Last Friday I had the opportunity to attend TEDxLansing and I am very glad that I went. First of all, it was held at Michigan State University and I’ll use just about any excuse to revisit my second home. Plus the event just sounded very intriguing. 17 speakers given 18 minutes to give the best speech of their life, plus videos from other TED events.

I couldn’t possibly stuff everything I learned from the event into this post, but I do want to share some of the highlights. John Hill, the Director of Alumni Career Services at MSU started off. His speech was given entirely on placards, which definitely set the tone for this conference. His job is helping people connect and he wanted to show how useful Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are for that. He is also a huge fan of the sweater vest.

Next up was Justin “Bugsy” Sailor. I thought his speech was interesting because he set out to travel across the country, staying at the homes of strangers along the way. The whole trip changed when he realized he was staying with strangers, but with friends he had not met yet. Definitely a life changing experience and one in which he had to step outside of a comfort zone.

I loved Allie Merrick’s speech. She is a speaker, poet, and singer and her presentation was a combination of all three. It was brave and powerful and was about the art of speaking. She said that silence is a rare commodity and you must raise the value of your voice in order to be heard.

Bob Fish is a bit of a hometown success story in East Lansing. He graduated from MSU and went on to found Biggby Coffee (formally Beaner’s). I love how he connects with his business by traveling around and buying people coffee. He stayed away from a powerpoint presentation and instead sat in a chair, held some index cards and spoke about various aspects of business. His was one of the best speeches that day. I got a number of gems from him:

• Choose to be profitable. A small business must be profitable, so decide profit is an expense line and pay upfront.
• Not free. Social media is not free, it is a good marketing tool though. Don’t forget to mention the name of your business. It takes time, effort, and thought.
• Risk. Entrepreneurs are often called risky, that they are gambling. Not true, they often have an idea or info that is just a little bit different.
• ROI x 10. Return on Involvement: give time, money, products and it will always come back to you tenfold.
• Be happy, make friends, find love and you will always be successful.

The author of Socialnomics, Erik Qualman also spoke. The number 1 need for humans is to belong and that is what makes social media so popular. He believes that social media is going the way of social commerce, in that you are more likely to buy something if your network of friends recommend it.

You always know that a speech has to be good when someone comes onstage carrying a firehouse to try and fill a tea cup. Karl Gude teaches information visualization for the School of Journalism at MSU. I wish that I had a paper napkin to draw a diagram of what happened, but instead I share with you this video. Equate that to the information overload that we get from the internet. We get so much bad news all the time and the brain is not wired for constant pain. He said it is okay to move on. It is important though to share information with your audience from a teapot instead of a firehouse, so target your audience instead of aiming for everyone. I also loved his message of evolving with technology, don’t be an “I don’t.”  He also stressed the importance of using illustrations, graphics, and photos to help people scan, notice, and understand your information.

Betsy Miner Swartz had an important message as well. Her speech made tears well up in my eyes, but it was important. It is no longer good enough to just sign the back of your Michigan driver’s license in order to be on the organ donation registry. You must sign up online now. Michigan is much below the average and she is trying to help change that. Sign up today and get your heart sticker for your driver’s license. Give the gift of life.

There was so much more and I apologize for leaving anyone out. If there is a TEDx conference in your area I highly recommend going. It was funny, informative, and motivational. TEDxDetroit is set to take place on September 29, 2010 on Wayne State University at the Detroit Institute of Arts and I hope to be able to attend.

Tomorrow I am taking a little bit of a road trip and going to TEDxLansing. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design. The original TED event started in 1984 to bring people together and is devoted to ideas worth spreading.

TEDx events are independently organized events that use the format of the original yearly conference. The 17 speakers have 18 minutes to give the best speech of their lives. Held at the Wharton Center on the beautiful Michigan State University campus (okay so I am biased), there will be everyone from a elementary particle physicist to the author of Socialnomics speaking.

I’m really looking forward to going and hope to share my experience with you both on Twitter and here with a future post.

If you are thinking of attending Affiliate Summit East in New York City August 15-17, then you should consider registering by this Friday April 30. Early Bird registration is ending and prices for all of the different passes is going up.

I highly recommend getting the Platinum Pass which gives you access to the Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, Keynote, education sessions, the Newcomer Program (formerly the Mentor program), as well as breakfast and lunch on Monday and Tuesday. Plus you will get recordings of all the sessions to view at a later date online.

This conference is perfect for people both new to affiliate marketing and those who have been in the industry for years. It is a great way to network, meet with merchants, and just hang out with people who understand what you do. Check out this video below to learn a bit more.

Now go and register for Affiliate Summit East by Friday. You will not be disappointed. I will be there and can’t wait to meet you!

If you are interested in getting out of the house, meeting others in internet marketing, learn something new and get the chance to network, then traveling to a conference may be a good idea. Here is a list of the Internet Marketing Conferences happening in 2010.

• PubCon South – This conference is held in Dallas, Texas and takes place from April 13-15 this year.  They offer sessions on Social Media, SEO/SEM, Search and Affiliate Programs.
• SOBCon 2010 – Billed as a business school for bloggers, this is an intense hands-on conference that has 6 sessions and meeting with mastermind groups to put learning into action.  It is being held April 30-May 2 in Chicago.
• SES Toronto – Learn more about SEM (search engine marketing), SEO, and advertising at this 3 day conference in Toronto June 9-11.
• BlogHer ‘10 – Held in New York City on August 6 & 7, this conferences focuses on bloggers with hands on learning, networking, and swag. This conference is already sold out and has a wait list.
• Affiliate Summit East – This huge gathering of affiliate marketers, merchants, and networks is in New York City August 15-17. I am planning on attending this one after my great Affiliate Summit West experience earlier this year.
• SES San Francisco – This four day conference held August 16-20 is similar to the one being held in Toronto, just on the west coast this time.
• Commission Junction University (CJU) – Hosted by Commission Junction, this three day event is centered around networking and education sessions. It is September 21-23 in Santa Barbara, CA.
• Affiliate Summit Unconference – This is billed as a participant driven one day conference on internet marketing. It is September 27 in Orlando, Florida at SeaWorld.
• Blog World Expo – This is supposed to be the biggest meeting of bloggers and is being held October 14-16 at Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.
• PubCon Vegas – November 8-11 held at the Las Vegas Convention Center, it is a bigger version of Pubcon South hosted by Webmaster World. One of my first big conferences, I attended one many years ago.

I will add to the list as I learn of others. Post in the comments below if there are any that I am missing or if you are attending any of these. Would love to hear about your experience.

I recently had a reader send me an email based on my experience at Affiliate Summit West. He wanted to know more about making connections with affiliate marketers and merchant before attending a conference.  I had mentioned that if you are not going to know anyone beforehand, to start preparing now.  Here was his questions:

Hi, I was reading your Affiliate Summit recap post, and you talked about making connections with people now for a future Affiliate Summit.  Where do you make connections with other affiliate marketers?  Also, how do you connect with merchants?  I occasionally talk with my merchant contacts, but I don’t think they’d invite me to any parties.  :) In short, I’m not very outgoing but I want to get everything I can out of an Affiliate Summit.  Do you have any more tips?

This was my answer to him:

Thank you for contacting me.  It can be a bit tricky but there are a number of ways to connect beforehand.

The best place is by becoming a member at http://www.abestweb.com.  It is a whole forum devoted to Affiliate Marketing.  You can meet some really great people there along with merchants.  Plus you can become a member at http://network.affiliatesummit.com/, it is great for networking.

The merchant list for the next Affiliate Summit is not out yet, but watch for it.  Look and see if any of the companies that you work with are going to be there.  If so, send an email to the affiliate manager for the company and ask to set up a meeting.  Many will be willing to take you to breakfast or dinner or meet for 15 minutes.  Another option is to make contact with the networks (i.e. CJ, Shareasale, etc) and ask for a meeting.  It is always nice to have a face that goes with a name for reaching out in the future. Shareasale always throws an awesome party and it is pretty much open to everyone.  Watch for the charity events too. All are open to people willing to make a donation and it is a great way to connect with people.

My last tip is to do a search for #asw10 on Twitter.  Find people that were tweeting about the conference and then give them a follow.  Start talking to them on Twitter and make a connection there.

You may have to step out of your comfort zone a bit, but it is really worth it.  Everyone that I met at Affiliate Summit was willing to stop for at least a few moments to talk.  Affiliate marketers tend to be very friendly people, so you should have no problems at all. Once you register for a conference pass you can sign up for their mentor program too.  I highly recommend it.

Wednesday I returned home from Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit West.  I had to immediately step back into my mommy role, because my daughter was sick but I did manage to post my notes from most of the sessions that I attended.  I had an absolutely wonderful and overwhelming time.

I’m not quite sure that I was prepared for the scope of this event.  I had plans going in to spend time with old friends, meet some new people, learn, meetings with merchants that I work with, and make new connections too.  I was able to do all that but not quite to the scale that I was hoping for.  I knew that being my first time, I could not go in with too many perceptions & ideas though, and to just go with the flow.

Things I found invaluable for the conference was my mini laptop, a notebook, business cards (kept them handy in my name badge), my poken (I kept that looped around my name badge), lipbalm, my iPhone (to keep up with the #asw10 hashtag on Twitter), and people that I have met previously.  If you are planning on attending a future Affiliate Summit and won’t know anyone there, start making connections with people now. It will help a ton.

For my next Summit I need to come up with a better plan for the Meet Market & Exhibit Halls. They were both packed full of tables and booths and I wasn’t quite sure how to approach either. I think researching the companies that are going to be there and reaching out to them ahead of time will help me out immensely.

Here are the recaps of the sessions that I went to:

Effective Social Media Techniques

Monetizing Blogs for Affiliate Marketing & SEO

Start Monetizing Your Blog

Keynote Speech with Dr. Robert Cialdini

Product Datafeeds: The Next Level

Live From Affiliate Summit West 2010

Scaling Article Marketing for Affiliates

Some of my favorite sessions and events from the conference were both sessions on monetizing your blog, the article marketing session, the Shareasale Under the Stars Party, and the Strike Out Breast Cancer bowling event.  I will definitely be going to another Affiliate Summit.  The next one is Affiliate Summit East held in New York City August 15-17, 2010.

Last Day of Affiliate Summit West 2010 and this is my first session of the day. I was a few minutes late, so jumping right in.

Scaling Article Marketing for Affiliates

Chris Knight, CEO of EzineArticles.com

The right mix of content:

1) original content you don’t syndicate (min 25% or more) – things you put on your own website
2) original content that you do syndicate (15-50%)
3) user generated content/articles (more the better)
4) reprint rights articles (never more than 30-45%)

He recommends finding a VA that will work with you on writing articles vs. using a content generating software

Who are you competing with?
Anyone who’s involved win content arbitrage
Big guys put out millions of articles
Millions of other using content to attract traffic
Social media UGC

Write more articles get more traffic is the mantra for this session

6 tips for maximum article traffic yield
1) article title determines traffic level
2) don’t sell hard in the body (lead gen)
3) be original (plr = puke)
4) volume required to make impact
5) 400-800 word count – a 1000 word article can be split into two unique articles
6) resource box seals the deal -

Deliver 170,000-200000 clicks a day to their members

Write for syndication in mind
2 links will get you more clicks than 3 links – 1 link may get you syndication
He recommends giving one full out url for when they are reprinted in text

Resource box secrets
Pictures in an add increase click through
Include author photo in resource box
If using pen names then purchase exclusive rights to a photo & keep it consistent
Essential elements:
Author name – ezine feels that you may not have written article
Website url
Usp
Call to action
Optional elements
Ezine subscription
Free report increase click through rate
Anchored text link
Your contact info

Big resource box mistake
Bad example
Visit chris at http://your-company-name.com/.
Good example
Visit chris at http://your-company-name.com/
No period at end

Resource box secrets to boost your content marketing strategy roi
Must include the word free
Click here in your anchored text outpulls everything else
Stay focused, don’t tell your life story

7 dangerous pitfalls to avoid – affiliate marketer version
1) going for quality *alone*
2) too much hype or bragging
3) making your content broad/superficial – get very specific
4) failure to deliver on article title promise
5) buying PLR articles or blatantly trusting your ghostwriters
6) submission in-frequency
7) failure to create systems to scale – have system in place to write more articles a day

He then took some suggestions from the audience about how to write more:

Dictation software can help increase your speed in article writing

Cascading content – re-purpose & repackage your content – write, make pod cast, twitter posts

Group of articles with same topic, but with different focus

Finding writers – hire locally a team to write for you
Use elance and find sahm’s with degrees to write – ask for a specific niche and list what you want them to have experience with

Posting an affiliate link in your ezine articles – you must have a domain name that you point to first

How can I increase my content footprint?
Think multi-year – how will you reclaim lost traffic? – content will be out there forever so use it

Tips for affiliate managers
1) designate 10-100 articles made available to your affiliates – that can be put on website, used in autoresponder
2) provide 3-30 articles a month that they can reprint
3) spell out reprint rights so that your articles don’t show up on bad websites
4) don’t release all of your content to affiliates – 50%

Summary
Highly pre-qualified free traffic is the reason
Traffic= directly proportional to article inventory
Develop an article writing team
You handle article title writing
Scale from dozens, hundreds to tens of thousands of articles
Automate & systematize

I am currently attending Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas.  Today is the last day of the conference and I just wanted to share some of my thoughts and impressions.  First off, it is big.  During yesterday’s keynote speech it was announced that there are 4,125 people in attendance.  I fortunately know some people from past events, otherwise it may have felt overwhelming stepping in with no connection.  If you are planning on attending Affiliate Summit in the future make sure that you sign up with their mentor program.  They assign you someone who can give you tips, introduce you to others, and generally help you make the most of your Summit experience.

Second there is a lot to be learned, both inside and outside of the sessions.  I have made a point to try and attend one of the sessions that are going on.  They are recorded and will be available for viewing later by attendees, but there is definitely a bonus to attending something live and having the chance to ask questions and meet with the panelists later.

Outside of the sessions there are opportunities to network and learn other things.  There have also been exhibit halls set up on all the days with tables and booths set up by various merchants and networks.  The first day it was on a smaller scale and it is called the Meet Market.  I thought it was a bit crowded and that made it difficult to get around to the various tables.  I was able to make connections with several of the merchants that I deal with, including one that I had never met face to face before.

My goal is to share some of the notes I have been taking in the various sessions.  There have been some very interesting ones and good tidbits for sure.

I’m still absorbing the message from the keynote.  I thought Dr. Cialdini was slow to get started but his research and points were top notch. Hoping to learn more about datafeeds and how to use them in this session.

Scott Jangro – President MechMedia – moderator
Brian Smith, Singlefeed
Larry Adams, Google
Shergul Arshad, StyleFeeder

Scott has been in affiliate marketing for 10 years – at the beginning it was very few people that had access to the product data – he wanted to give data to everyone that asked for it – good things & ideas started to appear – it was a good thing to give the data out
He is now an affiliate publisher that uses datafeeds in business everyday – build niche commerce websites

Shergul – data feeds can be dry he has heard, so he will start with a story – stressful flight experience – went to the Bank & sees Larry – Stylefeeder brings in 1000s of products & they separate them out based on each individual users style

Brian – got started as affilate for ancestry.com and netflix – now runs Single feed – they help merchants be successful on commerce sites

Scott’s goal is to raise awareness of product data feeds – best practices

What improvements have been made to data feeds?
Larry – roughly half of merchants provide feeds – has not seen a lot of improvement or innovation on merchant side, but has seen more creativity on publisher site – deriving interesting information that provides value – mining the feed for interesting data
They are trying to find ways to make the data more accessible – the network is trying to be the facilitator

Shergul – 30% of data feeds are excellent, 40% need some improvement, 30% are just really bad – retailers must be shown what they are missing with bad data – more tools available for innovation with open source

Brian agrees that not much has changed in last 6 years, but in the last 18 months they have become more complex with more product attributes – which is good for doing more creative things – but that means more work for the merchant – taking a long time for merchants to see value of data feeds, but they are finally paying attention

Scott has seen more access to product API

API vs. data feed

Shergul thinks that it depends on what you are doing as an affiliate site – API is good for smaller site – with a large site it is not a scalable solution – he doesn.t think it is either or

Brian thinks eBay & amazon has good APIs but not everyone understands them or has access – people are still paying with them and learning

Larry – different applications for the two techniques – APIs are becoming useful for creating a real time contextual ad unit – the data tends to be fresher than a datafeed

Scott data feeds have never been more accessibility – he believes they are all now free from all the networks

Larry recommends finding good datafeeds, be selective

Scott has a successful costume and shoe site – so it is possible to work within one vertical according to Shergul
Brian start with a good niche & API if you are just starting out, do it right – amazon, eBay, shopzilla, shopping.com – figure out how you can access it, how you can use it – go from there

Larry shop from your competitors sites and find out what you like/what you don’t, what features you like

Shergul – biggest obstacles of data feeds are categories, descriptions – some merchants feel that they have to put everything in the sales price column – err on the side of more information

Brian they pull data in, then SEO it, optimize it, correct it and then send it out

Standardization – can it happen?

Larry – first thing that comes to mind is categories – standardization of your own feed as a merchant – make sure everything has a price, descriptions are consistent amongst products

Shergul – companies such as Golden can & popshops are doing well – soft goods tend to not have upc codes attached so that can make things difficult

I had to leave the session a bit early, so not sure if they discussed best ways to use a datafeed, which is really what I was interested in.  Definitely something to research further on my own.  With that it is time to go to lunch.

Dr. Robert Cialdini is an expert in influence and persuasion.  He is also this year’s keynote speaker at Affiliate Summit West.  He is the author of Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive and the President of Influence at Work. You can find him on twitter @RobertCialdini

His keynote speech is about the Six Universal Principles of Social Influence.  Well he only really discusses three of them because that is all he has time for.  The six principles are:

1) Reciprocation
2) Scarcity
3) Authority
4) Consistency
5) Consensus
6) Friendship/Liking – give information about yourself that allows them to see parallels & commonalities – hobbies – school – where you grew up

Scarcity

-if I can’t have it, I want it

-loss language converts better i.e. you will lose $1 a day does better than you will save $1 a day

Information, unlike wine, does not get better with time.

Authority either comes from authorities or from yourself

What can you do to get instant authority? – mention a weakness in their case/drawback to their case – this establishes you as a trustworthy authority

Examples:

Avis – We’re #2 but we try harder.

L’oreal – We’re expensive but you are worth it.

Consensus

if a restaurant puts these are our most popular items on the menu then they become 20% more popular

They did a study on please reuse your towel sign found at hotels. People were more likely to do so if the sign read “please join your fellow guests” – they had the best result if they used the specific room number on the sign

we follow the lead of many others – similar others

Use testimonials from peers – need to change depending on target audience

Overall some really good information. He was a bit slow to warm up but had the audience laughing at the end. I will definitely be picking up his book.