I went to Affiliate Summit West 2009 and loved it, so it was time to go again. I scored a pass from John Chow, but quickly realized I had an extra, so I ended up giving it to a buddy of mine who doesn’t even own a computer. I was apprehensive, but I knew everyone was nice and would accept him even though he’s a techno-turtle.

Friday

As many of you know, I live in Vermont, so the Hilton in NYC is about a 5.5 hour drive. I left with Charles from Perfectly Grand because I convinced him to go and check out this “affiliate thing”. We left Vermont around 2PM and ended up reaching New York City around 7:30.

Saturday

The Audience Conference was amazing. The small feel of the whole thing made it really easy to approach the big kids in the industry and start a conversation. Talking with people like Jason Calacanis or Chris Brogan was really great. It’s an awesome feeling when Jason can pick me out of a group and ask what I do. Brogan did a great speech. I think he was funnier than some of the comedians. Great job Chris. We all really owe Loren Feldman a standing ovation.

Saturday night I hit the sack early because I knew the next two days would be crazy.

Sunday

I caught the Meet Market around 10AM, and then hit up a couple of sessions, but none of them were really ground breaking. The Affiliate Tactics one by Kim from PlentyOfFish is notable because it was that bad. I wish I had gone to Podcasting 101. I heard that one was great.

ShareASale party was great. I think it was at the Empire Hotel and spent most of the night hanging out with a guy named Zon relatively new to the industry. He’s already ripping it up doing PPC, and just hanging out with him, I have a ton of new ideas. The party was great and the view was awesome.

Ben, a great friend from Hill Farmstead Brewery, showed up Sunday night around midnight and that’s when the fun really started. We hit up Old Castle around the corner and got some drinks. We ended up drinking until about 3:30 in the morning with this guy Steve. Fairly standard drinking night.

Monday

What a night. They day was pretty normal, but what a night.

During the day, I missed breakfast, but caught the Luntz keynote.  I was turned off right away because he didn’t know anything about our industry. What the hell? Learn about the people you’re talking to. Otherwise he had some relevant things to say, but still: not knowing is a big turn-off.

I hit up the Shoemoney Facebook session, which rocked pretty good. John Chow and Ian Fernando were there and up to no good and were throwing things during the speech. Fun times.

I was going to go to the Ask The Experts session, but didn’t make it because I was too busy in the Blogger Lounge with Ben doing this:

Shortly after the beer lounge, I went to dinner with Missy Ward and a bunch of other cool people like Lisa Picarelle and Jim Kukral. I took it easy on the drinking because I didn’t want to make an ass of myself after the beer funneling thing. After that, we shot over to the NeverBlue party, which was kinda ok. It was loud and there wasn’t an open bar, so it was hard to network. ytCracker did a good show though. We stayed for like an hour and then bar hopped our way back to the hotel.
We met this dude from New Zealand that makes a shitload on gambling traffic in Australia. He bought out the bar and got us free drinks until 5AM. My buddy Ben also got digits from a cute girl in an Irish pub somewhere on the way back. This is all really blurry, so please forgive the lack of details. You probably already know more about what happened than we do.

Tuesday

To be totally honest, I don’t remember much of this morning. Ben slept until 5:00PM and I ended up showing up to Kukral’s keynote about 10 minutes late, but even though I’m not cool enough to be a super friend, I respect the guy and wouldn’t miss it for the world.

I watched some sessions. All kind of meh.

We ended up going to the Dot Com Pizza thing by John Chow and hanging out with him for the night. We ended up hitting some bars around 9:00, so didn’t get into his Apple Store shenanigans.

Wednesday

We started the 6 hour journey back around 1PM and stopped at a sweet sushi place in Hamden on the way. I made it back by 9:00PM and passed out.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Affiliate Summit East 2010

Get attention and be successful.

I recently read Jim Kukral’s book ‘Attention: This Book Will Make You Money‘ and loved it. I gave away a copy of the book to a reader yesterday. He really sums up what a lot of other people say about websites in a different way. Most other people discuss how traffic is the driving source behind revenue on a website and they’re totally correct. Some people say that in order to drive traffic, content is king and marketing is the queen (I actually think that was Gary Vaynerchuk, but I’m not sure). What it really comes down to is attention. If you want attention, build a good product. If you don’t have a product (or a good product), you can make up for that and get attention by doing something out of the ordinary or outrageous. Just don’t go after negative attention.

This entire week will be focused on some of the great things I learned while reading Jim’s book. I really do mean it when I say you should get it. If you don’t you’ll be missing out on some huge opportunity.

Commitment

15+ Hours. It really depends on how creative you are.

Put yourself on peoples’ radar and execute.

The Idea

The very first thing you need to do is have an idea of what you’re going to do to get attention. There are a ton of easy ideas like contests or paying for traffic and ads. When you’re dealing with a low budget, things get a bit more complicated. You need to come up with something truly original that doesn’t cost a lot of money. Sometimes people with huge budgets are even good enough at coming up with ideas that they can get a ton of attention with little to no money.

Try standard methods like press releases and asking friends to talk about it. Consider getting into things like video or other new formats for delivering content. Do something fun that people enjoy seeing. Out of the blue, I agreed to beer funnel some amazing beer made by a friend of mine at Affiliate Summit. Doing that with some high profile bloggers got both me and my friend a ton of exposure all over the internet. That didn’t cost me a thing. It didn’t take a lot of time, and it was a ton of fun. I haven’t seen any coverage of Affiliate Summit that didn’t at least mention that. Win.

Make sure people see what you do.

You can have a killer idea, but make sure you get exposure. Make sure that if you come up with something you shamelessly promote it until your fingers bleed. Get on Facebook, Twitter, other blogs, do press releases to the big news sites and hit up traditional media like television and radio. Look for sponsors who will give you some exposure to their customers too. Hit up forums and discuss what you’re doing too. This is also a great time to get feedback from people on whether or not your idea is good or not.

Consider doing a pre-launch or pre-event to build up some hype and get people talking. If you can provide a way for people to take the information viral, do that. The more people that talk about it, the more exposure you’ll get. Word of mouth advertising is also the single biggest form of advertising you can use.

Go.

All of the stuff I mentioned above is sort of wishy washy and not very concrete. You want something concrete? Spend the rest of today coming up with something novel. If you have trouble coming up with one, contact me. I’ll help you. I’m great at it. Spend the other six days this week promoting your idea a few hours a day. On the seventh day: execute. Use this as your motivation to launch from the foundation you’ve already built.

Go.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 6

Stay focused and have a backup plan.

During the last three weeks, I’ve been going to trade shows, getting sick, and having family issues. On top of all of that, I started two additional business ventures, and started dumping more time into an existing one I was already working on that. Needless to say, my time has been limited and I’ve been slacking on posting to my case study blog, as well as this one.

Commitment

Ongoing, but 4 hours to get started.

Set up the safety net.

Make sure you have a backup plan for when life just gets a hold of you. Try to have a two to three week article buffer on your blog so that people don’t think you’ve dropped off the face of the planet. Remember to have those posts already written and scheduled to go. If something more timely comes up, you can always change the date the post will launch.

Make sure you stay focused. Adding two new projects to my workload derailed my progress train on the other blog. That means that my attention is split and one of the projects is getting the short straw. Be sure not to dip into too many projects at a time, or you may ultimately make all of them fail.

Guest Posts

If you’ve started gaining some traction with your blog and want help building out your content, guest posts are an excellent way to get that extra little bit of content to give you that safety net you’re looking for. If you know you’re going to be away from the blog for a while, consider setting up a system for guest posters to submit articles to you for the long haul of that absence. I picked up the idea from an experiment that Josh is doing over that The Worlds Strongest Librarian.

He solicited guest posts from his readers and they’re going to support his site for him while he works on the macro-issues of dealing with the site. It’s a great plan and I really hope it works out for him. Maybe you’ll see a post or two from me over there too. I’m pretty excited about it.

Problems I Had Last Week

I’ve already kind of told you what my big issues were. That was the point of this post. Life can hit you when you least expect it. I had a death in the family which pulled me away from writing for almost a whole week. After that, I went to Affiliate Summit and immediately came back sick. I’m guessing I got sick from shaking hands with so many people. That brings up another completely unrelated point: use hand sanitizer when you’re at conferences. The little hassle of doing it will make you much more productive in the long run.

Remember: if you get behind, you have to do all of your current work, plus the stuff that you’re behind on. It’s better to get ahead when you have extra time than mortgage today’s time against your productivity tomorrow. It’s much less stressful that way.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 5

Affiliate Summit East 2010 is coming up and you need to be there if you’re an affiliate of any kind.  Actually that’s not true.  You need to be there if you’re at all interested in the internet – especially if you like to make money; be it consulting, affiliate stuff, or anything else.  Being around so many tech savvy people really motivates geeks.  It’s like a big nuclear explosion of geek.

It’s in New York City from August 15th through the 17th at the Hilton Conference Center.  If you need directions or to register, check out their website – it’s pretty informative.

I am bringing two merchant customers of mine and hoping to meet up with some key players I haven’t seen in a little while.  I wasn’t able to make it to the last two, because of scheduling issues, but I went to Affiliate Summit West 2009 and it was a blast, and I came back with so many ideas, I could barely contain myself.

Affiliate Summit is at the Hilton in New York City, August 15th - 17th 2010

Why am I bringing this up?  Early bird pricing ends on April 30th, and I wanted to make sure that everyone knew about the event in time to get the cheapest possible pricing.  In my opinion, nothing less than a Platinum pass is acceptable.  You want to be able to go to all of the sessions if you’ve never been there before.  A silver pass will suffice if you’re just going for the parties.

This is a great event for merchants to break into the affiliate arena.  This is where I bring my merchants to teach them how the ropes work.  It’s also great for affiliates of any level.  You’ll be able to find people there of equal or greater skill than you, and I promise you’ll learn something.

Check them out:

www.affiliatesummit.com

If you’re having sticker shock about the price for passes (Platinum is almost $900), don’t forget to enter contests and things for them.  I got 2 silvers and a platinum last year, and I already had my own passes bought.

Been to Affiliate Summit?  Tell me about it in the comments?  Have questions about it?  Let me know in the comments.  Need a guide when you’re there?  I’ll be there and I can give you some pointers.  Hit me up.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Affiliate Summit East 2010

Ok Everyone, I told you I’d get you some great shots from the Affiliate Summit Triathlon, and they’re here.  I’ll let the video do the talking.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Affiliate Summit West 2009 Bonus Video

Ok everyone, here is part three of the pictures.  They’re somewhat out of order from the other posts.  Imagine that they go between the two sets.  These are from the “missing” memory card that my wife had!

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Affiliate Summit West 2009 Pictures (Part 2)

Ok everyone, I misplaced a memory card and I’m waiting for some pictures from others, but I have some pretty good pictures from Tuesday night.  When I find the other memory card and get the other pictures, I’ll post a final gallery.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Affiliate Summit West 2009 Pictures (Part 1)

So Affiliate Summit hasn’t officially started yet, but check out some of the cool things Michelle and I have been up to – mostly pics.  I’ll be adding captions later, but I need to hurry up and get down to registration.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Affiliate Summit: On Location (Pre-Conference)

Hey Everyone,

I’m laid over in Manchester, New Hampshire right now killing some time writing up the intro post.  I’m headed to Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada.  I’m going with my lovely wife, Michelle, and we’re going to have a friggin awesome time.  We’ve both got Platinum Passes to the conference, which means that we pretty much have access to everything except the really exclusive VIP parties.

We’re also planning on checking out CES (Consumer Electronics Show for those of you that live under a rock) when we get there.  We should get there around 8:00PM tonight, and we’ll probably jump right into some gambling.  I’ve set up some meetings with people – details to come later.

I’ve been checking out some of the other ASW arrival posts, like Shoemoney and Robb Cheuvront.  I hope to see you guys there!

More information to come.  If you’re going to be at ASW or are already there, please leave comments and I’ll buy you a drink sometime when we’re there.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Affiliate Summit West 2009 – Here I come.

Thanks Shoe

I just picked up some passes for Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Las Vegas courtesy of Shoemoney.  Thanks Shoe, I appreciate it.  I hope to see you there.  I’ll buy you a drink or two if I see you.

Background and Information

Affiliate Summit is a great affordable conference for people just coming into affiliate marketing, because there is such a low barrier to entry (cost).  Overall the conference gets pretty good reviews, although I hear that after a while, you get used to – or tired of – listening to the same sessions all the time.  I’m looking at the session schedule and couldn’t imagine being able to visit the entire show floor as well as every session in just one visit.  I’ll try though.  It looks like there will be upwards of 3,000 people attending and a ton of exhibitors.

What am I getting from this?

I think there are three major things I’m going for:

1. I need something that resembles a vacation, and I think this is it.  This is a good way to expense some R&R to the company.
2. I’d love the chance to meet some of the major players in the industry and do some networking.
3. I know I have a lot to learn, and I think this will give me a barometer as to how much.

The Cost vs. Return

This is my first big conference, so I’m pretty excited.  I booked my flight and room and the Rio for just over $1200 with my travel agent.  I’ll be there from the 9th until the 13th.  If I didn’t win them, conference passes would have cost $700 more than that.  I would imagine that I will spend at least $1000 additional to that while I’m there.  On top of all of that, I will be missing 4 work days, with reduced productivity at best, reducing my normal income.

All in all, adjusted for R&R, I think I need to probably get a return of about $3,000 to break even, and we all know business isn’t about breaking even.  I think I can do it pretty easily.

I plan to cover the event and give updates every night (or maybe the morning after).  I’ll see you there!

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: I’m going to Affiliate Summit West 2009.