Affiliate Summit East 2007: My Thoughts

Well, I have to hand it to Missy Ward and Shawn Collins – Affiliate Summit just keeps getting bigger and better.

As always, it’s great to to catch up with old friends and business colleagues at the Summit and do some business.

But I have to admit that I missed out on most of the party scene as my 19-hour travel day to Miami – which included a red-eye flight – completely threw me off for the first couple of days. Almost fell asleep in my shrimp dinner at Bubba Gumps on Saturday evening.

On Sunday, I spent 4 hours at the Meet Market talking to merchants, network representatives, super affiliates and affiliate bloggers. What I found particularly interesting were the program pitches…

Some merchants and affiliate program managers really get the point of selling their programs to affiliates by including a quick list of features and benefits – and detailing how their program surpasses their competitors. Unfortunately, some companies send representatives that were hired the previous week and not only don’t have a pitch – they don’t have answers to your questions. Granted, although everyone has to learn the business at some point – Affiliate Summit is not the place for on-the-job training, unless there is an experienced representative to pick up the newbie slack.

On Monday, Jeremy Palmer, Scott Jangro and I did the “What Super Affiliates Want” discussion panel to an almost full house. It was great to see a number of industry thought leaders in the audience including Anik Singal, Lisa Riolo and Lisa Picarille. Jeremy and I stuck around for almost an hour after the presentation answering questions. We had tons of great feedback following the session, so I will be posting a point summary of our presentation later to the blog.

On Tuesday, Anik and I popped into a couple of sessions including Jeremy Shoemaker’s (Shoemoney) and Lee Dodd’s ‘Monetizing Communites’ panel. I had been looking forward to hearing what they had to say on the topic, but it turned out to be just a question and answer session, so we left.

We then toured the exhibit hall extensively and I was blown away by how many companies had booths set up. There was no shortage of affiliate networks, many of which I’d never heard of before. What I’d like to see more of in future are merchants with real products and affiliate programs, however.

On Tuesday night we went to the Forex Affiliate pool party and ended up dining in the hotel lobby bar and restaurant later with several other big groups from the Summit. I especially enjoyed listening to Brian Littleton of Shareasale share his musical talents at the piano during a singalong that harkened back to the Orlando Summit. For everyone’s benefit, I just listened.

[tags]Affiliate Summit, Missy Ward, Shawn Collins, Rosalind Gardner, Shoemoney, Lisa Picarille, Anik Singal, Jeremy Palmer, [/tags]

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