Affiliate Summit : My Second Day

Affiliate Summit East gets even more juicy on the second day!

The day opened up with an inspirational key note by Cory Booker. I liked the way he narrated an incident about Mahatma Gandhi. ‘Practice before Preach’ was a magic formula for the Mahatma and Cory brought it out well in his speech. The essence of his key note brought out the importance of self belief, vision and responsibility.

The exhibit hall opened up and it was great to see 100+ affiliate network teams in one single place, battling out to explain the affiliates – why their network should be chosen to work with. I had the opportunity to stroll down the exhibit area along with Ian Fernando for a while. Later, I visited the booths of NeverblueAds, RocketProfit and AzoogleAds – all where I do business with.

I met Emily Bouton, my AM at AzoogleAds booth and quickly fixed an appointment for lunch. We had to jog down to Morton’s Steak House, just next to Seaport Hotel – since it was raining out there. The food was great as well as our conversation. I have been working with her since I joined AzoogleAds and this was the first time I am meeting her in person. We have chatted literally every other day, but speaking face to face was really special.

More on the sessions of day 2…

My 5 Favorite SEO Strategies Exposed – was the topic for the first session I attended today.

Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive, an SEO specialist, came out with a few techniques that involves zero cost. He explained the benefits of using Google Knol and he dissected a google knol page to explain what google looks for in a page to be ranked higher in search engines.

• So, google looks for – poster quality, rating & rater quality, content length, freshness, reviewers & reviewers quality.
• Free tools recommended – Rank Checker, Link Diagnosis, SEO Quake – all firefox add-ons
• Paid tools recommended – SEO Spyglass, SeoMozPro – all independent tools

The final one I attended – ‘PPC Super Affiliate Strategies You Must Know’ – by Amit Mehta

Amit’s presentation was great and really helpful since I do a lot of Adwords stuff. He exposed some interesting aspects of how to manage bids and a lot of methods on how to do PPC if we need to succeed.

Some of the interesting tips provided by him were

• Overcome the fear of losing money – while testing you lose money but gain knowledge.
• 20/80 rule – only 20% of your keywords work, so refine them and scrap the remaining 80%.
• Testing in PPC – ad copy & domain name should be tested always | You could use splittester.com to find which ad copy should stay | 30 clicks on each ad would help to decide.
• Testing Landing Pages – checkout headlines, call to action, images and color scheme.

Both the above mentioned sessions gave in a lot of information that any affiliate marketer should know to succeed in SEO & PPC.

I also attended other sessions -

1. Anatomy of a Great Affiliate Program
2. How is Social Media Changing Affiliate Marketing.
   

Both of these sessions were panel discussions and I could’nt find any juicy information from them. I wanted to attend the session with the topic ‘Compliance – It’s More Than a Buzz Word’ – but it was in clash with ‘Anatomy of a Great Affiliate Program’ and I opted to participate in the latter because my friend Ian Fernando was a speaker in it. Although there was’nt any juicy information for me to take, he did a good job!

Looking forward to my final day at the Affiliate Summit East 2008!