I flew in Saturday afternoon, which wasn’t all that bad. An hour long flight, followed by 2 hours of walking through JFK, taking the AirTran to the E train, onto the Hilton to checkin. I got to my room just long enough to unpack my clothes, get changed, pre-register (BRILLIANT! Took 2 minutes this time, versus 45 minutes in Vegas!) and head to the Hotel Empire for the Buy.at party. Thanks to Kim Salvino for quickly responding to my tweet, when I was looking for an invite. They announced some really cool features, exclusive to their network, and I look forward to trying them out. After buy.at, we hung out at the hotel bar long enough to decide no BLT in the world is worth $17, and retired fairly early. Besides, we had to be up early Sunday for the CAMA Gospel Brunch!

So Sunday morning we (and by “we”, I mean Mike Buechele, my roommate, and I) take the train to the Cotton Club in Harlem for the CAMA Gospel Brunch. This is the third Gospel Brunch I’ve been to, and I think this one had the best entertainment, but the food was pretty bland. I have some video of the entertainment, but it doesn’t do justice. The CAMA brunch is a great way to get started on Sunday, and even if you’re not Christian, you’re invited to come. I promise you won’t be scarified.

After the brunch, I (with my Gold pass) attended the Get Noticed Fast, Advertising Tax, and Offline Affiliate Marketing sessions. Since I could only attend sessions on Sunday, and don’t really get much from the Meet Market (too crowded – if I see someone I want to talk to, I just hand them my card & tell them to call me later), I stayed in the same room and just chatted with people in-between sessions.

Sunday night I was fortunate enough to have won a ticket to the Market Leverage Yacht party. They did their best, but the limo company really screwed up. After waiting around for an hour and a half, then being taken to the wrong pier, then getting on the boat and waiting another half hour for the chef, we were on our way. I need my readers to do me a favor, and if I ever mention “dinner” and “boat” in the same sentence again, remind me how I felt on this venture. While I wasn’t hanging overboard, I was a little woozy. The Ginger Ale helped a lot. However, since we got a late start, I missed the Share A Sale party (AGAIN! 3rd year in a row now!) and just went back to my room.

Monday morning I headed out into the big city to find a Tim Horton’s with no luck. I headed back to the Hilton for the keynote, then hit the Exhibit Hall. This is much more manageable than the meet market. I had lunch with a merchant I work with, and got a lot of useful information from him. This is the power of coming to Affiliate Summit. You don’t get this information over the phone or email.

My dinner plans changed last-minute, and I went to Victor’s Cafe as a guest of Andy Rodriguez Consulting. The food there was amazing, and I had a good time chatting with Jennifer, Stephanie and Emilio (they helped me identify the food, too – didn’t matter, though – I eat it all).

After dinner, I headed back to the Hilton for karaoke. As you would expect, most people were pretty bad, but Lance (and I apologize, but I have no idea what company he’s with or what his last name is) was amazing, singing Louis Prima’s Just A Gigolo.

Tuesday morning I was up bright & early to run with Peter Shankman, the keynote speaker that day. I thought it’d just be the two of us (after all, who else wants to run at 5:30 in the morning?!) but there were 5 of us total. On my way down from the room, I passed @andrewlpayne and @cashtactics on their way up to their rooms – I invited them to join us, but they politely declined. Anyway, the run through Central Park was nice. Afterwards I did a little work, but since my roommate got in an hour before I woke up, I left the room so he could sleep and found a Tim Horton’s! I was so happy

After Peter Shankman’s keynote, I was kinda tired of the conference activity, so I took a walk to FAO Schwartz and bought the kids some toys (Morgan LOVES her (Not So) Scary Monster), dropped in Tiffany’s but didn’t want to buy the wrong thing, then started packing up. Tuesday night Jason Rubacky from Share A Sale invited me to the Yankees game, where we watched an amazing game between the Yankess & Blue Jays. While I really didn’t care who won, I’m glad the Yankees did, because that made 99.98% of the people around me happy, which helps.

After hanging out at the hotel bar for about an hour, I went back up to my room to clean & pack up to head home the next day. I took Mike to Tim Horton’s (I felt like a missionary… I showed him the good word, then sent him off into the world to spread the news!) then made my way to JFK for a horrible flight home. But when my family picked me up from the airport, I turned off my phone for a few hours & had a nice dinner w/ them.

While this post is long, I left out the details of meeting many great people… too many to name. I need to be on my game next time and blog daily. I took some photos, but not many.

Now I have a LOT of work to get done in the next 5 months, including some rebranding (inspired by the Get Noticed Fast panel). It was great seeing everyone again, and I’ll see you all in January!

Affiliate Summit

• Bring business cards! If you have nice cards, print cheap ones, too, for the network give-aways (fish bowls). Save the nice ones for networking
• Register early. There’s an early registration on Saturday this year (2nd Floor Promenade, 4-8pm), and based on the lines in previous years, I recommend if you’re in the area, take care of this.
• Plan your parties early – know what’s going on, when, and where. Same with the agenda… don’t be sitting in one session, wondering what you’re going to next. If a session sucks, get up & leave. Go to another, or go back to the exhibit hall.
• Hand sanitizer (avoid getting sick!), water, breath mints / spray, etc.
• I’ve never met anyone that doesn’t want to talk at Affiliate Summit. It doesn’t matter if it’s a merchant, network, or affiliate – start a conversation. The more you start, the easier it gets.
• If you haven’t booked your hotel yet, try to stay at the Hilton. If you have an extra 20 minutes, you can run up to your room & drop off all the crap you pick up from the vendors.

New York

• Get confused w/ NY taxis like me? Here’s the scoop:
  

  The trick is in the lights atop the cab. When just the center is lit, highlighting the medallion number, the cab is available. When the medallion number, as well as the side lamps are lit, the cab is off-duty. When no lights are lit, the cab already has a fare they are bringing to a destination.

• If you’re taking the subway (Map), get a MetroCard. I always buy a Pay-Per-Ride MetroCard when I’m in NY ($20 is good – with 15% bonus, you get 10 trips), and sell the unused portion on eBay when I get home.
• JFK – If you’re loaded with money and in a rush, or afraid of trains, pay the $45 flat-fare and get a taxi from JFK to Manhatten. Otherwise, take the AirTrain to Jamaica Center, then transfer to the “E” Train and take it to 7th Ave station. Then walk to the Hilton. Directions
• Central Park is 5 blocks from the Hilton – make it there. The Ed Sullivan Theatre isn’t too far, either. Just take a walk around in the morning – you can sleep on the plane home.
• If you’re looking for a dodgy Rolex, look for a man carrying a suitcase in Battery Park. A simple head nod will get his attention. They go for around $50. While you’re there, take a photo of Lady Liberty.

If you’re going to be at ASE in NY, leave me a comment and let’s get together!

So I cracked open one of the boxes

The suspense was killing me… what was in these boxes???

Part of my order included 5 packs of Lithium AAA batteries, which they decided to put each pack in its own box. In the end, my giant pile of boxes looked like this:

Luckily I had Amazon Prime, so shipping was free… otherwise, this would have cost a fortune!

I have to wonder why they did this… maybe it was a restriction on the product, or they were just being dumb.

I thought I’d check it out, so I went to a certain domain and checked the enhancements:

Of course, being the savvy marketer that I am, the username is already taken

So what’s GoDaddy getting out of this? The total package. Twitter is all the rage, and their users know it. Showing that GoDaddy understands this, too, helps reassure their users that GoDaddy is embracing emerging technologies and is ahead of the game.

Is your name available?

BillyMays.TV is a blog featuring Billy Mays, the products he pitches, and his show, Pitchmen, on Discovery.

I started promoting Billy Mays products through the As Seen on TV Network, and after a dinner meeting with then in Vegas last January, moved on from a single product to anything Billy Mays pitched. The stories I heard about Billy were great, and I had hoped to meet him someday. We even talked about a custom, Billy Mays ringtone! “Hi, Billy Mays here for your cell phone…”

Yesterday I opened my email, after being offline for 3 days, and found my entire inbox flooded with Billy Mays e-mails (from YouTube comments, Twitter followers, etc). Clicking on one, I read “RIP Billy Mays” which was a complete shock to me.

The fan base of this infomercial superstar is amazing. There’s no middle ground – you either loved him, or hated him. However, after the past 24 hours, all of the comments I’ve seen on the blog, the YouTube channel, and even the Twitter account have been positive.

Traffic to BillyMays.TV increased over 5,500% yesterday – Billy Mays was a superstar amongst all marketers and will be truly missed.

Building your business on a single company, product, or person is a huge mistake (heed the warning, Apple!). Luckily, this was a small portion of my affiliate business – it was more of a pet project, rather than a big income producer.

Remember Billy Mays this Wednesday starting at 11am on the Discovery Channel with a Pitchmen marathon.

Life’s a pitch, then you buy.

Sometimes, the asker choses the best answer quickly, and if that’s your answer, you get the points. But many times, the asker never choses the best answer, and it’s left to the voting public to chose.

So the other day I received a notice that my answer was voted the “Best Answer”, and got the credit. That prompted me to login to my account, and review my answers to other unresolved, or “In Voting”, questions.

When you vote for the best answer to a question, you don’t see who the author is, but you should be able to identify your answer based on writing style and sources. So go ahead and vote for your answer.

I did this the other day and voted on 9 questions that I took the time to answer, which where in the voting phase. Within 20 minutes or so, I received 9 emails that my answers were chosen as the best!

Now this may be considered cheating, although they don’t specifically mention this method as such. Don’t be surprised if your account is banned, but mine’s going strong, with 65% “Best Answer”.

A couple weeks ago I came across EverNote, a way to capture information and save it in a digital file. I have yet to unleash the true power of Evernote, but I’ve started.

To get my files scanned into my computer, I picked up the Fujitsu Scansnap S300 Color Mobile Scanner. This is one of the most important pieces of hardware I now own. In terms of productivity, I’d rank it right up there with the second monitor. This scanner is truly amazing.

First, I configured the ScanSnap to save the files right to Evernote. You have to create a new profile, and select the Evernote application in the profile preferences. Then left-click on the icon in the toolbar to chose the profile, then either press the scan button on the scanner or right-click on the icon and choose a Simplex (single-sided) or Duplex (doubled-sided) scan. That’s right… this scanner will scan BOTH SIDES of a document AT THE SAME TIME. Oh, and did I mention it does this in FULL COLOR, and it’s FAST?!?!

Here’s a video I took showing how fast the ScanSnap is:

So anything on my desk, I scanned, tagged, and then either shredded or recycled (by the way: you can recycle shredded paper. Save a tree). Right away my desk was cleaner. Then I attacked the pile of business cards from the last couple Affiliate Summits.

The business card software is clunky, but it works (most of the time). I still have to figure out how to export it to GMail, but that can wait. I rarely use these cards, but felt like I had to save them. Now they can go, as I have the data in a database, along with the image of the card (front and back, if applicable).

Looking for more to scan, I thought it’d be a good idea to scan my articles of incorporation, so I’d have a digital backup of them. I created a new journal just for these papers, and in a few minutes had them scanned in. Now I have a digital copy of the papers (convenient to send to my accountant or attorney if I have to), a copy saved with Evernote, and they’re backed up with Mozy (my online backup provider).

What’s nice about the files is that when they’re scanned, they’re PDFs. I haven’t played much with the OCR functions, but that’d make it easier to search & find things (right now, searches are limited to my titles & tags).

Then I figured, since I could use the ScanSnap with Evernote, why not set up a profile for Picasa. So I did. I set the profile to save to Picasa as a JPG, and scan at a higher resolution. Then I took a packet of photos that a Cub Scout parent had given me about a year ago, stacked them about 8 at a time in the ScanSnap, and hit the button. In about 10 minutes, I had all of the photos scanned. Now the quality isn’t the best, but that’s the fault of the disposable camera, not the ScanSnap.

I’ve also used the ScanSnap to quickly make a PDF to then fax with MaxEmail and to make a hard copy of a paper document.

There’s so much more I could probably be doing with my ScanSnap and Evernote, but I have to learn all of the functionality. At least my office is now considerably cleaner.

First, you have to set it up yourself, which is OK if you know what you’re doing in Plesk, but Plesk backups SUCK. You can’t extract a single file from them, or get the SQL commands to rebuild part the database.

Furthermore, Plesk restorations SUCK. Plesk removes the current (live) site, then attempts the restore. Oh, and if the restore fails? Sorry – you have nothing now. Talk about back-asswards.

The final nail in the coffin is the fact that you can ONLY access the GoDaddy backup FTP server from your main server. So if your main server fails, don’t worry: you have a backup – you just can’t get to it.

After all that, I decided to write my own backup script. If you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself.

I started with a basic script that saved the files an FTP server, which was a good first step. But I couldn’t find a cheap FTP server for backups, so I looked at Amazon S3. While the pricing is a bit confusing, I know it’s cheap. It looks like I can backup my entire server, daily, for about $0.02 / day. You’re not going to find a better deal than that!

Enough already! Here’s the script. It’s completely free, and probably has more comments than actual code in it. Just PLEASE don’t ask for support on this one – get a sys. admin if you need help configuring it. Or figure it out with trial & error.

Storing your data in “the cloud” can be dangerous if you don’t have permissions set right. A webinar by @WilsonMattos cleared that up for me (previous webinar available for download).

So, get your server backed up, and once you do, make sure you can successfully restore the data!

Remember last year when I won $500 from Pepperjam? I’ve been on a streak since then. I’ve won:

• A signed Gary Vaynerchuk “100 Wines” book, courtesy of Zack Johnson (Zack – STILL waiting for it!)
• A nice stash of Beef Jerkey & a steak brander from Oberto
• An IDrive portable USB drive (so small, I lost it somewhere in my office!)
• A Silver pass to Affiliate Summit East in NYC this summer (thanks Market Leverage!)
• Can’t forget my Buxton Bag from Affiliate Summit West last year – oh, and my Share a Sale dart board!

There are other things, too, but the point is take 2 minutes and enter the contests! Here’s your chance to get in on a new contest.

I’m entered to win a 40? Samsung 1080p LCD HDTV from Nickycakes. If you have a Twitter account, you can enter in 2 minutes. If you don’t, it’ll take you 5 minutes. 5 minutes (or less) to be entered to win a 40″ LCD HDTV? What are you waiting for? If I don’t win, I at least want someone I know to win it!

Experience Wine & Food pairings on the Niagara Wine Trail! Each $20 ticket includes a wine tasting with a different paired food sampling at each winery, a commemorative wine glass & keepsake recipe holder and a copy of the recipe for the sampled food at each winery along the way.

Based on that description, I was expecting each stop to have some sort of dish along with recommended wines, so we could sample the wine with and without the food. In my opinion, only Freedom Run and Niagara Landing got this right. Other places simply had a plate of cheese stuck in the corner.

We started our trip at Arrowhead Spring Vineyards. I was happy starting here, as they gave us some nice wine glasses for the rest of the day. Had we started at another winery, we would have gotten other glasses (not as nice). So we were off to a good start. The guys took the dry route, while the women went sweet. Nothing really impressed me at Arrowhead. The Apogee was nice, but not worth $28.50 / bottle.

Next up was Freedom Run Winery. Again, the girls went sweet and the guys went dry. I started with a dry rose which was made especially for one of the employees wedding. A nice story, and a descent wine for a hot summer day. We eventually got to their 2006 Cabernet Franc – unfortunately I did not pick any of this up, although I should have. It was just my type… a wine that you could just open up and have a glass w/out anything else. In the end, the taster shared with us their Pinot Noir, another good wine. A special trip back to Freedom Rum may be in order just to pick up these two wines. Freedom Run also got the idea of pairing right, serving a chicken dish with a Riesling. This was a pairing that worked well, and I was looking forward to other wineries doing something similar, although the rest disappointed me.

Next stop was Eveningside Vineyards. A little barn in the back, they seemed a bit overwhelmed with the traffic coming in. Nothing there excited any of us, so we moved on.

I’ve had Niagara Landing Wine Cellars wine before, and we stopped there next. They almost had the pairing idea down, but hiding the food in the back with the wine in the front, I sampled a few wines and THEN found the food. My fault? Maybe. In any event, their Riesling was worth picking up a bottle, while Laura bought some fruity thing. Niagara Landing was the turning point in the tour for me.

After Niagara Landing, we went to Warm Lake Estate. The lake is warm because of the excessive amounts of manure they use, which can not only be caught in the nose, but also trapped on your tongue. Their Pinot Noirs both smell and taste like manure (I’ve had shitty wines before, but never wines that taste like manure). I’m not alone. Not only did the lady next to me make horrid faces as we tasted, but I mentioned this experience to Steve and he immediately knew of the place I was talking about. We’ll be sure to drive by next time.

Honeymoon Trail Winery was up next, and it was a nice change from Warm Lake. The bartender was hilarious, constantly chatting with us and telling jokes that you either have to be drunk to enjoy, or have a sense of humor like myself. Things were getting a little fruity, and I still had the taste of manure in my mouth, so I didn’t truly enjoy this spot, but we decided that next time, we’ll start here as they have nice glasses, too, and I want to give them another shot.

We then drove for a while to The Winery at Marjim Manor, an old, historic house that’s supposedly haunted and was featured in an episode of Ghost Hunters / TAPS. The location was beautiful, and the selection plentiful. The story about the location, their owners, and Thursday at 3:00 was fascinating. However, most (if not all) were blended with some fruit juice, and very sweet for my taste. I was done at this point, and just walked around for a bit.

We started to head home, with two more stops. The first was at Vizcarra Vineyards which, again, featured lots of fruity wines. All I remember was sweet, then I went outside to enjoy the sun.

Just down the road was Spring Lake Winery, our final stop, which was in another beautiful setting. However, I was wined out at this time and didn’t even finish one sampling. This was another location which disappointed with a lack of food.

Overall, we had a great time and look forward to heading out again. However, I think we’ll choose 2 or 3 locations (they charge like $1 / tasting, or 4 for $3), instead of a pass for all of the wineries, and bring a lunch with us. I’ll definitely be heading back to Freedom Run to pick up a couple bottles, and can’t wait to visit the locations we missed another day.