I attended my third Affiliate Summit this year in Vegas. All the Aff. Summit's I've been to have been the winter "ASW = Affiliate Summit West" here in Sin City, Nevada, USA.

Each year I get more out of these events, but this year's was the best for me, although there are lots of things that can still be improved - read on for details.

First of all, let me warn aspiring and newbie affiliate marketers. This event can be quite overwhelming for you as there are over 4000 attendees, multitrack sessions to attend, a "meet market" which is a total zoo of networking mania, and the Exhibit Hall - like the Meet Market but spread out over time.

This ASW was great because I went to it with some clear goals in mind - to meet some good affiliates for my Canadian mortgage lead business, catch up with some affiliate friends, pick up some new trends and tips in affiliate marketing and play some poker :)

Lots of catching up was had at an event I organized, called the Canadian Affiliate Marketing Meetup which I already covered here.

Poker:
As for poker, I competed in DK's PurposeInc poker tourney at the Mirage - see view from my seat with eyes blacked out, although I will reveal that the tall guy standing in the blue shirt who wandered around us all night getting free drinks was rumoured to be the Drink Guy Rob McFaul @rmcfaul). This was my first ever live poker tourney, so I was happy to make the final 10 on Sunday night. We then had the Sat. night top 10 join us and I survived until getting busted out in 15th place when some other tall guy (Troy Tennison) went all in w/ pocket 9's and I called w/ pocket Jacks... and he flops a 9 to bust me. That's poker.

I'm over it now - not too shabby for a newbie live poker player to hit 15 out of 77 total players. Unfortunately I didn't get "in the money" but did meet some cool affiliate marketers. I played again another night at Harrah's, in a $80 buy-in (included $20 bounty) but that went pretty miserably. For now I think I'll stick to online poker where I seem to do better.

Btw if you are looking to try some online poker check out an oldie but goodie affiliate site of mine which compares poker sites.

The ASW11 itself was worth coming to. First some of the good points/takeaways:

Sessions:
- I hit a few and the best that I attended was the one on Mobile Affiliate Marketing. I took over 3 1/2 pages of written notes with some killer ideas such as designing your mobile pages with html5 which some people say could replace Apps entirely.

Other tips from this session were that search traffic on mobile is much more expensive than display ads currently. So seek out display ad networks for mobile and you could get a much higher ROI. Try "click to call" and check out RingRevenue for click to call affiliate marketing.

- Another session that was awesome was the SEO review panel, which I sat in on with Lynn Terry @lynnterry, who I finally was happy to meet f2f. I was awestruck by @sugarrae on the panel, who ripped sites apart like a Ginsu knife.

One of the big takeaways from this panel was regarding buying paid links: "never buy paid links from sites that clearly sell paid links"... and if you DO buy paid links, send the traffic to a separate site first to see how it performs, so you don't risk search engines penalizing your money site.

-I tried a couple panel sessions which didn't have any presented content or very little, and they didn't work for me. I thought panels would engage with the audience more, but there were few questions/discussion. I sensed that the audience came to learn and not discuss.

-On the topic of asking questions, this year's format was to be different in order to prevent people from making little sales pitches about their own sites before asking a question. We were supposed to tweet/sms/post our questions electronically during the session. While logically this idea makes sense, I didn't see anyone use this system.

Instead, it almost seemed to be ignored by the second day and there were even guys running around with mic's to get the questions the old fashioned way. A few people tried the sales pitch thing but it wasn't too big a deal. I think next Affiliate Summit should ditch the tweet-a-question process and go back to the old method BUT punish people who do the sales pitch thing by having the moderator move their question to the end, if time is available. This way the pitchy people would catch on a lot quicker and the good questions asked by non-pitchy people would surface with little effort required.

Sweet Networking:
- With some goals in mind, I managed to meet several people and just one week later am already setting up an affiliate who looks like they'll have promising traffic and volume to pay both our trips. Remember - affiliate marketing has to be win/win!
- Other than elevators, hallways, and in the casino, the best place for focused networking is the Meet Market (where companies get small tables) and the Exhibit Hall. The Hall is like the Meet Market only spaced out over a few days and the booths are bigger so it's a little more corporate. There seemed to be more breathing space in the Hall too. The Meet Market was jammed as it only went for a few hours. It got pretty noisy and hot but if you pushed along you could hit almost every
table and see if there were opportunities waiting for you. I don't think the network atmosphere could get much better at Affiliate Summit - it blows away adTech and some internet marketing conferences I've been to.

To me, this is what Affiliate Summit is all about - meeting, networking, deal making, finding win/win ventures.

Not so Great Networking:
- Some not so smart networking: You can network anywhere: I met one couple as we stepped into a crowded elevator. I asked them to give me their "elevator pitch" and they totally blew it. I asked "what do you do?" and their answer was "we do everything". Uh yeah ok. Next floor please.
- Technical networking issues: The wifi started to fall apart as more and more people tried to sign on. Maybe it was my tweet early in the first session re how the wifi was so great :)

Oops!

After I made that tweet, I couldn't get on the wifi half the time with either my iphone or laptop. I also noticed other bloggers complaining about it too.

The only place I seemed to get a consistent wifi connection was in the blogger lounge - maybe it's because Heather in BC was running a tight ship in there.

Now I know Shawn Collins @affiliatetip has mentioned that the hotel wifi is never adequate and the hotel wifi monopoly is hard to crack, but one suggestion I have is to get one of the big ISP's or Networks (Verizon?) who have an affiliate program, to sponsor the wifi and replace the hotel's wifi with their own beefed up network. The splash page could be a signup w/ email or some sort of wifi app you need to register for, and that way the sponsor would build a monster list of affiliates for their own program, and that would surely pay for any license fee they'd need to hand over to the hotel.

*I should mention that ASW11 wifi was at least better than over at CES2011 (the biggest consumer electronics show in the world) where the wifi was all over the place as exhibitor hotspots, BUT there was no internet access at all, so in this respect we were better off.






The Hotel:
- The Wynn overall was a good venue. I liked the rooms and the atmosphere of the Wynn was a little more upscale, reflecting the growth and increased recognition that affiliate marketing is getting, as a credible marketing channel. The location of the Wynn was also a bonus - across the street from the Fashion Mall (reasonable food court and awesome restaurant Maggiano's) and at the N. end of the Strip itself.

Thanks again to the ASW11 team for a solid conference and I hope to see you there next year.

Cheers,
Peter Koning
Affiliate-Software-Review.com

--- (Edited on 1/20/2011 12:51 pm [GMT-0600] by Peter) ---