After lunch and some networking Neil Patel was the next Elite Retreat speaker discussing Social Media.

Neil started out with a very in-depth overview of Digg.com. FYI: Neil was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal HERE as one of the top 20 digg.com users in the world.

- Neil talks about building your friends list. He says that while Digg has removed the ability for users to see who the Top 100 diggers are, other lists have been created to mimick the list, including this one HERE from a top netscape user.
- Neil says to use the list to befriend the top 100 users – the idea is that your friends will Digg your stories and therefore increase your change of getting on the Digg homepage. Neil says that you’ll have to space adding friends to Digg.com since Digg will only allow you to add so many users over a short period of time.
- Don’t self promote.
- Write interesting titles (eye catching) and descriptions
- Neil says the best time to submit a story is 12:00 – 1:00 PST.
- Top Digg topics: Digg, MySpace, Apple, YouTube
- Neil talks about understanding the Digg community – For instance, making fun of Kevin Federline or submitting pictures of urinals is the type of stuff liked by Digg. However, the Digg community is does enjoy tech stuff like tips on using Google, etc.
- Neil favorite categories are Tech and Politics.
- Neil suggests to not digg multiple times from the same location – you can get your digg account banned.
- Neil suggests to e-mail friends with Digg accounts within the first hour you submit to Digg. This will give you a nice base and will show other digg users you story is popular.

- Attendee asked about titles and descriptions – Neil suggests not to reveal too much in the post – use the Title and Description to sell the content of your post.

Neil talks about other Social media websites.

NEIL ON STUMBLEUPON:

- Neil says to install the Stumbleupon tool bar and stumble websites you like
- Neil says it’s OK to stumble your own stuff as long as your stumbling other random stuff
- Neil says to befriend up to 200 stumbleupon users – Since stumbleupon members only allow 200 friends you should only keep freinds that befriend you. This way – friends who have befriended you are more likely to stuble your stuff.
– *Neil said that unlike Digg.com, Stumbleupon is not great as a strategy for building links. However, if you’re looking for traffic, Stumbleupon could be great.
- Stumbleupon is mostly guys.
- Neil says to leave comments as much as possible when you stumble since this is a way of getting friends.
- The typical stumbleupon user is

NEIL ON NETSCAPE:

- Neil is a lot like Digg – it’s a Digg wannabe
- Neil suggests to befriend as many people as possible.
- Neil has 18,000 friends
- Neil says since tech stories are harder to make the homepage so focus on “do it yourself” and non-tech topics.
- Netscape delivers much less traffic than Digg – about a tenth of the amount of traffic.

NEIL TALKS del.icio.us

- del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website
- Neil says the main key to getting on del.icio.us is to leverage your audience and optimize your submission.
- Neil says if done correctly del.icio.us is a great source of links and high quality traffic
- Pro Blogger Darren Rowse admits that there is incredible value in understanding and using del.icio.us
- Getting on del.icio.us will also get you diggs or dugg, and
- Attendee directed everyone’s attention to the “links for you” button on the top of the del.icio.us homepage – he suggested that this is a great way of getting bookmarked on del.icio.us

NEIL ON REDDIT

- Neil doesn’t like Reddit because of its down voting feature
- Neil suggests that befriending is very important here
- Neil suggests to kickstart your submission by IM’ing friends or buddy lists.

NEIL ON MYSPACE:

- Neil suggests that he’s not a huge user of MySpace
- Shoemoney offered some insight into MySpace
- Shoemoney has a popular MySpace page
- Neil and Shoe suggest that MySpace has a lot of limits in place to prevent affiliates from monetizing their traffic
- Neil suggests that if you’re gonna create a profile use a “hot chick” approach since most hot chicks get more friends. (LOL, but that’s what he said).

Neil opens it up to Q & A.

At the end of Neil’s presentation we took a 15 minute break and then did a 1 1/2 hour site clinic where attendees were able have each speaker analyze their goals / websites.

FYI: One of Elite Retreat attendees is also blogging this event at http://www.emomsathome.com/blog/.

Today started out with breakfast and a quick meet and greet with attendees.

Each speaker (Jeremy Schoemaker, Darren Rowse, Neil Patel, Aaron Wall, Lee Dodd, & myself) shared “how I got started” stories with attendees then attendees shares there stories. Aside from the amazing success stories from each speaker I was blown away by the story of each attendee – without disclosing names, there are people here who are incredibly successful – some founded and / or work for well known companies and others have moving stories of personal obstacles overcome with significant success through online marketing.

Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) was our first speaker covering branding, blogging, and arbitrage. Shoe told the story of his father who founded numerous successful businesses, including a fishing lure company that was sold to a major branded lure company.

BRANDING: Shoe talked about the need to differentiate your brand from competition.

ARBITRAGE: “Understanding arbitrage is like selling bananas.” It’s about market inbalance – the profit you make by selling a banana for higher than you bought it for (your profit) is arbitrage.

- Talks about how to perform basic arbitrage using Google Adwords, Yahoo Search, and MSN Ad Center.
- Discusses strategies for building out landing pages. One of the attendees asked –
can you show us some specific examples?” I guess this was short for “show me the money.” Of course, Jeremy showed several examples of his own websites and how to make money using arbitrage strategies. One example given was http://www.dadamobiletones.com – a arbitrage website Shoe made to arbitrage affiliate ringtone offers. Note that the website uses Google Adsense ads on the page, which is another form of revenue = nice!
- Shoe talks about his “nickle traffic” concept – buy thousands of keywords at a nickle (or the engines minimum CPC) and send them through targeted landing pages. Ultimately, he buys lots and lots of keywords at the lowest price possible and carefully watches his EPC using a portfolio approach – i.e. EPC on overall campaign.
- Shoe talks about keyword gen and how he once purchased an entire database of millions of keywords from CNET and bid on those keywords using his nickle traffic theory.
- Shoe and I talked with the attendees about the different approach that is needed on Google Adwords versus MSN Adcenter / Yahoo. For instance, on Adwords, because of Google’s Quality Score Algorithm you can’t use Shoe’s nickle approach as well – however, I share that you still can use Google using a different strategy, which I’ll talk about in more detail tomorrow. MSN and Yahoo allow an affiliate to purchase high volume keywords based on Shoe’s theory.

STREAMS OF REVENUE: contextual (Adsense / YPN), affiliate, subscription (i.e. Lee dodd’s earnersforumn.com, donation, direct ad sales, products (i.e., Aaron Wall’s SEO Book).
Shoe says his favorite form of income is subscription income – more specifically, reoccuring subscriptions.
- Shoe shows some of his more proftable subscription-based community forums and talks about to set them up and how to strategically approach subscription rates.
- Shoe talks about direct ad sales – gives example of his blog – HERE.
- Shoe talks about direct product sales. He gives an example of how he sells cell phone data cables on one of his high volume ringtone websites as an additional form of monetizing the website.
- Shoes talks about contextual ads. He has many websites and usually doesn’t try to monetize them until there is at least 1,000 unique visitors per day. He tells us how is made the contextual income from his popular Adsense photo.
- Shoe talks about affiliate and how you need to think outside-the-box to become an affiliate superstar. Talks abouttaking advantage of seasonality, trends, etc. i.e., tax season.

Shoemoney talks in detail about the idea of white hat, gray hat, and black hat. He says he spends most of his time making money in the gray area, where rules are ill defined so there is opportunity to define them (and test the ropes).

Shoe discusses using CrazyEgg.com (Neil Patel’s product) to build and analyze quality landing pages. Shoe says Crazy Egg has helped increase his revenue significantly, especially using Crazy egg heat maps, which allow him to analyze where people are clicking….and, in turn, optimize his pages.

Shoe tells the attendees “don’t sell out.” Keep your goals in min at all times, but test and then once you’re done, test again.

Shoe offers his tips for success (about 10 tips or so to take your business to the next level).

Shoemoney closes with some words of inspiration and offers to answer Q & A.

FYI: One of Elite Retreat attendees is also blogging this event at http://www.emomsathome.com/blog/.

OK “Meet the Pepperjam Team” fans, this week we have a raw and uncensored video with Pepperjam’s Vice-President of Search-Engine Marketing, Ken Mohn, Jr.

Ken has been active in the online marketing industry since 1996 making him the most tenured person on the Pepperjam staff. A self-proclaimed computer nerd (which I vouch for), Ken’s 10+ years of experience in search-engine marketing, including advanced PPC and SEO, makes him a Pepperjam All-Star. From my personal experience, Ken is one of the brightest and most talented internet marketers I’ve ever met.

Anyway – in Ken’s video he discloses that he doesn’t wear underwear and shares his thoughts on the future of search, as well as why he loves Pepperjam.

Meet the Pepperjam Team: Ken Mohn, Jr., Vice-President of Search-Engine Marketing

For those of you who don’t know the “rules” behind the Meet the Pepperjam Video Series, here they are:

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.

Our previous videos include:
Maura Goodwin
Tara Lou
Dean Karasinski
Kim Noler (dated YouTube founder)
Stephanie Yachim
Roxy (Pepperjam’s English Bulldog)
Kris Jones
Katharine Dempsey

Other fun Pepperjam Vids:
Naked Crazy Man Video
Pepperjam Adds Ping Pong Table to Pepperplex
Roxy with the Tony Robbins Beach Ball

Check out Stumble Video NOW – CLICK HERE!

Stumble Video is a new service from StumbleUpon that automatically finds and plays videos that match your interests. It’s the same great technology that powers the StumbleUpon toolbar used by over 1.9 million people.

With Stumble Video you can:
- Channel surf the best videos on the web from our slick interface. Never leave the page as great videos are brought right to you
- Choose a particular channel to Stumble within, Stumble a particular user’s favorite videos, or Seach for great videos
- Easily share what you find with your friends
- View videos in our new full-screen mode
- Save your favorites and access them from any computer

I absolutely love StumbleUpon and the new Stumble Video is hot. If you are a blogger and you’re looking for innovative things to write about, Stumble Video is a great source…as is StumbleUpon in general.

Tell me what you think of the service since they asked me to test it for them.

eComXpo is a a really cool online tradeshow for internet marketers. Unlike other conferences where you have to pay thousands of dollars to attend, eComXpo is totally virtual and completely FREE. The conference runs from March 20 -22nd, 2007 (next Monday through Wednesday). Sign-up for FREE – CLICK HERE!

You may be thinking – yeah right – if it’s truly FREE eComXpo can’t be anything like those other conferences (think Affiliate Summit, Search-Engine Strategies, Ad-tech, etc.)? Well, I can tell you from experience that eComXpo is a MUST ATTEND for anyone looking to learn more about search, affiliate, and interactive marketing…and is as good, if not better than the other conferences in terms of educational content.

This will be my third eComXpo – last year I moderated a panel on Affiliate Marketing with some pretty heavy hitting affiliate marketing experts, including Todd Crawford (VP at Digital River), Chris Henger (VP at Performics), and Linda Woods (Founder of Partnercentric).

This year, I have compiled and will moderate the most impressive panel ever to be created on the topic of Social Media.

Speakers include Todd Malicoat (Founder, Stuntdubl.com), Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker (Founder, Shoemoney.com), and Neil Patel (CTO, Pronet Advertising).

Here are the specifics.

PANEL TITLE: “Buzz Marketing Secrets: Build Your Business using Social Media”
DATE & TIME: 4:15pm, Wednesday, March 22, 2007
LOCATION: Online – Sign-up at eComXpo.com
TICKET PRICE: Free
HOTEL & LODGING: Included in Ticket Price!

OK – so you’ve decided to attend. Excellent! Now we need your help. Since we are doing a LIVE Q & A at the end of the panel Jeremy, Todd, Neil and I would like you to submit questions ahead of time. Simply do so by commenting on this blog. Thanks!

Here’s a summary of the panel so you have a frame of reference to ask questions:

Abstract:
Learn how to build buzz and market your business on social media websites like MySpace, YouTube, and Digg.com. Find out why social media has been referred to as the “New SEO” and how you can use it to grow your business, build stronger brand awareness, and generate sales through word of mouth marketing and buzz.

Any questions – need clarification? Just post your thoughts.

Congratulations to Wendi Piersall of eMoms for being selected winner of a FREE Ticket (Valued at $4,995) to Elite Retreat – San Francisco.

I personally look forward to working with Wendy in San Fran to help her take eMoms to the next level.

From the rest of the Elite Retreat gang, including Jeremy Schoemaker, Lee Dodd, Aaron Wall, Neil Patel, and Darren Rowse, CONGRATULATIONS WENDY!!!

Jeremy Schoemaker gave me a call yesterday about two hours before the first show of his second season on WebmasterRadio.fm to invite me on as his guest. We talked about a range of issues, including upcoming internet marketing conferences (Elite Retreat, SEODays, SEO Class, ecomXpo, SES – NY), ringtone controversies, BumpZee, affiliate search arbitrage focused on TV Shows (i.e. American Idol) and seasonality / holidays (i.e. tax season, Easter) and much more.

In my opinion the show was very solid and in his second season Jeremy is a seasoned radio show host.

To listen to last night’s LIVE show CLICK HERE.

Today Viacom, (showing some major cojones) brought a $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube regarding the ongoing copyright infringement debate. Viacom actually calls into question YouTube’s business model:

YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a
lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’
creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent
Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and
selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and
is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy
has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on
its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself
while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring
YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.

I think Viacom has a valid point and here is why:

1. Viacom is a strong brand name, they have every right to protect their images and copyrighted property from illegal distribution
2. Having no control over how your material is distributed can lead to your characters and images being used in situations that are detrimental to the brands they worked so hard to build
3. Google/YouTube has made little to no effort to respect the property of Viacom, basically all they have put up is a little text message saying “If this video is not your property, please don’t post it”
4. Having the users of YouTube police the content they are putting up is a poor answer to “Please take down our copyrighted material”
5. Google has been able to get away with doing stuff like this for far too long and its nice to someone fighting back

Now Viacom is no small company and I am certain that they have been in similar situations, perhaps not to this magnitude though. I think that even though I believe they are in the right, they have a huge chance of failure.

1. Google must have a built in loophole somewhere whether it is that the users police the content or something else, you don’t get to be such a big company by following the rules ALL the time
2. Viacom is going after the biggest online company ever, Google has “endless” resources and could last much longer in a monetary legal battle
3. Knowing the online space as well as Google and having as much money as they do will allow them to immediately outbid and outspend Viacom on any further ventures they want to take. (e.g. say Google complies and and takes down all Viacom property, Viacom then proceeds to try and buy funnysouthparkvideos.com or something like that, Google could just continuously outbuy them and sabotage them in every manor, obviously not a good business model but easily doable, you know just peacefully readjust their acquisition strategy)
4. I think Viacom will see a sharp drop in interest of their products unless they can quickly build a community around their properties on another site (sanctioned by them obviously)
5. YouTube users will see this as an attack on them and the website they hold near and dear to their hearts resulting in them seeing Viacom as the enemy and possibly causing weening interest in all of Viacom’s online media

I respect Viacom’s decision to go after YouTube and Google, I just think that the web and its progression of how online property is to be handled is not as far along as the real world, resulting in some interesting verdicts. But only time will tell us what is actually going to happen, should be interesting.

A few months ago Michael Jones (Pepperjam’s COO) and Brock Siegel (Pepperjam’s VP of Bus Dev) thought it would be a cool idea for Pepperjam to consider offering everyone on our staff FREE gym memberships. Our entire executive team became really supportive of the concept so we decided to move forward full steam ahead.

Well…..after several negotiations with local gyms we announced today a partnership with the Wilkes-Barre YMCA to offer all Pepperjam employees FREE membership – the Wilkes-Barre YMCA is a state of the art facility offering such services as weight training, cycling, lap and recreational swimming, water & step aerobics, Pilates, yoga, Tai Chi, kick boxing, basketball, racquetball, squash and much more.

Pepperjam is proud to be one of the Nation’s hottest technology companies. We are also very proud of our hard working staff and are committed to providing benefits and incentives that separates Pepperjam from our followers.

Here is a YouTube Vid of the “FREE Gym Membership for Pepperjammers” announcement:

Alright everyone…I have a VERY exciting announcement to make regarding the fast approaching Elite Retreat conference that myself, Jeremy (Shoemoney) Schoemaker, Lee Dodd, Darren Rowse, Aaron Wall, and Neil Patel are putting on! We have all decided to hold a fun contest where we are giving away 1 free ticket (value of $4,950) to the conference.

To enter for a chance to win free registration to the Elite Retreat, you need to send in an email to ( contest(at)eliteretreat(dot)info ) with your contact information (name, email address, phone number, and mailing address) AND your answer to the following question:

“Why should a legitimate business need to worry about branding?”

If you choose to participate and send in your email, you MUST be ready and willing to book your airfare and hotel reservations right away as the conference is less than 1 week away!

Again, send the email in to: contest(at)eliteretreat(dot)info

Contest Deadline: Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 @ 1:00pm EST

I look forward to reading your replies and you may be our lucky winner!