I’d hesitated about approaching Affiliate Summit co-founder Missy Ward for this series till I felt the time was right.

As an experienced affiliate professional, Missy has built up a reputation in the industry, serving in senior management positions like:

• Director of Public Relations for Media Breakaway LLC (formerly CPA Empire, now known as affiliate.com)
• Vice President of Partnership Marketing for eBound Strategies
• President of Aluria Software
• Vice-President of Marketing for Global Travel International

Some of these positions were concurrent with taking a leading role in launching and growing the Affiliate Summit conference/trade show as well as a number of fundraising intiaitives.

If you’ve had a chance to talk to Missy during one of the trade shows, you’d find that she’s personable and knowledgable. During the course of our discussion, I got to know Missy better, including:

• How she got involved in affiliate marketing
• The formation of the Affiliate Summit and it’s goals and growth over the years
• How she got involved with fundraising activities, concurrently growing her affiliate business
• A preview of upcoming Affiliate Summit conferences and related events
• The guerilla marketing strategies used to promote the summit (merchants and affiliate networks can take a leaf out of Missy and Shawn’s playbook)
• Missy’s video blogging and promotion strategies
• A number of inspirational moments from the recent Affiliate Summit
• Key updates involving projects like Geekcast.fm, a new podcast in the making, Missy’s return to affiliate management and the revamped AffStat affiliate industry survey

Check out the hour long podcast, chock-full of content below:

Friday Podcast: Missy Ward [ 1:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (989)

Resources:

• Missy’s blog
• Missy’s Twitter account
• Affiliate Summit
• FeedFront
• Geekcast.fm
• AffStat (participate in the latest survey. closes Feb 28, 2009)
• Affiliate Marketers Give Back
• WeViews.tv
• ShipToTroops.com

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In addition to producing my own Friday Podcast series, a major source of information for me is listening to audio programs and podcasts.

I probably spend about 1-2 hours each day driving and where I used to listen to music, then later switched to listening to news programs like the BBC, I’ve since switched to listening to podcasts a couple of months ago.

Why listen to podcasts? I personally would absorb more information out of a book, especially since I like to mark them up, but a podcast is a good way to multi-task, especially if you’re short on time and a great way to find something to do while you’re driving, exercising (I’m shooting for at least 2 hours of exercise a week to fight the flab), or while cleaning my desk or doing paperwork.

My personal preference is to go for programs with useful content, although I do like the occasional “talk radio” style podcast with hosts who are doing a “Seinfeld” (ie a podcast about nothing…) but generally that doesn’t take up more than 5% or 10% of my listening time.

If a podcast contains very good information, I’ll make a mental note to go through it again and take down notes.

Here’re some of the podcasts which I listen to and (more…)

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