Tuesday January 19th

The final day of Affiliate Summit started bright and early with the Pinnacle Awards scheduled before the last day’s keynote by Brian Clark.  This was a change for the conference agenda, which usually puts the Pinnacle Awards in the afternoon after other sessions.  I like the change because it gets the awards out of the way, and didn’t interfere with any other sessions or independent parties planned in the evening.  I seem to remember last year that some of the award winners had to jet quickly after the awards to get to a charity poker tournament, among other places.

The winners have been blogged all over, but here’s a quick recap just in case this is the only blog you read (unlikely): Affiliate of the Year – Nicholas Koscianski.  Affiliate Manager of the Year – Matt McWilliams.  Exceptional Merchant – eBay Partner Network.  Affiliate Marketing Advocate – Angel Djambazov.  Best Bloggger – Jeremy Schoemaker.  Affiliate Marketing Legend – Scott Jangro.

Next up was Brian Clark’s keynote.  He admitted at the beginning that it was his first keynote, so I guess he did pretty well all things considered.  Of course, I have a whole post devoted to the keynote that I’ll go into later.

Once again, I intended to go into more sessions on Tuesday, but got sidetracked with all the networking possibilities.  As well, I was given a demo of a new affiliate network of sorts, Impact Radius.  It gives merchants and affiliates a way to also reach out and work with more traditional media partners.  I had an opportunity to interview one of the founders, Lisa Riolo, about the launch of the new network, which will also be another blog post coming up soon.

I made it a point to get to Jim Kukral’s session How To Get Motivated For Success!, which I’ll of course be posting a recap for.  It was a great kick in the pants to get going with projects that have been stalled for awhile.  I know Eric Nagel wrote an entire post about Jim’s kick in the ass.

While in Jim’s session, I heard via Twitter that Daniel M. Clark of Geek Dads Weekly was invited to speak on the GeekCast.fm Live panel.  I was bummed since I wanted to participate with that panel/group like I did at Affiliate Summit East 2009, but happy for Daniel.  I went into the session for a moment, but left in favor of running back up to my room for a few things.  As I understand, the session was some industry talk followed up with a lot of “how to podcast” type questions, so it looks like I personally didn’t miss much information that I didn’t already know.

The evening ended with a fail on the part of the Rio.  A BlogUp mixer was planned at the VooDoo Lounge, which was official and everything, not just 100 people crashing the lounge for a mixer.  Unfortunately, it was raining and since the lounge has an indoor and an outdoor area, the lounge ended up double booked with another much larger group of people.  So we tried cramming into the bar at the steakhouse for awhile, overwhelming the poor bartender on duty.  Finally, the Rio moved the charade down to the iBar and served complimentary champagne as a mea culpa.

I stayed for awhile, the  it was on to another Las Vegas tradition – the buffet!  A large group of us went to the Carnival World Buffet at the Rio, one of my favorite buffets ever.  Then again, I haven’t been to many.  It was good times and good food with good people – one of my favorite activities!  After dinner, I went and hung out with Heather Smith & Julie Vazquez, who were still at the iBar.  Had a very pleasant last night of Affiliate Summit West 2010!

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Happy New Year!  As I mentioned last Friday, I’ve spent this week with family in Oregon, so I have been semi-off the grid.  So this week’s edition of Cribbed Content is as much for me to catch up on things as it is for some of you!

On a personal note, 2008 treated me okay…but I’m hoping that 2009 knocks me off my feet!  I hope your lives are treating you right and leading you in the direction you want to go!

• The movie industry doesn’t get to have all the fun with an awards season: on the heels of ShareASale announcing their awards last week, the finalists for the Pinnacle Awards Finalists at Affiliate Summit West 2009 were announced this week.  Congrats to the finalists, and we’ll see who the winners are at the awards dinner in Las Vegas.
• Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed via Twitter that PageRank was updated.  I heard about it before then and I’m glad to report that this blog has gone from a PR0 to PR2, thus reassuring me that I hadn’t landed on some mysterious Google blacklist.  As exciting as this was, it was also proven how little PR means anymore when I checked my twitter page out of curiosity to find it was a PR9!
• It’s Official: The Performance Marketing Alliance is now an official, non-profit trade association.  Charter membership will be available sometime this month, I imagine starting at Affiliate Summit.
• I wrote another guest post at Marketing Pilgrim, this time on how Digg’s Lack of Ad Targeting is Hurting Revenue.

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We’re almost a month into Q4 and it’s getting to be the time of year when holiday marketing takes off, awards wrap up the end of the year, and updates are made just in time to start off 2009 with a bang.  Check out what’s been going on this week in the world of internet marketing.

• Read an interesting article on creating Multiple, Custom Footers for WordPress.  I guess this could come in handy, although I don’t really know what the benefits are.
• Google is finally going to make some upgrades to Google Analytics.  Some of the bigger developments include a beta version of an API, integration with AdSense, and more customized reporting.
• The 2008 Blogger’s Choice Awards winners were announced this week.  Some of the relevant winners include ProBlogger.net for Best Blog About Blogging, SlopeOfHope.com for Best Business Blog, Blog.Hostgator.com for Best Corporate Blog, and CopyBlogger.com for Best Marketing Blog.
• Speaking of awards, it’s that time of year again to submit nominations for the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards.  The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2008 so hop to it.
• There’s a good article on Twitter and personal branding mistakes that is all too true.
• I found this link searching around on ABestWeb Forums and it’s a great article on 20 Free Ways to Advertise Your Web Site.

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