Here is my recent Affiliate Summit webinar! Let me know what you think!

Affiliate Summit is definitely the best Affiliate Conference and probably the #1 Internet Marketing conference there is. No where else can you go and learn, network, and share with so many affiliates/publishers, networks, and companies in one place. I mean they get thousands of people every year and every year it grows and gets bigger. Shawn Collins and Missy Ward, the owners of the show, do a tremendous job at orchestrating exceptional shows twice a year. Now they are doing local meet-ups which I’ve heard are great. They have an exceptional staff to help in the process so everything runs as smoothly as possible. I go every year and have since back when it was in Orlando. Their Vegas shows are always epic. Affiliate Summit East NYC is right around the corner, August 21-23, 2011, so make sure to get your tickets before it sells out. Here are some great reasons to attend the Affiliate Summit in New York:

1. Great People – you are guaranteed to meet tons of exceptional people involved in the Online Marketing industry at Affiliate Summit. It’s a really friendly atmosphere and bustling with people of all types. There are also quite a lot of international folks that fly in from other countries for the show. Some good people watching there too because they will try to stand out. The affiliate marketing industry is really friendly by nature and so you will undoubtedly meet people that can help you further what you are doing. Building relationships is what it’s all about, and meeting people in person always kicks it off on the right foot.

2. Great Speakers and Panels – Affiliate Summit always has great speakers and panels of experts on a wide range of relevant and timely issues to the Affiliate Marketing industry and online marketing in general. I will be speaking this time around..Yaaay! I hope you can come out and see me present about how to use LinkedIn to maximize your business development. You can go to Affiliate Summit just for the networking, but why do that when you could go and learn so much from the speakers, so I highly recommend getting the passes that get you in to see the speakers. Here is the Facebook Event for my speaking session, make sure to RSVP!

3. Great City - New York City is a great place to go to a conference. I really like the Hilton hotel for the venue because you can really bump into and meet people more easily than at a sprawling conversion center. Not to mention you can stay at the hotel and be more comfortable because you can just go up to your room if you need to whenever. Adtech was much better when it was at the Hilton, so I’m glad Affiliate Summit is still there. I don’t think I need to say much about New York City, great food, great sights, great times all around.

4. Great Parties - They always have really good parties at Affiliate Summit NYC. You have to find out which are the best though, which can take a little digging around and talking to people to know which ones will be the best. You can try to get invites to the ones that sound great. You really can’t go wrong though. I’m not huge into conference parties these days, but I like to go at least for a little while to see who I might bump into or meet. I might go out late one of the nights to get the full experience. Usually I’m pretty focused on business and talking to people, so the parties are like a fun novelty. If you go to the right ones you can really have a blast.

5. Great Networking - If you like to network, then Affiliate Summit is for you! You can’t help but network and meet people with that many people at the show. If you are proactive and willing to go up to people and introduce yourself, you can really make some amazing connections and you never know who you might run into that can help you further what you are doing more than you ever imagined. Their “Meet Market” event is really great to network at and you are definitely going to get a lot out of the experience. Make sure to bring a lot of business cards and you should try to gather as many as you can yourself at the show. A couple hundred business cards is definitely do-able.

These are some great reasons to attend Affiliate Summit East! This year will be a great show, so I hope you will attend and we can meet. Thanks and I look forward to seeing you there!

Affiliate Marketing has become an extremely large and varied sub-industry of Online Marketing over the past 10-12 years. There are literally hundreds of thousands, if not over a million individuals, all over the world, that have become hip to monetizing their websites, blogs, portals, and subscriber lists with affiliate programs. Now, there is a brand-new event solely dedicated to honoring the best and brightest in the Affiliate Marketing industry. The Affiliate Marketing Awards will be held on April 12, 2011, in San Francisco at the W Hotel. The categories will be judges by industry heavy-weights like Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit, Joseph Morin, Peter Bordes, Jay Weintraub, Oliver Roup and Steve Hall. There will be tons of honors given out and should be a really good time. The categories are as follows:

Best CPS Network
Judges are looking for a network that concentrates on cost per sale campaigns that may include some cost per lead campaigns which has been outstanding in the last year. Great advertising campaigns and great publisher support.

Best CPL Network
Judges are looking for a network that concentrates on cost per lead campaigns that may include some cost per sale campaigns which has been outstanding in the last year. Great advertising campaigns and great publisher support.

Best Coreg Network
Judges are looking for a network that concentrates on Co registration campaigns that which has been outstanding in the last year. Great advertising campaigns and great publisher support.

Best Merchant Campaign
Judges are looking for the merchant who has truly embraced affiliate marketing to produce successful results with great publisher relations.

Best Agency
Judges are looking for an affiliate management agency which has exceeded client’s needs and affiliates expectations.

Best Affiliate Manager
Judges are looking for that person who has done something special for affiliates in terms of hard work and communications we well as providing excellence in service.

Best Banners
Judges are looking for an advertiser or agency who has produces some great affiliate banners.

Best Overall Affiliate
Judges are looking for that person or company delivering great results for advertisers while benefiting the advertisers marketing

Best Content Affiliate
Judges are looking for that person or company delivering great results for advertisers while benefiting the advertisers marketing with content sites

Best PPC Affiliate
Judges are looking for that person or company delivering great results for advertisers while benefiting the advertisers marketing with PPC marketing

Best Merchant Innovation
Judges are looking for that person or company delivering true innovation in affiliate marketing as an advertiser.

Best Affiliate Innovation
Judges are looking for that person or company delivering true innovation in affiliate marketing.

Best Sales Campaign
Judges are looking for a campaign that delivered a great increase in sales.

Best LeadGeneration Campaign
Judges are looking for a campaign that delivered quality leads.

Best Mobile Campaign
Judges are looking for a campaign that delivered sales or quality leads using mobile technology.

Best use of Social Media
Judges are looking for a the best use of social media marketing in affiliate marketing.

Best use of Data feeds
Judges are looking for a data feed which has truly benefited affiliates and made it easier for them to make money.

Best Third Party Tool
Judges are looking for a tool which has truly benefited affiliates and made it easier for them to make money.

Best Marketing Affiliate Blog
Judges are looking for a blog which converse affiliate marketing and benefits both advertisers and affiliates.

Hottest Affiliate Manager
This award is just for fun and please submits your entry to be voted on. Voting will be set up shortly.

Hottest Affiliate
This award is just for fun and please submits your entry to be voted on. Voting will be set up shortly.

This should be a really great time and great networking as well. Be sure to use coupon code: EW10 to save 10% off your ticket!

Click here to check out The Affiliate Marketing Awards site and get your ticket today!

Hey everyone, here is my power-point from my presentation at the Performance Marketing Expo in Miami Beach a few weeks ago. Everyone said they enjoyed it so I’m glad it went well. Let me know if you have any questions about any of the bullets. thx!

Strategizing and Planning:
- Competitive Research & Intelligence
- Emulate the Best in Field and Better It
- Regular Meetings to Discuss Strategy
- Delegate Tasks to Staff's Strengths
- Hold Staff Accountable for Projects
- Each Month Re-evaluate Strategies
- Grow Each Channel Each Month
- Go After It like a Beast!

Diversifying Traffic Sources:
- Diversify Traffic Sources like a Portfolio
- Seek Our New Online Advertising Campaigns
- Expand and Optimize Current Traffic Sources
- Build Partnerships that Last and Last
- Reciprocate with Traffic to Get More Traffic
- Leverage Organic/Free Traffic to the Max
- Monetize Databases to Create Repeat Traffic/Buyers
- Utilize Behavioral Re-targeting to Increase Repeat Traffic
- Implement Referral Programs to Increase Viral Traffic
- Focus Heavily on Social Media to Increase Sharing/Liking

Crushing the Competition:
- Have a Better Performing Website than the Rest
- Deliver Value to Your Visitors/Users/Customers
- Stay Ahead of What Everyone Else is Doing
- Keep Tabs on Your Compeitors Promotions
- ‘Go at It’ Harder than Everyone Else
- Constantly Seek to Improve Conversion Rates
- Change is the Only Constant!
- Create Opportunities Out of Nothing
- Use Your Creativity to Out-think Everyone Else
- Have a Blast Promoting Your Company/Website!

Hello all my CostPerNews subscribers! I hope you are having a good week thus far. Great news! I have been asked to be a speaker at the Affiliate Summit in New York City, Sunday, 3 PM, August 15th, 2010. My session will be about niche site building and content strategies to generate affiliate commissions. I plan to bring as much knowledge, tips, and strategies that will render all “affiliate systems” pointless. I hope you will join my presentation and I look forward to speaking to you afterwards. I will be available to speak with whomever would like to pick my brain about Internet marketing in general. I look forward to meeting you at ASE10 NY! Hope you have a fantastic week and see you then!
- Evan, CEO, experience Advertising

There are a lot of companies launching into the performance marketing space with an affiliate program, a great amount of desire, and “wanting-ness” to succeed. But if you don’t have certain things in place, it’s going to fall flat on its face or never gain the traction that you want it to.

So, the first thing you need to address is your website and your conversion rate. How well does it convert? How well does your landing page convert? Do your part. If your website isn’t performing like a rock star, your affiliates aren’t going to be very happy. If they send 100 quality clicks and they aren’t making any sales they are going to say, “this sucks” and they will move on and you are going to lose the opportunity to get them as a regular producer. Now, if they’ve sent the same 100 clicks and they got three sales and they made $50-100, then you are in the ball game. So you have to keep working on your website to make sure it performs for your affiliates to gain traction.

Effective ad units and banners are a must. You have to have dynamic banners, good text, and email creatives. However, the creative you are using to facilitate your partners has to be high-end, has to look good, has to have calls to actions, has to have a high click-through rate in order to just get the clicks. Give them a chance actually to make a conversion now that you’ve got to them there. Reliable tracking is essential. We recommend HasOffers to handle internal tracking. With internal tracking you can track everything. Not only can you track direct partnership and affiliates, you can track major networks and CPA networks all through one central interface. You can also track your paid search and whatever other paid campaign you are engaging in.

You must have responsive, pro-active affiliate managers…this I can’t stress enough. I would say 90% of affiliate managers aren’t pro-active enough and that might even be a generous amount, giving them a 10% pro-active rate, because a lot of the problem is people don’t know what to say to people. So if you don’t have a very experience affiliate management person in-house or using a very competent affiliate management agency, it’s kind of like babysitting your kid with a zombie. They’re not going to get that nurturing and that education that they deserve and that’s going to enrich their lives. They are going to get someone that’s sitting there on the couch watching TV while your kid beats his head against the wall. So you need really good affiliate management or partner management, and then obviously you have to take it really, really seriously.

Have a strategy for your affiliate marketing growth…put a strategy together! Ask yourself: How are we growing this affiliate channel? The performance channel in Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4? Don’t be cheap, don’t say, “what’s the cheapest we can do this for”, say “what can we spend to grow this effectively and what’s a good expenditure of money to grow our affiliates.” If you can spend money wisely, you can really grow your affiliate channel broadly and very quickly, but you have to do the right things and you just don’t spend money willy-nilly anywhere, but you should confer with somebody that can advise you accurately on how to spend the money. You can effectively spend money to grow your affiliates and grow your partners, but like I said, talk to the right people to advise you.

You should be offering to provide tools, resources, and training for your affiliates. Give them resources, give them tools, give them keywords, give them content, fresh content, unique content, something they can use to market with. If you facilitate people they will market easier. It will be a much broader program if you can facilitate a thousand people as opposed to a hundred people. So you really have to manage on a broad basis in order to get the most participation.

Behavioral re-targeting is something that’s sort of all the rage. Try out companies like FetchBack, Advertise.com, and Google (does behavioral re-targeting now through AdWords). It’s going to increase conversions overtime by retargeting them with banners when they leave the site. When they visit, the affiliate cookies are going to drop, and they are going to make the sale. So when you’re retargeting the visitors of your site, you’re kind of giving an affiliate a chance to get an extra conversion, which only benefits them and you.

Find more partners and do more BizDev, BizDev, BizDev. I will beat my head against the wall about Biz Dev because companies just don’t do it enough and they don’t do it smartly. It’s really kind of troubling to me because it could be so effective if you just did it occasionally with the right amount of gusto and the right amount of follow-up. Business development is a very effective thing to do, but a lot of companies just don’t do it the right way, so it’s a little personally frustrating, but it can be done properly and it can be fruitfully.

Networking socially through social networking is an absolutely must! Your affiliate managers, your business development people, your marketing directors, they should all be on Facebook and Twitter, working your fan page, on forums, meeting people, networking with people, getting Linkedin with people, building their networks. In my own personal network, I have over 2000 LinkedIn connections that I worked very hard for years to acquire and it took a lot of work, but it allows me to have a lot of reach and have a lot of partners that I can turn to in a second to work with. So building their own personal contact network on behalf of your company is very, very important.

Affiliate conferences are very important to developing relationships. Affiliate Summit, that’s definitely the number #1 conference. Great show…everyone should go to at least one of them a year. Ad-Tech is sort of the mother of all digital marketing conferences and I think the New York Show and the San Fran Show are a must. LeadsCon is a newer show that focus on lead generation and they’re having one very shortly and then the Performance Marketing Expo is the new show that is coming to Miami this September, and this is going to have some great speakers and some great attendees. Should be a great show. So you should be sending someone from your company to these shows every year to meet people and to network…and tell them not to be scared! Tell them to be friendly and go up to people and shake people’s hand. Tell them what you do, ask what they do. If they aren’t going to network, don’t even bother, don’t sending them, make sure they’re really friendly and proactive.

These are but a few of the ways you can ensure you gain traction with your affiliate marketing program. Thank for reading and let me know your comments!

The Performance Marketing Expo will be coming up September 27-29th in Miami Beach, FL at the Eden Roc hotel. There are some really nice sponsorship packages available and they are going quick! There are basically 2 sponsorship levels. The conference is going away from the traditional boring Booth/Exhibit Hall concept for a more intimate show focused on coordinated networking and educational sessions from Internet marketing industry leaders and experts. There will be many super-affiliates in attendance which is absolutely priceless to be able to rub elbows with the top super-affiliates in Affiliate Marketing. The conference agenda is completely amazing, check it out here. Also, please see the speaker list. See the Performance Marketing Sponsorship packages here.

The upcoming affiliate marketing and social media conference, Performance Marketing Expo, has added another proven super-affiliate to the attendee list with PricePickle.com. PricePickle is a really nice coupon portal where visitors can access all the latest deals from online merchants and retailers. Performance Marketing Expo now has the following super-affiliates confirmed to attend:
- CouponMom.com
- MarketAmerica.com
- eCoupons.com
- AlexsCoupons.com
- TrialPay
- Parent Media Group

These are some of the biggest affiliates on the major affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Shareasale, and Linkshare. All the exhibitors and sponsors will get to meet and network with these proven super-affiliates and many others. More super-affiliates will be added to the show, so stay tuned!

Hey everyone! Exciting news…the newest and hottest new Internet marketing conference, Performance Marketing Expo, is now booking exhibitors and sponsors for this exciting event! If you are looking to get your business in front of proven super-affiliates and other Internet companies, this is a must show for you. The show will feature 30 guaranteed super-affiliates that will be flow in for the show from all over the world, as well as 100s of hungry intermediate and new affiliates to meet and network with. I will be personally inviting 100,000 of our affiliates and publishers from the affiliate programs we manage to this show, so you know it will be huge!

The company producing the show, IIR, is the world’s largest conference organizer so you know it will be a top-notch production. My company, Experience Advertising, has already agreed to exhibit and speak at the show and help with the promotion, which I’m really excited about because you know how I like to promote!

Don’t wait! I will be blasting all of my Internet connections (2000 on LinkedIn) to see if they are interested in exhibiting or sponsoring so if you want a good booth space do it quickly. I already have commitments from several companies that I know, so don’t be left out of this great show. Also, you will get the early-bird rate if you sign on early.

You can visit their homepage here: www.performancemarketingexpo.com

You can visit the exhibitors page here: http://www.iirusa.com/performancemarketingexpo/become-an-exhibitor.xml

Or simply contact:
Lisa Deutsch, Business Development Manager
Phone: 646.895.7482
Email: ldeutsch at iirusa.com

Any questions please let me know. I will keep you updated on all the exciting developments leading up to the show. Hope to see you there!

Very exciting news that there is a brand-new affiliate marketing/performance marketing conference taking place September 27th-29th in South Beach at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The event is being put on by IIR, the largest conference company in the world. This will be a very exciting event featuring excellent education, great speakers, proven super-affiliates, online merchants, affiliate networks, and hundreds of affiliates eager to learn and meet people. Since my company is based in South Florida, we have been asked and am taking a large role in promoting this affiliate marketing conference. If you are interesting in attending a fantastic affiliate event you should save the date and make plans to attend. All of my connections in the Internet marketing industry will be there and we will be inviting all of our affiliates/publishers across the major affiliate networks we manage on (over 100,000 bone-fide unique affiliates) I hope you will come on down to sunny, beautiful Miami Beach later this year and do some business at the Performance Marketing Expo!

Breaking News: Affiliate Convention Los Angeles is coming in December, where Affiliates Always Attend for Free! Yes it’s true!

You really should try to attend this event. Whether you are a company or an affiliate, this will be a great learning and networking experience. I went to the last one in Denver and it was a really great time. I was a presenter on Affiliate Marketing 101 and my sessions we packed to the hilt with hungry-for-knowledge affiliates. And I met a bunch of great people personally afterwards. There were lots of friendly people there to brainstorm with and have little meetings at the event itself. And the parties they had out at night were really fun, with a few suprises. I ran into a bunch of people I knew and met tons of new people, so it was a very successful endeavor to say the least. I highly recommend attending this next one in L.A.

Check out their site to register and learn more: http://www.AffiliateConvention.com

They have lots of great sponsorship opportunities and booth opportunities you can check out. Make sure to be there. There will be tons of great affiliates and companies there to meet with and learn from.