I have documentation and skype recordings that verify 100% of what is claimed here. I’ve tried to be as fact-based and objective as I can possibly be.

Long story short, I had a very simple situation turn into a big stinking mess because of the misinformation provided to me by one of the AMs at AKMG, Eleah.  Now this girl, Eleah, is extremely nice, but she’s a grunt at the company and has no real voice.  That’s where the problem for me lies. She tells me one thing, I act on that information and incur expenses, then her boss tells me another thing, and asks me to abandon the previous design work and do something new. (Update: In fairness, they did offer to have their in house people edit the sites, but this was only offered after we had gone round after round with me telling them I was done with the offer.)

I initially agreed to run this Oriel wine offer. It’s a weak offer with a low payout, but it’s wide open, barely any competition, so I said I’ll give it a shot.  I spend 30+ hours doing some hardcore research so when I do launch the offer, I have a decent chance of at least making ’something’.

After all the research, I hire a designer who does a design for me. I submit it to AKMG for approval and Eleah comes back with “approved as long as the remaining copy to be completed in the website does not in any way allude to or insinuate that you are part of Oriel Wine.”  The domains I submitted were also approved.

The design used all of Oriel’s provided graphics and the color scheme was closely tied in to their site. It was not a knock off and anyone with 1/2 a brain knew from reading the flog copy that it was for sure NOT Oriel Wine.

Fast forward to the day I start traffic, 2 hours in they have issues with the design and the domain(s) I’m using.

I stop traffic, they come back with some weak excuse that “the Oriel marketing guy approved your design, but the Oriel CEO did not, it’s too similar to their own site”. I explain to her that that info might have been useful a lot earlier in the process and that now I’m already $400 into designs (3 designs for 4 sites) and I wasn’t about to spend another $300 to have them updated.  On this day, AKMG wouldn’t provide me any further feedback detailing what exactly would make the lander compliant or what the merchant really wanted.  They just said “something else, a review site”.  They knew my plans (I have emails with Eleah) long before this and plans included flogs.

Long story short, I got pissed and said since you approved the design, let it run, or reimburse me design expenses.  I asked for a paltry $510 to cover the design fees (and domains) for the designs they approved and I can’t use now. They declined to let it run and later said (I have this recorded!) that they don’t feel they are responsible for the design fees even though they gave the approval. [UPDATE: At the point where I asked for approval, I had only spend $50 on the design.  The other expenses were having it coded as a wordpress theme and modified for Thesis.  The look/feel of the design did not change whatsoever, only difference was it went from Photoshop to a fully coded WP Thesis theme. The decision to have it coded up came AFTER Eleah approved the design.  Had she said the design wasn't approved, no biggie, eat the $50 and start from scratch using Eleah's feedback.  Since she approved the design and I moved forward, I felt that they should comp me for the additional expenses. This is no different than an AM telling you it's ok to run PPV and 2 months later, the merchant says it's not ok and wants to withhold 2 months of commissions... The network has a responsibility to cover it's mistake in both my situation and the PPV example.]

Before anyone starts down the “the merchant has the right…” path, let’s be clear that I agree 100% with what AKMG is saying  when they now communicate their merchant’s intentions. The problem is they communicated something totally different a lot earlier in this process and it ended up costing me.

I’m sure guys run with AKMG fine all the time, but if you’re new and looking for a quality network, AKMG sucks…

The real victim here is Oriel Wines.  I have the domains and the designs and the research and I’m going to push the heck out of these other offers, bumping out all the top Oriel SERPs.

UPDATE: I’m surprised I forgot to write what I was most angry about. My feelings were that if the merchant was pulling this indecisive crap this early in the relationship, I was concerned with the possibility they’d pull this sort of reversal later on, once they had $5K-10K in commissions payable to me. This is why I told AKMG that I was done with the offer and I didn’t trust the merchant or their NOOB internal staff.  I wasn’t gonna waste my time arguing with Oriel about keywords they didn’t have on their list, or approved keywords they later reconsidered, etc., and that’s EXACTLY where the situation would have landed had I ran traffic with AKMG.  It’s a network’s job to deal with the biz end of the merchant>network>affiliate relationship and I cannot see how AKMG could have failed more completely.

The convention started with a golf tournament on the 17th of June.  Lots of folks were confused and thought there was an exhibit hall opening that day too. I met at least 6 affiliates who flew in on the 17th so they could see the exhibit hall, only to not have it there.

Walking into the Korbel Ballroom in the Denver Convention Center was a little out of the normal for a convention.  Most conventions I’ve exhibited at or attended are massive, with hundreds of exhibitors and a long rows full of t-shirts, pens, and business cards.  Walking into this one made me wonder if I walked into the local VFW for a craft fair.  I’m not kidding when I say there were less than 2 dozen exhibitors, and only 3-4 major networks (Neverblue, Copeac, XY7, and that’s about it.) were exhibiting.  Then you had some 3rd tier service providers who were selling solutions geared at the guys doing $100K+ a month in sales/traffic, a vastly different audience than the largely beginner population who actually attended the conference.

In addition, it seemed to me that some of the companies sent their B teams.  A number of the exhibitors were obviously not used to trade show formalities and subsequently acted like total jackasses on more than one occasion.

The keynote comprised of the CEO of Pepperjam, Kris Jones, with special moderation conducted by Jeremy Shoemaker.  This was actually a nice presentation to listen to.  I did not know that Pepperjam was a $100 million dollar company, that Kris had a law degree, or that the word Pepperjam came from his grandmother’s gourmet jelly (She called it Mississippi Mud) which he sold commercially.  This session was the one I most wanted to see, and I found out 2 minutes into it that they were streaming it over webmasterradio.FM for FREE, which pissed me off, and rightfully so, because there is nothing I hate more than wasted time.  I’d have paid a $300 fee to catch the sessions live streamed had that been an option, but instead I spend $1K coming in person.  Kinda miffed..

The conference had 1000 people preregistered and I counted approximately 300 people at the keynote.  A quick once-over of the checking station outside the conference main entrance indicated a LOT of badges had not been claimed.

Not everything about the conference was bad, this is what I actually liked:

1. The conference was uber organized.  These guys obviously know what they are doing.  Top notch experience in that area.
2. Things started on time
3. Sound/display equipment WORKED
4. Free broadband Internet (hard wired) in our rooms and it was actually pretty damn fast.  Not sure what company sponsored this, but it was VERY much appreciated.
5. The exhibit hall had plenty of sit down space for one-on-one meetings
6. The party hosted by Wickedfire, Shoemoney, and others was OFF THE HOOK fun.  No drama/fights, just a lot of boobs and booze.
7. The conference hotel was SUPER pimp and VERY affordable at $150/night
8. Hotel was next door to conference
9. The session rooms were very spacious and sound was not an issue.

What I did not like about the conference:

1. The keynote broadcast for free.  Seriously, I’d pay a few hundred for an “online pass” to pretty much every conference if I could listen in to the keynote/sessions.  I’d get a shitload more work done as well.
2. The exhibit hall was painfully lacking, especailly for a conference with 1000 preregistered.
3. The conference was just too void of content to justify a 4 day stay.  I chose to come on the 17th and leave at noon the 19th because though the sessions on the 19th/20th would have been interesting, they did not seem to have the deeply targeted content that one would find at other conferences, specifically Affiliate Summit.  When I come to these things, I expect to find new perspectives, see how other people interpret topics such as how negative rebill offers are being developed, etc., and the sessions at this conference, though interesting, did not warrant an extended stay past the first day’s agenda.
4. At the pre-conference party, the average age was 24.  During the KEYNOTE, the average age was at least 46 and there were white/bald/grey heads EVERYWHERE.  Wasn’t sure if this was a Vietnam vets meetup or a tech-heavy affiliate conference.

Overall, I’d rate the conference a 6/10.  There were an assload of beginners, old people, and ebook/clickbank geeks.  That in and of itself made the conference pretty intolerable, but thanks to a few hardcore workaholic friends, I got a lot out of the conference and depending on the session content, may attend the next Affiliate Convention, scheduled for December 3rd-6th in Los Angeles, California.

I think the thing most authors miss is that Twitter is a conversational platform, not a social media network like Facebook.  (Note it’s not a communication tool, but rather a conversational tool!)

Twitter’s longevity is sustainable for two reasons:

First it’s stupid easy to use. Anyone who can type can instantly use it.
Second, there is no advertising on Twitter. This sets it apart from 99% of the other social platforms out there.

The whole reason Myspace is a derelict graveyard of information is the advertising platform was woefully invasive to the web user.  They also allowed users to customize their page theme CSS and didn’t control how ads were displayed on those themes, resulting in seizure-inducing experiences for 99.9% of the users!  I think most new social platforms understand the failings of their predecessors and architect their offering as to avoid making the mistakes of those previous.

The thing about Twitter that gives it a very sustainable competitive advantage over the other major social platforms out there is quite simply, simplicity.  You can build any custom client, such as TwitterFox, TwitterBerry, and TweetDeck, and customize the Twitter experience to your own specific needs.  It’s funny, but each time Facebook changes it’s layout, there are the inevitable 4,000,000 users who join a new “the new Facebook layout stinks” group.  Facebook never seems to find a happy medium.

Twitter on the other hand completely avoids these hassles by following the golden rule of IT: KISS. (Keep it simple stupid!)

Aside from adding placements, I didn’t touch the campaign whatsoever. I was terrified Google would find it and slap so I didn’t touch anything that could trigger a manual review of the campaign and/or ads.

Of course the inevitable happened.. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were sitting down one afternoon, drinking beers, and wondering how they could have a little fun. They picked a random Adwords account, which happened to be mine, and started slapping campaigns.  Ok, they didn’t really do that, but it makes me feel better to go that route so whatever…

So my traffic was gone to an offer that was consistently converting well.  I tried to reload the campaign on another adwords account using a new domain/creatives/etc., but they disapproved it near immediately.  Then I got a “final warning” email from Google so I figured I had better just let the campaign die.

I was doing month-end for March 09 when I ran placement reports and found that I only had 4 sites that sent the majority of traffic to the poker offer.  I decided to contact the sites directly and see if I couldn’t buy some ad space or purchase whatever option they had to get my creatives back on their pages.

3 of the sites didn’t bother responding, but a 4th not only responded, they indicated they had a lot of traffic to unload and would take their $2 CPM rate down to $0.30 CPM (Cost per thousand) so I jumped at the chance.  I paid $750 for 2.5 million impressions, which I know sucks but I wanted to test out this traffic direct to the offer and see just how well things would convert.  This was perfect as the site was exclusive to poker players and they had TONS of volume each day.

I was really disappointed in the site’s backend ad serving software.  I was used to being able to add my own creatives, edit the URLs, and pause traffic.  Here I had to go through the sales rep and it wasn’t the quickest response rate.

The first 2 days were terrible, I had a .16% CTR (Click through rate) and conversions were a paltry 16%, far less than the 40% I got through adwords.  In a new twist, I found the advertisor was scrubbing the hell out of my leads, which I found odd because they weren’t flagrant about it before.  The end of the 2nd day I told them to pause the traffic, I had ~500,000 impressions served and only $120 to show for it.  I decided that I’d spend the weekend working on a new offer, and whitelabel the creatives to this site.

I wanted the users of the site to see that this is an exclusive offer to them (even though it isn’t) and that they are getting one hell of a deal on whatever it was I was pitching.

As of this post, I haven’t decided what to display with the final 2 million impressions, but I’m leaning towards bizopp.

The buy negotiations were easy enough, I feel I got a good into rate at .30 CPM, and they treated me like royalty, even though I’m probably one of the smallest buys they’ve done.

Things I would change in the future are:

1. I’d have a 48 hour clause
2. I’d get some ‘bonus’ impressions added.  TV stations do this all the time, you may buy a 200-spot prime time package, but ask for another 200 spots in the overnight hours for free.
3. I’d make sure I had control of the creatives and URLs, and if not, see if I could use my own ad server and they simply stick the placement code on their site.

I’ll keep you posted on future developments in this campaign/media buy, but for now, I’m rating my first buy as a bust, but a great learning experience.

Almost all training organizations and colleges offer online training now. Find a technical school in your area that offers online courses is my recommendation.

Here is the truth about paid education:
Accredited private/state Colleges: Full of 2-year-old+ material (some material as old as 5-6 years) and instructors who are FAR removed from the world of profit and innovation. Stay far away.

For-profit colleges: Full of 2-year-old material but has a few instructors who know their shit. These guys base class offerings off of economic indicators and local business steering committees. Stay away if you can help it.

Tech universities: Mostly up to date material, BUT, most of the instructors are part-time because they work in the real world full time. Most are also seasoned veterans with very current experience. This is where you learn the nitty gritty of a topic, not just the theory or concept.

Technical Education Centers: New Horizons Computer Learning Centers for example is an excellent resource. They put uber-amounts of training, certifications, and real world experience into their instructors and are great for niche learning. Plus they are in SO much hurt right now you can EASILY negotiate a 5-6 course deal for the cost of 2 courses. Trust me, they’ll take $6K for 5 courses, especially since it’s online.

Very much consider meet the teaching staff at any place you consider attending; if you can’t meet them and size them up, don’t bother wasting the money.

REMEMBER THIS:

You get a formal education to make a living.

You self-educate to make a FORTUNE…

Download the plugin for free here

Make sure you read the installation instructions here

Test it out by using your iPhone or BlackBerry and navigate to www.nickmattern.com.  Note the simplistic layout on the Black Berry and now it doesn’t try to download the main blog’s theme.

I don’t want to live blog about every little detail for two reasons…

1. Liveblogging is teh ghey, and I’m certainly not teh ghey.
2. It depreciates the value of the conference if the blogging community continually publishes the golden information after each session.  Why would anyone come to the conference each year if one person continually gave away all the secrets other folks paid $2K for?

I want to cover the event and publish quality information, but the question is for whom and why the heck should they care?

In the end, I’ll likely end up detailing the experience in all is frivolous glory – sessions, bar fights, geek fights, and other not-so-lame occurrences.

I plan on taking a TON of video, TON of photos, and doing a lot of unusual interviews. If you haven’t subscribed to my blog yet, I know it’s not likley your flavor of vodka, but subscribe anyway, I’ll be sure to deliver this January, just wait!

I asked around my circle of friends at WickedFire.com and was told PPC-Coach.com had some decent information, especially if you were on a budget.  I had $2000 to blow on this new venture and wanted to at least double my money before I made the decision to continue.

A little background on my PPC experience before I started PPC-Coach.com…  I had dabbled with driving PPC traffic to a few Ebay affiliate domains I owned.  Huge mistake.  I spent a few hundred driving VERY targeted traffic and still only generated $64 or so in commissions.  This immediately put a sour taste in my mouth towards PPC.  The next thing I tried was direct linking offers with YSM and Adcenter.  The commissions broke me even with my ad spend, but didn’t reimburse me for the time I spent creating the campaigns.

Again, I was doing what I was advised to do: test the hell out of everything, keep what converts.  Well at this point my goal was 100% ROI for each campaign, which included my hourly wage of $35/hour for setting the campaigns up.

So fast forward to PPC-Coach.com.  The way they sell their product is pretty intuitive. You pay a monthly subscription for access to their site. PPC-Coach.com has a number of tools, articles, videos, scripts, and forums to help you become a more well-rounded PPC ninja.  Each month, you are granted access to a new strategy/idea.  Month one is polls, not sure what the other months are…

Before you start using PPC-Coach, you’ll want to have these items:

• Adwords, Adcenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing Accounts
• Adwords Editor installed, Adcenter Desktop Installed. (Yahoo doesn’t have a desktop tool, and if you want to import campaigns personally, you need a gold account.  Support will import campaigns for you, but it’s not immediate.)
• $300-$2000 for your ad spend  (Remember to divide this between the 3 networks…)
• An account on a network such as Neverblue, Copeac, Ads4Dough, or Advaliant.  (Click on the links to get started. I recommend getting signed on with all 4.  It’s a good idea to diversify, and many of them have the same offers.)

How PPC-Coach.com Works

The program is segregated into monthly tutorials. Each month you are granted access to a new tutorial via the forum.  The first month, you are given a script that allows you to run polls on your website. The script itself is pretty bland, but it converts.  It has some features that are supposed to help with quality score.

The premise for the first month is to build a landing page asking a web user to answer a question, typically a yes or no format, and in exchange they get something.  “Is Barack Obama going to save the country? Yes or No gets you a free iPod Nano”, or something like that.  The web user answers the question yes or no, and is taken to the advertiser’s landing page, where they enter their ZIPCODE or Email address.  At the point the end user enters their ZIP or Email, you’ve just earned a commission and frankly don’t care where the end user goes next. That’s how ZIP/Email submits work for the most part.

This strategy is pretty solid if you want to generate some inexpensive and consistent revenue.  You won’t make TONS of profit until 5-6 months down the road when you have the cash to run the more expensive scaled campaigns, but once you hit that mark where you’re profiting $1000+ each week and are on weekly payouts with the networks, you’ll find that this method is a cash cow.

The forums are FULL of good ideas and information that will help you start your first campaign.

The main complaint I had with the program is the volume of posters in the forums not using the search feature.  The same questions were asked over and over and over, which really prevented me from getting a lot of info in short order.

I had some technical issues with the poll software. I prefer to run IIS and the software is copy-protected with Zend, so it was a real pain in the ass to get LAMP hosting off my network.  Once it was on the Apache box, the script ran fine.    Of course, the forum post I wrote asking Coach for help went unanswered for a long time.

The next issue that really cost me time was the 3-in-one and other PPC tools. It appeared that the output for MSN was using the wrong delimiter.  I had to redo the entire thing in Excel, then import it into MSN before it would work.  I again commented that it appeared not to be working properly, but got no response.  The tools are good for newbies, but if you’re a geek who knows a thing or two, the tools can be a hinderance.

Bottom Line Review

It seems that for a total newbie, the PPC-Coach.com system is great.  The coach and other members take TONS of time to spoon feed people as they go the course.  For those of you that have more than 20 minutes technical experience, I think you’ll find the courses/info/tools a bit lacking and frankly, you’ll find similar tools out there for free, and MUCH better tools out there for a few bucks more than what PPC-Coach.com charges.

If you have the cash and want to invest some time picking up new tricks, take a look at PPC-coach.com.  If you have experience in PPC, there are no strategies on PPC-Coach.com that aren’t discussed elsewhere for free!

Here is my review of the Dell T105 Server:

Configuration:

• Dual-core AMD Opteron @ 1.8MHz
• 4 GIG 800MHz RAM
• 2x 250G SATA HDDs, no RAID
• 1x 100mb NIC
• No OS

My Enhancements:

• Windows Server 2003 Enterprise
• AVG Network Edition

PROS:

• Quiet Machine. This is one you can easily keep in the open office, not in a rack or closet. (it’s a desktop by the way)  The HDDs are cheap and make TONS of noise when utilized.
• The machine is quite quick to boot, even with SQL server, IIS, AVG, and Active Directory running.  Boot takes about 2 minutes, which for a server is pretty good.
• The two 250G hard drives are plenty of space for my web front ends, a SQL server, and IIS logs of my heavy traffic websites.  The drawback is that I didn’t get RAID as I knew I was supposed to…  Next time.
• Inexpensive. I paid just under $700 for my configuration, and it comes with a 3 year warranty.

CONS:

• I purchased my machine without RAID, and with a DVD-ROM for installation media, I only have 3 SATA ports available for HDDs, and no onboard RAID to use.  Dell offered a RAID controller, multiple in fact, and I should have purchased one.
• No Gigabit NIC.  Again, Dell has this upgrade option, I simply didn’t utilize it.
• Operating system upgrades weren’t competitively priced.  I could purchase the license for Server 2003 for about $300 cheaper than Dell was offering.

Verdict:

The Dell T105 Server (Dell T-105) is an extremely good choice for small 20-30 person offices or those who wish to host multiple websites with 4000-10000 hits per day.  If you want a system that will last you 5+ years, this one is not it. The HDDs are consumer class and the ventilation isn’t going to keep the parts happy for 5 years.  If you keep this system in a well ventilated area and patch it regularly, it will give you excellent performance at an affordable price.

Find the Dell T105 on the CHEAP!
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