knofun

Kris Jones from Pepperjam is the man. Not only is he the CEO of a kickass internet marketing company, but he continuously hooks me up. He hooked me up and invited me to attend Pepperstock, their annual company party in PA. He hooked me up to speak on his panel at ASW 09. He hooked me up with a pass to Elite Retreat, an unbelievably effective internet marketing gathering.

Now, he has hooked me up further. Pepperjam is the first licensee of ZinText, my in-text advertising platform I built for eBay. If you are a Pepperjam affiliate and you have been approved into the affiliate program you can check out PJN InText here. There are also some reviews up on the web, here are some I have found:

http://www.masonworld.com/announcements/pepperjam-ebay-text-ads-review/
http://nailsblog.com/2009/02/23/pepperjam-in-text-ads/

So thanks Kris and thanks Pepperjam and thank you, the affiliate.

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing pepperjam, zintext

Yo, I had a really great time at affiliate summit this year. Shoemoney was there doing his thing, PepperJam had an awesome presence. I spoke on a panel with Kris Jones, CEO of PepperJam, on where affiliate marketing is headed in 2009. Some really good insights on the industry, plus I got to sit next to Brad from BradsDeals.com. He is a smart dude, wish I had gotten more time to talk to him.

Which brings me to my next point, I didn’t have much time after the panel because it went 12-1 on Sunday, and the Chargers v. Steelers game started at 1:45. I ducked out of there quick sorry folks did not mean to be rude but come on for San Diego sports the Chargers are all we have and I think that says volumes. So yeah the way that game ended sucked. I was supposed to do a webmasterradio show with all the other panelists after and I kinda bailed. Sorry.

Anywho, that night I went to an awesome dinner hosted by the nice folks at Market Leverage curtesy of my boy DK. I somehow got seated next to the CEO Michael, who turned out to be a fascinating guy with tons of knowledge about all kinds of fun topics. The three of us talked and talked through an amazing five hour dinner at the new Encore tower. Wow. Big thank you to DK and Michael.

The next night was kind of a blur, I remember tons of suite parties and seeing E40 rock a sick show at Rain. Ran into him later at the blackjack tables. Good times.

web marketing affiliate, asw09, pepperjam, shoemoney

Hey guys all 12 of you reading this probably know by know I finally got off my ass and redirected my personal blog to knofun.com. If not, hopefully you noticed this time

Big thanks to go out to PepperJam Network, EASILY my favorite affiliate network in terms of honesty, transparency, availability. PJN decided to give me a years supply of Fiji Water, I guess for being ‘Top in Lead’ not sure if that means I got the most leads or what, but THANKS!  I’m not sure how they knew, but Fiji is my favorite water. I know they were specifically called out in Seth Godin’s recent book All Marketers are Liars for selling only because of the bottle design, but what the heck. I like the bottle design

This contest was apparently sponsored by ShopFijiWater.com, which is a cool site that - u guessed it - sells fiji water. The subscription models are cool and make great gifts.

Thanks again to Kris, Robyn, Michael, Mandy, and all the PJN guys, see you at ASW ‘09!

Uncategorized affiliate, fiji water, pepperjam

If you are serious about making a living from internet marketing, you need to attend shoemoney’s Elite Retreat. It’s only five grand, which may sound like a lot but when you look at the setup of the conference you are getting face time with the absolute top experts in the field. Like I said, IF you are serious.

Don’t have five stacks but you are still really serious? Doubtful, but where there’s a will there’s a way. Fortunately for you Pepperjam is hosting a contest to give you a free pass to Elite Retreat. You still have to get yourself to San Fran, but you are serious about this internet marketing thing right?

other elite retreat, pepperjam, shoemoney

Wow I haven’t been hungover like this in a while. Yesterday was eBay’s “Affiliates Day” at their annual developer’s conference in Chicago. Had a really full day starting at 8:30am, which if you know me you know is way before my workday usually starts, especially with the time change. But it was definitely worth it. ePN showed up in force, with around 10 account managers, VPs, basically everyone from their internet marketing team.

We as affiliates are often used and abused as marketing tools, but this was a really special experience to work closely with the folks involved in the program. They did a bunch of sessions:

• Matt “everyone who uses the term eCPM on a regular basis is on my team” Ackley - gave a great talk on where eBay is today and where they are headed. Really interesting to see their internal thought process and he did a really good job of making us feel like part of the overall strategy.
• Jarrod “internet celebrity” Schwartz - drilled down into the partner network some more and had some good insights. It was also good to make fun of him for having his picture in the sidebar on the affiliate forums for so long hahaha
• Will “don’t you dare send me bad traffic” Martin-Gill - this may have been the most educational talk of the day, he went into the value of ACRUs (for u non epn addicts this is a new user registration), and how they can pretty accurately predict the lifetime value of a customer after just a few days on the site. Right now eBay pays flat rates for ACRUs, $25-35 depending on the volume you do. Will discussed this possibly changing to a value based model, so affiliates that drove ACRUs that didn’t generate much value to the company would make less per, and affiliates that drove better traffic would make more. Makes sense but change is always feared.
• Cian “only funny because of my accent” Weeresinghe - the head of an intern at ebay.co.uk talked about geo targeting. When they launched ePN they made a big deal of how they were going to geo target for affiliates. Uh, yeah. I posted a while ago about this saying it doesn’t work. Apparently it does work, but it works via javascript (huh???). If you copy and paste the exact code (including the javascript) for every link you make, I guess it works. This is kind of retarded to me. Every click for every eBay program (canada, france, uk, au, everything) goes to rover.ebay.com. Is it really that hard to download the free maxmind db, do a live lookup on the click, and send the user to the correct ebay? I am sure they could even afford the $12/mo 99% accurate edition. Bottom line, eBay should do a better job than any of its affiliates at geo targeting, so why not? In the time Cian gave his talk I fixed my geotargeting for ZinText using the free one. Cian was on my side, and apparently its up to Jarrod to get it done.
• Steve “don’t stuff my cookies” Hartman - did the mandatory network quality talk. nothing new here, just remember not to cheat! don’t even try to cheat, we are too good at catching cheaters, there is no more cheating now that we are here to catch all the cheaters. He did have some funny quotes pulled from some blackhat affiliate marketing site with guys getting their accounts closed.
• Sunny “i am only here for the famous IM party” Li - I really should have paid more attention to this talk but this was like 6 hours in and my ADD had about all it could handle. Plus I found an open wifi network and was gettin it crackin on digg Anyways, Sunny was from the developers conference and gave a talk on the APIs and how they are changing and stuff. Really important to my business and I couldn’t tell you what was said

Then they gave me some cool Robert Marc sunglasses (everyone got sunglasses, a bunch of different brands) and some free drinks, then we all met up last night for dinner and a party all hosted by eBay.

I would just like to say thank you first of all to eBay and whoever’s idea it was to reach out to affiliates like this. I would also like to thank everyone from eBay involved in the event, especially Kim Thai. It was a great experience for me and I learned a lot. There was great energy in the room, and everyone was pretty jazzed about promoting ePN and making $$$
Side note, I also got a chance to meet Michael and Kris Jones from PepperJam. These guys are very cool and if you haven’t had a chance to explore their network definitely give it a look.

other chicago, ebay, epn, pepperjam