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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Super Affiliates:

• The best affiliates in a program based on performance and earnings, usually the top 1%, who generate the majority of revenue for a program.

I’ve also used this term to refer to an affiliate who is well known across multiple programs to run a super successful affiliate site participating in many programs.  Such well known super affiliates include John Chow, Zac Johnson, Connie Berg, Mike Allen, and Amit Mehta.

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine

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I was looking forward to attending this panel despite knowing that I probably knew all there was to know on this subject, because I knew two of the panelists.  Boy was I wrong – it just goes to show you that there’s always something new to be learned when attending trade shows! The panel consisted of:

• Shawn Collins, Co-Founder, Affiliate Summit
• Mike Allen, CEO, Shopping-Bargains.com
• Tim Jones, Blogger, TheRealTimJones.com

I was proud of the boys – despite having a crowd of general noobs to affiliate marketing they did an excellent job and really threw out some solid information.

Bullet Point Review!

• Blended ads look nicer and work better.
• PopShops has a WordPress plugin that’s super easy to use.
• Remember to work the ads in creatively.
• Think and plan for the long term.
  • Your blog is your brand.
  • Be the expert.
  • Share your space.
• Affiliate marketing is a great start but doesn’t stop there.
  • Be careful – advertising the wrong way can tarnish your image.
  • Think like a business and set goals.
  • Craft a business plan and follow it.
  • Look for other retail opportunities (your own affiliate program?)
• There’s lots of opportunity for creativity.
• Most people don’t know it’s an affiliate link and most don’t care (when using text links).
• .htaccess redirect helps clean links up – fairly simple process.
• 50%+ of subscribers come by email.
• Utilize social media to build readership and establish yourself as an expert.
• People have to get there before they can click.
• MaxBlogPress, OpenX are good free ad serving plugins.
• Ninja Affiliate 1.5 is a paid plugin that automatically ads contextual links to keywords you enter in.
• Peel away ads (page ears) also work well
• Target your ads to your audience.
• Yahoo! Answers works well to help establish yourself within your niche as an expert.
• Don’t venture too far outside your niche.  You want to upsell and compliment your blog.
• The first thing you’d do?  Tim says sign up with the affiliate networks.  Shawn suggested doing a Google Search to get a feel for your competition.  Mike advises to make sure your site works and that content is up before applying for the affiliate programs – the merchant has to want you.
• Spend the $10 on a domain & it’ll get over the first threshold when affiliate managers review your application.

I don’t have any notes from the Q&A portion of the panel because a lot of it was specific to those bloggers asking the questions – they wanted to know specifics.  Personally I don’t think a Q&A session is really the time for that but I understand the desire for people to take any opportunity they can get to ask a question of an expert!

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