Reflecting on an Origin Story: Affiliate Summit East 2007

Posted on Aug 9, 2012 in Career, Conferences & Networking |

Yes, you read that right.  After a whirlwind trip to Oregon this week for a wedding, I’m making off into the night on a red-eye flight to New York for Affiliate Summit East 2012.

ase07-20This marks a milestone for me.  Affiliate Summit East 2007 in Miami was my first Summit, so this will be (counting last May’s Affiliate Summit Central) my 10th Summit and the 5 year anniversary of this blog and my participation in Affiliate Marketing.  I was just a baby in affiliate marketing back then.

Wow… how things  have changed!  Back then I didn’t know what I was doing at ALL, somehow teaching my co-worker everything I knew about affiliate marketing on our red-eye flight from Oakland to Miami.  And by everything I knew – that means everything I’d learned since about November of 2006, so not much.  How naive we were – we totally blew off the Meet Market thinking it would be lame (maybe back then it was, I wouldn’t have known) and didn’t participate in hardly ANY networking.  We were more interested in South Beach every night to eat dinner on the strip.

The trip was not all fun, and I did take it seriously and so glad I did.  I still use the same college-ruled composition book for notes.  The sessions I went to at that Summit might make you chuckle:

I remember some of the speakers, but not all… Jeremy Palmer, Scott Jangro, Rosalind Gardner, Stephanie Agresta, most notable in my mind at the time was Jay Berkowitz and his 10 golden rules session.  I remember offering up the merchant I worked for at the time for analysis in the Conversion Rate Clinic and going back to my manager at our booth saying, “We have a LOT to fix when we get back!  Josh Sloan made a magical impression on me with his magic tricks as we exhibited beside 1&1,.  We went to ONE networking event and only because we were told we could win some sweet prizes.  It was there that I met Karen & Joel Garcia, who I count as friends now.  I remember returning from that show and deciding that I should start a blog.  I started it on Blogger (I know, I’m ashamed too…) and later got with it and ported it over to self-hosted WordPress.  Want to read my first post?  It’s a doozy… but it was 5 years ago on 8/2 (also my wedding anniversary & Kevin Smith’s birthday).

Get Noticed FAST SpeakersSo in a few days I’m off to Summit again, and I’m so glad I went to summit back in ’07.  It set me on this career path when I just had a job, so I’ll be forever grateful to the speakers in the sessions I attended and the people I met back then that ignited this spark.  I’m proud to say that 5 years later, I’m still loving it!

Want to sit down with me and chat about any of the affiliate programs I manage?  Check out my schedule at Tungle.me/trishalyn and let’s set something up!

Another laugh… my random photos from Miami in 07!

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