Affiliate Convention was certainly an experience. First I’m going to post about the daytime convention activities. Then I’m going to tell you about the parties. I have a series of pictures covering both. Warning that some are not safe for work. Take a look at the photos page at top right if you’re interested.

You’ll certainly have heard people complaining that it was small, but I feel it made networking a more intimate experience. I made some wonderful new friends and really loved the whole thing. I’m certainly glad I went.

The talks I attended were useful but available on Webmaster Radio. So I tended to not worry about attending them and focus more on networking. I was too hung over to make it to any of the early talks although they were probably the best ones.

I sat in for:
Super Affiliate Marketing Techniques: with Heather (awesome) Paulson, Steve Schaffer, Hamlet (supercool) Batista, and Jessie Jones
All intelligent speakers giving out good advice but just like any 1 hour talk they didn’t have enough time to go into enough detail to really change things  for me. It served well as an introduction to a few concepts. A person would need to get some one-on-one time with these geniuses to really benefit from their experience.

Managing Search Campaigns that Scale: with Dan Boberg, Marc Barach, Mark Ziler, and Brian Lewis
All nice guys with good services to sell, but these things are geared towards large companies. After sitting through a long talk discussing strategies for using up to millions of keywords and how it can make you super rich, I asked a question of the panel. “How much do your services cost and how are the fees calculated?” The answer was about 5% with a $5,000.00 per month minimum. These services are not really intended for small time affiliates. But it might be worth considering for very large affiliates. Had I known what I was getting into, I wouldn’t have been in the room.

Black Hat vs. White Hat: with Scott Polk, David Snyder, Frank Watson, and Marc Lesnick
Fun to attend. Fun to listen to. Mostly it was entertaining. Should make for a fun listen over at Webmaster Radio. There were lots of clever ideas being thrown out there. Go check it out.

Legal Matters and Affiliate Marketing: with Steven Richter and Amanda Berry
Definitely worth attending. The short of it is that if you are an affiliate marketer, you probably aren’t compliant even if you think you are. Your TOS won’t protect you if the rest of the site is a huge scam. It is critical that you actually treat your visitors in the way your privacy policy claims you do. I asked him about LLC’s and offshore companies as defensive strategies and Mr. Richter emphatically recommended having a good lawyer set things like this up for you. He added a small disclaimer that setting up offshore entities can work against you by raising suspicions of the IRS and other investigative agencies. In other words incorporating goes without saying, but going offshore may make you look guilty. But it makes it much more expensive for people to come after you.

Final Panel Debate: with Heather Paulson, Beto Paredes, Phil Maher, Charles Mui, and Hamlet Batista
Free beer and potato chips with no limit on the beer. Everyone attended this one.  Just a big, fun wrapup to the convention. Prizes were given out, people were thanked and the general feeling was pretty warm and fuzzy.

Meals: I had the opportunity to meet and socialize with some wonderful people. On day one I grabbed lunch with some serious SEO types, Jim Kreinbrink of Hyper Dog Media among them.

For dinner on day 1 I was honored to share the table at Maggiano’s with Ricky  Ahuja, and Cathie Terry of Affiliate Venture Group, Wes Mahler and Roland Navarro of Tracking202 fame, Mario Girard and Julia Smart of CPA Underground and Rishab Verma and Richie Gill of Elite Commision. I wish I had a recording of the conversation.

On day 2 I skipped lunch and wound up having dinner during the evening party at the Lure Lounge with Augusto Ellacuriaga of SpanishSEO and Jim Kreinbrink of Hyper Dog Media. Both of these gentlemen are multi-faceted in their diverse knowledge of internet marketing techniques.

The parties were legendary and impossible to forget but hard to remember for some reason. I think they deserve their own post. I’ll try to get to it soon.

I came home with some great pictures but sadly there are several awesome people I met and somehow failed to get a picture of. I’ll have to do better next time.