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!
Getting ready for Affiliate Summit West 08
Twitter is alive with activity. The summit has set up a group twitter that tracks whenever someone uses the keyword asw08 in their twits. This is very cool, especially considering I didn’t know Twitter had this capability!
Everyone seems to be in a rush to get things done. Jim Kukral from ScratchBack.com is MCing the keynote on Monday. He’s twittered several times tonight about the video he’s working on for the presentation. At ASE07 in Miami the keynote was Ze Frank, a hilarious individual, so I’m hoping for no less at ASW08.
Stephanie Agresta from Stephanie Agresta Consulting is also a speaker and author of the Internet Geek Girl blog. She’s twittered off and on today about her flight information and getting ready for the trip from out east. Sam Harrelson from Affiliate Fortune Cookies has been twittering as well and he’s even had to change his flight because of inclement Northeastern weather.
Of course myself, I’m twittering here and there about getting ready. I’m not lucky enough to have a nice new company supplied laptop, so I’m on my own personal laptop this weekend. I do have a press pass, so I be working on keeping the interweb updated from the blogger’s room through this blog and Twitter. I’m committed despite my chunky clunky Dell Latitude laptop :p.
As a final note while I’m getting my laptop set up tonight, I encourage everyone associated with affiliate marketing in any way to check out this month’s issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine. Besides there being a keen write up of the PsPrint Affiliate Program, there’s a lot of great affiliate manager tips. I’ll be attending the whopping 10 hour Affiliate Classroom LIVE affiliate manager training on Saturday in Las Vegas before the summit. I’m eager to get in there and take notes… is it too much to hope for actual desks? :p I know that it’s at the Rio and from all the conference space I’ve seen at hotels in the last year, I’m sure there won’t be surfaces to write on readily available, so I’ll be taking my clipboard with me.
Hope to see you there! I’m considering bringing my camcorder with me to the exhibit hall, so if you’ve used PsPrint in the past, come on by for an impromptu video plug!
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