Affiliate Summit West 2009 Wrap Up
Well, Affiliate Summit West 2009 is now in the books. If you weren’t there, you totally missed out on a TON of great content and networking opportunities.
Let’s start with the meet-up I hosted. Jason at Ads4Dough.com graciously sponsored the first ever Wickedfire.com Meetup. We had about 200 people show up over the course of the evening and it was great meeting everyone and putting names to the avatars. Surprisingly, no one got killed or maimed. 99.9% of the people were down to earth cool.
Sunday morning, I headed down to the conference early with Bofu2u and we ran into our ScarySEO friend Carolyn Shelby. The line was like 2 people deep and we got our press passes right away. About 2 hours later, there were probably 200 people in line and the line was moving S-L-O-W. Hint for next year, get your butt out of bed early the first day and get your pass first thing! We started by attending the Nickycakes session. It sucked for the most part but Cakes had some really good, yet generalized, information that a lot of people afterwards seemed to really like. The other 3 guys, including Andrew Wee, pretty much put me to sleep.
The next session I attended was a panel with a TON of newsprint media flunkies. Not to be harsh, but these people really, REALLY thought that what they do is the cat’s meow. I kept thinking 2 things:
- I’m not sure they realize just how dead newsprint is
- Blogging the news is not profitable
Now I’m guessing most of the people at Affiliate Summit went for the information and education, they didn’t want to sit around listening to some ancient relic of a bygone era talk about how plagairism is killing the blogging business? What? You mean the *WeightLoss.com sites are ALL not making people INSANE profits? Duplicate content aside, this session was a total buzzkill for the conference. What an ill-conceived panel of so called ‘experts’.
After that disaster of a session, we went to Wolfgang Pucks SPAGO. Total win. Had a lobster club sandwich that restored my faith in humanity.
For the rest of the afternoon we hung out at the meet market and met some affiliate managers we had never met in person before. Scott from Neverblue was 100% cool.
The next day we hung outside the conference talking with affiliates like Ryan Eagle, SlightlyShadySEO, Contempt, Ad Hustler, NickyCakes, AOJon from Wickedfire.com, and others.
(Have to run, will finish this post at a later date!)
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