The silver lining at Affiliate Summit East
Ok, so the Affiiate Summit conference in Boston wasn’t nearly as good as their previous shows. I think I made that clear in my previous post. But it wasn’t a total bust – there were highlights. Putting on a show of this size takes a lot of work and coordination, and the organizers (and some speakers) deserve some credit. Here are some of the best highlights from the conference (evening antics and Sox game aside):
Keynote Address: Corey Booker (Major of Newark, NJ) (video). Mr. Booker, who was introduced by a few members of the Blue Man Group, started the conference off with a dynamic, interactive, motivational speach about his first years and challenges cleaning up the streets of his city. I must have missed the part where he tied his story back to Affiliate Marketing, but it didn’t seem to matter. Some people can just talk and people will listen to what they have to say; he’s one of those people.
A Few Good Break-Out Sessions: As I mentioned before, some presentations were disappointing. But just when I would get fed up with marketing pitches and underprepared speakers I would sit in on a session that offered some real nuggets of wisdom.
- Landing Page Testing to Attract Super Affiliates (slideshow): Tim Ash (of SiteTuners) was the first solo presenter I saw. He did a good job of addressing the whole audience in a pretty big room – walking the floor rather than standing at the podium, and taking questions on the fly. Tim shared interesting information about multivariate testing and the methods of testing millions of landing page variations to tweak out conversion performance increases. Some of the ‘uncommon common knowledge’ tips Tim shared included (1) keeping your risk reducers (or what I’ve previously called credibility builders) visible – don’t push your McAfee logo to the bottom of the page; (2) Reduce the link count on your landing pages – limit the number of options if you want visitors to take a specific action; (3) For e-commerce sites, don’t require account log-in before check-out – most users probably don’t have an account. And When asked what free multivariate testing software he recommended, Tim gave one answer: Google Website Optimizer.
. - Monetize Your Site with Amazon Associates (slideshow): Just like the session above, what set this session apart was the presenters’ interactivity with the audience, good questions, and honest answers. This was a bit of a marketing pitch for “Amazon Associates” (Amazon.com’s affiliate program), but the name of the session makes that pretty clear – so no big deal if they throw in a little self promo. Two of the panelists were Amazon associates who have had success with the program. Another panelist was Matt Tavis, an Amazon representative. These different perspectives on the panel allowed the audience to ask questions about experiences with the program and about how the program worked, and what features were available (or not available).
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For example, I asked how I could find which Amazon Associates ‘widgets’ (ads) I could use if I just knew the size of the ad block I was trying to fill and the products I wanted to promote, but didn’t have a widget preference. Matt admitted that the way the Associates program is set up users are forced to pick the widget type first, and that there is currently no way to narrow the options based on ad size. Then he promised to raise that question to his team back at Amazon. I later saw Matt on the expo floor, where he took my e-mail and promised to get back to me with some widget suggestions. I never expected to hear from him – but I did. That kind of service goes a long way.
. - Copywriting Clinic: This session invited some good discussion and the panelists were sharing opinions, even if they didn’t agree with one another. We had some butting heads on the panel (thanks to Tim Ash stepping up and respectfully disagreeing with Anik Singal), and a little bit of a debate over whether readers want more or less content, which I think kept the people in the room awake. The resolution, by the way, was that it depends on where the content is published. If you overwhelm readers with information when they are ready to pull out their credit cards (aka: “in the conversion path) – that’s not good. But should those readers be looking for additional information elsewhere, you want to make it available.
Ok – there you go, a few compliments for the presenters who did it right. And here are a couple more, for Affiliate Summit co-founders Shawn and Missy, for always making themselves accessible and easy to talk to. That’s the kind of stuff that goes a long way toward keeping the show and the attendees down to earth – in my opinion one of the best things about AffSum.
