Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 19 [39:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A couple of hyper-caffeinated affiliate marketers (Mike Buechele) and (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!

In this all-too-RARE episode, we reunite and make lots of fun of ourselves for being inconsistent in our scheduling and shows.  We discuss some things that are kind of old and some things that are brand-spanking new.  It happens.  Incidentally, I realize I said the name Richard Attenborough when we were joking around and I was trying to reference those classic nature shows from our childhood with the stoic British actor describing gazelles running across the Serengeti.  Not sure what the actor’s name actually was, but I know now that it wasn’t Sir Attenborough.  Oh well, despite that, episode 19 comes in at a cheetah like speed of 39 minutes.

Also, I just fixed the audio problem where it cut off about 33 minutes in.  Sorry, should be all good now!  In this episode we discuss:

• My new gig with For Me To Coupon.
• The Advertising Tax hits Colorado.  Read more about it here:
  • Fox 31 KDVR News: Online sales tax bill moves through House
  • Examiner.com: Are state representatives going to put work-at-home moms out of business overnight? (by Jen Goode!)
  • Performance Marketing Association: Colorado House Passes Bill that Threatens to Devastate Affiliates (by Lisa Picarille!)
• The launch of Impact Radius – more of an exchange than a network.
  • My Interview with Lisa Riolo of Impact Radius
• Seesmic Look.  Seriously, what is this?  We decided – it’s a search tool!
• 1938 Media starts 1938 Business & teams up with some heavy hitters to produce this year’s Audience Conference.
  • Loren Feldman and Affiliate Summit Team Up
• Shout outs went to the losers of the Affiliate of the Year Pinnacle Award, Kim Rowley and Eric Nagel!

Want to catch up with us & ask questions for the next show? Find us on Twitter: @MikeBuechele & @TrishaLyn.  Or leave us a comment!

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Monday January 18th

Day 2 of Affiliate Summit for me started off a bit rocky.  I was far from hung over, but I awoke with the familiar feeling of an impending migraine.  I decided that, despite the morning keynote by Dr. Robert Cialdini not being recorded, I’d have to skip it in favor of some more quiet time before the storm to dispel the headache on the horizon.  Luckily it worked and I went down just at the end of the keynote to catch up with some folks to get the cliff’s notes version of the keynote and to find my first morning appointment.  Luckily, the staff were handing out little cheat sheet cards with the main bullet points from the keynote, which I got and took note of.

I mentioned I had a meeting.  I learned a valuable lesson at this conference – don’t just research what the person you’re meeting with does, research what they look like!  We’d decided to meet in outside the theater after the keynote, and man was that a bad idea.  A sea of unfamiliar faces and I have no idea what this guy looks like!  I hang around for about 15 minutes, trying to find someone who looks like they’re also looking for someone, to no avail.  I check my watch and decide that I have to move on in order to get to the session I wanted to go to.  So now I know that next time I have to meet with someone, I’m either going to meet them somewhere not so busy or snoop on their Facebook profile to see what they look like!

My first session of the day was Product Datafeeds: The Next Level, which by nature was dry, but sill interesting.  Scott Jangro did a great job as moderator and I did my best as a student.  I figured that I know the basics about datafeeds, but moving on in my career to a company that provides a coupon feed, I better learn more!  A full review of that will come later today.

After lunch, I did some time working in the For Me to Coupon booth in the expo hall.  I’m glad that I did some homework about the basics of the company before standing in the booth, because we certainly didn’t have a whole lot of downtime to chit chat.  People were coming by nonstop asking questions about the service, which is awesome.  I was put to the test many times on my knowledge, and thankfully only had to defer to Forrest & Nate a few times for questions I had no clue about.  But it was also a great opportunity to learn more nitty gritty stuff about the service when more technical affiliates stopped by with really detailed developer questions.  A great introduction to my new job!

I ducked away from the booth for some rejuvenation time in the blogger lounge, then on to the Oprah, Flogs and FTC: Hot Topics 2010 session.  It was interesting, but frustrated me that the presenter went through a LOT of good information in his presentation much too fast.  I’m incredibly happy though that the presentation has been uploaded to SlideShare, so when I post my recap of that, it’ll have the presentation link!

Before the activity for the evening I had a lovely few drinks with Heather Smith, Julie Vazquez, Lori Herren, & Joe Vaughn from Izea.  After playing with the Microsoft Surface table in the iBar, we moved our operation over to the All American Bar & Grill for the 20 cent chicken wings!  It’s the Rio’s 20th anniversary, so they had all sorts of deals like that.  About 60 wings, a basket of fries, and a few sodas all came in under $30!  I learned a TON more about Izea and their products sitting with two insiders and Joe, a sales manager from Izea.

After dinner, it was time for our evening activity, one of my favorite activities hands down anywhere – TRIVIAL PURSUIT!  They set up the Wii  on a large screen and popped in the game.  I was happily chosen 3rd or 4th for Team Missy Ward and we proceeded to kick ass.  Of course, another team came from behind in an upset win, but it was a TON of fun playing the game.  I know this is a game I’ll have to get for my wii.  It was good times, and everyone who played & stuck around until the end was generously given a complimentary Gold Pass for Affiliate Summit East 2010, which we’ll be using to bring Dominic along! 

For a normal, sane person, trivia’s end at midnight would have been the end of the evening, but oh no.  Now it was time to wander over to McFadden’s Restaurant & Saloon for a party once again thrown by the folks at GTO Management in conjunction with MakeBeer.net.  Coopers Brew makes some fine beer and their affiliate program is for the home brew kits that they sell, which are handy for the home brewer.  It was  a great time with displays of male competition and a punching bag game.  A few heads hit it and then headed off to another club, but I was done for the night around 2am so I headed back to the room to get some sleep before my early meeting!

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I have returned from another successful trip to an Affiliate Summit, this time the conference was Affiliate Summit West 2010.  It was an interesting trip, considering the new direction my career is now taking.

So here’s the scoop – at the end of the month, I’ll no longer be working as an outsourced program manager with Paulson Management Group.  They are bringing all work in-house to their Boulder, CO office. – which means that I’d have to move from California to continue to work with them.  Instead, I’m going to be transitioning over the next two weeks to work in client support and sales for ForMeToCoupon.com, an automated coupon feed service for affiliates.  I’m excited for the transition, into yet another aspect of affiliate marketing.

So at this Affiliate Summit, I did double duty.  I both represented Paulson Management Group and the client whose program I still manage, and represented ForMeToCoupon.com in their booth as well during the expo hall hours.  It was very interesting, but worked out better than I’d imagined.  Amy with Affiliate Summit was awesome enough to print me out a second version of my name tag badge that had the FMTC company name on it so I wouldn’t confuse anyone (more than I might already have confused people).  So, enough about my new role, which I am very excited about and have already started working on.

I didn’t go to as many sessions as I normally like to at a conference, what with the meetings I had and the time I put in standing at the FMTC booth.  Those recaps will come soon.  Until then, some brief recaps of my days at Affiliate Summit West 2010 are soon to come!  I don’t want to write the longest post in the history of TrishaLyn.com, so I’ll break them up.  You can see them later!

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