I am back in Chennai, my hometown in India. Even though my return journey from New York was hectic & tiring with 22 flying hours, the thought of the pleasant experiences I had in this business tour – eased my tiredness. The view of the Liberty Statue is still doing it’s round in my mind… The view of the New York City from the Empire State Building… an evening at the Times Square… Mac Burgers… Starbucks Coffee… the list would go on & on!

At New York – I took the opportunity to visit the offices of AzoogleAds & Rocketprofit – two of my favorite affiliate networks.

My AM at AzoogleAds, Emily – took me around their beautiful office. It was nice that Emily introduced me to her colleagues and seniors in the business. Now, it becomes even more personal when doing business with AzoogleAds!

I just can’t forget the meeting with Matt Wasserman – my AM at RocketProfit. Their new office was just getting the final touches when I visited. The massive work space brings all their departments under one roof which is now located in three parts. These guys are growing really fast!

I have never met Matt before, but chatted a lot in the past few months. It was nice to meet him in person and time flew by over lunch, by just getting to know each other’s business & lifestyle. Working from their office for over an hour, I was able to trash all misconceptions & it has laid a good foundation for me to work on with RocketProfit more aggressively!

Now, back in Chennai – I need to get back to work. It’s going to be different from here since I have learn’t a lot of informations, ideas, techniques & secrets from my first business tour. As I had worked on a homework plan before I started my journey to the Affiliate Summit, it is equally important to test & put into action – whatever I have learn’t from the Summit.

So, I am working at a plan to list out all the new informations I have gathered – and schedule a time frame to test them before I fly to the next subject. I will also be posting all my experiments & results in this blog, hence be ready to use my testing results and take yours to the next level. You are always welcome to share your thoughts with me, right over here and also on my next posts about my experiments.

• There are 1000+ companies registered to participate in the event.
• There are 124 booths setup by companies to showcase their products & services.
• There are 25 hours of closed door conference sessions with industry leaders.
• There are 4 hours of ‘open to all’ conference sessions.
• Attendee numbers are expected to cross 2000+.
• There are 2 dinner bashes to socialize.

With so much people, with in depth knowledge on their specialized fields – culminating at the venue – it’s just going to provide an enormous wealth of informations to be learnt. Also, it would be a great opportunity to meet industry leaders, affiliate networks we work with and fellow affiliate marketers with abundance of knowledge. My head started to spin when I put in all these facts together.

My immediate questions were

• what should I do to utilize the knowledge base that is going to be available at this event?
• how should I organize myself to learn more from this event?

Well, the answers also came in as a result of checking blogs on ‘what to do’ as an affiliate summit first timer. I have decided to do my homework!

My homework plan

• I need to understand my objectives and set a goal for me.
• List companies that would be of interest to me & learn more about them.
• Set up my event schedule by choosing the sessions that I should participate.
• List individuals that I should meet & learn more about them.
• Prepare an elevator speech to expose who I am.
• Create a Business Card specific to this event.

With these homework plans in mind, I have made printouts of the Exhibit Hall & Meet Market layouts – that would be useful to get an orientation to visiting the booths.

And I have compiled a document to list the Sessions available at the Summit. You can download my word document – Affiliate Summit East 2008 : Sessions Overview – over here. It would be useful to analyze and choose which session you need to attend since there would be upto THREE SESSIONS taking place at the same time.

Am just getting excited as the days near by and my homework continues…