Affiliate Summit West 2011: Day Two

Affiliate Summit Day Two kicked-off today with one of the best keynote’s I’ve ever seen, period. The keynote was not only inspirational but it also taught me a ton of useful information that I knew absolutely nothing about.

It’s important to know what you know and know what you don’t know. Too many people think they no everything so they don’t take the time to learn. This morning’s Keynote was about the psychology of advertising and was given by Drew Eric Whitman an advertising expert and author.

affiliate_summit2011_keynote

While I do a ton of Internet Marketing and advertising I never really thought much about the psychology behind it. I’m a data guy so I’ve always made my decisions based on cold hard data…this totally opened my eyes!

I’ll be doing a summary of each of the individual seminars next once I’m back from Vegas but for now I want to cover the highlights. If you want to read Drew’s book C$shvertising it covers everything he talked about an much much more. (Please note this is an affiliate link…but this is an affiliate conference so how could I resist!)

I bumped-into David from KeyRPM who I’ve known via email for years but never met in person. It’s always great to put a face to a name and there really is no substitute for meeting someone in person.

After the Keynote I headed over to my first seminar of the day Tools for SEO Success in 2011. I can honestly say this is the seminar I had been looking forward to the most and it even exceeded my high expectations.

affiliate_summit2011_seo2011

The speaker for this seminar was Wil Reynolds the founder of SEER Interactive. Aimed at an advanced SEO audience Wil got the audience engaged and excited right-away.

I’ve been doing SEO for 15 years and I learned at least ten new things in Wil’s talk. He was very relevant, highly knowledgeable and a great presenter. I am so excited about what I learned that I thought I’d share a few nuggets with all of you and of course more to come in my detailed posts to follow.

  • Google is putting more emphasis on local than ever before
  • 20% of all searches are locally based
  • There is a really cool way you can get local backlinks very inexpensively (not giving away the secret publicly)
  • 2011 is the year that un-natural link-building campaigns get slammed
  • Search has moved from generics to long-tails, it’s not happening, it already happened

I learned a LOT more from this and I’ll be sharing bits and pieces in upcoming posts. I really don’t think it’s fair to give-away too much from this seminar since attendees have paid to attend and gain access to this information. If you really want to increase your knowledge attending a conference like Affiliate Summit is the #1 way to do it.

affiliate_summit2011_exhibitionhall

After the SEO seminar I headed over to the Exhibition Hall to meet with existing partners and meet new affiliate networks and merchants. I found a ton of new potential partners with expertise in credit, debt, payday loans and plenty more.

There is no better way to close a lot of deals in a short period of time than in the Exhibition Hall at Affiliate Summit. I always enjoy meeting with my affiliate managers and continuing to develop our relationships. Learning about new affiliate networks is a lot of fun and really shows how many ways there are to monetize your traffic.

affiliate_summit2011_blogger_room

After the Exhibition Hall I headed over to the blogger room to begin putting-together this post and grab a quick cup of tea. My voice was a bit shot today after lots of loud talking at the kick-ass party ShareASale threw last night at Tryst so I used tea to keep my voice alive.

affiliate_summit2011_trendspotting

The last seminar I attended today was about how to Profit from Trendspotting – a topic that I think is VERY useful for Domainers. I was excited to see that Stephanie Lichtenstein, a social media expert and blogger I met last year was on the panel.

This seminar was filled with some really great gems and just like the SEO seminar I’ll be keeping most of this under wraps, you really have to attend the show to learn all the secrets! I will tell you that I now have some excellent ideas and techniques for finding some awesome trend domains in 2011.

After the seminar I went back to the Exhibition Hall to meet with my affiliate manager from ShareASale. It was a lot of fun to talk to him about all the sites I’m working on and how we can take the revenue to the next level. I have been really impressed with ShareASale and they have an awesome team of excited people that love their jobs. I’m making ShareASale a major part of my monetization strategy in 2011 and can’t wait to share some of the results with all of you.

Tonight we’ll be going to the Affiliate Ball, a private party at the Rio with Three 6 Mafia as the main guest. Along with Three 6 Mafia there will be a few other rappers there most notably Sir Mix-A-Lot! It’s going to be another fun party and I’d like to give a huge thanks to ProfitKingsMedia.com for being the main sponsor of the events.

That’s all folks – tomorrow is the last day of Affiliate Summit and marks my 7th day in Vegas…how I’m still awake is beyond me! Stay-tuned for more updates live from Affiliate Summit West 2011!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton