Conferences & Networking

HOW Conference Post-Game Show

Posted on May 22, 2008 in Conferences & Networking, Marketing |

Well I’m back in the Pacific Standard Time Zone after 4 days in Boston.  To date, it’s safe for me to say that the HOW Design Conference has been the best for PsPrint to attend so far!  About 80% of people stopping by our booth had never heard of us before, which isn’t necessarily bad.  This has been a relatively untapped resource for us, and we excitedly passed out samples of our printing, paper stocks, and information on the Reseller Program.

A neat feature of this show was that the expo hall wasn’t open the entire day – we only had to staff the booth from 8-9 am, 12-2 pm, and then 5-6:30p on Monday only.  I believe the “Resource Center” hours (their moniker) were set this way to avoid stepping on the toes of too many special sessions.  The real star of this conference is, of course, the educational sessions for designers.  The expo hall is just a bonus for vendors to be able to toss some marketing voodoo at a prime audience.

I think we’ll definitely go back next year to the HOW Conference, being held in Austin, TX.  Of all the trade shows I’ve been to as a representative of PsPrint, this was by far the most successful.  Everything arrived on time, our booth looked great, and the audience was truly interested in what we have to offer.  Overall, a great feeling!

Of course, I had to visit Faneuil Hall & Cheers, and did take some pictures that I’ll share tomorrow once I pull them off my camera.  My hotel (pictured above) was pretty decent for a Best Western, and I have some tips & such to share about Boston for those of us going back for Affiliate Summit East in August.  But that, my friends, I’ll leave for another day.

Free Toolsday for May 20th

Posted on May 20, 2008 in Conferences & Networking, Tools | 1 comment

I learn so much just by hanging out on Twitter most of my day. I learned about a spectacular travel site called TripIt.com from Sam Harrelson.

This knocks TripAdvisor out of the park.  I got on TripAdvisor thinking that it would be great a resource with all the reviews of hotels and attractions in the areas.  But in the last year 99% of the travel I’ve done has been for work, where I’m not there for pleasure and I’m not necessarily choosing where we stay or go.  So I don’t think I’ve logged into TripAdvisor in months.  At least 6.

TripIt is a much more suitable replacement for me.  And the user ease is AMAZING.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  First, let me tell you the purpose of TripIt.  The site works as a great organizational tool that aggregates your activities, meetings, hotel information, flight information, etc into a centrally located personal travel assistant.  Just email your confirmation emails directly to plans@tripit.com and it integrates the details into your trip itinerary.

The itinerary itself is spectacularly thorough.  Not only does it add your hotel info and flight info through the email, but you can also add different types of events, restaurant outings, and meetings.  Everything is color coded and the site automatically adds Google Maps and Directions from one location to another into the itinerary.  Here’s an example from my current trip to Boston:

TripIt also integrates well with Google Calendar, which is my online calendar of choice, and adds exact time and details for each appointment, flight, check in, check out, etc.  The site has a printable itinerary that is currently keeping me on track here in Boston, and if you’re more of a mobile/smart phone reliant person there’s mobile features as well.  I only wish the printable version was color coded as well, but I understand why it’s not.

If you travel a lot for business, you should give this site a try at the least.  As all the free toolsday features, it’s FREE!  So you have no reason not to go check it out.

Tradeshow Madness

Posted on May 8, 2008 in Career, Conferences & Networking | 7 comments

Is there really a “trade show season”? I’ve heard this referred to time & again, but I seem to go year ’round so I don’t know what that season is! Yes, soon it will be time for me to hit the road again and make my rounds of the country in search of truth, justice, and the American Business Way!

Actually, both of the conferences in my future take me to Boston, MA. I’m hoping since it’s on the coast that it won’t be as muggy and terrible as when I visited New Jersey in 2006 for a film festival. That was awful. I’ve never been to Boston, so I’m excited. This next trip is quick and won’t allow for a lot of time to see any sights except in the evenings, but for the second show I’ve worked a day or so in to see some stuff.

Boston, MA

First stop, the HOW Design Conference May 18th through 21st. I’m on booth duty the entire time, so no sessions for me. Which makes me sad, but I’m relying on a co-worker that is attending the sessions to take good notes because I’m sure it’ll be interesting. In a geeky designer way. In booking this trip, it was pretty last minute for the company to make up it’s mind in who would be sent, so costs were pretty expensive. I managed to get one hell of a deal on a flight for $380 on Hotwire, a feat which seems to not be repeatable as looking for the flight for my second outing only returned prices in the $420-460 range. Since it was also the last minute and there has GOT to be some other conferences or events going on the same week, almost every decent hotel in the area was booked solid or $500/night. So we’re staying at the Best Western near Longview Medical for $300/night. Never have I stayed in such a poorly valued Best Western – but we’ll see.

Next on my list, the always great Affiliate Summit. I won’t be attending this as a representative of PsPrint. This is on my own dime. I’ll be going as a member of the press, and will be reporting live (hopefully) on the sessions I attend and the different events I go to. I’m stoked, and BIG Shout Out to Missy Ward, one of the co-founders, for helping make this happen for me. I’ve booked my hotel already, luckily getting on on super fair group rate of $189/night at the Seaport Hotel where the event will be happening. As I mentioned above, I tried to get a great deal on a flight booking 3 months in advance, but still only got higher…so I’ll watch the fares for awhile and see what I can do to swing a cheaper flight. I’ve built a day into my schedule out there to HOPEFULLY see some cool Boston stuff…maybe if I win the lottery I can go to a Red Sox game at Fenway! I’m really excited and can’t wait.

And BEST news of all, the wonderful Scott Jangro found out the problem I was having with the RSS feed – Revver & PodPress were just not playing nicely together. It has been fixed so PLEASE remember to subscribe to my RSS feed!

Be sure to share some travel tips with me!

Day 3 of asw08 – Part 2, Fin!

Posted on Feb 28, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

Of course the best way to keep readers is to create a sense of anticipation in one’s blog, yet I assure you that was not my intention in waiting until today to finish my recap of Day 3. The Nevada dryness and, I come to find, altitude was not conducive to my attempts to fight off a bug that’s been going around here. So I returned home from ASW08 yesterday, slept ALL day, and already feel better just being back here on the California coast with my 20 ft above sea level home and cool air.

So where was I? Somewhere around Asymmetric Warfare. This was a great panel about affiliate fraud, something I’m not entirely familiar with how to combat. I picked up some great tips and can’t wait to receive a copy of the presentation from moderator Graham MacRobie. There was a TON of information, such as tips on how to prevent fraud, a list of countries to be careful of applications from (these countries are REALLY easy to create offshore corporations at so it could be fraudulent), and information on typo-squatting, tasting, and kiting (not sure if I spelled that right).

Some highlights I noted:

• Know your partners & reach out to them. Staying in touch will help weed out fraud.
• Check the WHOIS contact info for the affiliate domain name – will help ID fraud but also give you a chance to see if they have any other websites that your program would be a good fit for.
• Do what you can to own your own typo’d websites and redirect to your official website to avoid typosquatting (costly, but probably the best way to protect your brand).
• Don’t assume fraud will go unnoticed.
• Be wary of affiliates using redirects – not always a sign of fraud but worth a second look.
• www.torproject.org – proxy site to see the affiliates website as the rest of the world sees it, just in case they have an IP rule on you so it looks legit to the manager.
• Well thought out rules indicate vigilance against fraud & help to protect against it.
• Networks can help protect you because they trade info about globally bad affiliates and provide a first line of defense against fraud before the affiliate even gets to you.
• An audience member asked if it’s better to let everyone in or to be really selective, and the panelists advised to go for an approach right in the middle. Give the new affiliates a chance to succeed as lots have potential they just need to gain experience. Reach out to the little guy & try to help rather than cutting them from your program when they don’t perform.
• A good way to stay in touch with affiliates without being annoying to them is to just get an agreement with them about how often they want to be contacted. One call per month can be much more effective than a weekly blanket email.
• Understand how your company deals with transactional fraud before setting a policy that will affect paying your affiliates.
• If you’re really concerned, there are a lot of local task forces on police departments revolving around cyber-crime that can give you more information.

After that last session I packed up our materials for shipment back to Oakland and called it a day. I was still feeling ill, so I didn’t make it down to the un-keynote or the road rally. Hopefully when we go back to Boston for Affiliate Summit East 2008, I’ll be able to report more in-depth!

Day 3 Affiliate Summit – Part 1

Posted on Feb 26, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

Still sick, I managed to get as much sleep as I could and skipped breakfast in favor of that goal. Once I slept as much as I could without skipping more than just some food, I headed down for the Super Affiliate Strategies that Work panel. I was interested to see how this differed from the What Super Affiliates Want panel I attended at the last Affiliate Summit in Miami.

It was a great panel, and I hear it was standing room only. Rock on – my sick self managed to score a seat otherwise I never would have lasted in there. It was a great panel by Kris Jones of Pepperjam, Amit Mehta, Zac Johnson, and John Chow. It was mostly Q&A from the audience with a little bit of moderation from Kris, so lots of good stuff. Someone actually blatantly asked about black hat tactics…to which he received a pretty unbiased response from John that he was just better off in the long run to stick with whitehat tactics if he wants to be a success overall. Which makes sense to me. Since this session was Q&A style it was pretty different from last year’s panel I already mentioned, which is good for me. I’d hate to get a lot of duplicate content. Some great points I picked up from the session are:

• Amit looks for a niche where there’s a lot of search traffic and builds a site with content & landing pages. Optimizes through SEO.
• Keep working on content & adding new things.
• Relevant content around affiliate links help the buyer make a decision.
• The long tail search terms are more stable for long term success.
• There’s an incredible risk for affiliates using black hat tactics. There’s an incredible amount of opportunity in white hat channels so you’re better off keeping your nose clean.
• John noticed that people were scraping his RSS feed and he started by sending cease & desist orders and trying to go after the culprits, but when the culprits became too many he just started throwing ads into the RSS and continued to make money off them.
• Develop your business system & that’s something that no one can just copy off of you.
• Amit uses an umbrella domain then makes sub domains for the more specialized, high traffic stuff or registers an alias and redirects the traffic.
• Social networks (resources, Facebook applications) are what’s hot right now.
• Yahoo & MSN seem to convert better for whatever reason than Google. Google users are more savvy.
• Spaces between 3 & 5 are the sweet spot in search results. Constantly bidding for the Sponsored Results box may not necessarily be worth your time.
• Day parting (bidding lower during the night) can increase ROI
• Continually split test everything.
• Have a great relationship with your affiliate manager and that will help you to leverage to increase commission rates or added bonuses.
• Amit advocates his strategy of bidding on hundreds of keywords and spread the sales between them, while Kris advocated creating a narrower ad campaign that’s very clearly related to your content.
• Some good programs & tips:
  • Winner Alert: everyday it sends you a report with what’s winning
  • Efficient PPC
  • AdWords Editor

Overall it was a great session, and in case I missed anything J. Botter live blogged from there as well.

After lunch and some hours staffing our booth, I headed to the Asymmetric Warfare: Battling Fraudulent Affiliates session. More on that later.

Day 2 of Affiliate Summit – Suck All!

Posted on Feb 26, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

Almost a month ago I was granted a press pass for the Affiliate Summit. I was excited to get into the bloghaus and blog about the day as it happened. I was thrilled to walk around and network with people. I really wanted to get some great coverage of the Keynote (coverage hell, I wanted to just listen too), but… none of that happened.

Why? Because Las Vegas hates me. And there are far too many germs here. And somehow during the day on Sunday…I developed a cold. A bad one. Damn this dry air & germs!

So I didn’t get up in time to make it downstairs to have breakfast AND make it to Jason Calacanis’ keynote like I wanted to. I managed to grab some breakfast and share some stats about our affiliate program with my colleague here with me from PsPrint to help out and then to man the booth. I sent her out to get the table top sign made that wasn’t made in time for the show. I station the booth for awhile and talk to some good people before it’s time for me to head off to the morning session I planned on going to.

Oh, incidentally, for anyone who wants some GREAT coverage of the keynote, check out J. Botter’s Blog.

I digress.

I attended this morning’s “Video Innovation in Affiliate Marketing” panel. Good stuff, although I was a bit disappointed in moderator Melissa Salas reading off a prepared script pretty much verbatim. But I really enjoyed the insight from video professionals, and it’s comforting to know that content really is king, and that production value isn’t as important. Woo Hoo! I was wondering how you’d go about monetizing a video, but Revver.com seems to answer that. I’ll definitely be checking that out when I get back to the joy that is desktop computer (this older laptop isn’t that great). I really enjoyed Gary Vaynerchuk’s sense of humor & ballsy honesty. I’m excited with my new Aiptek A-HD 720P 5MP CMOS High Definition Camcorder

Some great points from the panel session:

• Most people come on the internet for two P’s – pleasure or problems. If you solve someone’s problem, it’s a good video.
• KNOW what you’re talking about. As long as you know your subject, you can produce great content.
• In the next 12 months, you should test video on your site. By 18 months from now, if you don’t have video on your website you may be in trouble.
• Video really works to sell as it gives your brand more credibility & builds brand equity.
• Depth of information is quality will translate to a successful video.
• Work on integrating video into your current web experience for the most effective video experience.
• The average video watched online is about 2 minutes long.
• An enormous amount of video watching is done at work, so keep that in mind. Melissa added that a Click to Listen button is much appreciated by these people.
• In terms of size & format, go for the best quality you can when shooting, even if it has to be compressed when uploading online. If you can afford it, shoot in HD. It’s where everything is headed. (Side note – this makes me really glad that I bought my new HD mini cam! It’s the one in the picture.)

Day 3 should be good – hoping for some informative sessions and to feel better.