Posted on January 27th, 2009 in General
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Things have been a little slow post-wise here at nickycakes.com this january. Don’t worry, though, there is plenty in the works. Nickycakes has been busy redoing his newbie guide and its looking like its going to be in 8-10 long ass sections. So be on the lookout for that. Hopefully it will clear up some of the stupid questions being asked in #cakes lately.
Speaking of #cakes, it’s going strong with about 160-200 people in there on any given night. Many big names in the affiliate marketing world like barman(ppc.bz), shoemoney, ryan eagle, smaxor (ads4dough), eli (bluehatseo), aojon(wickedfire), seocracy, slightly shady seo, and many others are in there almost all the time. Check out Cakes Chat info to find out how to get up in there.
Twitter is something Nickycakes has been in love with for a while now. If you’re not following nickycakes twitter, then you’re definately missing out on the day to day stuff that’s involved with affiliate marketing. This means you get to hear john chow-esque updates about what the cakes is having for dinner, but also there are occasional important updates and funny posts. Also, every post made on nickycakes.com gets posted on twitter, so you can stay up to date and not risking missing that next important post. There’s this cool twitter plugin for wordpress that Nickycakes installed last week, and if you link to one of the posts on this blog, a link to your twitter will show up at the bottom of the post, above the comments, kinda like trackbacks, except not instantly sent to the fcking garbage can like any trackbacks coming to this blog are. If you have a blackberry or iphone, getting them hooked up to twitter is really easy with twitterberry and whatever lame twitter app for apple’s phone is popular these days.
A few weeks ago was the unofficial opening of the Nickycakes Fanclub. Nickycakes uses his facebook account mostly for personal stuff, like keeping in touch with old friends from high school, so recently, most of the business contacts that Nicky has not actually met in real life much have been removed. There was just too many messages on facebook from these random AM’s at affiliate networks trying to push offers and shit. Annoying. So….Nickycakes Fanclub was started to fill the void. Now you can have a proud emblem of your love for Nickycakes.com displayed prominently on your facebook page for all to see. This also gives you the opportunity to photoshop Nickycakes into retarded situations and have a place to post them.
Videos from Nickycakes’ session supposedly will be available online for your viewing pleasure in some capacity in the near future. This also goes for the lengthy interview with the prosper202 guys which actually covered a lot more in-depth stuff.
That’s it for now.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Welcome to the 3rd and final installment of the ASW 09 wrapup post. Most of you were probably holding your breath for this one, but before it gets out of hand, a little disclaimer. The information in this post is probably all made up, fiction, satire, alleged 2nd hand knowledge, unreliable, and for entertainment purposes only. Also, any events that may or may not have occured outside affiliate summit, such as things that happen at parties, are really in no way related to the show itself. Things can get a little crazy in vegas.
Tame In-Show Drama
It’s always fun to see the interactions between companies that dislike eachother when they’re forced together at a trade show. Last years ASW had Azoogle and Copeac booths located next to eachother which made for some fun times and hilarious promotional materials. Copeac had some great little flyers with an arrow “coincidentally” pointing at the booth next door and saying some fun things about “the competition.” At this ASW, as well as ASE in Boston last year, copeac brought these awesome foam slingshot rockets and had their booth mysteriously within firing range of “the competition.” Some chick at the booth started getting pissed when Nickycakes and his friends rolled up and started grabbing rockets and firing them en masse across the exhibit hall. What did they expect?
Worth mentioning are Toronto rivals CX digital and Azoogle booths being next to eachother this year. Also Frazier from CX and Ryan Sessler from Azoogle look a lot alike.
Also funny was to see the singlesnet.com and match.com booths directly across from eachother. Even more funny was to see so many guys working for dating sites who were so unlikely to…have girlfriends.
Party Drama
Cx Party -
The CX digital party, as mentioned in the last post, was really nice. Their guest list was only affiliates that worked with them and maybe like 1 guest if they were lucky. That’s what made their party so good. No companies trying to pitch them stuff, etc. Nicky spent a few minutes downstairs in the palms hanging out with the cx people as they were checking people in, and they were turning non-invitees away faster than evolution books in a Wasilla library. Somehow, Nate Whitehill, the dude who designs like…john chow and uberaffiliates blogs, got in as someone’s guest. But instead of just staying and enjoying the party, dude starts calling people and telling them to come there and to say they’re his guest. So these people show up, and the cx people are forced to go down 29 floors to tell the douchebags to leave cause they weren’t invited. Honestly guys, things are getting a little rough for you on the party scene when you’re trying to namedrop nate whitehill to get into a party. Just sayin. Pretend to know the dj or something, at least.
Advaliant Mansion Party -
By now, you have hopefully read the full story of the rug adventures at the advaliant mansion party at red rock. Nickycakes had half a post written up about this whole ordeal but had to scrap it when Barman beat him to the punch complete with skillfull photoshops and whatnot. This is probably the funniest story of the whole time in vegas, so go read and enjoy: PPC.BZ MisAdventures: The Rick Flair Rug From the Red Rock Mansion. And big thanks to c0ck (the guy with the rug) for the cuban cohiba. He keeps it real on the cigar tip.
Undisclosed Private Poker Game -
Alright, just to repeat, this is all second hand and probably false info. Anyway, there was this private poker tourney in a suite at one of the bigger hotels in the area. One of the attendees was John Kitover, owner of bannerblindness, which was featured at #2 on nickycakes’ top 10 worst sites 2k8. So John ends up losing the poker tournament early…not surprising. He then proceeds to make this big sales pitch, holding up the game, bragging about how he has 10 employees (lol) and if you need any work done just call him and starts throwing his business cards all over the table like a retard. John then proceeds to disappear into some room with the two hired adult entertainers who happened to be at the poker tournament. 20 minutes later, an extremely drunk kyle irwin becomes irritated that the adult entertainment has left the party, so armed with his camera phone kyle goes on a quest to find the missing strippers. Upon opening a door to one of the rooms, Irwin is greeted by angry yelling followed by John throwing water on him and trying to slam the door in his face. Enraged by the water throwing, irwin proceeds to kick the door open in John’s face a few times before giving up and going back to the party with a hilarious video on his phone. A few minutes later, Barman needs to use the restroom, which is located through the bedroom in question, so he ends up walking in on John sitting with one of the adult entertainers who then asks barman to “spot him $500″ to pay for some undisclosed activity. Barman laughs in his face and basically tells him to go F himself, at which point John proceeds to walk out into the party and start individually begging people for money, including asking the head of one of the biggest affiliate networks to spot him $80. Then, John goes and finds Kyle, who is at this point watching the video with a bunch of other guys and laughing, and buys the memory card from his camera for $100 in a desperate attempt to cover his tracks. Stay classy, Bannerblindness.
Copeac Party -
Later that evening, in another location, Kyle Irwin from the previous story ends up extremely drunk. EXTREMELY drunk. Starts walking around and trash talking pretty much everyone in sight. He ends up spouting racial slurs and threatening the wrong dude and gets punched in the face once and then ejected from the party. Guy doing the punching ends up hero of the party and possibly ASW. Kyle is actually a pretty good guy, usually. Apparently later he was spotted puking between some slot machines. Good times.
That’s It For This Year
Well that’s about all Nickycakes has in him about ASW 09. Now you know what you’re missing if you didn’t go.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
There were a ton of parties at ASW this year, so it was kinda hard to choose which ones to go to. Most of the Cakes readers ended up at the Advaliant mansion party, the Copeac party, the CX digital party, or some combination of those three. All three ended up being off the hook in their own way, as Nickycakes had predicted in his pre-game post. This post should give a little rundown of these events.
The Advaliant Mansion Party
So what Advaliant seems to be doing lately is throwing a giant blowout party at these shows rather than getting a booth. It seems to be working well for them. At ASE 08 in Boston, they took all their top affiliates out on a big fishing boat and then to a nice restaurant. Then at adtech they had a big party at 2 connected nightclubs which was awesome. It was actually a group effort with them and a few other companies, especially Gene Miller and GMB Direct. Gene is pretty much a genius when it comes to these types of things, and from what Nickycakes hears, was the brains behind the mansion party. Here’s a picture of Gene with a portrait someone did of him:
Ok, so here’s the thing…the party itself was awesome, but Nickycakes was only there for like 20 minutes. Guys…don’t take a girl to Vegas with you unless you know they will be able to hang out with your work friends. Nuff said. Cakes got taken away from that party quicker than Uberaffiliates fake ID at the last ASW. But, that aside, the party was pretty jumpin. The place was packed, and you couldn’t walk anywhere without seein some people from wickedfire. There was a huge pool out back and apparently an indoor pool somewhere. Tons of hired dancers everywhere, loud music, open bar, poker tables, the works. Here are a couple pics that someone managed to snap before Nicky had to bounce:
Geoff from Advaliant, Cakes, Dan Wallace (kair0s)
Geoff, Alla the Ukranian Advaliant AM, Cakes
Was a pretty sweet shindig and laid the foundation for one of the funniest stories in ASW history.
The Copeac Palms Sky Villa Party
Copeac started the night off with a bang by hosting a poker tournament in their sky villa suite at the Palms. Nicky was supposed to take part in that, but ended up having an important dinner, and everyone knows he keeps it real when it comes to eating. Not really sure who the winner of that was, but apparently Barman came in 2nd. There was also some drama with the idiot from bannerblindness (featured at #2 in nickycakes’ 2008 top 10 worst post) throwing business cards all over the table when he lost, and then later begging for money to pay some adult entertainers for something or other since he was short on cash. Sounds like a real standup guy.
Anyway, a little about the Sky Villa suite (CX digital also had a sky villa for their party, one floor down): it’s like 6k square feet, has a jacuzzi pool which hangs out over the edge of the building, a couple bedrooms, a steam room, gym room, spinning circular bed, and pretty much anything else you could ask for in a party spot.
The party was invite only, and they had bouncers being real dicks at the door to anyone without an invite..which was great, because theres nothing better than watching bitchy drunk girls who don’t belong getting angry that they can’t get into the party. If you didn’t already have a relationship with Copeac, then it would have been pretty difficult to get an invite. But it’s not that hard to get on the list if you at least sign up and talk to whoever your affiliate manager is over there, and run a little traffic. They definately take care of their affiliates. That said, there were tons of people there. Affiliates, affiliate managers, network owners, big merchants, whoever. Place was jumpin, especially around midnight.
One of the best parts of the party was meeting some of the people from the ad approval team at Facebook. They seemed really enthusiastic about changing their policies or at least making them more clear. We’ll see, but here’s a pic of Nick with Marisa, the girl responsible for disapproving all his ads:
And then here’s one with Shoemoney:
Thanks to Mike for the party. Definately one of the coolest network owners in the biz.
CX Digital Roll Like a Billionaire Party
The venue for the CX Digital party was almost identical to the Copeac party, just one floor down, however the parties themselves were quite different. CX decided that it would be better to invite ONLY their affilaites. No employees from other networks, no merchants, no non-affiliates basically. There were really no exceptions and getting in without being on the list was near impossible. This made for a really nice party where nobody was trying to sell anything, and everyone was pretty chill and just enjoying themselves.
The food there was great. They had all these little fingerfoods catered. Especially good were the little one-bite hamburgers. They had lots of other good stuff too like shrimp and little ham sandwiches and stuff. Nickycakes could have thrown together a pretty big ass meal if he hadn’t already eaten too dinners. The best, though, was the cheesecake guy. They had this dude serving scoops of cheesecake in desert glasses and had all sorts of bangin toppings to put on them. Was really really really bangin. Cx, please get that again next year, kthx.
The entertainment was great as well. First, they had a blackjack tourney, which Nickycakes ended up not realizing was happening until it was too late. Danielle (also featured on nickycakes’ 2008 top 10 worst post) ended up winning. Looked like a lot of fun. They had quite a few hired girls walking around the party and dancing and stuff. Didn’t make for bad scenery:
Hey..nice shirts ladies…oh wait..no..that’s just paint.
Here’s the DJ:
Great party by the peeps at CX Digital.
How to Get Invited Next Time
Ok, golden opportunity to drop some referral links, but the fact of the matter is, if you’re not signed up to these networks (and yes, they have big ass parties at pretty much all the events) then you are unlikely to get invited, so sign up and build a relationship with them for next time:
Advaliant - Pretty much all the AM’s there are great.
Copeac - Jeff or Ryan are great guys to work with, so maybe ask for one of them.
CX Digital - Ask for Winkie if you already kinda know what you’re doing, or Frazier if you’re from digital point, speak broken english, you’re under 18, or you just don’t seem to be able to figure out this whole “affiliate marketing” thing.
Thanks to everyone who gave Nickycakes pictures, like Alla and Dan Wallace. Any more pics people have of parties like this, feel free to email to nickycakes at gmail so he can add the good ones to this post.
Keep it real, and stay tuned for the 3rd part..which should cover some juicy drama.
Published by nickycakes //
First, Nickycakes would like to say that he was absolutely humbled by the number of people who came up and thanked him for providing a useful resource for new and experienced affiliates. That is the ultimate goal of this site, and is really the best payment for this job…well..other than the buckets of referral commissions of course. It was really awesome meeting everyone, and this was, by far, the best Affiliate Summit that the Cakes has had the opportunity to attend. Another big thanks for everyone who showed up to Nickycakes’ session. It was great to see so many people awake at noon in vegas. Cheers.
Ok, so the wrapup post will have to be broken into 3 parts just because there is sooo much stuff to cover. The first of the 3 parts will cover the show itself. It’s important to separate the show from the rest of the conference this year because so many crazy ass things went down, and the affiliate summit staff may not want everything directly associated with them. And, to be fair, it is vegas after all…so crazy stuff is bound to happen. So after reading this post, stay tuned for the other installments which will contain parties and drama galore.
Day 0: Saturday
Nicky didn’t end up getting into vegas until late Saturday evening, which felt like even later due to the time zone difference, so he ended up just crashing and missing the Wickedfire Meetup on Saturday night. Apparently it was good times tho, and many pictures were taken. There were also the exclusive wickedfire T-Shirts given out which Nickycakes was proud to have designed the back of. Ruck, cakes’ good pal and owner of Convert2Media footed the bill for the shirts and had the shirt order rejected by two separate printing companies due to the dickroll url on the front. Awesome.
Day 1: Sunday
Arriving at the Rio about 20 minutes before his panel, Nickycakes went down to the conference center to find a long ass line at the registration tables for people trying to get their passes. He decided that half an hour was too long to wait, so he just walked to the front of the line, found an open computer, filled in his registration info, got his pass, and went on in. Good game.
The panel Nickycakes was speaking on was at noon on Sunday. It was the first session of the conference…why not open with a bang, rite? The panel was supposed to be about Affiliate Marketing…lead generation strategies, whatever. Andrew Wee was the panel moderator, and Nickycakes, Geordie Carswell, and Miles Baker were the panelists. Geordie is another ppc guy, and Miles does SEO. Andrew….attends conferences and has a blog…as well as plays some facebook games from time to time. The way Andrew set it up was..he would ask questions of the panelists, and then they would answer citing their experience in their fields. The questions were pretty basic, and didn’t really have much depth to them, so it was hard to go into much detail. The weird thing was, after the panelists answered, andrew would go off on some tangent about blogging which didnt really relate much to what we were talking about…but i guess that just everyone on the panel a chance to drink some water.
As the thing was filling up, Nicky was able to take a couple pics prior to everything getting started. Most of the room ended up pretty full of people with a few standing in the back (click to enlarge):
And a few pics of the session in progress:
In all honesty, the thing went pretty well. The place ended up pretty full as people were able to get their passes and wake up from partying the night before. There were some decent questions asked, and good answers, and there were also some pretty awful questions asked as well. Overall, not a bad first professional speaking gig for the Cakes. More to come hopefully.
Destone (seen sitting in the front row to the left with red hair in the panorama pic) was met with utter failure when he tried to rickroll the entire room at the end using…..an iphone… Cakes couldn’t even hear it and he was sitting 5 feet away and the room was silent expecting him to ask a question. Stay classy Craig.
After that, there were more sessions, but the Cakes went to the Meet Market, which is just a giant room with tables set up for a bunch of companies, networks, whatever, and you can go around and talk to everyone. Kinda like a more casual version of the main exhibit hall which starts on monday. One of the fun parts of the meet market was the booth that Facebook had set up. Facebook decided they wanted to come to ASW to see first hand exactly how much everyone hated their ad approval team, and the resounding answer was: a metric fuckton. One of the guys at the booth even held up a video camera and recorded Cakes going on a rant about how he’d love to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on facebook traffic if they would let him, but since they wont, that money is now going to other people, like myspace and google.
Day 2: Monday
Monday is when the exhibit hall opens and you get to go see all the real big booths. Nickycakes was up early and decided to try the continental breakfast at the conference. It consisted of cereal, pastries, and fruit, and there was orange juice and some other stuff to drink as well. Not exactly the giant omlette that would have been ideal for a starving affiliate, but it was enough. Nicky then headed over a little late to the Gary Vaynerchuk keynote. Apparently this guys claim to fame is that he hosts some wine show on tv and has some related website. Well, he was a good public speaker, but the keynote was devoid of any real decent information that could be used towards affiliate marketing, unless you spend your days endlessly trolling digital point and joel comm’s blog. Probably the only useful thing he talked about was like…don’t reply to too many people on twitter cause it’s annoying.. The Q+A session that followed was all just people trying to get voice time on the mic to promote their shitty websites, so Nicky rolled out early to avoid bothering everyone with his snoring from the back row.
After the disappointing keynote, most everyone headed over to the exhibit hall, where all the still-half-drunk affiliate managers were struggling to finish setting up their booths and choke down some alka-seltzer in time for the crowds to show up. As far as the show itself is concerned, the exhibit hall is where it’s at for affiliates. Not necessarily because all the networks are there, but because the other affiliates are there and you get to go hang out with them and talk shop a little. You can’t really talk shop at the parties at night cause most people are sloshed and don’t feel like talking about work that much, but in the day, everyone wants to talk some business.
Now a little bit about booths. If you’re an affiliate network, you might want to pay attention to this one if you want to attract any affiliates to your booth. Put yourself in the shoes of an affiliate walking around the ASW exhibit hall. Almost every network is trying to get you to come over and chat so they can tell you about their “most exclusive offers”, “best payouts”, and “best affiliate managers” or whatever. EVERYONE. It gets boring having every booth trying to sell you something. That’s why most affiliates just walk around and talk to other affiliates…it’s much more productive. So…your goal is to attract affiliates to your booth. What do affiliates want? Do they want some flatscreen displays with a signup form to your network? Do they want a variety of free pens with your network name written on them? Or maybe some anti-stress foam things? NO. Let’s take a look at some good and bad booths.
Here’s the bad..this is a double booth during a really busy time when tons of affiliates and other people are jam packed in the exhibit hall. You can almost hear the crickets. The logo has been removed since this company seems to be [allegedly] rather trigger happy with the legal documents.
Really? Two chairs and a glass table? Do you honestly thing this is going to bring you more business?
One booth actually hired a freakin magician…well you could really just call him a 5yr old birthday party type clown except with no makeup and a suit on…
Ok, lets take a look at some booths that actually attracted affiliates:
Jason from Ads4Dough was pretty much spot on with what affiliates want in a show booth. He just got a decent sized flatscreen, nintendo wii, and a big ass wrap around sofa. The thing was packed the whole show. There were like at least 1mil a month in revenue worth of affiliates on that sofa like the whole show.
And then there was the booth that had the foosball table. People were all over that one:
No pics available of it for some reason, but copeac had a keg and a sofa at their booth which was a pretty good draw as well.
Day 3: Tuesday
With monday being the big day, tuesday is more of the same as monday, except things are kinda winding down. Especially since there are so many parties monday night, and pretty much all the attendees and exhibitors are hung over, it’s a pretty slow day. As none of the networks who took pics with me have responded to nickycakes’ requests for said photos, here is the obligatory pic of nicky with his favorite cx digital affiliate manager…
Whenever network people get off their collective asses and send me more, they will be posted.
update pics:
That’s it for the official conference stuff…more to come on parties in the next post.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
needed for asw post(s). send to nickycakes ATTTTTTT gmail
kthx.
Published by nickycakes //
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