a wave broke. This is not a touched up photo, this is the actual color and brightness. It was just mind blowing. The trail behind Deuces that she left as she paddled, was a dance of blue light.

I spread my fingers and drug them through the water, and behind each finger was a train of blue light, as if I was finger painting with light.

It was so extreme that I commented that no one was going to believe us, and that if you saw the same thing in a movie, you would think it was bad special effects since it was so extreme. In all the decades I have gone in the ocean I have never seen anything like it.

It was one of the most lovely things I have ever seen in nature in my entire life. Just breathtaking, and I am sure a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Thanks Deuces

So today I was going to stop by Mike Koenigs (huge name in info marketing) and Vivian Glyck’s house to sign an agreement.

I just am getting to know Mike, and I had never met Vivian, but have been trying to promote her charity.

I arrive at their house, in a very lovely suburban neighborhood of San Diego, not far from my house.

I pull up with that, “want to make a great first impression” kind of feeling. I even made sure I had on a fairly new t-shirt,

shaved, brushed teeth, all that fancy stuff.

Vivian thought I was going to drop a document in her mailbox, and I thought that she had left it for me waiting in the mailbox to sign.

So I arrive at the house, grab an envelope out of the mailbox, and head back to my car to get a pen, tearing the envelope open as I walk.

Just as I have ripped open the envelope, Vivan opens the door, and says hello. I turn around, and walk back, holding the contents of the envelope in my hand, and say “hello!”

I then realize, that I am not holding the document I expected, but instead a check for $1800 that is not made out to me. Ooops. Awkward.

I then greet Vivian and say, ha, ha, ha, I just accidentally took this out of your mailbox! ha, ha, ha….ha

Nothing like meeting someone for the first time while stealing checks out of their mailbox.

Great way to make a good first impression.

Of course she was cool with it, and after hitting me with the envelope, we sat and had a good laugh and a two hour talk!

It is really cool hearing the behind the scenes of Mike’s life. He is doing some of the biggest numbers, and possibly THE biggest numbers in info marketing. I loved hearing how he runs his empire, and his plans for the future.

Also, Vivians very excellent group to help Africa is having its fundraiser this Thursday. Should be great.

A couple of days ago I was out surfing with deuces, and the straggly haired blonde guy paddles up and says, “What’s up dk?” it was Frank Kern.

Now that question, “What’s up dk?” is a hard one to answer.

The entire time I have been involved in the internet people have been trying to figure out WTF I am doing LOL

I have spoken at the biggest conferences on SEO and facebook ads, had Matt Cutts blog about my link baiting, helped execs at facebook with facebook.com, rolled to lots of parties with Shoemoney, (my hero ), taken Matt Mullenweg to Dim Sum, gone to the homes of the info marketers mafia of La Jolla, surfed with Frank Kern, and run my own ultra snobby (insert laughter),  hard to get into event, thinktank.

The part that didn’t make any sense was what is my end game?

The truth is, with all of this I honestly have made much more money using the internet to get new patients into my chiropractic office, than I have from anything else.

The reason I have been doing this, do this now, and will do all of this ultra networking, and pioneering on the internet is people.

There are two halves of this. One half is the people who run the internet, you guys who read my fricken blog. I love you guys, I love the vibe of the industry. It is still in its birth, and is the bloody wild west where fortunes are won every day, and you can still see your friend panning for gold after all these years, who still has not found a single rich strike. After all, what other industry can you roll in to your own poker tournament with a couple of pro UFC fighters, and the hot blonde girl Kate Morris, from hangover, and have it seem totally normal! LOL

The other half of the reason I love the internet and always will are the other people. The users.

Since the beginning and to the end, I will be here for the users. By the way today is about the day the 7 billionth person will be born. Happy birthday Urdu!!

I love these fricken people, with all their problems, their hopes, their dreams and even their destruction.

We are all playing the same game right? The game of being born, chasing your dream, whether that dream is a bowl of rice to fend off starvation, or your fourth ferrari, and marrying Miss Arizona.

I love every little piece of it, the sweet juice of the ripest plum dripping down my chin, the smile of someone you never saw before, the peak of a bra that sticks out from out of a dress that wasn’t intended to be, the smell of bus exhaust early in the morning. It really all is just beautiful.

All of this is people, folks, users.

I love the internet because we get to reach them, all of them.

I would think by now, that everyone at least knows someone who uses the internet, and I would bet in one way or another half the people of the world are now connected.

When you do this, the information flows. You can’t keep a people suppressed for long when they hear fitty cent rapping,

“Fed’s ceased the six, the Lex’ and the Range Rover
Now a n!gga rollin in a Toyota Corolla
Used to never get high, now I’m never sober”

Eventually they figure out there is something out there better than what they have now.

So, we the internet entrepreneurs as a group, when we are connected to each other can share what we learned, and can influence what the rest of the world finds out about. Of course you can make a bajillions of dollars off of doing this, but that isn’t the point.

It is the excitement and opportunity that comes from being connected, connected to each other, and connected to the world, and what we can do with that.

In exactly a month, a gaggle of us are going to get together for thinktank a couple of yards from the ocean, eat really well, surf, play, and learn from each other, and figure out how we can help each other help the world, and make a few bajillion dollars in the process

I used to be a lifeguard in Laguna beach. It was on one of the gnarliest beaches on the planet, Aliso. This was back before being in Laguna got you a spot on T.V. Almost did it as my career.

Fast forward to this morning. I was out surfing with Deuces in Cardiff. We were on our way out, and I spotted this little thing bobbing in a rip.

A rip is short for rip tide. This is when the water piles up close to shore from the waves bringing water in, and the water flows out like a river. It can travel as fast 10 miles per hour or so, often much faster than you can swim.

Well, as I got closer, I realized it was a little girl in the rip.

I got up about 10 feet away, not wanting to scare her, and asked her quietly, “Would you like to grab the end of my surfboard and have me pull you in.” She was totally chill, and said yes and nodded her head up and down.

Over the years, I personally have developed a bit of fear (sometimes downright strong fear) of being out far in the ocean. I was a bit further out than my comfort zone and now I had her as my responsibility too.

I started slowly toward shore, pulling her with me.

At one point, her mom made it out to where we were.

As we hit the zone where the waves were breaking I grabbed onto the little girls arm, and a few waves crashed on us.

Oddly enough, just as I was getting to dry sand, the lifeguards were coming on duty.

Mom was a little concerned, girl was totally chill. I made sure to tell the little girl how great she did in the waves, and how relaxed she was. I didn’t want her to start getting scared of the ocean, she just needs a little more training.

Fun first rescue of the summer. I am sure there will be more.

Odd afternoon

We, my wife and I, went to our usual hangout, Panakin next to Rancho Santa Fe.

On our way over we discussed that it has been pretty tough making money the past few years. Possible yes, but more difficult.

As we arrived, times, they are a changing. The old, one off movie theater just closed, as did the Italian restaurant as well as a few other businesses that had been here 20 years.

That was odd, right after our discussion.

Then I get my tea, and cup of ice to make my special ice tea i have there.

As I walk away from the counter, there are as I count them 7 people here.

This pleasant looking guy says, Hi? dk? David Klein?

I say yes.

He says, Paul Lemberg, I sent you an email yesterday.

Now both of us are truly surprised.

This aint La Jolla. La Jolla is a bustling town, full of internet marketers. This is a few miles up the road in Del Mar, where the houses are tens of millions of dollars, and you NEVER run into anyone you know.

Turns out that someone had told him about thinktank, and YESTERDAY he had emailed me the first time, introducing himself and asking for an invite.

Not even my “NetStalking” as Dan Ryan calls it even aproaches this level.

I have been going to this place for 20 years, and I have never run into anyone I knew here from the online or offline world.
Totally weird but cool.

We said hi, I found him on facebook and friended him.

I found his site, on coaching businesses. By the way this guy is a big shot, worked with Richard Branson, big companies, etc. etc.

Then I wrote this blog.

Now I am going to walk over and get to know him.

Hey, if you are in the neighborhood, stop by yourself.

I will be here for a few hours working on some thinktank stuff, and my new info product.

Love you guys.

Peace.

Tonight was like a networking nirvana. I was invited to Nathaniel Broughton’s kinda three time a year or so SoCali event. This time it was at Amish Shah’s house in La Jolla. The lanterns from thinktank got to see the light of day, and light up the night, as the events lighting.

A lot of good friends were there including about 15 thinktankers.

Almost as soon as I arrived I saw Frank Kern off away from most of the people talking to a guy. The party was on the top level of the house, with a swimming pool dividing the deck into two. There was a panaromic view of the ocean off to two sides of us. We were up a few thousand feet higher than the ocean, and the sun was just going down. Just breathtaking.

Now I know most of the guys I know at the party know who Frank Kern is. He is totally one of my hero’s, and I know he is to a lot of us.

It was a moment of marketing nirvana strolling across the deck, sunset gloriously behind me, getting to walk up to Frank to introduce myself.

He turns out to be just as quick witted in person as he is on his videos. He talked freely about his new book, and answered my detailed questions about his facebook ads, and the ROI.

He was just as humble as any hero should be, and treated each and every person who had the courage to come up and talk with total respect and dignity.

Just a bad ass mother fucker.

I got to hang out with a bunch of old friends, Chris Hedgecock, the Lozano brothers, Erik Itzkowitz, Dan Ryan, and others.

I was thrilled to also see Mike Koenigs, who created Traffic Geyser, and just did his mainstreet marketing program. It was really a thrill to listen to Mike talk. He honestly believes in what he does, and works extremely hard to help turn the regular guy on the street into a hero. Mike has great purposes and really cares. He also turns out to be a neighbor and hikes in the same canyon I do by our homes.

There were all kinds of fascinating people there.

In fact this one pretty girl came up to me who remembered me from thinktank (uh-oh!) and turned out to be one of our past bartenders.

There was a lot of talk amongst the attendees about thinktank, who is invited, when will it be, you really gotta go etc. I started leaking some ideas about this years event, but nothing solid yet.

It was just a lovely event, and the pinacle of what we all strive toward. Just a lovely time with lovely people, and old and new hero’s.

Then as the party started to wind down, the mellow music was switched over by Nate and Amish to old school hip hop, at which time break danced my way down Amish’s hill to the valet.

I just came across this on Wikipedia, attributed to Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee’s son.

It is just lovely.

Brandon died when he was 28, his father at age 32.

Time to get busy

Well, I would say this: when you move down the road towards mastery of the martial arts—and you know, you are constantly moving down that road—you end up coming up against these barriers inside yourself that will attempt to stop you from continuing to pursue the mastery of the martial arts. And these barriers are such things as when you come up against your own limitations, when you come up against the limitations of your will, your ability, your natural ability, your courage, how you deal with success—and failure as well, for that matter. And as you overcome each one of these barriers, you end up learning something about yourself. And sometimes, the things you learn about yourself can, to the individual, seem to convey a certain spiritual sense along with them.

…It’s funny, every time you come up against a true barrier to your progress, you are a child again. And it’s a very interesting experience to be reduced, once again, to the level of knowing nothing about what you’re doing. I think there’s a lot of room for learning and growth when that happens—if you face it head on and don’t choose to say, “Ah, screw that! I’m going to do something else!”

We reduce ourselves at a certain point in our lives to kind of solely pursuing things that we already know how to do. You know, because you don’t want to have that experience of not knowing what you’re doing and being an amateur again. And I think that’s rather unfortunate. It’s so much more interesting and usually illuminating to put yourself in a situation where you don’t know what’s going to happen, than to do something again that you already know essentially what the outcome will be within three or four points either way.

- Brandon Lee

Looking back on 7th grade math class, I remember Tina Rotta, and I remember these little circles being drawn on the board being called Ven Diagrams. All of a sudden I got the concept of how things can connect to things that connect to things.

It became part of a running joke with my friend Mark and I and the cast of Different Stroked, until Dana Plato died. We had Dana show up at a 50′s party I had, and also we would deliver pizza to Jeff Bridges when I worked at Numero Uno pizza.

Cirque du Soleil does this. They brought together all of the best parts of life, art, music, dance, beauty, sex, hot chicks, acrobatics, and even half pipes! The craziest moment of Cirque for me was the final song of Love the first time I saw it, when this angry, disabled older woman was standing there fists clenched, crying her eyes out, singing along, as if it was still 1971. Cirque can be that powerful.

As a chiropractor and an athlete I am in love with the bodies, the motion, and the limits they push themselves past.

So imagine my sheer job, when at the Purpose Inc. XY7 poker tournament at Affiliate Summit, Angel Djambazov introduces me to this quiet, tough and tender looking Russion guy named Vlad. Then Angel says, “He’s in charge of Cirque de Soleil’s e-commerce, and has been asked to bring new marketing innovation to Cirque”

I almost peed in my pants in jealousy.

To me the internet is communication. What a wonderful thing to talk to the world about, Cirque du Soleil.

Vlad has an amazing past, across many continents and countries, but doesn’t want me to brag about him, so I will keep it to that.

He is the perfect guy for the job at Cirque.

Then after Vlad Vervelsky got knocked out, he quietly asks me if I know anyone who would like to go see O with him right now. I was about 2 seconds of leaving my own poker tournament to go with him, but figured that probably would not work out too well! So instead I grabbed some of the crew who were watching the game, and off they went to see O while the boys played poker.

Imagine going from sitting there watching poker for 6 hours, to being taken to one of the biggest shows in Vegas, by the a bigshot from Cirque’s marketing!

So Vlad added some real extra sparkle to the tournament.

To switch over to a different universe, I grew up in Sun Valle, on the edge of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, auto wrecking capital of the world. Full of stray dogs, gangs, and empty lots full of fun stuff to blow up or play with in the days before the word toxic dump was invented! Growing up I thought we were rich because our neighborhood was so much nicer than the bad parts of Sun Valley. Later I realize were plain old middle class. After the end of the Jackson 5, and before Michael Jackson became famous, Tito Jackson moved in on our street. I was a little kid, and he was a pop star, so I wouldn’t say we hung out and spun records together, but he would smile and wave, and say hi, every time we parted from our mid street football game.

I then fell in love with Michael Jacksons music. The one section in ABC, “What I neeeeeeed…” is still for me one of the greatest moments of art of all time.

So imagine how tripply excited I was when Vlad said that Cirque is coming out with a Michael Jackson Cirque De Soleil.

My wife and I have seen every Cirqu in Vegas now, except Zumanity, and have even seen some of the traveling tent Cirques.

It is crazy how the world keeps intersecting in and out of all of my different worlds.

I honestly don’t think there are really 4 or 5 billion people out there. I honestly think the number is more like 10,000.

Just enough that I haven’t met everyone yet, but small enough that everyone I ever meet seems to already be connected to me.

It has been an interesting few weeks helping a little with the marketing of Amish’s magic bullet.

If you have been following me I got introduced to the “info marketers” last spring, when I followed Shoemoney to Frank Kern’s event in San Diego.

Now, any of you who know me, know that I spent a lot of time, money, and effort the past 4 years learning every facet of internet business that I can.

I’ve gotten to meet with Execs at facebook, work on building a server that could handle 2,000 requests per second because it needed to, got written up by Matt Cutts on his blog, been made fun of by Danny Sullivan in front of 2,000 people at pubcon, thrown poker tournaments, been the playboy mansion twice, (third time this thursday at Domain fest!), driven Matt Mullenweg to Dim Sum, been mentioned in lots of press, Spoken at Affiliate Summit, Pubcon, etc., made my own exclusive invite only kinda conference, got known for Video marketing, and on and on and on.

I have set out to experience every nook and cranny of the internet business world, and when I was trained enough have now set off on a few new cool ventures. The new main one, that no one knows about,  is still going to be top secret for a little while longer.

Amish just gave me the opportunity to market to the toughest group in the world, internet marketers. I know a lot of my crowd are CEO’s, finance guys, etc. but all of us sell and market.

What cracks me up is how we as a group market to millions and millions of people a day. Each one of us at a minimum reaches thousands of people a day with our marketing message.

The crazy ass funny thing about me is I love people to market to me.

I love reading good emails. I love seeing good T.V. commercials. In fact I actually often enjoy commercials more than the shows.

Amish, did get thousands of dollars of sign ups through my links. I honestly am not too concerned whether I get the money or not,

but I did get a hell of an experience about info marketing.

One of the really cool things about it, is how personal it is. When I sent out each email, it has my name at the end of it. If you liked the email, you either smiled, signed up, unsubscribed, or just deleted.

I think the hardest part on the recipients are those people who are friends or fans, who just hated the emails.

In fact Scott Richter, the father of affiliate marketing, just sent me an email basically saying he thought my emails were irritating. I love Scott and I know he likes me too.

I also was talking to the two heads of another big affiliate company at Affiliate Summit, who realized who I was. One of them was saying out loud to me, “I don’t know why I never unsubscribe from your emails?”

I once heard Howard Stern say something to the effect that, “They don’t turn off because they don’t want to miss what is going to happen next”.

I never go negative. Well, almost never.

A lot of people who like to maintain a public presence in our internet business world like to go negative to cause a stir. I don’t.

I just enjoy helping others connect, helping others make their lives better, and laughing my fucking ass off.

It is tough for the reader to want to be part of that, but also hate marketing messages if I send them.

I think I made it hard on a few people because they had the stress of wanting to see what will happen next,

next event, next conference, next party, or fun video, but also didn’t want to see the sales emails.

Well, thank you to those who signed up for Amish’s thing. Good luck, work hard on it, and ask for

my help if you need it. And for the rest of you, thanks for hitting the delete key, instead of the unsubscribe.

I honest to god, love the crap out of everyone who reads this, between 5k and 20k people each posting,

and really, really, really am enjoying this run!

Much Love,

dk