Life Update
Jul 9th
It’s been a while since I posted here so I figured I would give a bit of an update on what’s going on in my life.
About a month ago I sold off a large majority of my poker websites. I kept a handful to keep me with a bit of an income stream, but for the most part I am pretty much out of the poker game. The main reason I did this is because I was getting fed up with the constant stories of affiliate programs changing their terms and screwing over their affiliates plus I really wanted to try and start expanding into other industries.
At the time I was selling everything I was working on a project to build a casino site about the best casinos online. Since I already started with that project I figure I will continue building the site (which is almost done) then start focusing more on my plans to do things in other industries. I am really happy with this site so far, and think the design is incredible (thanks Will!).
Recently I made it out to Prague for the iGaming Super Show which was a lot of fun. There I caught up with some old friends and got to meet some people that I had spoken to many times online but never met such as Roger (congrats on finally making it out to an event 
). The highlight of the trip was definitely the CalvinAyre.com party which consisted of an old sewage plant that was still active, many midgets, beautiful women, all sorts of Mad Max characters, overhead jousting, a drum band, unlimited booze, pyrotechnics and much more! Unfortunately I didn’t bring my camera, but you can see a bunch of the pictures from that party here.
While over there I also managed to get down to Vienna for a couple of days, which was a very beautiful city (I added a pic of Belvedere Palace which is now a Museum to this post).
Once I finish up with the casino site my next plan is to build a kind of Men’s Online Magazine which will be sort of a cross between Askmen.com and Forbes.com. I really don’t know how it will do but it is more something I want to do for fun and think that it could have great potential. Also I am kinda new to other types of online marketing so it will be a bit of a learning experience.
Anyway, that is all for now, and I will try and get some more interesting posts up soon.
Real Estate Negotiations vs. Website Purchase Negotiations
May 6th
After spending the last 2 or so years trying to buy a condo which I finally found a couple months ago I learned a lot about the negotiation process (after many failed offers). Here are a couple things that I think could be used to negotiating the purchase of a website or domain (if you aren’t already using them).
Time Sensitive Offers (BUYING) – One of the things that I picked up that I thought could be applied to the affiliate industry is the use of time sensitive offers. Basically what I mean by this is putting in an offer, but telling the person your offer expires in X # of hours. This way you put the pressure back on the seller to either accept your offer (if it is the highest at the time there is a good possibility this will happen) and risk losing it, or holding out for a better one. Typically if you come in around the amount they are looking to get, but a bit lower usually you will get the site you want and save some money doing it. I find that far too many people on PAL and other forums have the worst approaches to both buying and selling their sites. People post offers in a thread (which is now visible to any other potential buyers) and give the seller an endless amount of time to make a decision. For me personally if I am going to commit to a purchase I want to know if I have it almost immediately, which is why I like using this approach.
Offer Conditions (BUYING) – Another thing that could work with purchasing websites (like they do in Real Estate) is putting restrictions or conditions on your offer. Almost every real estate deal will have some kind of condition on the offer, so why not do the same with virtual real estate (or domains). This way you can come in with a good offer and ask the seller to take the site off the market if he accepts, but also give yourself some time to do some due diligence on the property you are buying to make sure there is nothing funny about it.
Holding Back Offers (SELLING) – One common tactic used in the real estate market is to hold back offers. Basically this means you set a sell date, and allow everyone to present their best offer anonymously. This can create bidding wars back and forth as the seller will then usually try to work with the top 2 offers on price. Sure, its annoying as hell from a buyers standpoint and it might discourage some, but this could also lead you to making a lot more on the sale of your property than you had planned.
Anyway, I am sure there are some other things and I didn’t really plan to write this post so most of this is off the top of my head.
Life Update… Well I have spent the last month or so getting settled into the new condo. It has been a ton of work, but its pretty close to done now. Just need a couple more small things. Other than that I have been trying to get some other projects going that I have been working on for a long time. One is a men’s magazine kind of site that is a cross between Forbes and AskMen.com. Another one is a Casino Site that I will post more about once it is complete. Then I have a few more sites that I will be developing further down the road which include a real estate site, a local furniture store site and a site about local restaurants. I am really just trying to dabble in a bunch of different industries to see what works and what doesn’t. I also hired a writer that is helping me get many of these sites ready.
Here are a couple of pics of the condo that I think I promised in the last post:
The View:
My Workcenter / Dining Room
Guest Bathroom:
View of most of the place (there is a new sofa now and the dining table is now white glass):
Kitchen:
Affiliate Tip: I don’t think I have ever really posted many good tips on how to make money for a while so, here is an easy one. Scour around for domains that have some good keywords in them (I know all the really good ones are gone, but if you look for ones with lower search volumes or find dropped ones its possible – preferably generic with things like “online” “poker” “review” “code” “bonus”, etc. in them). If you have to spend $50-$100 to get a pretty decent domain. Then get someone to build you a decent template that you can reuse for several sites (this will be the most expensive part but it is a one time cost and the more you spend the more you will get in return). You should be able to get something decent for around $400. Write around 25 pages of good content (the more the better) and add it to the site. You should instantly be able to flip that site for around $2000 or more depending how much content is there on your $500 investment.
Bought a Condo!
Mar 1st
After looking for the past 2 years (pretty much) for a place to live I finally found a pretty nice condo that will do the job. It is right downtown in Toronto and for a downtown condo has a decent amount of space. The building it is in is pretty sick and has all sorts of cool ammenities including a pool, bbq area, gym, rock climbing wall, spin class / yoga studio, movie theather, business center and many more! I move in in just 3 weeks so will probably be scrambling to get a lot of things ready for the move.
Work has been getting pretty busy lately too. I am trying to develop a lot of the domains I have just sitting around with nothing on them. The biggest one that I am building is a casino site, which I will post more about when its closer to completion (just in case any of you readers have similar domains that you are building on )
Other than that, not a lot else going on in my life. Will try and write some better posts on this blog soon.
Robot Porn!!!!
Jan 25th
After years of linking to Brandon Berndt’s blog on my here I finally asked him why he never gave me a reciprocal link. I mean I always send him nice messages to see how his day is going and thought we were pretty good friends, but apparently my site is not link worthy on his blog. When I inquired about getting a link Brandon said he would only link to my site if there was robot porn on it. Here is the link he gave me:
I didn’t really get it, but apparently he has an obsession with Robot Porn and who am I to judge. So in exchange for the link, here is your Robot Porn Mr. Berndt:
And now for the video….
New Year / New Design
Jan 4th
First off HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone that reads my blog! To start the year off right, I figured I would give this site a new look and opted on using the free Mystique Theme. It has a whole bunch of cool widgets, and best of all, IT IS FREE!
Hopefully everyone has recovered from the New Year celebrations and is back working now. I had a nice little break, though feel like I am getting a bit sick now (obv from all the partying over the holidays).
I read one of the weirdest stories today about how iPoker is banning winning players. As an affiliate I think this is absolutely retarded of them and makes me less eager to work with iPoker Rooms. Basically they are coming out and saying we only like when players lose. I don’t know about other affiliates but I have always wanted to attract and help poker players get good and win more money, because at the end of the day it means more money in all of our pockets. Them sending out this message just makes online poker in general look bad. Hopefully the sites affected can get this straightened out and band together to create a new network.
I don’t really have much else to say other than Happy New Year just want to make sure the new theme is working properly.
Here is a cool video of Travis Pastrana making a car fly on New Years Eve:
Also, if anyone wants to do any link exchanges just comment below, or send me a message on PAL (if Jeremy ever gets the server fixed ).
New Office / Happy Holidays!
Dec 22nd
Again, it has been a while since I wrote anything here so I thought I should probably post an update of what is going on in my life. So, here are some of the bigger things going on….
New Office - The past few weeks I have spent looking for a new office. Finally, last Thursday I managed to find one in one of the best areas of the city (Yorkville for those of you that know Toronto) that doesn’t cost a fortune. I am splitting the office with my good friend and fellow affiliate John making it even more affordable. The office isn’t anything super fancy (it looks like it was probably used as a closet at one point), but the location can’t be beat. I will try and get some pics up shortly (probably after we paint it and fix it up a bit more). The main reason I decided to get an office was working from home and Starbucks all the time was really starting to take a toll on my productivity. Even after being here for only 2 days, I feel like I am already accomplishing so much more.
Other Niches – Lately I have been really trying to focus on building some sites in other niches. I have had a music site with a friend for a while now that gets pretty good traffic, and registered a few other domains to try and build on (such as a site about Toronto Catering companies – still being built). Who knows what the future is for online poker, so I think diversification can never hurt.
Vacations – In January I will be heading down to Trinidad with a few friends for a week of fun in the sun. I have never been there before, but my friend is half-trini and goes there all the time so he knows where to go. After that I may head back to Argentina for a month, but still trying to decide.
Working Out – I am not sure if I mentioned it here before but for the past few months I have been taking Muay Thai classes. They are an amazing workout and I am probably getting in the best shape of my life. I think since I have started I have lost around 20lbs or so. Anyone thinking about trying it, I HIGHLY reccomend it, but be ready to work your ass off!
Other than that, there isn’t too much else going on that I can think of, so I will end this by wishing everyone a Happy Holiday!
Great Motivational Video
Nov 18th
So, today is my birthday and I have already decided that this year I am going to break a lot of old bad habits and start “doing” a lot more. Anyway, while trying to find something to watch before going to bed I decided that instead of watching some show that is entertaining, why not use this as a chance to possibly improve myself (even if its in the slightest). I started to look for motivational videos and came accross this blog. I chose to watch the “Nick Vujicic – Life Without Limbs” video and have to say it was very intresting and I think everyone can probably get something out of it. Nick was born without arms or legs. At 23 years old he now spends his time travelling the world doing motivational speaking, helping people and investing his money in the stock and real estate markets. Here is the video if you have about 30 minutes (thought it seems to kinda cut off in one part and at the end). Enjoy!:
3 Cool Tools For Tracking Visitors On Your Website
Oct 1st
Reading Justin Goff‘s latest facebook status update kind of inspired me to write this post…. So without further adieu, here are 3 cool tools for affiliates to use for cyber-stalking the visitors of your website that you might not have heard of:
ClickTale – Last week my friend John told me about this cool tool. Basically you add a couple of lines of code to your pages that allow you to see everything people do when they come to your site. By everything, I really mean EVERYTHING! ClickTale creates a video for you that tracks what every visitor is doing on your site including mouse movements, heatmaps and when they are scrolling down on the pages. This allows you to determine how effective your pages are at driving a sale and what aspects of the page are actually getting the visitors attention the most leading them to click (or not click) through on to your offers. There is a very small delay in the time it takes to create the videos (probably like 5 minutes) but it is pretty much live data. The free version allows you 100 free recordings per week or you can pay like $80 per month for the bronze package which allows multiple sites and something like 20,000 recordings.
HitTail – This is another live stats system that allows you to see how people are getting to your site from referral sites or search engines. It shows you exactly what they searched to get there or the specific page where they clicked a link to your site. I know most of this information is available in Google’s Analytics but its nice to have this info live so you can see what is causing traffic spikes on your site. It also helps you understand where the visitors are coming from (ie. Google.com/Google.es/Google.ca etc.) to reach your site.
Woopra – This is a cool tool that allows you to track the people on your website live. You can see what pages people are on, how they got to your site, and how they have moved about while on your site. One of my favourite features of Woopra is it even allows you to send a message to the people on your site if you want to “help them out” or ensure that all their questions have been answered to help drive the sale better. (Shout out to Cheryle for telling me about this one)
Of course Google Analytics is also one of the best, but I left it out of the list because I assumed everyone already was either using it, or knew about it. Hope this helps and if you have any other great tools you want to share post a comment below.
LOL – “I will sue if you don’t remove your site from Google”
Oct 1st
Came accross this funny pic. Best line “If you don’t agree to remove your site from google for this keyword we may go upto any extent and may sue you for this”:
People make me laugh sometimes!
Budapest Affiliate Conference Trip Report
Sep 16th
It had been a while since I had been able to make it out to a conference (Barcelona 2008 was the last one), so I decided to book my ticket to Budapest this year for BAC. It was nice that the conference was in a change of venue, which made it much easier to justify the long trip.
I arrived on the Wednesday morning after a long flight with a connection in Frankfurt. I was a little worried about going because I thought that I wasn’t going to know anyone there as many suckers people backed out last minute including the person I was supposed to split a room with (Nick). Regardless I still went and landed in Budapest around 11am. As I went to tell the cab where to go I realized that I was in a different hotel than I had thought. Meh, I went with it and headed to the new hotel (InterContinental). I arrived at the hotel to check in and looked down at my reservation to realize it was for a day later (crap I thought, but figured they would probably have a room). As I explained the situation that I might have gotten the date wrong to the guy at the front desk he replied, “I hope your reservation is for today because our hotel is full”. Fortunately, he managed to find me a room after hammering away at the keyboard and speaking gibberish Hungarian to his co-worker.
After a bit of a nap, I started trying to find out who was in town and managed to get in touch with Mark from PAL. We decided to meet up for a beer and hit a cool little bar a short trip from the hotel. We took one of the oldest subway systems in Europe to get there which was pretty cool. It was nice meeting Mark finally as we had chatted many times online about how we were both former IBM slaves employees. As I was heading out I also ran into Richie formerly with Carbon who I had spent some time hanging out with in Barcelona and we exchanged info to meet up later. Richie (like me) loves to party so I knew he would be a good person to meet up with later.
On the 2nd day I got in contact with Greame (DealerDan) who was out having a few drinks with some people and invited me to join them. I met up with them all at this cool square, grabbed a few beers then took off because he had dinner plans with Bodog. Fortunately he invited me along so I managed to get a free meal from the Bodog guys (Seb and Claire – who had been my affiliate manager in the past but I never actually met). After a nice dinner, which included several Mojitos, we all headed over to the opening party which was hosted by Expekt. As with most gambling conference parties it was a complete sausage party. I wasn’t really in the mood to party so I just took it pretty easy. I also ran into Carly and Jo (from Pokerstars) and Andreas (darko on the forums, but never really posts). I ran into a bunch of old friends too which was nice and we were out of there early (around 2am). We went to hit up the casino, but they wanted to charge us 10 Euros to go in and gamble. We laughed about that and decided to save our money and call it a night.
Day 3 was the 1st day of the conference. I met up with Richie in the lobby around 9am who was with Ven (formerly at Party Poker) and we hit up the buffet at the hotel. We had a great breakfast laughing the whole time and completely lost track of time (not getting out of there till like 11:15). We then hopped on the shuttle and headed over to the conference. We did the whole stroll around the room (me looking for the best swag – probably a bath robe from Chipleader). Richie knows pretty much everyone so he kept introducing me to a lot of people. I decided to hit up the SEO sessions (one on link building and the SEO roundtable) after which were all around pretty decent. Though I didn’t learn a whole lot, there were a couple of tidbits here and there that I learned which should help. After the conference we had a bit of time so Richie and I headed to a little bar close to the hotel. Richie ordered probably the gayest drink in Budapest which consisted of pink lemonade, a pink straw and a cherry, I opted for a beer. Mike from Poker Nordica also came and joined us for a drink then we all split up to our own dinners. I headed to the PAL dinner and met DealerDan in the lobby. There we waited like 20 minutes for Seb (yea, we gave him a hard time about it) then finally headed over to Spoon for an awesome meal. At dinner were several people I hadn’t seen in a while like Giorgio, Jason (GoodKarmaKid), Stephen and Russ from Commission Account as well as several new faces. After dinner Seb, Russ and I wanted to keep drinking so we decided to head over to the conference party sponsored by ChanceRoom. Again, it was a huge sausage fest so after we finished our few free drinks (they had this weird ticket system) and grabbed Alex Pratt and Andreas and headed over to a club that several people had been talking about called Bed Beach. Bed Beach was awesome! It was a huge outdoor club with a massive dance floor, tons of tables and a nice VIP section. We ran into many other people and spent the rest of the night mingling not getting back till like 6am (I think – didn’t wear a watch all trip).
At Bed Beach
On the 4th day (the last conference day) I slept in and missed Calvin Ayre’s speech which was one of the things I was looking forward to. Fortunately from what I heard from other people it was rather awkward and he didn’t really tell any interesting stories about entrepreneurship. When I finally did get to the conference I had my meeting with Lee Allen from Sticky Eyes (an SEO company). They were doing free SEO analysis sessions for conference attendees. This was really cool and Lee definitely knew his stuff. He definitely made me think differently about a couple of things and wasn’t like most SEO companies that just BS and pretends they know what they are talking about. Thanks Lee!! After that I walked around the conference a bit more and ran into Johan formerly at FTP / Gnuf. We had met a ways back in London at the Cap Awards dinner and he really helped me make the push to doing this full time. I also met his wife Anna who is with an interesting bingo company called Maria (a branch off from Unibet). Unlike most sites it sounds like they are actually building a brand than just a site (so if you promote Bingo check them out and tell her I sent you). I hung around at the conference a bit more and ran into Dee from 888 and chatted with them for a bit and finally left the conference. I ended up getting in touch with Graeme after who was having a dinner with some people close to the hotel so I decided to join them. There I tried Goulash for the first time, which I understand as being the “big dish” of Hungary and pretty tasty. After dinner we headed over to a party hosted by Bodog. We were greeted at the door with a glass of champagne and asked to take our picture with some of the “Bodog Girls”. Bodog REALLY knows how to throw a party. The venue was awesome, they had special tables where you could try the national drinks of Hungary (I liked the Unicum the best which is a bitters), tables with free cigars (good ones), constant Mojitos and Caipirinhas plus Hors D’oeurves and even a hand massage table. The party ended around midnight and I decided to head back to Bed Beach with Johan and Jennifer from Betting Jobs. There we ran into many other people and drank and chatted the night away.
Bodog Girls at the Bodog Party
On the Sunday I slept in again and missed the “tourist session” as I was pretty hung over not rolling out of bed until about 4pm. I ran into Richie again at the patio of the Sofitel (the main hotel – directly beside the InterContinental) and we had some drinks to nurse the hang over. Richie was with Chris from Poker Space and a few other people. Chris came up with a great idea to head to a shisha bar so Richie, Chris, Jen (Fortune Poker), and 2 Swedish affiliates (Mike and Peter) all headed over to this place recommended by the hotel. We ordered some massive platters of food and shared everything. The conversation started pretty tame but after Richie asked what everyone thought about Megan Fox things progressively turned into pure hilarity. We learned some new things like what “musting” is along with several other funny things. It was definitely one of the highlights of the trip.
On a side note, some of the companies throwing the “Official” parties could really learn a thing or two from Bodog. Having a club filled with guys staring at 1 or 2 girls dancing, then making them pay for drinks (especially affiliates) to be there says a lot about your brand. Bodog goes all out when they do a party and it says a lot about their brand. In the future I think the parties should be turned into more of a “pre-drink” where everyone goes and drinks for free then heads out to various nightclubs around the city. If you were at Bed Beach you will know that industry people pretty much owned their VIP areas.
After that the conference was officially over for the rest. I stuck around in Budapest for a bit the next day then headed to Prague for a couple days to do some sightseeing. I am actually writing this on the train back from Prague to Budapest where I have to catch my flight in the morning.
All in all it was one of the best conferences I have been to and was really nice meeting many new people along with seeing some old friends. Till next one!
Doyle Brunson and I