During this time I have experienced multiple failures as well as a few great successes.  I have made a lot of money on the successes, but at the same time I have taken some pretty brutal losses on the failures.  Welcome to the life of an entrepreneur, it’s never an uneventful journey.

Similar to a high stakes poker player, being a serial entrepreneur you have to expect, and be mentally prepared for many swings throughout your career.  You also have to be willing to assume a level of risk that 99% of your friends could never imagine.  When starting out, you have to be willing to risk your last dollar into something if you have conviction that it will be successful.  It is virtually impossible as an entrepreneur to become a millionaire without this type of attitude.

With all that said, there are not too many projects I work on these days that give me the entrepreneurial goose bumps.  In fact, out of 100 different business ideas or investments, I can think of maybe 3 or 4 throughout the years that I have been as excited about as what I am working on now.

I have never been more confident in something as I am in the success of what I will just call “Project V” for now.  Getting back on my own and being the CEO of my company is the best move I have ever made.  I have assembled an amazing team of individuals at Empire Marketing, and this is a primary reason I have 100% confidence in what we are building.

As you all know, I have always been a firm believer in surrounding yourself with successful people.  This principle is especially important when founding an internet start-up.  You are only as good as your weakest link.

I keep speaking in the forums, in this blog, and on the radio about innovation for one reason.  I want everyone to realize that it doesn’t matter where you’re at right now, what you have failed at in the past, or what your net worth is.  Everyone has the ability to create their own destiny and make big things happen regardless of circumstances.

A wise man once said the following:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge”

Albert Einstenin

I wanted to share from a personal standpoint on why I believe this “soft launch” has been so successful, as well as exactly what I have done to make it successful .  Hopefully other entrepreneurs reading this article can take some good advice and information from my experience.

For starters, the site is only about 10% launched.  The forums are essentially the only part of PAL that is live right now.  So as you can imagine, my main focus behind the scenes is on getting the main site prepared.  The private / invite only forums are a concept that is completely new to the poker affiliate industry, and one that I have been thinking about for several years.  This concept allows a small group of top producing and ethical affiliates to come together in a private community where we can share great dialogue and conversations.  The only way new members can join is by being invited by other quality affiliates.

This new concept to the poker affiliate industry will ensure the integrity of my personal site and community, which is paramount to me.  Whenever I put my name on something, I will settle for nothing less than excellence.

Since getting started in the poker affiliate industry almost six years ago (I know, that makes me a dinosaur), I have worked hard to surround myself and learn from others more successful than me.  And at the same time, I have shared my knowledge and spent countless hours helping people less successful than me.  Some of these guys I have mentored are now making 10X what I make each month!!! Where do I send the consulting invoices to???  And you ballers know who you are!

But the point is, and I don’t think it’s a big secret, I have busted my ass over the last five years to build my personal brand, guide others to success, and to nurture hundreds of relationships with poker affiliates.  Whether it was selling an Ebook in 2005 while corresponding with affiliates on an InvisionBoard forum, or founding what is now the worlds largest poker affiliate network at PAW, I have always made myself available free of charge to help my fellow affiliates.

Can having 300+ contacts on Skype, 100+ on Linked In, 350+ on Facebook, 400+ daily blog readers, and of course 10 different email accounts be cumbersome and time consuming, YES!!!  Trust me, my wife won’t even use my laptop because of all the orange skype boxes that pop up every few seconds.

Nonetheless, I attribute this commitment I have had to affiliates over the last half a decade to much of the success I am seeing right now at PAL.  I guess it’s like a pay it forward thing, and why I have gotten such good support from my friends in the industry.

It’s crazy, last Thursday when I decided to “soft launch” this new concept of a private invite only forum, I really didn’t know what to expect.  Being a viral marketer though, I always realized the concept of “invites” and how sick it can be.  In retrospect had I known how successful it would be, I would have waited til Mike was done with the main site, oh well, that’s a good problem to have.

I hit up a few of my closest friends in the industry on Skype, maybe 10 or so and invited them to come over.  Every single one of them did, and saw the value in what I was trying to accomplish.  And now, a good majority of the growth at PAL has been from you guys inviting other rock star poker affiliates.  This is purely a community building itself from within.  It’s been a truly amazing thing to witness so far.

I feel after spending some time with both Poker News and PAP over the last couple years, whom by the way I have the utmost respect for both these organizations, that it’s just time for me to get back to being an Entrepreneur / CEO and running my own business, as well as consulting company.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Thank-you guys for the continued support in this industry.  If you need an invite to the forums at PokerAffiliateListings.com and we know each other, feel free to drop me an email.  Although I’d rather you ask one of the other members so our community can further grow from within!

I mean let’s be honest, when you rank #1 in google images for Fat Blunt and get “hotlinked” to from hundreds of sites, life must be good!

I think I’ll do more of these posts occasionally as well. I am so bored of writing about poker affiliate content, (more to come on that later).  My new business and project are going extremely well, but I’m feeling a bit brain dead.  I should be able to give a full update on Brandon and I’s radio show this coming Thursday.  Tune in to our poker affiliate life radio show, bitches.  You won’t be disappointed.  Thursday 3:00 P.M.

Anyhow on to the link dumping.  If you want to be dumped on as well, please catch me on skype, email, or hollar at me in the YouPorn live chat with the sentence “I’d like to be dumped on”.  I’ll put your link on deck.  Or link to me with something, and I’ll probably link back in future dumps.

Let the dumping commence:

There are few people that probably live as crazy or fun of a life as me…….Roger might though.  Check out his blog. Personally, I just follow it hoping for more pics to be posted of his girlfriend.  If she were my girlfriend, I would talk her into helping me work on my google images traffic for a “new website” I was building.  Much love for the guy though as he enjoys beautiful women, golfing, and surfing.  He also knows a thing or two about Mac Poker and US Poker Sites.

Ding Ding, next up is the famous “Prince” of poker (not drunken Scotty Nguyen either), I mean hell, Nat Arems Poker Blog is generally known as N 82 50 24.  No shit, Nat is really known by several people in the poker industry as a number.  I wonder if he would “Go Crazy” if he actually heard “The Dove’s Cry”?  He is only one of a few people that can actually be referred to as a number in this world, and probably THE only one in the poker world.  I do have have to dump some link love though as he launched a new site on a killer domain Poker Terms.  Go there now and search my last name (Enke)…..Good stuff

Next up, Randy (Ridge) gets a shout out.  After having a gay reference thrown at him in fantasy football league by a Canadian, he decided to fly the gay flag as his avatar on PAP.  For the record, he is married with a gaggle of kids.  Good thing all your Poker Rakeback players don’t know about your new flag….. I probably wouldn’t fly that outside your house in Arkansas either.

My homeboy TJ knows a ton about online gambling sites, but he also could be the Hollywood Madam of the poker affiliate industry.  How does a kid from Cali know every affiliate in the industry?  If I had TJ’s skype contact list, I would find a way to spam it! LOL.  Nonetheless, TG is a becoming a baller and is always entertaining.  You too can be into attracting Degenerate NFL Betting college kids.  Great sites TJ!

Mike Wittemeyer finally got his poker affiliate extraordinaire blog up.  I imagine this should be a fun blog to follow.  Mike is pretty good at helping web surfers find the best online poker sites.  Unfortunately, he is not so good at staying awake at 4:00 AM after 15 drinks in foreign countries.  Ball out til ya pass out homie!

Just because Brandon Berndt takes his puppy to puppy training every week, he is really not that gay.  If it weren’t for his hot wife who is a great chick (I’d hit it) I probably wouldn’t feel as comfortable co-hosting a weekly affiliate radio show with him.

Now on to (poker69), I am fairly certain Kevin who is a Poker Affiliate and marketing star is much bigger than me, and also benches a lot more than I do.  (I have been working out 1 1/2 weeks).  So with that, go check out his blog.  I won’t comment on your girlfriend(s) Kevin.  Feel free to ship NSFW nudes though.  K, Thanks.

Finally, I got my boy from the ATL who keeps bullets, condoms, and other crazy shit openly displayed on his dresser.  He actually has a better poker affiliate blog than me (probably just setting me up where I’ll be forced to buy it from him someday, and I’ll actually be the one paying the cost). That’s fine though because unfortunately his taste in women is a little lacking as can be seen in the video below.  <—–Holloway dated this girl and produced this video while co-habitating together in the D during 2008.

Please email me if you would like to be dumped on as well.

Hosting an event like this has always been a goal of mine in the industry. I can’t express how happy and excited I am that it went over so well. The speaker sessions were absolutely amazing and the feedback we have received from both affiliates and affiliate managers has been 100% positive.

You can get a full recap of the show by listening to the podcast of our PAP Radio Show last night. We start in on the Poker Conference recap around 30 minutes in.

Enough about the boring details of the actual conference though. Let’s talk about the fun and shenanigans. This industry is unlike any other when it comes to people and partying. I believe we went to clubs every single night, and the earliest we ever went to bed was around 4:30 A.M. The clubs in Cyprus were amazing and the music was awesome. Hearing American music mixed up by the Cyprus D.J.’s with some Euro techno beats was sick.

The only downfall about going anywhere outside the States as a U.S. citizen is that our dollar is fu***** terrible. We went to a strip club one night and I payed €20 for (1) Heineken. MInd you this was a strip club, but the average cost of a beer was around $12-$14 USD. Three of us went to dinner one night for sushi and seafood and it cost €260. The next night our dinner for (6) of us cost €650. I do have to say that although it was expensive, it was worth every penny.

Some of the notable people I spent a lot of time with over the week were Markus “Big Baller” Tandler, Bob Raines, The Indian Princess, Party Poser, and of course how can I forget………… John Holloway. Speaking of Holloway, I would love to get him and Kyle Healey together and challenge them to a contest to see who has more game. I won’t go into details here, but one morning at 6:00 A.M. people were in the pool with random girls they brought back from the club.

Seeing how much of a success this first Poker Conference was, I am already looking forward to the next one. My goal is to have over 1000 people next year, and bring the event to a more central location. Below are a ton of photos Alex took from the conference.

All in all, I am happy to finally be back to work and sitting in my office. Me being without the internet or a phone for 10 days probably should be a spiritual event or relaxation period! Unfortunately it buried me in the amount of work I need to catch up on now.

Ohhhh, and just as a standard tradition, I feel obligated to post a picture of me with a couple hot blonde’s on each arm.

Vol 1 – http://www.facebook.com/album.php?ai…2&id=571421538

Vol 2 – http://www.facebook.com/album.php?ai…d&id=571421538

Vol 3 – http://www.facebook.com/album.php?ai…3&id=571421538

Vol 4 – http://www.facebook.com/album.php?ai…8&id=571421538

Vol 5 - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?ai…c&id=571421538