I know I have opened up Web2.0 accounts all over the place, some becasue it was the latest greatest others because I wanted to make sure my name showed up in case I wanted to use later. Either way, I'm sure I'm not alone in trying to remember all the sites I have signed up for in the past year. This site… http://knowem.com/ Help you identify if you have already been there or if you have a common name.. if your name is already taken.

Hope this helps you get an idea of the landscape, this can be especially helpful if your a WEB2.0 marketer who is looking to open accounts up based on your target keyword. This is a Howie trick that seems to work since the name usually becomes anchor text within the site and may point to your target URL.

One week ago last Sunday I went to the MEET MARKET at Affiliate Summit in NYC at the NYC Hilton Midtown. It was a smorgasboard of CPA networks all over the place, some I heard of and some I never heard of.

I was in a hunt for a hispanic CPA network (more on that in a future post) and landed a boutique CPA network that specializes in both US and Non US Spanish related offers. There was also some great networking with other marketers and publishers, I ended up finding some interesting products to test for affiliate marketing.

In case it's not clear what I have been up to as of late, I have decided to switch over from consulting SEO and PPC services and spinning over those skill into affiliate marketing and CPA marketing for myself. My focus will be PPC and PPV/CPV traffic rather than messing with the "almighty" Google. One of my biggest clients spends TONS to get their brand out there via Google and for what they get in return I don't see the value compared to the 2 other search engines or the use of PPV/CPV.

Going back to the Affiliate Summit Event, I loved it! It was my first Affiliate Event and it kicked arse, in addition to all the networking I did there were also some parties to further deepen those connections made during the day. I didn't make it to the ShareASale party which looked awesome, I saw some fellow marketers the next day all hung over raving about how much fun they had at the ShareASale party and how many attendees there were and valuable connections that were made.

I decided I wouldn't miss out and I went to the Linkshare party the 2nd day of the Affiliate Summit East. I didn't plan to go to the Linkshare Party it just kind of happened while attending the Offervalut Party held by Mark Roth and Howie Shwartz. I kinda met Howie at an event last year and we got to chat for a sec, I love Howie's sneaky Web2.0 tactics and lots of his content is unique… or at least I haven't heard anyone else promote. It was a great networking party and I ended up meeting a CPA manager from Israel who had some promising offers for me to play with.

Note for anyone who goes to this event, meet as many industry people as you can… you don't know who will have some great advice, insight or insider info that help you drive more sales. I got a few nuggets I am testing right now that look very promising!

Next event for me is AD TECH, I want to get my feet wet in media buying, especially for one or 2 of my big clients that I will keep after I transition to CPA marketing.

Wow, I'm psyched! This coming Sunday Affiliate Summit come to town. I was lucky enough to score a ticket from someone I found online who couldn't make the event and he was super fair about charging me cost and not trying to make a buck on me. Super Cool!

This is my first affiliate related "convention" besides bringing business cards I wonder if I need anything else besides maybe a backpack to carry any papers or gift or any other "stuff" you usually get at conventions.

My outcome for going is to meet with the existing networks I'm already signed on for as well as make new contacts with networks I may not have signed on for as of yet.

My other outcome is to meet fellow affiliates and perhaps marketing icons, I know Offervault's Mark Roth will be there. I didn't get to connect with him last year when I was at live event with Howie Shwartz.

For any visitors that read this before AS kicks off, give me a shout. Look me up on Twitter or Facebook, give me a buzz (number can be found on my Facebook Info page) I'm sure I'm gonna love the event and I'm expecting some great stuff. Thanks for coming by and if you visit this site on occasion, sorry for the 1 month delay in not posting anything. I'm sure I'll have lots to share after the Summit!

Yep, I said bumrush… it's an old term that was used lots when I was a kid. Basically it means mad frenzy which is what happened at 12 midnight today.

Facebook opened the floodgates to they Vanity URL update this evening, what that means is that they are dropping the unfriendly numbers and symbols they used to have.

Apparently there were half a million Facebook vanity URLs snatched up in the first 15 minutes after midnight! Wow, thats a mad rush, hence the word bumrush.

I must admit I didn't research any of this or it's implications and perhaps, just perhaps… I made a mistake. Hate to admit it but I went for a common term that I like to use for getting leads… oh oh, I'm revealing too much

I grabbed affordableseo as my URL, so not you can look me up on Facebook as Facebook.com/affordableseo

Funny part about this is that I'm moving away from the SEO consulting I've been doing and getting into some new ventures. I decided I was tired of trading time for money, especially now that I'm on a big project with a huge fortune 500. All the SEO, PPC and related work I have ever done has been trading time for money.

I thought eventually I would have a VA (virtual assistant) that I would train and teach how to do some of the voodoo I do but that never happened. I basically have just been consulting for the past 5 years and it's time to step into new and greener pastures, especially now that the economy will be going through some major flux for the next few years in an effort to correct all the bad loans and overspending that has happened everywhere.

So anyways, thats another subject, just wanted to say it has been an interesting evening on Facebook with some surprising numbers… comes to show you how important folks hold their Facebook profile to a phrase or name.

I am a huge fan of Amazon's S3 services and recently decided I wanted to mask my S3 share with a sub domain. I did some searching around and found a great post on how to easily get this done.

I'm not going to take that content and repost it here, that wouldn't be fair. But if your looking for a great explaination of how to use your own subdomain to point to your S3 buckets, the go take a look at this set of instructions here…

Tracking anything done online is part of a successful approach to marketing. That said, I have been playing with affiliate marketing as well as CPA and discovered a nice tool to rework you URLS with some id tracking.

Google has a PPC URL Builder that can integrate with Google Analytics. What I like about it is that it's platform independent so your free to use other forms of traffic generation albeit Yahoo or MSN's PPC programs or banner, email etc. By being able to assign different tracking code to the same link it's easy to identify where traffic is coming from.

This is especially valuable if I want to track how my links on my blog are doing, I still have to initiate link cloaking but to add id specific data to it will help further identify where that winning conversion comes from.

The tool is free and if you don't have a plan to track, you can now start on using Googles free tool for URL Building as they call it.

Happy clicking

Just learned about this Google Wave thingy that is being previewed by Google right now at http://wave.google.com/

Seems to me that it's like a portable API that can update like a Facebook conversation on any object. And it has the ability to add folks to the threaded conversation! I love the idea and if it can integrate into existing Web.20 properties such as Twitter or Facebook, it may be a delightful way to centralize all convo's as they happen.

I especially like that communications look like their are in real time chat, that's awesome as well.

So… take a peek at the Google Wave while it's in preview mode because I suspect there will be lots of buzz about it in the coming months.