Affiliate Summit East Recap - Day 1

Welcome back!

I would have preferred to write these recaps as I attended the conference, but my laptop encountered some technical difficulty on the trip to Boston, so I was unable to blog during the conference.  Later, my cell phone also went down.  It was a complete technological fail trip for me.  The whole experience has convinced me to buy an Asus EEE.

Day one was so hectic — tip for future attendees, get there the day before the conference.  I chose to fly up the day the conference started and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to the first session on Sunday.  Fortunately, I made it just in time to see the first session (one of the best of the conference for me), John Hasson’s “PPC Strategies That Really Work.”  I had the pleasure of bowling on the Wii with John later in the Blogger’s Lounge.  He has the strangest form I’ve ever seen.

I next went to see my friend, Sam Harrelson, struggle through his speech on social media (I say struggle, because he had a late night doing the first GeekCast Live).  In spite of his lack of sleep, Sam did an excellent job covering a wide array of social media sites and tools to use in growing your affiliate marketing business.  Sam takes very anti-spam approach to social media that I greatly appreciate.  Using social media to properly advance your business effectively requires an extremely subtle approach, in my opinion.

Next I went to the pepperjamNetwork Education Clinic, where I was introduced to this network.  I really like their approach to affiliate marketing, with an emphasis on open communications and transparency between advertisers and publishers.  They offer a strong variety of merchants to promote, as well.

In between this one and the next, I took a quick tour of the Meet Market.  This place was insane!!!  There were vendors and affiliates everywhere.  The compactness and crowding of the room really encourages interaction between the vendors and attendees.  You were not getting out of there without talking to a few vendors.

Finally, I attended “Affiliate Marketing Basics for Managers” with Andy Rodriguez. This provided a bit of insight as to how I may be able to market using affiliates with one of my core businesses.  With a little discussion with Andy after the session, I barely had time to go check in at my hotel (flight was too close to allow me time to do so earlier) and then head over to the Share-A-Sale party on a boat docked at the Seaport.

With day one over, I just tried to catch up on some sleep and get ready for day two with the keynote speech from Cory Booker first thing in the morning.  More on that, tomorrow.

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