Shmuly Tennenhaus is on a religious crusade to share YouTube with the masses – most recently he was interviewed by Bob Mayer of NBC’s Miami, Florida affiliate Channel 6. Shmuly does a five minute interview on how the average Joe or Suzie could easily shoot a video and upload it to YouTube.

There is nothing revolutionary about the video, but I think it’s pretty darn impressive the amount of attention and quasi-celebrity Shmuly has garnered since quitting Ice.com as their marketing director sometime last year. I had the opportunity to spend some time with Shmuly last week in Vegas – this guy really takes this YouTube stuff seriously…as he should since his YouTube Channel at OneParkAvenue is white hot and when he submits a video it is practically destined for multi-thousand viewership.

I wish Shmuly well on his YouTube for Dummies crusade – he is a very intelligent guy with a ton of personality and an eye for the crazy and outrageous. In short, Shmuly has a massive sized nutsack – large enough to get his mug on the Today Show – don’t believe me? Stay tuned.

The Affiliate Summit West has come to an end, and I can tell you that it was awesome. From the beginning, here it goes…So I wake up at 3:30 am on January 21st, and am out the door by four.  I picked up Tara DeGiusto, Maura Goodwin, and Brock Siegel and we were on the way to the Wilkes Barre/Scranton International Airport.  Barring that Brock’s name was not in the computer and we had to book a flight for him on the spot, things started off well.  Get on the plane and we are on our way to Vegas…so we thought.  A light amount of snow caused the navigation system at the Cincinnati Airport (CVG) to go offline, so we make a pit stop in Pittsburgh to refuel and wait (and that we did).  45 minutes later, we are in route to Cincinnati.  Because our connecting flight was scheduled for 45 minutes after we landed, we unfortunately missed the connecting flight that was supposed to take us from Cincinnati to Vegas. So, a little upset, we proceeded to the Delta Representatives to find a flight to get us to Vegas.  The lack of customer service made me want to vomit.  For all of you who know me, I am a very friendly person.  I am nice to strangers, respectful to my peers and generally fun to be around.  DELTA REPS AT THE CVG AIRPORT HAVE NONE OF THOSE QUALITIES.  They are rude and incompetent.  They also could not help us.  I ended up calling the 1-800 number for Delta and the rep on the phone found us a flight to Boston and then to Vegas.  Not ideal but she was awesome and it was all she had.  So all in all, we flew from Scranton to Pittsburgh then to Cincinnati, then back to Boston, then on to Vegas.  Total travel time…a whopping 18 hours minus our presentation booth which made it the following morning.  Our flight home on US Air was a breeze.

On to the conference.  By the time I actually got to Vegas, I was so tired that I ordered food and went to bed.  The next day was great though.  I stayed in the booth the whole time and got to meet some of the nicest affiliates ever. The Martini’s are great, as well as the crew from Zanox.  I also had the wonderful opportunity to finally meet Shmuly.  I had multiple conversations with some of my favorite affiliates, including  Scott Hazard, and Asif who was his normal, friendly self.  I was able to meet up with some friends from 77Blue, Fat Wallet, Upromise, and last but not least, Ebates.  I also had the opportunity to briefly speak to Shawn Collins in an elevator, and he was great as usual. The Pure Imagination party was fun, and if I owned a club, it would totally look like Tryst.  I was so happy that Scott won the Affiliate of the Year, and had my fingers crossed all evening.  After about 4-5 glasses of champagne, I retired (believe it or not!) and had some quesadillas with a friend back at the hotel.The next day, Kris Jones , our CEO, spoke and it was actually the only speaking engagement that I was able to attend, but it was awesome.  He did a great job.  I was impressed.  I did hear that Shoemoney’s Q and A was also very engaging.  The speaker line up for the Summit is usually impressive.We all had a good time, I got to meet Shoemoney’s sister, Andrea, and saw Dillsmack again.  They are great people.  The best thing about the Summit is that attendees get to meet people face to face who we work with over the phone and through email.  I made a lot of new friends, connected with some old ones, and had a really great and memorable time. Can’t wait until Miami, although I can tell you that we will not be 9 people strong again. 

Pepperjam Pictures Posted from Affiliate Summit – Las Vegas. Have fun – we did. CLICK HERE FOR PICS.

Guy Kawasaki, one of the most influencial business leaders and technology minds of the last quarter century has accepted an invitation to speak at Elite Retreat – San Francisco. Guy will speak on Monday, March 19th. The event, which features prominent speakers Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney), Lee Dodd, Aaron Wall, Darren Rowse, Neil Patel, and yours truly is set for March 19-20 at the San Fransisco Courtyard Downtown in San Francisco, California. For details, click here.

Guy Kawasaki is currently CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm which specializes in high-technology startup firms located in Silicon Valley, California. In addition, Guy is a regular columnist for Forbes.com. Guy Kawasaki was one of the original Apple employees and was responsible for marketing of the Macintosh in 1984 – in fact, Guy is attributed with much of Apple’s early success and was brought back years later as an Apple Fellow, which once again helped to re-fuel Apple’s business. Guy has started and sold numerous businesses, many of which he sold for tens of millions of dollars.

Guy is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

My friends – I am honored to be part of the select group of speakers at Elite Retreat. In fact, if I wasn’t going to be there as a speaker I would be going as a guest – this is going to be an opportunity of a lifetime for those who attend.

If you are interested in attending the Elite Retreat please visit eliteretreat.info for more information. I know I can speak for the other speakers when I say that we look forward to meeting you and spending face-to-face time with you in an effort to take your business and income to the next level.

Ever think to yourself “Man what a great short film this would make” or “If I could only get my movie out there”? Me neither, but apparently some people are very interested in expressing themselves through film whether it is some backyard wrestling, a gaming stunt video or LonelyGirl15. Soooooo, when I read today that YouTube was going to start sharing revenue with users I was pretty excited because its a really good idea. Not only will it keep people coming back but you know someone is going to get really good at gaming YouTube and do a ShoeMoney type picture where they hold up a check for 100K from YouTube.

By engaging users on such a level it actually should foster creativity and self-promotion. I guarantee that there will be films put on here that garner some sort of buzz for sundance or any other film festival.

On a completely different note I was thinking that Google would serve ads for possibly related objects like they do in GMail. For instance, (and they beat me to it by a second) this quote by Gerbot from ThreadWatch: “If [Google] is really smart and they’ll start running ads for cups/boxers under videos of guys getting kicked in the nuts.”

Entirely feasible. Anyway I am sure they will find a better use for what they are proposing to do with YouTube than selling things for your groin.

Best,

Dean

In my opinion, Pepperjam has the best team in internet marketing – we have the most passionate, interesting, and intelligent people in the online marketing industry. If you’ve attended any of the various internet marketing conferences across the United States chances are that you’ve met one or more of us. In short, I’m very proud of my team and I thought it would be a cool idea to give those of you who don’t know us the opportunity to meet us. Here are the rules:

Every Friday Pepperjam will post a new video interview of a member of our staff – everyone will be included – affiliates managers, executives, search-engine marketing managers, directors, software engineers, assistants, online media buyers, and interns. The person being interviewed won’t know he / she has been chosen until about 30 seconds before the interview – this way you’ll get an unrehearsed, real world look at the employee…hopefully, this will make it interesting and non-corporate, which is what we are known and respected for across the internet marketing industry.

Why are we doing this? Well, I am proud of our team and I think you’ll find them as interesting and intelligent as I do. Also, I’m a student of viral video and the social media space and I want to test the waters as it relates to what corporate america is doing (and not doing) to spread buzz and build next generation work places.

Finally, I just thought it would be cool to put some people in front of a video camera that have never done so before, have a little bit of fun, and see if Pepperjam can spread some additional buzz about why we are the leader in online marketing.

FYI – all videos will also be posted to YouTube. If you think what we are doing is outside-the-box and interesting please blog about it and share the story with the world.

Sooooooooo, without further adieu, Meet the Pepperjam Team – Video #1 – Get to Know Maura Goodwin – Pepperjam’s Assistant Director of Affiliate Marketing.

We arrived safely in Pennsylvania via Las Vegas after spending several days at the Affiliate Summit. First, I’d like to thank Robyn, Aaron, Brock, Kate, Maura, Megan, Kim, and Tara for being an incredible team – Pepperjam was well represented and if you attended the Affiliate Summit to met at least one of us. Second, I’d like to give a shout out to some of our closest friends who we had the opportunity to spend some high-quality time with: Shoemoney, Dillsmack, Andrea, Marcus, Schmuly, CrazyEgg guys, Nicole, David Lewis, Asif, and the Best of the Web guys. Also, we had a blast spending time with and meeting many for the first time Andrew Wee, Kris, Zanox team, CareerBuilder guys, Paresh (Ice.com), Scott Hazard, Alex’s Coupons, and many others.

Day 1 – Sunday
Longest day of the trip since most of our team was stuck in transit because of bad weather on the east coast – in fact, the trip was supposed to take roughly 4 hours and ended up taking over 18 hours with a combo of delays, cancelled flights and missed connecting flights. The good news for me – I arrived early Sunday morning with no problem because I only had to fly from San Fran since I was there on Friday and Saturday night for the Inc. 500 Conference and Awards Ceremony (stay tuned for pics from that event).

The gang got in around 10:30pm and not surprisingly were exhausted – the night ended early, but I had the opportunity throughout the day to spend some time with friends like Shoemoney, David Dellanave, Neil Patel, Marcus Tandler, Brock Siegel and others.

Day 2 – Monday

Best day of the conference. We spent most of the day at our exhibit booth, which was without question one of the top three attended booths of the conference. Many of our industry friends stopped by, while we were able to network with industry people and prospective clients. One of the cool highlights of the day was watching Nicole – Shoemoney’s hired model – hand out exclusive Shoemoney (black) t-shirts…the shirts all went in about two hours or so with the help of some of the Pepperjam girls who assisted Nicole. Also, it was cool that our booth was across from the WebmasterRadio.fm booth (they were reporting LIVE from the show floor) and Revenue Magazine since they were handing out blue cupcakes.

After lunch I attended the “Super Affiliate” Question and Answer panel that featured Shoemoney – in general, the discussion wasn’t that good because there wasn’t a moderator. However, Shoemoney stepped up and played that role and did a solid job – also, his comments were on a much higher-level than the other two panelists, which was a disappointment since the others were supposed to be Super Affiliates – I can think of at least 20 other Super Affiliates that could have been paired with Shoemoney to make the panel awesome. In fact, while the session was Video Taped rumor has it that the video was pulled because one of the panelists was extremely unprofessional and lacked respect for some of the attendees.

On Monday night we went to a pre-party at the Palms sponsored by Jamster – the beginning of the party, which was actually a pitch for us and others to support the Jamster Affiliate program on CJ and / or Zanox, was a terrible bore. However, the fact that it was held in the MTV Real World Suite was pretty cool and also turned into a pretty cool networking opportunity once the presentation was complete. In particular, the team at Zanox was really impressive.

After the pre-party we went to the Tryst Nightclub At Wynn Las Vegas - the event was sponsored by Digital River’s One Network (great affiliate network). I estimate that there were about 1,000 people at this party – it was amazing – rumor has it that the event cost over $150,000.

The event started out with an awards ceremony that didn’t work out all that well since most people were interested in partying and therefore it was almost impossible to hear the MC – Todd Crawford. Award winners included Todd Crawford who got the Legend Award (great choice here), Affiliate of the Year – Scott Hazard from CouponPouch.com, and Jim Kukral from ReveNews.com who won Blogger of the Year. Some advice for next year’s award ceremony planning committee – hold the event before serving drinks or hold it in conjunction with some other event that takes place during the Summit.

The party at the Wynn was one of the best (might have been the best!) parties and networking events I’ve ever gone to at a conference – very, very classy event.

After the Wynn the Pepperjam Team and a small posse of about 20 friends met-up with Shoemoney, Dillsmack, Marcus, Andrea and others at the Ghost Bar (one of the most famous clubs / bars in Vegas, located at the Palms). The partying went straight until the bouncers asked us to leave since the bar was closing (somewhere around 4:00am). HINT: If you drink red bull and vodka until 4:00a.m. it will be difficult to fall asleep – also, you’ll still feel the effects of the red bull long into the next evening.

Day 3 – Tuesday

If you read the above you’ve probably guessed that I was still feeling the effects of the night before, especially the red bull. I met up with the rest of the Pepperjam Team at the exhibit booth, which was once again 5-deep with friends and prospective clients. I had to speak at 3:30 – 4:30pm later that day so for the most part I took it easy prior to my speech. Throughout the day I met a lot of really cool and interesting people, but for the most part I stood back and watched my incredible staff do their thing – these guys (and gals) are the best in the business – if you didn’t have the opportunity to meet either Robyn, Maura, Kate, Kim, Tara, Brock or Aaron you missed out. Pictures coming soon!

My speech was titled “the Confluence of Search and Affiliate Marketing.” However, what I really talked about was affiliate marketing search arbitrage from the perspective of an affiliate – I shared some tips and strategies for how to use search arbitrage to make significant income across various affiliate and ad networks. In general, I felt the event was well attended and after my “formal” presentation there was an excellent Q & A where the audience was very involved and asked excellent questions. In fact, one of the attendees said that he felt my presentation was the best of the entire Affiliate Summit – while I doubt that, I felt that I was very candid and offered some tips that have the potential of making a few people in the room very wealthy.

Day 4 – Wednesday

We flew home safely from Vegas to Wilkes-Barre, PA via Philly.

The conference was a really awesome time – definitely the best Affiliate Summit to date. While I believe the industry is diversifying very quickly I strongly believe that Pepperjam remains one of the hottest and most buzz worthy companies in all of online marketing. If you attended the event and walked by our booth, listened to the enthusiasm of any our our staff, or simply heard someone at the event talking about how Pepperjam seems to be everywhere, you would have left knowing that Pepperjam is a force in this industry – a force that I am proud to be part of – a company that is worthy of the rewards (2006, Inc. 500) and recognitions we are receiving…In no small part, it is due to the fact that the Pepperjam team is made up of the best minds in e-commerce and internet marketing (them, not me.)

A special thanks goes to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward for hosting the event and to Team Pepperjam for making it one of the best professional experiences of my life.

Elite Retreat was held for the first time in San Antonio, TX in December of 2006 – the event was hailed as one of the most successful and exclusive internet marketing events ever held. This time around the event will be taking place March 19-20 in San Francisco, CA – also, I have been added to the roster of speakers that includes internet marketing luminaries such as Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney), Lee Dodd, Aaron Wall, Neil Patel and Darren Rowse.

Elite Retreat is like no other conference – unlike the “traditional” internet marketing conference where you pay several thousand dollars to sit in a crowd of hundreds or thousands of people and listen to speakers, at Elite Retreat your ideas and experiences are shared one-on-one with a small team of well-known experts. CLICK HERE to learn more about Elite Retreat, watch a cool video and to read BIOS of each speaker.

If you have questions about the event please call Andrea at (800) 888-8151.

At previous conferences, including Search-Engine Strategies, Affiliate Summit, and ecomXpo I’ve discussed the issue of merchants strategically covering more real estate (I’m referring to available Google / Yahoo paid and organic search listings) by strategically working with sophisticated search-engine marketing (SEM) affiliates. My argument has consistently been for merchants to choose a handful of select SEM affiliates, share confidential keyword-level conversion data with them (require an NDA, of course), and then develop a search-engine marketing strategy that allows the merchant to cover as much real estate on Google as possible.

This argument makes a lot of sense, especially from the standpoint of the merchant since the merchant typically controls the affiliate relationship through the merchant / affiliate agreement. Think about it – the merchant lays out the rules (i.e., you can bid on my trademarks but you can’t bid above the minimum or you can bid on these high converting terms but you can’t bid above me, but I’d like you to bid above my competitior who is merchant X.) You get it – the merchant is in control. But what about the affiliate?

This time around, at Affiliate Summit West, which is going to start this Sunday in Las Vegas and run through Tuesday I’ve been asked by “sugar” Shawn Collins to address my argument from the affiliate perspective. In other words, how do SEM affiliates (my friends the affiliate marketing search arbitragers) approach merchants about an exclusive or semi-exclusive search-engine marketing partnership? How does the affiliate approach (and convince) a merchant about getting written authorization to bid on the merchants trademarks? What kind of tools exist for affiliates to conduct competitive research such that the affiliate becomes armed with information about the merchants competitors that they don’t even have? How do affiliates get around and deal with Google’s recent Landing Page Quality Score Algorithm change that has unjustly raised the bids (i.e. $10 bucks per click instead of 0.35 cents) of many affiliate search arbitragers? What other considerations are there when approaching a merchant about providing search-engine marketing services on a pay-for-performance basis?

I will address all the above issues in detail and provide affiliates with a “how-to” make money using affiliate marketing and search arbitrage. In addition, I’ll provide some of the pitfalls, as well as some hardcore strategies that will enable affiliates to be prepared when approaching merchants about a possible relationship.

You can’t afford to miss this event!

I got my start in the affiliate marketing industry back in 1999 as an affiliate marketing search arbitrager. I’ve generated hundreds of millions in sales for merchants using search arbitrage. I’ve tought many affiliate marketers how to use search arbitrage to make money and I’m planning on teaching several more next Tuesday from 3:30 – 4:30pm at Bally’s Las Vegas.

See you there!

For those of you unable to make it I’m thinking very hard about taking the Pepperjam video camera to the presentation and posting the video here and on the Affiliate Summit Video website when I’m done. Let me know if you’d be interested.

Most advertisers have no idea how to work with Google’s PPC Quality Score algorithim.  As a veteran, somewhat sophisticated PPC expert, I even surprise myself with the secrets I continue to uncover.

One thing I can scream from the mountaintop with utter confidence is that short term thinking and action can trash your PPC marketing efforts on Google (and now a Panamized Yahoo) in a hurry.  Let me give you quick example of how to use the Google quality score index to your advantage, and how treating it like a now fading memory of the ultra-transparent Overture system can bite you in the ass:

With the holidays fast approaching, I took one of our gift oriented merchants and used the Quality Score to cement them into the first position on an exhaustive list of their most important keywords.  I bid the hell out of those terms in October and November while testing copy and maximizing CTR. What resulted was fascinating:  No matter how much our competitors bid on those terms in their holiday push, our client remained number 1.  And the best part was that they had number 1 at a lower cost than when I started the experiment.  Take the other side of the coin: 

As many advertisers chose to OVER FOCUS on keyword level ROI, their bids are constantly changing via their PPC managers or their rule based PPC bid management software. They think they are being clever but as those bids go up and down, their quality score suffers. Now comes the time for top level holiday conversions and a little flexibility on their part as to CPA and ROAS.  Too bad the short term thinking left them with a low quality score and the inability to make up for lost time.  Now they are paying a premium for a lower position and they will never know how good things could have been.  

The moral of the story is that a short term dedication to keyword level ROI can actually harm your SEM efforts.  As the engines become more sophisticated in their ad delivery. you need to think globally about your efforts and understand that a dollar saved now can be thousands of dollars wasted later. With the enrty of Yahoo into the quality score landscape, you can simply no longer afford to think short term about your paid search strategies.