Affiliate Summit Blog

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It’s incredibly tempting to think of a web monetization conference as just another conference aimed at a small audience.  However, this year’s Affiliate Summit West is proving that the conference is moving well beyond being relegated to just another niche conference.

The Meet Market on Sunday was absolutely tremendous and set the stage for the rest of the conference.  Having been to most of the Affiliate Summit’s over the years, I was absolutely shocked to see the amount of people in Las Vegas and ready to do business at the Meet Market.  It was an amazing event and the excitement from it easily moved over into dinners and events in the evening such as the much anticipated ShareASale party at the Palms.

In the past, my experience has been that Mondays have been a day of business deal making with lunches, meetings and exhibit hall meanderings filling up most of the day for Affiliate Summit attendees.  However, this year the event was in overdrive and between the incredible Day One sessions (having Jason Calacanis live Twitter the Wil Reynolds’ session “How To Futureproof Your SEO Efforts” was incredible given his new start-up Mahalo) and networking events.

Monday started off well enough with Jim Kukral’s masterful MC’ing and intro of the keynote presentation from Jason Calacanis.  There was a great deal of buzz before this event about exactly what Calacanis would say about affiliate marketing and he did not fail to bring the noise and ruffle some feathers in his keynote.  Rather than rehashing others, I’ll just point you to my live blogging of the keynote as well as the reflections from b5’s Tris Hussey. 

The day continued to generate a feeling of excitement with great presentations on video, PPC, search, affiliate networks as well as a well attended and incredible exhibit hall floor.  The Moniker Domain Auction was tremendous, and it was amazing to see sites go for upwards of $200,000 along with a number of high quality sites that fetched anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 consistently.  

The early evening brought the Pinnacle Awards Gala. Connie Berg was awarded the Affiliate of the Year, Haiko de Poel, Jr took the Affiliate Marketing Advocate Award, Buy.com was awarded the Merchant of the Year Award, Brian Littleton was named as the Wayne Porter Legend Award Winner and I was beyond honored to be named as the Best Blogger (even though there are dozens more of you that were more deserving.  I digress.).  

Monday night brought the normal flow of parties and dinners including the Affiliate Bash which was well attended.  Performics also held an event that was well represented.

This was easily the best Affiliate Summit I’ve attended in terms of buzz, excitement, quality and content.  I look forward to seeing how tomorrow goes and if this level of electricity will continue to envelope the event.  Missy Ward and Shawn Collins have definitely put together a must attend show and it’s amazing to me that the Affiliate Summit is beginning to find footholds in both the traditional affiliate world as well as the social networking and blogger world.  Clearly, affiliate marketing is alive and well.  

The Affiliate Summit is the best example of that and definitely the place to be if you’re in affiliate marketing.

More tomorrow.

Sam Harrelson  

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