Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas in only one month away and the party invites are starting to roll in. The latest is from my good friend DK. DK and the girls over at Purpose Inc. are hosting a poker tourney on Sunday, January 9 at The Mirage Hotel. If you’re heading to ASW, you’ll definitely want to get in on this. Free drinks, poker and girls are always a good combination in my books!
The timing of DK’s party is perfect because my party at the 10,000 square feet Hardwood Suite at the Palms happens on Monday, January 10. We’re expecting over 1,500 people to show up. All I know is I don’t want to see the bar bill!
Anyway, head on over to Purpose Inc. Poker now and enter your email address to receive your personal invitation. We’ll see you in Vegas!
My friends over at MaxBlogPress has an awesome Christmas sale going on right now. For the next seven days, Max will give you the opportunity to literally snatch five of their best selling products, worth $475.00, for 70% off!
This discount offer will expire on Midnight December 14 and this package will never be sold at this price again.
I have used MaxBlogPress products on my blog and they are awesome. If you purchase the five items separately, you would spend a minimum of $475 but in the spirit of holiday season you can grab all five products right now and get instant access for only $137. A savings of $388. The package includes.
This is a pretty sweet deal. If you’ve never purchased a MaxBlogPress product before, this is your chance to pick up their five best for one amazingly low price. Even if you already have one of their products (I have Ninja Affiliate and Subscribers Magnet), it’s still a great deal. However, great deals like this won’t last. Once that countdown timer hit zero, the deal will be gone so don’t wait too long!
Remember my blog post on how to really make money with Clickbank? It details a method to making money with Clickbank that works much better than the “hit and run” marketing method. The post was greeted with huge approval and received nearly 300 comments before comments got closed. If you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to do so.
The reason I brought up that post is because of Aaron Darko. He took that post and turned it into a really cool piece of hosted software that does all the steps I wrote about. Aaron calls the product Push Button Money because the system is literally as simple as pushing a button. Here’s how it works.
At this time, Push Button Money offers five niches to choose from. More will be added in the future. The system supports all the major email auto-responders, like Aweber. All you have to do is enter your Email account ID and your Clickbank ID and click continue. The next screen gives you the fields to enter all the information to create your squeeze page.
The include template has already been filled out for you. You can use it as is or change the wording and text to better suite the product you’re trying to promote. After entering the information in all the relavent fields, the software will produce for you:
A squeeze page optimized for the product.
An exit pops and redirects to the offer after collecting the email
An Autoresponder series to followup with that product
1 click upload direct to your domain
The end result of the Push Button Money system is that you get a system that helps you build a list of targeted prospects within a niche and then sends that traffic to a high converting Clickbank offer. Then the Aweber auto-responder will follow up with the list to build the relationship and recommend other Clickbank products. Hence, you are building long term value and avoiding the hit and run marketing that fails so many Internet marketers.
The best thing about Push Button Money is the price. I expected Aaron to price this thing at a few hundred dollars but the entire system cost only $77. However, Aaron has it even cheaper than that because this is launch week. During this grand opening, you can get Push Button Money for a one time payment of only $37. In other words, the system cost less than what you would have to pay a designer to make one squeeze page.
If that wasn’t good enough, Push Button Money comes with a 60 days no question asked money back guarantee. Try it for a full 60 days and if it’s not what you hoped it would be, send Aaron an email and he’ll refund your money. If you liked the ideas presented in my Clickbank post but haven’t started because you have no system in place to create the squeeze pages and auto-responder emails, Push Buttom Money is as close as you’re going to get to automating the process.
Normally, when you think of Pho, you don’t think of fine dining. All that changed this week when Alessandra and Jean-Francis of Provence Restaurants joined us for Dot Com Pho. It’s not everyday that you get to have lunch with a pair of local celebrity chefs. Add in the attendance of Aaron Koo and it meant that half the table at this week’s meetup were chefs.
As you no doubt guessed, most of the discussions centered around food, restaurants and fine dining. However, we did managed to get in a few other topics and even had time to show off two gadgets of the week. If you’re ever in Vancouver and want to sample two of the best fine dining restaurants in the city, check out Alessandra and Jean-Francis’ two Provence restaurants. I’ve dined there many times and have never been disappointed.
I have blogged from many different places just to prove that you can blog from anywhere in the world. The last time, I blogged from a plane at 32,000 feet. This time, I’m blogging from the Amtrak Cascades train going from Vancouver to Seattle.
Blogging from a train is actually very easy if you have the right gear. The train doesn’t have any WiFi so you’ll have to either tether your iPhone or use something like the MiFi from Virgin Mobile. My MiFi only works in the US so I’ll have to tether my Rogers iPhone during the Vancouver leg of the trip and then switch over to the Virgin MiFi when I cross over into the US. The laptop I’m blogging from is an Apple Macbook Air. The business class car has electrical outlets to plug in all my blogging gear.
The business class car at the Amtrak Cascades is very roomy and quite comfortable. It’s also very emptied. There’s only four other people in the car with me. You think with the holiday season and all, the train would be packed. Other than no in-train wifi, the Cascades is equipped with pretty much everything else. There’s even a nice dining car where you can grab a bite to eat and business class riders get $3 off any food purchases. I might use it to get a few Diet Coke or two.
The train ride from Vancouver to Seattle takes 4 hours. The reason it’s so slow is because there’s quite a few stops along the way. I don’t really mind that because it gives me more time to relax and enjoy the amazing technologies that allowed to make this blog post.
For the past day or two, some readers had trouble accessing this blog. Instead of seeing the familiar blog home page, readers were greeted with a 403 forbidden warning saying they don’t have permission to access. The reason for this was I was testing out a new security plugin call AskApache Password Protect. This is an incredibly strong security plugin to protect your WordPress blog. However, it’s so strong that it can lock you and your readers out if you go crazy with the settings, which was what happen yesterday.
This plugin doesn’t control WordPress or mess with your database, instead it utilizes fast, tried-and-true built-in Security features to add multiple layers of security to your blog. This plugin is specifically designed and regularly updated specifically to stop automated and unskilled attackers attempts to exploit vulnerabilities on your blog resulting in a hacked site.
The power of this plugin is that it creates a virtual wall around your blog allowing it to stop attacks before they even reach your blog to deliver a malicious payload. In addition this plugin also has the capability to block spam with a resounding slap, saving CPU, Memory, and Database resources. Choose a username and password to protect your entire /wp-admin/ folder and login page. Forbid common exploits and attack patterns with Mod_Security, Mod_Rewrite, Mod_Alias and Apache’s tried-and-true Core Security features. This plugin requires the worlds #1 web server, Apache, and web host support for .htaccess files.
AskApache offers tons of options to lock down your WordPress blog. You can turn on any or all. However, you should turn on each feature one at a time and then see how it affects your blog. You should also ask your readers if they can access your blog after turning on a feature. I had a total of 12 features enable and while I was able to access everything, a small group of readers were locked out.
If you lock yourself out (which happened a few times to me) then you’ll need to FTP/SFTP/SSH into your blog and remove the code the plugin wrote in your blog’s .htacess file. It’s pretty simple to do and gets you instantly back in but I can imagine the look of horror on a locked out blog owner’s face if he didn’t read the plugin’s readme file.
While no amount of security can keep out a determined hacker, AskApache will stop most of the automated bot and SQL injection attacks. Having an extra layer of security never hurts. Just remember to not turn on everything all at once (unless you enjoy locking everyone, and yourself, out of your blog).
Thanks to Geeks Are Sexy for the heads up on this plugin.
A couple weeks ago my friend Tyler Cruz launched the PublisherForums.com $7,000 Contest (I supplied some prizes to the contest). Basically, it’s a webmaster forum posting contest where effort is rewarded (no random drawings). There are prizes for the top posters, top quality posters, and top referrers.
Tyler has a total of 55 prizes that will be given away to 12 lucky winners. The prizes are put into prize packages. For example, 1st place of the Top Posters category is actually comprised of a bundle 7 prizes valued at $2,163. You can find out all the details on the official contest page at http://www.publisherforums.com/contest/.
Entering the contest is free and with $7,000 worth of stuff up for grabs, I wouldn’t wait. Tyler tells me the number of people entered so far are pretty low so your chances of winning something are really good. Click the image below to enter.
Paul Walker, the creator of Clickbank Cash Supreme and Affiliate Cash Ultimatum, is back with a brand new course. This time, he’s partnered with Stephen Ng and Tom Geller to bring you Freedom Blogging Profit.
Freedom Blogging Profit reveals the best kept secrets to making money from blogging with viral free traffic from Facebook. According to Tom, no one has taught this before. There are a lot of course teaching how to get traffic from Facebook by PPC, but the Freedom Blogging Profit course is totally different. Freedom Blogging Profit will reveal how to make easy money from massive amount of free traffic from Facebook and how to monetize this traffic by blogging. The method doesn’t involve creating Facebook Fan pages or spending money on Facebook ads.
The actual business model is sound. Blogging is one of the most profitable ways to make money online (just look at me as an example) and Facebook is a site that can send you a massive amount of free viral traffic. And we all know that in this business, traffic equals money.
Freedom Blogging Profit is made up of two modules:
Module 1: Phantom Viral Traffic System
Module 2: Freedom Blogging Formula System
There’s also a bunch of extra videos and training materials to help those new to affiliate marketing or blogging. Freedom Blogging Profit normally sell for $197 but during this opening launch special, Paul has priced the course at only $37 for the first 300 students. Freedom Blogging Profit is covered by a 60 days no questions asked money back guarantee.
Silicon Valley-based 2Performant, Inc is launching the Graffly service on its innovative affiliate marketing platform. Similar to Groupon, which provides extremely generous but time-limited coupon offers – Graffly partners with one leading merchant every month who is willing to offer a significant increase on the commissions that they pay to publishers in exchange for promotion on the Graffly network.
For example, Davids Cookies, a gourmet dessert retailer, was Graffly’s November merchant. For all of last month, Davids Cookies paid a 25% premium on their standard affiliate commission (7.5% vs 6%) to all publishers that promote their website using Graffly affiliate links. Harris Beber, the VP of Ecommerce at Davids Cookies, called Graffly “a fantastic way to attract the small number of super affiliates that drive the majority of an ecommerce site’s affiliate revenues.”
December Offer – Double Commission on Uncommon Goods
This month, Graffly will be partnering with Uncommon Goods. All Graffly affiliates promoting UncommonGoods.com this month will receive a doubling of their normal commission (10% to 20%). Graffly is currently planning their 2011 promotion calendar. If you would like to be considered as a merchant, please contact merchants [@] graffly.com
Graffly has already attracted hundreds of affiliates during their two week pre-launch period and is catching the eye of the best and brightest web marketers. Adam Schwartz, CEO of CouponSurfer.com, one the largest coupon sites on the Internet and a leading super affiliate praised Graffly saying, “There are thousands of merchants out there that we can promote. Graffly is an innovate way for individual merchants to rise above the noise and for CouponSurfer to make significantly higher commissions than we normally would.”
Built On The 2Performant Platform
The Graffly network is built on the 2Performant platform. In addition to all the standard infrastructure that merchants and affiliates need to interact with one another, 2Performant has a robust Apps Marketplace where 3rd party developers can push the envelope and come up with novel ways to assist affiliates in promoting merchants in exchange for a piece of the action. For example, the Social Reactions app scours the net looking for positive feedback (from Twitter, Facebook, etc) and combines it with product information / images into a widget that can be embedded on a promotional website.
Win-Win-Win
Radu Spineanu, the founder of Graffly and CEO of 2Performant, sums up Graffly’s value in the following way. “Graffly is a win-win-win. It helps merchants get noticed in an extremely crowded environment. It helps affiliate to earn higher commissions. And, it enriches the affiliate experience for everyone with Apps that are cooler and more effective than text links and banners.”
The Uncommon Goods promotion comes at a really good time. Uncommon Goods specializes in “anything but ordinary” gifts. Being the holiday season, a smart affiliate can really cash in with the double commission that Uncommon Goods is offering to Graffly affiliates. Super affiliates like Adam Schwatz are taking advantage of it. Why not you?
This is a reminder that tomorrow is the last day you can buy Problogger‘s two book for 25% discount. When it comes to blogging and making money by blogging, very few people are as good at teaching it as Darren Rowse. In addition to the daily tips he gives out everyday at Problogger.net, Darren is also the author of two great blogging resources: 31 Days to Build a Better Blog and Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers.
These two eBooks have received rave reviews and helped thousands of bloggers to not only get more traffic and make more money with their blogs, but it has helped them to improve their content and copywriting as well.
31 Days to Build a Better Blog
If you’re looking for a systematic way to get your blogging off on the right track, then this is the book for you. Within the next 31 days. you can have the money making blog that you’ve always dreamed of.
31 Days to Build a Better Blog is a downloadable e-book designed to help you revitalize your blog by giving you 31 tasks that you must do each day. Follow the simple step-by-step instructions and I guarantee you will see positive results. By giving you actionable steps, you are not only learning but you’re also doing.
Each day in the project contains:
A Task – something to DO that day.
Teaching – each day you’ll be given great instruction on both the WHY and HOW of the task of the day.
This brand new eBook is designed to help you take the content featured on your blog up a notch.
Your blog posts are the cornerstone of your blog and will be the difference between you reaching your goals or not.
This scorecard resource is designed to help you analyze the most important elements of your content to make sure they’re engaging, readable, professional and optimized for search engines.
I’ve known Darren for many years. He is the real deal and he’s also the original problogger. We have shared the stage at every Blog World Expos and he always been a fountain of knowledge. What’s more, he freely shares that knowledge on his blog and his books.
Just enter november25 at the checkout to receive your discount. As you no doubt guess from the code, the coupon is good for this month so you have until end of tomorrow to take advantage of it. Go get it now!
