John Hasson

The contest for a free affiliate summit west 2009 gold pass ends soon.  Winner will be chosen December 1st.  So make sure you enter

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I started playing around with SocialMedia.com again. A few weeks ago I was seeing some good results. Then my conversions stopped. Then I get obviously bogus clicks/data….. here… read this and tell me what you think.  The [REMOVED.... ] are my editing.  everything else is a direct copy from their support site.  Now granted it is less then $50 but still they are being a pain about it.

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This is my first blog contest ever.  I’ll be speaking at Affiliate Summit on “advanced concepts for automating daily website tasks (such as downloading stats, uploading changes, etc.) without access to an API.”

What that really means is I’ll be showing you how to automate some repetivie tasks.  I was thinking of showing you a way to log in, download stats into a spreadsheet or database, etc.  But I figured I’d let you all have some input.  Post in the comments below a particular task you would like to see how automate and whichever one I pick wins a free Gold Pass to ASW09 (means you get to come to my presentation).

Here is an example: Show us how to log into site XXXX and download the daily stats per ad to a mysql database.  (or spreadsheet, etc) or show us how to automatically upload a spreadsheet of ads to facebook, etc.

I’ll be going over a few basic techniques such as automating a webform, dealing with AJAX and so on.  All of this will be done with FREE software.  There will be NOTHING TO BUY to use the methods I’ll be showing in my presentation.

So to win, enter what you would like to see for the example used in my presentation and you win a free Gold pass.

Tags: Affiliate Summit 2009, Contest by John Hasson
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A week or so ago I had a quick chat with one of my readers.  Well the good news is he wasn’t mad and still wanted me to look at his site.  Now, I was going to post screenshots, etc.  But really in this case I don’t think it is appropiate.  I will let you see the advice I gave though:

Couple of things

1) This website is pretty ugly
2) There is no real focus with so many different products

To fix

1) Make it less ugly
2) (and this one is key) when you send someone to a url (I like [http://HIDDENURL] better cuz it doesnt look like a nested frame) don’t distract them.  the primary F (standard webuser eye movement heatmap) on the page has nothing about the offer.  It is all extra navigation stuff that will confuse the user, distract them or make them just close the page.  Get rid of the menu, etc and the header @ the top, move the offer up there so that is all the user sees.

Other things:

Is your content actually unique and helpful to the user? If not you will have a harder time.

He said cool and he would try to make the changes.  So I guess we are cool.  *crosses fingers*

Tags: Advice by John Hasson
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I’ll be going to Elite Retreat again this year.  Yes it is expensive.  Last year was my first year.  At first I wasn’t sure if the connections and the things I learned at Elite Retreat would pay off.  But recently it has paid off big time.  The attendees are very open and the presentations are of real data, not a bunch of marketing fluff.  Imagine somebody saying, “Here is how I make 150,000 dollars net a month” and giving explicit details, and you get a good idea of what goes on.  The attendees are just as good (sometimes better) then the scheduled speakers themselves.  And yeah this is an affiliate link.

See you in San Francisco.

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What I am looking for.  A smart, honest and loyal person who can help run things over here.  Knowing the internet, how to manage files on a computer and a couple of things like that are pluses.  Most anything else I can teach you.  You would be learning PPC management, basic programing and database skills.  I suppose it would feel like an admin assistant position for the first few days/week while you learned how we are doing things.  But then as you started to manage some of the campaigns, etc. and were doing a good job (ie, helping us make more then we are spending on a campaign) you would start to make more money. As things grow you can expect to be moving into a managerial/mentor position as we bring in new people.  The office is in my house on the first floor.  Warning you about that now.  I have toyed with getting an outside office and I might do that in the future, but for now it is here.  Sometimes it will be boring and repetitive, othertimes it will be super exciting.   As far as pay, expect lousy pay ($8+ an hour lousy) at first.  This will be almost an apprentice like role.  As you learn and show how awesome you are, we will be able to pay you more.  Hours?  We don’t do weekend here.  (Well I do, but I don’t expect you too)  I’d guess 8ish hours a day, sometimes more and sometimes less.  Location, Lehi, UT.

So in a nutshell that is what I am looking for.  Questions?  Do you fit this bill?  You want to risk it?  Contact me.

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The joys of parenthood include sharing in their illnesses.  My kids were fine in a day, I was not.  Got to see the Dr again for the first time in about 2-3 years.  They gave me a choice of a penicillin shot or pills for my strep.  I opted for the shot for 2 reasons.  1) Didn’t want to have to do another co-pay @ the pharmacy.  2) Shot was easier then swallowing a bunch of pills for a week or two.– my throat is still hurting like crazy.

So now I am just weak, hurts to talk, *really* hurts to swallow, amazingly sore all over, etc.  (I don’t usually get sick so it is an interesting experience for me)

Luckily I early voted, so no worries there.  I was going to volunteer as a poll worker today but that got canceled since there is no way I can do that w/ strep.  Just a few minor campaign tweaks and stats monitoring then back to bed for me.

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Ok, I tried. Really I did.  I’ve been on OSX for about over a year. Things that bothered me…

1. Firefox sucks on a Mac.
2. When the HFS+ file system decides to go screwy you can waste a day or two fixing it
3. I was spending lots of my time inside VMWare on my bootcamp partition.
4. I already have photoshop 6 for windows and don’t feel like spending a ton on CS3 for the Mac
5. Excel for the Mac blows compared to Excel on Windows.  (Try having really complex charts, and it slows to a crawl on the mac where the exact same spreadsheet does geat in Excel 2003)
6. Games.  Seriously.  Games.  (Not that I play that much, I don’t, but every now and then when you want to test something, rebooting into bootcamp just to try a game (or run photoshop w/o terrible slowness) is just a big pain)
7. I’ve tried Parallels and VMware Fusion. Neither one is awesome.  But they both get the job done, and you can use Visual Studio inside either just fine.
8. That STUPID suspend to crash bug that will NOT go away.

I am sure there is more.  So at this point I had 2 choices.  Sell the macbook pro and buy another laptop or just convert it to mostly XP.  I chose the latter.  So now I have a macbook pro running windows XP as my primary system.  The hardware is still awesome.  And now if I ever have a very rare instance where I need OSX I can just reboot into it… that is probably what I should have done in the first place.

Tags: Advice, Personal by John Hasson
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