Another Affiliate Summit is over and as usual it was an excellent show. I was only in Vegas for 3 days and 2 nights so it was all a bit of a blur. There were so many great events, dinners, and parties. But the best part of course was seeing new and old friends.

I decided to try to attend some sessions this year and was able to hit 3 of them.

The first one was the Facebook session. Facebook is really starting to embrace affiliates which is a good thing for everyone in our industry. They know they have made a lot of mistakes and experienced big time growing pains in the last year, but they are committed to bringing on high volume advertisers. Basically, if you keep it clean and don’t run shady offers, they want to work with you. If you aren’t working with an account rep, I suggest calling and getting one. That really facilitates getting your campaigns going.

The next one I went to was Tim Ash’s landing page session. Tim is a great speaker and really motivating. I have always been a huge landing page tester, but he inspired me to take it to the next level. The bottom line of the session: you never know what will increase conversions so test everything and keep testing forever. Even if you think you know what will work, never assume, just test. I even bought Tim’s book after the session. I think landing page optimization might be the most important thing for any campaign.

The last session I sat in on was the super affiliate PPC marketing strategies. This was mostly a Q & A with some interesting questions, but more geared for beginners.

The expo area had a lot of booths with rows of new networks, many I have never heard of before. I stopped by the ones I knew to say hi, but didn’t spend much time in there. I’m proud to say this was the first time I resisted the urge to pick up any schwag. No new junk to clutter up the office!

There are always tons of parties at night to choose from. These are excellent opportunities for networking at the conference, in a more relaxed and casual setting. The best party this year (just like last year) was the CX Digital party at the Palms. These guys really know how to put on a nice event. Nate and Fraser are the best, thanks guys. I had some really good discussions with affiliates doing amazing things. I love talking to under the radar guys who don’t have blogs or big online presences. They just do their thing and are quietly killing it the background. Those are the guys who are really driving the innovation in our industry. I hope to stay in contact with everyone I met.

Some new business relationships were started and old ones solidified. I met with one company over dinner at the Mandalay Bay and I know we are going to do a lot going forward. I never would have hooked up with them had we not met at the show, and now I have a completely new revenue stream to explore. These are the kinds of things that happen at a conference that can really increase the scope of your business.

If you have never been to an internet marketing conference, I highly suggest going to Affiliate Summit West next year. It is definitely worth your time and money. See you there next year!

We are making a big push around here in 2009 to automate as many things as possible and make life easier. To that end, we have been testing a lot of new tools lately. Not sales letter page things, but actual tools that I think show some promise. Although most end up not working as advertised, some are actually turning out to be worth using.

With all the emphasis we are putting on building our landing sites for SEO as well as PPC, we needed a fast way to build up links. This technique helps with quality score, bid prices, and eventually free traffic to affiliate sites. One tool we tested that does work as promised is Social Submitter. The software automates the submitting of links to social bookmarking sites. It can submit to 160 social bookmarking sites and is a very advanced program. You can create filters for your submissions, use proxies, and see the status of your bookmark submissions all within the program.

I almost hesitate to blog about this one, because I think its a great advantage to have. This could be used to promote straight affiliate sites, or just bookmark your blog entries to get more exposure for your site.  But with a price tag of $150, most people will pass this one up. As far as I’m concerned though, any tool that helps make money is always worth the price. They have a demo you can use to try the program to a limited number of sites for 3 days, if you want to test drive it. Is anyone else using this software to boost affiliate sites yet?

I have scaled back my conference attendance this year. I didn’t make it to Affiliate Summit East, and just decided not to go to Pubcon after going the last 2 years. But I am definitely going to be at Affiliate Summit West in January. I’m all booked and registered. In my opinion that is the one conference that is a “must go” every year.

First of all, everyone loves Vegas. There is no doubt it is the best place to have a conference. Secondly, Affiliate Summit is the most well attended and relevant show for our industry.

If you haven’t registered yet, Affiliate Summit has created a coupon code just for CDF Networks readers.

Use the code: CDFNETWORKS10 to get 10% off registration of any pass. (platinum, gold, or silver)

Will you be there?

This post is a little off topic for CDF networks, but it should be useful when you are traveling for conferences or just vacation. I have been using this technique now for about 8 years and have saved a TON of money on hotels. Here is how to game Priceline, using their own system.

Background:

I’ll assume you are familiar with the bidding model that PL uses on their site and get right to it. PL wants you to bid as high as possible. To make you do this, they have set bidding limits so that when your bid is rejected you can’t bid on the same zone and star level for 24 hours. In this way they prevent someone from starting at $1, then incrementing until they hit a winning bid. They want the winning bid price to be a secret and force you to make your best offer first. But what if there was a way to get around that 1 bid rule do some incrementing of bids to find the best price?

The trick:

There is a way to get around the bid rule, its called free re-bidding. Free re-bidding means you make a change to your bid offer by adding another zone than you know does not contain any hotels of the star level you are requesting. Making that change allows you to increase your bid price immediately on the zone your really are intending to stay in. Confused? Check out the example.

Example:

Say you want to stay at a 4 star in San Diego, downtown zone. You bid $60 on your first try, and its rejected. Rather than playing Priceline’s game and waiting 24 hours to try a bid of $65, use a free-rebid. But how do you find the free re-bids? Simple. Just check another zone in the same area you are searching, then look at the star levels that are offered below. If there are none of the hotels available in that area, that star level is greyed out. You have just found yourself a free re-bid zone. Now just raise your bid a bit using the original zone you really wanted, and the new free rebid zone. The free rebid zone allows the new bid to go through, but the system only looks at your original zone because thats where the hotels with the 4 star level are located.

Click to expand

In this example for San Diego there are 10 free re-bids you could use for a 4 star hotel in this area. That should allow you to increment your bids slowly enough to hit almost the exact lowest price for a hotel. Enjoy!

I’m finally back after the whirlwind events of the past few days. All in all it was an excellent show, definitely the best one I have attended to date. If you are on the fence about whether going to a conference is worth the money, (like I used to be) I highly recommend going. Not so much for the sessions but for the face to face networking. I met so many cool and interesting people, and people I will for sure be working with in the future. I found a lot of new niche affiliate offers that I never would have dreamed of trying, but now have agreed to test. It’s great to talk to people doing the same things as you, but also doing totally different than you. Like last night for example, at the Tao party I met a couple of spammers, sorry high volume email deployers as they like to be called. Even though I have not done any email promotion and really don’t have any plans to try it, these guys were killing some of these offers. It was fascinating to hear some of their stories. I was trying to sell them on the virtues of PPC, while they were trying to sell me on “the dark side”. It’s the mix of everyone that made this aff summit unique.

I didn’t get many pictures, when I meet people I am always so into the conversation I forget. But here are a few I managed to snap.

The famous pool on the 32nd floor of the Palms (the one I almost fell into)

About 2,000 affiliate geeks standing on top of each other to get a glimpse of the Blue Man Group

The Blue Man group private performance (very short)

Andrew Wee, Me, and Mark Wielgus

Amit, Chow, Zac Johnson, and Kris from Pepperjam after the super affiliate session.

Me and Jennylee (bonus points for the first person who knows what TV show she was on)

Now back to the real work of catching up. I’ll have some good on topic posts I think you guys will like.

As you have no doubt heard on many blogs Affilate Summit West in Las Vegas starts this weekend. I was going to say head over to the site and register for this conference, but apparently it is sold out. I have been to a few other conferences, but this is my first affiliate summit. It should be interesting and I plan on hitting many of the sessions as well as parties. To be honest I have overextended myself a bit this year, accepting invites to many of the events on the same night. Sunday is a big night with the Shareasale, Wickedfire/Copeac, Maxbounty, and CX Digital parties. I will try to go to as many as I can. Monday is the big Webmaster radio event at the Venetian, as well as some private meetings I have with some of my networks. I plan on making some posts from the event in the blogger room with Mark from 45n5. Any swag I get I will be giving away on the blog when I get back, so I’ll try to get some good shirts and hats.

Hope to see all of you there!

Well it’s great to be back at the CDF Networks world headquarters after 3 days in Vegas. I ended up cutting the trip short by one night, and getting back late last night. A little Vegas goes a long loooooong way. I have been there many times over that last few years and the pattern is always the same: I’m really happy to get there, but then even happier to leave. I made some great new contacts and have some new techniques that I am anxious to try out. Rather than a coherent post, here are some final random thoughts from the show.

• When you are a little hung over, getting French toast and a huge glass of orange juice from room service is great. Dumping the entire full glass of orange juice directly on the keyboard of your laptop is not so good. Talk about sticky keys.
• I found a couple new PPC networks to try out. These guys always claim their traffic is the cleanest, targeted traffic on the planet. The next PPC challenge we do should include 15 PPC networks.
• I went to a couple of the domaining sessions. I’m not into this currently, but I have always wanted to try it. It was interesting to hear some of the techniques people use and more importantly, how to use domains to drive traffic to affiliate offers. They claim that type in and direct traffic converts even better than search. I can definitely see the attraction of paying one fee for a domain and getting unlimited traffic, rather than paying for every click like PPC.
• The Google reception was fun. An open bar for 2 hours and a room full of Internet Marketers is a dangerous combo. The only thing we go after harder than free T-shirts if free booze. One small comment though to Google. What’s up with the chips and salsa? You have 100 billion in the bank, how about putting out a deli tray at least?
• I am really exited to test sending traffic to a new merchant that I met in Vegas. This is traffic I was previously sending to a CPA network type offer. I hope to eventually be sending most of my PPC traffic to companies like this. The flexibility and of course payouts can’t be beat when you go direct. Thanks for the awesome dinner guys, you know who you are!
• $12.99 for 24 hours of WiFi, sucks.
• There was a lot of focus and buzz on video. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how video can be used in the affiliate marketing world effectively. I have a few ideas of things to test, including video landing pages for certain offers. If done right, it could be great but there are some technical challenges as well.
• If I’m going to be a proper blogger I really need to take pictures at these things. I had every opportunity to take pictures with all the important guys but I didn’t do it. I’m not the biggest “networker” in the world, but luckily my business model doesn’t depend on who I know in the industry.

All in all it was a worthwhile trip. I met a few new clients, and learned a few new tips, which should pay for the conference easily. Now back to the real work.

Here are a few of the pics I did remember to take.

You could land a 747 in there.

The expo area, Yahoo had the biggest booth.

Not sure what a Ferarri has to do with domains, but there is was.

Well, the first day of Pubcon is over and I survived. There is a LOT of people here this year, way more than last year it seems. I went to some of the sessions and the cocktail party so my head is still spinning a little. Here are some of the more memorable items for the day. I will be devoting some full blog posts to some of these later.

-This year the main hall/expo area/lunch area is in this enormous conference hall. There will definitely be no crowding issues this year, you could literally fit 10 football fields in there.

-Listened to the keynote speech from Craig of Craigslist. Nice guy, not the most dynamic speaker.

At the PPC sessions with reps from all the search engines a few interesting points:

-Google finally admits to the keyword insertion feature. Something we have all used forever, but they have never documented until now.

-Adcenter now has a certification program, just like Google and Yahoo. They have a training course and cert test to take, if that’s important to you. Search for Adexcellence for details.

-When pressed, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, all claim to have offline editors in the pipeline. I really hope so, but I am not holding my breath. For now we’ll still have to build campaigns with Google and convert.

-Lots of talk about dayparting. I don’t use it, but I can see the value of it for some niches.

-MSN is coming out with a cool Adcenter add-in for Excel that will do keyword research, reporting, and optimization. Looks like an awesome tool.

-I talked to the head Yahoo guy for a bit and asked when they are going to start allowing Geo-targeting of any other countries besides the US and Canada. He basically told me, it’s not going to happen any time soon. So if you wanted to target a campaign to the UK, you would have to open a Yahoo UK account. I told him they are kind if missing the boat with this lack of flexibility.

-MSN is really working on their quality score algo that they will be rolling out soon. It will focus on a lot of the same factors as Google, but be much more transparent, they say.

-MSN doesn’t like arbitrageurs. In fact, “arbitrageurs we just don’t want them” was the direct quote. Our job is going to get harder.

-Learned some good new tips to game Google’s quality score. More on that in a future post.

-Finally getting 1 free drink ticket is good. Getting 2 more extra tickets from the Webmaster World dude because the bar is about to close before the night session is great. Thanks!

Got any questions you would really like to ask one of PPC product managers? Let me know in the comments and I’ll try to ask it in the next couple days. I’ll also try to take some pics on day 2 - if I don’t forgot the camera in the hotel room again!