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Today is the day that I leave to go to Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit West (ASW)! This will be my second time attending the Affiliate Summit conference. The first time that I attended was in August for Affiliate Summit East (ASE) in Boston. I had a great time in Boston. I met a lot of people and learned a lot from both the people that I met and from the sessions that I attended. This time should be the same too.

ASW is taking place in Las Vegas this year. There are two conferences every year, one on the east coast, and another on the west coast. Although ASE changes every time, ASW always takes place in Vegas, I wonder why????

Anyway, I’m really excited to be attending another conference. There are so many great people to meet, good sessions to attend, and lots of information to digest. If you haven’t attended, and you are in the affiliate marketing industry, you should definitely try to attend at least one conference. The information that you will learn is worth more than the price tag of the event. Also, if you book your pass for the next conference while the current is going on, you can get it for at great discount! That’s what I always do.

This will be my firs time in Las Vegas. I will be staying at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino where the conference is taking place. At the last Affiliate Summit in Boston, I made the mistake of reserving my room at the last possible time and ended staying at a hotel next to where the conference was taking place. It was kind of annoying because the majority of the people where in one place and small group of procrastinators were at the hotel next door. This year, I didn’t make that mistake. As soon I purchased my conference pass, I also booked my hotel room!

Sessions That I will Be Attending

There are going to be a lot of great sessions and speakers this year at ASW and I attend on sitting in on many of them. Here is a list of the sessions that I will try to make it to this year at ASW:

Day 1

1. Affiliate Strategies for Traffic Generation and Monetization - This will be the session that kicks off the event. On the panel for this session are Nick Koscianski (NickyCakes) from NickyCakes.com, Miles Baker from Marketingwithmiles.com, and Geordie Cardswell from Diversion Marketing. The session will be moderated by Andrew Wee from WhoisAndrewWee.com. They will talk about PPC, seo optimization, website strategies and more.
2. The Black Ink Session - Jeremy Palmer will teach you how to plan, develop and market your own profitable affiliate site with a hands-on case study.
3. Automating Websites and PPC Management - John Hasson will be the speaker for this session. John is a really cool guy who tells it how it is. I attended his session the difference PPC engines last year and learned a lot. I look forward to this one as well. John is going to talk about the advanced concepts for automating daily website tasks (such as downloading stats, uploading changes, etc.) without access to an API.

Day 2

1. Keynote Address by Gary Vaynerchuk. I wouldn’t miss this one for the world. Gary is a great motivational speaker and entrepreneur. I really look forward to finally seeing him in person.Advertising on Facebook - The power of advertising on Facebook is amazing. You can target your ads to the exact demographic! This session will talk about advertising on Facebook. On the panel will be Zac Johnson, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Alex Schultz from Facebook.
2. Landing Page Testing To Increase Conversion - Tim Ash, author of Landing Page Optimization will talk about landing page testing to improve conversion.

Day 3

1. Super Affiliate PPC Marketing Strategies - Anik Singal, Rosalind Garner, Colin McDougall, and Amit Mehta will talk about how to inexpensively use Google, Yahoo, and MSN to drive inexpensive traffic to your site.
2. Setting Quality Standards in Affiliate Marketing - William Martin-Gill from the Ebay Partner Network will talk about improving the quality of the ebay affiliate program.
3. The Art of Keyword Blasting - Ian Fernando will talk blasting keywords and keeping the ones that convert
4. Affiliate Triathlon - I’m taking part in the Affiliate Triathlon this year. Every year, money is raised for a good cause. Shawn Collins decided to sponsor the first 5 people who commented on “Want Me To Sponsor You For The Affiliate Triathlon?“. I was commenter # 2 and got sponsored by Shawn. I also plan on making a donation myself. The money is being raised for the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

That’s it for the sessions and activities that I’m going to attend and be part of. In addition to this, there are going to be lots of parties being thrown by the difference CPA networks, and as always, the parties are the best time to network and meet other link minded individuals.

I really can’t wait to get there. Unfortunately, I’m stuck at this small airport, just waiting to get my flight delayed, AGAIN!

Alright, i’m out of here. I’ll post a recap of everything when I return.

Peace out!

Affiliate Marketing affiliate summit, asw, las vegas, rio

Affiliate Marketing

I recently attended my first ever Affiliate Summit conference. I have been wanting to attend this conference for a while and I’m glad that I was finally able to do so. I was in Boston from Saturday, August 9 to Tuesday, August 12.

Saturday
White in Boston, I stayed at the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel, which is just a few minutes away from where the conference was taking place. Ideally, I would’ve loved to stay at the hotel where the conference was taking place, but due to my normal nature of doing things late, all rooms were booked when I finally decided to book my room. As a matter of fact, I almost ended up not even getting a room at the Westin.

After checking on Saturday, I went over to the Boston Seaport hotel’s lobby bar for a drink and to meet some people. Ian Fernando along with Charles Ngo came down and we all chit chatted over a few drinks. Ian and Charles are the first people that I really interacted with at the summit and they’re both great people.

Sunday, Day 1
Day one was pretty laid back. I thought that the check-in process was going to be a breeze, but it wasn’t for me. There were some printing problems so I ended waiting for 20+ minutes before getting my pass. It would’ve been nice if an announcement about the printing problems was made a little sooner.

After registering, I immediately went to John Hasson’s presentation, Which PPC Engines Work and How?. John’s session was packed with people and full of great information. Thanks for all the great information, John.

On Sunday night, Share a Sale hosted a party on the Odyssey ship. I almost wasn’t able to attend since I didn’t get a ticket. Lucky for me, Eric Nagle was nice enough to provide me with two tickets since he wasn’t going to be attending anymore. I had a great time at the share-a-sale party. Thanks again, Eric.

Monday, Day 2

Mayor Corey Booker’s speech was great. It was moving and very motivational. but it didn’t relate one bit to affiliate marketing. I still don’t know why he was invited to speak to a bunch of online marketers. Don’t get me wrong, his speech was moving, humorous, and motivational, but I think it would’ve been better if we had someone from the industry speak to us.

The first session that I attended was Wil Reynold’s “My 5 Favorite SEO Strategies Exposed” . Wil’s session was very informative. He talked about the different tools and strategies that he uses to gain back links. He also talked a lot about Google’s new service, Knol, In case you haven’t heard, Google Knol is Google’s answer to Wikipedia. Although the service is new, pages created in Knol are ranking high, and very quickly.

Me, listening to Wil Reynolds speak (flickr)

The second session I attended, The Anatomy of a Great Affiliate Program , was moderated by Heather Paulson and included the opinions of Ian Fernando , Janet Attard , and Daniel Gray . Although the session was geared towards companies who ran affiliate programs, it was good to hear Ian’s perspective, from an affiliate’s point of view

The third session that I attended, and probably my favorite of the day/possibly the entire conference, was Tim Ash’s “Landing Page Testing to Attract Super Affiliates” . The session was geared towards companies with affiliate programs but the information was useful for everyone. The main point that was drilled into everyone’s head is testing; one small change can increase your conversion rate and increase your profits. Tim is also the author of Landing Page Optimization . At the end of the show, one lucky audience member won a signed copy of his book.

Tim Ash’s session was very informative. (flickr)

The last session that I attended was Amit Mehta’s PPC Super Affiliate Strategies You Must Know . Amit seems like a great guy, but I after sitting in on the session, I wish I would’ve attended another session. The information that he provided was nothing new. As a matter of fact, most of it was already available on his blog.

Tuesday, Day 3
On Tuesday I went to the Ask The Experts Roundtable Discussions. It kind of sucked because a lot of the so called “experts” who were supposed to answer questions simply didn’t show up.

I attended Zac Johnson’s How to Grow a Blog table. Zac pretty much answered everyone’s questions starting and growing a blog. There were lots of people at the table who wanted to know how he got his blog become an authority in such a short period of time. The information that he provided was very useful.

Overall, my first affiliate summit was a success! I learned a lot and met a lot of great people and I look forward to attending the next conference in Las Vegas.

Affiliate Marketing affiliate summit, affsum, ase, ase08, boston

I’ve decided to try marketing online dating sites. If everyone else is making money with online dating, I want a piece of it, too! The more competitive a niche is, the better the possibilities of earning money from in it. If others weren’t making money from it, there wouldn’t be so much competition. So if you’re looking for a niche, try ringtones, credit cards, loans, insurance, online dating, and travel. You’re going to make money, if you play it right.

I will write as much information as I can about this online dating campaign I’m going to start. I’m currently in the process of putting a small site together and hope to have the site complete by Friday, March 14. Once the site is complete and online, I will start campaigns in Adcenter, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Google Adwords. I might even give the second tier ppc engines a try, even though I’ve never really worked with them.

Affiliate Marketing

It’s time for me to optimize my ebay campaign. I have been testing it for a month, and I know that I can definitely make a lot of money from ebay. There are still millions of people out there who do not have ebay accounts, and at $25 per new user, it’s definitely worth pursuing.

The ebay affiliate program pays $25-$30 per new user who buys an item or simply bids on one. On top of new registrations, you are also paid half of what ebay charges its sellers to list an item. The more money an item sells for, the more you get as an affiliate.

The cool thing about ebay’s affiliate program is that they provide you with so many tools to help you make money.

The ebay API is the number one tool that they provide to their affiliates, or anyone. The ebay API allows you to retrieve listing data directly from ebay. The data is returned in xml format, instantly! I use the api to get listings of what ever I’m promoting.

At first, I was a little intimidated by the API; I’m not really a programmer. But with the help of google and some PHP related queries, I was able to understand the ebay API have it output the data I sought.

Optimizing My Ebay Campaigns

Although I didn’t make a lot of money with the program this month (advertising ate most of my profits), I’m determined to increase my earnings this month.

Last month, I had a 45% CTR and earned $4,796.78. My goal for this month is to increase my CTR to 75% or higher. With a higher CTR, I will be able keep more of that $4,796.78 :-).

I will do the following to increase my CTR:

1. I will get a domain name for each product I’m promoting and build a mini site around it. Right now, I have one general domain and simply create a page for each product that I’m promoting. For example, If I’m marketing Dyson Vacuums, I would create a Dyson Vacuum and place it at www.domainname.com/DysonVacuum.What I will do is create brand new sites revolving around the product. So instead of www.domainname.com/DysonVacuum, I will create www.DysonVacuumOnSale.Com (just an example, I don’t own that site if it does exist).
2. I will go over the keyword data that I’ve collected over the past month and eliminate the ones that didn’t convert so well. By eliminating the duds, I will increase my overall conversion rate.
3. I will redesign my landing pages. I’m not really much of a designer. I will probably get someone to design some pages for me.
4. I will expand to MSN Adcenter. I tried Adcenter before, but it seems like they simply take forever to get anything done over there. I don’t know, maybe I’m doing something wrong.

Next month I will post the outcomes! Enjoy the rest of your day. Peace out!

Affiliate Marketing, Ebay

Here is a list of 25,000 cities and towns in the U.S. I’ve added the city/town’s full state name and abbreviation. Use it to expand your keyword list. The list is in excel format. Column A contains the city/town name. Column B contains the full state name. Column C contains the state abbreviation. I got the list from the U.S. Census Bureau’s website. I was made aware of the list after reading Jeremy Palmer’s High Performance Affiliate Marketing ebook, which is now available free of charge.

• us-cities.xls - 2.73mb

Affiliate Marketing

After seeing all the fun that I am currently missing by not attending Affiliate Summit West, I have decided to sign up extra early for the next conference set to take place on August 10-12 in Boston.  I officially bought my full conference pass tonight. Yay for me!
By registering this early, I was able to get a full conference pass for $759. If you are like me, and have never attended any of the conferences, I would suggest that you go ahead purchase your pass as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the more likely you’ll come up with reasons not to attend. My number one reason for not attending was the price tag.

Depending on where you are, you could easily pay over $2,000 to attend when you factor in airfare , hotel, food, etc. On the same token, the information you will learn, the people you will meet, and the fun you will have will justify the big price tag for the event. It will also be tax deductible since it’s for business purposes.

So if you haven’t done so already, sign up for Affiliate Summit East before tomorrow (2/26/08) and get the full pass for only $759.

Affiliate Marketing

To all of you going to Affiliate Summit West this year: have a great time, and bring back a lot of information for all of us who couldn’t make it to Vegas this year. I truly wish that I could’ve made it. This would’ve been my first Affiliate Summit. I plan on attending Affiliate Summit East in Boston on August 10-12. I honestly can’t wait.

And also, in case you haven’t noticed, Shawn is offering full passes to ASE for $759 if you purchase it between February 24-26. So grab them now for a nice discount.

Peace!

Affiliate Marketing

If you aren’t running any zip submits offers, you’re probably missing out on the chance to make a few extra bucks. Just in case you don’t know, with zip submits the user only has to fill out one field in order for you to get paid. Many people don’t run these offers simply because the payout is low; around $.90 - $1.50 per zip. You will find a lot of the zip submit offers on Azoogle, CPA Empire, RocketProfit, IncentaClick and other CPA networks.

Profit from Popular New Stories

One of the easiest ways to make money with zip submits is by creating polls around popular news stories. Think about all the crazy shit that’s happening in the news today. Everyone is making money from it, why not you? The last time I ran a zip submit offer was when the rapper T.I was arrested for buying or trying to buy machine guns. I ran the ad on yahoo for a few days and while the story was hot and was able to make a $50-$100 profit every day.

When ever a big news story breaks out, create a simple webpage with a simple yes or no question regarding the news story. For instance, one of the biggest news stories going around now is the whole Roger Clemens steroid scandal. To monetize this news story, do the following:

1. Find a zip submit offer that relates to baseball. If there isn’t one, you could always use the “free $500 Visa Gift Card” offer. That seems to work well with any news topic.
2. Create a page on a website with the poll. In this case, your poll would besomething like “Did Roger Clemens Use Steroids? Vote yes or no and get a free $500 visa gift card” Or,” Did Roger Clemens Lie? Vote yes or not and get a free $500 visa gift card.Link the yes and no buttons to a page that redirects to the zip submit landing page. You want to mask your affiliate link because if the user thinks they’ll remain on your site, they will most likely click the link. If they hover over the link and see that it takes them to a completely new site, they might not want to click on it. Hide it anyway you can/know.Keep the page as simple as possible. Put the question above the fold so that reader is presented with it upon entering the site. Below the fold, include information about the headline, such as an article from a credible news source. Also, grab some info about Clemens from other blogs or even Wikipedia.
3. Once you have your page ready, it’s time to start getting traffic. I recommend advertising on Yahoo Search Marketing and Google’s content network. You want to advertise on yahoo because they’re more likely to approve your ad and won’t hit you with a stupid $5 quality score bullshit penalty.When it comes to Adwords, skip the search network and go directly to the content network. You will be able to get low bids without worrying about stupid quality score bullshit.With zip submits, you want to pay the least amount of money per visitor. I keep my bids below $0.10. It doesn’t make sense to try to bid $0.50 or more. It just won’t work.

Once you have this set, just rinse and repeat. Wait for the next big news story and do it all over again.

Affiliate Marketing