A Day at Affiliate Summit West 2011 #ASW11
Vinay Patankar · 12 Jan, 2011 · Travel
4:50pm – Woke up at the Wynn overlooking Las Vegas Blv. 4:55pm – Got out of bed to check my phone that kept beeping. Had message to go to lunch – 4.5 hours ago... Organise to meet a friend downstairs for food and to watch the BCS game. 5:45pm – Get downstairs and get in line for food. 5:50pm – Realise Shoemoney is launching his new product in 10 minutes, so run off to the announcement room for the only event/speech I will see all ASW. 6-7pm – Watch product launch of Link Control and get a free lifetime pass. C ya later Hypertracker. 7:30pm – Roll with Shoemoney to play my $2k blackjack hand. I get dealt a 13 against a 10, land an 8 on the hit for 21. Dealer is 18. Winner winner chicken dinner! 8:00pm – Eat dinner/breakfast with Shoemoney and crew at Switch. 10:00pm – Head over to the Affiliate Ball at Rio with a VIP ticket. Watch 3-6 Mafia rock the house. 1:00am – Head over to the Veniusian for a drink 1:30am - Head over to XS at the Wynn 3:00am – Have a 'drink' with a nice young lady in my hotel room 7:00am – Sleep time It's a tough life... Photos and video to come For another Travel angle, read Affiliate Summit West #ASW11 - Recap, Video and Photos.
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My Half Assed and Very Late Affiliate Summit West Schedule
Vinay Patankar · 07 Jan, 2011 · Business
Tomorrow I leave for Vegas baby, second time in a few months, and second time with a $1k+ free conference ticket in my hand. The universe must want me to go to Vegas.... You rock universe! But more importantly Shoemoney, his sexy staff, all my friends and family who voted for me, all the people who don't know me but I harassed them via email or Facebook and to a few hundred random s from Mturk in some third world country. YOU ALL ROCK! If you don't already know, I am headed to Affiliate Summit West on an all expenses paid trip because I won the Shoemoney Crazy Affiliate Contest. ## Travel Plans I am a very last minute traveller. Some people spend days even weeks planning their trips. I usually wake up in a haze, walk out the door and figure out where I'm going while I'm walking. OK, that might be a bit extreme but I am closer to the latter than the former. Spending 10+ months travelling last year taught me that its not worth spending all your time planning if its going to cost you enjoyment in the moment. Plus sporadic planning can turn into crazy adventures. It can also turn into a looming and costly disaster but that’s a story for another day. I have a 9am flight which I booked at 6pm tonight. I then booked a nights’ accommodation at Circus Circus which looks very entertaining for its modest price tag, and is close to the Wynn so I wont have much of a trek in the morning when I switch to the Wynn. ## ASW Schedule Looking around the web for some things to do, I stumbled upon the Canadian Affiliate Marketing meetup which is from 5:00PM – 6:30PM at the Wynn Parasol “Up” Bar. I figure I gotta go and get my pass so could be a good opportunity to meet some Vancouverites. Then I'm headed off to DKs Poker Tourney. I figure this will give me a good opportunity to chat with people and maybe make some plans for the rest of the summit. And that's about all... Ill figure the rest out when I'm there. If anyone has any tips on specific events or parties to attend I'd be keen to hear about them. I also had some questions about whether I will be blogging live from the event. In all honest, no probably not. I'd like to, but yea, doubt its going to happen. Will try and do a few post about it when I land - if I don’t come back with 100 business ideas that lock me down for the next few months! Anyways, if anyone is at ASW hit me up. We can grab a beer. Related read in Business: Affiliate Summit West #ASW11 - Recap, Video and Photos.
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Winning the Shoemoney Crazy Affiliate Contest - P1
Vinay Patankar · 07 Jan, 2011 · Business
So as you may know by now, I was the winner of the recent Crazy Shoemoney Affiliate Summit Contest that finished up a couple of days ago. Here is the prize as it currently stands: - A platinum pass to Affiliate Summit West. - 2 nights hotel accommodations paid for at host hotel. - $500 Airfare Reimbursement. - $2000 to gamble on 1 hand of blackjack (can you handle the pressure?). - Roll with me at Affiliate Summit. - A pass to the Epic Advertising Playboy Mansion Party this fall. Very epic prize. It was a long road with many hours invested. To win, you had to write a post on your blog stating "why you should win the contest". 10 finalists were then selected by Shoemoney's staff. After that it opened up and the winner had to acquire the most votes over the course a 5 day period. In the end, I emerged triumphant with 43% of the total votes. Over the next two posts, I will give a break down of exactly what I did to win the competition. ### The Finalist Post First things first. Before anything else you had to get selected by Shoemoney's staff as a finalist. This meant a killer post. The first thing I did was assess the competition. I immediately understood that there would be no point attempting this thing half hearted. Just whacking up a useless post on my blog isn't going to win me a prize easily valued at $5k but it will deteriorate the quality of my blog and brand. So before even deciding whether to enter it or not, I had to do a quick analysis on reward/ratio. If I my chances of at least getting into the finalists were slim to none, I wouldn't even bother entering. That decision would be made solely based on the competition. In the end, there were 92 Comments with probably 70 entries to the competition. But when I made the decision to enter, there was less than 40 entrants. Firstly, this low number was very surprising. I guess that it was the holidays and what not probably meant less people were aware of the contest. Any way, I started reading through the other comments and was fairly shocked at what I saw. There were a number of entries that were 1 paragraph long, broken links and posts with clearly no thought put into them. Yes there were also a few good posts, but most of them were below par. Low numbers and low quality? Shit yeah, bring it on. When I first read the post there was two days left to enter the contest. Knowing that I had two days, there was no reason to rush the post. You should treat it like any other piece of writing you are trying to get right and write it out, let it sit, edit it, let it sit some more (something I usually don't do because it takes to long and editing is annoying but it definitely is the most effective technique). ### The Essay Approach When it came down to writing the post, the first question I had to ask my self is "What is this post trying to achieve?" this is something we all had to do in school when we were given one of those annoying questions and told to discuss it. What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to argue a point? Solve a problem? In this case, the point was to be selected. To be chosen. So I started thinking about other types of documents that have a similar purpose. The first that came to mind was a resume, something I have lots of experience with as an ex-recruiter. A resume is a document you create so you are selected. But getting hirired for a job is not usually just from your resume, you need to do a good job selling youself to secure the position. This train of thought brought me down the path of a sales letter. Really the purpose of this post was to sell myself. Really, this post was to be a sales page. ### The Sales Page Post I am by no means an expert copy writer. But I know a little. I know what some of the key elements of a strong sales letter are. These include: - Telling a story - Building Trust - Emotional stimulation - Focusing on the benefits I started telling my story. People like dealing with people they know, so the more of a story you can tell the more trust you will build plus it makes for an enjoyable read. I continued with emotional stimulation by writing the post in a very casual manner and by sprinkling humour through the post. I then wrote a section on how I can give back and what the benefits would be of hiring me. Whether they are tangible benefits for someone like Shoemoney or not is irrelevant. They just have to be better than the benefits the other contestants were offering. Some is better than none. ### Additional Elements On top of the above elements which appear in every post I added two more of my own for this particular post: - An element to show I had done my research - A gimmick to stand out from the crowd If you see down the bottom of the post, there is a picture of a girl in a grey shirt with a CLICK HERE underneath her. This was not chosen by accident. Actually Shoemoney talked extensively about this picture in his video on Facebook advertising. By adding this element is showed that I actually knew who Shoemoney was, followed his stuff and paid attention. Plus it was slightly humours, at least I thought so anyway. The last was the tattoo gimmick. To be honest, this was chucked in right at the end. I was basically reading my post thinking shiit, I need a gimmick to close this deal and maybe more importantly, to win the votes. Sure I had a strong post, but it didn't jump out at you, there was noting overly special about it. If you see Donny Gamble's post he included the elf video and Danger Brown had a cool video of his own plus he was going to shave his head. These are two other fantastic examples of utilising a gimmick to get attention which resulted in both these guys making it to the finals. I don't know why I chose to get a tattoo. Basically I just thought it would be something that the judges would notice, people would talk about and it would make a funny story. No real reason besides it was a straight gimmick. ### The End Result Here is my winning entry. I probably spent a good 4-5 hours on it, possibly longer. Lots of that time was just reading it over and over correcting little bits and pieces. But every couple of times I read it I would get another big idea and chuck it in. As I said the tattoo idea didn't come until the very end, maybe the last or second last re-read so it definitely pays to do this. Next up securing the most votes. If this Business topic resonated, continue with Affiliate Summit West #ASW11 - Recap, Video and Photos.
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Bring on the Controversy
Vinay Patankar · 03 Jan, 2011 · Business
Electron plumber just released a post on his blog ripping into me for using Amazon Mturk as a marketing tool in the Shoemoney Affiliate Competition. Its true, I wont deny it. I did it. And kudos to him, we all gotta do what we gotta do to win and attempting to eliminate the competition is an age old strategy to win a fight. But the truth is, I didn't really have much of a choice... I worked VERY hard on this competition, not only on the entry post but also on gathering votes. I spent the good chunk of my New Years Eve and every waking moment hustling for votes until Jan 2nd untill I saw this... Those are tweets coming from a post on John Chow's blog. For those who don't know, John Chow is a very successful blogger in the Internet Marketing space whom I greatly admire and whos blog I regularly read. The only problem is, he has 118,000 readers!!! 118k wtf? that's like more than some celebrities. El Plumber was right. I am not a super star, I don't have the Alexa rankings to control the masses. I thought I had a compelling entry that would naturally attract votes, but in a situation like this that means jack. After all the work I did, blasting out to my lists, hanging on Facebook asking everyone to vote for me for 2 days straight, asking friends to post on their walls, pulling thousands of emails from every conversation I've ever had on Gmail and of all my social network connections. Even asking random girls in bars to vote for me on their smart phones. I thought I was doing pretty well and used a number of interesting marketing methods that I will post about later. While I cant see my votes, I can see the clicks from the links I was marketing and things were going pretty well. But now that a post had gone out to 120k readers the competition had been taken to a new level. After seeing the tweets, I started doing some investigation. Oh and by the way, its not just tweets, there is syndication and a whole bunch of other ridiculous stuff that happens when someone posts on a blog of that size. I wasn't sure if this was a legitimate friend-helping-a-friend-out post or if it was a brilliant paid advertisement (which I am not against by the way). I had read last years winners post as he talked about how he won the competition. He too had bought a post on John Chows blog to help him win votes. Here is his excerpt: > ### Enter John Chow > I’ve been following John and Jeremy for a long time. I’ve watched them compete against each other (to see who cold get the most RSS subscribers in an allotted time frame) and promote ZK in the Internet Marketer of the year contest. > It only seemed natural I enlist the services of John Chow and so I contacted him about the possibility of a sponsored post. It seemed like a good fit, the Shoemoney and Johnchow audience is similar and John Chow has a big following (71000 RSS subscriber and 51000 twitter followers). > I felt it would be a solid investment as it would likely bring in a lot of votes. I figured if I lost there would still be some value in the links from John Chow and some of the attention it generated. > Five bills later I had a post up on John Chow promoting me and I was feeling pretty good. > I almost when onto sponsored tweets and tried to buy a tweet from Shoemoney himself but I assumed he would decline in for conflict of interest reasons. Probably should have done it for the potential attention/linkbait anyway. Not sure if 5 bills was $500 or $10k but either way, that's lots to spend. And since John Chow's following is up significantly from last year, it would probably be even more expensive this year. I still wasn't sure if Donny had done the same thing so I dug up his post on John Chow's blog. ### This is what it looked like: ### Now see Donny Gamble's Post: Look familiar? After seeing this I thought F\*(%... I cant win this doing what I'm doing. As El Plumber said, I simply don't have a big enough following. But it seems that a media buying frenzy was about to begin. Technically speaking, if I had the funds I should have been able to buy advertisements all across the internet. Make Facebook ads with the criteria of "ages between 10-99" and plaster them up. Create PPC campaigns on every keyword and buy the front page of MSN. Buy spots on Google TV, hire a professional producer to make me an emotionally stimulating, NLP filled commercial causing people to emotionally connect with me and have a strong call to action to resulting in votes on promise of donating a billion dollars to starving children if I won... Unfortunately for me, I don't have those kind of resources.... There was no way I was going to win without some form of paid marketing approach so I started looking around at the different tools and marketing channels I have at my disposal as an internet marketer. I looked at various media buys, sponsored posts, sponsored tweets etc... But if I am going to be spending money on advertising, I am going to look for the channel that is going to bring me the best return on investment. The tool I chose is one that I have used a few times provided by Amazon. ### Enter Mturk Mturk or Amazon Mechanical Turk is basically a service where you can find people to complete a small task for a small price. You can have them do things like comment on a blog, bump up a post on Digg or vote for you in some competition. I thought about running a PPC campaign and paying anywhere from $0.10-$2.00 per click and not be guaranteed a vote. Sure if I threw enough money at it, I would get the same results but it didn't seem like something that a smart internet marketer would do. Why pay more for the same results? With Mturk, you can have an action completed for you for a set price. Depending on the difficulty of the action, you might pay anywhere from $0.05-$2 per HIT (Human Intelligence Tasks). Since this task was a very simple one "go to a web site and click vote" I created a campaign paying $0.05 per HIT. Not sure what Donny's ROI will be on his John Chow investment, say he paid $1000 and got 1000 votes (less than a 1% conversion) its still pretty expensive. I figured 118k readers, even if he had a 1% conversion that would be 1180 votes. So I structured the hit to be 909 votes, with fees that worked out to be exactly $50. Pretty good investment I thought plus I felt I had already done pretty well in the natural voting part, I just needed something to counter the big influx of votes Donny would get from John Chow. ### The Results? Firstly, nobody knows where they stand so its all very exciting. It's completely up to Shoemoney and his staff on how they choose a winner. I didnt do anything illegal, there are no rules stating what marketing tools can and cannot be used. But this isn't a democracy that is going on here so my fate and that of the other marketers lies in the hands of Shoemoney and his staff. I'm sure if someone had access to Oprah they would ask her to do a shout out for them. If that were the case all the Mturkers in the world probably wouldn't help. It is clear that the final portion of a competition like this is not about the quality of your entry, but about who you know, your ability to leverage marketing channels and the resources at your disposal. Much like business in the real world. All I can say is that I really want to win this competition. I needed a paid marketing channel to stay in the game and this was the most financially viable channel to use. Good luck to the other contestants, I hope your marketing efforts don't work as well as mine, but if I don't win, I hope you post about how you did so I can learn and grow. For another Business angle, read Social Network Shopping.
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Step by Step Guide to Hiring a Virtual Assistant (or How I Hired my First VA)
Vinay Patankar · 31 Dec, 2010 · Business
A few weeks ago I hired my first VA (Virtual Assistant) on OnlineJobs.ph. I have outsourced things before like development projects to Elance (now UpWork) and little bits here and there to Fiverr (which rocks, by the way, the amount of stuff you can get done for $5 is amazing) but this was my first venture into hiring a full time VA. For those who don’t know what a VA is, here an excerpt from Wikipedia: > A virtual assistant (typically abbreviated to VA, also called a virtual office assistant) is an entrepreneur who provides professional administrative, technical, or creative (social) assistance to clients from a home office. Because virtual assistants are independent contractors rather than employees, clients are not responsible for any employee-related taxes, insurance or benefits. Clients also avoid the logistical problem of providing extra office space, equipment or supplies. ### Task list Firstly I made a task list. I outlined all the things I knew I had to do on a regular basis and that I do not enjoy doing. When choosing the tasks you want to outsource there are a few things you should consider. The first thing should be what you dislike the most. The more you dislike the task, the more you should want to outsource it. The second is how much it will cost to outsource. You may hate copywriting, but if you don’t want to fork out tens of thousands to get your sales material written, then you’re probably going to do it yourself. For me, the things I outsourced for my first VA were: 1. Article Writing. I don’t mind writing (although I do dislike editing) but I can’t stand writing about the same topic over and over, rewriting articles and writing spun articles. And this is something that needs to be done over and over. So this was high on my list. 2. Creating profiles and submitting stuff. From articles to ebooks to software to slides. Submitting stuff is very time consuming and drives me nuts. 3. Social media profile building. Again, not hard just monotonous and time-consuming. There is more than enough work there for a full-time employee, and tasks like article writing can easily be expanded. There is never enough articles you are writing. ### Finding staff To find resumes I looking around the few of the job boards, but I found OnlineJobs.ph to be the best, \UPDATE: Another new one to check out is [Outsourcely\]. For my search criteria, all I did was type in “article writer” and sort by date so that the newer resumes came up first. When assessing the skills that your worker needs, always make sure you target the skill that will be the hardest to train in. For me, it's going to be much harder to teach someone how to write well than it will be to teach them how to submit to a certain site or use a certain social network so writing was the key metric I was looking for. If you are hiring a programmer, it would be their core language skill (PHP, Java) etc... Contacting Staff Before I started searching, I wrote up a quick email. Here it is below: Subject: Article Writing and SEO Position for Australian Company > Hi XXXXX, > I saw your resume on OnlineJobs.ph and I'm looking for a person who can do the following: > Job Description > - Article and Blog Post Research > - Article Writing > - Article Submission > - Web 2.0 website creation > - Ebook creation > - Directory Submission > - Wordpress Blog Updating > - Other Traffic Generation Strategies > I am looking for someone to work a full time position, working 9am-6pm 5 days a week, your local time. > Salary starts at $250 USD per month and goes up depending on performance > I am wondering if you are interested? > If you are, please provide the following: > - A full copy of your resume > - Examples of work you have done (Articles or Blog Posts) > - Your current availability Points included: - Job description - Working hours - Salary expectations - Request for more information I sent this email to ~20 people. This is the start of the screening process. Basically, you are trying to see how well they take instructions. I have already given some instructions here, and if they do not answer the above three questions correctly, they are instantly disqualified. Some people responded asking me questions, or with just weird answers, they were instantly disqualified. A few (about 7) responded with the correct information. Those that did, I moved on to the next step. ### Screening To screen my staff, I gave them a task to complete. Again, I got this idea from Tyrone’s Mass Outsource (no longer being sold) and I am SO glad I did this step. I wouldn't have thought of this myself, even though as a recruiter I have been extensively exposed to this method, I just didn’t think people would do it for me seeing how I’m not a big company with a solid reputation. But it was the best thing I could have done. Here is the task I gave them: > Hi XXXX, > Thank you for your response. > To make sure you are suitable for the position, I would first like you to complete a task for me. > Please send me an email at the point you start the task, and at final email. This way I will know how long it took for you to complete the task. > Below are the instructions: > 1. Write an article of 400-500 words on the keyword "Ecommerce Strategies" > 2. Use the following in the resource box: Finally, if you want to build an e-commerce store, you should watch the free video course on how to build an online store at eshopwiz. This will take you through the exact steps you need to build your own online store. > 3. Submit the article to the top 3 article directories > 4. Create necessary article and email accounts > 5. Forward me the directories and logins so I can check the task has been completed. > Note: > It is not necessary for the articles to be approved yet, I just want to be able to read them and see that they have been submitted correctly. > If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. > Kind regards, > Vinay This is what separated the superstars from the super\\\\\\\* people that looked good on paper that said they had all this experience doing exactly what I wanted either didn't respond to the task or came back with very silly questions. Only two completed the task and one was exceptionally better than the other. The idea is to give them detailed instructions, but not too detailed. I would give more details than this in a real project such as what directories to submit to, what secondary keywords to focus on etc... but for this task you want to see what they are capable of on their own. At this point, I had 1 candidate left. So I was pretty comfortable. But for the final step, I got on the phone with her. If I had two or three left I would have done the same, but I think getting it down to three is the target I will have in the future. ### The Phone Call I have done phone screenings thousands of times as a recruiter so this wasn't really anything new to me. What I really wanted to get a feel for was her living situation and her motivation for taking the job. Plus I wanted to weave out gaps in her resume. Without going into too much detail, green lights are things like ‘family’ and ‘long term’ with good reasons that they left their previous jobs. Red lights are ‘need money’, ‘no family’ and ‘first time’ as these show lack of stability and experience. After she ticked lots of green light boxes, I offered her the position on the phone and she started the next day. The whole process happened over 3 days. And so far she has been great! Hiring an outsourcer is something I recommend anyone who is in a position to do, do. It drastically increases your productivity, lifts your mood and adds more structure to your business. Related read in Business: My First Collaborative Ebook is Here!.
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I’m a Finalist!! VOTE NOW! :)
Vinay Patankar · 31 Dec, 2010 · Business
Hey there sexy people, It seems my entry for Shoemoney's crazy affiliate west contest made it into the top 10 finalists!!! Here is the mega awesome prize if you have forgotten: - A platinum pass to Affiliate Summit West. - 2 nights hotel accommodations paid for at host hotel. - $500 Airfare Reimbursement. - $2000 to gamble on 1 hand of blackjack (can you handle the pressure?). - Roll with me at Affiliate Summit. - A pass to the Epic Advertising Playboy Mansion Party this fall. Please vote for me \[ Vinay \] by CLICKING HERE # CLICK HERE # VOTE OR DIE # CLICK IF UR SEXY # SALSA IS AWESOME Related read in Business: How I Created an Info Product.
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The Ultimate Contest - Shoemoney, Affiliate Summit and the Playboy Mansion!
Vinay Patankar · 28 Dec, 2010 · Travel
# Wow Oh WOW! Could this possibly be the best possible prize, contest thingy ever to be created? Two points, that instantly highlight the craziness of this contest: 1. An opportunity to roll with Shoemoney at Affiliate Summit West 2. A ticket to the Epic Playboy Mansion Party I can't decide which one is better. I know that spending a weekend with Shoemoney will completely change my life forever. And that's not just some "oh yay lets go and get feelings and be all emotional and see the light" warm and fuzzy life changing crap. I'm talking direct, immediate repercussions that will hockey stick my income, network, reputation and lifestyle immediately. Buuuut, the Playboy Mansion.... This is something that has been on my "top 10 things I want to do before I die" forever like... You could have all the money in the world and not be guaranteed entry to the mansion. Well.. if you had all the money in the world you could probably get in, but you know what I mean... The good thing is if I win this contest, I won't have to choose! Because Shoemoney, the mad man that he is, is giving away the opportunity to win both of these fantabulous prizes in one hit! Oh he's also chucking in some other cool bonuses like a free trip to Vegas and a $2,000 blackjack hand to sweeten the pot! This post is my entry to said contest which you can read all about here. ### Why I Deserve to Take this Puppy Home First a bit about me. My name is Vinay, how you doing? A year ago I took it upon myself to redesign my life. I was 24, working in a good job in Sydney as an IT Recruiter. Life was good, I was earning 6 figures, had lots of toys, but it wasn't Shoemoney good. And I wasn't free. I wanted excitement, adventure, riches, travel, VEGAS!! So I set off, off to see the world. For the last year I travelled through South East Asia, Europe and North America. But before leaving I took it upon myself to get set up with some income to help me along the way and truly achieve my goals. Having an already fairly strong background in IT and business the internet seemed the way to go. My first endeavour was an e-commerce store which is still running strong and has been my main earner over 2010. While travelling I worked on this business and quickly learned the ways of the internet world. Heineken Festival, Lake Balaton, Hungary After 9 months of excessive partying like New Years in BKK, the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, 4 day festivals in Hungary, the biggest nightclub in the world in Ibiza, underground raves in Amsterdam, experiences in Berlin that I will not write about publicly and much other craziness it was time to get serious again. Deadmau5, Ibiza, Spain So a couple of months ago I relocated to Vancouver where I am now. I have stuck my head down doing 100 hour weeks and have got lots done. I released my first free product. My first collaborative ebook and my first paid product is currently in WSO testing. I have built niche sites like this and this. I have a full time VA and have assembled a team to produce my first app kicking off early in 2011, no links here, this one is hush, hush. I feel I am right before tipping point and am just looking for something to push me over the edge. Rolling with Shoemoney would without a doubt be the rocket fuel that pushes me to the next level. I wanted to move to Vancouver so I could have access to opportunities just like this. I made it to Blogworld for my first Vegas experience a few months ago which was mental but nothing compared to what I expect ASW to be! I also wanted to be in the same time zone and be closer to people who were more experienced and accomplished than me in the online world. They say you are the sum of the 5 people you spend the most time with so I want to make sure I spend my time with people I respect and who are better, faster and stronger than me. So far so good as I met my partner for my software project here already! ### Ok so why do you DESERVE to win? Well I don't know if I deserve to win or not, only our esteemed judges and super sexy voters will determine that. But what I do know is that I WILL maximize this opportunity to its fullest. Some people will tell you they party hard, but few people know what partying hard really is. Some people may tell you that they know how to be professional, but few people have pitched to Fortune 10 Investment Banks. Some people may tell you they are serious about making it online, but few people have put in the work to learn everything they possibly can AND act on it. Some people are applying for a free trip to Vegas, but few people understand the REAL value you are offering in this competition. CLICK HERE Hell, I will fly myself to Vegas for the opportunity to hang for a weekend. I don't care about the expenses or the blackjack hand (although I REALLY want that ticket to the Playboy party!) I know the value will be far beyond the immediate material benefits of the prize. In terms of what I can offer in return... What do you give the man who has everything? Well, I know I can offer fun company. I can tell you that I'm an easy going guy with a steadfast positive attitude. I have oodles of interesting stories, know how to have a good time and get along with people from all walks of life. I'm also a single man with lots of experience chasing girls all around the world if that's your kind of thing. I can be known to give good advice but I can also be known to tell it how it is which some people don't appreciate. In return, I prefer to be told how it is and I know Shoemoney is that kinda guy. You won't need to tread lightly with me. In terms of promotion: I will blog the whole experience and promote Shoemoney as the next Hugh Hefner to every good looking girl I come across for the rest of my life. I will do any type of interview or promotional campaigns you want. I will send everyone who helps me win this a personalised card filled with blue glitter and for the grand finale: If I win the blackjack bet, I will use the winnings to get the shoe money logo tattooed onto my back!!! Yes you heard me right. John Chow can even record it and post it on his blog! By the way, I don't have ANY tattoos so this is a pretty big deal. That's how bad I want this. I've thought about it many times and have always said, if I ever get a tattoo it needs to have a good story behind it. If I'm lucky, I might have just found my story. So please Shoemoney and his oh so very good looking staff, pick me!! My Future Possible Tattoo For another Travel angle, read Affiliate Summit West #ASW11 - Recap, Video and Photos. What happened next: - I'm a Finalist, Vote Now - Winning the Shoemoney Crazy Affiliate Contest, Part 1 - The $2,000 Blackjack Hand at ASW11 - Just Say Yes, and a Tattoo
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Video Failure and a New Future - Niche Site Duel 04
Vinay Patankar · 27 Dec, 2010 · Business
This is a continuation post from the niche site duel I started earlier. Take a look at post one, two and three first if you haven't already. As you may have read, I started with a slightly different method of creating a niche site from the standard model that Pat and Tyrone followed in the Niche Site Duel. Instead I was to make a series of videos to drive traffic to a squeeze page, build a list and sell products. This didnt work out so well... Maybe because I didn't put enough work into it (probably this), maybe because the model was wrong, maybe because the niche was wrong, for whatever reason, here are some quick results: I made 24 videos - first problem as the target was at least 50 - and you can see them here: ### Stats The videos so far have received 878 views. From those 878 views I received about 85 visitors. ~10% CTR (Click Through Rate) From those 85 visitors, I received 12 email sign ups to my squeeze page. ~ 14% Opt In Rate From the 12 visitors, I have sold 1 product for a comission of $10. Granted I only spent about 2 days in total making the squeeze page and the videos, but this is still not a great result by any standard. ### Tips from Videos I wanted to give a few tips I learned from making the videos. I have been working on projects I find much more interesting than this one, many using videos such as the free course I built on how to make an online store. So I have learned lots. And this was my first forte into video so I am glad I did it. ### Video Tools: To make these videos, I used three different tools: - Microsoft Powerpoint - Create a slide show (Use Open Office if you don't have) - Cam Studio - Screen and audio recording - Windows Live Movie Maker - Editing These are all free and easy accessible tools that anyone can use to start making videos. For the content, I used PLR (Private Label Rights) content that you can find around the web by searching. This is basically content you can buy for really cheap and brand as your own (I spent less than $10). ### Video Techniques Few tips I want to share when making the videos. 1. Make your videos short and varying in length 2. Create a strong call to action at the end with clear instructions - "click on the link below and sign up to our newsletter to get xyz" 3. Create long outros to your videos after your call to action. This means the user has less of a chance of being distracted by the related videos that pop-up and will more likely click on your link. 4. Use Tube Mogul to distribute your videos to multiple video directories ### Why did I Fail? The main reason this project failed was not enough traffic to the videos. There are thirdly main reasons for this. Firstly, I didnt make enough videos... If I had made 100 videos, I would have had at least 4 x the visits. Probably more because the chances of one or two of them becoming popular and getting many hits is much greater. Secondly, I didn't market my videos. This is huge. I didn't build backlinks or get comments to videos thus they sailed by unnoticed. Thirdly, I didnt pick a 'video friendly' niche. Sure my competition research was sound, but logically I think I was off. Sleep Apnea is not a visual topic and not many people are searching for it on YouTube. If I had picked something like Golf Swing or something more visual then I think I would have been in a better situation. ### What Next? Well, if you have visited in the last few days then you may have noticed it is no longer a squeeze page (a page designed to get just name and emails like ) but is now a blog. I have decided to turn it into an auto blog cluster. I may talk about this in the future, but for now all you need to know is there are hundreds of blogs running on it that all look like this: As usual, there is nothing better than a good failure to keep you on your toes. Besides the video marketing, I learned lots about squeeze pages, list building and a whole lot more. Plus the project is not yet dead, taking a new direction. Oh, I also learned I don't like learning about, reading about, talking about or making videos about sleep apnea. Thus why the auto blog route. I couldn't stand to make more content on this subject :) A strong follow-up in Business is Designing a Squeeze Page – Niche Site Duel 03.
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My First Collaborative Ebook is Here!
Vinay Patankar · 15 Dec, 2010 · Business
Just a quick post to tell you about my first colaborative ebook that I released over at my other blog eshopwiz.com This has been a great experience, I got to meet many interesting people from all different areas of business. More about the creation of this book in the near future. But for now, go check it out here! A strong follow-up in Business is Step by Step Guide to Hiring a Virtual Assistant (or How I Hired my First VA).
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Founders of Youtube, Twitter and Skype Speak at Dublin Web Summit
Vinay Patankar · 24 Nov, 2010 · Business · Technology
My friend Michael Clyne of Pathpacific.com just posted up the recording of the Dublin Web Summit where they had some truly amazing speakers. The line up included Chad Hurley - Founder of YouTube, Jack Dorsey - Twitter Founder and Niklas Zennstrom - Skype Founder to name a few. Michael runs a video production studio in Dublin so check him out if you're in that part of the world. ## Chad Hurley - Founder of YouTube ## Jack Dorsey - TWITTER Founder ## Niklas Zennstrom - Skype Founder There were a few other great speakers including Brent Hoberman - LastMinute.com, Sloane Berrent - AnswerwithAction.com and Soraya Darabi - FoodSpotting.com. More related clips are available on YouTube: Dublin Web Summit 2010 talks. Related read in Business: Idea: Create Separate Instances of Browsers for Separate Web Apps.
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How to KILL it In the Corporate World (or the Big, Small, Big Theory) – Part 2
Vinay Patankar · 22 Nov, 2010 · Business
Last post I introduced the big-small-big theory on how to get ahead in the corporate world. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you go back because this post won’t make any sense otherwise... I talked about the concept of how working in a small business produces more productive employees which can then progress faster in their careers but if this were the only factor, couldn’t you just go from university into a small business, maybe even a crappy business working as a manager then move into a job as Head of Equities at Citigroup? Hellz no! ### Big Businesses See, big businesses like order. They like structure and the LOVE process. And it’s not like its without merit. Start up workers cringe at the thought of filling out forms for stationary and needing to complete detailed expense reports at the end of each month. But when you have 100k+ employees, small numbers make a big difference. So while big businesses tend to make inefficient employees, who take the long route when encountered with decisions and actions, it needs to be done or the company would implode. This is why big companies don’t like people from small businesses. It is too much of a culture shock. While the big business doesn’t need to teach them how to do their job (ie how to program) they need to teach them all the processes such as documentation, communication logging, project scheduling etc... If a programmer spots a bug in a live program, he can’t just solve it like he would in a small business. He would have to analyze the program. Report it to the support team with a detailed document and submit a support ticket. The support team would then send it to the testing team to make sure the bug exists. Then it’s sent to a support development team that focuses on fixes and upgrades. They will organise a meeting with the developer who found the problem. A solution will be drafted, while consulting with the architect. The project will be approved by the Project Manager. It will be inserted into the project schedule by the coordinator and it will finally be executed. That may seem inefficient, but it’s necessary. It’s necessary because if every programmer just started hacking at the system, and ONE single guy messed up, causing the system to go down for _10 minutes_. It might cost the bank the equivalent of that guy’s entire life’s salary – _probably more_. Understanding this process is essential for anyone working in a big business, and this is exactly what you're taught in your first few years as a graduate in a big business. In fact, this is basically all you are taught as your first few years as a graduate. Besides how to scan shit... (If you're a recent college grad and don't like the sound of this, don't worry. You can still get some value from this job by adding everyone to LinkedIn) ### Small Businesses Small businesses on the other hand need more of this structure if they want to expand. This is why small businesses like bringing people in from the big guys. They bring order to the chaos. Then they get corrupted... But at least they understand how and why structure is necessary. Once they pick up some actual knowledge and skills from the small business, they are now a super worker. Who actually knows stuff, has had to make real decisions, not just small tweaks to existing processes and hopefully has results making a real impact on the success of a business. Plus they _understand the value of order and process_. At this point they can walk back into a big business in a higher position completing the big-small-big structure. ### Risks This method of getting ahead is not without its risks. That being said, no method of getting ahead it without its risks except maybe being born rich or looking like Megan Fox. Risks include picking a crappy small company that either doesn’t do anything or dies. You should obviously analyse this before you take the job. The great thing about this strategy is that you can look for your small company while sitting in the big one. Don’t leave until you find the perfect position. Look for a small company that is rapidly growing and one that will have progression opportunities. One that has holes in its organisational structure or has huge growth potential (pre IPO anyone?). Look what is happening to Google right now! They are fighting an uphill battle to keep their top staff including recently throwing $3.5 mil at an engineer to not go to Facebook. If you pick your small company right, it can make all the difference. Another downside of this is work hours and stress. Moving to a smaller company will likely increase both of these elements. If you are planning on having a kid, now is probably not the best time to leave your stable job for a risky start up. Be prepared to work hard in the small business or you will not get the rewards. Where as in a big business, lots of the time it’s not really worth working hard. Because the reward for doing an exceptional job is usually the same as doing an OK job. If you know anything about the Dilbert Principal doing a crap job will probably get you promoted faster, drinking helps too, but in reality it’s all about personal preference, so networking is probably the best way to go. For another Business angle, read How to KILL it In the Corporate World (or the Big, Small, Big Theory) – Part 1.
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How to KILL it In the Corporate World (or the Big, Small, Big Theory) – Part 1
Vinay Patankar · 17 Nov, 2010 · Business
### My Corporate Experience For a 25 year old, I think I know more than expected about the corporate world. Working as a corporate recruiter for almost 4 years in Sydney and my natural curiosity for business kinda helped. I had some of the biggest companies in the world as my clients including Citigroup, JP Morgan, UBS, Deutsche bank, Vodafone, 3 Mobile, Symantec, CA and many more. I also serviced a number of smaller companies too. Mostly niche software development firms (I recruited developers). As a recruiter, you get to see a company from the outside. You see how the structure is built, how decisions are made and how people move within organisations and to new businesses. In essence, you see waay more than most employees within the actual company see as they are stuck in their little subdivision, working as a tiny cog in a monstrous machine. ### The Corporate Struggle Getting ahead in these big businesses can be very tough. There is an immense amount of competition, and nothing you do really ever has an impact on the company. Think about it. If you work for Citigroup in Sydney, and the whole of Citigroup’s operations in Sydney account for less than 5% of Citigroup Global revenue, as one of the 3000 people working in Sydney, you are contributing to 0.00016% of the business. Even then, if you’re not at least a middle manager or a bread winner you’re probably contributing less. So how do you stand out? How to you take your career to the level you really want? And more importantly, how do you do it quickly? See, not only is it harder to make an impact in the company you are working in, there are slower decisions, the organisational structures is set and growth is slow. Basically, you’re up the proverbial creek and you aint got no paddle. Unless you use cunning office politics and networking to get ahead, which can work very well but is a whole other post, or maybe book... it can be very difficult. But then how do you see these young gun managers and bankers running around the big institutions? How do they get in? I have a theory that may just answer the question. This is something I picked up from observation, but I don’t think my sample was big enough to call it a fact, so I call it: ### The Big-Small-Big Theory The big-small-big theory refers to someone who comes out of university and gets a job in a big company then leaves that big company for a small company. While working for the small company he progresses quickly through the ranks. He then returns to a big company at a much higher level then would have been possible if he just stayed working for his original big company. This happens for a few reasons. ### Growth Small companies are growing much quicker than large ones (if it’s a decent company). Growth means expansion. Expansion into new territories, new markets, new services and new products. Growth also means opportunity. As an insider your natural odds go up. ### Organisational Structure Holes Small companies make do with what they have. There will be employees wearing many hats. This is due to budget constraint or lack of activity. When the company grows, the burden on the people working multiple roles becomes too much, forcing the company to split the job, creating a new position. In big businesses, the organisational structure is defined to perfection. There are no holes. The only way you’re getting the bosses job is if he moves up or out. ### Less competition This should speak for itself. Less people, less competition. Better odds of getting that promotion. ### The Deep End Ahh, the deep end. Welcome to small business pressure. This is when you are working away until suddenly, your business lands a new client. Maybe the client is bigger than ever before, maybe it is in a new industry. Whatever the reason, you need to learn and you need to learn quick. It is rare that a big company like Citigroup will ever come across a client or situation that it doesn’t already have detailed documented processes on how to handle. Thus you are rarely chucked in the deep end and your learning curve is much slower. ### The Result More responsibility = a faster learning curve = more productive employee. Sounds easy right? Have questions? Like why it’s called the big-small-big theory and not the small-big theory? Or are there any downsides or risk? Don’t worry, Ill cover them in part two of this post. Click here to read Part 2 If this Business topic resonated, continue with How to KILL it In the Corporate World (or the Big, Small, Big Theory) – Part 2.
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