Affiliate Summit Sessions I Attended

Yet another Affiliate Summit in the books and I am back home ready to get back to work. Right now I am at that point where I have about 100 things I want to do and I just need to prioritize them and come up with a plan.

I am usually not a fan of going to sessions at these conferences but I do find myself going to more and more and most of the times I do I am glad I went. Even though I have been doing this for many years and probably know a lot of what will be talked about I still find myself picking up bits and pieces here and there that I know will help me grow my business, make my sites more effective, and in the end make me more money.

Here is a quick rundown of the sessions I went to this time:

Sunday, January 9th

Monitizing Pop Culture: Lisa Picarille, James Keating, Tricia Meyer, and Kim Rowley – The panel here basically talked about how to monitize pop culture. I don’t really do anything with pop culture but there are many similar tactics I use with different sports sites and the two markets are fairly similar. They talked about how they find different pop culture niches, how they build sites around a specific product, person, movie, artist, or something like that and how they can monitize it.

One thing I took away from this is you need to take chances on some of these trends and have some forsight to catch the trends before they happen. And even though you think everything will be great with a trend they could also flop. An example of this for me is a site I built last summer. Stephen Strasburg was just a rookie but there was a ton of hype around him. He was the #1 pick for the Washington Nationals and he made his MLB debut on June 8th. After seeing all they hype on ESPN I decided to build a site selling Stephen Strasburg jerseys. Pretty quickly (I think a day or two) the site started ranking in Google and the traffic and sales started coming in. I put the site up on June 9th, a day after his first start and saw my first sale on June 11th. Not too bad.

He kept stringing together some awesome starts and was doing some amazing things for a rookie. Then on July 29th he went on the 15 day DL. He had a couple more starts but then on August 24th he went on the DL again and on Sept 1st he was put on the 60 day DL and ended up having Tommy John surgery. Season over. Probably won’t pitch in 2011. So poof, there went that niche. The site still ranks and I still see sales come in here and there but nothing like it would have been if he had done great all year.

Anyway, enough of my story. This was a very good panel and if you didn’t catch it I would recommend watching the video when it is available.

Mobile Marketing – The 97% Response Rate Channel: Mike Koenigs and Brian Williams – I have known Mike Koenigs for a few years and my company was partners with him on some projects in the past so I was looking forward to hearing him speak. He really knows his stuff. He does come at things from more of a “guru” side of things (BTW, have you checked out unguru.me yet???) so I did expect the presentation to be slanted a bit that way and it was. There was a bit of the “look at all the great things I have done and look at who I have worked with in the past” sort of stuff but there was also some good info shared.

The main point of the session was how effective mobile marketing, specifically text messages, can be. 97% of all text messages are opened and most of those within the first 15 minutes. So for the right type of product or market it can be very effective and a great way to convert some sales. I know you would have to be careful with that and if you spam people with texts it would just piss them off but if they sign up to be reminded of sales or when a webinar starts or something like that I could see it being very effective. So if you are into local lead generation, webinars, sell high ticket items, or something like that I could see it being effective but I can’t really think of how to use it for what I am currently doing.

In the evening there was the Shareasale party celebrating their 10th anniversary. Great time at Tryst. I can’t say enough how much I enjoy working with Shareasale and it is awesome that I can consider so many of the people that work there my friends. Congratulations on 10 great years and I am looking forward to 10 more!

Monday, January 10th

SEO-Ask the Pros: Bruce Clay, Greg Boser, Todd Friesen, and Stephen Spencer – I have know a few of these guys for many years (since maybe 2002 or so) and it is always good to brush up on SEO stuff. There was a lot of talk about links, site structure, buying links, whether a penalty is algorithmic or manual, and other topics like that. Most of the stuff is focused on bigger sites and more competitive industries than I usually work in so there wasn’t much specific that I could take away but these guys did a great job answering questions and giving good, specific answers and not just theoretical stuff.

Yep, that’s it for Monday. Only one session. I thought it was more than that.

Tuesday, January 11th

Pinnacle Awards: Congratulations to Carolyn Kmet, Lisa Picarille, Eric Nagel, Todd Farmer, Zappos, and Deals.Woot for winning the Affilaite Summit Pinnacle Awards. I picked 3 of the 6 winners correctly so that is one better than last year.

Keynote – Brian Solis – For the most part this was a pretty standard keynote presentation. Brian talked about social media, how it can be a great way to get inside the minds of your customers, how to engage your customers through social media, how to use different social metrics to track your customers and stuff like that. Not really a ton of practical take aways from this but I would rate it on the higher side of the keynotes I have heard in the past.

In the afternoon I went to lunch with Wade Tonkin and Bill Lambe from Football Fanatics so I didn’t get to check out any of the afternoon sessions. Looking back I thought I had gone to more sessions than I did but I guess there was only 4.

I also spoke on two panels:

Using Datafeeds to Monitize Sites with Eric Nagel and Scott Jangro – We talked about the benefits of using datafeeds, different tools you can use, how to aggregate multiple datafeeds, and other basics about using datafeeds. We had some great questions from the audience so that always makes it easy to fill an hour. If you do have any other questions about datafeeds please feel free to get ahold of me and ask. Also there was one tip I picked up on my own panel that I will be testing but I will keep that to myself for now. hehe.

Improving the Affiliate/Affiliate Manager Relationship with Todd Farmer, Jamie Birch, Jason Rubacky, and Logan Thompson -If you are an affiliate you have had to deal with affiliate managers and affiliate managers deal with affiliates every day. We talked about how to build a good, reciprocal relationship, how that relationship can be mutually beneficial, how to communicate with each other, and why it is important to build a good relationship and not just treat the affiliate like they are just a number. Jamie Birch had a great point that if as an affiliate manager if you are dependable the affiliates will trust you and that is so true. Also Logan Thompson suggested he get some Seahawks season tickets as an incentive so he will probably be joining me for some games next year.

Thank you for everyone who attended my two panels and for all the great questions. Audience feedback is so important to a good panel and we couldn’t have done it without you. If you did attend any of the sessions above I would love to hear what you thought. Also if there are any I need to check out on video let me know.

In a day or two I will post a list of the sessions I wish I had been able to make it to. I am really glad there will be videos available for these.

All in all it was a great conference and I can’t wait for Affiliate Summit East 2011 in NYC August 21-23rd. Register today for early bird pricing. This show is sure to sell out so the sooner you register the better.