Affiliate Summit East Day 2 recap

Today, I attended 3 sessions.  They are “How to monetize your site with widgets”, “Social Media Marketing for Affiliates” and “Advertising on Facebook.”  I took bunch of notes at the Social Media Marketing for Affiliates session and here is my recap.

Speakers for the event were Brent Csutoras, Todd Malicoat, Chris Winfield and Neil Patel (moderator). This session was held in a small room and there were lots of people sitting on the floor and standing to attend.

Chris went first as a speaker and talked about how he thinks people should be utilizing various social media tools.  Here are some of the key points he made.

• Back to basics : Use what works for you.  Everyone has different usage. Some may still get great results from billboards, direct mailing.  What works for others may not work for you.
• Experiment, test and try new things.
• Strategy : join and participate in communities you are interested in. Be active, interact with others, be helpful and provide good content.
• Don’t use Twitter just to tweet.  Mix it up a little to leverage and to inform your customer.
• Promote your site by being creative and increase visibility.
• Pick sites that match your niche and contribute.
• Test to find what works for you and scrap what does not.

The second speaker was Brent. I actually met Brent about 2 years ago through my then client.  I visit one of his sites, Weird Asia News, since the site has great content and I really enjoy reading it.  Here are some of the great tips during the session.

• Content is the key to get visibility
• Top 10 list kind of site always works as long as the list is effective, comprehensive and valuable. Negative list is also a great way to draw people to visit.
• In order to draw someone to your site, you have to have easy to read content, be creative by using visuals and be really helpful.
• Utilize current event : Act fast.  Do some research and make sure to tell a better story than the actual source.  Provide accuracy.
• It’s fun to be off beat and extreme.  Take a risk, but be careful not to violate the terms of service.
• Host your own image and be unique.
• Identify your social goal and desired keyword to target and optimize.
• Research : Find out what is working out for everyone and know your competitors.  Check out their search engines.
• If you have a group of people working with you, make sure to get feedback to improve.
• Tie in your content with current event.  For example, if you run a financial blog, make sure to tie in with the current economy.
• Have a plan for success.  You don’t want your server to crash if you suddenly get lots of traffic.
• Don’t accept crap.

This session had a little bit of technical difficulties and Todd, the last speaker, was a little rushed to do his presentation.  I do not utilize many of the tools he introduced and I wish he had a little more time to go over without speeding through his presentation.  Anyways, here are some of the great tips he shared regarding tracking social media and linkbait for affiliates.

• Research : Make sure to set up metrics and do some competitive analysis.  There are lots of tools out there, such as Digg and Stumbleupon.
• Preparation : Set up tools, create baseline metrics, set up feed subscription
• Track : Track traffic, awareness (by monitoring brand mentions and article mentions), inbound/outbound links, engagements (by getting comments) and conversions (leads, RSS feeds, sales and newsletter sign-up).
• Tools to track awareness : blvdstatus, Trackur, Samepoint, Raven Tools, Quarkbase, Whostalkin.com, and Twitter search.

Overall, every single session pretty much talks about research and utilize tools available.  This session provided me some tools I have never heard of and I’m definitely checking them out.

It has been very hard to pick sessions because there are so many of them I want to go, but I do have to pick one each hour.  Which sessions have you attended and what did you like/dislike about it?