When we went out to Affiliate Summit we also did the tourist things and took some pictures. This was a good test for me as I hadn’t really used my Sony A300 all that much. Most of these pictures were taken outside the Mirage Hotel. This is the waterfall that is really beautiful.

The Mountains behind the Rio were amazing, this was taken through the glass from our 18th floor room at the Mirage.

Here is a closer view of these amazing clouds, snow and mountains.

You can see the view we had from the room, you can’t tell where the sky ends and the mountains begin. It is a shame that crane ruins a great picture. Have a feeling that will be photo shopped out in the future.

Here is a view of the Las Vegas Strip with clouds in the background and the newly opened City Center.

This picture was taken from the monorail platform behind the Bellagio. The monorail is new and goes from the Bellagio to City Center, great place to get some pictures of the Las Vegas Mountains.

This is the sign above Harrah’s Casino. I love the details of it.

The waterfall again outside the Mirage but this time it has the Dolphin statues.

This was the first shot I took at City Center. I like the reflective nature of this shot.

Here is a shot of the Bellagio with some very dark clouds over it.

I hope you enjoyed these pictures, I made them small for the web. The originals are quite larger and were shot in RAW files. Can’t wait to print some of these and put them up in the office.

There has certainly been a buzz about Foursquare and I don’t know why. I see Foursquare as annoying and will never use it anymore. (I have an account and I yes I know how it works.) As you probably know I use Twitter a lot and when I get an update of someones location from Foursquare I will usually stop following that person.

I have a guy that I was following on Twitter that checked into Foursquare every morning from a Starbucks. The first thing that popped into my head is the guy should make coffee at home and send the $5 he would save everyday to a charity or something. Odds are if I had known he likes to waste money like that I don’t want to be following him anyway. While he thinks it’s cool to be at a Starbucks everyday I am totally thinking otherwise.

I have another buddy that checks in almost every half hour from the same locations everyday, once again I don’t care where you are or where you are going. Since this guy is up in Canada and I have no plans on going there it is nothing but annoying when I got these updates. It makes me wonder if this guy really thinks we care where he is.

Someone else I was following on Twitter used Foursquare to give updates whenever they stopped to eat. Everyday his morning update was from Dunkin Donuts. His lunch was from another fast food place and dinner was from KFC. When I see this person all he talks about is how his diets never work and he doesn’t know why. He may be the mayor of his local Mcdonalds but to me he something else.

I don’t get why anyone would let anybody know their location using the gps on their cellphone. You have no idea how they are going to use this information or if they are going to sell it. What if Foursquare was sold tomorrow to an advertising company? Now someone you had no relationship with knows your popular locations and what time you are usually there. To me this is the scariest part of Foursquare.

What happens if a crime is commited in or near your location, you could end up being dragged into something you know nothing about. I know that is far fetched but it could happen, all because you had the need to tell strangers where you are.

Last week I was reading about how big brands were giving money towards Foursquare. Little do they know there are many people like me that find Foursquare as annoying. Whenever I see the companies that are using this I stop buying their products forever. Never again will I buy a product from a certain soda company that gave Foursquare 10k a few weeks back. Guess they are doing me a favor since I drank alot of soda over the years.

I am all for Social media but this service is totally spammy to me. There is no circumstance where I would keep following a person that likes to post their location updates to Twitter. If you want to use Foursquare be my guest but please turn off your updates on Twitter.

If you are running any sort of online business you constantly have to keep learning to keep going and making money. One way to learn while you are working or on the go is by listening to a podcast.

I am not talking about a certain podcast from your industry which you should be listening to anyway, I am talking about one that is outside your industry that you can learn new ideas to spark up your business. I often listen to podcast that are based around a hobby or something that I want to learn about.

A few weeks ago we were at Affiliate Summit meeting new people and I started talking to someone about SEO and when I asked them certain questions it became apparent that they had no clue.

I told them if they wanted to learn about SEO they could find a few podcast and listen while they worked on their sites. Of course since they were just getting started in affiliate marketing I also steered them to www.geekcast.fm where I am on a few podcast and there are other good podcast on the subject also.

I listen to almost every podcast on Geekcast since they are mostly about making money online. You can get them delivered automatically using Itunes which is a huge time saver. You can listen in the car (since most radio stations suck now anyways) or you can listen using an Ipod while taking in your morning run.

If you make time to learn your business should improve. If you can’t find a podcast in your business then start your own, you can be the expert in your field and business will come to you. You will be considered a leader in your field and business will come to you in ways you never expected.

Today I downloaded the new app on my Droid that allows me to post right from my smartphone. This post is a test to see how it turns out.

I am not sure how I will be using this but it can come in handy for times I don’t have a laptop with me. So far I can tell that between this app and notepad I will be using this to post.

Update:

I have made two post to this site using the Wordpress for Android app and I am loving it. I have made a post directly from the app and also made a post using notepad and copy and paste directly into the app which I can see becoming the normal way I will post.

( I originally wrote this post about 4 or 5 years ago. When I redesigned this site I deleted a bunch of pages that I will be bringing back that still apply.)

What Is Vinny Talking About Now?

So you are wondering what does hot dogs have to do with making a website or affiliate marketing. Well after I explained my theory to a few people they told me I should write it down somewhere so that is what I am doing. If you are experienced at making websites you should know what a keyword list is. If you don’t know then you should go find out what it is.

Just like every other website maker I know I have a keyword list that I get from either Wordtracker or one of my other places that I can’t divulge due to competition. Well instead of making a page or pages based on each keyword on my list I expand the list to some things that one may ever search for daily but eventually they will. When that time comes my page will be either #1 thru 10 on the search engines. Now I don’t play tricks with the engines because that is a waste of time. Build pages for the user and you will be better off in the search engines anyway.

Let me explain how and why this is called “My Hot Dog Theory”

Back when I was around 18 I had a job installing replacement windows, the job was ok but I had to travel all the way to New Jersey and that stunk. One of the strangest things that every happened to me came when I was working with the window company. One day we broke for lunch and we stopped at this hot dog truck on the side of the road. Although it was a regular hot dog truck they had tables and chairs and people on line waiting to get hot dogs. Being from New York City I had never saw such a thing, here we walk up to a cart and get a dirty water dog. There is no lines and no table and chairs.

As I got to the side of the hot dog truck to place my order I saw the strangest menu I had ever seen. They had over 300 varieties of items that you can get on a hot dog. The guy in front of me had string beans, cole slaw and cheddar cheese on his. They had all sorts of chili dogs but to the extreme if you know what I am talking about. I was so dumb founded by the guys order in front of me I ordered the same thing. Guess what It was great! They do great business because had repeat traffic and viral marketing due to having a variety. This is something that every website owner craves for.

Now that it is about 15 years later I am making websites and I start making my keyword list and the sites are coming along fine. As I am checking my website server logs I am finding that people are finding my sites using obscure terms. Now every site I make has a huge list of phrases that people may never search but if and when they do I am in place for that traffic. At some point someone somewhere will use a search term like “left handed hot dog” and guess what I will have the top spots across the web for it.

I seriously doubt that others will be making a list when making a site about hot dogs that includes left handed hot dog since that is not the way webmasters think. Guess what people do search for these things, join the parade and include some of my hot dog theory to your site. It can’t hurt and it doesn’t cost you a thing except for some time. The plus here is there is no competition plus some other terms from this page may make it into other search engines. You just never know!

There is a little bit more to this story but I have had your attention for about a minute or so and as you are reading this I will be making more pages. Not the data feed type crap that is out there but unique to the user and giving the user some valuable information about something like “Boston baked beans plastic casserole dish” or something similar.

Of course you have to make the page full of quality information and quality content. You can still get visitors to your site with the build it and they will come theory. You just have to know what the people are looking for in the first place.

Has Vinny lost his mind? Yep all the way to the bank. See some more of my traffic theories on my traffic building pages.

Once again Affiliate Summit has come and gone and I am filled with information overload as I am sure the other 4000 + people that also took in the Summit are feeling.  We got in to Las Vegas on Saturday morning and settled in before we headed over to the Rio for registration.

After meeting up with a bunch of affiliates and affiliate marketers it was time for dinner and some networking at the parties. We went over to the Palms for dinner at N9ne and then to the party with the nice people from Buy.at up at the nightclub “Rain”. It was a great place for a party as we took up on the second floor which had soundproof rooms for networking, that was a great place to meet others and discuss affiliate marketing and meet the people at Buy.at.

Sunday it was time to get up early and head over to the meet market which was very crowded with merchants trying to meet with affiliates. This is as always my favorite part of summit. I always seem to meet some new programs that I usually wouldn’t talk to but the face to face meeting is huge. This summit was a little different for me as working as an outsourced program manager I was not there to talk to merchants I was there to meet new affiliates to bring into our programs. Just walking around the meet market I met quite a few affiliates that will be joining our affiliate programs.

I probably met more affiliates in sessions and outside the sessions then I can count. In between the sessions I could be found in the Bloggers lounge which was a nice retreat from all the traffic in the hallways. I met quite a few bloggers that I had been following on twitter for a while and some that I am now following. Heather did a great job as the blog mistress, I hope she is the blog mistress for all summits to come.

As you could probably figure out I was in the session that Loxly was the moderator for on Mommy Bloggers. The mommy bloggers in the session discussed how mommy bloggers work together to spread the word for each other. It is in such contrast to everything I learned as an affiliate it blows my mind. I was taught to not share my sites with other affiliates as they may steal your ideas and make their sites outrank yours.

This session has opened my eyes a bit and I am now putting together a little “sports affiliates club” where we will not only share ideas we will share our sites with each other and help each other by leaving comments on each others blogs and tweeting them out for each other.

After the session it was back to the meet market and then to the bloggers lounge where I seemed to have about 5 coffees lol.

This morning when I got off the subway in Bed-Stuy I see the homeless guy with a coffee cup and he is singing songs trying to get a few bucks for his morning coffee. This guy is there every morning and I am sure he makes a few bucks as he is very entertaining. He sings songs that are not the normal songs, one day its nursery ryhmes and the next day it could be Nirvana. He makes everyone smile as they walk by with these crazy songs.

I go into the coffee shop like I do every morning to get my breakfast and talk with the old timers like I usually do. The homeless guy comes in and starts singing “Harper Valley PTA”. The whole place is in laughter as they want to know why out of all the songs in the world this guy choses this song to sing.

Two of the old timers start a discussion across the room from me about who sang the song originally, the guys are starting to work up quite a discussuion and its getting heated. These guys are usually disagreeing with each other, they are like an old married TV couple. One of the guys is insisting that the song was sung by a guy and the other was saying it was a woman. I know of course that the song was sung by a female but the name escapes me as it was a one hit wonder.

Now I was cuurious so I take out my Droid and do a quick Google search for “Harper Valley PTA” and I see it was sung by Jeannie C. Riley so I let the guys know and of course the guy that said it was a male singer disagrees with me.

He didn’t realize I had looked it up online, actually he probably doesn’t even know what a computer is as he is still stuck in the 1960’s. I went into my pocket again and pulled out my Droid again and searched for “Harper Valley PTA video” and sure enough the video of her singing was on YouTube.

I start the video and show him the lady singing Harper Valley PTA and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I didn’t realize that the two guys had a wager for breakfast on it. It seems that the guy already owed the other guy a breakfast and he was betting double or nothing. Well he lost and everyone in the place knew it and was rubbing it in. Apparently this guy is one of those that boast when he wins so it was a change of pace that everyone liked to see.

You should have seen the reaction from everyone as the video was playing. Some guys were asking me why do I keep a jukebox in my pocket, all of a sudden I am standing among 7 or 8 people showing off the features of the Droid. People were amazed that it was a phone, I got tired of this as my breakfast was ready and starting to get cold but people were so intrigued I couldn’t just walk away. I spent about 10 minutes showing off the phone. It was quite a site to see.

All because of a guy singing a one hit wonder from the 1970’s. Can’t wait until tomorrow to see what he sings, maybe I can get a free breakfast out of the deal

I bet you can find at least five things that your website should be doing or doing better. Odds are you have built a site and you are getting some traffic but things are not exactly how you thought they would go. Well lets take a look at five things that may help you get better results. Some are so simple it may surprise you that you haven’t thought of them on your own.

1) Does your site help the user solve a problem? This is either a yes or no. In this day and age the consumer is looking for an answer for their problem, if your product does that then explain it any way you can. This may be a video or a white paper or something of the sort. Give away the information so that the user remembers how helpful you were, they will end up telling people through word of mouth.

2) Do you know what your visitors are doing on your site? Odds are you think you do but you could be wrong. You need to get some sort of analytics set up and see how a user is navigating through your site. You may not even know what your most popular pages are,or even what your worst pages are. You may be focusing on the wrong things and wasting time.You also need to know how people are finding your site. Get a neighbor to sit down in front of a computer and put them on your site and see how they navigate it, it will not be what you thought. get a pen and paper and tell them to give you the honest truth.

3) Do you have an email newsletter? Getting traffic is hard enough so once you get a customer you should try and make them a returning customer. This saves you the worry of trying to rank in search engines and also decreases your advertising cost as you already have that customer. A lifetime customer is the best investment you can make for your site.

4) Do you have a FAQ page? Whenever you get an email asking questions about your site or product make that question into a line on your FAQ page as it will be looked for again on your site. Your answer will help others find you and use your services. It will also end up being keyword rich content that will attract the search engines and get you good long tail keywords.

5) Do you have trust pages? Every website needs to develop trust with the potential customer. Your site needs a page for privacy policy, contact us, terms of use, disclaimer, and let the customer know what you are doing with their information and what they can expect from your site.

I bet if you are not doing these things your site is not doing what you want it to do.

I got my new Droid phone two days ago and I am just loving it so far. I was one of the holdouts that was still using a regular cell phone with Verizon, this phone came along at the right time. My contract was up on October 25th and I was in a debate with myself about what to do. Did I want to stay with Verizon or jump to an IPhone.

My town is well know for cell phone dropped calls and everyone I spoke to hated the service they had with AT&T so I was on the fence about what to do. With Verizon I rarely had a dropped call so I was very happy with the service, I just didn’t want to go through the hassle of testing another cell phone carrier. I really needed the service that an IPhone delivers to run my vast network of websites. I was in a catch 22 so to speak.

When Verizon announced that they were coming out with the Droid (Hate the name) I decided that I would just go and get one and hope for the best. It has been two days and I am more then thrilled with it. Although I am still finding useful apps an such I am finding it easier to be connected by using my Gmail and Facebook and especially Twitter.  I am now in contact with the world almost 24/7.

While I have not done so just yet I am planning on writing my webpages using the Droid when I am traveling or just  heading into the city by train. The battery life is good except when you have the GPS turned on. That is a huge drain on the battery. The app that I like the best is Cardio Trainer as it acts as a pedometer and tracks your steps. I have been walking about 8 miles a day with it. It updates to my workout plan and I am just loving it.

Some things I don’t like are the glass, I am not use to having that so a screen protector is a must have. I have it in a nice rugged case that clips to my belt. I didn’t like the choices Verizon has for the cover as I got two of them so I improvised.

All in all I am very happy that I didn’t get an IPhone, this came about at the perfect time for me. I am sure you can see me twittering happily about out it on Twitter.

2009 was not the year of the elephant or year of the chicken it was the year of  “Trust”.  After getting Chris Brogans book “Trust Agents” I started to read it and as I was going along I felt as if he was talking about me and my websites. In a way he was, as most of my content websites are built around the readers and providing them with information that they can use.

By doing this I have built a trust over about 8 years on one of my better sites. I have an automotive site that was built over the years where people are sending me questions about their car and I answer it. I will Google for the answers (if I don’t already know the answer) and then write a page so others that have the same problem don’t have to send me an email.

Between all of this I ended up with a website that helps people with older models to get those hard to find parts. I have become an authority on this topic and usually when I send someone to an auto parts site they usually buy the parts as I am a trusted source.

If you are not building trust on your websites you are missing out big time. Now I get emails from readers saying thanks for the info and that they are forwarding my sites to others. Some of these readers belong to car clubs for my brand and they tell people by the hundreds about my site. Oops scratch that I meant OUR site. The website is all about them and their car.

What I did is ask people to send in pictures of their car and any info they want and I make them a web page.  They bookmark it and send it to their friends. Why its all about “Trust”. You may hear webmasters say they want the consumer off their site asap and on to the merchants site but that doesn’t always apply. I would rather get return visitors over and over again. My site visitor on average goes through 10-20 pages on my site.  These visitors get to see the ads a lot more and take action. They come back and buy over and over. They enjoy the site and “Trust” me that I would never place any type of crap on the site just to make a buck.

I am now getting emails asking for when my next newsletter is coming out, I get 10 a week asking this and another 25-50 signing up for my newsletter every week. Why because I am a trusted source.

This past week OUR site was added to the main website for this car by the manufacturer. They linked up to us on their resources page as a trusted authority for people with older models. That doesn’t happen without having a trust factor.