Reflecting on an Origin Story: Affiliate Summit East 2007
Yes, you read that right. After a whirlwind trip to Oregon this week for a wedding, I’m making off into the night on a red-eye flight to New York for Affiliate Summit East 2012.
This marks a milestone for me. Affiliate Summit East 2007 in Miami was my first Summit, so this will be (counting last May’s Affiliate Summit Central) my 10th Summit and the 5 year anniversary of this blog and my participation in Affiliate Marketing. I was just a baby in affiliate marketing back then.
Wow… how things have changed! Back then I didn’t know what I was doing at ALL, somehow teaching my co-worker everything I knew about affiliate marketing on our red-eye flight from Oakland to Miami. And by everything I knew – that means everything I’d learned since about November of 2006, so not much. How naive we were – we totally blew off the Meet Market thinking it would be lame (maybe back then it was, I wouldn’t have known) and didn’t participate in hardly ANY networking. We were more interested in South Beach every night to eat dinner on the strip.
The trip was not all fun, and I did take it seriously and so glad I did. I still use the same college-ruled composition book for notes. The sessions I went to at that Summit might make you chuckle:
I remember some of the speakers, but not all… Jeremy Palmer, Scott Jangro, Rosalind Gardner, Stephanie Agresta, most notable in my mind at the time was Jay Berkowitz and his 10 golden rules session. I remember offering up the merchant I worked for at the time for analysis in the Conversion Rate Clinic and going back to my manager at our booth saying, “We have a LOT to fix when we get back! Josh Sloan made a magical impression on me with his magic tricks as we exhibited beside 1&1,. We went to ONE networking event and only because we were told we could win some sweet prizes. It was there that I met Karen & Joel Garcia, who I count as friends now. I remember returning from that show and deciding that I should start a blog. I started it on Blogger (I know, I’m ashamed too…) and later got with it and ported it over to self-hosted WordPress. Want to read my first post? It’s a doozy… but it was 5 years ago on 8/2 (also my wedding anniversary & Kevin Smith’s birthday).
So in a few days I’m off to Summit again, and I’m so glad I went to summit back in ’07. It set me on this career path when I just had a job, so I’ll be forever grateful to the speakers in the sessions I attended and the people I met back then that ignited this spark. I’m proud to say that 5 years later, I’m still loving it!
Want to sit down with me and chat about any of the affiliate programs I manage? Check out my schedule at Tungle.me/trishalyn and let’s set something up!
Another laugh… my random photos from Miami in 07!
ASE09 Session: Keeping Your Affiliate Program Clean
Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.
Session Description: Learn advanced approaches to running a clean affiliate program. A review of the systems, processes, tools and techniques used by leading affiliate programs to keep their programs clean. The panel consisted of:
- David Naffziger, CEO, BrandVerity (Moderator)
- Jamie Birch, Owner, JEBCommerce (Twitter @JamieEBirch)
- Graham MacRobie, President & CEO, Alias Encore (Twitter @grahammacrobie)
- Joshua Sloan, CEO, Sloan Tech (Twitter @sloanzone)
This session contained a lot of useful information targeted mostly to companies with an affiliate program and also outsource program managers. Some of the information was useful for affiliates, especially the need for a good relationship between affiliates and affiliate managers. The session consisted of short presentations by David Naffziger and by Graham MacRobie and then the floor was opened up for questions.
The presentations gave a brief overview of some of the common forms of abuse affiliate programs need to avoid. These include PPC violations, Cookie Stuffing, Legitimate link replacement, transaction lead fraud, and Brand Squatting. Some of the ways given to combat abuse were to know how your partners work – know how traffic is normally sent, who else they work with, is their plan consistent with their performance, and is their traffic pattern different from the normal. Examples of various software was give, a couple from Brand Verity and also free alternatives.
The question and answer portion gave several very good tips. One of the first was that no program should auto-approve, that affiliates each be inspected to make sure that they are who they say they are. Another was to go over the terms and conditions listed for the program at least once a year; it is better to have over strict rules and regs. that are lightly enforced rather than not enough. This will help in the long run because if abuse is found it can then be removed. Less than desirable affiliates are likely to group in the smaller networks as they are less likely to be discovered. More abuse is likely in a new affiliate program. Having the highest payout can make you a target on account of greed. Many of these comments can be used both by affiliate managers and also act as warnings to affiliates as to the relationship they should have with their manager.
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