Posted on May 27th, 2009 in General
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Ok, so Nickycakes isn’t even going to bother to link to these clowns, but there is something called Affiliate Convention going on June 17-20th (next month) in Denver. It is being advertised as a “free convention” for affiliates which means just the exhibitors and other non-affiliate attendees have to pay. This seems like a good plan, however, the good ideas seem to halt there.
First of all, Denver is an awful place to have a convention. The weather isn’t that great compared to plenty of other destinations, there’s really not a whole lot to do, there aren’t exactly a ton of airlines with hubs in denver, making airfare a pain in the ass, etc. Also, every summer, Media Breakaway (cpaempire) has a conference around the same time, and they were forced to cancel theirs because of this retarded show which will probably be 20x worse. They could have had it an hour and a half away in Vegas probably for cheaper, in a decent venue, with tons of stuff to do, and lots of fun, but seriously, Denver? Come on..
Second off, while the “affiliates are free” thing sounds good on the surface, it’s bound to be a complete disaster. Having to pay $200 for registration to affiliate summit is a GOOD thing for affiliates. Wanna know why? Because then you don’t have a bunch of worthless broke retards from digital point trying to leech info that they’ll turn into their next $7 e-book (can i haz review copy plz). Want data to back up this theory? No problem. Affiliate convention has a page that shows demographic data for the affiliates who have signed up so far… guess what, only 70% of them even speak english:
Add this to the fact that almost every “free” convention fails miserably, and you have a recipe for disaster, already, even if there were nothing further wrong with this convention, which there is.
Third, the people running it really have no clue about the industry. Not only because of their speak selection, which will be covered in more detail in the next point. The “owners” are webmasterradio and affspot. Webmaster radio is an awful “free” web radio station that is supposed to be webmaster related obviously. Their shows about anything affiliate marketing related are devoid of anything worthwhile. This can also be said about their shows on SEO and the like. Totally worthless. They cram more ads into their stuff than one of those 800 page fashion magazines. They used to try to extort some money out of you if you wanted to like…get past shows and stuff without commercials, but it looks like they gave up on that failboat recently. And affspot…well, not even really mentioning them, but they’re an affiliate marketing forum with about 100 threads or so, if that tells you anything. So needless to say, neither entity really knows anything about the industry, which is another disaster waiting to happen.
Ok, finally, the speakers. Admittedly, there are a couple good speakers on the list. They have 2 of nicky’s friends from mediatrust speaking, but further than that you’ll find nothing but garbage. Here’s a rundown of a few of the clowns that they thought people would want to listen to:
Kris Jones (Pepperjam) - Yeah, lets get the guy who runs one of the most retarded commission junction knockoff networks to speak. Hmm…maybe he’ll talk about hiring a bunch of inexperienced girls straight out of undergrad as affiliate managers because they look cute. After all, that’s what all affiliates look for in an affiliate manager right? Oh, and he’s talking about transparency, which is one of their networks selling points. At first Nickycakes was interested when he found that out, only to discover that all they do is mark each of their offers with an arbitrary meaningless grade for how “transparent” it is, but it really means nothing. They don’t get to look at the merchants backend to see if they’re scrubbing or anything like that. Oh, and also, instead of an affiliate manager at pepperjam managing the relationship between the affiliate and the merchant, the merchant itself in most cases is required to manage speak to the affiliate directly. THATS TRANSPARENCY RIGHT GUYS???!? RIGHT?!?11 What a joke. Nickycakes almost thinks that the merchants are the retarded ones for even giving pepperjam a cut of their margins. Almost… And this is the idiot they have headlining the conference. Nice pick, morons.
Aunesty Janssen (founder of affspot) - Good job founding affspot forums….or something. Hope you tell everyone how you got all 50 of your forum members to sign up.
Graham Gochneaur ([allegedly]head of Clickbooth marketing) - Talking about “how to get what you want from your affiliate manager”. How about you talk about how to get your affilate manager to [allegedly] tell you to make fake blogs to promote your offers and then [allgedly] send an email out the next week telling everyone how you would NEVER and have NEVER [allegedly] told people to promote products this way. Maybe you can also talk about the positive impact that [allgedly] sending c+d letters and [allegedly] suing affiliates for giving you negative press has done. It will certainly be interesting for people to see if your boot is [allegedly] as empty as it at every other conference.
Michael Jenkins (CEO Marketleverage) - “How to Successfully Promote Your Affiliate Campaign By Video.” Hmm, maybe you should have a talk about something else. Like…how to be completely out of touch with affiliate marketing. Or…how to try to bribe bloggers with bags of crappy electronics into saying nice things about you instead of actually being a good company and letting your own merits generate a buzz for yourself. Or…how to make yourselves look like the biggest joke in the industry at conferences by putting a bunch of $1 bills in a phone booth with a fan blowing them around and thinking that high volume affiliates are going to be not only excited to jump inside and look like a monkey grabbing at dollar bills that they dont need, but will then be inclined to sign up and run traffic to your network. lol.
Gillian Muessig (President SEOMOZ) - Seomoz….nuff said.
Ok, so yeah, for those reasons, Nickycakes is not attending the conference. But he WILL be in Denver, to attend parties and hang out with his affiliate friends who accidentally decided it would be a good idea to go. Media Breakaway should be having a pretty nice shindig, which should be off the hook if the rumors about Scott’s party abilities are true.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on May 22nd, 2009 in General
Alright, well, congratulations to Jeremiah Cooper of JeremiahCooper.com for winning the TV. A winner was selected the day before (@Tevye2009) but he failed to respond after like 36 hours or so, and a winner had to be chosen so lucky Jeremiah was drawn out of the hat. The TV is on its way to florida where Nickycakes is sure it will be put to good use. Coop was able to get 3 people to sign up to the contest under him, giving him 4 entries, which definitely helped his chances. Thanks again to CX Digital for supplying the television. That’s not exactly something the Cakes would pay out of pocket for haha. Please go sign up to their network if you haven’t already. They have some good peeps there.
Ok, so that part is kinda boring. Let’s talk about some of the other contestants who deserve some honorable mentions.
Probably the big story of the contest was a guy who goes by cd_1. He decided to try exactly what Nickycakes would do in this situation: game the system. Basically, he signed up thousands of twitter accounts with random names, and signed them all up to the contest using his main accounts referral link. The only way Nicky was able to weed out all the fake accounts was because he was using a really outdated useragent for all of the fake signups (they all appeared to be using IE 5.5), so marking them all as fake was pretty easy. After he realized that none of his entries were counting, he contacted Nicky who thanked him for all the fake twitter followers, but informed him that the entries wouldn’t count. For being a good sport and putting in so much effort, though, Cakes gave him a bunch of free points. He didn’t end up winning, but he did get pretty creative with it. Hopefully he will be nice enough to follow through with his request to make a guest post about the whole thing…
The points leader in the contest was Jonathan Volk who was determined to do his best to win the TV for his pastor. Kudos to him for his effort. As Nicky has said before many times, you can find out whos a true balla by seeing how much people give away to charity. Anyway, he got a total of 37 people to join the contest using his link, giving him almost a 5% chance of victory. He even ran some ppc campaigns to the contest, but it’s unclear if any of that traffic “converted”. A for Effort Jon.
The “Luckiest Guy On The Planet” award goes to some random guy whos twitter name is @antwanp. He joined the contest like everyone else, and didn’t get any signups on his own really. But, when @shoemoney decided to tweet the contest, he didn’t even bother getting his own link and just used that guys link instead. He got the dude like 25 signups. Luckily that guy didn’t win. That would have been lame as hell.
As you can see on twitterholic, the contest did a good job at getting more followers for @nickycakes, although a bunch of them are fake signups from cd_1.
Overall, complete success. Someone got a free TV that Nickycakes didn’t need. Everyone had fun. Nicky got to code the whole thing from scratch which is what he loves doing. Pretty rad.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on May 13th, 2009 in General
That’s right, tomorrow is the last day to participate in the contest for Nickycakes’ 40″ 1080p HDTV. If you have not yet entered the contest (it’s really easy, and completely free) then now is your last chance. If you HAVE entered the contest, it’s your last chance to refer more people to the contest to score yourself more chances to win. If you have already entered, it might help to re-tweet your link again, which may attract more people who missed it the first time.
How will the winner be chosen? A list will be made of all the people who entered, in alphabetical order by twitter id. If the person has multiple points, they will appear in the list that many times. The winning number will be chosen by random.org with the closing nasdaq price on friday as the seed number. That way nobody can claim it was rigged or anything.
Because Nicky will be out of town this weekend, the winner may not be officially be announced till monday depending on how much fun he’s having.
And yes, after the contest, the Cakes will return to writing…you know…actual posts.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on May 6th, 2009 in General
Stats Last Updated May 13, around 4pm pst.
Well, the contest has been pretty sweet so far. If you have not joined the contest, please do so here. It is incredibly easy to join, and only requires that you sign up to twitter (if you haven’t already) and send out 1 message. Completely free and takes about 2 minutes total. There have already been over 300 entries, and some people have referred a lot of people to the contest. Cakes has whipped up a little stats page that should be updated daily. You can view it here: Nickycakes Contest Stats. There is even a column that shows your current chances of winning with the number of points you have. The rows marked in red mean that the person is not following @nickycakes on twitter and therefore will not be in the drawing for the TV unless they are following @nickycakes on the day of the drawing.
Some people have been getting creative with the contest, making blog posts about it and such. Jonathan Volk has the 2nd most points (currently with about 5% chance of winning) mostly because he made a blog post about the contest. The guy with the most points is some random dude, and shoemoney copied his link and tweeted it, so the guy got like 26 entries just from that. Pretty easy though, just throw your link on facebook and beg a couple friends to join the contest and you have a very nice shot of winning a sweet 40″ hdtv. Also keep in mind that your twitter followers may be on different timezones, and it wont hurt to re-send your link so the people who have missed it may see it.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on April 30th, 2009 in General
For those of you who have not been following, Nickycakes won a 40″ 1080p LCD HDTV at AD:Tech last week from CX Digital. Since Nickycakes already has a TV and doesn’t really know where he’d put another one, he decided that it would be best to give it away to one of his readers. Here’s a pic of Nicky in front of the TV in question along with his friends at CX Digital:
Ok, so how is the contest going to work? Easy, just follow the simple steps below:
- Step 2: Link to this contest on twitter USING THE LINK GENERATED FOR YOU BELOW. If you don’t use the link below you will not get credit. For linking to the contest, you get 1 point, and for everyone that enters the contest through your personal link, you will get 1 point. Winner will be randomly selected from all available points, the person with the most points does NOT automatically win. Think of it like raffle tickets. Very simple. Feel free to get creative with how you promote your link, including forum spam, blog posts, whatever. Most of the readers are online marketers anyway so it shouldn’t be too hard to prove yourselves. Get your link below:
- Step 3 (optional but reccomended): Join CX Digital, and see what they can do to help you make more easy monies on the intrawebs.
Contest stats will be tallied up every couple days and there will be a leaderboard. Contest ends at midnight EST May 15th. There are safeguards in place to prevent gaming the system, so good luck with that. Nickycakes knows you were thinking about it (1 entry per person, assholes).
Update:
Apparently people are getting confused about how this works. Not sure how that happened since this is probably the simplest thing you’ve done all day besides dressing yourself without accidentally stuffing both legs into to the same pantleg, but Nicky will explain it again in detail:
- When you get your link, and send it out on twitter, you are entered into the contest. The bots on nickycakes.com will see it appear on twitter and record you as having entered.
- Anytime someone clicks your link, and arrives at this page, they are recorded in the system as having been referred by you. As soon as they get their personal link and send it out on twitter, you are awarded with another entry in the contest, just like a raffle.
- FOR EXAMPLE: If you tweet the contest, and then 5 of your friends click your link, and each of them send out their own tweets about the contest, you now have 6 entries into the contest. The winner will be randomly chosen out of all entries.
- There will be a page with a list of how many points everyone has, probably on monday.
- After you post the link on twitter, feel free to post it anywhere else you want that you think your friends might enter, such as Facebook, AIM, MSN, your blog, xrumer, digital point forums, any other forums with lots of poor people who love free stuff, etc. Use your imagination. It might also help to tag your tweets with things like #swineflu, #jonasbrothers, #h1n1, etc.
- If you still somehow have questions about this incredibly simple contest, join cakes chat, and let us ridicule you for being so stupid.
Published by nickycakes //
