Thank Coffee It’s Monday

In a weird fact about me – up until this year, I’d never drank coffee. Not once. About 70% of North American adults consume coffee on a daily basis, yet I’d never touched the stuff.

I grew up in Scotland, so I basically grew up drinking tea. The smell of coffee also repulsed me. I’d see people waiting in line at Tim Hortons, talking about they were addicted and needed their fix to get going for the day and I just laughed. That’d never be me.

But it is now.

I first consumed coffee earlier this year while in Edmonton. I had a charity walk to participate in, and in true Dealer Dan fashion I stayed up till 4am the previous night getting absolutely hammered. Woken up at 8am the next day for this long walk near death, my friend basically crammed a half hot chocolate, half coffee concoction down my throat. That got me through the walk, and was my first taste of coffee.

I never touched the stuff again until Mexico, when a business partner(Scott) convinced me to join him in a frappucino with baileys. I had a couple of those during the trip but that still wasn’t fully being a coffee drinker.

During one business meeting after Mexico we headed to Starbucks where he convinced me to get a frappucino. I did, and enjoyed it even before we snuck some baileys into it. A week later, another meeting and this time he got me to try a Tim Hortons Ice Cap. This one really hit me – the caffeine in those is strong, and I was buzzing for a good hour or so after it.

Last Sunday we met up to set up his home office, and in between setting up dual monitors, watching football and drinking beer he made me a coffee. The intention was to have Baileys in it but he filled it too much so I had my first pure coffee drink ever(A Tim Hortons K-Cup), as I had to make space for the wonderful Irish cream. I was stunned to note that I actually enjoyed it.

Last Wednesday was the big day. Around 10:30am I was starting to feel sluggish. I’d been up late watching my friend Jay Farber crush the poker tables as he proceeded to go heads up at the WSOP Final Table. I was feeling very sleepy but had a busy day ahead of me and couldn’t really afford a nap.

So I headed into the kitchen, made my first ever coffee and went with “double double” because that seems to be the most common.

And holy crap I loved it.

For the hour before drinking it, I was just sitting there staring at this organized to do list, with no idea where to get started. Before I knew it shit just HAPPENED – I was just crushing it, hammering through one thing after another.

Awesome.

Since then, it’s became part of my daily routine. 10:30am = coffee. 2:30pm = coffee. I went out for lunch earlier this week and had a couple of beers. Usually that means my day is shot as I just can’t be bothered working. However I came home, had 2 coffees and boom – ready to rock.

Oh coffee, where have you been all my life?

The true greatness of this new love is yet to come however. You see – where I live there is only one fast food place. KFC. Which also happens to be the only fast food place I hate with a passion. I’ve lived in this house for about 13 years now, and KFC has been across the street ever since I moved in, just taunting me. I’ve ate it only once since living here, and I threw it up quickly after.

It got so bad that on Tuesday evenings I’d refuse to go outside, simply because the smell of the chicken due to the “Toonie Tuesday” special would make me nauseous.

So for 13 whole years, KFC has sat there just laughing at me. And on the same week that I started drinking coffee? Well I went outside Thursday morning, to see KFC had a big “Closed” sign on it and people were busy taking all the signage down.

Why? Why because it was purchased by another company.

Tim. Freaking. Hortons.

Last week may have been the best week in my life.

Wow:

I just wrote 733 words about coffee. I’ll let you in on a little secret: I snuck one 20 minutes ago after waking up. Can you tell?

You Don’t Know Jack:

Here’s the problem when you are a long-term affiliate marketer; you get confident in your abilities. Too confident. When you launch new websites it’s such a smooth process, because you think you know it all.

But you don’t.

Here are two landing pages based on the NHL both from Bodog:

Landing Page A is a typically great landing page. It’s got a really nice traffic related graphic, a catchphrase, a bonus offer, a nice CTA button, and a simple step by step guide all above the fold. Pretty much the ideal landing page.

Landing Page B is a list of the current hockey lines available at Bodog.

Now if you asked me what the best landing page is – well, my first answer would be “It depends”. Because it does. It always does. However from an overall perspective, I’d say “Landing Page A Hands Down”.

Yet on BetNHL.ca, Landing Page B is currently outperforming Landing Page A by 25% over 6 weeks of split testing.

Now that doesn’t mean Landing Page A sucks. Because it doesn’t. It’s a tremendous landing page. But it’s just a good reminder that you can never trust your judgement; you have to test shit out. Constantly.

I’m a big believer in knowing your audience and Getting Inside the Visitors Head. But again – a lot that is just educated guess work. By split testing you get to learn more about your audience, plus gain some cold hard facts about what works and what doesn’t.

In next weeks T_IM I’ll talk a bit more about this and my thoughts on it. But one thing you need to take away from this week is that if you think you know something – you don’t. Always question yourself. Everything you do – even if it’s successful; look at ways to make it better.

Because 99.9% of the time, you can.

Dumbest Promotion of the Year?

I love marketing in all it’s form. From the superbowl ads all the way down to your local grocery store flyer. I like to look at the deals going on, the product placement within the flyer, and think about why they would place this item on the front page, why they’d bury this item on the 4th page, and pay attention to all the buzz words they use.

In my head, I picture a team of expert marketers all arguing and debating over this flyer all week. In most cases it’s probably just an intern with a warezed copy of Photoshop.

There’s one promotion that occurred over the weekend by a couple of big box stores, that I just can’t wrap my head around. I’ve tried. I’ve talked to many people, thought about it a lot and read various opinions.

And I still don’t get it.

Future Shop & Best Buy up here in Canada ran a promotion: bring in ANY current gen video game, and trade it for Call of Duty Ghosts, Assassins Creed 4 or Battlefield 4.

Read that sentence again. ANY freaking game.

Let’s use Call of Duty Ghosts as an example. This game came out last Tuesday. On its first day, it sold probably about $450,000,000 worth of copies. In one day. With tax in Canada, that’s almost $70 each person paid for it.

3 days later, people were able to buy it for about $1, the average trade-in value of the games being traded in. And this wasn’t just Ghosts – there were two other practically brand new games as well.

What? Why? Why in the hell would they do this? It makes no sense. It wouldn’t help brand loyalty. For every 1 person who managed to snag a copy, there was about 5 people who lined up in the cold for 2 hours and got jack. Promotional campaign to get people in their stores? But then they forced everyone in this awkward line along the exterior of the store, not allowing them to browse.

We’re just days away from the launch of the next-gen systems, and the CEOs just decided “Hey, we need to get our hands on about 1 million copies of NHL 07 for the XBox 360!”.

I just don’t get it. I’ve heard conspiracy theories about this somehow screwing over EB Games – but all I know is I’m going to be paying a lot of attention to these companies over the next little while to figure out exactly the reasoning for this promotion.

Maybe the old Blackberry CEO took over or something.

Kids Say The Darndest Things:

My 10 year old son Mason has been using my Skype account to chat to his friends. No big deal as it’s only when he plays Minecraft with them, and he talks to them on the phone first.

He got a new girlfriend a few days ago, and he added her to Skype. This got annoying real fast, because she didn’t seem to comprehend the statement “He isn’t here. He is out all day.” She’d keep trying to video chat with me, and keep messaging me “brb” and “back” and “I just ate a cheese string.” This is a 9 year old girl for christs sake – I’m pretty sure just by having her on my friends list I am committing some sort of felony.

So I told Mason last night he had to get his own Skype account, and I asked him what he wanted his nickname to be.

My son, for chatting to a bunch of 9-10 year olds including his 9 year old girlfriend wanted the following name:

“Creeperman.”

Be sure to stay tuned for next weeks T_IM.

Thank Bail It’s Monday.

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This article, as are all articles on AffiliateBible.com, was written by Graeme aka "Dealer Dan". Graeme currently resides in Kingston, Ontario and has been running his own internet marketing business since 1996.

This article was written on November 11, 2013 however all articles are looked at on a monthly basis and updated to keep them relevant.

If you need to contact Graeme, please see his Contact Page. If you are an affiliate manager wanting promoted please see this page.