Lately I’ve been gravitating towards using twitter, although the lightweight 140-character cellphone text messaging aspect of it, doesn’t feel very substantial, and conversations seems to ebb and disappear in the deluge of public and private messages being fired off every couple of seconds.

For a while, it seemed like MyBlogLog had been in a holding pattern, and I’d been hoping for some integration either with the Yahoo! shopping properties or its Mash social network.

I may be wrong, but it doesn’t seem like social media/social traffic is a major focus for Yahoo! now, and that’s where it might be missing the boat.

The New Face of Yahoo! MyBlogLog: Tilly “Two Thumbs” McClain 

Still, it was encouraging to see that Tilly McClain has been named Yahoo! MyBlogLog community manager earlier this week (it’d previously been under the stewardship of Robyn Tippins and Ian Kennedy previously), and perhaps we’ll see some interesting developments in the coming months.

Maybe MBL might even have a podcast or a vlog?

I’m sitting here with my fingers crossed…

I’m not sure how long I’ve known Robyn, but I know it’s probably about 2.5 to 3 years.

I first got to know her through my blogging efforts and later she invited me to join the MyBlogLog Advisory Group.

I don’t think a whole lot of people are aware that Robyn racked up about $200,000 in consulting fees in the year before joining Yahoo! and relocated from Virginia to California to take up the position.

During the Friday Podcast, I found out how Robyn got started (generating $30,000 a month from a single physical product), how she branched into consulting, including taking on projects for some of the biggest companies out there, and how someone aspiring to enter the business/web consulting field can get started.

As always, there’re lots of gems in this one.

Check it out:

Here’s what I face each time I click on my “Home” setting on my Facebook profile:

Keep scrolling…

Click on the “more” tab below and keep scrolling…

So getting on Facebook is quite a painful experience.

Being hit by irrelevant application invites, and with Facebook system where multiple people can keep sending you invites to the same app over and over again, and the best part is that you have to deny/ignore each application request one at a time, means you could be spending 15 – 30 minutes each day just getting rid of application requests…

So is this effective social marketing?

Should you still go out and develop a facebook app?

With MySpace, you would get friend-bombed and bulletin-bombed and event-invite bombed before the social network became largely socially irrelevant…unless you were a teenager with iron-like patience or maybe bopping away to your MP3 collection as you were patiently wiping…or maybe accepting every application request that came in…

That’s the one beautiful of a professional network like LinkedIn, aside from some social gamers throwing out irrelevant questions to their network every other day, the pre-screen is largely successful.

With Facebook, I’m thinking that the next Facebook app developer who comes out with the “One Facebook app” – tagline “One Application To Rule Them All” – which could do a global delete of pending application and friend requests, might just emerge the king of the mountain.

The question is, “Mountain of What?”

Social marketers, I’m keen to hear what you’ve to say, maybe Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Wayne Porter (whom I know is addicted to a particular insidious Facebook game…), Stephanie “Internet Geek Girl” Agresta, Robyn “Sleepyblogger” Tippins, Shawn Collins, or if you the reader might like to weigh in, drop a comment below…

My daughter Bianca was pretty excited about it:

Opening the box revealed…

Purple wrapping paper?

And…

A haul which included:

• MyBlogLog decals
• A Yahoo! pen and pencil
• A Yahoo! bumper sticker
• Purple Gummi bears (in rapid extinction as I write)
• Purple gumballs (also in scarce supply as I write)
• A Yahoo! pin

It’s great to feel appreciated.

I was a little confused though, because judging by Yahoo! web pages:

I’d have thought the corporate colors might be red and white, but it’s actually purple.

Take a look inside the purple house of Yahoo!

So I learned that one of Yahoo’s corporate colors is purple today, though it was a little confusing initially.

To build a strong brand identity in the marketplace, do note that colors are as much as part of your identity as the look of your blog template and sales and landing pages.

PS: My thanks to MyBlogLog Community Manager Robyn “Sleepyblogger” Tippins for the schwag.

Notes follow after the “more”:

“Do what you love, love what you do”

As a consultant, I meet people who are slogging away at 9-to-5 job for 40 years, so that they enjoy another 20 years of retirement.

Does it make spend 40 years to enjoy yourself for 20 years?
It certainly doesn’t sound very fun.

Why not enjoy all 60 years instead?

Do something you love, and which continually fires you up.

Linked In: Haven for the nosy

With comprehensive bios, you get a sense of the Internet Marketer’s path.

A common question I continually receive: how did you get started?

An easy solution: study profiles on LinkedIn.

I am fortunate to “work”, or rather be in an industry with people who are really fired up

Always a pleasure to talk to people who are just as excited today with what they’re doing, as when they first started out.

Let me poke around the backgrounds of two of my friends.
I’m sure they won’t mind…At least I hope they won’t mind.

Sam Harrelson
Sam has been Prof of Religious Studies at Gardner-Webb University located in North Carolina.

Sam’s other experience:
Affiliate manager, COO for online advertising network
blogger and new CEO for revenuews internet marketing content portal and community
US East Coast GM for Clicks2Customers, serving as an evangelist and building relationships with key north american customers

–

or look at Robyn “SleepyBlogger” Tippins who’s been:

• b5 blog network editor
• worked as a blogger/writer/content developer
• word of mouth marketing project for Intel
• “video game work” at PR agency Fleischmann Hillard

I’ve talked to Robyn regularly and she’s doing very well business wise, and enjoying what she’s doing too.

Robyn’s currently Community Manager at Yahoo! blogging community MyBlogLog.

–

Someone who loves what they’re doing:
just need to read their blogs, or twitter updates or meet them at events like sobcon, affiliate summit to know they’re fired up about what they’re doing.
can see it in their eyes, and from the way they talk. just excited to do what they do.

–
–> people are constantly emailing me for “secrets to internet marketing success”

The biggest secret or motivator for me has always been to focus on what’s exciting.

What makes you wake up at 3am, not because you have to, but because you’ve tons of ideas circulating in your mind and you need to work on it immediately.

Sure, there will be days, when you have 500 emails to go through, and you can’t always pass it to an assistant, but i think when you take something on, you take it all on. when you’re dating someone, and if it escalates into something more serious, you accept them for who they are, warts and all.

Loving what you do is a choice you can make, it’s something in your control.

The choice is in your hands, and you can choose to work for 40 years, to enjoy the next 20 years after that (assuming inflation doesn’t catch up with your savings)…

Or you can instead make a choice to find something you enjoy doing now.

It’s coming to about 6 years since i last worked for somebody as an employee,
During the early days, you won’t have the certainty of having a fixed paycheck coming in at the end of every month,

I’ve always learned something new with every new project and each new consulting assignment I’ve taken on.
As an Insider’s insider, you’ll be surprised how things work behind the scenes.

–
To wrap up, you’ll know you love what you’re doing, when it leaves you feeling energized at the end of the day, or giving you a high.

If you play your cards right, and find something you enjoy doing and throwing yourself fully into it, there’s no doubt that you’ll find a pot of gold not just at the end of the rainbow, but at each step of the way.

First the MBL Advisory Group: I’m looking forward to working closely with MBL to further bring the service to a new level. The other advisors are experts in their own right, like:

• Cord Silverstein
• Wendy Piersall
• Drew Meyers
• Jonathan “Trust” Phillips

MBL is on the forefront of social networking especially for bloggers. In 2006, some naysayers were predicting that “blogging was dead, and Digg was the future”.

Uh huh.

Until Eric and the MBL team launched the MBL widget late last year which has become pervasive. In recent times, Scott Jangro’s BumpZee and BlogCatalog have launched their own variants of their social widget.

And lately you’ve got a number of wayward MBL users who’ve devised a number of dubious ways to generate income by comment or widget spamming the heck out of sites which use the MBL widget.

I think there’s a lot of bad information going out there. If you want to game social traffic or social media (depending on how you call it), you might like to build a foundation in “social engineering” along the likes of Kevin Mitnick, or what the NLP practitioners or Pick-Up Artists practice. You’re much better off brushing up on your social skills and applying techniques of rapport and relationship building in order to achieve your goals.

Widgets and by extension, technology is just a medium, it’s ONLY a channel to get your message across. You still need an attractive message to get a conversion. I call that message “content”. The bigger and stickier your ball of “content” the more likely you’ll succeed.

So it’s unlikely that blogs, forums, social networking sites are going to be “dead” anytime soon, but rather overly focusing on the “Internet” side of “Internet Marketing” is going to work against you.

–

Having said that, building on the points raised in “Unlocking the Social Inner Circle Code“, one of the likely replies will be “Huh? How do I create value?”

The law of social reciprocity applies as much in the online world, as in real-world relationships.

If you keep taking from the other person or from the community, things will get to a point where you can’t take anymore. The social circle will release you and you’ll freefall into social oblivion.

I think value boils down to listening to your audience. Hearing what they have to say and providing an answer to what they have to say.

Spamming is very much a mirror of a one-sided conversation, you’re just blasting something at someone, never listening to what they have to say.

The moment you start listening is when doors start opening.

Every MyBlogLog blogger will have some relationship with Eric. After all he’s the default “friend” when you join the network.

With Eric’s departure, will new MBL members be greeted by Yahoo! Community Manager Robyn Tippins?

It was just a little over a month ago that MyBlogLog ran their ad on StandoutJobs to hire two wickedly good developers.

In the video ad, Eric, seen with MyBlogLog co-founder Todd Sampson were talking about the atmosphere at the young company, and it’s a pity to see Eric’s departure.

He’ll be gradually phasing to becoming one of the bloggers in the MBL community, creating the moniker bpm140 and will be blogging over at marcoullier.com.

I’m thinking bpm140 could be an abbreviation for 140 beats per minute.

Given Eric’s penchant for dance music, see his KLF post, I’m guess bpm140 could either refer to heart-thumping dance music, or merely the heart rate of a baby (he’ll be a dad for the second time soon). Perhaps it’s a dual reference…good one, Eric.

His priorities following “retirement”:

• enjoying the pending birth of my second son
• losing some weight
• finally getting my contacts organized
• read a bunch of books
• Oh, and getting reacquainted with an old friend called “blog”

I noticed that he’s got “insert pithy tagline here” below the title of his blog. Perhaps he’ll be starting a “pithy tagline” meme soon.

We can only hope.

David Dalka mentions that during SOBCon upcoming changes to the popular social networking site include:

• A rebranding (to reflect it’s acquistion by Yahoo!)
• Some MyBlogLog 2.0 upgrades – site redesign and a Web2.0-ish widget upgrade
• Anti-social spam features like avatar moderation and masking type features

Since Google rules the roost at the moment on the search engine front, there’s plenty of opportunity for Yahoo! and Microsoft to capture mindshare and market share on the non-search engine traffic fronts.

There’s opportunity to look at the hubs of highly targeted traffic clustered around social sites and forums.

So far we haven’t heard not many high profile forums being acquired have been reported in the mass media, even though transaction values for these deals can range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions.

Selective media focus? Perhaps. But as social traffic and social media continue to gain prominence, Yahoo! initiatives to rebrand and reinvent itself will be crucial.

It could be an interesting inflexion point for Yahoo!

Witness:

Whether you choose to see Yahoo! Auctions as ‘retiring’ or closing, it is indicative that Yahoo! is:

• Exiting the auction space, bowing down to eBay
• Channelling its resources into it’s Yahoo! Shopping channel

What US internet marketers may not realize that at least in Singapore, there are as many or possibly transactions done on Yahoo! Auctions Singapore compared to eBay Singapore.

How does that affect your business model if you’re using auctions as a distribution channel?

Either way, it doesn’t pay for the Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft behemoths to lay their eggs in every basket. As you heard and will continue to hear, the mantra is “focus, focus, focus” even if you’re a multi-billion dollar company.

Taking aim at an area of speciality, whether natural search, social traffic or another web 2.0 channel would be the way to go.

See: Robyn “Sleepyblogger” Tippins SOBCon blog links

I don’t read many magazines, reading most of my content and feature content online.

Besides reading the print edition of Singapore’s major English daily, The Straits Times, which comes with weekly tech, fashion and lifestyle “magazines”, on the rare occasion, I check out:

• Revenue (I read the online digital edition when I can)
• Skymall catalogue found on most domestic flights
• Tabloids like US, People

Tabloids and rag mags are a good opportunity to conduct niche research, especially for FMCG (fast moving consumer goods). You can find out which are the hot jeans, perfumes/fragrances, electronic items and build a niche themed site within a couple of hours.

Depending on how hot the trend is, you could reap affiliate or CPA commissions for a couple of weeks or even more than a year, if you trendspot correctly.

The other thing is magazine preferences reveal a lot of a person’s personality. Kris and Lee Odden have a fairly strategic/macro type approach (having leading their own respective business organizations), but more so from their choices of the Smithsonian, Forbes, Inc., while younger guys like Shoemoney and Joe Whyte go for more topical/news type publications like Playboy, Wired, Maxim, Stuff.

To propagate this meme, I tag:

• Laura Alter
• Michelle MacPhearson (who was a good sport to take part in the Goals meme)
• Sleepyblogger Robyn Tippins
• Social Traffic Queen Alex Mayo
• PlanetAndrea

So the conversation seems to have shifted from whether “onsite blogging” provides value, to how difficult it is to “liveblog a session” because of the multiple tasks involved:

• Pay attention to the speaker
• Live blog the session

Here’s a secret I learned as a former journalist. I together with the reporters from the Reuters, Associated Press and Bloomberg news wires, sat listening to Microsoft, HP or some other company make their announcement, and we used our strategies, following that, we’d file our reports (the newswire guys generally filed their reports within 30 seconds to a minute to someone in the newsroom), the reports would go live.

Due to our ability to effectively process the information successfully, their reports would be circulated all over the world, and my news stories would make it to page one of Singapore’s business daily, or it’d make the front page of the tech session.

Compared to everyone else, we have the same brain, the same abilities, but yet we’re able to achieve different results.

So the question is:

What made the difference?

—

Before we get into that, consider all the tasks you have to get through every day.

You need to:

• Check and respond to email
• Collaborate with joint venture partners
• Develop your own products (or project manage if you’ve outsourced it)
• Update your blog or submit news articles/press releases
• Manage the sales team in following up and marketing your services
• The administrative stuff like filing paper, and probably the least exciting activity (at least for me…) filing your taxes

On top of that, we all only have 24 hours to finish this in.

So again: What makes the difference?

Your time planning and execution strategy you use make all the difference.

I won’t go into time planning, but focus on the execution aspect.

Many business owners and new entrepreneurs fail because:

• They fail to realize what’s important
• They fail to do what’s important
• They fail to follow up on what’s important

The Pareto principle states that 20% of the people in a city in Italy owned 80% of it’s wealth. Since then, the Vilfredo Pareto’s principle has been generalized to:

“20% of what you do will lead to 80% of your results” — So of the 10 things you do, you need to complete 2 of them to become really successful. The problem is that most people choose to do maybe 5 or 6 things.

Unfortunately, those 5 things happen to be part of the trivial 80%.

Fast forward to Internet Marketing, my opinion is that we’re closer to a 95-5 rule (It’s actually closer to a 90-9-1 rule, but I’ll save it for another day).

That 5% effort which gives you your 95% of results could be:

• Brokering a joint venture with the leader in a niche you’re targeting
• Landing media coverage in the most influential media for your specific segment
• Selecting the ONE seminar/convention out of hundreds held every year to be in the right place at the right time to meet the one partner/mentor/client who will help propel you to the next level of success.

Being able to sort out your priorities and more importantly, acting on them, will give you unfair leverage over all your competitors.

If you’re looking for one takeaway form this post, here’s one thing you can start doing now which will bring you phenomenal results. It’s a simple, two-step process.

Are you ready?

• Spend five minutes at the start of each day determining which one thing you must finish today which will bring you a giant step closer to your goals (It’s usually the ‘most difficult’ task, which has been pending for some time)
• Completing it to the best of your ability (Make a personal commitment to finish it before you go to sleep)

Want to see someone who’s put this into action? How about “PC Torque – $25 million in 4 years”
[And if you’re interested in the live blogging strategy. Here’s the answer:

• Spend time listening to the speakers at event. Take down keywords. Occasionally note down a phrase if you plan to quote them on it.
• Before you start writing, take one minute to summarize what you’re going to say. Limit it to 3-5 points. Each point can be 1-2 sentences.
• Just do it.]

For additional ideas, check out:

–> Internet Millionaire Code

I can identify with her sentiment that: “I’m wondering (aloud I suppose) if I’m the only one who finds the typical disjointed, rambling liveblogging posts are of any real value to offsite readers?”

Here’s my take:

It’s nothing to do with whether the blogging is live or not.

It has everything to do with your content and your presentation.

As an example, look at presenter Nicole Eggers on WebProNews.

Nicole Egger, WebProNews video news update presenter

Besides being very easy on the eyes, Nicole presents WebProNews updates throughout the day.

What makes readers continue to come back is the amount of useful information they get within the 2-4 minute video broadcasts.

No medium is perfect however, and when Nicole first presented in early February, she received negative feedback for her Southern Drawl (She’s from Kentucky). [Alister Cameron’s noted when she first started presenting early this year “Yahoo has high hopes for Panama” and posted “WPN’s Nicole Eggers is gorgeous. Pity she can’t speak properly“. See Nicole’s replies].

So how do these two seemingly disparate topics (Robyn’s qualms about LiveBlogging and WPN’s Nicole Eggers video broadcasts) match up?

The key is this: Content.

It’s a constant refrain. but Content is King. (and Queen, and the Prince, and the Princess too).

If you have tried live blogging and it’s fallen flat on it’s face, it likely had to do with the two factors: content and presentation.

Rambling blog posts frequently point to a lack of organization, or an overly emotional, rather than an intellectual approach when presenting information.

To contrast the two approaches, the emotional approach could be something along the lines of:

• I am at SES New York
• I met lots of friends here and made loads more
• I am having fun

It would not be as informative as say:

• I am at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas
• I met Shoemoney who whispered that hosting pages at ____ website can significantly boost your Google quality score and bring you easy $0.05 clicks
• I met PepperJams’ Kris Jones and he mentioned that the factors in almost all successful affiliate marketing campaigns lie in your ability to ___ and ____. And for the best payouts and highest conversions, the offers at ____ affiliate network are second to none.

See the difference?

In the case of WebProNews (WPN), content and your presentation are key again.

Readers who read this post and head over to check out Nicole’s broadcast today [Judge Rejects Webcasters Appeals] will notice that she’s neutralized her Southern accent a little. (and I didn’t think it was necessarily fair to come down so hard on her when she first appeared. Compare the quality of your own blog posts now, compared to when you first started blogging).

Will you continue visiting the WPN or continue live blogging as Robyn mentions?

There’s no question actually, quality content will always win.

• It’s highly targeted
• It’s immediate
• It’s low cost and often free

The downside is because of it’s interactive nature (which contributes to it’s virality), spam marketers will always try to flood you, and drown out your message with their spam.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Posting irrelevant images (usually a scantily-clad female) in their avatars [see: How Your Social Network Avatar Can Make Or Break Your Internet Marketing Efforts]
• Comment spam: “I like your site, come visit me at (website address)”
• Being generally obnoxious (use rules of social etiquette to figure this one out)

On social community sites like MyBlogLog, Eric and his team have instituted several measure like: limiting personal messages to 20 a day (with an innovative reciprocal message feature in place) , and eliminating animated GIF avatars in favor of single (static) image ones.

But that still doesn’t quite solve the problem of ‘widget spam’ where people with link baiting avatars feature on your sidebar widget that appears on the right of this blog.

Fortunately, MyBlogLog community manager Robyn Tippins informed me that MyBlogLog includes features to block both visitors to your site, and mask your presence on a sidebar widget with the ‘cloak of invisibility’ feature (the name I’ve given to it).

Initially I had asked Robyn about killing the community visitors altogether. (which might seem extreme, until you consider that it creates a better user experience for your visitors)

Robyn responded:

If it’s on the [sidebar] widget you can hover over then and click the red x.

At this point there’s no way to kill visitors to your community page (but you can kill community members, I think).

I’m annoyed too by those avs. We are killing animated gifs this week, but the sexy graphics are a pet peeve of mine too (and I’m hard to offend).

—

Here’s how you’d delete visitors (say if I wanted to remove my buddy Ryan Chua permanently from my sidebar widget:

And similarly if I wanted to ‘mask’ my presence on another blog:

Let me clear the air, I am personally not offended by these images, but if they affect the blog readers user experience, I will step in and moderate the blog.

I’ve gone one step further and made the recommendation that MyBlogLog could include a classification system that is moderated from a central node at MyBlogLog. Avatars could be flagged with a “G” or “R” rating like movies are. Or maybe it’d be easier to setup a NSFW (not suitable for work) rating (I’ve been told nude images have been used for some avatars).

True, it would reduce some traffic in the short term, but when you look at how this increases the longevity of the social networks (some of which have degenerated more into ‘spam networks’), it also makes the network a more legitimate and credible medium in the long term.

Here’s Robyn’s response to my feeling that posting 20 messages a day could be limiting:

Andrew, hopefully this won’t hamper users that are actually engaging in conversation, because everytime you receive a message back, you up your daily limit by one. So if I message you I have 19 messages available, but if you message me back, then my message limit goes back up to 20.

It’s only one method we’re trying, so if you have any suggestions let me know.

—

The concept of reciprocity is an intriguing one and goes one step further than just blanket quotas.

I think as time goes by, the messaging model will get refined further.

And it is forward thinking on my part that 20 messages would be insufficient for a community size of 1,000.

It would seem fair to incorporate gradual increments to the number of available messages to MyBlogLog members in good repute. That way, it’ll prevent MyBlogLog members from going out of the network to use email to communicate.

Here’s why MyBlogLog should increase message quotas: MBL is an excellent workaround for blogs which require user registration for blog comments. As an alternative to commenting on the blogs, I’ve switched to commenting within their MBL community (and addressing a community of readers who are personally vested in the blog content).

PS: As eMom Wendy Piersall mentioned, everyone’s psyched about Robyn’s new position. To check out Robyn’s role at MyBlogLog, check out Eric’s “Everyone who is MyBlogLog’s new Community Manager, raise your hand“

While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the practice, I feel that it sets up expectations that the blogger or website owner will have to deliver on once the visitor lands on your page.

If you can keep your readers happy, you’ve laid the foundation for a successful and low cost (possibly free) traffic generation model.

The sad reality is that more than 90% of the sites using such techniques have average (and usually sub-standard) poor content.

At best, this is gimmicky in my opinion and best used for one-off, throwaway adsense-oriented traffic.

But if you’re a serious Internet Marketer in this for the long haul, you’d do much better to build your brand, which means either using your photograph, or an image which represents your online presence.

Iconic Avatars: Michael “GrayWolf” Gray, Jim Kukral, Rasheed Ali, Robyn Tippins, Todd “StuntDubl” Malicoat, Shawn Collins, Chris “Drinkbait” Hooley, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker.

Credibility and reputation are essential to your long term success, and being consistent in your online branding build rapport with your visitors. Consistent branding will bring you intangible returns in the way of joint ventures which will net you much more than merely driving traffic to an adsense-optimized site.

I don’t know about you, but it would be difficult to take some aspiring marketer who uses a Hooters girl as his icon, seriously, much less consider a joint venture.

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?