*adhd sufferers scroll straight to the bottom.

These past 3 weeks have been pretty crazy for me, so I thought creating a list of happenings would be suitable.

• I flew to San Fran.

• Stayed at the 202 mansion with the industry saints Wes Mahler, Alex Tshering, Nana Gilbert Baffoe, The Waldek, and Man Ma. Worked at top secret “Cleervoyance” offices for three days, which also happens to be the HQ of the “Puzzle Queen.” (Sorry for being so vague, they are a new company that want to remain low profile for now.)

• Tracked down the mysterious Mc Rib at a local Mc Donalds and had lunch with Justin Barr (entrepreneur, sports analyst, misc horder and food fanatic.)

• Bought some memory for my laptop from a dodgy looking repair store (possibly the reason for the death of my laptop.)

• Had lunch with Phoenix Morgan (he nearly lost his wallet but thanks to his lightening pace he managed to run back and pick it up off the street before any local opportunists could.)

• Went and visited Feldo. Got Sataysfied on the street. Delicious.

• 

  Photo taken on the Castro of typical Halloween party people.

  Headed out to a house party for Halloween with Wes and Maria and then somehow got dropped off at “The Castro” (interesting place to say the least.)

• Watched the baseball World Series final game at a local pub. Did not have a clue what was going on, but the dirty beards and old school music were great.

• Flew over to NYC with Silver Stoltsen (my roommate/confidant for the week).

• Went to a very classy lowkey Mundo Media (great folk) event. Met up with Alex Tsatkin a.k.a The Angry Russian, and my Italian cousin Giancarlo Maniaci (the man that makes things happen). Also bumped into Jackey Chen and Kamal Bidie Shokar (this is the kind of person I have my A.D.H.D summaries for), as well as the Consumer Track posse.

• We then went to a Mazzle Media event which had an awesome rock violinist playing.

• Went to Ad Tech, scoured the floors for the day. Was a bit disappointed with the lack of new traffic source opportunities. Mainly connected with companies I had already been working with. OpenX stole the show hosting a table tennis tournament on the actual Ad Tech floor.  Luckily my arch nemesis didn’t show his face at the conference.

• That night we were invited to a “special” steak dinner hosted by the oh-so-charming birthday girl Kim Kaplan and Benyonce Louie from Plenty Of Fish.  Other attendees were Casey Jenks, Matt Wasserman, Stanley Shilov, Silver Stoltson, Alex Tsatkin, Ken Chen, and Thatcher Michelsen. A very civilized bunch. Great food and conversation to top it off!

• Secrets traded, stomachs full, we headed over to an Azoogle event. Then we went to an a BDR Engage event at the “Greenhouse” (not my house, just a local club). I finally got to meet the elusive Ryan Thompson (I’ve never seen a happier man) and his team from Bootcamp Media, as well as Brandon Clark, (flapjack lover and dance-floor renegade) from CPV Lab.

• Another day at Ad-Tech sweeping the floors for new contacts. Bumped into Eric Ngo, Ad Hustler, and Mr Ian Fernando.
• 

  Katy Perry, Rihanna and Mr Green have all been spotted at The Griffin

  Then went to a lovely small shindig hosted by Ryan Thompson (still in an extremely happy state). Hung out with Eleah Pedortillo (number 2 Ogilvy fan) from AdSimilis. Headed over to “The Griffin” for Gene Mikhov’s birthday. Wow that was an eye opener. Reminded me of something from a Bond movie (really, really nice, expensive club, with a hint of Russians). Lost my wallet too.

• Last day in New York, Silver walked round town for the day. That night we managed to get tickets to a NY Nicks NBA game. Good seats too! Sat next to Al Houston, opposite Thierry Henry, and within stalking distance of Chris Rock.

• 

  Disneyland turkey leg lovers.

  Next morning I flew over to L.A, was picked up by the ever so shifty Nick Tumbocon (he sports a thick wirey mustache that overhangs his top lip). We then headed to Disneyland and meet up with the crew Miss Danielle, Jasper Pangilinan (p90x success story), Azineth Briones, and Mr Roland Navarro. Stunner of a day! Topped off by eating whole turkey legs and watching a dance battle with some guy doing the Melbourne shuffle.

• Back to NZland!

• This past week or so, I’ve been chatting to local startups as well as turning up to some business events. Why? Well this next year I’m interested in doing some angel investing…to keep things interesting!

Wow. I’m exhausted after writing all ofthis. So that’s roughly what I’ve been doing. I’m finally get back into the swing of things. If I haven’t responded to your email please forgive me!

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As for my special A.D.H.D readers:

I hung out in San Francisco for a bit. Flew to Ad Tech conference in NYC.  Had more success leveraging existing relationships than making new ones. Lost my wallet. Went to Disneyland. Came back home to write some great new blog posts for you lot.

Related posts:

1. Affiliate Marketing – Keep Productive, Not Busy. For those of you who haven’t read “Four Hour Work Week”, do it. You won’t regret it. For those of you who have, you know...

Frank Kern wrote a very interesting article the other day titled, “You: The Best Guru EVER“. It speaks a lot of truths about taking action. He mentions:

All a Guru can give you is education.

But the fact remains that’s only 25% of what you need.

You still need throw in 25% effort, 25% determination, and 25% sticktoitiveness.

…And that’s the 75% that YOU and ONLY YOU can provide!

At the end of the article he puts up a challenge to his readers and followers “Don’t buy any advice this month”.  Interesting, huh? Written by Frank, one of the biggest Gurus out there. It made me question,why on earth he would say something like that?

• Was he just being a great honest guy? Saying, “Hey, this is how you actually do it”.
• Did he feel this article would be useful to increase his brand’s trust, so he could sell more of his guru products?
• Or did he write it to respond to complaints made by his guru product customers?

With all that said, it was quite a thought provoking article to say the least. Great stuff!

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P.S. Why does every guru story start with a friend telling them something?

P.P.S. I’m not guru bashing here. I don’t have anything against Frank Kern. I think he is one smart, smart, marketer. He certainly knows how to pull people’s strings. Everyone seems to have great things to say about him.

Related posts:

1. You’re The WORST Affiliate Marketer Ever! If you took that title to heart, you are not built for this industry. I’ll explain why later. One thing that really interests me about...

For those of you who don’t know, Jonathan Volk and I have a history that goes waaaaay back. I’m not going to go into any details, but let’s just say, we would never trade Farmville secrets or poke each other on Facebook.

As you can see, the featured space on Affbuzz has been split in two. Frankly, I’m not impressed. I’m disgusted. It is extremely likely that Volk and his crew tampered with the Affbuzz algorithm, mixed in with black hat SE0s, and ninja optimization in order to get in the featured spot.

We all know the Affbuzz algorithm is more complicated than Google and HTML  combined. So how did Volk manipulate it? Well one of my investigators sent me something very interesting…

Feast your eyes on this photo that was captured by a hidden security camera at the inaugural Affbuzz.com meet-up in San Francisco:

Left to right of photo: Affbuzz owner, Jacob (Volk crew), Mr Volk, Mrs Volk.

As you can see, Volk is using an iRead. For those of you who aren’t up-to-date with technology these days, it’s basically a knowledge extracting tool hidden in the shape of a iPhone. You just point it at someone’s brain and it downloads their knowledge. Look where Volk is pointing his iRead…it’s not at JB the owner of Affbuzz.com is it now???

Volk is no stranger to the iRead. The biggest brain of them all (Google) tells me Volk has optimized 272,000 pages talking about “iRead”. Seems like he’s been using it an awful lot lately.

Yes Volk, “Something Fishy is Goin’ On”.

Anyways not to worry. I’m actually in the middle of developing anti-iRead head gear to protect knowledge extraction from people like Volk. They will come with adjustable straps and a choice of two colors.

You have been officially busted Volk! Your reign of terror is over. I’m sure Affbuzz will do the right thing and sandbox you for life.

For too long affiliates have been strung along by this cover up.

Most of you have heard of AffBuzz.com, the so called “Affiliate Marketing News Aggregator”. This website is run by the ever so cunning Justin “JayB” Barr.

Now what most of you don’t know is that the primary reason that Affbuzz.com exists is not as an “Affiliate Marketing News Aggregator” but as an aggregator of the highest quality ad copies you will find on the Internet. You will probably be having a WTF moment around now but have a little think.

Affbuzz is basically a page of attention grabbing titles. Attention grabbing titles (a.k.a ad copies) are what make or break affiliate campaigns.

Lets look at the facts.

The Contributors (ad copy submitters):

Shoemoney.com

Amish-Shah.com

NickyCakes.com

JonathanVolk.com

BrandonAdcock.com

The list goes on…also including Dennis Yu.

The Testers (ad copy viewers):

Now these guys are the hardest group of people to sell to on the Internet. They know every trick in the book. They can spot a sell from a mile away. To top this they are also extremely banner blind.

The testers are you guys, affiliate marketers.

Basically you guys tell Affbuzz which ad copies are good or bad by either clicking the links or not.

How it all comes together:

Some say* Affbuzz has a pattern recognition script that processes through each day’s most popular ad copies. This script then spits out high quality ad copies which can be applied to any marketing campaigns.

Others say that Affbuzz is just an affiliate marketing news aggregator.

You decide.

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But seriously next time you are thinking of creating ad copies take a look at Affbuzz for ideas. The people who post there have full-time jobs dealing with CTRs. In the last couple of months, posts displaying figures in their titles have performed best. e.g “Landing Pages with 74% Click Thru-Rates. Believe it.” or “How We Lost $1026.47 On Google Yesterday“. Next time that you launch a campaign, if you haven’t already, try creating a few ad copies with figures in their titles. CTRs will definitely improve. Also look out for the use of symbols (e.g “$”, “%”, “-”) in strategic places. They catch your eye more than you may think.

*No one actually says that… well possibly Dennis Yu.