Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

Many of the thinktank coupon codes have sold out. If you have gotten a pre-invite, and are trying to register and your coupon code does not work, let me know.

2008 was the first year of thinktank.
If you were there, you were part of a special group that will remember what happened for the rest of your life.
If you were not one of the lucky few, then here are a few glimpses of what happened.

It was fistastic!

More about thinktank here.

Zac Johnson is the internet marketers internet marketer. Zac is swimming in some of the toughest waters, marketing to marketers.

I know what this is like, because I do the same thing.

Zac has a new e-book to help you become a 6 figure blogger.

I can already tell you why this is going to be a success.

Here is why.

He picked a 1oo K as a target, not a million bucks.

I believe Shoemoney said he is making somewhere like a million bucks a year from his blog.

I bet John Chow is somewhere in that range as well.

My blog and I bet most of the other famous bloggers you read make at most in the hundreds of thousands per year from their blog,and the closely related activities around it.

Zac obviously knows this subject, as he has done this for years.

Zac is Leveraging his Friendships

Zac is a very well liked guy. I have never heard or seen a single word written badly about him.

This is not easy to pull off when 100’s of thousands of people know who you are.

Zac sent out an e-mail earlier letting me, John Chow, and I am guessing Shoemoney and others know about his affiliate program for the launch. Since there is no income coming directly from the book, he is doing a contest instead on how many people he gets to sign up.

Although he did not say it, I am assuming he is building a quality e-mail list of those interested in building a profitable blog, and he can monetize that list later.

There is Broad Appeal to Zac’s Product

This has the potential to get him hundreds of thousands of contacts in a very short time. How many people want to make money blogging? I had recently seen a huge spike in traffic to Jonathan Volks website, and asked him what happened. He said it was nothing more complicated than his writing an e-book and making it widely known. Almost everyone in America and Europe knows what blogging is. Almost everyone in the U.S. and Europe knows that people make lots of money on the internet. The potential number of people who could read this book are limitless.

Zac made it easy to get in.

No money down. No commitment. There isn’t even a hint as to what is in it for him. In fact, once you download the book, there is nothing to keep you from forwarding it to your friends.

Money and Recognition in it for Those Who Help

I can already guess that Shoemoney is going to win the contest even though he hasn’t blogged on it yet, and John Chow will probably get second.

My traffic is usually about 1/10th the traffic they get, so I predict I will win one of the $100 prizes. Now $100 isn’t really enough money to make it worth my time to write this blog. But on the other hand Zac is my friend, and I want to help him. Also, if Zac posts me as a winner, it get’s me more traffic, followers, links, notoriety etc.

A casebook study, and executed perfectly.

By the way the e-book rocks. I have allready learned a ton from it. Plus there is a chapter by me.

Go here to get the book for free on becoming a 6 figure blogger.

Go here to be an affiliate for the e-book.

Why You Should Be an Affiliate for the 6 Figure Blogger book.

Zac is a big shot, successful and busy.

If you want to get his attention, and start the road to friendship with him, be an affiliate.

This e-book is a big deal to Zac. You can tell by the work he put into making it so dam good.

I promise you he will be studying where every sign up came from.

Even if you only get 10 signups, Zac is going to notice.

If you want to come to thinktank this year, on your mark, get set……..

There has been an overwhelming response to the survey.

The general consensus has been, don’t change much, get easy light charcoal for the BBQ on the beach, have more intellectual thinktank type  small groups. Also, more structured networking like our “speed dating” early on in the event, so you can make friends earlier in the event.

Oddly enough no one suggested removing the open bar.

For the surfers in the group I am planning on getting a thinktank Stand Up Paddle Board we can all use.

Expect more of the best stuff, less of the lousy stuff, and always a few surprises.

I apologize this year for those who don’t get in.

The pricing my surprise you, but I still expect it to sell out fast.

thinktank Sep. 17, 18, 19.

In the survey I just sent out about this years thinktank, I tried made a comment that has gotten me a quite a few responses.

Facebook is the new Google, Twitter is the new facebook, and Google is trying to become twitter.

For my core readers, I am sure the self evidence of this is obvious without explanation.

Facebook’s annual revenue as far as I know is not public, but it is way up there. I have buddies who are trying to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, who still have trouble getting facebooks attention. I know I spend a small fortune on facebook each week, and the impressions just keep flying across the screen.

Here is my math, not based on any inside facebook data, but simply using a little known info and logic.

Lets assume facebook has 400 million users.

Let’s assume each user sees 4 screens per day on average. (Think it actually is much higher, but some people never go on at all)

That is 1.6 billion impressions.

If we assume that it costs about .0002 dollars per impression, my estimation, which is 2/100 of a penny per impression.

Then we have about $320,000 per day in income.

If you multiply that by 365 days per year, you end up with over 100 million in revenue per year.

(Double check my math above and I will correct it if I am off)

I actually think my estimates above are way on the conservative side, and bet it is much closer to a billion.

I’ve known half a dozen billionaires over my lifetime, so that is not unbelievable, but the fact that that is generating that

in cash every year, is enough to get even googles ears pricking up, even if they are making 20X more.

Facebook is now going off of the blue and white page, and into a website near you. If you look at the top of Shoemoney’s posts,

you will see the new like button. This can only end up to some type of cumulative suggestion to you of what sites you will be interested in, in each industry or search category, eventually making facebook a true human search engine. I expect we will see that in two or three years, or maybe next month?

Since facebook confiscated the moving stream of twitter, twitter is adding more and more social interactivity between users. You can now easily retweet with a button, and if you hold your cursor over someones user name on twitter, you get a little box of social information about that person. I have a feeling that little box is going to grow and grow, and eventually contain the obvious thing we all want to know. Do they follow me?

Google on the other hand, watching these young upstarts moving in on their turf, is picking up some of their tips. The most obvious of which is googles desire to be fresh. Shoemoney recently poked fun of my not so fresh looking chiropractic page, and how it still ranks number one. Google is at an interesting crossroads where it is trying to give us the most relevant info, yet at the same time, their site is coming to life with change. I consider myself a pretty early adopter of new technology, and I find myself messing with the options on the left side of the screen in google, modifying how they show my results, twitter like, or google like.

In a few years I expect the three of them, along with a whole new slew of competitors, many of which will be running on the same engines, but just with different branding, will all do basically the same thing. They will keep us in touch with each other and the world, and help us find what we want.

I love the fact that is so dam complicated with so many different options and strategies, that it is now impossible to figure out THE right way do make money with it. It reminds me of surfing. One of the reasons I love it so much is that not only are you busting the moves you want on the playing field, but the playing field is constantly changing under your feet.

Welcome to real internet surfing. Not only are you making and implementing strategies, but at the same time, the very fabric that you are working with, is changing under your very hands. There is going to be great reward for those of us with flexible minds.

There are now about 2 billion people on the internet. There is no shortage of traffic. You can put up almost any kind of site, and if it has honest real content, thousands of people will end up there. I have a page that is a very high ranking page on choosing a mattress, that I never get around to even giving an offer to convert to. Does not even have adsense on it.

A year ago I first crossed paths with Tim Ash, the guy who is behind the Conversion Conference, Site Tuners, and Attention Wizard. Tim wrote a book called Landing Page Optimization. It is absolutely the best book ever written on conversion.

Tim actually, factually has more experience on what pages convert and what don’t.  The reason Tim knows more about it than you do is that Tim has a piece of software that can literally make over a million landing page options in a week.

If you have a site that has a few million visitors per month, then Tim can figure out the best landing page in a few weeks that creates the conversion you are aiming for.

For sites in the thousands of visitors like I have Tim does it based on experience. I gave Tim a shot with a facebook landing page that I had been spending about $5,000 per month on. The problem with a website that has a few thousand visitors per month, is that it takes a long time before your results have any statistical significance.

We have now been running Tim’s version of my landing page for about a month. So far it looks like there is about a 40% improvement in conversion. The problem is that the sample size is still too small to know for sure. Ask me again in a few months and we should have the full info.

Tim’s numbers speak for themselves, and when you hear him talk, you will know you are hearing the real deal.

Some of the things are so obvious that you will know them to be true as soon as you hear them, but were not previously obvious to me.

One example is that people don’t want to scroll down. If you put everything you want them to see above the fold, (on the screen), then they are more likely to see it. Also that people’s eyes move from the upper left to the lower right. He also confirmed Shoemoney’s research about a big fricken bright button on what you want them to do. Many of the other things are more subtle, but when put together create a page that you can look at and just know is right.

The express review that I did with him is under $1,000. His conference is priced averagely.

The truth is, that if you click around the internet, you will immediately see that most landing pages are not thought out, and definitely not set up for conversion. Just ask yourself how much more profit you would have if you paid the same for the traffic you have, but simply converted 10% or 20% more.

Many of the affiliate landing pages I look at, I won’t send traffic to because I can tell by looking that it is unlikely to convert. By the same token, I find more and more I prefer to send traffic to my own pages, because I can control the landing page.

If you want to go to the Conversion Conference, use my promo code (discount code) to save $250 off of the 2-day conference pass, plus I get an affiliate commission  promo code CCW603.

If you want to get your page reviewed and corrected by Tim personally then e-mail me (dk =at= purposeinc =dot= com) and I will hook you up. If you have a site that has a million visitors per month and are making money off it, then e-mail me about Tim’s software that can maximize the landing page conversion. If you have a site with a million visitors per month and are not making any money off of it, then I’ll buy it from you and get it profitable! LOL. Just contact me as well, and we can figure out what needs to be done.

(there is a little intentional changing of small facts below to protect details of various businesses mentioned to protect those companies including my own)

Over the past two weeks facebook has made some changes to the way it is handling affiliate marketers. This is another wave in a series of changes over the past year where facebook has altered what ads are acceptable to be run on facebook.

I have been getting a steady stream of e-mails and phone calls from some of the biggest players in the industry asking me what is going on.

None of what I am saying is coming from inside of facebook, but instead what I have seen happening to my own campaigns, and from the campaigns of other big shot affiliate marketers.

The phone call or e-mail usually goes like this.

Super Affiliate: “Hey, How’s it going?”

Me: “Good! How are you?”

Super Affiliate: “So,….ah…have you noticed anything different about facebook ads lately?”

Me: “Yeh, I had some of my campaigns turned off”

Super Affiliate: (Now relieved that they were not the only one, now speaking in a stronger voice),

“Yeh! We were spending $xxxxx dollars a day on (dating/games/or education offers) and our ads just got turned off and retroactively disapproved.”

This has not been an uncommon conversation over the past few weeks.

facebook has been improving the quality of its ads over the past year. Many affiliate marketers I know, will run anything they can make money off of that doesn’t put them in jail.  (an exaggeration, but not by much). facebook on the other hand is trying to protect its users from illegal and unethical behavior of it’s advertisers.

In my opinion, and only in my opinion, I think that affiliate marketers have as a group simply pushed the edge too far, and facebook is being a bit “cautious” or maybe “suspicious”, or “protective” against any affiliate offers that are being run.

Some people I know, who I believe have been spending way over the cost of a new Porsche EACH DAY on facebook ads, have had ads removed that appear to be both legal and ethical in my opinion.

This is a strong move by facebook, as this is real cash in a very significant volume that facebook is saying no to.

Here is a personal example of an ad I tried to run in another country to test what is going on.

I actually tried to run a few different versions of the ad to be as compliant with the policies as possible.

The original ad was not in English, but below is the Google Translation into English.

The Title of the Ad was:

Online Dating

The image in the Ad was:

The body of the ad said:

Online dating site (Dating Name Brand). Please complete form
online to participate.

If you click on the ad, it takes you to a dating site called “SITENAME”, which is a very generic site, similar to Match.com or Eharmony, but in another country. The site is free, and I am guessing makes it’s money off of advertising, or plans on making its money that way.

The ad was submitted to be shown to Males, who were single, between the ages of 21 and 60 in that country. It is interesting to note that in the new dating guidelines for facebook it states that you should also select in the demographics of the user, whether they are interested in men or women. At the same time, for some countries there is no option to choose whether the user is interested in men or women.

The ad was rejected with the following explanation:

Ad Disapproval Reason(s):

* The content of this ad does not adequately reflect the product/service offered. Ads may not be false, misleading, fraudulent or deceptive.  Per section 4, ads must not make unsubstantiated claims, including but not limited to prices, discounts or product availability; use of current events in the ad text or image that create false association to be used for irrelevant commercial agenda; use of false qualifications to create a sense of relevancy; as well as the implication of dynamic ad content.  Any statement made within an ad must be accurate and relevant to all users.

Additionally, ads must disclose what action or set of actions is required to qualify or receive the product/service.  Offers requiring the submission of Personally Identifiable Information must disclose on the landing page how such information will be used and distributed.  This disclosure must be clearly and prominently displayed.

When I read the reason above, it does not seem to match up with ad I ran. I can’t quite figure it out.

Now on the other hand, the ads I have running for brick and mortar businesses are running just fine with no hangups.

My feel I am getting from this is simply that facebook is being extremely careful of affiliate offers, extremely careful.

My final analysis is that an affiliate offer is no worse or better than any other offer. A brick and mortar advertiser, or a large fortune 500 company, can also be deceptive, or criminal in their advertising. At the moment the affiliate marketers have simply pushed a little too far, and are getting pushed back. This creates a tremendous opportunity for brick and mortar businesses to be advertising on facebook because they are not competing with the overly profitable illegal affiliate offers. Since facebook is a bid based system, the price is simply going to be a bit less now than it would have otherwise.

Many affiliate marketers have been scrambling to find other sources of traffic, and I am sure that is big talk at Ad Tech this week.

Jason Akatif, founder of Ads 4 Dough stated that he keeps a spreadsheet with hundreds of traffic sources. It sounds like affiliate marketers will need to do the same, at least for a while. I am starting up a spreadsheet to do the same.

Take a minute to read Andy’s blog about his March Madness program help with micro student loans for those in need abroad. Andy is always on the cutting edge of finding ways that small amounts of our money, can make a big difference.

Andy Rocks.

Andy Liu controls some of the most visited sites on the internet.

Tonight I am sick and I am also pissed off. For any of you who know me well, neither of those things happen to me very often, like I don’t think I have had a cold in around two years which is typical for me.

Here is why. There are X number of miners who are now either dead, or in grave danger, and it sounds like around 3 more who died trying to rescue them.

What was this great jewel for which these guys are risking their life or dying? Is it some universal truth?, Saving a child? Creating an eternal utility that will benefit mankind for centuries to come? All of these are things I would risk my life for. Nope, they were going underground to get coal.

Why are they going after coal? This coal will be for the greatest degree be used to be burn, which will heat water, which will boil. When the water boils it can turn wheels. When these wheels turn, they have magnets attached, which push electrons through wires. Those electrons moving through wires, is electricity. These guys are risking their lives, and/or dying so we can watch T.V., and run our I-Pods.

I am all for energy consumption. AS we speak my wife and I both have our Mac’s open, and the T.V. news is rolling in the background.

I am not one to bitch and moan without giving solutions. So here is the solution. Yes I can say this because I have been saying this for 20 years.

To preface this I love military. I love the idea of high tech equipment rolling across the tundra kicking ass on evil people. Lots of my peeps got gassed in world war 2, and my wife would have been speaking German and eating strudel, instead of Norwegian if we had not spent a grip on going into Europe to whoop Hitler.

I am all about righteous causes, and sacrificing oneself for the betterment of mankind. I have lived this my whole life, from being a lifeguard, to teaching, to being a chiropractor.

The fact that we have spent something like a Trillion dollars the last few years on wars to protect us from unknowable enemies that we can’t really put our fingers on, and that haven’t turned out to be exactly what we thought they were is another story. Not saying it wasn’t a good way to spend money. I have a lot of warrior friends who got their chance to test their training, shooting mortars, missiles, flying, and even get to drop out of a helicopter into a building and play street fighter except for real.

I am not a fan in any way of the death that took place on either side as a result of this.

All you need to make electricity is something that moves relatively frequently in quantity that you can latch onto. A common way is burning something like coal, or oil, or making heat from a nuclear reaction that heats water. Once you have steam from the hot water you can turn a wheel, which moves the magnets against the wires, which moves the electrons and makes electricity.

I had the pleasure of meeting a guy a few years ago who is one of the greatest windmill designers in the world. He was working on a bearing for the center of the entire windmill where all of the friction from the spinning is, that would hold the tons up from magnetism. This is the force you feel when you put the wrong sides of two magnets up against each other. Amazingly, it creates almost no friction but can hold a ton of weight.

What if we had given that Trillion dollars plus of war debt to help him build the best windmill he could and then crank them out by the thousands to power up the entire country?

What if we had given that money to my buddy Paul Cross the inventor who came up with a tidy idea on how to use the tide moving in and out to push a simple paddle, which spins a wheel, which makes electricity.

A few years back I met a guy who worked with his wife for a guy named Openheimer. For those of you who don’t know the name, this group spent a few months in New Mexico and created the first atomic bomb. Americans rock at getting together in small groups of brilliant people to peak stuff that moves technology in huge giant steps forward, ie: car, airplane, A-Bomb, computer, internet.

So I am pissed. I am pissed that we just blew a trillion bucks on a war with very little measurable benefit of outcome, that we just passed a health care deal that puts more money toward surgery and drugs that are not really solutions to the cause of health problems, (exercise, chiropractic, nutrition, mental health). Along with this we spent billions of dollars on companies that suck and could not make a profit. I have made a profit every week during this recession. Give me the money, or Shoemoney, or someone else in our crew, and we will make a bunch more out of it creating jobs and improving our country along the way.

All of this happened the week after I just spent 40 hours over 2 weeks making sure my taxes were as perfect, honest and tight as I could possibly make them, just so I can give away over 50 percent of my income to a government that will spend it on programs that give money to people who don’t work 80 hours  a week like I do.

So how do we solve this?

Over time I will go into more details but it is this simple.

1.    Don’t invest money in killing people. There are very, very few times where killing people makes things better. Hold a gun to one of my friends heads and if I have a way you will be gone in 3 seconds. Other than that, there are very, very few times it makes sense. Stopping other mass murders or genocides is usually a good time to use war.

2.    Don’t invest money in treating symptoms. Unless the medical treatment cures the cause of the disease, or at least makes a massive, measurable improvement of function such as insulin with diabetics, don’t spend money on it. Treating symptoms is no more intelligent than smoking dope, or taking coke. You feel better, but get sicker over time. If people want drugs or medical treatments to help how they feel, let them work to make that money. And no, you don’t deserve any health care. God did not make us, or we were not created, with a plaque that says we will always deserve the most expensive healthcare on the planet. There just is and will never be enough money for that, just do the math.

SPEND ANY GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE DOLLARS ON THINGS THAT HAVE PROVEN TO PREVENT ILLNESS NOT TREAT IT

3.    Abolish the IRS, and create a consumption tax of a fixed percentage. Everyone would save instead of spend, and you wouldn’t have to do taxes. Even if it wasted a crap load of money, which it won’t think how much time it would save, and the increase in your productivity as a result.Wow, was that so tough?

4.    Stop paying instructors to talk to students. Instructors need to be there until the students learn how to read and study on their own, and then they serve no purpose. They only personnel needed  for school are to keep the kids in line, and help them on how to learn. While we are on it, don’t force kids to go to school. Education is a gift, but if you don’t want it, don’t force it on them. Let them work when they are young. I did manual labor starting at around age 10, and have worked a job or a business since I was 15. It did me a ton of good. Put all of the education online, well written, and let students guide their own curriculum.

5.    Keep the military, train them, buy them the best stuff, and make them bad ass and strong, but give them domestic work to keep them busy, productive and worth the money we spend on them.

6.    Stop giving money to people who fail. O.K. if you are born with no arms or some unlucky tragic thing take care of them, and give them a break. Everyone else, get up and work. I promise you when I am old, my hip doesn’t work, and I can barely breathe, I will be doing everything I can to improve my life, the life of my family, my community, and my country. I totally dig this one elderly Asian man (I think Philipino), must be 70, who I see at the beach every summer digging through the garbage for Aluminum cans. Wow he inspires me! So life has been rough? Tough! Talk to my buddies like my friend the graphic artist in Manilla, Jonathan Antonio, who was working for me, literally while his neighborhood was flooding, and water was pouring in through his roof.

7.    By the way, read up on drinking 2 oz. of pomegranate juice a day. All of the research shows it clears out your arteries like a drain cleaner. Don’t trust me on this, research it for yourself, but it sounds like a miracle drug to me. (Ask your doctor )

8.    Take all the money we save, and use it to develop long term renewable energy sources for the benefit of all mankind.

That is enough to get started. Let’s get those things in place over the next few months, and we should be in good shape.

If you guys decide you want me to head this up, feel free to elect me and I will be more than happy to get these things in place, but you all better be ready to work ☺

Then once we have all of these things in place, the country should be humming along. Then we can show it all on some reality T.V. shows, and the rest of the world can copy us.

Was just doing taxes. (This is our San Diego earthquake story)

My wife walked down to the lower level, and I felt the house give a little roll.

I yelled to her, “hey, we are having an earthquake”.

I immediately thought of one of my silly things, which is to watch water slosh during earthquakes.

So before it even stopped shaking, I grabbed the pool key and yelled, let’s go see the pool!

As I got out the door, I noticed a little wind, and as we were running said,

“oops, the wind will cover up any ripple waves.”

When we got to the pool it was a different story, the whole pool, about half an olympic size one, was sloshing back and forth,

like a drunk, stumbling, carrying an overfilled beer across the bar, that sloshes out the side.

We stood and watched for about 3 minutes, and it slowly subsided, but never stopped.

Our neighbors just moved to California, and I met them for the first time.

She asked “Does this happen all the time?”

We said, nope, you were just lucky.