We will be doing some maintenance on our server cluster starting friday November 21st, at 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time. All of our services may be temporarily down while we work on the servers. The expected down-time should last no longer than 5-20 minutes. This is an advanced notice.

Like last time we have used PHP to help us randomly select the winner of theses three ASW 08 tickets. This script takes 1000 votes and randomly distributes them among all the participants, the top three users with the most amount of events will win the free passes. Below is the official code snippet that was used to determine the winners, this code was ran only once to make this completely fair.

<?  
$lucky[1]["name"] = "musignr";
$lucky[2]["name"] = "Ricardo";
$lucky[3]["name"] = "Nick";
$lucky[4]["name"] = "yebot";
$lucky[5]["name"] = "Mike N";
$lucky[6]["name"] = "Ryan";
$lucky[7]["name"] = "Adam";
$lucky[8]["name"] = "Luke";
$lucky[9]["name"] = "Stefanie";
$lucky[10]["name"] = "Clint Lenard";
$lucky[11]["name"] = "Cogs";
$lucky[12]["name"] = "Jocelyn Myers";
$lucky[13]["name"] = "Wes (MasterlessSamurai.com)";
$lucky[14]["name"] = "Tyler Cruz";
$lucky[15]["name"] = "Tobias";
$lucky[16]["name"] = "josh";
$lucky[17]["name"] = "Sunil";
$lucky[18]["name"] = "Ray";
$lucky[19]["name"] = "Dmitriy";
$lucky[20]["name"] = "Adnan";
$lucky[21]["name"] = "Steve Thornton";
$lucky[22]["name"] = "Lars Callary";
$lucky[23]["name"] = "Mark K";
$lucky[24]["name"] = "Justin";
$lucky[25]["name"] = "josephine";
$lucky[26]["name"] = "Aaron";
$lucky[27]["name"] = "Grant";
$lucky[28]["name"] = "Leitzmedia";
$lucky[29]["name"] = "audax"; 

for ($i = 0; $i < 1000; $i++) { 
    $num = rand(1, count( $lucky ));    
    $lucky[$num]["votes"]++;
}

foreach( $lucky as $key => $row ) {
    printf("%s received %s votes <br/>", $row["name"],  $row["votes"]);
}  
?>

And this is the result!

musignr received 27 votes
Ricardo received 42 votes
Nick received 41 votes
yebot received 44 votes
Mike N received 30 votes
Ryan received 36 votes
Adam received 29 votes
Luke received 24 votes
Stefanie received 32 votes
Clint Lenard received 38 votes
Cogs received 31 votes
Jocelyn Myers received 28 votes
Wes (MasterlessSamurai.com) received 40 votes
Tyler Cruz received 31 votes
Tobias received 40 votes
josh received 40 votes
Sunil received 40 votes
Ray received 32 votes
Dmitriy received 27 votes
Adnan received 27 votes
Steve Thornton received 37 votes
Lars Callary received 40 votes
Mark K received 30 votes
Justin received 42 votes
josephine received 36 votes
Aaron received 40 votes
Grant received 36 votes
Leitzmedia received 30 votes
audax received 30 votes

And the winners are!

• yebot with 44 votes
• Ricardo with 42 votes
• Justin with 42 votes

For those who won please email Wes to get your free pass. Thanks to everyone who participated. Sorry if you lost this contest, as they say better luck next time, but really, we do appreciate all the testimonials you submitted and it means a lot to us. Thank you!

And if you still want to goto ASW 08, we still have a discount code for you. Simply use the code SHAWN100 or MISSY100 to receive a $100 discount off your ASW passes.

If you won, you need to contact us within the next 24 hours or else the free tickets will expire. Affiliate Summit staff has told us if the tickets are not redeemed before friday, Nov 21st, they will no longer be valid, send us an email right away so we can register your free ticket!

Because Ricardo has forfeited his ticket, Nick is now the new ticket holder, who was fourth with 41 votes.

This is a recap of the webinar we did with ClickBooth. Clickbooth Affiliate Marketing Mastery With Tracking202.com"
Wednesday, November 19, 2008 8:30 PM - 9:30 PM EST

Google has just released a new keyword tool, and we absolutely recommend you check it out. We wanted to share it with everyone, the new tool is specifically designed for search marketing, and can actually help suggest keywords based on your landing pages or specific niches. The tool is called the Google Searched-Based Keyword Tool. It is a generally good idea to always try to generate your keyword list off more than one tool, as we've talked about here.

You can do some cool things like see all the keywords in your niche, that have decent volume but low bids by modifying the filtering. Take advantage of the new google keyword tool, you may be able to find some golden nuggets which could explode your search campaigns: http://www.google.com/sktool/#

Keyword targeting can sometimes feel like a guessing game. Potential customers are performing hundreds of millions of searches on Google, most of which you don't even know about. With so many searches, you have to guess which ones might be relevant for each of your landing pages, and hope you find the right audience for your AdWords campaigns. That's where the Search-based Keyword Tool (beta) comes in. With this new tool you can get a better sense of what your potential customers are searching for and which keywords you should advertise on.

Here's the scoop: you know that the Google search engine starts with searches conducted by users and helps them find relevant pages. But for keyword targeting, what you want is a tool that goes in the opposite direction by starting with your pages and identifying keywords that potential customers are searching on to find your products or services. The Search-based Keyword Tool does exactly this, leveraging search query data relevant to your website's content. In other words, this new tool gives you keywords that are highly relevant to your site but are not part of your AdWords campaigns. This helps you take advantage of missed opportunities.

The tool is also useful if you don't currently advertise on AdWords. For example, a shoe store could discover which footwear styles users are searching for, or a digital camera blog could decide which cameras to review by looking at which camera models attract the most queries.

The Search-based Keyword Tool is now available to all advertisers in the US and UK. We'll be expanding to additional languages and more countries in the near future. We'll also continue to develop the tool based on your feedback. Try it out at http://www.google.com/sktool, and let us know what you think.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew

Source

Affiliate Summit has kindly given us three extra passes to giveaway, which we in return will be giving away to a few of our users. Winners will be announced on Wednesday, Nov 11th.

Entering our giveaway is extremely simply. Just leave a short 2-4 sentence comment on this blog post saying what you like about our products, services, support or anything else you'd like to comment on. Please make sure to have no more than 4 sentences, we would like them as brief as possible

These testimonies will be displayed around the site so be aware that you are granting us permission to do so the moment you post your testimony. Of course we can always remove them by request later if necessary.

If you do not win, don't worry your still in luck, because you can use the coupon code SHAWN100 or MISSY100 to receive a $100 discount off your ASW passes. We will have the winners on wednesday, we will be randomly drawing the winner like we did last time.

This contest has ended: The results can be found here.