I got this note below, which shut down the BlitzLocal affiliate account on Amazon as of March 8th because of the new Colorado Affiliate Tax (HB 10-1193).  Read it below:

Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to “voluntarily” collect Colorado sales tax — a course we won’t take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

You may express your views of Colorado’s new law to members of the General Assembly and to Governor Ritter, who signed the bill.

Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Colorado-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.
Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

Update: Perhaps with some Denver medical marijuana, the Colorado legislators might ease up a bit.

Online Marketing is like Monopoly.

In the game of Monopoly you roll the dice, land on property, buy un-owned property, pay rent, develop property, collect rent and pass go. The problem many people have with this game is that they leave the game to luck and many hate the game because they rely on luck.

“I hate Monopoly, it’s all about luck.”, “It’s about the dice and buying the property first.”

If you feel that way about Monopoly, then I’m sorry, but you are missing some key elements and you are focusing on the wrong things and you will most likely lose.

Get a property.

Fortunately the online game of marketing removes some of those barriers for you. Online you have similar opportunities to buy property and develop property. Luckily you don’t roll a die to buy a property! But if someone else got there first then you are out of luck. Game over. Pack up. Go home. …OR, get the whole picture. The property, while key, is only one element. When I play Monopoly I typically don’t even go for Boardwalk, I go for the two brown ones right after GO. What you can’t recall the names of the cheap brown properties? That would be Mediterranean and Baltic, in the classic version. Internet Branding isn’t everything. There are plenty of people making money off of “Free” wordpress blogs, ebay, squido pages, Blogger Blogs, and so on.

Don’t really wholly on luck. If you really wholly on luck then you will lose when your luck runs out.

Develop your property.

The only way to make money in Monopoly is by collecting rent from visitors and passing Go… okay, minus the chance beauty pageant. FAT CHANCE! There are more beautiful people in the world then there are actors, models, and superstars combined. To collect rent you have to get visitors. To collect more rent you have to develop your property, i.e. target those visitors, direct visitors to goal. Ask Tim Ash about directing visitors, or just read his book. Targeting visitors can be the hunting portion. PPC and SEO fall under targeting practice. Directing visitors is getting them to buy, sign-up, call, or convert. If you don’t have a goal then you are not playing the game. It may be repetitive, but I am going to say it again, “Do you want visitors or do you want customers?” Yes, there is the argument that you must have visitors to get customers… Blah, Blah, Blah, …And what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Clearly you must have visitors to your property to collect rent. But if you are not watching the game and they move on before you collect rent then you lose. PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR VISITORS IF YOU WANT TO COLLECT RENT. That’s really what Landing Page Optimization is all about. It’s “Listening to your Customers.” Every great company listens to their customers. …Okay, there are “nice players” that will pay you rent even when you don’t ask them to. So, you can leave your property undeveloped and wait for those nice people that will pay you on occasion. And most people aren’t that nice! So we are not talking about domain squatting here; we are talking about developing your property by optimizing your site.

Make Money: Win the Marketing Game

Never lose site of the whole picture. Don’t get too caught up in a few small details. A sports car is made up of thousands of parts working together. All playing a role. All important. But to go off on just how important the exhaust is and only work on the air flow out, while ignoring air flow in, will only make you look ignorant and or arrogant. So can make money by, speeding around the board in your sports car, or by building your property to collect more rent, or sell later.

Some key elements to Monopoly Strategy.

1- Get a monopoly.

2- Cash flow.

3- Negotiate.

Most people that rely on luck or think Monopoly is all about luck only see the first element and totally miss the second two. How often do the two losers join forces to beat the big guy? That’s negotiation. The two little guys are negotiating. Asking for 3 free stays on their properties to cover their rent, may be better than letting them sell out real cheap to the other players.

Creating a Monopoly Online

Creating a monopoly online usually requires you to find a monopoly waiting to be had and dominating it before it ever appears on the radar. These obviously are rare and like the cheap brown spots, often not worth as much. Take for instance Austin Scorpion Control. Many websites will have more visitors an hour then that website will have in a month. But, it will be hard to take over their positions on Google. And while the positions where cheap when they were undeveloped and unnoticed, the cost now is a bit higher. Not to mention the fact that you would need an exterminator that actually wants and likes to take on scorpion problems. Most exterminators don’t specialize in scorpion control. The second way to gain a monopoly, NEGOATION. Have you tried searching “cheap domain name” online lately? Godaddy and its affiliates own most of the first page of Google. That’s a monopoly. Or you use Godaddy’s other tactic to gain a Monopoly…MONEY. Big super bowl ads. Lots of Money. Big SEO campaigns, lots of money. Going for a monopoly on Atlanta Pest Control is a lot harder than a monopoly on Alpharetta Pest Control, a North Atlanta, GA suburb. Therefore the money required to get there is a lot more. But what about the Negotiation? Hey, if you have a valuable piece of a monopoly that I want and I have a piece of a monopoly that you want, then let’s negotiate. Make a deal and trade. I could care less if you create a monopoly for home security systems in Chapel Hill. All I care about is bug control. I want a monopoly for Pest Control in Raleigh. What do know, we share matching properties… Chapel Hill, NC and Raleigh-Durham, NC. So I help you get your monopoly and you help me get mine. The catch is you have to be willing to let go of your property and link juice in exchange for the monopoly you really want.

There are powers that be that control small monopolies online in Direct TV, local locksmiths, unique travel accommodations, do-it-yourself pest control products, and chicken coops. You laugh, but that chicken coop guru is laughing all the way to the bank!

Some affiliates are losing millions per month, I’m told, as a result of my TechCrunch post.  And Shoemoney has not been shy about his willingness to write blog posts for money. If someone is about to ‘topple an industry’ (highly unlikely), one strategy is to trash his credibility and scare him into not writing anymore.  But what I didn’t expect was that folks like Jeremy Schoemaker would be out for blood, misstate facts, and even email our advisory members.  I reached out to him, to give him a chance to explain why he would go so far out of his way– so far, no response.

Let’s clear a few things up:

• Scott Richter does not have ownership in BlitzLocal. Yes, we were in his building.  No, his dad never threatened to sue any of these gossipers– he’s got more important things to do.  Yes, Scott has paid for many meals and entertainment.  No, Scott did not cover Jeremy’s travel and lodging to come see us– that was 100% paid for by Blitz, including the loan we made him at Affiliate Convention in Denver when he had no money.
• Gillian Muessig has no ownership in BlitzLocal and is not employed by the company. She is a friend, colleague, and mentor– since she knows how to navigate the waters in building fledgling companies to industry leadership.  She is the President and co-founder of SEOmoz and Rand Fishkin is her son.  SEOmoz is her baby and she has said so quite plainly– why wouldn’t she take this company all the way?  I respect her deeply for her insight and integrity, which has carried her company to where it is today.
• I’ve written a lot of articles. You’ve probably read some of them, maybe without knowing, as I wrote under other people’s names.  For example– a number of ad serving posts, as well as most of the ShoeMoney Xtreme guides. Look at the examples referenced in the articles and compare the writing styles if you’re not sure.
• We’ve been burned a number of times: This is common in affiliate marketing.  What’s not as common is someone that I’ve had deep respect for and trusted, such as Jeremy, do that to us a couple times, then claim the reverse.  He is a prominent blogger and a lot of folks look up to him– therefore, he should be careful as a role model.  Yes, the Facebook whitelisted account was his.  He called me up while at Facebook and agreed to a 50/50 revshare, so I assigned 2 full-time employees to that account.  After a ton of Russian brides and dating ads, and a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue, BlitzLocal was left with no earnings and Shoemoney took 2 employees. We lost a lot of money, which hurt a small business like ours, but we did not pursue him.  His recollection is different, although the email trail and IM chat logs of these employees tell another story.

I’m owing up to all the spam (or call it by whatever name you want) that I’ve done in the past. The TechCrunch article was part of that– and there are more articles coming.  Facebook has done a commendable job in shutting down loopholes– but there are many, and the players are so clever.  Are these players still making money?  Certainly.  Could we have?  Perhaps, but we didn’t. And whatever money we did make was spent on building our local platform– let me tell you that the road to scaling up real clients, especially in local, is hard. We don’t have much money.

I would be naive to think that I have enough power to shut down an industry– I am just one guy and BlitzLocal is a tiny company.  Would you ever fall for a MyLuvCrush ad?  The folks who read this blog do Internet marketing for a living, and I know you’re not falling for it.  At the same time, don’t fall for a hate-motivated piece– examine their motives and then check the facts to see if things add up. Jeremy mentioned that the reason the picture of sheep is the default avatar on his blog is that most will blindly follow whatever he says and not think for themselves.

One thing that has surprised me is the amazing support we’ve received from white hat folks, small businesses, industry friends, and the press. How folks have reacted to events of the last two weeks clearly define if they’re black or white hat.  If you’re an affiliate running deceptive stuff, you know that profits are hit-and-miss and that there’s often high school drama involved.  We did some consulting for the FTC– a nice surprise, as they promised not to sue.  The local and agency work is steady, the people are easier to work with, and you can feel good about what you’re doing. Ironically, we’re helping build a new form of affiliate marketing– it’s the local space. If you define an affiliate as someone who gets paid to promote someone else’s product or service, then you’d likely believe that Russian brides is out and local is in.

There’s two sides to every story, so consider the facts and make your own decision.  Meanwhile, I’m getting back to focusing on local. If you want to build a real business with local clients, I’d love to hear from you.

Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit sings a tribute to BlitzLocal.  What do you think?  Go to 9:30 in the clip to go straight to the original song!

I was able to catch up Murray Newlands, a famous blogger. We were able to have nice about his work in affiliate marketing, and the secret behind site, Murraynewlands.com, an affiliate blog that came from nowhere and is now everywhere in Google and twitter. Not only has he some great content on his blog, but is getting picked up and noted all over the blogosphere. Google Famous Blogger and you will see his name, I even hear he is working on Celebrity Blogger!

Murray, what ideas are interesting to you at the moment?

Chris Brogan’s writing on Trust Agents hit a chord with me. I have been very successful as a blogger since launching my blog earlier this year. My SEO is great, and a large reason for this is the links that people give me. I put this down to the content which people do like, yes, but there is more to it than that. I get lots of links from some great people I know in the industry become they want to help me. I always try to help other and I have found that truly what goes around in the blogosphere comes around. You want to connect with people who will engage with you and you soon learn who can fulfill that need with you and who will not. Once you get a reputation being engaging and helping others, you are soon introduced to more people who will also interact with you. It is a virtues circle of people who help each other, and these people swim in schools.

Who are some bloggers I should be trying to connect with?

Greg Rollett http://www.rockstarlifestyledesign.com

Drew Benskpark.com

Heather Smith boatinginbeautifulbritishcolumbia.com

Joetech Joetech.com

Steve Hall Adrants.com

Shawn Collins blog.affiliatetip.com

Connie brainfoggles.com

Chris Brogan ChrisBrogan.com

Eric Schechter www.ericschechter.com

Missy Ward www.missyward.com

Rax www.raxraxrax.com

How does blogging fit in with your affiliate marketing work?

Well, I blog about my work, and writing is a great way to explore ideas and concepts as well as share industry news. It is also a good means of making new contacts within the industry many of whom I now do business with.

What fears do you have with blogging?

When I first started I was worried about what people would say about my blog, my writing, MY SPELLING. Now I am not so worried about that, what I do worry about is the people who I forget to say thank you too and the missed opportunities. There is so much going on and so little time. I also have other projects which are getting more demanding and taking me away from my blog. I am not giving up.

Footnote: Murray knows how to draw positive attention. He ranks on Dennis Yu via just one interview with me.

The day before Affiliate Summit East in NYC, last Thursday, I attended a ULS get-together on Local. There were almost 100 people there– perhaps half from start-ups looking to network or pitch their product.  Entry fee was $20, but $10 if you do a 60 second pitch.  I am cheap, so I did the pitch.

After the pitching, there was a round table with Court Cunningham, CEO of Yodle– then the CEOs from outside.in, growthspur, and 8coupons.  Clearly, I was there to meet Court, as he is a competitor in the local space.  Panelists agreed that:

• the local space was a growing share of the $500 billion dollar advertising market
• the weak economy and low cost to make a website was initiating entrepreneurship on a scale never before seen
• the traditional media channels (radio, TV, print) are getting hammered, as ad dollars shift to local
• the cost of producing content is decreasing– we don’t need union writers, as anyone can blog.  Consider the Iranian revolution broke via twitter, not the traditional media

I was overall impressed with the quality of the networking– at the same level as Silicon Valley, with a touch less pretentiousness. The free pizza, provided by Seamless Web, was also a nice touch.

Afterwards, I had the pleasure of meeting Graham Lawlor, founder of of Ultra Light Startups.  The concept of being ultra light is that you don’t need venture capital– just a couple folks with a great idea and a lot of resourcefulness. Looking forward to seeing how these informal groups (including TechStars and YCombinator) help young entrepreneurs achieve their dreams.

If you’re looking to start your own business, want to network with other startups, or perhaps need a bit of inspiration, I’d recommend that you attend one of these events.

A few days ago, I offered to perform a SEO analysis on the website of one lucky winner– something at BlitzLocal that we normally charge between $6k-10k to do.  There were 23 responses and I’m choosing BusSongs.com, which is by Keith Mander, a current Facebook employee and ex-Googler (not to be confused with the other Keith that blogs here).

Let’s first start with an assumed goal of the site– to make money from ads, as there are no products to be found.  Keith is using 4 cleverly-placed Google AdSense units on each page, in addition to serving ads via Google Ad Manager (GAM)– a product that kills OpenAds and will be merged into DART DoubleClick (that’s the subject of another post). Notice how the links on the left blend in well with the orange.

The site has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 4 and a MozRank of 4.58– moderate juice is flowing to the site. The MozRank, as developed by SEOMoz is a more accurate view of link juice that is flowing, as the toolbar PR is rarely updated, plus there’s a huge difference between a low 4 and a high 4.

This nice level of juice flows through the rest of the site nicely, allowing 3,130 pages to be reported indexed by Google, such that even lower level pages are getting crawled and are ranking.  Site that have a low homepage PR peter out quickly– there’s not enough juice left by the time the bot gets to the pages that are 3-4 links away from the homepage, so they don’t get indexed. To validate, just go to one of the lower level pages, grab a paragraph of text (maybe 15-20 words) and paste the whole thing right into the search box.  That will let you know what’s being indexed.

Also try some of the terms the site wants to rank on.  In this case, I searched on “99 bottles of pop on the wall” and see his site taking the first position.

Of course, search on just the domain and you see him first– if you’re not first on your own name, something is quite wrong or you have a generic name.

Not only does Keith rank #1 on his name, but he has 8 sitelinks, the maximum number of sitelinks you can have. While you can’t choose which links are sitelinks, it’s great to have them anyway.  You have to be in the #1 spot for a search and also have enough “authority”.

I’d guess that Keith wants to rank on “children’s songs”, as that is the first searchphrase in his home page title.  He’s #2 from my search here in the US, and the #1 result is PR5.  Let’s go to SEOmoz’s LinkScape tool (requires a subscription, but well worth it) to dig deeper….

While some SEO pundits like to wax on about LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and how search engine theming can help you rank on terms that you don’t even have on your page– the more practical reality is that you want to have these terms on your page and for anchor text in sites that link to you.  Note that in the above seoMOZ LinkScape report, that the #1 anchor text is “bus songs”.  No surprise there, but “nursery rhymes” is #2 and “children’s songs” isn’t until #10, passing a piddly amount of juice from only a few domains.

Thus, Keith will have to decide whether it’s more important to go from #2 to to #1 on “children’s song” or try to get to the first page on “nursery rhymes”. It’s a question of big dwarf or little giant– which is bigger? Let’s find out how much volume is available:

For every 19 searches on “children’s songs”, there are 68 searches on “nursery rhymes”. Further, for every 19 searches on “children’s song”, there are 100 searches on “nursery songs”– the term you’d want to own if it were no extra effort.  Note that Google’s Insights for Search tool doesn’t tell you the exact number of searches on each term– rather, they give you a relative figure, with the most popular term being indexed at 100 and every other term scaled against that term.

So how do you decide what term to go after?  Let’s say that I was ranked #8 on “nursery rhymes” and #2 on “children’s songs”– good rankings on a highly popular term and great rankings on an okay term.  Moving from #8 to #3 on the popular term would produce about as much increase as going from #2 to #1 on the okay term.  As you get towards the top of the page, your CTR will go way up.  I wouldn’t be surprised if moving from #2 to #1 yielded a 3x increase in clicks.

Of course, you wouldn’t do this in a spammy way, where overnight all your inbound links suddenly have identical anchor text of “children’s songs”. But you could kindly ask the 70 sites who gave you 81 links with anchor of “bus songs” to switch to something else. If you add “bus songs” to the list in Google Insights for Search, you’ll see it has a paltry 4 versus the 100 for “nursery songs”.  I doubt you’d lose the #1 ranking on your name, largely because you get a boost from that being your domain, it’s not that competitive, and so many folks have already linked to you on that phrase.

Oh, and there are 26 inbound links that have BLANK anchor text– probably want to do something about that.

Finally, let’s take a look at bussongs.com through the eyes of a search engine spider, which reads text, not images.  It looks like this:

• The 32% text to code ratio is excellent– we like to see over 25%.
• The 301 redirects from the www homepage and index.php to non-www is smart– it solves the most common SEO problem, called the canonical domain issue. Most people redirect to www, but as long as you choose one, it doesn’t matter.
• missing meta information– you should at least have the meta description, since you’ll want to persuade the engines to use your description when your results show up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).  Don’t worry about other meta tags– keywords, gaming H1 tags, and so forth.
• The alt text on images does very little, but while you’re at it, you should put your domain name at the END versus the beginning– change:

One word of caution, a few months ago, Google started changing search results to biased by whether you’re logged in, where you are geographically, and what you’ve searched on before.  Thus, check your rankings when you’re NOT logged in and also via proxies.  Every is getting different search results, so you don’t want to be led down the garden path.

And a few non-SEO items

• Funny that the #9 song is the Diarrhea Song– Kids…. what a sense of humor.
• If kids (and parents) like the site so much, where is your email auto-responder and newsletter subscription box?
• You should do the same on your Facebook page, which has 550 fans (of which I am one).  Use the Facebook static HTML plug-in to put in that email box, a poll, and other interactive stuff.
• Maybe even install Facebook connect and Facebook Fan boxes– you do work at Facebook now, right?
• Leaderboards are a powerful concept– People are driven to do silly things in the name of popularity.  Why not allow folks to submit songs, earn points as part of a community (provided they are old enough), and have “name that tune” games?  On your top visited page, you show pageviews per day.  If you shown total cumulative pageviews, the numbers would appear a lot more impressive.
• If I can nit-pick, you have some typos.  “Angles” should be “Angels” here in the page title and text.  By the way, I did that as an excuse to give you another PR5 link from my blog.

Keith, I hope you have enjoyed our SEO review today– congratulations on winning!  You have a great site, as we’d expect from a former Google employee.

Readers, I’m considering making this a weekly review, so if you’re interested in seeing more of this, let me know by posting to my Facebook fan page at facebook.com/dennisyu.

Facebook keeps releasing new features to their self-serve PPC platform. It feels like Google from 2003– are you keeping up?

Did you see that you can target people on their birthdays, in addition to your existing fans, as well as being able to select multiple countries?

• If you’re selling gifts of any type– this is your chance to do something.  Cards, flowers, T-shirts, silly items… Doesn’t even have to be birthday related– you could even promote a little cosmetic surgery to older women– Imagine this ad:

• If you’re a brand, you can pay to hit your fans when they’re elsewhere on Facebook– think of this like the old days of Paid Inclusion on Yahoo! or perhaps like today’s brand bidding.  The point is there is some level of cannibalization to pay for people that you already “have” as fans.  Yet if this drives incremental traffic, you can price in that overlap to make sure it backs out.  And if you have less than 100 fans, who cares.  But if you’re a brand like WWE and have over 250,000 fans, it would be a great way to drive marginal revenue. Now it’s too bad you can’t target OTHER people’s brands and fan pages.  That would be like Coke bidding on Pepsi.  What would you pay to be able to target your competitors?  Oh, wait– I forgot.  You can do that all day long on PPC.
• If you just want to be a pimp: Some people just don’t have a good reason to market.  But maybe if you get to 100 fans on your page, you can then register your page’s vanity url here.  Even if you have no fans to start with, if you’re paying 30 cents a fan, it’s only $30 to get to 100 fans, and then you can grab a name like facebook.com/toiletpaper or whatever you fancy. Many generic names are still free.
  

If you’re making profits via these new tactics, however small, it’s time to scale them up. If you are a non-spammy advertiser, then I welcome you to sign up for our automated Facebook ad posting platform, which automatically multiples variations of ad creatives and landing pages, then reports back with the best performers.  If you’re selling weight loss, get rich quick scams (also euphemistically called “BizOpps”) or products that auto-renew at insane rates (called “negative option”), then don’t bother, since your ads won’t get approved by us or by Facebook.

But maybe you’re a stay at home dad filming how to home school videos or perhaps reviewing top 10 kids movies, in preparation for the upcoming Christmas shopping season.  Don’t laugh– if you’re an affiliate and you aren’t starting now, you’re late to the game.  Then it makes sense to start promoting your wares.

I’m presenting on Facebook advertising at Affiliate Summit East in 2 weeks, and again, at HostingCon 2 days later.  Come join me!

A couple weeks ago, Jeremy Shoemoneycame to visit BlitzLocal and we headed to a Denver strip club with Scott Richter and other folks in tow.  Here’s the shot we took outside the club which you can also see in today’s shoemoney.com post.  Tell me, is that a good or a bad thing to be seen outside a strip club, even though we’re there to play the awesome beer pong, for which they have tournaments on Tuesday and Thursday nights?

Will this help or hurt our image with our Fortune 500 clients or professional service firms looking for small business advertising or social ad serving on Facebook?

The folks at Webmaster Radio put on the first Affiliate Convention, ending just a few hours ago.  Billed as “free for affiliates”, many said that the event wouldn’t happen, wouldn’t attract high quality affiliates, and couldn’t secure a sponsor.  Even Larby Amirouche was considering whether or not he was going to come. But when 10 of us from BlitzLocal went to the Mile High Affiliate Party on Wednesday night– held at a Denver strip club, we saw a packed club of 300+ people. The show had 1,200+ folks registered and over 900 folks badged. The Thursday session I moderated on Alternative Search Engines (mostly Facebook) was standing room only.  And today’s session on lead generation strategies was packed, too.

What did I learn?

• A conference where affiliates get in free draws a different crowd: The usual suspects– Shoemoney, GetAds, Scott Richter, Wes Mahler, etc— were there.  Yet folks such as Mark Brooks, (the pre-eminient expert in online dating), Gillian Muessig (president of SEOmoz.org) and Mark Nelson (Director of IT at Quiznos)– who are not part of the typical affiliate scene– provide expertise in online marketing that you otherwise wouldn’t get.   There are a ton of folks who are part-time affiliates and are quite skilled in their day jobs– usually more well-rounded than full-time affiliates that have just one trick.

Lunch with Wesley Mahler, Mark Nelson, and Mark Brooks

• New perspectives from non-affiliates: For example– if you are a dating affiliate and didn’t attend, you’ve really missed out– dating is HOT.  The downturn in the economy has driven out the folks who aren’t serious, leaving the remaining traffic converting better. Folks in this space are killing it in a market that’s still growing– yet those who are making money will want to tell you that you should stay out of dating, since “it’s not doing too well.”  You would have learned what techniques super affiliates are using, what niches are working, how to tweak landing pages, how to SEO those pages, and so forth.

Super affiliate panel providing tips and advice

• Local and social are the future: I spoke about local lead gen in one of the panels.  Yet a number of other speakers noted the opportunity for affiliates to reach out to the millions of local businesses and sell them on a pay per call basis.  Instead of competing against hundreds of other affiliates on the same offer, you can have the exclusive for roofing contractors in your neighborhood.  Sure, each one might only earn you $300 a month, but what if you could duplicate your PPC templates and landing page templates to 100 of them– and earn $30,000 a month?  That’s steady income for you. Call tracking software, whether offered by BlitzLocal or other vendors, is now easy to use and cheap.  The Facebook and twitter land grab is on, just like domains 10 years ago.  Use that to fuel the fire.

Dennis Yu speaking on advanced local lead generation

• Drunk people tell you their secrets: There has been a party each night and it was in those personal meetings that I’ve learned more than I ever could in a session that’s being filmed and recorded in front of hundreds of people.  If you want to really move up your learning and earning curve, you need to reach out.  The drunker, the better.

Packed house and open bar at Platinum 84

The Mile High Affiliate Party included beer pong action too