This was the best Affiliate Summit I’ve been to yet!  It was fantastic running into so many old friends, people I’ve known online for years but never met in person, and making new friends from all over the world! I thought I would post a short synopsis of what I did and where I went, but also give you some of the key insights I had about my own business and many of the tips and tactics I learned.  Many marketers don’t go to the sessions, they feel they’re too successful or already know everything, but I don’t let my guard down like that. I’ve been doing this for over 10 years and if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that you’ve gotta stay on top of everything as much as you can and ALWAYS be improving and moving forward.  So you’ll find me at many of  the sessions sitting right in the very front row, taking notes, and absorbing as much as I can.  One thing I’ve found by doing that is even if I’m hearing the same information I already know, they’ll always be a new idea that comes to me about something new or different that I can implement to improve my business.  So here’s just some of what I did and what I learned…

Sunday I arrived and checked in at the stinky smoky RIO hotel & casino.  After staying at Mandalay Bay after this years Affiliate Summit I won’t ever be staying at the RIO again, more on that later. As soon as I got to the RIO went straight to the first session…

A Primer On Search Engine Optimization with Josh Ziering.

From what I understood Josh is Ian Ziering’s nephew. Ian is the former star of the original Beverly Hills 90210 and married a playboy playmate.  He said his first website was MyAuntIsHot.com, I concur.

Josh’s presentation was lively and entertaining although most the information was very basic but living up to the title of the session “A Primer on SEO”.  What I took from his session was the following…

• If you’re using WordPress then use a Popular Posts plugin but set the Popular Posts for only the previous X amount of days.  This prevents your most popular posts from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy since they’ll be forced to be updated.  Excellent tip!
• A good reminder for me was to check all my Title Tags, H1 Tags, and Meta Desc.  I have some sites I’ve stalled on doing this, so it was a good reminder.
• Good tools he recommended were NODoFollow Firefox Plugin, Rank Checker, and SiteSnatcher.
• Another good recommendation was page.ly which is a webhosting service that will manage and update WordPress for you.

Monetizing Blogs for Affiliate Marketing and SEO with Kris Jones, Drew Bennett, John Carcutt, Tim Jones, and Murray Ross Newlands.

This panel was alright, I got a few tool suggestions that were helpful…

• Disqus – a conversation building plugin which works with WordPress, although I didnt’ see this used on any of the panelists websites I visited.
• Broken Link Checker for WordPress – This is one tool I will be using for sure on my sites, a great way to automatically check for broken links.
• Best Post Summary for WordPress.
• Blog Traffic Exchange – Something I probably won’t use, but thought worth sharing.

Video: Biggest Affiliate Marketing Opportunity Since Google with Jeremy Palmer and Rosalind Gardner

This session was way too basic for me.  It wasn’t so much because of Jeremy, he apparently did the slide show and had some good statistics and general info.  Jeremy stated that if YouTube were a search engine they would be #2 in traffic only behind Google, he also had some good suggestions based on his personal experience recording himself.  But Rosalind added nearly nothing valuable to the session and appeared to only answer questions in generalities.  During the presentation she got out her flip camera and filmed everyone and said she was going to put it on her blog.  Well, I went to her blog today to see the video and this is what she says…

I took a short video during Jeremy Palmer’s and my presentation about video marketing here at Affiliate Summit West 2010 — or at least I thought I had!

Apparently, one must press ‘Record’ first.

UGH!

You’re presenting at Affiliate Summit as an expert about video, but you can’t even run your 3 button flip camera?

I really wanted to hear things like what video sizes are best, HD or not HD, viral video, doing overlays with your URL in your video, and what about those click boxes you see all the time on YouTube? Are those effective?  Also, what kind of things really sell well with video? What about sites like Qik and 12seconds and doing live streaming from your iPhone?  None of that was covered.

Nonetheless, I’m determined to at least get SOMETHING out of all the sessions and the one tip I will use is to keep your videos to 2.5 minutes in length or shorter.

So after that I went out with some clients/friends to an out of the way place at Bill’s Casino for some fantastic Steak, Lobster, and Banana Foster!

The next day I got up early and headed out to the keynote…

Keynote presentation with Dr. Robert Cialdini.  It was great!  Lots of things he covered seemed to be from his book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”. Excellent book and an excellent keynote! Everything he mentioned was directly applicable to online marketing. Instead of posting my notes however, I recommend you go out and buy and read his book.

Next we we’re off to a few sessions…

How to Fix Failing SEO Efforts with Wil Reynolds. I have to give him some SEO link love for the fantastic presentation! I’ve seen Wil 3 times now at Affiliate Summit West and this was his best presentation yet. The guy talks about a mile a minute so you gotta be paying attention as he’s really sharp, his advice is advanced, and if you blink you could miss something!

Wil has some fantastic suggestions, cutting edge news, and insights. Here are just a few of the things he touched on…

• Use Google Suggest to find keywords and article ideas.
• Search “Last 12 Months” when doing keyword research on Google Insights.
• Get Google Intelligence for your Google Analtyics to set up email notifications of increases or decreases in traffic from specific keywords.  This was an EXCELLENT tip.  Apparently it’s a beta feature that you have to ask Google to enable for your analytics account and there’s more you can do with it as well.
• Social bookmark all the pages with inbound links coming to you.

Wil’s overall theme was to not get bogged down in caring what Google may or may not do, not caring about your pagerank, or other things, but just focusing on results and what really matters in your business.  Excellent presentation!!

After that I took a nap, slept longer than expected but was able to get in on the Ask the Experts session.  It was alright, I got a few tidbits about conversion boosters.

That evening we went out on the town and ended up all over at various parties and clubs.  It was a blast!

Tuesday…

Scaling Article Marketing For Affiliate Marketers with Chris Knight of Ezine Articles. This is probably the one session that completely changed my perspective and will grow my business tremendously. Chris’ website Ezine Articles gets around a MILLION visitors a DAY! Absolutely incredible. He had tons of tips and insights on article marketing that I’m putting to use immediately. His big driving point was “Write more articles, get more traffic”. He even had us all chanting the phrase throughout his presentation. Here are just a few of his tips…

• Never trust your ghostwriters. Always stay on the ball.
• 2 links in your resource box gets the most traffic.
• Always do one link in your resource box with the full http URL.
• Putting FREE in your resource box and/or CLICK HERE will increase the CTR to your site.
• Make sure your articles live up to any promises in the titles.
• Don’t focus too much time on quality alone.
• Create a system you can scale.

Thanks to Chris for this fantastic session!

How to Get Motivated for Success with Jim Kukral

I was pleasantly surprised with this candid session with Jim.  He shared a lot of great insight into how he motivates himself and I loved the quote he shared “Doers get what they want… Everyone else gets what they get”.

I didn’t take too many notes, but I definitely felt more focused and motivated after leaving his session. Objective achieved Jim!

So that was the end of the sessions, however I then headed off to Mandalay Bay for the ClickBank party and the ClickBank meeting the next day.

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Yours in success,

Miles Baker