Karma can be a real bitch. If you treat people like shit, it can come back to you 10 fold. You should always treat other people how you want to be treated. So, be nice to your fellow human beings, and good things will come to you!
On a side note, I noticed something funny today happened to Snaps. Tough break pal on your recent troubles with the big G:
This should be a reminder to everyone that if you are going to buy links, don’t be stupid about it!
DISCLAIMER: The following blog post is intended as a joke only. Regardless of what is said in this post Brandon really is a hard worker, is not gay, and is a close friend of mine.
The highly anticipated re-launch of BrandonBerndt.com is finally here! After over a year of no updates and many emails from fans yearning for the latest “Brandon Gossip”, Brandon has finally done it and re-launched his Blog.
One of the reasons for the new site Berndt told one of our reporters is, “people google my name a lot”. He is considered somewhat of a celebrity amongst his fellow Poker Affiliate Managers.
The new blog gives you a real insight into what Brandon does all day as a Poker Room Manager / Affiliate Program Director (at least when he is not gambling online during company time, out for a day on the golf course, or questioning his own sexuality). But after all, its not all glamour and fun. There is some hard work* (seen here on his BlackBerry during a dinner in London) involved and the hours are long.
Brandon is by far one of my favorite affiliate managers to work with, and I am glad that I have had the opportunity to meet and work with him on various projects. If you aren’t already working with him, I suggest you check out the Chan Poker affiliate program.
The most recent post is an article about how to run an affiliate progam (something many affiliate programs NEED to read….hint, hint, spin32).
As mentioned before, many people have been waiting for this relaunch. John Goldie of FiveSomething.com told us, “I can’t really breathe, Brandon’s blog is one of the best things I’ve ever seen. He is like the affiliate manager equivilant of a Japanese Ninja Master. Congrats.”
I look forward to the future updates on Brandon’s new blog and if you haven’t done so already I suggest you bookmark this one. Nice job Brandon!
* Thought it looks like he might be working, we really cannot confirm that he is actually doing anything. For all we know he is just playing Brick Breaker.
Dear Spin32Poker/Spin32Live/Spin32Casino/Spin32.com/Whatever the hell you call yourself,
Stop spamming me. This morning I replied to your email asking to be removed from your mailing list. In case you can’t remember what email I am talking about, it started off:
“Dear %Name%
I visited your website %Website% and wondered…”
And, came from a campbell@spin32.com. Sure enough, about 10 minutes later I received another email from you guys with my information in it (which you obviously bought or stole from another site as I have never given you my email address.
You obviously didn’t learn anything when it was first brought up in this thread. I have heard all your crap about how you are a small site and can’t afford to hire multiple people to send emails all day, but why the hell would I want to work with you if you can’t even take 2 seconds to look at my site and send a personal email (not just some cookie cutter crap).
One of the funniest things is that you are even sending these out to people that own <establishedpokersite>bonus.com. Are you guy’s that retarded? Why would someone advertise spin32 on something like pokerstarsbonus.com?
If you really want to build relationships with affiliates do it on a personal level, but its already too late for you guys. Hopefully some other sites out there will read this and learn why SPAMMING DOESNT WORK!
Honestly, do yourselves a favor and just shut down your affiliate department right now. Nobody is gonna want to work with a bunch of spammers that use shady marketing tactics!
And, now that I have gotten that off my chest, lets end this on a positive note…
Just got back from a nice week long vacation in Jamaica. It was lots of fun, and I really needed the break. I got to see Bob Marley’s birthplace, and climbed Mt. Zion, went to Dunn’s River Falls (see below) and just hung out on the beach eating lots of Jerk Chicken and other good food. Here are a couple pics:
Dunns River Falls
Our Resort at Night
Anyway, back to work now 🙂
I was talking with beanie today about possibly doing some link exchanges with his awsome poker blog. Beanie being the nice guy that he is, said I don’t even really need to give him any links as I could just post my own stories on his site myself when I create an account. In my head alarm bells rang off: FREE LINKS!
So, I registered an account, added an article from my site and it was up instantaneously on the homepage. If this isn’t a great way to get free links, I don’t know what is. The site kinda works like a poker digg, and anyone can submit stories which can be voted on by the users of the site. So, if you just wrote an excellent peice of content and want to get it out there fast, why not submit it on his site. This can be a great way to help your SEO efforts as it will get your story on one of the best poker blogs on the Internet and a PR3 site right away.
But PLEASE! If you are going to use this service, don’t abuse it. Try to submit only your best stuff, and not your latest review of xxxx poker site. I am sure Beanie would also appreciate it if you gave him some link love back also 😀
Thanks Beanie!
I decided to write about the topic of respect because there are far too many children getting into business that seem to lack basic people skills entirely. Let me tell you a story of what happened last night with an affiliate that I thought I got along with pretty well (for the sake of identities lets just call him SNAPS – because snapping in a situation is completely retarded, especially if you are trying to get something resolved)…
So its late, I am about to go to bed, when suddenly this message pops up:
21/05/2008 2:51:08 AM SNAPS : you are a total douche
21/05/2008 2:51:49 AM Graham : ?
21/05/2008 2:51:58 AM SNAPS : think before you talk
21/05/2008 2:52:32 AM Graham : whats the matter?
21/05/2008 2:53:07 AM SNAPS : you’re an absolute twat
21/05/2008 2:53:15 AM SNAPS : why don’t you think before you post bullshit on PAP
21/05/2008 2:53:18 AM SNAPS : and mention other peoples domains
21/05/2008 2:53:21 AM SNAPS : that can land them into trouble
21/05/2008 2:53:22 AM SNAPS : idiot
21/05/2008 2:53:34 AM Graham : what domains?
21/05/2008 2:53:50 AM SNAPS : bye graham
At this point I honestly had no idea what SNAPS was talking about, but figured it had to do with something that I posted in a thread that I had been heavily involved with on PAP (and had actually defended in the thread without mentioning names). In the thread I had randomly listed off a bunch of domains as examples (ie. xsitebonuscode.com, xsitereferralcode.com) not really pointing fingers at the owners of those sites, just making things up off the top of my head. It was then that I realized that one of the domains I had used as an example redirected to SNAPS’ site.
Sure, I screwed up, but it was completely unintentional. But, after being called an idiot, douche and twat by this individual I also wasn’t too eager to go back and fix the post either. All this person had to say was “hey man, that site you mentioned in the post is mine, can you please remove it”, and it would have been gone immediately. Instead, this person thinks that it will be more effective to talk to me in a condescending and disrespectful tone to get the problem resolved…. WRONG! I find it funny that people can have such big mouths when hiding behind their computer, but I guarantee they would not say these things face to face. Anything I post online I would gladly back up in person.
Hopefully you have learned something from this experience that it is better to treat your fellow affiliates with respect than treating them like a dog. Don’t be so quick to overreact as a lot of the time people may not know what they are doing that is so wrong. People will be much more willing to accommodate you when talk to them like normal human beings rather than a piece of shit!
Whether you believe it or not, the affiliates role is very similar to that of a salesperson but looking at many affiliate sites you wouldn’t think so. Many new affiliates focus so much on the content, that they forget to actually promote the product at hand (whether it be a poker room, poker software, books, or whatever).
When you look at your site or any article on it, you should be working to close a deal in every peice of content. Whether it simply be a banner on the side, or a link to a poker site in an article. Look at your site from a visitor’s point of view and if you don’t see any reason to sign up under one of your offers, then you probably aren’t doing a good job.
Since I have really been lacking on tips for poker affiliates, let me end this post with a great link to some really good videos. I suggest you watch them all, but if you don’t want to use up 5 hours, watch the one on conversions. Its called the stompernet scrutinizer and there is a link in the bottom right corner to pull up the playlist of videos.
Good luck!
So, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I recently went to Monte Carlo for 10 days. The main reason for the trip was to watch my brother play in the EPT Grand Final, but also just to get a little bit of a break and clear my head. Ever since quitting my job I have felt a little overwhelmed and hard to focus, but I think I am finally getting over that. On the plane I listened to a great audiobook called Getting Things Done, and I think that over the next few months I will try and implement a lot of the things it teaches to get myself more organized.
Back to the vacation…. We landed in Nice for a few days before heading to Monaco. The weather was pretty shitty, but hey, I was in Europe (I love it over there). We hit a few pubs there and pretty much just did the tourist thing (walked all around the city). Here are a couple pics from Nice:
After a few days there, we were on our way to Monte Carlo AKA Ballerville. This place was insane! Every other car was practically a Bentley or a Ferrari. I have never seen so many of them in one week in my life!  Here are some pics of the constant car show:
But really, the cars above were nothing. The one that really caught my attention was this one, the Bugatti Veyron:
At over 1.12 Million Euros, in the words of Jeremy Enke, that is “Certified Baller“.
Monte Carlo is a beautiful city, but really expensive so if you go, bring lots of cash. With some restaurants charging as much as $8 for a can of coke, you can go broke pretty quick. Here are some pics of the ports:
The big boat dead center is insane! 17th largest yacht in the world.
As you can probably guess… I love yachts and nice cars. I did a ton of walking in Monte Carlo, and even took one day to go to Italy (small town called Ventimiglia) to eat some pasta and pizza. The pasta I had in Italy was awful, but the pizza was pretty decent. The best part was the Cappucino’s…soo good.
So as I mentioned before the reason I was there partially was to watch my brother play in the EPT. Unfortunately he went busto at the end of day 1. He got crippled with KK twice, once into AA and another time with 4 callers. He managed to make a huge laydown against the AA, but it left him pretty short.
It was cool to meet many of the players that I write about all the time face-to-face. I had many elevator rides with people like Daniel Negreanu, Freddy Deeb, and Barry Greenstein. I also got to play Gavin Griffin heads-up in the Pokerstars Lounge for charity, which was lots of fun.
While there, I also went to try and find one of the members of one of my forums, Glen Chorny. If you followed the event, you’d know that Glen went on to win the whole tournament, which was awsome because I had been cheering for him for several days. His parents took us all out after to the club at the hotel where we polished off a magnum of Cristal, magnum of Dom, along with 2 regular size bottles of Cristal. Here is the group of us after the tourney:
I ended up getting back to the room around 6am, and almost slept through my flight back. Fortunately I had set my alarm two days prior and I heard it in time to get up. All in all, it was a fun trip, now back to work so I can get my own Bugatti!
Sorry for the delay in my Monte Carlo trip report… I am planning to write it in the next few days. For now, I thought that I would share this with the readers of this blog.
Every time I go to get my haircut I see this poster hanging above my head when I am getting my hair washed. I think this is a great poster and something everyone can take something from.
21 Suggestions for SUCCESS – By H Jackson Brown Jr.
1. Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your happiness or misery.
2. Work at something you enjoy and that’s worthy of your time and talent.
3. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.
4. Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know.
5. Be forgiving of yourself and others.
6. Be generous.
7. Have a grateful heart.
8. Persistence, persistence, persistence.
9. Discipline yourself to save money on even the most modest salary.
10. Treat everyone you meet like you want to be treated.
11. Commit yourself to constant improvement.
12. Commit yourself to quality.
13. Understand that happiness is not based on possessions, power or prestige, but on relationships with people you love and respect.
14. Be loyal.
15. Be honest.
16. Be a self-starter.
17. Be decisive even if it means you’ll sometimes be wrong.
18. Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for every area of your life.
19. Be bold and courageous. When you look back on your life, you’ll regret the things you didn’t do more than the ones you did.
20. Take good care of those you love.
21. Don’t do anything that wouldn’t make your Mom proud.
Source:Â http://www.21suggestions.com
Also, shout out to my homie John Goldie… he started a great new blog about business, check it out!
Ever heard of Plentyoffish.com? Its a free dating site. It’s ugly as hell, but would you believe how much the guy that owns it makes? Check out this video of Plenty of Fish founder Markus Frind:
Tomorrow I will be heading to Monte Carlo for 10 days to watch my brother play in the EPT Grand Final and I can’t wait! I have always wanted to go to Monte Carlo and this is the perfect opportunity to do so. We will be staying in Nice for 2 days then heading onward to Monte Carlo on Friday.
I think this vacation is what I need right now, as I feel my head is very cluttered since leaving my job and I just need some time to relax and start thinking creatively again.
I find that I come up with the best ideas when I am on vacation and I am sure that seeing all the ballers of Monte Carlo will help provide some good motivation.
I’ll try and take lots of pics and post them when I get back. So if you are looking for me online over the next week or so… that is where I will be 🙂
