So today I went through the photos on my camera phone for the first time in several months. All I can say is there’s definitely some interesting ones. Here’s a quick sampling with some explanations.

Random Strip Club - On the way back from the Bahamas last year I got laid over in Washington D.C. Conveniently there was a strip club right next door to the hotel. Bingo……

$4K Slot Cash - While in the Bahamas with AbsolutePoker I won around 5K or something on a slot machine. I think this is what I had left after the strip club…..

Got to Drive a Viper this summer - This is my buddies ride, and it is the sickest car ever. I am buying one of these in the next five years

Random Asian Girl On A Plane - What kind of a weirdo takes a picture of a sleeping Asian girl on an airplane…..

My Crib - From around 2500 feet, my House is in there somewhere….. I live on the street that ends in the circle.

Twin Brother & Hot Athletic Chick - I’m guessing many of you didn’t know I have a twin brother. I’ll entertain side bets on the following. Bet# 1 - Nobody reading this can beat him in any race between one and 26 miles. Bet #2 - I can score with this chick before you, I’ll bet the house on that one.

The Crew- These are the people I dominate in poker, yahtzee, and ping pong. You may recognize the the dude with his eyes squinted from a few 1980’s adult videos….Nice work JB, welcome to the interent.

Ryan Mcrea (future rock star)- I rented a place with this kid and partied alot when I was in my early twenties. He has been asked to open for Nickelback and is recording an album next month. You heard it here first, the next Howie Day/ Dave Mathews. Click on the link to here a shitty acoustic version of my favorite song.

Ryan Mcrea - Dance

And Finally a farewell to this week from me to it - This pretty much sums it up. Have a great weekend

I admit it. This week I have been a very lazy affiliate and have been napping on both my blog and PAW the last 3 days. I am actually in the process of acquiring some kick ass domains that has consumed quite a bit of my time. If I get these I am confident they will result in at least 100 new real money players per month to a couple different poker sites. I imagine that number could be much higher, although I really don’t know what to expect at this point. I’ll keep you all posted…..it could be very exciting

Aside from the potential acquisition of these two domains, this week has been exceptionally frustrating. As many of you know, the server that PAW resides on is a piece of shit. I really need to get that moved ASAP, but unfortunately I am not the techie at PAW and I’m depending on others to do these things. Likewise, although the PAW Network is kicking ass and growing each month, we had an issue with the scraping of PartyPoker stats. PartyPartners changed their backend and our scraper was scraping the PMP’s and showing them on our end as real money players.

Nonetheless we paid out affiliates CPA’s for sending play money players…….Oops. Our team is actually very good about auditing the numbers each month. But PartyPoker somehow slipped by. In my opinion mistakes like this shouldn’t happen as they are costly to the sites overall revenue. Being the director of the site I take full responsibility, but shit that just sucked Monday night when I got that news.

In industry news, one of the largest SportsBooks had a worse day than I did on Monday. If I were the idiot who filed the bogus lawsuit, I would be a bit nervous. Messing with a multi-million dollar offshore gambling operation for some reason doesn’t sound safe. Can you imagine being one of the guys at 1st Technology and hearing this song come on the radio if you were out to dinner ANY TIME in the next few days.

In regards to my napping, I think everyone in this business needs to take a few days every once in a while to step away and reflect. With that said I have been golfing the last two days. Normally I would work late at night on the days I golf. But even better, I spent the evenings watching movies and eating root beer floats with my wife and kids.

For the last few years it has not been uncommon for me to work into the wee hours of the morning. Lately however this is getting old. Oh wait, actually I am getting old. I am considering changing my sleep schedule a bit and getting to sleep at normal hours, and try to be up around 7:00 A.M. every day. I normally wake up now around 8:00 - 8:30. This sucks however though if you go to bed after 2:00. I know this defies traditional “poker hours”. But fuck it, I am not a poker player. I am a business person that dabbles in online poker.

Tonight I am shutting off the laptop again. I ordered a video on DVD called Loose Change that I am going to watch with the wife. I normally don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but I watched some exerpts from this video and it looks interesting noneteless.

Courtesy of JS from www.KickAssPoker.com who posted the original link to the Loose Change Video on Google Videos. I’ll be sure to give a report in tomorrows blog post.

Every year I play in a fantasy football league with a bunch of friends. The guy who runs it, John is my next door neighbor and one of my best friends. He is also a Green Bay Packer fan, meaning he is going to have a really really long season.

Anyhow, our draft went off as planned on Saturday. We have fourteen guys in the league and we collaborated in a living room drinking beer and making picks for 3 hours. Our league is heavily weighted on defense on quarterbacks. I had 6th pick so that is somewhat of a tough spot. As much as I wanted the Bears defense, from that pick it might be hard to justify.

Well lucky for me, the die hard Bear fan that had 5th pick took them and made my decision even easier. This is a pretty cool league as everyone takes it quite seriously and each week there is a ton of smack talk and competition. Not too mention the winner in this league scores around $700. Last year I took 3rd place just missing the championship game. Overall I am quite pleased with my draft and I am looking forward to a big year. I am a little weak at WR, but I have the #1 Defense, #1 Quarterback, #1 Kicker……………as George Bush would say, that there is strategery!

Here is my overall draft for the 2007 MooseKnuckles Squad. Bear in mind it gets tough with 14 people and 16 rounds. And yes you read that right…..the name of my team is The MooseKnuckles.

How can I possibly go wrong with this lineup!

Monday Rants

1. Let’s see what else is new for a Monday. Actually today was quite shitty for a few reasons that I’d rather not share in this blog (business related). Sometimes it just amazes me though how fucking stupid people in the online gambling industry can be. For an industry that literally rains money and turns regular people into very wealthy individuals, it never ceases to amaze me how stupidity can also run rampant.

2. My next rant is DMOZ; I have been saying that DMOZ is rubbish for years. And finally the corruption has come full circle with Shoemoney’s post. I have been trying to get PAW a DMOZ listing for years however was not willing to pay for it either.

3. Kinkos faxing - The fax machine in my office is broken so I went to kinkos to send a 15 page domestic fax. It cost me just shy of $20. That’s one hell of a mark-up for a .72 phone call.

4. Hostgator - If you know anything about me or my business, then I’m not going to explain.

On a more positive note though I cashed out $1000 from the PayTru Pokerstars debit card today. Holy shit, that must mean I actually won some money somewhere along the line. My buddy Ryan has also been in town the last week. He is from Vermont and a really kick ass musician. I have gotten to watch him perform a few gigs here. He is heading back to the East Coast tomorrow morning so I am going to take him out tonight and probably have a few beers. The only way my day could have a better ending would be if I come home really late from the bar and my wife is waiting up in bed for me wearing some sexy lingerie.

On that note, I am becoming delirious and it’s 5:00. Time to call it a day.

I often hear this question asked on various affiliate forums. “If you were just starting out and only had $100 to spend, how would you spend it?”

It is interesting to read the responses. But in my opinion, if you are just starting out and only have $100 to spend, you are what I like to call “fuct”. I’m sure that’s not what most new affiliates want to hear, but it is true. Not that you can’t turn $100 into hundreds of thousands, but even asking the question about what you should do with the $100 is the wrong approach.

If you start with next to nothing and somehow build an affiliate empire, it is going to have absolutely nothing to do with that initial hundred bucks. You will have that empire because you busted your ass and put in hours, months, and maybe even years building it.

If you only have $100 to spend, forget about the money at this point. Your time and effort holds way more value. Even though I have done very well over the years in affiliate marketing, I once started out with nothing in this business. Everyone starts out their first day as an affiliate with $0 coming in. The biggest piece of advice I can give to someone with only $100 to put into their new affiliate business is to research and learn. I remember when I first started promoting PartyPoker. The first month I made $200-$300 I went out and bought 250,000 hits to my WSOP website from some traffic seller. Hell, even if I converted 1% of the traffic I was going to be balling. That dream lasted for about 2 nights.

It wasn’t until about 4-6 months into this business that I realized the only way I was going to “live the affiliate dream” was by hard work and lots of hours. Once I dedicated every waking minute to that shitty Compaq Presario desktop in my “put together” office I started seeing results. Many of these results came from research and emulating what other successful affiliates had done. Sure I had to spend money to make money, but the growth was coming from trying new things and learning from my failures along the way.

With that said $100 doesn’t make a bit of difference in the beginning. Mind you it is WAY harder to start up now days then it was back then. But here are a few things I would do if I was starting out that are 100% free.

1. I would get a free page at squidoo

2. I would study and learn SEO for months. Then I would optimize this page to rank well for a high paying CPA poker bonus code.

3. Next I would become a super active member at one of the big internet “general forums” such as EbaumsWorld. <—-Just an example.

4. Once I developed the rapport in this community I would offer to host a freeroll tournament at a poker site and throw in $100 to the winner, or make it a fun prop bet. Regardless just something fun that doesn’t make you look like a spammer or affiliate marketer. Remember you have to be a trusted and liked member in a forum for this to fly.

5. Build another squidoo page just for this tournament. Make it fun and sell why all the members should be playing on this. Even better contact the forum owner and offer 1/2 the CPA revenue for them to help pimp it to the members. Webmasters love money and this will keep you in good standings.

6. After the tourney if you made even a decent amount of money from the CPA’s now you have (2) revenue sources with both squidoo pages.

7. Use this money to hire a designer from a freelance forum to build you a sexy poker site with a nice CMS (content management system)

8. Repeat the SEO techniques you learned from the squidoo pages, but now you have a custom CMS where you can add multiple pages every day.

9. Never stop researching, learning, and keeping up on the trends in our industry. Once you reach the top, stay on top.

10. After all this, go buy a new house, a Lexus, and a Rolex. And by all means, swear never to go back to being a monkey in Corporate America.

The bottom line is that if you want to be a full-time affiliate, it takes a ton of hard work and lots of hours. Working in a cubicle for a 3% annual raise for the rest of my life sounds miserable and God willing I will never have to go there again.