I debated at some length whether I would attend again this year. But decided I might as well. I met a few people last year that justified it. I’m really only going for the networking, but I’ll sit in on a few sessions as well. Sure, you can make friends in the industry long distance, but nothing really compares to shaking someone’s hand in person and sharing some experiences like lunch, dinner, or a drunken bender that lasts into the night.

Sorry, I haven’t been updating my blog very often, frankly it is because I’ve been too busy with my family. We just had our 5th child 10 weeks ago. Also, if I’ve been at my computer, I’ve generally been working on scaling up my stuff. I used to give updates about my income monthly and have really been remiss about that.

Here is a general update: Things have been pretty steady over the last year. Increasing a little bit every month. Last month I made about $8,600.00 net on about $16,000.00 gross. I have a goal of making $30K net in September. Cash flow has been one of the biggest factors limiting the rate I can scale things. I’ve finally reached the point where I have enough business capital to scale things as fast as I can do the work.

The Parties:

Platinum 84; June 17, 9pm: I was about an hour late to the party.  The location was inconvenient but there were free buses running a loop from the Hyatt convention hotel to Platinum 84. Being late already, I took a cab.

I heard several first hand accounts that Marcia Brazil the highly publicized celebrity hostess immediately got drunk, was on stage naked making out with 2 strippers(even though she wasn’t paid to strip). She according to one unconfirmed report did something with the beer pong balls that was more likely to be seen in Bangkok.  She definitely dove across a beer pong table smashing full beer cups and making a huge mess. She was grabbing guys and kissing them full on the lips, poured beer over some guys head, and violated someone’s religion (don’t ask). In less than an hour, she got kicked out of her own party at a strip club. It had to be pretty bad.

I thought it’d be no big deal to be a fashionable 1 hour late to this thing, but regret that I missed out on the opportunity to get some pics of this craziness for you guys.

After I got to the party, it was packed full of mostly professionally behaved people with an open bar and full buffet of food and booze that never ran out.  There were incredible looking topless women everywhere. They called it a strip club, but they just stayed topless. None of them ever ‘stripped’. Although I was much too interested in networking and meeting people in the industry to leer at the girls.

The Platinum 84 party was about as wonderfully tacky and sexist as you can imagine. If you like that sort of thing, then you certainly missed out on something.

The Alto; June 18 5:30pm: Heather Paulson of the Paulson Group threw a classy little gathering here where it was pretty upscale. It was early so everyone was sober and well behaved. I made a few connections and then received an invitation to dinner so ducked out at about 7pm or so. I don’t know how late this gathering lasted.

The Lure Lounge; June 18 9:30pm: Not a strip club right? Well, maybe you should decide. I was late due to my dinner with 3 network owners and the 202 guys.

I assured my wife this one was networking only. No naked girls. But to my surprise they had about 6-8 painted ladies running around with trays of shot glasses. Drinks were free for a short while, then you had to buy your drinks unless you knew someone who gave you a vip bracelet. I was up there pouring vodka straight into people’s mouths. I took a video of some local rapping duo that performed for about 30 minutes up there.  This party was packed full and pretty fun I have to admit. For you pervs there are a few more pics of the painted ladies in my photo gallery.

Unknown location: about midnight June 18

I was hanging out with some pretty awesome people. But in their interest I won’t name them here. We headed from the Lure Lounge on foot to some other club and one network owner smooth talked us all into the vip upstairs area with free redbull, drinks, and girls dancing on a platform. That place about finished me off and I stumbled into a cab about 1:30. I’m sorry, but for some reason I don’t remember the name of the place. There were maybe 10-20 conventioners that made their way over here. Bonus points in the comment section if you can name the place.

June 19, 5:30 pm, I can’t remember the name of this place either even though I didn’t drink anything on Friday. Really…. I gave my drink tickets away.

We went straight from the convention hall to this place. It had a large bar area upstairs and a couple tickets for free drinks. Some wings were laid out. A decent sized crowd showed up here. I stepped downstairs with a couple affiliates to have dinner. People were still their socializing until 11:30 when I left. I was homesick for my wife and kids. I’m sure I could have partied until 2 in the morning again. I drove home that night (about 220 miles) and got home at about 3am.

Parties I missed:

There were parties in hotel rooms every night until very unreasonable hours.

I know some folks went to the Diamond Cabaret strip club on both the 18th and 19th

On the 19th, there were people gathered at the top of the Hyatt having drinks.

Probably a lot more I don’t know about. I imagine there were several simultaneous gatherings at diverse locations every night.

Here’s a quick video walkthrough of the party at kind of a quiet moment:

You’ll certainly have heard people complaining that it was small, but I feel it made networking a more intimate experience. I made some wonderful new friends and really loved the whole thing. I’m certainly glad I went.

The talks I attended were useful but available on Webmaster Radio. So I tended to not worry about attending them and focus more on networking. I was too hung over to make it to any of the early talks although they were probably the best ones.

I sat in for:
Super Affiliate Marketing Techniques: with Heather (awesome) Paulson, Steve Schaffer, Hamlet (supercool) Batista, and Jessie Jones
All intelligent speakers giving out good advice but just like any 1 hour talk they didn’t have enough time to go into enough detail to really change things  for me. It served well as an introduction to a few concepts. A person would need to get some one-on-one time with these geniuses to really benefit from their experience.

Managing Search Campaigns that Scale: with Dan Boberg, Marc Barach, Mark Ziler, and Brian Lewis
All nice guys with good services to sell, but these things are geared towards large companies. After sitting through a long talk discussing strategies for using up to millions of keywords and how it can make you super rich, I asked a question of the panel. “How much do your services cost and how are the fees calculated?” The answer was about 5% with a $5,000.00 per month minimum. These services are not really intended for small time affiliates. But it might be worth considering for very large affiliates. Had I known what I was getting into, I wouldn’t have been in the room.

Black Hat vs. White Hat: with Scott Polk, David Snyder, Frank Watson, and Marc Lesnick
Fun to attend. Fun to listen to. Mostly it was entertaining. Should make for a fun listen over at Webmaster Radio. There were lots of clever ideas being thrown out there. Go check it out.

Legal Matters and Affiliate Marketing: with Steven Richter and Amanda Berry
Definitely worth attending. The short of it is that if you are an affiliate marketer, you probably aren’t compliant even if you think you are. Your TOS won’t protect you if the rest of the site is a huge scam. It is critical that you actually treat your visitors in the way your privacy policy claims you do. I asked him about LLC’s and offshore companies as defensive strategies and Mr. Richter emphatically recommended having a good lawyer set things like this up for you. He added a small disclaimer that setting up offshore entities can work against you by raising suspicions of the IRS and other investigative agencies. In other words incorporating goes without saying, but going offshore may make you look guilty. But it makes it much more expensive for people to come after you.

Final Panel Debate: with Heather Paulson, Beto Paredes, Phil Maher, Charles Mui, and Hamlet Batista
Free beer and potato chips with no limit on the beer. Everyone attended this one.  Just a big, fun wrapup to the convention. Prizes were given out, people were thanked and the general feeling was pretty warm and fuzzy.

Meals: I had the opportunity to meet and socialize with some wonderful people. On day one I grabbed lunch with some serious SEO types, Jim Kreinbrink of Hyper Dog Media among them.

For dinner on day 1 I was honored to share the table at Maggiano’s with Ricky  Ahuja, and Cathie Terry of Affiliate Venture Group, Wes Mahler and Roland Navarro of Tracking202 fame, Mario Girard and Julia Smart of CPA Underground and Rishab Verma and Richie Gill of Elite Commision. I wish I had a recording of the conversation.

On day 2 I skipped lunch and wound up having dinner during the evening party at the Lure Lounge with Augusto Ellacuriaga of SpanishSEO and Jim Kreinbrink of Hyper Dog Media. Both of these gentlemen are multi-faceted in their diverse knowledge of internet marketing techniques.

The parties were legendary and impossible to forget but hard to remember for some reason. I think they deserve their own post. I’ll try to get to it soon.

I came home with some great pictures but sadly there are several awesome people I met and somehow failed to get a picture of. I’ll have to do better next time.