Daniel M. Clark

Well, here we are, nearly a week after Summit ended, and it just now occurred to me that I left out a few things from Tuesday and neglected to come up with a final summary. What can I say - I was so excited by all the prospects and opportunities I was given that I raced home and got to work!

I’ve devoted an episode of Geek Dads Weekly (#3: Affiliate Summit West 2010 Recap) to talking about my time in Las Vegas; I hope you’ll check it out and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear about your experiences at Summit as well!

You can be sure I’ll be taking what I’ve learned from maintaining this blog and applying it to my blogging efforts at Affiliate Summit East 2010 this August! Better notes, more pictures - I’ve heard a lot of great feedback that I can’t wait to put into practice.

See you in New York!

.#asw10

Apparently there was a “problem” with the reservation for BlogUP. VooDoo doesn’t seem to want to cooperate. Boooo. We might end up somewhere else.

#asw10

I was planning on attending, but I’ve been asked to sit on the panel for a live discussion with fellow GeekCast.fm podcasters at 3:15 in the Palma room! If you’re reading this and you’re here at Summit, you can’t say you didn’t know about it - so come on out and see us!

#asw10

Day Two Finale:

Yesterday wrapped up with a couple of exciting events (notice that I’m not blogging the evening events because, well, I’m too busy having fun!).

The first that I attended was an affiliate launch event held by GTO Management at the ESPN Zone inside the New York New York hotel. The program launched was FanDual.com, and after a presentation explaining this new concept in fantasy sports betting, we were given access codes worth $25 each to try it out. We signed up with new accounts, and chose our NBA rosters to do battle with - the results will be known tonight after the games complete. Knowing nothing about basketball, I choose my team at random, and only laid down $5 of my $25 balance. Should my team win, I’ll take down $9. Now, I’m not much into sports, but who knows? Maybe this could be something that I find I’m interested in over time. Certainly many of my Geek Dads Weekly listeners are sports fans!

Funny story: on the way to New York New York, I was sitting up front in the cab. There were four other passengers: Kim Rowley and her brother Mike and Mike’s girlfriend Amber, as well as Matt McCabe, my Affiliate Summit Mentor Program mentee. When we arrived, I covered the cab fare (about $10), and when the others insisted on splitting it with me, I told them that rather than that, they should all put one dollar in a slot machine once we got inside, and that I would split the winnings if anyone hit. Kim and Mike both hit and cashed out five bucks each, covering the cost of the cab! Not bad!

Not so funny story: I handed the cab driver a twenty, and he seemed to think that he deserved a nearly ten-dollar tip, because he didn’t make any moves to give me change. I actually had to ask him for change. Look, I’m not a cheapskate or anything (as my hotel bill will surely attest… I’m scared to look at it upon checkout), but a ten-dollar tip on a ten-dollar cab ride? Don’t think so.

We had a blast at the GTO event, then headed back to the Rio for the Affiliate Summit Trivia Tweetup event. Lisa Picarille channelled her inner game show host (she was right on target) and set up four teams to play Trivial Pursuit on the Nintendo Wii, projected onto a very large screen. Each team ended up with 6-12 people on it (some folks came and went, and I’m not convinced people didn’t float to different teams throughout!). I was on Team 2 with Shawn Collins, Jen Goode, team Captain Michael Coley of ABestWeb, among others. We took an early lead, filled up our little pie thing first, and headed to the middle to win the game. Each other team had three pie pieces or less, and it looked like we had it in the bag… then we missed nearly every other question thrown our way, each team filled up their pies, and Team 3 performed a spectacular upset to win the game. In competitive sports parlance… it was sick. Congratulations to Team 3! During the event, it was announced that the winning team’s members would receive complimentary Gold passes for Affiliate Summit East 2010 in New York later this year. At the end, Missy (who might have been a tad tipsy) announced that everyone who participated and made it to the end of the game would receive a pass! How generous is that?!

I headed up to my room after the Trivia Tweetup (nobody was sure what made it a Tweetup, other than a few people saying they’d be there via Twitter!), which leads to…

Day Three! The final day of Affiliate Summit.

I’m once again missing the Keynote - Brian Clark of Copyblogger this time - to take the time to catch up on email, respond to offers I was made yesterday, and update my blog here. My day looks pretty great so far, with a session or two to attend, and more great events later in the evening (including one held at the VooDoo Lounge here at the Rio - very cool).

More updates on the way!

#asw10

Peter Shankman of Help a Reporter Out is starting his 2pm session, Self-Promotion Will Save The World.

“Self promotion when done right is trust.”

“Self promotion isn’t about talking about yourself, it’s about listening, then chiming in with something relevant.”

• Self promotion is the art of making people talk about how great you without you getting it out there and saying how great you are yourself.
• The art of Twitter lies in the retweet. Be helpful. Be informational in purpose and context.
• Ask, when Twittering, “is this relevant to more people than just me?”
• When building an audience, avoid using “I”.
• Your customers control where your company/brand is going, not you.
• Self promotion is nothing more than great customer service to begin with. Your customers will take it from there.
• Read the book “Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service”.
• Self promotion should never be recognized for what it is. If you can make someone do something for you and make them think it was their idea, you will win every time.
• What can you create that makes people want to show it off?
• Blog things that people can relate to.

“Life should be a networking event.”

Peter is a natural storyteller and an awesome businessman. I find myself listening to him and not typing nearly enough notes. I did a great job (I think) of blogging each session I attended yesterday with detailed notes and links; this isn’t going to be one of those sessions.

All of the Summit sessions will be available for viewing after the conference; I highly recommend watching Peter’s session first.

The last piece of advice? Stand up at the dinner table when a lady stands up. Watch Peter’s presentation to learn why.

At 11:00 I set up for the Affiliate Showcase, and while I will write more about it later, I wanted to give the preliminary results of my experiment. So far, nobody has used a Poken with me, nor has anyone used the Bump app for iPhone. It’s all about business cards here at the Affiliate Showcase!

.#asw10 It took me some time to figure out (because I’m not familiar in the least with tumblr), but I’ve got comments in place now! The Disqus commenting system is now integrated into the blog here, so if there’s anything you’d like to say about Affiliate Summit, the sessions, Vegas, or anything related to what I’ve been blogging, please share!

Disqus supports Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, Yahoo logins plus guest comments if you don’t have any of those, so join in!

#asw10

It’s just after 10 in the morning here, and after a long night of dinners, parties and late-night bowling, I managed to drag myself out of bed just in time to make it down here to the Blogger’s Lounge. My schedule today is a little different than what I had planned - I was going to attend the morning’s keynote (the first of two), but it was just too early. Instead, I will be grabbing a bite to eat down here and then walking the Expo Hall for a bit before setting up my table at the Affiliate Showcase at eleven.

Dinner at the All-American here at the Rio last night was good - I met fellow tech enthusiast and a Geek Dad himself, John Federico and swapped stories about our kids, our wives and our work in tech and online ventures.

After dinner we rushed down to the Summit Mentor Program Meet-Up, where I was able to hang out with my ‘mentee’, Matt McCabe and introduce him to some folks I know. I wasn’t able to stay the whole time though, as I needed to run upstairs to my room and change clothes before the ShareASale Under the Stars party.

Brian Littleton and his amazing crew put together yet another fantastic Affiliate Summit party! There was karaoke and dancing - neither of which I participated in - as well as casino table games (free, of course), a chocolate fountain, video games (which I won - go me!), darts, food and drinks. The atmosphere was great, the people were great and the whole event was another in a long line of successes for ShareASale.

Directly after Under the Stars was the charity bowling event sponsored by my friends at Things From Another World and GTO Management with bowling shirts provided to all participants by bowlingshirt.com. All proceeds from the registration fee went to the National Breast Cancer Foundation, the official charity of Affiliate Summit. I’m a hell of a bowler myself, and sporting the black and hot pink bowling shirt I was given, I proceeded to crush all the competition. What do you mean 54 isn’t a good score? Nine gutter balls isn’t a positive? Really?

I got back to my room around 2:30 or so, and woke up about eight, so I’m not exactly at my peak today - but I’ve got some good coffee, some good company and some good times ahead of me before I head home on Wednesday. Updates from today’s sessions will be coming throughout the day.

.#asw10

The 3pm session, Start Monetizing Your Blog Today is about to start, starring:

• Marty Fahncke, President, FawnKey & Associates (Twitter @FawnKey) (Moderator)
• Kristin Kinsey, President/CEO, MadHatter Consulting, Inc. (Twitter @KC)
• Tricia Meyer, Owner, Sunshine Rewards (Twitter @sunshinetricia)
• Carolyn Tang, Director of Client Services, ShareASale.com (Twitter @catango)

Each panelist represents some aspect of the customer purchase process in affiliate marketing. Carolyn is representing a network. Kristen is an Affiliate Manager. Tricia is an affiliate.

This session is Affiliate Marketing 101. When I walked in and said hello to the panel before they started, they asked me why I was here! Two reasons: first, I want to live blog one session in each time slot - no sitting out. Second, I want to support three of my favorite people in the industry; when it came to deciding which session to attend, none of the others were enough of a draw to overcome that.

Carolyn is starting off by talking about creative (banners, widgets, video) and Pay-Per-Call for use in offline advertising.

Tricia is continuing by describing what she does to monetize her Twilight site - AdSense, eBay, and generally pushing traffic to a pure commerce blog. This site doesn’t have a ton of repeat visitors or followers, but converts very well. Tricia is a fan of PopShops (and so am I). She’s also a fan of working with eBay (which I’m not), and GoldenCan (which I’ve never worked with).

Lastly, Kristen is giving us a breakdown of what affiliate managers and outsourced program managers (OPMs) do. Managers create all your link code as well as providing video, banners and widgets for the affiliates. Your affiliate manager will be responsible for accurate tracking of sales and working with the networks to make sure everything runs smoothly. Managers will also be able to identify hot trends and items that are converting particularly well.

The session is wrapping up with an “extreme blog makever”. The first site to go under the knife is Hot Dog Hockey. Kristen suggests mixing up the merchants so ads don’t get repeated. Tricia recommends not just going with big name merchants, think about smaller merchants. Carolyn recommends examining Pay-Per-Call integration. The second site is Sbenco.com. Tricia thinks that he should put some Affiliate Summit affiliate links (available through ShareASale). Carolyn really wants him to work in some video. Kristen recommends moving the AdSense off the top of the site.

Thanks for the session!

.#asw10

I should probably mention before I get too far into this…

There are quite a lot of people who follow me on Twitter and on Facebook that aren’t affiliate marketers or who don’t really care that I’m live blogging the event. These posts are getting piped to both Twitter and Facebook; I’m going to make an effort to remember to include the Summit hashtag #asw10 at the beginning of each post so that folks on Twitter can filter out those posts if they like. If you use Twitter’s web interface, you’re out of luck, I’m sorry. If you’re using a client like Tweetdeck that supports filtering (which I wrote about last October on my blog) I won’t be offended if you shut me up until I get home on Wednesday.

The first session I’m attending is the A Primer on Search Engine Optmization session, which I would have been on time for had I not left my Macbook’s power cord up in my room. Like I said earlier in the blog, my room is waaaaaay at the end of the hallway on the 13th floor, so you can imagine how happy I was when I realized I needed to go back and get it.

Joshua Ziering from FullSpeedSEO.com is speaking. His Twitter is @JoshuaZiering

Here are a few key ideas that I’ve picked up so far:

• Use the ~ character when searching on Google, and Google will bold the terms on the resulting pages.
• Make sure your page loads fast - Google gives you points for that.
• It’s better to be tagging the homecoming queen. You need that explained? Okay, basically it’s better to be linked to a high profile person or website than to be known by dozens of people that nobody knows or sites that nobody reads. Backlinks from authoritative sites are key to your growth.
• Page rank doesn’t matter. (I’m so happy people are starting to come around on this… I’ve been saying it for years, but I haven’t been tagging the homecoming queen, so nobody heard me!)
• How do you get good backlinks?
  • Write guest posts
  • Social bookmarking - Digg, Stumble
  • Profiles on YouTube, Slashdot and others
  • Twitter, Facebook
  • Avoid URL shorteners whenever possible - they don’t help you!
• According to Matt Cutts of Google, link bait isn’t necessarily bad. “…it doesn’t have to have negative connotations…”
• There is no subject you can’t write link bait for.
• Blog comments are still good for link building, if done right. Be relevant, be white-hat.
• Look for sites that use CommentLuv, a “do-follow” plugin for Wordpress. Don’t turn down no-follow links, but try to get good ‘do-follow’ links whenever possible.
• Use Yahoo to gather information on sites in your niche. site:TheirSite.com and you can export the results to a spreadsheet.
• Check out Site Snatcher and Link Excavator.
• Check out Rank Checker and SEO Information from SEOBook.
• Coda Development Software for Mac users comes recommended for building and managing sites.

The full session video will be released to (I have to double check this) registered members after Summit concludes.

Affiliate Summit West 2010 has officially opened - well, early registration and badge-pickup was actually yesterday, and the charity poker tournament was last night… but today is the first day of sessions and the Meet Market.

I’m sitting in the Blogger Lounge with Eric Nagel and Peter Shankman (of Help a Reporter Out) - it wasn’t supposed to open until noon, but apparently Peter is handy at picking a lock!

My schedule for the day is available at affiliatesummit.sched.org, so if you’d like to meet up, come find me! I’ll be updating throughout the day from the various sessions and the Blogger’s Lounge in the Coco room.