Days -1 and 1 of Affiliate Summit East 2008
Just a quick recap of days negative 1 and 1 of Affiliate Summit East 2008 before I head off to the Share a Sale Under the Stars party that started an hour ago (give me a break, I’m fashionably late!).
Day Negative 1 (a.k.a. Saturday)
- The Affiliate Classroom Live event went well overall. I feel like the people in most of my discussions were picking up what I was putting down. I feel like I could have been better prepared, but that was really my own fault. I hope that I’m asked back in the future of other events and can do a bang up job! Also met some cool peeps.
- AffSpot.com forum meet-up was fun – got to meet some new people like Angie & Roger from Snow Consulting, talked at length with the ever charming Lisa Picarille of Revenue Magazine, finally met the lovely penguin Jen Good of JGoode Designs, was thrown schwag by Sam Harrelson & Aunesty Janssen the admins of the Spot, and met Bill (Beachy), Ron (7daysRon), & some others that came & went. As I was looking down reading something on my phone outside the bar I recognized Jim Kukral of Scratchback soley by his mandals with socks walking by! Love it.
- Speaking of Sam, he had to bail on the Affiliate Dinner last night so he graciously gave me his ticket! I went and had a great meal, lots of laughs at the expense of the roastee Connie Berg of FlamingoWorld.com, and talked at great length with apparently my #1 fan Kim Rodgers from 4Checks.com. It’s funny that I JUST ordered my new checks from them for the first time last week, so we had a great discussion! The highlight just might have been Brian Littleton from Share-a-Sale dressed up as Captain Jack Sparrow for Connie’s love of all things Johnny Depp.
- Finally, while the concept of recording a live podcast for GeekCast live was a terrific idea, it ended up being a FAIL of epic proportions. It was an insanely fun time talking and having fun with peeps but between the audience, topics, & Shawn’s BeerTender, it was too much of a party. It was a blast though that kept me up until 3:45am.
Day 1 – Affiliate Summit Kicks Off
- Registration was incredibly easy now that they’ve come up with self check in kiosks. Love it!
- Missed the PPC and Social Media tracks I wanted to attend thanks to a righteous headache this morning (no, I DON’T think it was a hangover!) but heard the social media was good.
- Headed into the Meet Market and MAN was it packed! Got my fare share of awesome schwag, bought myself an “I Gave Back!” button, and got some good info on some cool networks and programs. It was a zoo in there so I had to bail, bu t it was good that I did since I’d lost track of time and was able to get to the NY tax laws session.
- The day isn’t over! I’m shutting this bad boy down in lieu of blogging about the other session I attended today and I’m heading over to the ShareASale party on the Odyssey Cruise yacht… can’t promise how long I’ll stay but it should be a blast!
Ball: Dropped Stress: High
I have good news, and I have bad news. Hopefully this will explain why I’ve been asleep at the wheel here.
First, the good!
- TrishaLyn.com is now available as a mobile compatible site! Just point your smartphone browser to www.trishalyn.com! Thanks to Shawn Collins & the Geek Cast crew for mentioning this nifty plugin in the last episode and Shawn specifically for sending me the link.
- Speaking of Geek Cast, I was mentioned two weeks running. Apparently Scott Jangro and I will be the only audience members for their Geek Cast Live show from Affiliate Summit, and Lisa’s counting on me to help keep the boys in line. Ah, good times will be had I can FEEL it!
- Affiliate Summit East 2008 is SOLD OUT and takes place in a little over a week. I’m excited to be hitting Boston again and finally meeting some of these people I’ve been networkin’ with online since the last summit.
- Affiliate Classroom Live! is also in about a week, so I really REALLY need to get my act together and formulate some talking points for the round-table discussion I’ll be leading.
Now, the not so great.
I’m sad to say that after almost 2 years my beloved supervisor is leaving our company. I’m going to miss her tremendously as she’s been a complete pleasure and joy to work for! To be honest, I’m taking the change harder than I should because of….- I’m moving! Just from one city here in the East San Francisco Bay Area to another, nothing major. It’s just that I absolutely detest packing and moving. Luckily my husband acknowledges that I’m a weakling and useless in the actual heavy lifting, so I’m on packing and unpacking duty.
- With the change in my supervisor leaving, my job responsibilities are changing as well. I don’t think I can say much right now, but involves some shifting in terms of my focused projects within the marketing department.
Obviously the combined changes of job responsibilities, moving, taking a long weekend vacation to celebrate my 5th wedding anniversary, and taking off for several days to attend Affiliate Summit East are all a bit overwhelming. I hope to be rejuvenated after my vacation and be able to jump back into the swing of things with some excellent coverage of Affiliate Summit!
If you’re giving away stress balls at the summit, save one for me!!
Read MoreCribbed Content for June 27th
Surprisingly enough, this week is flying by for me. It seems like a slow summer week, but at the same time I’ve been awfully busy with some new projects at work and some thoughts circling in my head about a new website I may tackle soon. The idea is all there, but I have to flesh it out and, really, decide if I have time to do it! Here are your links for this week – the word around the campfire in online business.
- Once again, the affiliate marketing industry attacked as douchebags. And by people who call themselves professionals, no less. Shawn Collins did all the lashing out necessary in his blog Consultants Can Fix Affiliate Marketing.
- Congratulations to Lisa Picarille & Revenue Magazine for winning the Performance Marketing’s Most Vocal Advocate Golden Link award at this week’s Linkshare Symposium. It was worth is for her to be able to say “Sorry, Jangro”. If you don’t get the reference, go to www.SorryJangro.com
- Just yesterday on the heels of Google partnering with Yahoo and more talk of a potential Microsoft bid on the company, Yahoo officially announced their reorganization plans. In laymens terms, they’re taking some time to get their shit together 🙂
- More confusion is being perpetrated about the PMA by Shoemoney. Try doing some research next time before declaring something is a scam with shady intentions. Affiliate Classroom is NOT running it, they’re just providing a website and vehicle for it. Other companies are providing resources as well.
June BAAMC Meeting
After running to the bank to take out money for bridge toll, heading west towards the big scary city, and rifling through my car & wallet for change for the meter while praying that the meter maids were taking a day off, I finally made it into the June Bay Area Affiliate Managers Coalition meeting, this time hosted graciously by Real Networks. As an aside, I like their building… older, brick, kinda funky and unique but still professional.
Last time I did a video because it was my first venture over there and I had a lot to say. I was happy to receive some kudos on it from BAAMC organizer Michael Brucker. We had some special guests at this meeting… Lisa Picarille from Revenue Magazine came over and Brook Schaaf from Schaaf Consulting flew up from LA just for this. Aren’t we special? 🙂
I was going to write a good long post about it, but it seems Lisa in her diligence as a journalist has beat me to it! So here’s her take at RevenueToday.com. She mentions a few other special guests that attended the meeting, but I didn’t see them (and yes… I’d recognize them!) so maybe they were on the phone listening in… I did arrive a touch late.
So, some notes not mentioned from my take. It was nice to finally meet Lisa in person, especially after subbing for her that once on Affiliate Thing. Very gracious…although I have to tell you, it’s totally surreal sitting in a room looking at a person speak that you listen to every week without an image in your head. Strange lol. She was surprised that I’d had time to come to the meeting given how busy I usually am, which prompted me to mentally review how busy I must sound on Twitter and this here blog without actually intending it!
Also said hi to Karen Garcia of GTO Management who came to the meeting directly from SFO – what a trooper! And had a nice conversation with a fellow affiliate manager who’s used PsPrint a lot in his former life of being an event promoter and loves us! Always great to hear!
Brook talked about the up-and-coming Performance Marketing Association (PMA), which got a lot of people in the room revved up. We also talked at length about the NY affiliate tax and how we wish the networks would get more involved. What’s definitely clear is that there’s a lot of confusion on how we’re effected as managers and the programs we represent. A vague law will only vaguely be enforced, NY!
Incidentally as a side note, the PMA launched their blog this week and today Rebecca Madigan posted their plan of attack.
We also talked a bit about some miscellaneous things like video widgets and the like. Since most of us in the room have our programs through Commission Junction, we collectively wish they’d buck up on offering some more interesting and innovative creative options, like widgets. One opinion was that video is pretty good for buzz, but general consumers never think to click on the video so it doesn’t convert as a sales tool. I think the jury is still out on video as a traceable seller like a banner ad.
That’s the meat & potatoes of it, really. Our next meeting should be sometime in August. And I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that I managed to escape parking-ticket free!
Read MoreEarly Bird Price for Affiliate Summit ENDS TODAY
Boston, MA
Want to meet me?! Of course you do! Remember that today is the last day to sign up for Affiliate Summit East 2008 and still get the cheaper Early Bird Pricing. The full conference pass – today only – is just $949 while an Expo Hall Only pass is a very affordable $99. If you’ve been waffling about going, pull the trigger and do it now while it’s still cheap!
After tomorrow, the prices go up to $199 for the expo hall only pass and a whopping $1449 for the full pass. And of course, if you sit on your lazy duff until the last minute, you have to shell out $299 for an expo hall only pass or $1949 for the full conference pass.
There are a lot of great sessions already scheduled and on the agenda for the summit. A full agenda is online already. I’ve already added several to my TripIt account so I can plan out my time, including Sam Harrelson’s Leveraging Social Media, Andy Rodriguez’s Affiliate Marketing Basics for Merchants, and Lisa Picarille’s Content that Kills sessions.
There’s no reason not to save money and really, this is a great event for affiliate marketing professionals – both publishers and advertisers – to network and learn from. So go today and register for Affiliate Summit East 2008 in Boston while you can still get in with the best price!
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Making It Big
This week has been full of win, and it’s only Tuesday!
All the Cool Kids (and me)
My humble little blog TrishaLyn.com has been featured on Alltop.com under the Marketing category. Alltop is a digital magazine rack, per se. At each Alltop site, they display the latest five stories from 30+ sites on a single page, aggregating the information as a starting point. Alltop is a great way to expose yourself to blogs and websites relating to your interests that you may not have stumbled upon before. The interests range from women’s interests to sports, religion to geekery. In the marketing category my humble blog is mentioned amongst the likes of Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, Michael Martine’s Remarkablogger, and Seth Godin’s blog. I’d say that lives up to the “all the cool kids (and me)” slogan!
Guest Co-Host of AffiliateThing on WebmasterRadio.fm
Regular host Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip.com and co-founder of Affiliate Summit invited me on to co-host the weekly Affiliate Thing podcast in lieu of regular co-host Lisa Picarille of Revenue Magazine who can’t make it tomorrow. I’m excited as I know this is a well-produced, professional podcast broadcast on Cranberry Radio, so I can’t wait. I’ll be recording from the pleasure of my own home in the morning and can’t wait to chew the affiliate fat with Shawn. I will say that I’m glad I’m not the one who has to edit it! it’s all recorded over Skype, so it’ll be great quality I’m sure!
Featured Expert on EzineArticles.com
That’s right, yours truly is also now a featured expert author on article site EzineArticles.com. So far I’ve submitted my Top 10 Things That Improve Work Ethic article and plan on submitting many more. If you’d like to see any of my former blog posts as articles on Ezine, drop me a line and let me know!
So that’s it! I feel like all this work I’ve been doing is paying off, and let me tell you, it’s a terrific feeling! I’ll be sure to report back on how the recording of Affiliate Thing goes tomorrow!
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