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STM London & My Plans For March
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New Premium Posts, Plans for 2015 and Good Reads
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Moving to Thailand: Why I’m Going Back

STM London & My Plans For March

In case you haven’t heard, STM Forum is holding a massive affiliate meetup in London next month.

Somebody better call 8 Northumberland Avenue ahead of time — because to the unsuspecting waiter, bar man, or miscellaneous lost Japanese tourist, it’s going to be raining vast quantities of sausage from March 9th.

That’s the opening night of a three day networking marathon that brings together some of the biggest names in our industry.

STM has slapped together a fantastic lineup of speakers, many of which you will recognise from the forum, including:

  • Lorenzo Green (Mr Green)
  • Jordan (stackman)
  • Besmir (bbrock32)
  • Caurmen
  • Dr David Savory (Zeno)
  • Josh Mayne (Maynzie)
  • CMdeal
  • Alexander Tsatkin (The Angry Russian)
  • Tim Tetra (Timtetra)
  • Benjamin Yong (Kokofai)
  • Jim Stark (Jim)
  • Charles Ngo (Dr_Ngo)
  • John Alanis (Johna5150)
  • Alex Willemsen (Scitox)
  • Lars Kroijer (Kroijer)
  • Christian Weselak (Ratalliance)
  • Robert Gryn (Zeropark)
  • Christina Szekeres (FBQueen)
  • Rohail Rizvi (Rohail)
  • Chris Hanage (Papaya Mobile sponsor speaker)
  • An Advidi sponsor speaker TBA

That is a lot of authority in the affiliate space.

Most of these speakers are closely intertwined with the daily struggles of affiliate marketers.

(Unlike some of the speaking lists you see at other conferences, where most of the ‘authorities’ wouldn’t know the language of affiliate marketers if it slapped them square in the jubblies.)

The Schedule

You can see the full schedule of events here, but I’ll summarise the best bits and some important notes:

Monday, March 9th

Monday’s shenanigans are open to everybody, both STM members and the general public. You need to register online before attending.

Registration is free.

After registering, collect your pass between 12pm-4pm on Monday from 8 Northumberland Avenue, WC2N 5BY. You’ll need it for all events.

The highlights of Monday include 3 hours of speeches from industry veterans, and an opening party hosted by AppFlood at Forge Bar near Cannon Street.

I’ll definitely be attending on Monday, so if you want to meet up for a drink (but don’t have STM membership), drop me an email or track me down at the event.

Tuesday, March 10th

Tuesday is for STM members only.

Not a member? Sign up now.

Voluum will be kicking off a networking brunch between 10am and 1pm at the Prince Albert Suite near Regent’s Park.

This sounds pretty interesting.

Attendees will be divided in to smaller groups depending on the type of traffic sources and verticals they run.

Personally, I can’t wait to see what the ‘First Free Find & Fuck’ table looks like…

In the evening, there will be more speeches at 8 Northumberland Avenue, as well as the inaugural STM Awards.

This blog has somehow wrangled a nomination in the Blog of the Year category, despite about five new posts.

There are some excellent nominees in the ‘Success Story of the Year’ category, which will go to the affiliate who has made the most emphatic progress, as seen on the STM Forum. If you need a rocket lit under your arse, I suggest you sign up and read the stories of the nominees.

They are the true stars of the STM brand.

You will find guys who have gone from zero to $XX,XXX/month in profit. And their progress can be followed, in full, on STM.

Of course, you can meet these affiliates in person.

By coming to the event.

Adsimilis will cap the Tuesday by hosting a Games Night at All Star Lanes in Bayswater.

If you are a dab hand at foosball, bowling or Xbox, you can come along and shame your fellow peers.

Wednesday, March 11th

Wednesday is also for STM members only.

The morning starts with paintball hosted by Avazu.

Just reading the description — “We have the ultimate STM twist for this paintball experience but we can’t tell you anything else” — I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds pretty bloody ominous.

  • Guns loaded with acai berries?
  • Capture the laptop (full of campaigns)?
  • Team Affiliate vs. The FTC?

The last time I indulged in paintball, I got — what’s that quaint British term? — oh yeah, absolutely fucking smashed.

I almost ended up on the motorway after attempting my best Rambo impression with less than 20/20 vision and a fundamental ignorance of the ‘Out of Bounds’ signs.

From 8pm onwards, a legion of bruised, battered and hungover affiliates will be tapping up the Core Bar on Queen Street.

Wednesday’s grand closing party is sponsored by Advidi and has an equally ominous 1990s theme.

Come on, suckers.

Who’s gonna bite the bullet and go Full Geri?

Geri 1990s

It’s your last chance to drunkenly extract campaigns network with the best in the industry.

STM is known for putting on the wildest affiliate shows in town.

If you are in London — or willing to travel — this is going to be a HUGE three days that will inspire, motivate and hopefully kickstart your campaigns to the next level.

Sign up to STM today, and register for the event!

Special kudos to the sponsors:

My Plans For March

This blog has been quiet recently. I’ve had to prioritise my business with a focus on training employees, at the expense of splurging my views to you cretins.

Life is busy.

I’m moving to Thailand with my girlfriend on March 14th.

She’s already secured a job in Thailand, and the final arrangements have been made for us to say Au Revoir to the Big Smoke.

We’re counting down the days with a combination of excitement and dread.

  • The excitement of starting a new life in Asia
  • The dread of dealing with final ‘logistics’ while the calendar closes like a spiked ceiling in the Temple of Doom.

Who am I kidding?

It’s mostly excitement.

I have a house full of belongings to shift:

Furniture, appliances, a huge pile of books… a Lazy Spa…

Is there such a thing as owning too much crap? I think so.

I was going to blow a fortune putting my stuff in storage, and shipping over my office essentials — but fuck it, why bother?

There’s a good saying: “The more stuff you own, the more your stuff owns you.”

The only thing I’m taking to Thailand is my clothes — and my dogs (back to their homeland, the expensive little arseclarts).

Everything else is getting sold, donated to charity, or trashed.

Of course, ‘dealing with everything else’, as anybody who has moved house will attest, is a great aphrodisiac… for shitting your pants.

It will be worth it in about 3 weeks!

I can’t wait to touch down in Bangkok.

RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK:

  • In case you missed it, my brand new 2015 edition of Premium Posts is available now. Need a recipe for affiliate success in 2015? You won’t find a single resource that covers as much ground as this. 375 pages of my very best tips and strategies.
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New Premium Posts, Plans for 2015 and Good Reads

Christmas is coming.

I can tell because the seasonal fatty in me aches for Gingerbread latte and industrial-sized buckets of mulled wine.

Now is a great time to be an affiliate marketer.

Mainly because it’s a bad time to be anybody else.

Take the rest of the workforce, for example:

Wake in the darkness, spaz at the cold, wrap in seven layers, power-walk through the black ice to an overheated tube where the chances of catching a nice, hearty flu increase fivefold with every station passed.

Rinse and repeat, Monday to Friday.

The thrill of watching it all unfold from my office window is the pinnacle of working from home.

And if anybody disagrees, trust me — their priorities are all wrong.

I’m only half-joking.

I enjoy London in the winter.

But I’m still excited to get out of here.

My Plans for 2015

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll be aware that I am perennially on the edge of moving somewhere that isn’t London.

I have a success rate of about 20%.

Well, something will have to go seriously wrong for that not to change.

My girlfriend and I are moving to Thailand in March.

We’ll be based in Bangkok, which already feels like a second home.

It’s difficult to explain, but South East Asia has a magnetic pull. Once you get a taste for the food, beaches, pools and blistering heat, you start to ask why you wouldn’t live there if you could choose.

I’ve been three times in the last year. Every time I leave, it’s through gritted teeth and a death trail of mango sticky rice.

The expat community in Thailand is, of course, well known. It’s getting younger and younger thanks to flexible working arrangements and the smaller world that we live in.

I know more British affiliates based in Thailand than I do in London.

Jesus, I need to get out more.

Bangkok, besides being a balls-to-the-walls awesome city, is a great base to explore the rest of South East Asia and beyond.

I’m stoked to see some countries that I’ve never been to before: Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Vietnam and more. Suggestions welcomed.

It should be an exciting year!

New Premium Posts Next Month

In other news…

It’s 18 months since I released the last volume in my Premium Post series.

I had a new release ready to go in the summer. Unfortunately business got in the way of writing, and by the time I returned to finish it up, I wasn’t happy with the content.

So on to the scrap heap it went.

One complete rewrite later, and the next volume is almost ready to be unleashed.

It will cover a huge amount of ground: from adult dating, to mobile campaigns, the current Facebook and Google landscapes, to new areas like pay per call, Teespring and several ‘unfashionable’ sources of traffic that can blow up your earnings biggie style.

This is going to be a mammoth release. The chapter covering adult dating alone is bigger than the entire Volume X (which was dedicated to it).

I think you’re going to struggle to find a more definitive pillaging of the affiliate marketing industry as it stands today.

Stand by for a lot of brain farts when it goes live on December 17th.

In the meantime, here is something every affiliate should read at least once. Maybe even twice.

How to Build The Future…

I read a lot of business books. Sometimes mindlessly.

When you’ve chowed your way through the entire Amazon bestsellers, you become familiar with the arcing topics that every writer and his dog likes to bark about. There’s only so many times I can relive the story of Maslow, Kitty Genovese or a room full of marshmallows.

The mind doth start to play with its balls.

Zero to One, by Peter Thiel, is the rare type of business book that stops you dead in your tracks.

Zero to One Review

“Notes on Startups, or How to Build The Future” sounds like a bold strapline. If anything, it undersells.

Thiel outlines the concepts that can make or break a startup, without resorting to magic bullet steps to pique interest. He talks innovation, technology, team-building and — most effectively — how to stand apart from your competition.

The book is a page-turner that demands to be put down. A rare thing.

It opened my eyes, my mind and my notepad.

It forced me to digest its concepts slowly, chapter by chapter.

Any book that begs to be placed aside while you question the wisdom of your current beliefs deserves the highest praise, especially when it’s so much easier to publish the opposite.

Thiel is a legend of the tech sphere. He didn’t need to write a book.

Likewise, when you have Mark Zuckerberg (“This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.”) and Elon Musk (“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.”) singing your praises, you don’t need lowly blogs like this to sell a book for you.

But I enjoyed the read so much that I have to recommend it.

Probably the best business book I’ve read this year.

Surprise, Surprise. Penguin Goes Viral

Finally, did you see the John Lewis Christmas advert?

If you’re outside the UK, then probably not.

Here it is:

I’m no brand advertiser, but I’ll tip my hat where it’s due.

That is some proper next-level Mad Men shit.

There’s a fine line between ‘going viral’ for the sake of sapping bandwidth, and going viral in a way that showcases a brand with goodwill that turns in to sales.

John Lewis are one of the best at getting it right.

Alas, this ice-cold fart will be shitting penguins — I repeat, SHITTING PENGUINS — before he goes anywhere near John Lewis at Christmas.

Moving to Thailand: Why I’m Going Back

12 months ago, I traded the stifling heat of Thailand for the leafy safety net of West London’s suburbs. I wouldn’t say I made a bad decision. But like many expats returning from a tropical paradise, all I can think about is what I left behind. And why I left it.

Coming home was the weary culmination of a year exploring Asia and realising just how ‘safe’ I’d been playing my life. My passport was stamped to shit, my visa was running out and everything about Asia was a million miles from the home that I considered my own.

It’s only when you’re clung to the back of a Cambodian tuk tuk as it cuts up a group of veering motorbikes that you start to think, “Jesus, London might be plastered in chavvy little shites, but at least it never put me through a real-life game of Mario Kart…

It’s difficult to move to a new country. Especially when that country has such a unique and foreign culture, not to mention a whole new language. There are mistakes I made in Thailand that held me back from ever calling it home.

When you are disconnected from friends and family for the first time, you imagine what’s going on without you. You see the photos on Facebook, the news on the BBC, and you feel like you’re missing out on the lives of those closest to you.

It’s only when you get home that you realise the nature of the illusion. All that you’ve been missing is a semi-occasional ‘catch up’ where everybody shares how little has actually changed. Rarely is it worth waiting for.

It’s a year since I arrived back in London and the only noticeable change is my own rising intolerance to the mundanity of these same old empty streets.

I am paying £1500/month to rent a house full of shagged fixtures, albeit in an area with good schools and a reasonable commute to Central London. It would be nigh on perfect if I had to commute, or if I had kids. But I don’t, and I won’t, so what in the heck am I doing here?

That’s the question I’ve been asking. And that’s why I’ve decided to do the sensible thing… and move back to Thailand.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you may be starting to sense a pattern.

‘He gets bored, he bitches about it, he moves to the other side of the world, he rinses and repeats.’

That’s pretty close to the truth. But there are lessons I’ve learnt, things I will do differently.

Admittedly, breakfast on the beach in Koh Samui won’t be one of them:

Breakfast at the Library

So what did I learn?

Well, if you’re thinking of putting a boot through your apartment and escaping to a sunnier part of the world, these reminders will do you no harm.

Adopt the country as your own.

It doesn’t work otherwise. The reason I failed to settle in Thailand was because I never really tried.

I was guilty of treating it as an extended holiday rather than a permanent move. Small decisions like decorating my apartment, or buying new furniture would turn in to a personal revolt. I wasn’t fully committed, which is the equivalent of embracing a life in transit.

You need to put in the effort to make your home feel like home, not simply a residence where you’re staying for a short period of time. And if you work from home too, that means pimping out a proper office. Not getting by on the tiny bloody dressing table that serviced me in Sukhumvit.

Learn the language.

My target is to be semi-fluent in Thai (speaking it, not writing it) within 3 months of touching down. The difference language makes to your overall happiness is incredible. Not being able to communicate is a real pain in the balls. It’s like a wedge between you and the city.

Even though Bangkok is an easy place to get by without speaking Thai, it’s impossible to fully enjoy the quirks and sideshows if you can’t speak the native tongue.

I’ll be taking a year of language classes in Bangkok. It’s dirt cheap (only £500), and it gets me the education visa that takes care of another big stress…

Visa issues are a bitch.

Oh yes they are.

How do you settle abroad if you don’t know where your next visa extension is coming from?

It’s frustrating enough having to exit Thailand every 90 days to get a new visa, but the situation is even worse when you have no guarantee that said visa application will be accepted. I had my extension denied in Singapore and was forced to choose between an education visa, or returning to London. I eventually chose London.

If you’re going somewhere with the intention of settling for the short to mid term future (1-3 years), you better have your visa path mapped out like a hawk – or be prepared to relocate within 14 days and lose your existing deposits.

Make an effort socially.

When you relocate as a couple, there’s less pressure to push yourself in to social circles and get to know new people. You share experiences with each other.

While that is nice, I definitely want to spend more time meeting new people in Bangkok – and to network with the strong expat community. You’ve got to make friends and connections for any city to feel like home. As a couple, it’s easy to unintentionally insulate yourself from all the meetups and events that are going on around you.

I met up with several affiliates on my last trip, including some familiar bloggers like Andrew Wee, Justin Dupre and Nick[y Cakes].

This blog gets a ton of traffic from Thailand, so it’ll be great to catch up with a few more marketing scumbags when I get the chance.

If you miss ‘home’, visit it.

By speaking to a lot of expats you will notice a recurring trend. They move to Thailand, they move back home, and then they move to Thailand for good.

Sometimes this is down to visa issues, but more often it’s a case of homesickness followed by the realisation that home isn’t what it once was.

It’s not just expats that encounter the problem.

Even students who’ve enjoyed the time of their lives at University can suffer from boredom and unrest after returning to their hometowns. You learn a lot about yourself in the time away and when you return, you’re not quite the same person.

Often the place where we grew up isn’t the place where we feel we belong. But we’re always going to miss the friends and family that we associate with that place.

This time, when I’m feeling homesick, I’ve learnt enough to realise that I can fix it by visiting home for a couple of weeks and catching up with everybody. There’s no need to move back for good.

Nothing crazy or otherworldly will happen while I’m gone. It never does.

Bangkok at Night

Recommended This Week

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