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My Bags Are Packed, I’m ready to go! I went! – I’m
Back From the Affiliate Convention in LA By James Martell
With this event, it's their mantra "where affiliates always attend for FREE!" and the sponsors pick up the cost for admission for the affiliates. It is an interesting model and we will have to see if it is successful in the long run. The conference is hosted by Webmaster radio and the venue was quite nice in an older but recently refurbished hotel, The Hyatt Regency in Beverly Hills. In the morning the event kicked off at 9:00am with a series of different speakers throughout the day. The highlight of the event for me was the speakers. The overall event was heavily weighted to the SEO world which I enjoyed. I was also invited to speak on two panels, one each day. I particularly enjoyed listening to Danny Sullivan, a leading "search engine guru" who has been covering the search engines since 1995. He talked about the state of search, which incidentally is alive and well. I had a chance to chat with Danny after his talk who was happy to answer questions and one question I had for him was about the infamous no follow tag and should it be used on affiliate links? His answer was yes it should. I also enjoyed a panel called Shades of Gray where four SEO experts, 3 former black hats and 1 white hat talk about the good, the bad and the ugly of search engine optimization. I can't say I picked up any real nuggets from the session because they were quite vague in the answers, but it was all very interesting. I did find the networking opportunities at this event very good and had a number of great conversations primarily on the topic of content creation and SEO. I met up with Linda Woods from PartnerCentric.com, a leading Agency, and we had a nice chat and estimated there were between 500-600 people in attendance overall. She was quite impressed by the number affiliates in attendance. The next Affiliate Convention event is in Denver, June 21-22, 2010 and I am planning on attending again and do recommend this event as one worth attending. All the best,
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I
had first heard about the Affiliate Convention
earlier this year and I considered attending the
spring event in Denver, but decided not to go
because my schedule was so full. Then I heard about
the fall event which was being held in LA on Dec 3rd
and 4th, so I chatted with a business associate of
mine about going. Phil Watkins, who is in the
process of developing my new affiliate program also
arranged for me in to speak at the conference and
accompanied me on the trip.
