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.
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• 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.
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• 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.

Amazon.com is choosing to fight back by suing the state of New York. On the affiliate network side, ShareaSale, an affiliate network, released information about how this effects their merchants & affiliates:

“As many of you are aware, the State of New York has implemented a new tax law which requires retailers based out-of-state to New York to collect sales tax if gross sales through an affiliate program totalled greater than $10,000 for the previous 4 NY State tax quarters.

In the State of New York, their tax quarters end on the final days of the following months: February, May, August and November.

The below report indicates how many dollars in gross sales were generated by your New York resident affiliates during that timeframe.

Quoted from the law: “The cumulative gross receipts from sales by the seller to customers in New York State as a result of referrals to the seller by all of the seller’s resident representatives under the type of contract or agreement described above total more than $10,000 during the preceding four quarterly sales tax periods. (Sales tax quarterly periods end on the last day of February, May, August and November.)”

If the number is above $10,000 – you may need to cross-reference all of your sales from that timeframe against your own records in order to determine what value was generated by sales directly to New York consumers. In that case, please contact us and we will provide you with a report that shows all order numbers from that timeframe that were generated by New York affiliates.

Please make sure to read the law, and utilize your legal counsel for any questions. ShareASale cannot provide any legal advice regarding this law, we can only provide you with the information needed to assess whether or not you are affected.”

Another affiliate network, Commission Junction, also released a statement to its customers:

“As you may already know, the State of New York recently enacted new legislation that addresses tax registration, collection, and other time-sensitive obligations. As with all laws, this law may or may not apply to you and your business. We are actively monitoring the law and will use reasonable efforts to protect ourselves and our publishers as we deem appropriate.

The application of the law is dependent on particular business and factual circumstances, and Commission Junction is not in a position to provide legal and tax advice regarding this law. However, we encourage you to perform the appropriate due diligence as it relates to your business.

For your convenience, we have provided a link to a memo from the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, Office of Tax Policy Analysis, Taxpayer Guidance Division that addresses the new legislation:
http://www.tax.state.ny.us/pdf/memos/sales/m08_3s.pdf“

This is big news if you’re doing running affiliate business out of New York – it could essentially cause the whole state to be non-competitive in the affiliate marketing arena. I can only hope other states don’t follow suit. On the other hand, as with all websites, it can be difficult to tell where a site is based. I imagine some New York based affiliates have already started ‘moving’ their virtual headquarters out of state.