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!
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
I’m technically on family holiday vacation this week, holed up in a lovely cabin in the mountains north of Asheville.
We have wifi here, but I decided to opt for the Touch and my Blackberry (and Kindle of course) over lugging up the Macbook Pro. I’m actually writing this on the Touch with the fantastic WordPress app. Honestly, it’s pretty smooth and I need to do this more frequently.
What I’ve realized this week is that I can do most everything that I do on my laptop with just the Touch and the Blackberry. Tweeting, reading feeds in Google Rader, answering email, playing in Facebook, and now blogging are almost more enjoyable on the Touch over the laptop.
But what about “business stuff” like checking stats, reading and writing Docs and spreadsheets or FTP’ing into sites? All are (easily) doable and smooth in this sort of a mobile scenario. Actually, I’m really enjoying stretching myself and learning the new skill of mobile aptitude.
Of course, much of the content I create and consume is based in cloud computing rather than relying on a desktop. I make heavy use of all the Google apps. When I have needed a doc, I just access it in either Dropbox or on drop.io since I keep things sync’d on those places anyway. It’s worked out well.
So, my grand experiment in digital nomadicism is going surprisingly well. I could easily see myself just bringing the Touch and Blackberry to Affiliate Summit this month and leaving the Macbook home. 8 of my text books for the coming semester are in the Kindle, so my load for school will def be the Touch (Bible software apps are tremendous), blackberry and Kindle.
Digital nomadicism isn’t for everyone, of course. I unabashedly rely on web and cloud apps over desktop bound software and I’m not tied to an enterprise infrastructure that requires any special software. But a lighter load in a new year is always a good thing!
During my presentation called “Leveraging Social Media” at Affiliate Summit East, I took up most of the allotted hour to discuss tools and strategies that affiliate marketers could use to help them both better monitor and better participate in the increasingly important social networks out there in the wild.
This is an important issue because not only are these networks (in my presentation we touched on Twitter, Friendfeed, Seesmic and Facebook, but there are dozens of others) important for “traffic” but these hubs of communities have become an invaluable source for marketers to find conversions, early adopters and brand evangelists.
The main questions that most people had during, after and in the week since about the presentation pertained to the “how” aspect of using these networks in a responsible manner.
It’s not an easy question to answer since a great deal of operating in the social web is subjective and full of variables associated with individual programs, personalities and the social networks themselves.
At the end of the day, my constant recommendations all went along the lines of “do your homework, know the community and don’t feel obliged to use services such as ping.fm to cover everything.” In fact, I advise marketers to generally stay away from services like ping.fm because the fine line between “participant” and “spammer” is so easy to cross (and so easy to seemed to have crossed).
In other words, be interesting and provide a service (such as pointing to relevant info, even if its yours) in a responsible (whatever that means to you) manner.
DeWitt Clinton gets very geeky and brings in another aspect that you might want to consider if you’re a marketer with a little bit of know-how… attractiveness.
Head over to his blog and read the rest of the entry with the examples he gives. It’s a powerful read that points to the need for both functionality and appeal as you get your messages out there (and aren’t all messages marketing messages?):
Microblogging syndication formats » DeWitt Clinton: “This is just the beginning — I feel I’m only scratching the surface of what can be extracted from existing syndication formats. For example, comment stream aggregation (via the comments element or RFC 4685 autodiscovery) is a great next step after this. And I only call out FriendFeed because they’re the best at aggregating multiple content sources, but these concepts apply to any content aggregator, and finding a way to reuse existing formats like RSS and Atom to create rich presentations automatically will enable us to do more with less manual work between aggregators and publishers.”
While practicality is important to reach, don’t discount the need to reach people through visual appeal!
At the Affiliate Summit West event in Las Vegas in January, the Sunday “Meet Market” took on a whole new dimension. Rather than a cavernous room with sparsely attended tables and a disinterested audience, the the Vegas event launched a Meet Market that was packed and full of considerable buzz about the affiliate industry.
Hopes were high for this week’s Affiliate Summit East Meet Market. And, ASE did not disappoint…
The room in which the Meet Market took place was absolutely packed and every table was surrounded by interested participants.
What makes the Sunday Meet Market different from having a booth in the main exhibition hall on Monday and Tuesday? I asked that question to a number of attendees and most expressed (both on the exhibitor and non-exhibitor side) that the Meet Market allows for more intimacy than having a full fledged booth. Plus, the event happens on the “first” day of the show (even though many attendees are flying in on Friday and early Saturday in order to take advantage of the networking opportunities then), so there is an excited energy that runs throughout the crowded room.
While there are certainly benefits to having a booth (branding, affiliate recruitment, a space to work deals and a way to get your message out), the Meet Market is quickly becoming a can’t miss event at the Summit.
Affiliate Summit East is now in full swing. If you’re not here in Boston (why aren’t you?), you can follow the conference Flickr stream on Tris’ account (Tris Hussey is one of the top geek photogs out there and does amazing work, so check it out):
Got my copy of FeedFront in the mail a few weeks ago and I wanted to give a quick review with my thoughts and whether or not we need “offline” magazines in a digital world.
I turn 30 just a few days after this year’s Affiliate Summit East. Helping me ring in my third decade is good enough reason to come to Boston, right? Well, even if you haven’t gotten a ticket yet, there’s a very good offer on the table for today.
For today only, Affiliate Summit is running a special promotion where anyone who hasn’t already registered for the Affiliate Summit East in Boston (August 10-12) can get a free exhibit hall pass…
Everybody that is currently registered for Affiliate Summit 2008 East, taking place August 10-12 in Boston, is welcome to share the following coupon code with their friends and colleagues who are not yet registered:
ASE08JUNE11
This code is good for a free exhibit hall only pass (value $199).”
So, if you haven’t registered to come, you definitely should today. I can’t recommend the show enough (not just because I’m the “Minister of Social Media” this time) but because it really is the premier event for learning, networking and recruiting affiliates in the performance marketing space.
The speaker list is quite varied this year and the Affiliate Summit team has really mixed things up (in a good way) to keep the East show fresh.
Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Lisa Picarille and I recorded GeekCast 21 on Tuesday. If you’re interested in how to recruit affiliates in this changing landscape, give it a listen…
GeekCast 21: The Art of the CPA Pitch : GeekCast.fm: “The first few minutes of the show describes innovative ways to recruit affiliates outside of the traditional emails and cold calls (which are becoming increasingly ineffective). The conversation steers into the direction of why companies like Apple and Microsoft fight over the ‘cool’ factor in their marketing campaigns.”
The show runs about 80 mins and is filled with all sorts of geeky goodness (Twitter, video, stats, etc).
I subscribe to the general RSS feed of the network to keep up with who’s joining and what’s going on (yet another cool feature of Ning is the RSS implementation… I can keep an eye on the network without having to login every hour) and it seems like it’s really catching momentum.
Here’s the view from my feed reader:
I hope the network keeps rolling as it could be a very valuable place and facilitator of offline interaction as well come August.
Missy Ward and Shawn Collins of the Affiliate Summit have put together an “offline” publication that looks like it’s going to be a great read based on the talent assembled for the articles.
I contributed a piece describing the best ways to get things done in affiliate marketing using web2.0 tools:
* Editors Note: Missy Ward & Shawn Collins
* Five Ways to Evaluate a Merchant’s Landing Page: Dan Murray
* Pros & Cons of Utilizing Multiple Networks: Brian Littleton
* Twitter Grabs Attention: Lisa Picarille
* GTD in Affiliate Marketing with Web 2.0: Sam Harrelson
* Affiliate Marketers Give Back: Missy Ward
* Online Video Advertising: Tim Carter
* Nobody Would Use a Search Engine with Paid Results: Dan Gray
* Building Profitable Customer Relationships by Following These Simple Email Axioms: Tom Kulzer
* Are You the Next Super Affiliate Blogger?: Zac Johnson
* Ad Networks, Vertical Ad Networks, and Affiliate Networks: Peter Figueredo
* Affiliate Manager Compensation: Shawn Collins
* My 3 Favorite Blogs You May Not Visit: Wil Reynolds
* My 3 Favorite Tools You May Not be Using: Wil Reynolds
* Get Off Your Butt and Start Making Videos: Jim Kukral “
I think a good deal of its success so far has to do with it being hosted on Ning instead of Confabb as in years past. I love the integration of RSS, Twitter streams, Flickr, YouTube, etc that Ning provides and it makes the entire network feel much more robust and inviting than years past.
There are already over 70 pretty active members (growing daily) signed up and we’re discussing the NY state affiliate situation, how to market to marketers and all sorts of relevant topics that will surely be hot buttons at the conference in early August.
So, if you’re going to Affiliate Summit East (15% off if you use that link plus the code ase08afc15), make sure to join up on the network.
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Personal Stress Relief from Economic, Environmental Issues » Blog Archive » The Sterkly Affiliate Network
on 2012-02-29 08:40:18
I turn 30 just a few days after this year’s Affiliate Summit East. Helping me ring in my third decade is good enough reason to come to Boston, right? Well, even if you haven’t gotten a ticket yet, there’s a very good offer on the table for today.
Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Lisa Picarille and I recorded GeekCast 21 on Tuesday. If you’re interested in how to recruit affiliates in this changing landscape, give it a listen…