My last Fail Campaign Friday post Local Town T-Shirts promised a follow up t-shirt campaign so here it is! This post is about a quick shirt design that ended up losing me over $400 over an infringement claim.

On April 8th of 2014 a wrestling hero from my past, The Ultimate Warrior, passed away. Now I can’t even begin to tell you about how much my friends and I were into professional wrestling when we were younger. Literally every t-shirt we owned featured a wrestler (aside from the obligatory Dragonball Z t-shirt of course), walls were covered with posters of Wrestlers, we attended tons of live events, watched every Pay-Per-View, etc. My friends and I had stuffed pillow like dolls to the right that we would practice wrestling slams with. My best friend actually got a full size Wrestlefest arcade machine for his birthday one year, his parents were pretty much the best obviously.

The Ultimate Warrior T-Shirt

So the morning after the passing of one of my childhood heroes I decided to launch a shirt campaign. Now I want to be clear that I think in an event such as a death of a public figure you can be trashy and you can be classy. I would never try to profit off a death by making false claims like “He died for you by a shirt for him” or try and trick people into thinking the money is going to a fund or his family. Personally I don’t find anything wrong with promoting products that may be of a higher interest during a passing of someone. I do however think that you shouldn’t embellish on negative things. As a similar example when another Wrestler passed away people were making shirts with his face on it and said “Don’t do Cocaine” and the likes. That is pretty trashy in my opinion and I wouldn’t endorse such actions.

So I basically made a quick design with a virtual assistant I was working with. It was the outline of the facepaint the wrestler would wear with the words “Warriors Always Believe”. Now I don’t really remember this being a huge tagline or anything but I remember hearing a few times in videos.

Promoting the Product

To promote the shirt I launched a quick facebook and promoted a single post as you can see below. I was getting $0.01 costs per engagement and I think I ended up spending like $100 promoting the first page post that garnered about 3,000 page likes.

Facebook Page Insights

I then promoted the T-Shirt

Facebook T-Shirt Insight

Promoting the shirt cost more money that I expected but I was still turning a profit.

Ultimately in the 7 day t-shirt campaign I ended up selling like 65 T-Shirts at $20 a piece.

The Campaign Ends

So the campaign was about over and I was looking at earning in the $700 range and I had spent about $400 total in advertising. I literally had like 4 hours left on the campaign and I got an email from TeeSpring stating that the campaign was suspended because of a trademark violation and all orders would be cancelled.

SAAAAAY WHAT!?!

The Cease & Desist

Now I am no stranger to getting cease and desists (C&Ds) and over the years I have gotten pretty good at understanding what you can legally can and can’t do when it comes to this sort of stuff. I’ve had my fair share of digital millennium copyright act (DMCA) requests that I have fought with legal help or adhered to take downs when they were warranted. The important thing to note is that just because someone thinks you did something wrong, doesn’t mean you actually did. Unfortunately Tee Spring had just shown me that they didn’t give a crap about their affiliates and just axed my campaign without even a call.

Now I want to be clear that Tee Spring did what I would expect a giant corporation to do. They got a general request in from the Ultimate Warrior’s licensing company who made a broad bullshit claim about trademark violations and threatened to sue, so Tee Spring axed a bunch of campaigns. What Tee Spring probably should have done was pickup the phone or send an email and let people who had open campaigns (especially those with sales) and straighten things out. I haven’t run a campaign with TS since because it pissed me off so much.

Now I asked for a copy of the C&D (which they refused to give me) and tried making my case which they didn’t care about. They were kind enough to give me the licensing company’s information that complained though. Tee Spring also gave me the recommendation “Well if you are not in any violation just relaunch the campaign”… These guys know the affiliate model and at the time would candidly speak with you about how to avoid trademark issues, yet they showed zero remorse for the $400 in ad spend I just ate because their legal team didn’t have the balls to spend 15 seconds and listen to me and make an educated decision.

Let’s Talk About Trademarks

I am well aware of the risks of violating a trademark (I mention this in my previous t-shirt posts) and before I launch anything I do a robust search in the governments handy dandy  Trademark Electronic Search System. This tool by the United States Patent & Trademark Office makes it really easy to find out what is trademarked and for what uses.

Please keep in mind that a trademark has to specify uses. As an example “Ultimate Warrior” is a valid trademark for entertainment purposes (specifically in professional wrestling). This means they have the right to use the wording “Ultimate Warrior” in those specific instances. However that same use trademark does not necessarily mean that it protects “Ultimate Warrior” from being the name of a food product or something of another nature beyond what is specified in the approved trademark.

You can see in the images below that there are trademarks for the “Ultimate Warrior” which do not call out clothing at all. Most likely they attempted to get this trademark and were rejected. So although they do have a case for “Ultimate Warrior” not being on a shirt they cannot claim ownership of “Warrior” which is what my shirt says. They further claim that they own the trademark to the face paint image when in fact the only trademark on the list that had any relation to my shirt’s facepaint image is an expired/dead trademark. That specific trademark had an illustration of the Ultimate Warrior on it and could be deemed that the drawing on his face could hold trademark relevance over my image…but oh wait, it’s an expired/dead trademark so that is irrelevant. Unless you live in the make believe world of laws that Ultimate Creations (the Ultimate Warrior’s licensing company) and Tee Spring live in.

Let’s Try Not To Repeat Mistakes

In an effort to never have this happen again. I tried talking to Steve from Ultimate Creations. Steve was quick to try and threaten and belittle me. “Why would you want to exploit someone’s death”. Let me clarify that Steve has zero problems exploiting someone’s death, he just wants to make sure that he is the one making the money off it and related topics not you.

Below are a few screenshots from our conversations. You can clearly see that as I pushed to actually get the trademark ID # to lookup it turns out they don’t have a trademark they have a Service Mark. This is very different than a trademark as I say to them in the emails which they then just stop responding to. Clearly it was an absolute B.S. C&D they were trying to enforce by threatening corporations over a trademark they don’t even actually hold.

So Steve basically now says they own a Service Mark not a Trade Mark….ugh. There is a large difference between SM & TM. To makes claims that you own a TM when you actually have a SM are two very different beasts. Clearly this guy didn’t know what he was talking about and was just trying to scare people away.

 Would I Work With Tee Spring Again?

Although I was really upset at the time of this happening I do still think they have a pretty solid program over at Tee Spring and can imagine myself working with them in the future if I ever saw the opportunity to sling some more tees. I was definitely not a power seller in the tee-shirt arena it was just an area I was experimenting on an Aff Playbook 30 Day Follow Along (Forum Members can go search for Mike’s 27 Day Challenge to see all my shirt designs).

As mentioned earlier I understand from a compliance/risk perspective why Tee-Spring cancelled this campaign on me. I was just really upset that they had been pitched as the affiliate friendly place and when I needed some support beyond a ‘change this color’ request, they didn’t really care.

More Tee Shirts

Did you see my last post Fail Campaign Friday: Local Town Shirts ?

Every few months on the Aff Playbook forums we do a really fun Follow Along contest where a goal is set and people will tackle that goal and post their results. Typically its pretty generic but like “Facebook Campaigns” or “Pay Per Call Campaigns” etc. A few months back we had one going and I joined along and launched 20 campaigns on Facebook selling t-shirts. I had quite a few flops there and a few successes that came afterwards. The important thing is to learn a lot in these follow alongs and share your results so others can learn. David usually has some really good prizes to. This month they are giving away a Yoga Pro 2 laptop to the best thread. Keep in mind this is the best documented/updated/experimented follow along someone runs, not necessarily the most revenue generating.

So with that, I wanted to share one of my failed campaigns. Everyone in the internet marketing world has known that Facebook absolutely crushed T-Shirts from places like Tee Spring in late 2013/early 2014. People were (and still are) scraping names to put on T-Shirts, jobs, etc and made a killing. I know several people who were doing $100k+ months before FB started cracking down on the name scraping.

I wanted to try generating t-shirts for local regions and just target them on Facebook by location. Not quite as niche as total scrapes but lets give it a try.

Lunenburg, MA

Lunenburg T-Shirt Design

I ended up talking to a few people from Lunenburg, Massachusetts and they shared a story about how there was a giant controversy in their small town about a racial spray painting incident which ended their high school football team’s season. I asked them if they thought there might be interest for a t-shirt that talked about the town and inspired pride and overcoming this issue. They really thought there would be so I gave it a go.

The primary issue effected their high school which is represented in sports as the Lunenburg Knights. I didn’t see any good resolution images of knights on any of their websites so I bought a stock illustration and put a catch slogan of “Lunenburg UKnight” on it. Get it, UKnight, as in Unite, with the word Knight…yes super creative I know. I ran it by the people who I was talking to and they loved it and so we tried giving it a go. You can see the shirt to the right.

I advertised it on a Facebook page that I whipped up and just targetted people in that town. I was getting a decent enough CTR on newsfeed ads.

Negative Feedback

What was really interesting is, I think people really liked the design and it had a few sales (ultimately it didn’t reach its goal to launch), but it had a TON of negative feedback.

I was getting harassing discussions on my ads. I casually interacted with the posters trying to educate myself on how to execute better in the future but it was to no avail. I in no way implied or suggested that this was in anyway a fundraiser for the town but I kept having people accusing me of trying to trick people. In fact I relaunched ads and clarified that it was not associated with any town organization and was a for profit design that was designed with help from local people from the town. This didn’t seem to help.

Below are a few comments that I received:

• “WHO IS RUNNING THIS DOES ANYONE KNOW?!?”
• “I spoke to the PTO and they assured me that this isn’t running through them!”
• “I’m refusing to buy this until someone says where the money is going”
• “Nobody buy this until they say where the money is going!”

As I was interacting with some of the posters I asked why they were so upset. They said I was using copyrighted information and the school’s logo on something unapproved. I casually replied saying that the logo in use was in no way owned or licensed by the town or school and the name of the town was also not disallowed from being used in this manner. I was in no way violating any laws or trying to mislead people but these people kept thinking I was.

Others said that they would buy the shirt if it was a fundraiser for the town.

I even started getting concerned citizens messaging the page trying to fish who the owners are. This was an interesting woman who wanted to buy 4 shirts but only if I told her the name of the person profiting.

So here I was, slowing becoming an enemy of the town. It was clearly time to abandon this campaign.

Results

Per the ritual of Fail Friday posts, and as mentioned the campaign never reached its goal. The town folk were really delusional about the legal aspects of their generic words Knight & Lunenburg. This is fine, don’t purchase the shirt, I personally would’ve appreciated them not trolling a for profit business with false laws, but Oh-well.

T-Shirt Results

Although this would go beyond the scope of me cranking out a t-shirt design in 5 minutes, I think a little more community spirit could’ve gone far here. If I maybe called up the PTO and said I would donate a small portion of the shirt money to them and then posted that with the ad, maybe I would’ve done better. Who knows. I actually had a few local shirts going at once, thinking it would’ve been a good micro niche to hit. Sadly it wasn’t so.

As always I hope my readers learned a thing or two from my failures.

More T-Shirt Case Studies

If you are a member of the Aff Playbook forum, a paid forum full of top quality case studies, follow alongs, and lessons, go search for “Mike’s 27 Day Follow Along” to see the 20 shirts or so I launched with all the ad results and the ones that succeeded and failed.

I’m pretty sure back in March there were like 10 of us who focused on t-shirt follow alongs if that is your thing. I have another follow up post to this one coming up next week.

Mr. X enjoys the warmer weather.

In 2013 I got introduced to one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. He jokingly claims to be an ex NSA employee (to this date I am not sure if this is a joke or truth) that is trying to live a simpler life. He’s not exactly the most secretive fellow but goes by the ever clever nickname of Mr. X. We came across each other as he was looking for some help to market a product teaching people basic computer security processes (attack and defend methods). Myself being an Information Technology professional and in the marketing scene, I was a great resource to help teach him about marketing his product.

At some point I made a deal with the devil and wagered 1 bitcoin (at the time worth about $1,000, now about $300 thankfully!) that he wouldn’t be able to hack me. I mean after all I kind of know my stuff. Turns out I wasn’t quite as secure as I think I am.

I granted him remote access to my computer, on a non-administrator account to prevent installing any programs. A week later he was showing me account passwords for my various email accounts, FTP logins, root VPS access, pretty much everything. It didn’t stop there, he had spidered access across accounts, basically penetrating other people’s accounts through my contacts. In a week he had accumulated over 300 logins.

Unbelievable!

I really thought he was totally messing with me and then I watched him as he popped open up like 30 different accounts. I was watching him crank open one after another, a few of them contacts in my address book!

It was truly shocking how insecure we are as a society in our internet age.

He went on to show me how he did it all. The exact process, the methods to his madness. The techniques, amateur at best, but incredibly effective.

What I Learned

• First of all we are all vulnerable to phishing attacks. It doesn’t matter if you are an amateur or a pro, we are all susceptible to excellent social engineering.
• Anti-virus programs are practically useless, do they ever work anyways?
• Mr. X claims that unauthorized penetration attempts are illegal in many geographic locations but finding someone to enforce such crimes is tough. He claims that someone breaking into a high level account (government official/celebrity/etc) or using stolen credit card data, etc. can all of a sudden make this a very trackable crime.
• Letting a hacker onto your computer is not a good idea…
• Letting a hacker onto your network, even worse idea. I witnessed numerous accounts popping up all coming from my IP address. In a bad world X could have easily made it look like I was the point man here.
• Change your default router logins! X jumped on mine and opened it up.
• There are ways to protect yourself better.
• Always keep your files backed up.

Now That I Know

Now that I know what is possible and how it happens I can protect myself a little bit better. I’m never going to make the statement that I couldn’t be hacked because like I mentioned everyone can, but knowing the means/methods/reasons really helps you safeguard yourself a little better.

I told Mr. X that if we had a go again he wouldn’t be so lucky. He said “Are you sure when I stick a Verizon sticker on my truck and show up in a hard hat that someone won’t let me in to look at your network router?”.

Well played Mr. X.

I would make the recommendation that if you have never practiced any penetration testing (the process of someone trying to break into your accounts) you should. Find your vulnerabilities, and fix them. This process is typically very expensive, at a corporate level I get quoted about $5k for external testing, and $5k for internal testing. I would recommend you find some computer science student, look for a shady hacker style one, and ask them to do it.

Project X

Back to our original discussions, now that I’m in the know a little bit better we are working on putting together a guide to help people prevent these attacks. My goal is to finish this guide first because X is also working on a guide to show how he goes about the process. The ying and yang of security I guess.

If you have any good stories about computer security feel free to share below.

I’ve seen the awesome “Hello Bars” on tons of websites before and always wanted to play with it. The other day I had a situation where I needed it for a site I was working on so I browsed on over to hellobar.com and to my dismay I saw I needed to pay for it, a monthly fee per impression. This really made me back off because I was kind of expecting a wordpress plugin that I could install on a bunch of my sites for one low time price.

Hello Bar

Now the Hello Bar looks like it has some really cool features onto it, but to be honest, I can’t imagine myself taking advantage of the split testing options too much on the particular site I was working on. As I was looking at the bar I really thought, “this thing could be easily recreated”. Now the A/B testing results, that would be a little bit more time consuming, but the basic design, maybe a half hour or so.

Of course someone had beat me to the punch. I found several people copying the content almost exactly. One I thought would be a nice share was on All Blogger Tricks. He replicated a Pure CSS clone of the Hello Bar. You should definitely check it out if you were looking to use a free Hello Bar on your websites. He even explains how to add it as a WordPress text widget.

I would recommend to make the small change in the CSS on the line for ‘#abt-hots‘, the drop shadow (box shadow) is too strong, I would modify it to ‘box-shadow:1px 1px 5px 1px‘. This will make it a little more like the original.

Is This Like Pirating?

Hello bar was in no way the first to ever put a bright colored bar at the top of your webpage. They did brand it very nice and I still think its a great product, just I wasn’t willing to pay for it when I knew I could recreate it so easily, and their value added features didn’t beat the cost comparison in my head. I think I remember reading that the guys over at Crazy Egg acquired Hello Bar a while back. I personally subscribe to paid plan at Crazy Egg even though there are free alternatives out there. In that case, the product provided value to me vs the alternates.

Another Friday another funny failed campaign. Who would’ve thought that people wouldn’t sign up for CPA offers just because it had their favorite TV Show actors on it?

A while back I was working on some projects on my computer and my wife had a friend over. It was a young girl she used to baby sit who was probably 18-19 at the time. My wife is about 7 years older than the girl or so. I was a little surprised that they, well they had A LOT of things in common. One of which was they loved watching the TV show ‘Glee’. The show itself follows a diverse group of kids who sing in a glee club at their highschool.

Seeing that there was a pretty diverse range of people who were really into the show, I thought it might be a good area to target some ads to.

I opted for PPV pops to promote some different campaigns. Unfortunately Glee kind of has a diverse following, so I really wasn’t sure who or what to make ads about. The demographics according to sites like Quantcast show that Fox.com in general has higher women visitors and ages 18-34 are their major demo.

So I did what anyone would do, pushed a bunch of different landing pages and wanted to see what happened.

The Landing Pages

Whenever I am testing campaigns I have a goal. Test as fast as possible for the least amount of work needed. Hence you have extremely crappy landing pages just trying to judge interest. If things work well, then I usually crank out better copy, better content, etc. The idea here is, I don’t want to waste time on something that isn’t going to work. So below are my super amazing 5 minute landers.

Biz Opp based landing page.

This Business Opportunity lander was a pun on the character Puck’s side business in the show of cleaning pools. I wasn’t expected much from this one, but you never know until you test it.

Geo Tagged Dating Landing Page

This was the lander I had the most hope for. It was a dating lander which used the Maxmind Geo scripts to dynamically find the user’s city (in my case “Groton”) and add that into the copy. The lander also had numerous nuances of the show in it, referencing Lima, OH, etc. This was the top performing click through landing page. As a side note, this lander targets singles who are women. So you already potentially cut your viewers in half. I also ran one targeted to males.

Penny Auction Landing Page

I never really pushed Penny Auctions but thought it was a good offer to try and send some general audiences to. Sadly the viewers disagreed. This offer had very little traction.

Stats

Of the six various offer landing pages I created I didn’t generate a single lead. Click throughs were extremely low.

Glee Landing Page Stats (landing page | Views | Click Throughs | CTR)

Landing page #2 was the highest CTR so I let that one continue on for more impressions and still had no luck.

Why It Failed

I really didn’t have the highest hopes when I launched this campaign. It was kind of on a whim and I really didn’t put much work into it. I didn’t really research the demographics as well as I should have and I was targeting people by URLs like Fox.com/Glee . I think people more familiar with the TV niches would easily explain that when people are going to URLs like that, they aren’t in a ‘browsing’ mode where PPV pops can interrupt them as well as other niches. More than likely the users visiting my various URLs were trying to watch episodes and if anything I should have been being pushing them to some sort of internet TV offer.

Also Check Out

Be sure to check out last week’s Fail Campaign Friday: Ray Lewis Super Bowl Ads!

So a long time ago I ran a few instances on this blog I called ‘Fail Friday’ where each Friday I would share a failed campaign with people. It was pretty fun discussing failures of epic proportions or showcasing a stupid niche you thought might work but never did. It got a lot of great feedback and I thought it would be fun to bring back.

The Campaign

In the early part of the 2012 NFL season I had some easy money coming in every Monday from Football ads on Facebook. It was a really cheesy campaign to get people to sign up for a NFL Jersey email submit. The offers ranged from $1.25-$3.00 per lead from various networks, eventually finding a network’s offer that worked. This was really important because I tested nearly identical offers from 6 networks, until eventually finding one I could average a $0.19 EPC on.

Example of an NFL email submit

These leads kind of dried up after a few weeks and so I stopped running campaigns like this. Then when the Super Bowl was coming at the beginning of February of this year I thought it would be a great time to ramp this campaign back up by running more ads on Facebook.

From running similar campaigns I was aware that with enough volume I could get to a low $0.10 CPC with this US based traffic.

The Ads

So here is what I did, basically grabbed a few different pictures of Ray Lewis from the Baltimore Ravens crying like the little baby he is. Threw some colored bars with text over it and then created multiple variations of the ads.

I KNEW from previous ads, that you need a KILLER CTR on Facebook for a campaign like this to be profitable. So I used some custom software I build to auto generate ads for me.

What was really cool is I needed each ad to do a few specific things.

• Target ONLY Men in the United States (sorry ladies, not everyone is Amanda Orson)
• Make a UNIQUE ad for every single NFL team’s fans.
• Target each ad to only those fans and use a usable name in the ad.

Fortunately for me, like I mentioned the other day, I have a really great Facebook Bulk Uploader that I made that can do all of this for me. I simply uploaded my images, set my specs, and then entered each Likes & Interest,  IE: #New England Patriots, #New York Giants, #Philadelphia Eagles, etc. Then I opted to place the team names in both the Ad Titles and the Ad Body, so instead of the ads saying “Hey #New England Patriots Fans”, it would read “Hey Patriots Fans”.

Mike’s Auto Generated Ads

Thanks to my uploader I was able to have all these ads generated in about 30 seconds or so. In total I generated over 300 ads to try and find ones that would work.

Why Upload So Many Ads?

Well there really wasn’t a need for so many variations, but bottom line, the timeline for this niche to be successful was probably going to be under 24 hours. So I had to have every single ad submitted before the Super Bowl even took place and then optimize once I started the campaign.

So for those wondering, I also whipped up a variation of ads in case the Ravens lost!

Ray Lewis loses ad revisions

The Results

The ultimate failure of this campaign had nothing to with the ads or the offer. I made  a critical mistake when launching the campaign.

Ad Variation Results in Facebook

As you can see all the ads had AMAZING CTR. They were definitely on a quick path to being below $.10 CPCs. I’m sure the FB experts can quickly spot the issue I ran into.

I DID NOT SEPARATE EACH AD INTO A DIFFERENT CAMPAIGN!

So although I had all these other team variations, a lot of them were not getting impressions because Facebook wanted to keep sending impressions to the top ads in the campaign. With the Super Bowl getting over sometime close to 10:00-11:00PM EST (I can’t remember the exact time) it wasn’t too good of an idea to be sending your impressions to east coast markets.

The campaign was instantly profitable but I was unable to optimize as I was at a friend’s house watching the game. Then as impressions dragged on the campaign hung out overnight as it was struggling to deliver east coast impressions while leaving all my others sitting at zero impressions.

The next day, CPCs started climbing and the offer stopped converting.

Campaign dead.

Moving Forward

From this experience, I learned the hard truth that I’ve had people always tell me, separate ads into separate campaigns. This has never been a problem for me because I typically don’t have so many different interest targeting parameters in a single campaign. Usually my biggest modifier is different images/titles. If one image is performing awesome so the others don’t get impressions, well, that works for me!

I’ve since modified my Facebook Uploader to allow users the option of generating new campaigns for each targeting group, age groups, zip codes, subid, etc. Hopefully I won’t miss out again on such a short timed niche.

My Uploader

I know people are going to be asking about my super awesome uploader. Well its almost ready everyone. I have high level affiliates using it right now and giving me amazing feedback. I’ll probably send out some beta invites to my email list members in the next few weeks before I officially launch the program for public use. If you were interested in staying up to date, be sure to sign up for my email list below.

In late April of last year I found myself wondering what was the next step I could take in some self educating. I’ve always wanted to have a better grasp of web programming but never got around to it. Then one day when I was just making excuses for myself for being too cheap to hire a programmer I made the choice. It’s time to learn to do some coding!

At first I really didn’t know where to look. I know HTML good enough, but I was looking to be able to actually code some logical awesomeness up. I put out a call on Twitter. Got a few responses and got one from @LukePeerfly that was a really good recommendation, to go with PHP. I see Luke crank out all kinds of awesomeness and figured he must be a good recommendation.

So I picked up the book PHP & MySQL The Missing Manuel by Brett McLaughlin. This was a pretty easy book that I really enjoyed slowly reading a few pages at night or during lunch breaks. I never actually finished the book to be honest. But halfway through I felt I had enough knowledge to start to play with my own items and really begin trying to make some fun stuff. Specifically the book really helped give me a great intro into PHP and MySQL databases. I’ve worked with both before, but really was following step by step guides on how to get what I needed done. It was amazing to actually understand how to connect to a web server database and be able to input records and make requests in SQL (structured query language).

Once I picked up enough knowledge to understand some of the lingo it was really easy to look at things that used to seem like problems and be able to imagine solutions. I can’t explain how often I have an idea and I end up just stuffing it away with the thought of “I really don’t want to pay someone to do that right now”. Trust me, with my novice experiences, those days still happen, but now I have a means at tackling the ideas myself.

Few Apps I Made

The very first thing I did was build a Facebook bulk import tool for use with the FB Power Editor. This has been a really handy tool that replaced my old Excel macros when making FB ads. I’m happy to report that I’ve been tinkering with this App for over 6 months and have decided to do a small product launch with it. It’s got some REALLY great functionality…thats really simple, but really useful for us marketers in it. Keep your eyes open for it!

Screenshot of my soon to be released FB App

Next I made a Roulette simulator. I basically programmed in my betting strategies for the casino game, roulette, and let it rip. Its a simple script but it was really useful for recognizing patterns in relation to odds. I’m not saying I have a fool proof system, but it makes it very clear with things like “If I double my bet on a win how many times in a row can I win before I lose my total bankroll”. This was really fun to play with, by the way, after looking at hundreds of tables of color coded and charted data, the answer is 5. 98% of the time I would not have more than 5 successful double downs in a row within a 100 spins.

After tinkering with PHP I can definitely say that at a certain point you realize coding something IS NOT the hard part. Trying to make it look pretty, and provide enough easy to follow documentation is the hard part! My apps were done in very short periods of time, trying to show someone (besides me) how to use it, is the real time investment.

Increase Productivity

With basic PHP knowledge I was able to really increase my productivity on a few things. For example, I used to have tons of folders on a web server for every variation of a dating ad I would run on Facebook. Once I learned PHP I had one single file that would look at sent variables for sex/age/country and redirect users from there. This has saved me so much time finding files, copying redirects, setting up split tests, etc.

Working With Databases

Working with a relational database is a very complex science. Luckily, its only as complex as your application. When you start building some larger projects your mind is going to hurt as you begin planning out database tables. Realistically I should really go pick up some good reading materials on Database design concepts, it would probably be a much better use of my time then adding columns every time you forget something.

So Bro, You a PHP Pro Now?

Heck no. I have barely touched the surface. However thanks to a TON of generous programmers out there I’ve been able to buy and borrow bits of code here and there to help me on some of the larger projects. I definitely have a new found respect for all my coding internet brethren. I highly doubt I’ll ever be a master by any means, but definitely feel like I know enough to be dangerous!

Danger Mike, Out!

What an amazing time I had in Vegas. Well except for getting horribly sick, oh and losing all my money, it was a really great time!

I left last Saturday for Las Vegas, Nevada to hit up Affiliate Summit West 2013. In case you didn’t know Affiliate Summit is the premier affiliate marketing conference out there and is held a few times a year. At my first summit I purchased a pass that would let me go check out a bunch of sessions but since then I’ve always opted for the lowest level pass that only gets you into keynotes and the trade show. I’ve always found the most valuable part of attending the summits being the networking places (trade show floors, parties, meetups, etc.).

Fortunately I had arranged a fairly cheap trip which would ultimately free up budgets for my favorite hobby of long term lending to casino resorts. I ended up getting my round trip airfare for free from a credit card and Caesars comped my 4 nights there and gave me a $100 to gamble with. They obviously know their customer well!

Bellagio Fountains

Day 1 – Saturday

After a very tiring 12 hours in airports and airplanes I was anxious to check into my hotel room. Surprisingly enough in line I met the infamous Barman. He told me how I was his favorite blogger and he was really striving to be like me*. We briefly touched upon something that Dr. Ngo had referenced the other day about tipping the hotel staff $20 for a room upgrade.

I was originally scheduled to stay in the Palace tower and upon handing the woman at the counter my license & credit card with a crisp $20 bill sandwiched between I began my pitch. “So I don’t suppose you have any available complimentary upgrades?” We both began to chuckle as she saw the $20 and recognized my pitch immediately. She laughed and explained that she appreciates a tip but she has to earn it first with excellent customer service. After a few minutes of looking she informed me that she had a room available in the newer Augustus Tower for no extra charge.

When I looked online and compared the rates, it was a retail upgrade worth about $200.  Score!

A little later I grabbed some dinner with my friends Sam Rusani, Brian Evans, and Josh Rodriguez. It was nice to catch up since I missed ASE 6 months earlier and its been about a year since seeing these crazy guys in person. After dinner a few of us swung over to the Palms Place where Gabe Cano who I met last year at a roulette table (Networking Can Happen Anywhere!) and some friends had rented one of the awesome penthouse suites out. It was a pretty chill party and funny how many people I’ve been chatting with online showed up and I finally got to meet in person. On a side note, is there a single person from New Jersey that isn’t an affiliate?!? Thanks for the invite Gabe, Derek, & Dino, had a great time and shared some great conversation with all your friends.

View from the Palms Penthouse Suite at night.

Day 2 – Sunday

Being from the east coast I was 3 hours ahead of Vegas time. So when it was 3AM PST I was basically up for about 24 hours. Each time I go to Vegas my sleep schedule gets so messed up. I was only able to sleep for 3 hours before my body refused to stay under.

I made it back over to another penthouse suite at the Palms Place where David Ford from Aff Playbook had invited me to two mastermind events he was holding that day. One on consulting with him and Stephanie Hudson and another specifically focused on advanced affiliate marketing techniques. The consulting mastermind was slick, I think everyone in the room was really excited to see successful marketing consults and learn from their profitable exploits.

The affiliate mastermind after was a solid 6 hours of awesomeness. My mind was completely blown by the talk that CTR Tard rocked out on. If you missed out on this, hopefully next year they do another one and maybe it can compare to this one.

David Ford getting ready to rock out.

There were 8 different types of amazing homemade cookies available!

Penthouse suite view during the day.

“I’m so handsome I put my face on my cards!”

After the mastermind a bunch of us grabbed dinner at the Palms casino and along the way finally ran into this stud. Negbox (NSFW) and I had been chatting online for probably over 3 years now and keep hoping to run into each other. It was great to finally meet up with someone that you’ve been bouncing ideas off and texting useless crap to to for so long. It was great to see how far he had come in accomplishing his master plan (leaving his day job so that he could work twice as many hours working for himself….) um Brilliant!!

After that I hit up the Aff Playbook Meetup that was in the same suite. By the time I got up there the place was already packed. Got to awkwardly introduce myself to a few people, enjoy some drinks, and get to have the rematch of the year! Last year at this very meetup I met Jeremiah Cooper from Wolf Storm Media. We agreed we should play a friendly game of pool on the available table. This friendly game turned into a room wide embarrassment as I had more balls left on the table than there were women in the room. I know what you are thinking, this must’ve been a close game then (WAKA WAKA, Affiliate Joke!). Anyways after last year’s beating I met up with Coop to play again.

Just the 8 Ball Left

It was a hard fought battle and in the end I once again fell. The game was significantly closer this year as the only ball left was the 8 ball. Enjoy your victory WSM…it won’t happen next year!

I left with some friends to head over to the WAM Ads & FreshAds party at a swanky suite at the Palms. They had plenty of ladies around for eye candy and entertainment. They had some really great people there, I was getting introduced to guys from Bing & AOL. Thanks for the great party guys.

WAM / FreshAds Media Party

“Nobody pay any attention to the girl who just ripped off a dress and climbed on the table…”

After returning to the hotel late, it was time to get some serious gambling going on. #17 was lucky for a bit. I hit a nice hand of $20 on it for a $700 payout.

Lucky #17!

This stack was short lived.

Later in the night I stopped by the bar and hung out with Logan Thompson, Luke Kling, Travis Glenn, & Chris Guthrie for a bit. It was pretty awkward when a woman there began talking to us and her pickup line was that Trayvon Martin was her brother…yes…oh and Aliyah was her sister….awkward as hell.

Day 3 – Monday

I woke up Monday, after a solid 3.5 hours of sleep, and was in total aches and pains mode. I had a horrible sore throat and felt terrible. I thought it was from talking loudly at parties but as the day went on I realized I was coming down with some sickness.

I made it to the trade show floor this day. I enjoyed walking the floor, saying hi to companies I work with and some new friends. The show floor was good sized but seemed a lot smaller than last year when there was two floors of exhibitors (the room may have been bigger though, hard to remember). There were a few really cool booths as usual and some definite duds there. I’m always reminded as I talk to exhibitors how exhausting it can be just standing there all day, a very unpleasant grind.

Busy Trade Show Floor

These guys had a cool booth, it was decked like a VIP lounge and only let members in. Cool angle.

After the trade show I stopped by the Adsimilis meetup. They had a wide spread of food, open bar, amazing staff, amazing pubs, amazing time. Thanks again for the meetup Adsimilis team!

Adsimilis Meetup

For dinner that night a bunch of us grabbed dinner at the new Gordon Ramsey restaurant at Caesars called Gordon Ramsay Pub & Grill. The food was delicious and the company was great. It was funny that everyone at the table was taking pictures of their food and one of our international friends was completely like “what the hell are you guys doing?”.

Gordon Ramsay Pub & Grill

These fries were awesome. The malt vinegar in the ketchup, not so much.

After dinner I was still feeling so crappy from my oncoming sickness that I skipped out on the party scene for the night and just went back to the room for an early night and to do some work.

Day 4 – Tuesday

Tuesday I got up and felt sick still. Before coming to the show I also saw there was the annual Shot Show in Vegas on this day. Fortunately for me at my day job we have a federal firearms license that is needed to get into a show like this.

The Shot Show was HUUUUGE. It had to be like 10 times the size of Affiliate Summit. It was really cool to visit the whole gun industry and learn a bit about it.

I then ended up making it back to Caesars in time for the closing keynote of Affiliate Summit. It was by Tim Ash, and I gotta say, it was awesome!

Tim Ash, ASW13 Closing Keynote

That night I just went by myself to see the Zarkana Cirque Du Soleil show. It was a really amazing show but I felt like I was a little mislead by the ads. They had this weird picture of a spider lady everywhere, so I thought the show was kind of a theatrical performance about her. Instead if was various short skits that led up to some ridiculous acrobatic routines of juggling, trapeze  tightrope, etc. All the tricks were amazing and worth the price of the $100 ticket but it was just a different experience than I had anticipated. I’m really curious to go see some of the other shows now.

Later that night I met up with some co-workers from Massachusetts who also flew in to catch the shot show. The next morning I left for home. I arrived back home and was greeted by a car covered by snow at the airport. Excellent. All in all it was an amazing trip and I really enjoyed meeting everyone and seeing everyone again. Thanks to everyone who was kind enough to share advice on some future projects I am working on, see you all in Philly?

Best Badge Of The Year Award

Haha I had to add a little shout out here to my buddy Tim who came all the way from Sweden to attend the Summit. We got to laugh at all his awesomeness from his awkwardly named tobacco to his hilarious name badge. He is obviously a boss balla!

Rape Tobacco?

STR8 BALLIN MEDIA!

* The barman never actually said any of that. I just wanted to force readers to read the entire post to get to this bottom notation.

If you’ve ever met me you know I’m a story teller. I’m not the most comfortable in silence and I like to hear about everyone’s lives and tell stories of my own. In other words, I never shut up. A lot of times when telling people abut various things I’ve done they ask me “HOW THE HELL DID THAT HAPPEN”. Usually the answer is much less exciting than the event, but still, it goes with the story. So I wanted to do a quick run down of the 3 coolest hook ups I’ve gotten as a benefit from others.

Number 3 – Meeting Troy Clark

Troy Clarke, former President of GM

One of my best friends works in the Social Media industry in D.C. He’s worked for a few great companies in Washington that had a few high profile customers. At the time they were running all the social media for General Motors. As it turns out the then President of General Motors, Troy Clarke, was going to be in Boston, MA for a meeting. The PR agency organized a small private dinner get together with influential automotive bloggers from the state that evening. Having always been into cars, my friend was amazing enough to think of me and got me on the invite list. He even got me a +1 for my friend lol.

Troy was a remarkably down to earth guy and was taking criticisms and advice from the nine of us very well. He spoke very candidly about GM’s strategy, their failures, and how we could help if we were interested. At the time he was probably the richest/most powerful guy I’d ever gotten the chance to meet and those sort of things really inspire you to strive harder in life.

Number 2 – Red Sox Opening Day 2012

Opening Day Tickets

I’m a huge Boston Red Sox fan and frequent Fenway Park during the Summer months. When I was 21 and interning for my uncle he took me to my first opening day game. Opening day was like a normal Red Sox game on crack, I loved it. I’ve since gone to every opening day game except two, one I had just started a new job, and another I went but couldn’t buy tickets (cheapest ones were $400 for standing room only) so I sat outside in a bar with my dad watching the game.

In April of 2012 opening day was fast approaching and the company I work for has 4 season tickets. Me and a few cohorts had been jokingly dropping hints to the president for months that we were planning on him giving us those tickets. In the end the senior team there did give me a ticket, all four. I opted to take some of my closest friends that I worked with. We had great seats and got to watch an awesome game, and start a miserable season off great!

Fortunately, I have a severe gambling problem and I ALWAYS buy a 50/50 raffle ticket that they do to raise money for the Boston Red Sox Charity. After a few minutes of arguing with my friends I convinced them to each spend the $5 to try and win, we all agreed to split the prize if one of us won. Many many….many beers later it was the 7th inning and we had all missed the raffle drawing. I pulled out my phone that I barely got reception on and called the # on the ticket and heard the winning # and noticed that my friend had that ticket right in his hand. I explained that I thought we just won!

They didn’t believe me and after some follow up phone calls our attention quickly turned from the very close game to celebrating! I took a picture of the ticket and sent it to the Red Sox on Twitter. They came to grab us and brought us upstairs to the swanky Red Sox offices. Now having been in most areas of the ball park, this was awesome to get to see. They had us fill out some tax paperwork and informed us that it was the largest jackpot they had ever had, today’s 50/50 had brought in over $16,000.  Yahtzee!

They wanted to take some promo pictures of us so they brought us up onto the famed Green Monster (best seats in the park if you ever get to go!) and snapped some shots. It was a great day, won money, Red Sox won, pefect day!

On Top of The Green Monster

They Even Put a Picture of Us At Their Charity Sales Desk

Number 1 – The Playboy Mansion

A lot can be said about failed affiliate CPA Network, Epic Direct. One thing is for sure though, these guys knew how to party!

This was one of the craziest things I’ve ever gotten to do in my life. They flew me out to L.A. Put me up in a nice hotel suite. Threw like 3 mini parties before the mansion party. Got to meet with all kinds of amazing people. So much happened during this crazy weekend, but many of us took a vow of secrecy, so I’m afraid I can’t go into details too much. There was a lot of grotto swimming, trapeze acts, ladies getting more comfortable, etc. For the record there were many taken men, like myself, who had a great time partying without any…touching. Others, may not have been so innocent… For months after this, all my friends and family kept asking, “what was it like!?!” “OH MY GOD YOU WENT WEAR?”, the whole thing was pretty surreal.

Mike Chiasson at the Playboy Mansion

What great hook ups have friends and colleagues gotten you!?!

Please share, I gotta know!

Back when I was in high school and first got Americal Online (AOL) I was hungry to download illegal files. MP3s were very popular among people in school, but programs were the things I was really excited about. Many people made it into some sort of contest how many Gigabytes of items could they download. This was well before the music industry really cracked down on illegal file sharing and programs protection methods were really weak.

I never used half of the programs I downloaded but I would always download the latest versions of:

Photoshop 6 (circa 2000)

• Microsoft Office
• 3D Studio Max (now Autodesk)
• Poser
• Microsoft Frontpage
• Adobe Photoshop
• Macromedia Flash (now also Adobe)
• Dreamweaver

Basically my goal was to have the biggest dollar value of pirate software I could, even if I never even launched the program. When I went to college I actually was pretty well versed in Flash and made Photoshop /Dreamweaver a regular part of my day (It is even more so now). For years I had been using a boot let copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) that I had downloaded from some torrent site a while back. A few months ago when I upgraded to Windows 8 I loaded up my external hard drive and was about to install the old reliable CS3 but then thought about it.

I make significantly more money now than I did years ago and maybe it was time to look at purchase the real/newest version.

Welcome to Creative Cloud

Adobe has all kinds of different levels of their Creative Suite that you would have to decide upon, based of which software you needed. Their prices range from $1,300-$2,600 for an entire package. Personally I opted to do the SAAS model where you pay monthly on a subscription basis. I signed up for the $50 a month plan (with a year contract) and now have the newest CS6 versions of everything.

Adobe CS Pricing

Creative Cloud Pricing

The Programs You Get

In addition they have some cloud storage & collaboration features that I’m not interested in using but its there.

Get Adobe For Free

The web was buzzing the other day when it was announced that Adobe was releasing their CS2 product (from 2005) for free to anyone who wanted to download it. Sadly this isn’t quite the case.

What actually happened was Adobe announced it would be shutting down the activation server, so pretty much if you had a serial key that was valid to the program it wouldn’t be able to reach out to a 3rd party to verify it works. Therefore allowing the program to be installed.

So although you can’t quite download it for free legally, no one is really going to stop you.

You can get all the details on this Slickdeals post (serials included).