Affiliate Summit East Boston Wrapup Blowout Post

Posted on August 18th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing

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Ok, so it’s been about a week since Affiliate Summit East Boston 08 finished up, and Nickycakes this it’s high time for a post detailing what went down.  First a small disclaimer.  Some events and people have been left out at their request, many understandably so.  If you feel like you want to be removed from this post as well, feel free to PM nickycakes so an appropriate blackmail…err…removal schedule can be arranged.  If you’re one of the people who didn’t feel like affiliate summit would be any benefit to you and didn’t attend, then you’re stupid, and hopefully you learn your lesson before Vegas.

Alright, so let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

Thursday, August 7th, Conference Pregame Day 1:

Ok, so even though the conference didn’t actually start until Sunday, there were plenty of things going on beforehand, and many people arrived in Boston early to check out the city and relax.  Nick’s affiliate manager at Advaliant and good friend, Geoff, got into town on Thursday afternoon with his girl Wendy, so plans were made for dinner that night.  Everyone (Cakes, Cakes’ girl Nan, Geoff, Wendy) met up at Montien which is a bangin’ thai restaurant near Chinatown in Boston.  Lots of good food and Cakes got to catch up with Geoff who he hadn’t seen since ASW Vegas in the winter.  Good dinner.

Friday, August 8th, Conference Pregame Day 2:

On Thursday, Cakes agreed to give Geoff and Wendy a tour of Harvard if they wanted, so they showed up in the afternoon to Harvard Square.  They met up with Cakes, Daniel, and John (Nicky’s neighbors who have recently started doing Affiliate Marketing stuff with great success).  Everyone walked around the campus for a while, but it was looking like rain.  Wendy managed to snap off a few pics before the downpour started:

It started pouring down rain shortly after that pic was taken, so everyone went to this cafe for a little bit to wait for a few more people before going to dinner.  Dan and Cakes’ girlfriends showed up as well as SlightlyShadySEO who had just gotten into town as well.  Everyone headed to Legal Seafood in Harvard Square for dinner on Advaliant, which was excellent.  Cakes had…crab…cakes.. and raw oysters, which were off the hook.  No pics of the dinner, unfortunately.

Later that evening, Cakes and the girlfriend went to go meet a couple other people who had showed up early for the conference at Underbar, which on Friday nights is a pretty good club.

Saturday, August 9th, Conference Pregame Day 3:

Saturday was the day of the Advaliant fishing trip.  If you didn’t know about the fishing trip, basically Advaliant decided that they were gonna rent out a big fishing boat and take all their affiliates out to the ocean to go fishing instead of renting a booth at ASE.  There were about 50 affiliates/friends and a bunch of Adv employees there.  Bunch of high volume affiliates were there, some newbies, some vets, good mix.

The trip was great, it was a good chance to talk to a lot of people Nickycakes had never met before.  Unfortunately the people driving the boat didn’t stop long enough to give everyone a chance to fish and kept moving around trying to find good fishing spots, so only 3 fish were caught the whole time.  Also, like 50% of the girls on the boat got seasick, including the Cakes’ girl and Wendy.  Some more pics

Oh, almost forgot, in addition to all the girls getting sick, Ian Fernando wasn’t feeling so hot either.  Dude is obviously not built for boats:

Ian ended up being a pretty cool guy in person, despite his involvement with the joke that is top affiliate challenge.  Anyway, there were lots of cool people on the boat, too many to list everyone here, and it was a great time for those who didn’t get seasick.

After hours of riding around on the boat, everyone was put on a bus and brought to a restaurant in town.  Great dinner.  Cakes had a giant chunk of beef which was great.  The restaurant obviously wasn’t expecting so many people because some tables got their food really early while others were waiting over an hour for their food.  Sucked for those guys (ha ha slightlyshady).

At Nickycakes’ table was Cakes, Cakes’ girl, her 2 friends, CDC from syndk8, and this chick named Andrea Shoemaker (not shoemoney’s sister) who worked for like…plumtree…or appleplum or some company like that who really had no clue about affiliate marketing but was trying to get into the business and advertise affiliate products revshare-style on their high traffic website or something.  She was extremely entertaining to talk to because she just really had no clue about how most of the people who send traffic to advaliant do business.  One of her more humerous quotes from the evening was “Oh, you aren’t the people who put those dieting ads on facebook, are you???“  which got the inevitable response from Cakes of, “Uhhh…yeah along with half the people in this restaurant…probably.”

Ok so after the great dinner, Cakes was finishing his desert and was approached by this dude named Carl.  Carl apparently had something he wanted to sell.  Unfortunately he had probably the worst pitch in the history of sales pitches.  After claiming he was not only a Navy Seal and a Hollywood casting director, the conversation went something like this:
Carl: So, everyone has been recommending you as a top affiliate who makes over $100,000 a month.
Cakes: Not sure who told you that, I don’t tell anyone how much I make exactly.
Carl: Well, I’m just looking for the top affiliates for something new I’m working on.
Cakes: Ok, wjat is it?
Carl: Well, let me ask you this first: Do you like famous hollywood stars?
Cakes: I guess so….
Carl: Ok, how about famous movies, do you like those?
Cakes: Could you just tell me what the product is that you want me to promote?
Carl: Ok, so you know how when they release movies, they advertise them on TV?  Well we’re going to do that type of thing but it will be on affiliate networks.
Cakes: Yes, I’m vaguely familiar…  So uhh…you’re selling movie tickets online, is that your product?
Carl: Well I can’t really discuss exactly what we’re doing, but if you’re interested, we’ll schedule a meeting with you and we can discuss it further.
Cakes: How about you just tell me what the product is already.  I’m not going to any meeting.
Carl: I just want you to know that this would be a great opportunity, we only want the TOP affiliates who make OVER 100,000 a year on this project.
Cakes: Yeah…who the hell doesn’t…you going to tell me the product you want to advertise or what??

Let’s just say Nickycakes never found out what this idiot was trying to pitch, but we can assume it was a giant failboat.

Anyway, big thanks to Advaliant for doing the fishing trip.  It was a great day.  And as long as you guys keep coming through with awesome hookups for everyone, you’ll keep getting shameless plugs on this blog, haha.

On the bus ride back to Boston, cakes learned that there were a bunch of his friends already in town for ASE and hanging out at different spots around the city.  After finally getting home around 10:30 or so, Cakes went back out with his friend John and met up with Nick Mazza (illeat.com), GigiDawg, and bunch of peeps from neverblue including his AM Scott.  Everyone was well wasted by the time Nickycakes showed up, so he only stuck around for a few minutes to say hi to everyone before going back home.

Sunday, Aug 10, Conference Day 1:

Before doing much inside the actual conference, Cakes had lunch with a guy from a new affiliate network and the dude who runs the Ultra tea offer at Legal Test Kitchen.  Thanks for lunch guys, it was real informative.

Sunday at ASE is the Meet Market.  Basically they set up a big room with tables and a bunch of the affiliate networks and merchants set up shop and people get to walk around and meet everyone, etc.  It’s not nearly as big as the main exhibit hall show on Monday with the big booths and stuff, but it’s a good opportunity to meet everyone.  This time, however, it was very cramped and hard to walk around with all the people.  The people from Wickedfire had agreed to meet up near the Singlesnet booth around 3pm but it was so crowded inside that everyone ended up meeting up outside in the hallway.  Here’s some pics from the meet market and the wickedfire meetup outside:

So after the conference stuff was done, it was time for dinner.  For about 2 months, some internet marketing friends from IRC who will remain nameless, had made reservations at KO Prime, a great steakhouse in downtown Boston.  Geoff from advaliant agreed to sponsor the dinner, which was an awesome gesture.  Well, by the time everyone showed up, somehow the number of people invited had nearly doubled, so the party of 15 or so ended up being more like 30.  The restaurant scrambled to make room for everyone, and eventually there were seats for all, but it was a little hectic in the beginning.

Dinner was amazing.  The food was awesome, of course, but the hilight of the evening was the giant russian version of Tony Soprano who showed up.  Jon from wickedfire was sitting next to Cakes and somehow the idea was formed that Cakes would pretend to be Jon and Jon would pretend to be Cakes, since the guy had never met either.  Apparently he was one of those scammy e-book biz-opp people which made him an even bigger target.  As Cakes (posing as jon) was offering the guy free advertising on Wickedfire for all his “make money online” e-books and offering to post great things about them in exchange for large sums of money, Jon (posing as cakes) was loudly proclaiming his homosexuality.

There were a ton of big moneymakin peeps at dinner for sure.  Probably a couple mil in revenue a month if you combined everyone.  Anyway, great dinner, thanks again to advaliant.

After dinner, Nicky went home for a bit and then headed downtown to meet up with some people who wanted to go to the club.

The Sunday Night Underbar Debacle

Ok, so here’s the story of what actually happened on Sunday night.  Since Cakes lives in Boston, people kept asking him what clubs are good to go to.  Nickycakes doesn’t go to the club that often unless he gets dragged there by hot girls, which is almost always on Friday and Saturday nights.  In all honesty, Nicky has never even been to the club in Boston on a Sunday night except once like 3 years ago.  So his first choice for where to go, Gypsy bar, was closed on Sundays.  The only other good one that Cakes has been to is Underbar, so he told everyone to go there on Sunday.  Well, as it turns out, Sunday is gay night at Underbar.  So probably like 100 people showed up to party and were greeted by dudes holding hands dressed in drag waiting in line for the club.  While Nickycakes finds this absolutely hilarious, it wasn’t intentional.  Sorry for anyone who wasted an hour of their Sunday night!  And a big “You’re Welcome” to all the wickedfire people who were probably right at home there.

Cakes ended up taking the people he was with to a crappy bar downtown before everyone left and headed to Saint, which ended up being pretty good.  He was with Nick Mazza + girlfriend, GigiDawg + girlfriend, and Winkie from CX.  Music was pretty good and there were a lot of industry peeps there and Winkie was fun to hang out with, which didn’t hurt.  Not really sure how it happened, but Cakes ended up at the strip club with all the CX peeps and some dudes from wickedfire.  There was some retard from like Tattoo…Tatto..something Media who was acting a fool and making it rain $1 bills.  Either way, it ended up being a fun night.

Monday, Aug 11, Conference Day 2

Monday is when the real conference stuff starts happening.  The sessions and breakfast stuff start happenign real early, maybe like 9AM.  Cakes was sleeping.  They then continue on till lunch.  Still sleeping.  Nicky ended up making it to the conf around 12 or 12:30, which was just in time for lunch with Scott from Neverblue.  Nick’s 2 friends Dan and John came as well.  Pretty much just shot the shit for an hour or so with Scott and ate some seafood and stuff before heading back to the conference.  Here’s what the conference looks like inside the exhibit hall, in case you missed it:

The exhibit hall serves two purposes.  First, it gives Affiliate Networks an excuse to go on vacation to go set up their booth and give out t-shirts, and second, it gives the affiliates a good opportunity to meet up, exchange idea, make fun of shoemoney/john chow, and have a good time.  It’s kinda sad for the networks really, as most affiliates REALLY aren’t there to find new networks to work with.  Yeah, it’s good to say hi to your affiliate managers and whatnot, but that’s really not what most affiliates are there for.

Here’s some fun pics from Monday’s exhibit hall:

So marketleverage was one of the funniest booths at the show.  These are the people that send all the worthless bloggers like John Chow a bag full of gadgets to give away as contest prizes just to get publicity for their network, but really, have you even heard of something good about them?  The people operating their booth seemed to really know nothing about the industry at all, and just seemed to want to attract people using their “cashinator” machine.  News Flash: Most of the affiliates at ASE made more money during the time it took to walk by your booth than the amount of cash actually inside the cashinator.  GOOD STRATEGY.

Monday night was probably the highlight of the whole summit in terms of good time.  Cakes took the previously mentioned Winkie to dinner at Top of the Hub first, which has some great food.  The view from up there is awesome, you can see the whole city.  The view was cloudy for a while in the middle of dinner but ended up clearing up.  Good food, good conversation, great company.  After dinner, after walking around the public garden and boston common for a while, it was back to Saint where everyone was the previous night.  Not quite as packed as Sunday, but pretty much everyone there was from the conference.  Copeac had a private table where most of Cakes’ boys who rarely miss an opportunity for free drinks ended up being magically drawn to.  Being pretty tired, Cakes decided to leave at like 1:30 and get some sleep, but apparently everyone was partying way late at some hotel suites and whatnot.

Tuesday, Aug 12

Tuesday was about the same as Monday.  Just hung out in the exhibit hall most of the day and met people.

Tuesday afternoon, Cakes met up with his AM and friend Brittany from CPAEmpire and Jon from Wickedfire and went out to eat Japanese Hot Pot in Chinatown with Cakes’ girl at Shabu Zen.  Here’s a pic of Nickycakes and Brittany:

Scott Richter was supposed to come for dinner as well, but apparently he doesn’t know how to use chopsticks and decided to go with some guidos from cpae to get pizza or some crap.  Hopefully next time Scott!

That’s It

Well, that’s almost it.  Now comes the fun of getting spam phone calls from every company you gave your business card to, every contest you entered in the exhibit hall, and every dude you gave your number to at Underbar before you realized it was gay night.

Overall Affiliate Summit East was awesome this year.  Cakes met a ton of great people, and learned a lot of new stuff.  It is seriously an invaluable experience as an affiliate, and the amount of stuff you will learn just chatting with other affiliates is mindblowing.  If you seriously can’t scrape together $500 to $1000 a day in profit after going to one of these things, you’re really not cut for this industry and should probably assemble your resume for a dayjob search.

Anyway, 3k words is enough out of Nickycakes, hope everyone had fun.

Keep it real.

ASE Was Great

Posted on August 12th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing

Well, it was certainly awesome meeting everyone at affiliate summit boston.  Nickycakes had an awesome time, met a ton of great people, caught up with people from the last summit, ate a lot of good food, and got a lot of new ideas.

The Cakes would like to formally appologize to everyone he sent to Underbar on Sunday evening.  He had no idea it was gay night, and although everyone got dickrolled which is hilarious, it wasn’t intentional!  Serious!

There will be a full write-up tomorrow with pics and stuff, but for now, Nickycakes is exhausted.  Time for some sleep.

5 Awesome Affiliate Program Rewards You’ll Never See

Posted on August 6th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Funny

Recently there has been a lot of competition between the Affiliate Networks trying to 1-up eachother by offering bigger, better, and more expensive rewards for affiliates bringing in top volume.  Big screen TV’s, motorcycles, laptops, vacations, ipods, gift cards, and pretty much anything you could think of.  There are, however, some awesome affiliate program rewards that you’ll probably never see actually offered by the networks.  It’s obvious that they simply aren’t listening to what the affiliates REALLY want, and offering useless booby prizes that the affiliates could just buy with their own commissions.

1. Kneecap Bustin’ Baseball Bat From Hydra Network

Sick of other affiliates stealing your landing pages?  Tired of that dick outbidding you for the #1 spot on google?   Affiliate manager not giving you the payout you deserve and want to give them a little more “incentive”?  Well now you can do it in style with this Hydra Network branded Tanya Harding style Louisville Slugger!

2. Lazy Bedridden Affiliate Bedpan from NeverBlueAds

Affiliates live the good life.  Waking up at the crack of noon, working all day in your pajamas.  Well, imagine not even having to get out of bed!  Keep a minifridge as your bedside table and use this premium bedpan from Neverblue to take care of the rest!  Now your bathroom breaks will never be an irritating interruption to your strenuous workday.

3. Tub For Swimming In Your Piles of Money From Advaliant

All that money you have stuffed in your mattress just isn’t being put to good use.  Now you can swim in a bathtub full of your hard(ly) earned cash with this jumbo Money Tub from Advaliant!

4. Photoshoppable Super Affiliate Check from Azoogle

Just made your first $100 and interested in starting an awesome super-affiliate blog?  Well now you can hop on the bandwagon in style with this easily photoshoppable azoogle ads commission check.  Be an “uber” affiliate by faking your stats to get a drooling horde of 3rd world fanbois willing to pay their wife’s dowry for a month of your “private consulting” services.  You’ll have thousands of subscribers in days, while at the same time gaining the respect of the other awesome super affiliates in the biz.

5. Affiliate Edition Turbo Tax Evasion Software from CPAEmpire

Forget setting up extra bank accounts in the Caymans.  With Turbo Tax Evasion: Affiliate Edition, you don’t even need to liberally apply business expense deductions to your disneyworld vacations.  Just upload your receipts and you’ll have more refunds on your hands than the Wu-Yi Tea Complaints department!

Ad Spots n Stuff

Posted on August 5th, 2008 in General

Ok, so Nickycakes is, at heart, pretty lazy about some stuff.  The ad spots on this site havent changed in months and the people advertising haven’t even been billed for them in months, mostly because it’s a pain to keep track of whos buying what ads and when to bill them all for like $300 a month (total).  Not exactly something worth spending hours managing, for sure.

Anyway, the dudes at oiopublisher were nice enough to let the Cakes use their ad management software which pretty much handles all the ads.  It looks pretty simple, but the jury is still out on if it works well or whatever.  Looks pretty good from the settings and stuff.

So yeah, long story short, all the ads are cleared now, and adspace is now open.  Price is still $50 a month which is an absolute steal considering just the referrals to Advaliant from this site have made over 1mil in commissions since january.  Keep in mind, however, that Nickycakes has to approve your ad before it’s allowed on the site, so if you’re running some crappy e-book site or are an affiliate network that is well known for scamming people, please don’t even bother.

Ok and just so this isn’t a complete self promotion post, here’s a funny story about how one advertiser got one over on Nickycakes:

So, this dude bought an ad on this site a couple months ago, and since Nickycakes wasn’t approving ads prior to taking payment he had to put it up.  Well it was an ad for PPC-Coach which is a service Nickycakes has talked about quite a bit and mentions in his newbie guide.  Basically it just linked to the dude’s referral url so the guy was getting affiliate commissions anytime someone read about PPC-Coach on this site and then clicked through his ad to sign up.  Nickycakes was getting pm’s all the time saying stuff like “hey dude i signed up to ppc-coach with your referral url, i’ll let you know how i like it.”  But they were, in fact, using this dude’s referral url.  So apparently this dude does the same thing all over on many affiliate marketing related blogs, and it must be fairly successful.

With so many blogs everywhere these days and people dying to make money with them, it should be fairly easy to buy cheap adspace.  Then you just find a good product/service with a good payout (preferrably recurring) and you’re good to go.  And then hopefully you stumble upon some idiot like Nickycakes who forgets to bill you for months and you get free advertising.

Keep it real.

Keeping In Touch at ASE

Posted on August 4th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing

Ok, so ASE is less than 1 week out, and judging from the number of people signed up just through Nickycakes’ link alone, turnout should be awesome.  At affiliate summit west over the winter, things were a little crazy.  Had the Cakes not hooked up with some peeps early on, it would have probably been pretty hard to find out what everyone was doing at night after all the official conference stuff was over.  That’s why you need a solid gameplan for getting in touch with people when you’re in Boston.

First and foremost, if you’re a fan of this site and want to hang out with other nickycakes.com readers, make sure you join Cakes Chat.  There are usually around 80 people at any given time in #cakes on irc.freenode.net which will make it an ideal place to ask where everyone is while you’re relaxing in your hotel room trying to make plans.  Even if you’re not at the conference, you’re missing out on a great resource of some of the smartest internet marketing folks in the business who regularly answer stupid newbies questions and such.

Once you’re out and about in the city, if you don’t have everyone’s phone numbers (which is very likely in this business), you should hook up with people on twitter.  If you don’t already have twitter, you should get it.  Yes, the name sounds retarded, but it’s actually kinda cool.  It’s like they took the facebook status updates and mad a whole website based on that where you could direct message people and allowed you to tie everything to your cellphone.  So get signed up and then follow nickycakes on twitter, as well as affsum.   If you have half a brain, you should be able to figure out how to turn on mobile updates from the affsum feed.  So then, all you have to do is send a twitter message like “@affsum where is everyone hanging out tonight” and it will be broadcasted to everyone else following the affsum feed as well.  Nickycakes will try to keep his twitter updated as much as possible during the conf.

Nickycakes.com readership has grown tremendously in the short time since Affiliate Summit West this year.  Subscriber count back then was about 200 or so, which made it pretty for Nickycakes to hang out with everyone he knew online simply because nobody knew who the fck he was.  This unfortunately makes hanging out with everyone almost impossible so make sure you show up to the meet market thing on sunday to exchange info with Cakes and the rest of the crew who should be meeting up there at some point.