This should have been posted about a week ago, but it feels like I needed all last week to get over my jet lag and get fully active again. My god, this was by far the worst one ever. Not sure if it was the average of 4 hours of sleep back in Vegas, but I’m guessing that has something to do with it. As I’m typing this I’m already in the middle of another trip, this time to  Berlin, so busy times right now.

Anyway, before the trip I was hoping I could do a in-depth blog post about the Summit about all the sessions, the people  I met from the business and all the new business I would bring home.

So, I’m afraid that’s not going to happen….. I think we made a little planning mistake. We planned our trip so that the Summit was almost at the beginning of our trip instead of at the ending like last year. So what happened was that we partied SO hard the first days and came home so late (it was the first time Vegas for 2 of us) that most of the Summit we were actually sleeping (SHAME ON US!!!). In fact the very first day we came home at 9:00 AM so the Summit was already open for a full hour. I felt so bad… We did manage to go there for a full hour though later that afternoon.

So, not so much info about the Affiliate Summit. Anything interesting else then you would like to share with us Gioom? Well yes actually. Some good and some bad.

First off, we started at the Aria hotel, located in the new heart of Vegas, the ‘City Centre’, the biggest privately funded construction in the United States. And my god, the City Centre is such a great addition to Vegas. It’s beautiful! Especially the Cosmopolitan hotel, it just looks stunning, inside and out! That’s where I’m staying next year for sure!

But the Aria was great too. Great room, but the most awesome feature must be it’s amazing ‘control the universe’ remote they had over there. It controls everything from the TV to the shades, airco, lights you name it. It was great fun when my buddy Hein was doing a nr 2 and I kept switching all the lights on and off, haha. (I guess you had to be there).

The room:

The most elite remote ever:

Then 2 days later we had to change hotels. Because of the CES, the AVN and the Affiliate Summit conventions there was no hotel who could accommodate us for our full stay (we did book pretty late). So our last 4 days we spent at the Planet Hollywood Towers by Westgate. Over there we had the 4 bedroom Penthouse suite and although the room itself was pretty amazing with a great view, HD beamer and bar, I would never go there again.

One being the fact that I had itchy legs all 4 days plus it looked like I had bite marks on there, so that made me suspect that they might have a case of  bedbugs going on there. Another of my travel companions had the very same problem. Some other problems that caused me not to go there again: the amplifier was broken on arrival, the desk clerks wear football jerseys without name tags (quite strange for a pretty expensive hotel if you ask me), my room wasn’t cleaned for 2 days despite having the ‘clean my room’ light on and finally when we had a guy sick with fever and all, there was nobody picking up the phone at the reception after 3 tries. So, will not be going there again.

Like I said, room was pretty amazing:

Now, the affiliate network parties are always a blast! Unfortunately we had a lot of parties to choose from, so we might or might not have seen the best ones, but it was big fun nevertheless.

First party was of Buy.at. A pretty new network in the US that originates from the UK. It is known as “Affiliate Window” over there and what I’ve heard of it, it’s one of the best, if not THE best, networks in the UK. We had a really good talk with Nick Cartwright, their brand sales manager and I’m definitely going to run some campaigns with them!

Anyway, the party was really good too, the location was just awesome! It was on top of “The Hotel”, owned by the Mandalay Bay. I really really REALLY didn’t like the outside glass lift going up some 58 floors, but it was well worth it because the view was nothing short of breathtaking:

The party was laid back but fun, unfortunately because it was not a closed party, there were a lot of weird people haning out there that came from the CES and had nothing to do with affiliate marketing, but despite that, we had a great time.

The next day it was time for the Epic Direct party. Besides the fact that it’s probably my favorite network out there, they are known for having THE best parties. I went to their Playboy Mansion party in 2009 and that was insane! This time their party was in the Blush, a very stylish club in the Encore. Great atmosphere, good people plus LOTS of gorgeous girls. Epic Direct keeps amazing me by having more beautiful girls at their party every time.

Unfortunately for some reason we forgot to take pictures of them, but instead I do have a picture of us hanging out with my affiliate manager Michael Boghosian

After that we were planning to go to Clickbooth’s ‘Black Card Party’, but when we came to the secret location, the staff told us that the party had moved but they had no idea where. Nor did we at that moment so instead we went somewhere else. Too bad we found out way too late where Clickbooth’s party had moved too.

As you can tell, we didn’t miss the parties, but it would be better if we had seen a bit more of the summit like last year. Next year we’re definitely going to do all the partying in the beginning so we will have more than enough time to hangout with other people in the business and do some more networking.

For all you non-believers I do want to post one picture that you can see that we were actually there:

And finally if you do want some real info about the summit, my buddy Jonathan Volk made a list of good recaps and you can find them here:

Ahustler
Ian Fernando
Riley Pool
Ryan Grey
Logan Tompson
Daily Conversions
Rohail Rizvi
Danger Brown
CDFnetworks
John Chow

Tags: affiliate conference, affiliate show, affiliate summit 2011, las vegas
Posted in Affiliate Shows | 3 Comments »

Yippee! It’s that time of year again! The most interesting 3 days you can experience as an online marketeer. Of course I’m talking about the Affiliate Summit West. The best conference there is for marketeers like us.

It’s THE best place to meet other affiliates, make deals with affiliate networks, do some networking in general, but the best of all must be THE PARTIES! I cannot wait to get crazy at one of those wild parties! (and of course do some business in the mean time too! duhhh)

For now it looks like the club I’m going with will be going to the Buy.at Mixology Party @ the Mandelay Bay on Saturday, either the ShareASale “Under the Stars” party @ Tryst nightclub or the Ads4Dough party @ SpearmintRhino on Sunday (waiting for rsvp confirmation still but I kind of like that location!), and on Monday we have a LOT of parties to choose from but since they are one of my 3 favorite networks PLUS they always throw one heck of a party, we’re going to the Epic Direct’s Exclusive party @ the Blush.

If this week is going to be only half as fun as last year, then we will have a blast.

Time to get a couple of hours of sleep now, and then it’s off to the airport and off to Vegas!

If you want to connect during ASW11 then drop a comment or mail me at gioom[at]gioom.com!

Tags: affiliate conference, Affiliate Networks, affiliate summit, affiliate summit west, asw11
Posted in Affiliate Shows | 1 Comment »

Besides Search Engine Strategies New York this was the first real show I went to since I started doing affiliate marketing back in 2006. SES NYC was pretty cool, also because it was my first trip to the Big Apple, but MAN, ASW was THA bomb! I almost went last year but because of a last minute cancellation from a friend that was supposed to go with me, I decided to drop out as well. Now I know what I missed! These are the guys that went with me this time.

Hein van der Wielen, director of BlueMango.nl, Frank Rovers, CEO of Feltron.nl, Me and Frank Raaijmakers, CEO of Amdir.nl

So, I know this shows have to be about doing business, learning a thing or two and especially networking, but what impressed me the most are the insane parties we went to. But more about that later. So we came in at wednesday but the show didn’t start untill sunday, so we had some time to spare. We checked in in the Venetian and we had a pretty nice room. It was called the ‘Rialto suito’. Altough it was nice and spacy, it was sooooo noisy! When the party people came in around 4′ish when we were doing some serious sleeping to overcome our major jetlag, my sleeping was over and I was tired the entire next day. Happened to me 2 times, then I decided to wear earplugs at night. Shame on you Venetian.

Anyway, we played some poker at O’Sheas which is an AWESOME place if you want to play FUN poker or craps! Everybody is having a good time overthere and they do not take things too serious like they would in other big casino’s. Definitly go there to play some 1-2 Texas Hold Em, you won’t regret it! Also we did some tasteful dinners and nice clubbing around the city.

Then sunday the show started. Because one of us had to leave on tuesday for a meeting we decided to get gold passes instead of platinum passes because we had to miss the tuesday anyway. So on sunday we attended 3 sessions. One about effective social media techniques, one about monetizing blogs for affiliate marketing and SEO and one that was called ’start monetizing your blog today’. Well, I can say, those sessions didn’t help me one bit and I think most of the people were quite dissapointed about these sessions. Even for a beginner this was pretty basic stuff and nothing new or revealing. Especially the first one, which I had high expectations for, was very dissapointing. ‘Don’t spam twitter’. Come on guys, we want want to hear techniques that can be applied to social media campaigns that drive your bank account to insane figures. But nothing of that. Unfortunately. From what I’ve heard the platinum sessions were a lot better, so the next Affiliate Summit I’ll be sure to hang around for the full 3 days.

We also went to the meet market, but it was SO packed that you couldn’t even say hello to the people you knew overthere. Crazy time! I did get to meet Markus Frind, Founder and CEO of PlentyOfFish.com though, the biggest online dating site in the world.

At night we had Copeac’s ‘Party like a rockstar’ party at the Tryst in the Wynn. Beautiful club, not too big, just right, but not too many people there unfortunately. The party was good and we got to meet 2 other dutch marketeers (which you don’t come across too often in the USA). They are with 4people.nl and do a lot of emailing. It was nice hanging out with you for a bit guys!

After that we went to the XS in the Encore. My god! This nightclub was INSANE!! Decorations were sooo beautiful, the sound was good and the atmosphere was just amazing. What more can I say. We had a GREAT time there!

Monday was a hard day for us. We were sleepy from all the partying, but we had to go out networking on the show again. So this day we mainly exchanged cards with various companies and people and I got inspiration on many new projects by just walking along the booths. I already got a lot of emails and calls from people who want to do business, so that’s good!

After the show we were so sleepy that we decided to take a little powernap. This turned out to be a 5 hour sleepfest. Markus Frind invited us over to a party at the Palms in the early evening. Missed that. After that there was this amazing party thrown by Azoogleads in the Hugh Hefner Skyvilla. Unfortunately we couldn’t go there as we had another party by Clickbooth right at the same time. As you can see by Steve Hall’s picture’s, this was a HOT party.

The Clickbooth party was crazy too. It was called the ‘Hangover party’ and it was shot in one of the 4 rooms the actual movie was shot in. Like the movie there was even a chicken in it. Awesome! We had a really good time there with our friends over at Clickbooth.

And that ended our trip to Vegas. We headed down O’sheas for a quick round of craps and then we headed out to the airport and had a 16 hour flight home. YUCK!

It was an amazing time and show and I hope to see you all at the next Affiliate Summit East from August 15 – 17!!!

Tags: affiliate show, affiliate summit west, las vegas, make money online
Posted in Affiliate Shows | 7 Comments »