ASW10 Tuesday Keynote Brian Clark
Entreproducer: The Affiliate Marketer as Media Mogul
Thin affiliate sites are disappearing from search engines, while social media is powered by content sharing, not sales pitches. It’s time to start thinking like a new media producer first and foremost, with affiliate relationships as just one form of monetization. The keynote was given by:
- Brian Clark, Co-Founder, DIY Themes
Brian notes that this was his first keynote, so good job on one under the belt! It focused on creativity, which I really did connect with. Unfortunately it did get kind of dry in the middle and I admit, I lost focus on taking notes. But he ended on a memorable note using some music clips to illustrate some points.
Bullet Point Review!
- Focus on branded websites – better for link backs. If you can get a keyword in, great, but that shouldn’t be the focus.
- Positioning – What’s unique about you? How do you stand out in a competitive landscape?
- Design – Great usability of the content (presentation).
- Contact & Community – you want people to raise their hands and pay attention to you over time.
- It’s easier to make money if you’re using content to attract an audience and sell something related.
- From a mindset standpoint, realize you’re in the media business.
- Branded content started with soap operas, kinda.
- There’s nothing more powerful than being an authority figure yourself.
- Branding is really everything – it’s the story you’re trying to tell the world.
- They hear what they want and hopefully it’s what you want them to hear.
- It’s not about traffic, and it’s not just about audience, it’s about creating fans.
- You don’t have to be a rock star to the whole world, just to a group of fans.
- Your brand is a story. If someone is saying something bad about you then it’s still branding.
- If the only thing people are saying about you is bad, at least you have feedback telling you want you are doing wrong.
- Most people that study creativity find that these people have lower associative boundaries.
- We’re socialized to put things in boxes and categories.
- Fail fast – keep trying and you’ll get a lot better at it.
Brian summarized with some clips from a group called Girl Talk that makes unlikely musical mash ups. I highly recommend going in search of this group, who has two albums out if I remember correctly.
Here’s the video provided by Affiliate Summit:
Day 3 of Affiliate Summit West 2010
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!
Read MoreAffiliate Marketing Fanatics 10: Gonna Make a Change
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A Publisher (Mike Buechele) and an Affiliate Manager (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!
Unfortunately this week we had a mic failure on Mike’s part, so even though I could hear him when we were recording the podcast on Skype, when listening back he was inaudible. I tried amplifying it and leveling it and everything, but it was a lost cause. So instead, we decided I’d give you a recap on what we talked about since they were all pretty important issues. Basically, we’re taking a page from Shawn Collins’ book on podcast failures ;). So the title refers both to all the changes going on with tax rules and disclosure regarding affiliates AND to the change Mike has to make to get the recording right next week!
The recap episode is a short and sweet 26 minutes on the dot since it includes a Jackson tribute at the end.
In this show, we discussed:
- A recap of Affiliate Convention.
- Amazon dropped North Carolina affiliates and sent a warning letter to Rhode Island affiliates. Darren Rowse wrote about it on Problogger.
- The FTC is tightening it’s rules regarding disclosure, but it’s still ambiguous enough to leave affiliates questioning what this means for them. Daniel M. Clark wrote an article on the FTC disclosure issue, as well as Brian Clark of Copyblogger’s wrote about how to turn disclosure into a selling point.
- Twitter servers took a hit yesterday when the news about Michael Jackson’s sudden death broke. Are they ready to be a major search engine?
- Rumors swirled about other celebrity deaths – this doesn’t make Twitter look like a legitimate resource in the eyes of skeptics.
- Finally, Rest in Peace to Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, who both passed away yesterday. We pay tribute to MJ and pontificated on whether or not we’d see affiliates attempting to capitalize on these events. I see just now that Shawn Collins is thinking about this topic as well on his blog.
BlogWorldExpo 08: Making Money Online with a Blog
This was also commonly referred to as the “Super Bloggers” panel. The members consisted, in total, of:
- Jim Kukral, JimKukral.com (Moderator)
- John Chow, JohnChow.com
- Zac Johnson, ZacJohnson.com
- Darren Rowse, ProBlogger.net
- Brian Clark, CopyBlogger.com
- Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemoney.com
Jeremy was late due to some quality Vegas partying, but once he did arrive he had some quality things to say. They all did, really, but I especially enjoyed Darren & Brian’s takes as I had never heard them speak before and I’d heard John & Zac.
Bullet Point Review!
- Jim asked what their number #1 money maker on their blog was:
- John Chow: Switching from an ad network to direct advertising sales using the OIO Publisher Direct plugin.
- Zac Johnson: Direct ad sales
- Darren Rowse: Recommended affiliate products.
- Brian Clark: Launching a membership site & selling WordPress themes.
- Selling any old crap decreases content value; sell things you actually believe in.
- Bloggers just want to write, not sell, so plugins are useful.
- Write about something that’s interesting or else it’s not sustainable.
- Revenue: 1. Direct Ad Sales 2. Affiliate Programs 3. AdSense.
- BC: Selling things (information, membership, etc) instead of advertising makes more money.
- A couple of years ago readers would complain about ads, but now they’re accepted as par for the course.
- The amount of money to be made in “non-sexy” niches is ridiculous.
- Start with what your readers want to buy, not what you want to sell.
- Offer incentives to sign up for your newsletter – 3x the money to be made with subscriptions.
- Newsletters vs. RSS – it’s way more beneficial to get people onto your email list.
- Aweber – BlogBroadcast tools count is included in RSS subscribers & sends an automatic newsletter with your blog posts.
- Many people still have no idea what RSS is, so offer delivery by email too.
- Blogs don’t have to look monetized.
- Sell yourself using consulting.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Wait until 100 or 1000 readers to bother displaying RSS numbers on the blog.
- RSS subscriber count is powerful for branding and can be factored into ad prices.
- JC: Rule of thumb when setting an ad price – what is the ECPM for that same spot on an ad network? Double that. Offer the ad to run for a month at a time or a quarter, depending on price.
- Condense your header – big headers take up valuable space.
- How much traffic do they see through search? DR sees about 40% to ProBlogger and 60% to Digital Photography School.
- Chitika is a good ad network with powerful blog widgets for contextual, relevant ads.
- Write for your users, not Google. Search traffic is just a bonus.
- It’s a tricky line to keep your editorial integrity and still sell stuff, so don’t sell willy-nilly.
- Build a business – get repeat customers, loyal readers.
- What percentage of the time do they work? A LOT – you have to bust your ass, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme.
- Always look deeply at a product & only recommend valuable things.
- Announce it
- Talk about the product info, merchant or manufacturers information.
- Share testimonials of readers.
- Review your experience with it.
- Credibility is key with sharing information.
- Endorse, review products.
- Sell advertising in newsletters, lots of merchants love that.
- Establish yourself as an expert.
- Remember that Teaching Sells!
This was a very informative panel, and a great way to kick off the sessions. The room was packed, and I especially liked Jim’s approach to using Twitter to get questions for the audience. With a tech set crowd like bloggers, it was highly effective and a great panel for sure.
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