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Affiliate Summit started off with a bang. The meet market was packed with exhipitors and attendees.  I spent a decent part of my day wandering the meet market and speaking to blog readers.  Although the show is packed it seems like Affiliate Summit did a much better job this time with getting people registered as there were nearly NO LINES!  Great work Shawn & Missy.

One session that I attended yesterday that really stood out was “Offline Affiliate Marketing.”  I was super psyched to see this session but it was a dissapointment.  When I heard “Offline Affiliate Marketing,” I thought it meant the opportunity to generate leads for local businesses such as dentists, real estate agencts etc.  The session was actually about tracking offline conversions to larger retailers.  The speaker, Jonathan Treiber, was super psyched about the opportunities of affiliates using paid search to drive consumers to coupons that have special barcodes that the retailer can scan when the consumer brings the coupon in.  The barcode contains subid so that you can track your conversions.  The only problem is that Jonathan Treiber seemed to glance over all the issues that a coupon can cause for an affiliate.  If your dropping cash on paid search and your prospect prints a coupon, do you really want to risk that the moron working as customer service in the store is going to take good care of your prospect?  How many times do you walk into a store and then leave because the people working there suck?  Also….what happens when the retailer is having a bad month and decides, ok, we’ll give the consumer the discount but we won’t scan the coupon so that we don’t have to pay the affiliate?  It’s like the brick & mortar version of shaving.  Although the speaker seemed intelligent, I think there was a conflict of interest in him speaking on this subject since his company provides this barcode technology.  I think for the next Summit in Vegas, ShoeMoney should be booked for this topic.

After the meet market ended, I went to the Ianteract Dinner sponsored by Elite Profits with Bryn and the Tracking 202 guys.  The dinner was at Molyvos which was a nice medditeranian restaurant.  The food was great but the service was super slow.  Took the waitstaff like an hour to get Bryn a drink.  The dinner was lots of fun though.  There was a total of 19 people there.  At the end, Elite Profits did the PIMPEST thing.  They gave each of us a Vintage 2000 bottle of Dom Perignon.

After Ian’s dinner we went to the ShareaSale Party Under The Stars.  This was good times.  There were lots of Wickedfire people there and just tons of industry people.  Shareasale provided an awesome venue, music and free drinks for all.

Next we headed over to a private party with Pinnacle Dream at the London.  They got a penthouse suite which was totally nice.  We hung out there for a while until the London security kicked everyone out because some ld hag complained that we were too loud.  What do you expect people are gonna do in a penthouse suite? It’s one of 2 things: Wild Orgy (which you know isn’t happening at any affiliate summit sausage party) or rowdy get together.

After this we went to a bar down the street and one of Emily Thompsons friends argued with me that my name was gay and that she’s gonna rename herself “I’m Better Then You” and make people call her that.  She does not understand that Ad Hustler charm

Affiliate Summit Day 1 was awesome.  Affiliate Summit is bigger and better then any other year and I look forward to see what day 2 and 3 have in store for me.

Please Note: I do receive a Press Pass to Affiliate Summit which get’s me in for free however, all statements and thoughts are my own opinions.

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It’s 8:00am and I’m at the Hilton posting this.

I’ve come down to Affiliate Summit one day early.  I checked into the Hilton yesterday.  This is the hotel where the conference is being held.  The hotel is pretty nice.  They gave me a free room upgrade but the room is pretty damn small.  After check in I went to early registration and was greeted by Shawn Collins & Amy Rodriguez who are 2 really hospitable people.

Last night I went out to dinner with a few hard hitting affiliates and had a good time.  We went to this Ichiban Sake bar and had some awesome food.  Ian Fernando ate a Wasabi dumpling and freaked out a bit (videos yo come later).

After that we headed over to the Buy.at party at the Empire Hotel.  It was a rooftop party and it was really cool to get a great view of NYC.  I finally met some of you blog readers at the party and am glad to now know you personally.

Next we headed back to the Hilton and met up with Naomi from Bloosky.  We chilled at the bar and she told us about her network and the offers that she’s agency of record on.  The Hlton bar was apparently the place to be because we ran into a bunch of people there like MLDina, the Market Leverage crew, John Chow as well as a bunch of other people.

After thei swe headed to the Wickedfire party sponsored by Sybarite.  I got to meet a lot of my wickedfire friends who I only know by screen names and avatars. It’s nice to meet people and put a face to a name.  The party was fun but some weird stuff went down at the end that I am not going to get into here.

That was pretty much the pre-summit festivities. Today the actual show starts.  I’l be trying to update on a daily basis so that I don’t have to write a 10 million word post after Summit is over.  I’m here on an Affiliate Sumit press pass and damnit, I wanna do a good job covering this event.

What were your pre-summit festivities?  Anything funky happen?

Please Note: I do receive a Press Pass to Affiliate Summit which get’s me in for free however, all statements and thoughts are my own opinions.

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Do you have an offer where the conversion rates are all over the place?  If so, hopefully you have tried the tips located in Case Study: Troubleshooting Erratic Conversion Rates.  I have already received some positive feedback of people who increased conversion rates after reading that thread.  Sometimes the problem is even simpler then you would think.

In our day to day work, while trying to troubleshoot a problem, we forget to click the affiliate link ourselves.  When you are seeing stats that you can’t explain I highly recommend checking your affiliate link.  If the offers landing page takes a long time to load that could KILL your conversion rate.  People do not like to wait for something to load especially if they are not dead set on going to the page.

Unfortunately there isn’t anything you can do about an offers landing page loading slowly.  You can alert the affiliate network but they probably already know about it.  Your only option is to switch to another offer until the page loads faster.

Keeping these types of things in mind make it a whole lot easier to troubleshoot a conversion problem when you get into a jam.  I hope this helps.

Does anyone else have good tips on troubleshooting erratic conversion rates?  Please share…

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Affiliate Summit East 2009 is quickly approaching.  Many affiliates will be arriving on Saturday.  We all know tons of online folks but it’s now time to put a face with a name.  In theory it should be easy to find all the people you want to meetup with at Affiliate Summit but it tends to turn into a bit of a clusterf*&ck if you don’t organize things.  Here are some Hustler tips for staying in touch with your contacts at affiliate summit.

1. If you are really tight with people ask for their cell phones.  This way you can text each other and find out where people are at.
2. Use twitter.  AoJon says it’s gay and it is but it comes in handy for events like this.  Even if you don’t have a twitter handle, get one and post it here.  To meetup and interact with wickedfire members use the hashtag #wfase and to find other affiliate summit attendees use hashtag #ase09 – Click either of those tags to see what’s being said on twitter.  My twitter handle is @adhustler
3. Visit Wickedfire as i’m sure their will be threads about what’s going on.
4. Nickycakes #cakes chatroom (irc.freenode.net #cakes) is a useful place to get information too.

I look forward to meeting you all so come up to me and say wuzzup.

Please Note: I do receive a Press Pass to Affiliate Summit which get’s me in for free however, all statements and thoughts are my own opinions.

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