Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 33: Interviewing Heather Smith
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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!
We’re continuing our series of interviews with some speakers at Affiliate Summit East 2010, coming up in just a month in New York City. This time, we talk to Heather Smith, aka Heather in BC, about her origins in affiliate marketing & the Affiliate Summit blog room she’s running during the show. In in this episode we discuss:
- It’s Ted Murphy’s fault and IZEA that Heather is involved in social media.
- Heather’s not an affiliate – she’s a blogger at Beautiful British Columbia.
- XShot and Heather are pretty much synonymous.
- John Chow & his infamous beer runs for the blog room.
Want to catch up with us & ask questions for the next show? Find us on Twitter: @AMF_Podcast, @MikeBuechele & @TrishaLyn. Like us on Facebook! You can also ask Trisha questions through FormSpring.me. Or leave us a comment!
Read MoreDay 2 of Affiliate Summit West 2010
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!
Read MoreAffiliate Marketing Fanatics 15: Be My Yoko Ono
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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!
We kept it short & sweet this week, but hey! We did two weeks in a row! YES… I’m patting us on the back for that. We talked briefly about some things that have been going on in the industry this week, and had a short & sweet conversation with limited tangents. And almost no discussion of Twitter, other than a third party service mention. Since it was so short I messed with outro music too, which brought us to a pleasantly succinct 19:30. In in this episode we discuss:
- The fantastic fill in job Eric Nagel did last week.
- Affiliate Day came & went on September 14th.
- Sponsored Tweets picked up their traffic
- CJU, despite neither of us going.
- How cool it is when industry celebs remember you!
- Halloween & Fall promotions are upon us!
- Fantasy Football with Jason Rubacky and Shawn Collins… and a brief girl’s guide to how scoring works.
