Here’s more goodness from the Affiliate Summit:

ShareASale’s Director of Client Services Carolyn Tang AKA Catango is one of the most pleasant and knowledgeable individuals in the industry and it was a pleasure to talk to her at the SaS booth, even though there were lots of people there.

As a tradeshow visitor, I’ve got more than my fair share of t-shirts, notepads, pens, paper weights and stationery to last 2.5 lifetimes. I liked how SaS did a little out of the box thinking to provide a photobooth where affiliates took some crazy pics (I’ll post mine later), and thoughtfully gave out baby T-shirts and bears. For affiliates with families or significant others, they’ll likely be seeing the SaS logo on a teddy bear or baby T for some time to come. (a good thing).

Check out the Friday Podcast interview on Affiliate Program Strategies with Carolyn Tang.

It was cool hanging out with top affiliates Colin “Google” McDougall and Ros Gardner over dinner at the Nobu Japanese restaurant at the Hard Rock for the private launch of Jim Lillig’s Offeratti network.

Considering that Colin doesn’t take raw food, it’s a testament to the great food at Nobu that Colin was enjoying the sashimi with the rest of us during the meal. It was also interesting to hear Colin tell his stories about his towed trailer that he rolls out for holidays. And if you’re looking for inspiration as you’re working towards your ideal affiliate lifestyle, Ros has bought a lot of nice toys/trinkets to enjoy the fruits of her labor.

It was great to meet affiliate network Market Leverage‘s marketing manager Dina Riccobono after talking to her over IM and being interviewed for MLTV late last year.

Market Leverage has a proactive outreach and affiliate recruitment program and it’s refreshing to see a network take the intiative in getting to know affiliates. They hosted a dinner at Switch at the Encore hotel, with Market Leverage CEO Mike Jenkins in attendance. It was a great opportunity to talk to affiliate managers Mike Kelly and Jen Fluker to get insight into how affiliate managers operate.

At the dinner, Mike announced the launch of Market Leverage’s greenlinks program, which provides links to video-based affiliate training from the ML website interface.

Here’s an earlier Friday Podcast with Market Leverage CEO Mike Jenkins

Jen Goode, better known as JGoode, headed the Affiliate Summit mentors program and did a great job (I believe there were more than 100 mentees in the program). I also had a picture taken with the penguin and nearly kidnapped him. Ah well, maybe next time.

In the meantime, check out the Friday Podcast with Jen talking about Print-On-Demand product strategies

With Jon Fisher AKA AOJon , founder of the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum. I started making these “gang signs” because a number of the “affiliate gangstas” started making them.

Before the panel discussion on Affiliate Strategies for Traffic Generation and Sales Conversion on the first day of the summit with Miles Baker, Geordie Carswell, Nickycakes.

The session went well with positive feedback submitted by the session attendees.

I’ll likely plan and submit a proposal for another panel in the future.

Nicky was recently interviewed by Tracking202’s Wes Mahler. You can check out the interview here.

Here’s my Friday Podcast interviews:

• Miles Baker
• Geordie Carswell
• Nickycakes

With Team Mystery from VH1’s The Pickup Artist season 2. Pickup artist Mystery AKA Erik Von Markovik – we both share the same birthday btw.) and “Hawaii” and Jason Adams.

Soon a crowd gathered:

It was a pleasure to finally meet Todd Crawford in the flesh:

I was trying to do my best impression of a “Todd Talk” impersonation.

what I found was interesting is that his wife has been keeping a record of all the celebrities he’s been mistaken for. And if you met him in the flesh, you might mistake him for a rockstar.

Check out Todd’s Friday Podcast interview on Affiliate Management

Mike Krongel is founder and CEO of the Copeac affiliate network.

It’s been one of the better performing CPA networks on my sites. If you haven’t yet, check them out.

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That’s it for this update.

More to come.

If you’re an affiliate signed up to multiple networks, you’d receive a constant barrage of daily emails with subject lines like “network exclusives, promote now!”, “Highest payouts!” and “Hot new offers”.

Likewise, I’ve checked out a couple of affiliate marketing forums where networks have sponsored sections of the forums and populated these sections with “These offers are hot!” then proceed to list down payouts and offer caps.

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I don’t know how you feel, but this is pretty much tantamount to email and social network spamming by overzealous affiliate managers.

A good affiliate manager should know when to promote offers and when to back off. And emailing/hounding me when I say I’m busy is one way to get on my really bad side.

The other thing that’s disturbing is how little time many affiliate managers take to understand their affiliates. Granted, each AM might have 500 affiliates under them with just 5-10% of them actively promoting campaigns.

But my thought is this – If you’re already investing a couple of minutes using an instant messenger or making a phone call to the affiliate: what’s the best way to use this time?

Should you:

1) TELL the affiliate about your best converting offer, and the exclusives and the highest payouts. (I doubt an affiliate running a credit repair website might be able to clear many acaiberry lead gen offers for you…)

OR

2) Should you ASK the affiliate what type of offers they’re interested in, and filter your pool of offers down to the most relevant 10-20 and email that information over?

The concept of customer relationship management (CRM) does not apply only to the advertiser-affiliate network relationship because the advertiser is paying for the leads/customers, I’d say that affiliates are equal part “customers” in the equation too.

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Having said that, using Twitter, or a blog to publish an endless stream of breaking news on “offer updates” is just another way of doing what everyone else is doing.

Here are a couple of ways to disrupt the “traditional” way of affiliate management, and stepping the standards up a notch:

Engage with affiliates: This is more than just sending me a Christmas card (even if I live halfway around the world), it’s engaging and understanding your affiliates’ requirements.

Geordie Carswell, back when he was CEO of affiliate network Revenuewire, would be available over AIM to give PPC campaign tips and promotion ideas. Likewise, Mike Krongel, CEO of Intermark Media which owns the Copeac network would be available too.

These days, Ralph Ruckman AKA “Ruck” is active on the Wickedfire forum and actively posts on the Convert2Media blog and gives out promotion ideas on the C2M affiliate forum with clear, actionable ideas to promote the offers on his network. Not to mention that his partner and co-founder Steve Howe practically lives on AIM.

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Building A Goodwill Virus: I hadn’t heard of Market Leverage till meeting some of their team at the Affiliate Summit last year. Since then, they’re proactively got my mailing address from my domain whois information and sent me a schwag bag earlier this year (and included some gifts for my daughter too).

Likewise, they’ve been following on their promotion efforts by organizing a series of contests on the popular blogs and rollout their “Cashinator” money grabbing machine thingie at events they’re taking part in. While these items and cash won’t be significant for successful affiliates, it does demonstrate that affiliates are a priority for the network and building credibility and a reputation among the affiliate community are some of its goals.

Also, having a regular video broadcast does help build the reputation of the affiliate network (or merchant). Market Leverage has it’s Market Leverage TV weekly broadcast, while Buy.com has it’s Buy.tv broadcasts.

If anything these intiatives demonstrates the networks or merchant’s investment in long-term projects which will ultimately bear fruit from its core of affiliates.

Taking some of lessons to mind when attending an event like Affiliate Summit will help any network get more mileage out of their participation in the event.

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Related podcasts:

• Mike Jenkins, founder Market Leverage
• Geordie Carswell, former CEO Revenuewire
• Dina Riccobono, Market Leverage marketing manager

Another major sponsor is affiliate network RocketProfit.

And the party will be held at the Mansion on Miami Beach.

So you can expect to see the folks like WebmasterRadio, WickedFire leader Aojon and the WickedFire crew, together with DigitalMoses Confidential, PepperJam, Options Media, Moniker and FriendFinder.

PepperJam is doing a promotion for their VIP list, check out the post here.

If you’re there, do be sure to say hi to Copeac president Mike Krongel and lead affiliate manager Danielle Iovino. I’ve learned more than my fair share of guerilla affiliate marketing tactics from Mike over the last few months and he’s always ready to share his experiences. Danielle’s one of the best affiliate managers I’ve met among the different CPA networks out there.

Be sure to pick the brains of PepperJam head honcho Kris Jones and Affiliate marketing director Robyn Martin.

Aojon has informed me over IM that he plans to do a number of unspeakable things at the party and it wouldn’t be prudent to reproduce them here.

Much as I’d like to, I won’t be making the trip down to Miami, although I’ve already told my wife that nothing is going to keep me from Affiliate Summit West at the Rio in Vegas in February next year.

If you’re headed to Affiliate Summit, and you miss the Affiliate Bash, you could be kicking yourself for some time to come.

If you haven’t already figured it out yet, the bulk of the power networking and exchange of affiliate marketing and CPA campaign information takes places at these events (especially after a few drinks).

Speaking of which, the other big party coming up is the Rich Jerk’s Playboy Mansion Party at Playboy Mansion West, Beverly Hills.

Hef and the Gals

There’s a bit of controversy from some Internet Marketers about boycotting the event as it seem to be promoting immorality or …I’m not entirely clear why they’re against it. [Read Tim Erway and Ross Goldberg’s posts]. I can understand what their detractors are saying, but I don’t really follow their line of logic.

If I had to make a choice between the two events, it would be a little difficulty, but I’d have to say my choice would firmly rest with Shawn Collins and Missy Ward’s Affiliate Summit and the accompanying WMR/Copeac Affiliate Bash.

Thanks to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward who conceptualized Affiliate Summit and have been grown it from strength-to-strength at about 200 participants in the first AS in 2003 till more than 2,000 at the recently concluded ASW.

It was a great opportunity to meet up face-to-face with a number of the online marketers I’d been reading and talking with over the past few months like ShoeMoney, Scott Jangro, Kris Jones, PlanetAndrea, Jon Fisher from WickedFire and Joe Whyte.

Becky “Webmoxy” Ryan was a friendly and intelligent person to talk to (even though I was deep in thought and seemed to have unintentionally ignored her when she called out a few times).

Maura, Robyn, Andrew Wee at the Pepperjam booth

Shoemoney’s assistant Nicole

Webmoxy Becky Ryan

More surprising still was the fact that a number of affiliate managers and affiliates whom I hadn’t met prior to ASW mentioned they enjoyed reading this blog.

Blogging can be a solitary affair and it’s comforting to have face-to-face validation (which gives a human face to the otherwise clinical awstats’ 6000+ monthly uniques).

Although I missed them, perhaps I’ll have a chance to catch up with Super Affiliate Ros Gardner, BlogKits founder Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson and SleepyBlogger Robyn Tippins at the next event. I heard Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis had to leave Sunday evening for school, so I probably missed them by a hair.

What I greatly appreciated was the opportunity to meet Mike Krongel and his team over at Copeac. They threw a killer party for the WickedFire folks over at the Caramel Loung in the Bellagio.

It’s a great opportunity to have met up with WickedFire founders Jon and Brandon and WF members like John “I like c**k”, SEO_Mike, chrislingle, lerchmo, jDog, DruSam, Surly, Kaveman, Smaxor, Jon Warass, ExEngima, Rick.

Mike Peters from Software Projects had some interesting stories to tell too.

I’ve been listening to some of the post-ASW buzz and one of the issues I’ve heard is that the workshops didn’t provide good information.

I think the major element of a ‘summit’ is to share ideas. And given the time constraint of a 1.5 hour session, I’d doubt it’s fair to compare AS’ workshop sessions with Elite Retreat or other multiple day workshop focused on a single topic like SEO or list building.

I had the opportunity to speak to merchants making their first foray into affiliate marketing and they seemed to have got basic information to follow up on their efforts.

The biggest benefit of ASW is ‘being there’.

And ShoeMoney has rightly pointed out that the best exchange of ideas takes place after the workshop, in the bars and restaurants after the sessions end. In a more relaxed environment, you have an open exchange of ideas and trading information on what works and what doesn’t.

And herein lies the rub, Internet Marketing has more to do with relationship building and personal contact, than just the technology aspect that people generally get obsessed about.

Online marketing is more than composing the best Web copy, or optimizing your landing page or PPC campaign.

If you don’t have grassroot supports from your peers, whether it’s getting feedback on something you’re implementing, or even working together on a project, you can still succeed, it will just take a much longer time.

You can, of course, read about ASW and other events from this blog, though in the long run you’d be missing out on some great networking opportunities.

Affiliate Summit East will be coming up later this year.

Will you be there?