Many Body Theory

So my blog was listed in Affiliate Summit’s Affstat as an affiliate marketing resource. When you weed out the networks there are about 50 blogs left written by actual affiliates and my blog was one of them.

What interested me is that rather than referencing the author (Nick Abramovic) like many of the other personal blogs, they called my blog “Many Body Theory” — is that my new brand?

Remember that Affiliate Summit East will be August 9th, 10th and 11th in New York this year.  If you have not planned your trip, start now because it is less than two months away.

Match.com is being sued again. Here is an except from Reuters:

“despite the emotional vulnerability inherent in the dating process, fraught as it is with fear of rejection and anxiety, Match defrauds the consumer of his/her time, labor, and emotional investment” by not telling them that someone they are contacting does not have a subscription.

“Because the writer has no way of knowing this, he or she may experience profound personal anguish, suffering which is easily preventable by Match,”

Apparently this guy is suing Match.com/IAC for $5 Million Dollars because Match.com told him to contact a user who was not able to read/reply to his emails.

Other news sources have covered this include: Daily News, NBC Dallas and New York Magazine.

This weekend was my birthday. Things started out with a benefit for inner city children on Friday night where the after-party lasted until 6AM. After sleeping for about 6 hours I spent the afternoon Saturday at Maiden Lane in San Francisco — this is a super-secret spot in the city where you pretty much feel like you are in Europe. Saturday evening was a limo ride that went over the Golden Gate Bridge and to a huge yacht where we partied until midnight (before heading to a bar back in the city for the after-party). I personally drank over 3 bottles of champagne just in the limousine (no glass, just straight from the bottle like a champ). Open bar and dinner on the boat made everything amazing.

I just got back from a 10 mile jog with the puppy where we went from my apartment to the Golden Gate Bridge and back. We stopped twice, once at Fort Mason and again at Crissy Field. It goes without saying that I am completely exhaust and will post pictures/videos up shortly.

Until I get the pictures uploaded, here is the video that was the inspiration for the yacht…

SpeedDate.com has ripped off Zoosk’s subscription page - the text, images, layout, javascript functions, you name it –http://tr.im/flattered

It is one thing for some 20 year old affiliate to copy another affiliate’s fake blog to market acai berry pills but SpeedDate.com is a VC-funded company.

This is a clear sign that they are not making any revenue.

Following up with people is without a doubt, my biggest flaw. It will be the end of me.

I’m writing this because this is true for almost everyone in the working world. It does not matter how challenging a problem is, execution is key. I don’t care whether you are signing a contract for a new apartment or doing a research project — if you don’t execute, you loose.

I could write more and make this a long and motivational post but instead both your time and my time should be spend executing the tasks at hand. If you have enough time to read this blog, you do not have enough items on your task list.

http://www.ppc.bz/stuff-that-is-actually-useful/some-blogs-that-are-good

PPC.bz the unofficial source of all things affiliate marketing has categorized this blog as something that is actually useful.

Chris Sherman asked if I’d like to start contributing to Search Engine Land. This is really exciting news and I’m looking forward to my first article.

More details to come.

The two do not always go together (unless you’re referring to dating offers). I won’t name names of some affiliate marketers who could be making even more money if they weren’t trying to impress their female account managers (hmm, I wonder if the networks do this on purpose?). For them, they like to show off how many sales they can generate for a certain account manager rather than taking their campaigns to the highest paying network and make even more of a killing.

Dating can suck in this space… there are a lot of late nights in front of a computer and unlike most of those guys who are computer programmers who guys still living with their parents – we many times are real people. We understand humor, we don’t play dungeons and dragons, and we make real money.

I won’t deny it – I tried asking one of my Google account reps out once (and was turned down, sadly) but what else will you do when your office is full of men? These are the women who you have to interact with…And it is a real bummer when they are actually quite attractive.

I personally have given up on dating for the most part. I’m always asked by friends and colleagues whether my profile gets special treatment on the dating site that I work for – just for the record: it doesn’t.

As a single, reasonably attractive guy with his life in order – I’ll pursue dating later. Sure, it would be great to not ask myself what I will be doing on a Saturday night, but it is refreshing to minimize the number of distractions in my life as well.

I’ve been asked to give a talk about Adgroup Management which will cover how to build a scalable campaign from the ground up by understanding what keywords to place in what adgroup and how to form your adgroups around campaigns in the proper way.

Additionally, I was informed that they most likely will want me to moderate a session as well during the second day.

I’ll be following up with some more updates about this over the next few days.

Well, being that I am biased and will say that the topic of Landing Pages & Multivariate Testing was the best topic (oh, did I talk about that?) I should probably discuss the second best topic of SMX London 2009.

2nd Best Topic: Writing Killer Search Ads & Landing Pages

I really enjoyed listening to Kate Morris of Marketing Demons.  I think I would have enjoyed Kate’s presentation more had it been first because some of what she discussed was covered first by Kerstin Baker-Ash’s presentation (who was also great).

Another great presenter was Guy Levine who mentioned off-line methods of getting great ad copy. Guy and I had a chat later that day and I mentioned the irony of his presentation: he suggested turning to magazines/newspapers for great headlines and it is our industry (online media) that is killing theirs.

Jon Myers, Head of Search at MediaVest, was the topic’s moderator and did a great job. He really gave the room’s energy a level higher than any other topic. When most moderators go to 10, Jon went to 11.

The networking was fabulous.

Well it wouldn’t be SMX without Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz now would it? I think I may have accidentally told Rand that I’d send him a few articles for his blog — which means anything that would have been worthwhile to read on this blog might now show up somewhere else

It goes without saying to give a big shout-out and thanks to both Chris Sherman and Fanny Jeanmougin for putting on SMX London and letting me speak. I look forward to SMX London 2010 and being able to present again.

As far as other smart people that attended the conference — It was awesome meeting Heath from Sony Europe. Words can not describe what a sharp guy Heath is in sales/marketing — maybe we will get the pleasure of having him speak at the next SMX because it would take Zoosk leaps and bounds to use a few pages from his playbook and apply them to our current strategies.