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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June is here, which means the “Amazon Tax” law, as it’s been dubbed, is now in effect. Merchants with affiliates residing in New York state will now have to charge tax on orders of customers in New York. In short, the state of NY has decided that affiliates constitute nexus, i.e. a term used to describe whether a business has sufficient presence or activity in a state or other taxing jurisdiction to become subject to the tax(es) of the state or jurisdiction. So now in NY state online retailers with affiliates residing in that state have to charge tax, regardless of where their corporate headquarters actually are. Some good links that explain this better than I ever could are to TechCrunch’s May 14th post and Scott Jangro’s May 22nd podcast.

So many of the larger online merchants with a large number of affiliates in NY have made the decision to drop their affiliates who reside in NY. The great folks over at ABestWeb.com Affiliate Forums have kept a running list of the merchants who’ve dissed their NY affiliates. So if you’re from NY, be aware that these merchants may not approve your application if you apply in the near future.

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