So now that I am back from Affiliate Summit East, I have to do the review of how things went. I know this post is a bit late but I have not been feeling all that well since I got back from the Summit.

Flying out to Boston:
I flew out to Boston from San Francisco the night before Affiliate Summit started. I got to the airport around 9 PM and waited to catch my flight. We all loaded onto the plane and waited... and waited... and then all of us had to get off the plane due to some technical issues. Doh! We waited till about 11:15 PM and another plane came. Things didn't go well again and we all had to wait another 45 minutes due to technical issues on the new plane. It was crazy. Once I finally got into Boston, my luggage was missing and so they were going to deliver it once they found it.

Day 1:
The first day of Affiliate Summit was pretty uneventful at first. I didn't have my luggage so I was in clothes that smelled like air planes (you know what I mean? haha), scrubby, and tired.

My awesome affiliate manager @ AzoogleAds, Ryan, hit me up to go get some lunch. I told him that I was scubby and he said, "It's not a fashion show, it's an affiliate conference!" Hahahaha. That was pretty funny.

Me and three azoogleads guys went and got lunch at The Legal Test Kitchen. It was pretty grubbin food.

The weather was nice and sunny until lunch was just about over. The rain just started to pour down.

We ended up catching a cab back to the hotel which was a few blocks away and relaxing a bit.

I wanted to go walk to exhibit floor and stuff but before I could I needed to get my luggage in order.

I ended up calling the airport again and seeing what time my luggage was to be delivered. They said sometime around midnight but had it waiting for me if I wanted to go pick it up.

I went, got my luggage from the airport, and went back to catch the last 5 minutes of the exhibit hall. It was cool because I got to meet Zac Johnson right off the bat. I also talked a bit with Adam from AzoogleAds.

After that, I went back and went out to dinner with some people from AzoogleAds and some publishers.

One guy that I really thought was cool at this dinner was Matt Marcin. If you read other affiliate blogs, Matt Marcin is a guy who won a contest over at NickyCakes.com by earning over $1,000 in 24 hours. He ended up winning an Xbox360 or something like that.

He was a really smart guy and we ended up going back to the Hotel Lobby (where there was a LOT of affiliate summit people) and talking for a couple hours. It was cool. He then introduced me to some really cool people such as Larby. Larby is a really cool younger guy that is also making a killing online. I learned a lot in the few hours that we chatted.

I was trying to find Mr. Uberaffiliate, Paul, but I didn't see him. It was at like 1 AM or so when I finally got to meet him in the Lobby.

We ended up talking for a little while and then... well... we met the spammer. Everyone called him the Russian spammer and he was one interesting character.

He came over and cornered us all and was telling us about his... rather interesting life. Hahahaha. Eventually all of us moved to the side and he had cornered Paul.

Hahaha. You can see Paul kinda backing up as this guy get's closer and closer to his face. It was so hilarious I had to take a picture.

That was the end of Day 1.

Day 2

Day 2 was pretty cool too. I slept in till about 11 AM which was awesome. After that I went down and walked the exhibit floor for about 20 minutes. Nothing seemed super extraordinary to me at first. I went back upstairs and I worked on some campaigns for a little bit.

I actually ended up just hanging out all day at the hotel till dinner.

I went to dinner with Paul from Uberaffiliate.com, Steve from Affspy.com, and some more AzoogleAds people (Ryan, Jeremy, Erin). This dinner was awesome. Most of us had some really got steaks.

I took a bunch of pictures but none of them really turned out due to the low lighting.

After dinner, I went back to the Hotel and hung out in the lobby again with Matt, Paul, Larby, and some other guys. We talked for a while and had a good time.

Towards the end of the night I got to meet some guys who regularly attend the Meetup202, including Wes (Owner of Tracking202 and Prosper202), Jimmy Ramos, and a whole lot of others.

It was really cool to meet everyone.

Day 3.

Day three was the day I was determined to check out the exhibit floor no matter what. I checked out of my hotel and headed on over to the floor.

It was really great to be at the exhibit hall on the last day because there was almost nobody there that I got to talk with pretty much all of the people at the booths.

While walking around from booth to booth, I got to meet up with some cool people.

First, I got to meet the cakes... that is nickycakes.

Nicky cakes was really nice and hooked me up with a skateboard deck from AKMG.

After that, we saw Zac Johnson again and took a picture.

After this I went over to the Market Leverage booth... Boy was that awkward. Hahaha. I tried just walking by slowly and of course they caught me and said hey to me either way. Hahaha.

I saw Wes again and ended the day with one more picture.

So right before I left to go catch my plane, I caught up with Jon Fisher (owner of WickedFire.com), and we checked up on our little competition.

All in all, affiliate summit was really awesome!

I want to thank AzoogleAds for flying me out and paying for my affiliate summit tickets!

Any way... this post is long enough so I'll end it here. Haha.

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Well, yesterday was the last day of Affiliate Summit East and man it was a great time. I'll post more details about my time at ASE in another post though... This post is about the Jon Fisher Competition.

For anyone who doesn't know, basically, I was trying to get my website Jonathan Volk to rank in google for the term Jon Fisher. Jon Fisher of AoJon.com (and the owner of Wickedfire.com) was trying to rank as high as possible for the term Jon Volk.

I saw Jon the first day of ASE in the night and when I had checked the rankings we were both at position 5. When I first saw Jon, I said, It's a tie!!!

After that we decided to extend the deadline to Monday morning.

Monday morning I didn't see Jon but Tuesday morning right before I was about to leave we caught up and checked the results right there on my iPhone.

In the few days time we had to finish optimizing, Jon had moved up 1 position to be in position 4. I was thinking, "Crap...!!!" Hahahaha.

Next we checked my google results and BOOM. I had moved up 1 position too!!! Another tie!

So all in all, we tied and we'll both be giving each other the links.

And that ends a fun google bomb competition.

More details to come about Affiliate Summit (with photos). Feel free to subscribe to my posts to get updates.

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This next post in the series of Affiliate Marketing Mistakes you don't want to make is going to be about name servers and dedicated hosting.

As some of you may know, I have three dedicated servers at my favorite web hosting company but this post really isn't about that.

When you get large enough in the affiliate realm to need a dedicated server, most dedicated server companies encourage you to host your own private name servers. Sounds professional and cool right?

For anyone who doesn't know, a name server is a server which basically points the domains to IP addresses on your server. In other words it makes your domain access the files on your server.

So what's so bad about having your own name servers?

In 99% of cases, having your own name servers is the best solution because you can ensure your websites are up more often. You control every aspect of your websites uptime essentially.

However, as an affiliate having your own private name servers is a bad thing. The main reason that this is a bad thing is because there are ways to look up every domain on a private name server.

Quick example:

Let's say you have grown enough to need two small dedicated servers. Let's say that you have set up private name servers. The sad part about this is that no matter what, people with a little know how can find every single site you own.

Clearly a bad thing for affiliate marketers.

The solution:
The main reason I like LiquidWeb so much is that they allow you to use their private name servers.

The reason this is so good is that while people will still be able to look up all the sites on their name servers they'll have to go through tens of thousands of domains. It's a lot less likely for someone to be able to find exactly which site is yours in this way.

If you sign up for liquid web under my referral link, you can contact me for more details on how exactly to set this up.

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I'm heading off to Affiliate Summit East now and I look forward to meeting all of those who are going.

If you are unable to attend, perhaps the next one you will be able to go!

For those going, you can probably spot me fairly easily by... well... you'll see...

Hahahaha. Just kidding of course. I saw those in a store while in Seattle a while back and had to take a picture with them on.

More seriously, I'd seriously love to talk to everyone just don't ask me for campaign information.

Lastly, I'd like to thank AzoogleAds again for the trip! They got the tickets for me (both plane and admission)! I highly recommend them for any affiliate offers you might want to push!

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This is a guest post by Patrick B. from CellphoneDigest.net

If you would like to write a guest post, please email me. More details on the contact page.

The biggest mistake I made with Affiliate Marketing was just recent. I've been trying to make money online for the past 3.5 years. I started a music site, four blogs, a forum and three ecommerce sites.

Nothing to brag about but I started making a few hundred dollars per month. However, I kept reading about these young guys like Jonathan Volk making a ton of money with Affiliate Marketing. So I decided to try my hand at it. Hey if Jonathan Volk can do it, why can’t I?

Before soon I started making some money. However, I had one offer (with no landing page) that I was promoting that I swore up and down the affiliate company must be robbing me.

This was after I completely ignored the offer but decided to start promoting it after the Affiliate Manager sent me an e-mail asking me to take a look at it.

I started promoting it and was pleasantly surprised that it was working. I immediately started making about $30 per day profit! I felt like a fool for ignoring the offer.

However, after a few days I started wondering if the affiliate company was robbing me. Every day I would get sign-ups but at about 5PM the sign-ups would stop. However, after a couple of weeks I soon realized that my budget was set to a mere $20 per day.

Holy cow, I’m a fool! After the budget was hit, the ads stopped running, thus no more signups. Again, I felt like such a complete idiot.

I quickly increased the budget to $100 per day and my signups shot up. I then increased my budget to $200 per day and added some more keywords and my profit shot up even further. Again I felt foolish for not doing this earlier. I missed out on a few hundred dollars of income because I simply wasn't paying attention. Now a campaign that was making me about $30 per day profit is now making me about $150 per day profit.

What I learned is take this stuff seriously, pay attention and always be tweaking your ad campaigns, keywords and landing pages to milk every last dollar out of it. I was happy with $30 per day profit but with some tweaking I could have been making $150 per day profit all along!

Now I make more money online than my full time job thanks to Affiliate Marketing. Hopefully, one day I’ll be like Jonathan Volk and doing it full time. Hey if he can do it, why can’t I?

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I've decided to start a new series of posts about affiliate marketing mistakes I have made. This series will be a good long series and hopefully will help you learn from my mistakes.

There is a saying that you're wise when you learn from your mistakes but you have smart wisdom when you learn from others mistakes. (I know I probably butchered that but whatever ;))

So for the first part of this series, I want to talk about a simple mistake that can really cost you money in the long run.

When I first started affiliate marketing I used to register domains not really caring about them since all my traffic was Pay per click marketing.

I'm not going to be talking about getting .info domains or anything like that, though I do strongly recommend you don't get those, I'm talking about when I register the domains.

See, when I would register domains, I wouldn't think much of it... it was almost a rush through the process and would never get the private registration. Little did I know just how important it is to get the private registration.

As an affiliate anytime you're successful in an area, people inevitably try to research your pages as much as possible. Sadly, if you're not using private registered domains there are ways for people to look up every single affiliate landing page / domain you own.

As you know with affiliate marketing, a lot of your success can depend on your ability to tap areas that others may not have seen before.

Generally when I get a domain, I register it through GoDaddy and use their private services. It cost's an additional $8 or $9 bucks to add private registration on and let me tell you, it's well worth it.

There will be more common affiliate marketing mistakes that you don't want to make coming shortly.

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I felt like I should post this because I have only been posting "bad" about Market Leverage. In reality, I actually do think they're a fairly good company.

While I might be upset about the whole situation (view part 1 and part 2), Market Leverage really has tried everything they can to help me.

They had their execs call me, they asked for as much info as I could give them, they worked with both my friend and I on multiple occasions but yet they failed to actually help me by catching the hacker. Now, that aside, they do have to protect all their affiliates and treat them as equals which I understand.

I guess the reason I am posting this is to tell you guys while I may be ending my professional relationship with Market Leverage because of the incident, I still think they're a great bunch of people and I urge you to continue using them if you don't have any problems with them.

So while I may have posted updates here on the situation and seemed upset (because I was) I still can't seem to think that Market Leverage is a bad company as an affiliate marketing company.

If this had happened to other companies, I am unsure what would have happened.

So to sum it all up: I am upset at market leverage for not being able to help me (by having inadequate logs or whatever) but I do still respect them and think they are worth using especially if you are using them already.

Hope that clears it up.

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So by now I'm sure many of you are wondering what ever happened to the Market Leverage issue I had.

If you don't know, the basic to the story is that both my friend and I were hacked and had our jump links replaced with Market Leverage affiliate links. We decided to contact them and try to get as much information about the hacker as possible...

My friend's site was redirecting to the market leverage hacker affiliate for just a few hours while mine was down a bit longer.

At first, Market Leverage seemed to be somewhat helpful. They called me and my friend and told us the normal, "We can't tell you anything blah blah." The only way we would be able to get information is to sue John Doe and get a court order to view Market Leverages log files / affiliate information.

They were trying to be helpful while really saying, "You're not going to get anything..."

Assuming that I would want to pay thousands of dollars to try to regain around $x,xxx in lost advertising revenue for a lawyer to try and go through the process...

Well today I got an email from Market Leverage saying that they pretty much found nothing.

What actually made me laugh was when Market Leverage told me that the hacker affiliate of theirs that the traffic was going to denied all claims. Duh...

What's even more interesting is that my friend provided them with a log of 300+ unique IP addresses that came to his site during the time that it was being redirected to the Market Leverage hacker affiliate link.

According to their logs, not a single ip matched for the time period... Hmm.

What's even better is that Market Leverage said that the affiliates did not see any abnormal jump in affiliate commissions and so they can't find any connection.

So apparently, to Market Leverage neither event ever actually happened it seems.

All in all, Market Leverage has TRIED to do what they can but at least in this case, the person who did wrong walks away with no correction and nothing done to them. Lame...

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Believe it or not, one aspect to your landing page quality score is how long it takes to load your page.

When it takes a long time to load a page, its looked down upon by google because it produces a lower quality customer experience. It is a thing very few people actually take the time to look at but can help you out a bit.

My friend Dave over at PPC Fool has created a neat little tool which analyzes your load time. You simply enter your page url and it analyzes the data and provides a pretty detailed report.

It's pretty neat.

The tool can be found here.

Thanks for the cool tool Dave!

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So the Jon Fisher competition is coming to an end so I just wanted to make a final post about it.

So far, Jon Fisher is beating me but I am not going to give up... So far he is just a few positions ahead for the term Jon Volk compared to how I rank for the term Jon Fisher.

My strategy on these last few days is to find some higher trust rank sites and try to list my url on them in any way possible.

We shall see how things turn out when the deadline hits this Sunday.

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