Trust Agents & Cocktails @ Affiliate Summit Recap 2

The day began with an interesting keynote from Chris Brogan & Julien Smith. As co-authors of the book Trust Agents they described the concept briefly and sparked some ideas from the discussion. The takeaway is to discover who the Trust Agent is in your space and if one doesn’t exist become that influential voice. Got It?

Had a chance to hear from Will Reynolds of Seer about the latest trends in seo and was excellent.

Some takeaways were:
- Utilize Google Api’s
- Yahoo Search Suggest is better than Google Search Suggest in a side by side comparison for accuracy
- Affiliates are able to respond faster than large brands so creates opportunity
- Rumor from Blogstorm.co.uk that Google’s Algorithm is favoring larger brands in organic results
- Pictures in organic search are appearing and could change the users behaviors and traditional rankings
- No-follows are not a waste of time on sites like Wikipedia (may be a factor down the road)
- Also covered were some of the latest demographic tools, trending, Firefox plug-ins, Grease Monkey scripts and more.

Overall, I always attend his sessions and find true value in them.

Next up was a Facebook advertising session with Zac Johnson, Jeremy Schoemaker aka Shoemoney & Alex Shultz of Facebook, Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal who discussed the benefits of using Facebook advertising to target users.

Here are the takeaways:
- Geo-targeting is essential and you need to know your target demographic. With Facebook you can target a particular region of the United States or the World. Shoemoney gave an example of Omaha Steaks and the fact that Philadelphia was the #1 market so by targeting ads to that region you would improve your conversions.
- All stressed that you can loose thousands of dollars in an hour so start small and test.
- Look at the suggested Facebook rate and bid below that.
- Facebook is not Google so quality score or accurate keyword tools not as advanced
- Ad copy & images must be rotated regularly
- Remember – take off your internet marketing hat and put on a Facebook one. Ultimately meaning that you need to compete with friends updates so better be a compelling offer with clear call to action.
- Big brands aren’t playing in the Facebook space yet so limited opportunity exists till saturation. If you were to jump into the dating scene you will see that saturation levels so tread carefully.
- International opportunities exist with Facebook.
- Lastly, once you identify converting keywords convert to a CPM basis and use the Facebook tools.
- Good luck, and let me know how it converts for you!

My Time to Shine & Speak – Ask the Experts
At 5pm It was my turn to speak and had a session in Ask the Experts about “Affiliate Strategies for Choosing Merchant Partners” The roundtable discussion lasted an hour an half and covered many topics including affiliate program types, finding your niche, evaluating the leaders in the category, trend analysis, ppc and seo implications and ultimately the selection of partners. I highlighted the costume industry and brought down the results all the way the the demographic profile of the costume buyer using commercial intent tools. I hope everyone enjoyed it and was great to give back to the industry after profiting from it for the last 10 years.

Evening Events
Later went to the Media Trust / Advaliant cocktail party at the Soho House NY (meat-packing district) and had a great time. Upon the return to the Hilton caught some unique Affiliate Summit Karaoke singing from various affiliate marketing rockstars and hoping many were not caught on video (it was memorable). As the evening progressed had more networking and closed it down for the evening.