Tuesday January 19th

The final day of Affiliate Summit started bright and early with the Pinnacle Awards scheduled before the last day’s keynote by Brian Clark.  This was a change for the conference agenda, which usually puts the Pinnacle Awards in the afternoon after other sessions.  I like the change because it gets the awards out of the way, and didn’t interfere with any other sessions or independent parties planned in the evening.  I seem to remember last year that some of the award winners had to jet quickly after the awards to get to a charity poker tournament, among other places.

The winners have been blogged all over, but here’s a quick recap just in case this is the only blog you read (unlikely): Affiliate of the Year – Nicholas Koscianski.  Affiliate Manager of the Year – Matt McWilliams.  Exceptional Merchant – eBay Partner Network.  Affiliate Marketing Advocate – Angel Djambazov.  Best Bloggger – Jeremy Schoemaker.  Affiliate Marketing Legend – Scott Jangro.

Next up was Brian Clark’s keynote.  He admitted at the beginning that it was his first keynote, so I guess he did pretty well all things considered.  Of course, I have a whole post devoted to the keynote that I’ll go into later.

Once again, I intended to go into more sessions on Tuesday, but got sidetracked with all the networking possibilities.  As well, I was given a demo of a new affiliate network of sorts, Impact Radius.  It gives merchants and affiliates a way to also reach out and work with more traditional media partners.  I had an opportunity to interview one of the founders, Lisa Riolo, about the launch of the new network, which will also be another blog post coming up soon.

I made it a point to get to Jim Kukral’s session How To Get Motivated For Success!, which I’ll of course be posting a recap for.  It was a great kick in the pants to get going with projects that have been stalled for awhile.  I know Eric Nagel wrote an entire post about Jim’s kick in the ass.

While in Jim’s session, I heard via Twitter that Daniel M. Clark of Geek Dads Weekly was invited to speak on the GeekCast.fm Live panel.  I was bummed since I wanted to participate with that panel/group like I did at Affiliate Summit East 2009, but happy for Daniel.  I went into the session for a moment, but left in favor of running back up to my room for a few things.  As I understand, the session was some industry talk followed up with a lot of “how to podcast” type questions, so it looks like I personally didn’t miss much information that I didn’t already know.

The evening ended with a fail on the part of the Rio.  A BlogUp mixer was planned at the VooDoo Lounge, which was official and everything, not just 100 people crashing the lounge for a mixer.  Unfortunately, it was raining and since the lounge has an indoor and an outdoor area, the lounge ended up double booked with another much larger group of people.  So we tried cramming into the bar at the steakhouse for awhile, overwhelming the poor bartender on duty.  Finally, the Rio moved the charade down to the iBar and served complimentary champagne as a mea culpa.

I stayed for awhile, the  it was on to another Las Vegas tradition – the buffet!  A large group of us went to the Carnival World Buffet at the Rio, one of my favorite buffets ever.  Then again, I haven’t been to many.  It was good times and good food with good people – one of my favorite activities!  After dinner, I went and hung out with Heather Smith & Julie Vazquez, who were still at the iBar.  Had a very pleasant last night of Affiliate Summit West 2010!

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Anyone who follows me on Twitter (if you don’t yet – what’s your excuse?) could see that I was more than making up for my lack of internet on my laptop by tweeting notes from the sessions I was in.  I strained one of my fingers on my dominant right hand Sunday night bowling with the folks from GTO Management, and even taking traditional written notes was a challenge.

So before I kick off all the notes I took at the sessions (it was lighter this conference than I have in the past), here’s all the tidbits of knowledge I tweeted while attending sessions at Affiliate Summit West 09.

From the Buy.at Party at Moon:

• http://twitpic.com/11sw2 – Tear the roof off at Moon buy.at party
• http://twitpic.com/11t7v – From the roof of the palms

From The Ultimate Pitching Guide Session:

• @skydiver just said re pitches on twitter “if u can’t pitch in 140 char u need 2 work on brevity anyway”
• Twitter has replaced focus groups- @skydiver

From the ShareASale Under the Star’s 80’s themed party:

• http://twitpic.com/1243s – Jon levine @ sas party
• http://twitpic.com/124e8 – Gettin’ down at SAS party

From Affiliate Videos: Where do they work best? Session:

• Video session: Youtube is larger than Microsoft in search engines- 77mil uniques
• u don’t have to have a professional prod studio to develop video
• .tv traffic increasing but still nowhere near as high as .com
• very brand & vertical specific video creative is the most requested
• People buy from people – at the end of the day video is the most effective medium for that. Amen!
• I love @andrewwee for bringing up ShamWOW in his question!
• get out there & try it!

From the Pinnacle Awards Gala:

• Nice touch on the tux & beer @affiliatetip
• Right on for Train Signals donating $10k for Breast Cancer Research- squish a boob save a life!
• Mike Allen – Affiliate of the Year
• AM of the yr- @djambazov Angel
• pinnacle award exceptional merchant CelebrateExpress.com
• pinnacle award Affiliate Mktg Advocate @mellies! Melanie Seery
• pinnacle award Best Blogger @jangro! Scott Jangro
• affiliate marketing legend – congrats to Kellie Stevens!
• congrats to thew winners!

From Advanced Optimization for Landing Pages Session:

• 2% avg conversion rate: 2009 year of conversion optimization
• test everything assume nothing
• Lisa Crossly Hunter: what are your affiliates doing that your search team can borrow from?
• start now, but don’t start without a plan. And test.
• gen rule of thumb- at least 100 conversions for at least a week (per element you change, I forgot to include that in the tweet)

From the Affiliate Triathalon:

• http://twitpic.com/12mj4 – #asw09 Brian Littleton of SAS @ Affiliate Triathalon

Of course if you’re REALLY bored you can just go to Twitter Search and enter in “#asw09 trishalyn” and see EVERYTHING I tweeted while at the conference

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I’m so excited I can hardly sit still!  In just a few hours I’ll be on a flight headed to Las Vegas.  I really do love going to Affiliate Summit – it gives me a chance to catch up with colleagues, have some fun, and learn a bunch of new stuff.  As always, I’ll be sharing it dutifully with you!

In the meantime, here’s the roundup of some of the stuff that passed through my peripheral consciousness this week!  Forgive me if it’s heavy on the Affiliate Summit stuff – whenever a conference comes near that’s almost all that’s on people’s minds!

• Can’t be at the show?  Gary Vaynerchuk Keynote at Affiliate Summit Streaming Live on Ustream.tv.  Awesome!  If you’re already a Ustream.tv user, just search for the affiliate-summit channel.  Otherwise go be a voyeur at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/affiliate-summit.
• Charter Membership is now open for the Performance Marketing Alliance.  The price tag is a bit hefty (keep in mind – I have no base of reference for how much professional organizations usually cost), so I’ll be grabbing some literature to show my company
• ReveNews editor Angel Djambazov shared his Top 5 Must See Sessions at Affiliate Summit West 2009.  I know I expect to be in at least 2-3 of those.
• Angel’s on a tear with the sessions stuff, sharing his Top 10 Must See Sessions at CES 2009.  For those of you not entirely geeky (yet), CES is the Consumer Electronics Show, with manufacturers vying to show off their goods to the masses.  This show is going on in Las Vegas as well and ends right as Affiliate Summit West 2009 starts.
• There’s a good two part series on the Affiliate Classroom blog that any webmaster should read: Why Content is Still King (and Queen) Part 1 of 2 and Why Content is Still King (and Queen) Part 2 of 2.
• With some news about a client of ours, PrintPlace Expands with New Printing Facility in California. Did you hear that?  It was the sound of shipping times being cut in half!

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