What I got out of Affiliate Summit West

Well as you can tell i had a lot of fun in Vegas, but it was a lot more than just drinking. I’ll start out by critiquing the sessions that i attended and then tell you were the true value is at these conferences!

Marketing Your Affiliate Site – Outside of the Box (Scott Hazard)

This sounded like a session that would offer a lot of creative ideas but I was very dissapointed. The first thing that Scott said was that by outside of the box he means outside of your house.

He spent most of the time talking about a coupon site that he has been promoting by going to local merchants and offering them a coupon on his site for a little sticker in the window to promote it. At first it seemed very interesting, but when someone asked how much traffic this has produce the answer was only 100-200 uniques per day. Considering one link on the internet can get you waaaaay more traffic this idea is complete BS for how much work and time he put into it.

Although it sucked, I did get a couple of good things out of this session. The first one, although it doesnt apply to any of my sites, is to sponsor local events that pertain to your niche. So say you have a golf equipment site, if you sponsor a charity golf tournament and get your site on there shirt, it will get a lot of exposure to to some very targeted customers. The other thing I thought seemed interesting is that someone in the audienced talked about finding a way to incentivize a bookmark. An example would be that your customer gets some extra content on the site for bookmarking your site. I have no idea if you can program a way to check bookmarks but if so it might be worth testing.

Anatomy of a Viral Video — Maximium ROI

Although I didn’t go into this expecting to get much and I was right, it was still pretty interesting. The guys from taxbrain.com(you have a huge viral video, no link love you !) Went through the whole process of creating thier viral video that ended up on a whole bunch of news stations and all over the web.

I think the best part of this session was when they talked about how they released the video in the off season for taxes so now that prime time is coming they are making ads that joke about or relate to the original video.

The next seesion I went to was Ask The Experts with Jon, Shoe, and Andrew:

It was pretty funny and not all the questions were good but hearing them all talk was still a really good experience, there a big thread about here at WickedFire.
heres a pic i got of them

The other 2 sessions that i went too were the worst. The first was ‘Bloggers – the new super affiliates’ which just talked about how many people blog now and how they would want to make money but hate tradition ads, so pointless. The other session was ‘optomizing you landing pages’ which pretty much only talked about what a merchant can do to improve landing pages, and talked about quality score for about 5 minutes.

Everyone says this, but its true
The best part of the conference was the NETWORKING. Thats the only thing that made it totaly worth while. Just talking to people from wickedfire about what they do expanded my ideas by double or triple. It’s also very motivating meeting some of the big earners and realizing that they are just regular people who make lots of money on the internet.

The best part of the conference for me was tuesday at lunch sitting with ILC, Seo_Mike, Andrew Wee, Jdog, and DruSam. Heres a pic and a couple others from the conference

The last one is a pic of me and Mike Krongel who I have to give a big shout out to because he is the reason I was able to make it to Affiliate Summit West in the first place. Go Join COPEAC, they rock, will help you out with anything you need, and are great with payout increases!

Anyways, all in all ASW was an awsome time. I met a bunch of great people, learned a bunch, and now i just can’t wait for ASE. Time to go put some of this knowledge to work and go make money!!!!