Affiliate Summit West 2010 Recap

After sleeping for 12 hours and catching up on emails, tweets, etc. I think I am ready to write my recap of Affiliate Summit West 2010. I was a huge slacker taking pictures so you will have to check out other recaps for those. Overall it was a great trip and a HUGE thanks goes out to Missy Ward and Shawn Collins and the rest of their team for putting it all together.

Also for me 90-95% of these conferences is about the people. Personally I don’t usually get a ton out of the sessions or the exhibit hall or stuff like that. The reason I go is to hang out with old friends, make new friends, and connect with people. I do attend a few sessions here and there and take a walk or two through the exhibit hall but they could take that stuff away and I would still go to these conferences.

So lets get started.

Friday, Jan 15th

I hop on a plane and start the “I hope a fat guy doesn’t sit next to me” dance. Sure enough who sits next to me??? Fat guy. So I spend the 2+ hour flight sitting on 3/4ths of my seat while the guy takes up the other 1/4th. Oh well, at least it isn’t that long of a flight.

I get to my hotel room (I stayed at the Palazzo this time) and there is a basket with a bottle of champagne and some other stuff with a birthday card. Very nice. The Palazzo earned my repeat business. Very nice rooms and very good service. After I get settled I head down to play some blackjack before heading over to the Rio to see what’s happening and end up winning $100.  Pretty good start to the trip.

I get to the Rio and hit up the iBar and find a bunch of friends others so I sit with them for a bit. Then a few of us head over to check out Aria and City Center to see what it is all about. Overall the place is pretty amazing. We walk around, check out some of the restaurants and bars, and then head back to the Rio.

At this point I am starving so Todd Farmer and I head to the All American Grill for some 20 cent wings. Not bad at all.

Back to the iBar to wait for other people to show up and and we hang for a bit but I decide to call it a night around 11 or so. Got an early morning tomorrow. I get back to my hotel, climb in bed and then notice that Goodfellas is on TV. How can I sleep when that is on? So that sucks me in for a couple more hours.

Saturday, January 16th

Time for some golf!!! I wake up at 6:30 and head over to the Rio to meet up with my normal foursome to go play some golf. We take a limo over to the Cascatas golf course and get ready for 36 holes of fun. Overall this course is awesome. I loved the layout of the holes, some good risk/reward shots, nice terrain changes, and it is in great shape overall. The greens however are just downright evil. Any two putt is awesome on these greens. They are fast and there is really no good place to putt from. We finish up right at dark and head back to the Rio.

I had a dinner meeting so I run back to my hotel to drop off my clubs and get freshened up a bit and then back to the Rio to meet some friends for dinner at the All American Grill. More wings and a salad. Great time with a bunch of my close friends in this industry. I am constantly amazed how many awesome friends I have in the affiliate marketing world. Every time I get together with them we have a great time.

I make an apperance at the AWB meetup really quick and then head up to get ready for the poker tournament. There were 77 players and over $15,000 raised for breast cancer charities. I had a great time but in the end I just wasn’t getting many cards so I was running low on chips. I ended up finishing 19th which isn’t too bad. Had a great time overall.

Time to head over to McFadden’s to catch the end of Carolyn Tang’s bachlorette party. So I hang out there for about an hour and then a group of us head over to the Imperial Palace to play some blackjack with the Dealertainers. These are celebrity impersonator dealers who rotate through dealing and performing. There are about 7 of us in the group.  Our dealers were pregnant Mariah Carey, Rhianna, one of the Blues Brothers, and someone else I seem to be forgetting. Mariah and Rhianna were good to us but Elwood Blues killed us at the end. Good times though. I think we were there for over 2 hours. It is now 4 AM and time for bed.

Sunday, January 17th

Time for the conference to actually start. I get there around 10:30 and get checked in and meet up with my mentee Bart. We talk for a while and I kind of give him a lay of the land and then head down for some of the sessions. I drug my dad along on this trip just so he could be introduced to my crowd of internet marketing people.  He does internet marketing also but his crowd and my crowd generally don’t cross over too much.  But we head to a couple of the sessions. We meet up with a couple of the guys from Keyword Spy and talk some business over lunch. My dad goes to talk to them more and I head down to walk through the meet market and go to the video session.

The video session was pretty good with Jeremy Palmer and Rosalind Gardner giving some good tips on how to get started with video marketing. This is a hugly under utilized area for affiliate marketers.

At 6:30 I go to the Mentor Meetup and unfortunately my mentee had some other meeting so he couldn’t go but I did get a chance to have a good talk with a couple who is new to the industry. I gave them some tips to get started and hopefully pointed them in a good direction. It is tough sometimes when there is so many ways to approach affiliate marketing and it can be hard to tell people where to get started.

Time for the Shareasale party. This year there was ice cream, pizza, and a bunch of other snacks. For entertainment they had karaoke, a dance floor, some gaming tables, a bouncy castle, some racing games, and some Wiis. It was a pretty chilled time and it was fun to connect with people. My dad swung by the party at about 10 or so and we hung outside with Todd Farmer, Rosalind Gardner, Lisa Picarelle, and a few other people for a while before heading to the next event.

Strike Out Breast Cancer Midnight Bowling Fundraiser: This was put on by GTOmanagement.com, Bowlingshirt.com, and TFAW.com. I think there were around 100 people or so signed up but not all of them showed. Overall I think there was over $3000 raised for breast cancer. I was on a team with my dad, Drew Bennet from benspark.com, and his wife Allison. We have a great time and end up bowling until about 2:00. Time for bed so I head back to the Palazzo. 

Monday, January 18th

Time to wake up for the keynote by Dr. Robert Cialdini. I find it amusing that on his slides it says “Copyright 2003-2005  Newinformation.com”. If it is copyright that long ago is it really new information? Anyway, he spoke about principles of influence and how you can influence people to take an action in tough economic times. Overall it was very good and I have some ideas I want to eventually implement.

As I am walking down the hall to my next session Brian Littleton from Shareasale.com stops me and askes me to do an interview for them. Without hesitation I agree. In the interview I talk about why I like Shareasale so much and mostly it comes down to the people that are there. It is one of the most awesome groups of people in the industry and if you don’t work with them you are crazy.

Then I make it in time for Scott Jangro’s datafeed session. Overall it is good and the consensus seems to be that about 30% of datafeeds out there are good and 70% need work of some sort. I use datafeeds for many of my sites and find that to be true. Rarely do I get a feed I don’t have to tweak or reformat in some way to work with what I want to do.

I meet up with Bart, my mentee, and I walk through the exhibit hall and introduce him to a bunch of different people I would recommend working with. Once again I hope I am pointing Bart in the right direction.

By this point I am really dragging so I head back to my hotel for a quick nap before the next event. I get about an hour nap in and end up more tired than when I started. I head down to NYNY to the ESPN Zone to meet up with the GTO crew and Fanduel.com. We have some appetizers and talk about the Fanduel program for a while.  I sit at a table with John Carcutt, Jason Rubacky, and Stephanie Lichtenstein. We have a good time and then I head up to play some of the games at the ESPN Zone. I rock the basketball and football games and then head back to the Rio for the Trivia Tweetup.

I am on Team 4 and while we might have had a rough start we make a game of it and come pretty close to winning but we kept getting some tough questions at the wrong time. I then head to the next GTO event which is up at McFadden’s for the MakeBeer.net program. They have one of those games with a punching bag where you see how hard you can hit so we hang around that for a while. Brian rocks the dragon kick, Scott is the head butt master, and we use Steph as a battering ram. Brett Elias and I take turns trading the lead as the hardest puncher but on my last punch I end up with a perfect shot and get an 895 to take the crown. Time to move on.

We hop in a limo and head over to XS at the Encore to a party put on by Paresh of OPMPros.com. Awesome group of people here.  We meet up with a couple other people at the club and I end up there until about 4:30 when I decide to call it a night. I have been to quite a few of the Vegas clubs and this is one of my favorites. It is huge, there is a nice outdoor area, and the service is quicker than some of the others.

Tuesday, January 19th

Last day of the Summit. I wake up and head over to see the Pinnacle Awards. I put up a post a couple weeks ago giving some ficticious odds on the awards and sadly enough I only got two of my picks right. Nickycakes suprised a lot of people winning the Affiliate of the Year award and defying my 20-1 odds to come out victorious. If he can beat Eric Nagel and Kim Rowley for this award he must know his stuff. Ebay won for merchant of the year, Shoemoney won for Blogger of the year, and Angel Djambazov won for Advocate. Matt McWilliams took home the award for Affiliate Manager of the Year for his work with Legacy Learning Systems and sent Jamie Birch to 0-3 on his nominations. Scott Jangro won a much deserved Affiliate Marketing Legend award and solidified himself as one of the best people in this industry.

I hang around the conference for a bit, drop in on a couple sessions highlighted by Connie Berg calling out Chuck Hamrick for working with the devil at the coupon session. I wander around a bit, talk to some people and start saying goodbye to all my friends. I was really looking to get home but always hate to leave my friends also.

So I head to the airport and fly home. Trip over.

I think this is my 6th or 7th Affiliate Summit I have been to. It is hard for me to rank one as being better than another since they are always good and different. This one had some great aspects to it but so have all the others. I know most of the people reading this will already be making plans for Affiliate Summit East 2010 but if you aren’t planning on going you really should.

What are some of your favorite memories of this Summit? Who were some of the people you got to meet? Leave a comment and let me know.