The real reason my Cricut Explore is still in the box
I’ve had a Cricut Expression for several years and love it. Made many holiday party decorations, assorted crafts, and even hundreds of Christmas cards one year with it (I don’t recommend that project unless there’s 10 people on your card list!). So when the new Cricut Explore came out in March with the ability to cut SVG files and other files that I could design MYSELF, I jumped on it, $300 price tag be damned!
Nine months later… it’s been sitting in the shipping box, next to my desk, unopened. When my super craft friend Jen Goode bugs me about why its still in the box, I explain how I haven’t cleaned off my card table that I use for crafts since last Christmas so I have no room to use it. But, I think I know the real reason I haven’t opened it.
Read MoreASE10 Experience Extravaganza: Monday
Expo Hall Booth Duty, The Best Steak Ever, & Trivia Tweet-Up
After going to bed at a relatively decent time considering I was still battling with a 3 hour time difference, I got up in time to get ready, rush up to grab a little breakfast, and make it into the ballroom for Frank Luntz’s keynote. I have his book, Words That Work, though I haven’t yet sat down to read it. I’ll spare you the details here, as I plan on writing another post with the notes I took, so let’s skip ahead to the FMTC booth. We had a sparse set up, but simplicity worked. Despite issues I had working with PromoPeddler.com, the notepads we ordered came out looking great. And the flyers we ordered from PsPrint were awesome as well. I was sweating bullets for weeks because we had the pieces shipped directly to the hotel, sight unseen, so if they were messed up, so were we. Everything at the booth went swimmingly, and after a long day I was headed out with the Schaaf-PartnerCentric crew for dinner.
This is the part where the food lover in me comes out. Of course, I’m a big girl, so I must love food of all shapes and sizes, right? In reality, I’m actually a very finicky eater with an almost ironic love for Food Network. The night before, I’d passed on going out with the team as they were going to a Greek place, and that’s not for me. So a steakhouse sounded much better. Let me tell you, we went to Rothmann’s Steakhouse and I had a fabulous fillet Mignon. It was, hands down, the best steak of my life. That’s not really saying a whole lot considering I’m just 29 and am accustomed to steak places such as Texas Roadhouse and Black Angus.
After said fabulous dinner, the crew went to a party thrown by Google and I opted to go back to the hotel for some Trivia. Unfortunately, someone forgot to send the Trivial Pursuit disk down from their room, so Drew Bennett came to the rescue with some Mario Kart he had brought with him. Not being the biggest Mario Kart fan, I opted to utilize the room for the free conference WiFi and get some work done. For whatever reason the wifi in my hotel room wasn’t working, so I hadn’t been online and checked emails since the previous Thursday! I was able to get some work done, have a nice impromptu meeting, and even play a couple of heats of Mario Kart before the evening was through. And by the end of the evening, Trivial Pursuit was brought down and extended the evening from 12 am to 1 am. I stayed until the bitter end when they kicked me out… utilizing as much free wifi time as I could before getting back to the grindstone of booth duty the next day.
Please feel free to view all the photos I took in New York: Affiliate Summit East 2010 on Flickr
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 MoreDay 1 of Affiliate Summit West 2010
Sunday January 17th
I’d arrived in Las Vegas Saturday afternoon, so I was all ready to get busy Sunday morning. My morning meeting had been rescheduled, so first on my agenda was meeting with a client of PMG. We had a good meeting, discussing Valentine’s Day promotions and going forward & my departure. It went well, though the food was a bit lacking. It was our fault though for getting a late start & needing to run to the Sports Deli instead of sitting down at the All American Bar & Grill as we’d sort of planned. Afterward I went over to the Meet Market, which was OUT. OF. CONTROL!
The Meet Market could not be contained to just one room! There was a smaller room first, which I thought was the whole thing until I didn’t see a few companies that I knew had tables (namely PMG). So I got in & out of there as fast as I could and found the other portion of the Meet Market, which was in a larger area adjacent to where the expo hall would be the next day, and it was not as stuffy, but still a mad house. I wandered to see what was there, but still had to high tail it out of there after talking to some people.
Next up was a session, which you’ll see a recap & notes for soon. After the session I went in search of the bloggers lounge, which was way out in the boonies. Lori Herren was awesome enough to go get Heather Smith and I cool buttons from the Facebook table. I hung out in there for awhile to mooch off the internet capabilities to upload photos I’d taken at the session before. I had every intention to purchase the internet access in my hotel room, but it wasn’t working and I did not have the patience for tech support. So I ended up staying downstairs until Lori had the inspired idea to go get dinner from the local In-N-Out Burger.
We got back and pretty much went straight into the ShareASale Under the Stars Party. It was awesome, as usual, with a terrific spread of pizza, bread & cheese plates, ice cream sundaes, cupcakes, a chocolate fountain, and of course, open bar! They had a plethora of things to do, from Wii Sports games, stand up arcade games, darts, fun gambling (no money involved), the photo booth, a DJ, dance floor, Karaoke, and the most awesome of all – a JUMP HOUSE! I was not adventurous enough to get into that bad boy, though I really, really wanted to! At one point, the spire knocked into the chandelier in the ballroom and knocked some panels off – party foul!
I had a good time with the chocolate fountain in particular & shaking my booty on the dance floor when they were giving away feather boas. I wasn’t even drunk! But who can resist a feather boa? I attempted to stay sitting for most of the party because I knew that the Strike Out Breast Cancer charity event was coming up afterward. I’m already a bad enough bowler, so I needed to conserve energy! Maybe I should have partook in the Wii Bowling to gain some confidence!
On to the bowling – it was fun despite my atrocious score of just 39. It began at midnight and was hosted by GTO Management, BowlingShirt.com, Things From Another World, and Affiliate Marketers Give Back as a fundraiser for the National Breast Cancer Foundation. We got awesome pink and black bowling shirts with the logo of the event on them, and had a great time. There were over 100 people there easily by my estimates, which is quite a feat for an event that started at midnight! It was good times, and I dragged myself back to the Rio and straight into bed to get ready for day 2!
Read MoreCribbed Content for March 6th
I haven’t had the chance to do very many of these during February… the month was filled with birthday celebrations, a vacation, and a lot of Wii in the evening since I’ve been strangely obsessed with Guitar Hero and Animal Crossing: City Folk. But since I’ve been back from vacation I’ve seen some great stuff, so I want to share.
Forgive me, some of it will be a bit out of date.
- Geno Prussakov put together a great list of affiliate marketing events in 2009.
- California is looking into a tax for online sales. Scott Jangro has written an open letter to the California outlining why it’s a bad idea. I am going to take his advice and grab the letter to send myself as a resident of California.
- Read the full California Assembly Bill 178 and contact your representatives to explain why this is a bad idea for affiliate marketers in California!
- 20/20 contacted the Performance Marketing Alliance for some background on affiliate marketing for a series they’re doing on the proliferation of work-at-home schemes. It’s good to see that they’re able to do some positive PR for the industry already… very promising since they’re off to a slow start.
- I wrote another guest post for Marketing Pilgrim, this time on The Search Engine Known as Twitter.
- If you’re at all interested in reading about my rambles about my Caribbean cruise vacation, check out my Posterous blog.
