Adam Riemer Marketing, LLC.

I’ve been to almost every Affiliate Summit to date.  This show has helped me not only grow my network, but also my company and career.  Each time I go I learn more and more for myself and for my business and new things that I can do.  Although I have met hundreds of people who have given me advice.  Here are ten things from ten people I have met at Affiliate Summit that have helped me to grow my business.  They are amazing people and I hope that you can find use for their advice as well.

1.  Kim Salvino – Kim has taught me to be more organized, to be loud, not be afraid to talk to new people and if you don’t see anyone you know in a lunch room, go find a table of strangers and find out what they do.  She is amazing for getting contacts, organizing them and following up.

2.  Tricia Meyers – Tricia has taught me so many things over the years.  One of the most important things is to make a list to accomplish every day.  Although it sounds dumb, it really keeps you going and lets you know what is realistic, what isn’t and how you can change your schedule to actually accomplish all of it.

3.  Eric Nagel – Eric taught me about working from home.  Instead of staying in pajamas all day, if I can dress up and get ready like I had a real job, I can actually focus better and get more done.  It is amazing the difference in the quality of work and amount of work you can accomplish by dressing professional, even at home.

4.  Karen Garcia, Angel Djambvoz, Joel Garcia, Kristin Kinsey, Robert Glazer, Mike Nunez and a couple of other OPMs.  Even though we are all competitors, every time I see them one of their first questions is how is business.  Even though we all compete for clients and work, we can all trust each other.  We may not agree on management styles or how to handle certain Affiliates, but if one of us was ever hurting or needed help, the others will always pitch in.  They have taught me that you actually can trust some of your competitors and we can all grow by working together.

5.  Missy Ward.  Missy has taught me that you shouldn’t always invest in everything, but you should give it your all when you do.  Not only has she been correct with almost every bit of advice she’s given me about my business and personal life, but she is someone that is the ideal person to go to if you need solid, honest and good advice.

6.  Shawn Collins.  Shawn taught me over the years to be confident in myself.  He helps me calm my nerves, gives pointers on how to keep your stress down and how to really maximize your experience at shows, when networking and when you have to speak.

7.  Connie Berg and Lisa Picarelli.  These two ladies are some of the smartest and most wonderful people I have ever met.  They have taught me to be tough and lead a conversation while also remaining professional.  They’ve taught me to speak my mind when it is appropriate and also about how to run a company with a no bs attitude.  They are amazing business people that I can’t thank enough and try to model my own public self after.

8.  Scott Campbell.  Scott taught me that even if you are a small guy and around huge companies with giant businesses, don’t be afraid to be the first one to go and reach out.  The only thing that keeps you back is your own fear.  If you are too afraid to even approach a large company, then you don’t have enough confidence within yourself and your own abilities.  If you know you’re the best and you can build your confidence then you can win those large contracts too.

9.  Rae Hoffman.  Although we are only recently friends within the last year or so, Rae has taught me that you need to say F it.  You can always move on and if someone or a client isn’t treating you well, don’t be scared, fire them.  There are tons of clients and there is tons of business out there for people who can actually do the work.  Rae is also all about loyalty to the people she cares about and it is one of the most important characteristics you can have to become successful in the long run.

10. Everyone else.  There are hundreds of people who I cherish and learn from at these shows.  Jim Kukral, Todd Farmer, Pat Grady, Nadia Levine, Jim Banks and many more.  I wish I could write what I have learned from each, but there wouldn’t be enough space.

Affiliate Summit has been one of the most influential pieces of my career.  Without it I would not be able to do half of the things that I can do today and my network would be much smaller.  If you have never been then you have to go.  Registration for Central and East is now open and you can buy tickets by clicking on the banner to the right or this link.  I highly recommend the show and encourage each of you to go.  You will not regret it if you prepare ahead of time and go in with a plan and leave with your checklist complete.

I’ve been creating a lot of campaigns and marketing plans/strategies for a bunch of new start ups and a few established companies this year.  These plans include everything from Search and PPC to Affiliate, Email, Social Media and a lot on sales funneling and conversion rate optimization.  I’ve also begun to notice some changes and started to think about how this will impact marketing over the next year and came up with a ton of new thoughts on what you may want to think about for marketing in 2012.  Here are 5 of them.

PPC:

Have you noticed that in Google PPC results you can tie in your Google+ account?  As far as I know and as of today, if someone clicks on the Google+ button next to your PPC ad, you are currently not being charged for the +1.  However if they do click on the ad or link and go to your site you are being charged.  Although this could change, don’t you think it’s odd that Google is giving you free exposure in search results for your Google+ profile page and enabling you to add it as an add on in your PPC campaigns with site links, phone numbers, etc…?  I could easily see the Google+ button, at least with your PPC if they can measure it, becoming a ranking factor and quality score factor for your PPC campaigns.  I highly recommend getting it added to your sites as well as your PPC campaigns (if you agree with my thoughts on it) so you can begin to get more Google+ votes naturally and before your competition does.

Email:

I’ve been seeing a lot more spam make it through filters by splitting up words with periods.  Today I had the same spam mail with the F word in the subject line make it through two filters on two different email accounts because they put a period in between u and c.  I’ve also started to see colors like red start to trickle back into my inbox.  I think that for email this year we may start to see some old tactics coming back and tighter restrictions on terms hitting the filters when the ESPs begin to realize the old phrases and tricks that are working again.  Not to mention possibly starting to have to pay for emails (depending on provider) or being hit with more email provider based ads on the interface with certain social media networks or service providers.

SEO:

With a giant focus on your brand, I think that link building in 2012 will be much more effective (if you are categorized correctly) if you have good quality, keyword rich content around your backlinks and use your store name or url for the anchor text.  It is more natural and the copy around the url can help the search engines determine what to rank you for.  Although keyword rich anchor links are great, if you don’t have a solid brand and brand that the Google algorithm recognizes and trusts, you may have a harder time beating out the big box stores.

Incremental Value:

I’ve been getting asked a lot more about how to measure incremental value on Marketing channels.  What the client is asking is “What would we have gotten if we hadn’t been advertising there and what is our estimated loss?”.   “What value is a channel, are keywords, are coupons, etc… adding and what is the loss or where could we reallocate the money from this channel too in order to earn more on our ROI?”.  With this thought becoming a more real question and companies beginning to take action on it instead of just hearing it and doing nothing, we may start to see tighter restrictions on trademarks, media buys, types of Affiliates in programs, etc…  There may also be more of a demand for multi attribute testing, multiple touch point tracking and changes to marketing plans and money allocation.

Ebooks and Publishing:

Although it may not be for the entire year, last business quarter I saw a ton of people publishing their first books and eBooks.  More and more shows were doing autograph tables and free book giveaways for speakers and I even started to put one together.  This could be a year where we either see everyone and their mother pushing these things like crazy, or it could be a year where it peaked and everyone starts to move on.  I think everyone will begin publishing and we will get swamped with promote my book, review and recommend my book, buy my book, etc…  There isn’t anything wrong with it but tons of people are now doing it which is why I am hesitant to finish mine.

Those are 5 of the predictions I had come up with for marketing in 2012.  There are a ton of other things I have been watching and a few of them have already started which is a very good thing for some channels and bad for others.  It’ll be interesting to see how each channel changes and alters over the next year and which ones begin to fade out.

I wrote an article recently for another site, but didn’t include everything that I had wanted to, so here is a bit more of a detailed post on 5 tips to help make your blog or website more social media friendly.  Being social media friendly not only helps to increase the amount of sharing and traffic you can drive, but it can also help to generate more backlinks for SEO with the increased exposure, it can help to create a better user experience and also stop people from getting distracted and leaving your site.  Here are 5 tips for making sure your blog is social media friendly.

1.  Test it in sharing tools.  One thing that causes people to not share a really great post is if the post doesn’t load in a sharing tool like Hootsuite.  One thing you should do is download two or three of the major sharing tools and see what happens when you load a url into them.  If the post’s title, description, etc… doesn’t show up, figure out why and fix the problem.  It not only makes it easier to share, but it stops people from just deleting it from the tool instead of loading it to share.  Having the title and description show up also gets the message and topic across to the person’s followers and friends without it being typed in or shown incorrectly.

2.  Use hashtags in the tweet buttons.  This is something I never remember to do on my own sites, but try to do on Client’s sites.  By loading hashtags about certain topics you not only help to ensure that the post will get tagged properly, but you’ll have a better chance at starting to trend or getting the popular posts showing at the top of the twitter results for a specific topic.  By hoping that people figure out and use the same hashtag, you end up not having as good of a shot in getting twitter to pick up the relevance of your post.  One thing to be cautious of is to not overload or stuff tags in as that is tacky and looks like spam.  You also want to leave room for you readers to add their own or change the tweet a bit.

3.  Use sharing buttons that don’t leave your site.  One thing that can cause someone to leave your site and forget to come back is distracting them by having a share icon that leaves your site or opens a new tab.  By using a share button that opens a smaller window and doesn’t actually leave the page you are currently on, and has the option to close after your readers share the post, you not only keep the person on your site, but you keep them focused on your content and not on a Facebook news feed or something that will pull their attention away from your site.

4.  Clearly label follow icons and share icons.  One thing that is still confusing on some sites is where you follow the site or person and where you share articles or posts.  You should keep these icons separate from each other and assume that your readers do not know the difference.  Make sure you clearly label them as follow me, become a fan, etc… and keep both types of icons grouped with the same goal together and separate from the other type of icons.

5.  Make sure you don’t overload images.  When you test your posts on sharing tools like Hootsuite or are just sharing on Facebook, try to create a design that only pulls the images from your post and not every image on the site.  Numerous sites end up pulling 20 or even 40 or 50 images including social media icons, logos, etc… into the sharing tool.  Not only does the person sharing have to scroll to find the right image from the post, but you are making more work for them.  By creating a design or way to share that only pulls a few images or just the one from the post you not only make it easier to share the matching image to the topic, but you can help to increase visibility on certain social sites when the post is shared and make your site much more friendly for the person to share so that they hopefully come back and share other posts in the future.

There are numerous things you can do to help make your site more social media friendly.  You should always try to think of how can I make my site more clear, how can it be shared easier and how can I make sure the message will come across the way I want it to.  By doing this you’ll not only begin to make your site more social media friendly, but it will hopefully become more user friendly as well.

One thing that you see on almost every SEO blog is that companies and SEOs say that your in house or outsourced SEO company needs to communicate with everyone in the company.  What I don’t see on many sites is the same for your Affiliate Managers.  Although it is a bit different for Affiliate Managers and Affiliate Management Companies, your Affiliate Manager can actually help to boost many other outbound sources and channels including SEO, PR, PPC, Email and more.  Because your Affiliate Manager is an outward facing person for your company, you should really think about how you are utilizing them and if you could be doing more.  Here are a few examples.

SEO:

Your Affiliate Manager and your SEO are both reaching out to relevant sites.  Both of them are asking for links or promotions, so why not combine the two efforts and have them work together.  Your Affiliate Manager builds long term relationships with site owners and when the relationship is strong enough, they could easily offer to write an article for the Affiliate in return for one backlink that is not for a competitive term for their site.  For example, if you run tours to Europe, but only England and Spain, and your Affiliate focuses on France and other tours, why not give them an article about all of western Europe and get the link off of England while they can have free content and use Affiliate links for Spain and haven’t given up any rankings for their main audience which are people traveling to France.

PR:

Because your Affiliate Manager is in contact with Bloggers, Authority Sites and Communities within your niche, when your PR department is about to drop a press release, they should send it to the Affiliate Manager as well.  Not only can the Affiliate Manager help to get a better pick up within the target communities, but they will be helping to build links, and get the word out where a normal wire or email list may not be able to reach.  Affiliate Managers are an amazing source of distribution for your PR department.

PPC:

If you have some terms that convert extremely well, your Affiliate Manager will have some Affiliates who may do PPC for them.  By sharing the list of terms and making sure that the Affiliates don’t direct link to your site, you can not only increase your exposure for these terms and knock your competitor out, but you can gain more sales for your company.  If the Affiliate commission is high enough and the margin can work in favor of giving it to Affiliates instead of in house which means that your company could actually save money by having Affiliates bid on these terms and then reallocating the money used on the old terms into other channels where they make more margin.

Email:

Suppose your email list needs a lift.  One great way to help it grow is to have your Affiliate Manager run a promotion on pay per sign up for newsletters and lists.  You may not always get the most targeted sign ups, but if you use the right partners who have relevant traffic and loyal readers, you could potentially build an extremely solid email list to market to.

Other Channels:

Your Affiliate Manager can help with a ton of other channels too.  They can have Affiliates help replace negative reviews and help with your ORM, they can create fun and informative videos about your products and make sure you are covered and found on video sites and in video searches.  Affiliates can increase your budgets for paid channels and even build out new ones that you hadn’t thought of.  If you have excess inventory and need to push it fast, you can go to your Affiliate Manager and have them run 50% off specials, newsletter drops, etc… and start to move the excess or old inventory faster than just letting it sit on your shelves.

If your Affiliate Manager isn’t communicating with the people across your company and in your Marketing and PR departments, you could be missing out on a ton of revenue.  Your Affiliate Managers are outward facing employees and they can easily help other channels grow if you show them how to do it.  Just like SEO, Affiliate Managers should be talking to everyone and seeing how they can help grow other channels.

I can’t believe Affiliate Summit is only a few weeks away.  That means its time to get my slides done, prep my business cards and get ready to see everyone that I have grown to become great friends with over the years.  If you’ve never been or want to know which sessions may be worth attending, here is my list of sessions and things to prep, pack and do for Affiliate Summit West 2012. (I didn’t list every session that I think is great, just some of the ones I will try to attend.)  If you haven’t booked your ticket yet, feel free to use my Affiliate Link through the banner to the right.

New things to bring and prep.

The Loso App. I already have it downloaded on my phone and am ready to use it.  What’s unique about this geo location app for Affiliate Summit is the What’s Up feature.  It allows you to record video messages and other people to find them or your friends to retrieve them.  This way if you are party hopping and about to leave, you can leave a video message at the location for your friends who haven’t shown up yet with where you are going.  You can leave a video message at a meeting spot when you are meeting with clients or new potential partners so they know what you look like and where you are and you can help your friends find your table at lunch by leaving a quick video.  There is a lot more to the Loso app, but it is a new definite for me for conferences like Affiliate Summit.

Cards for each of my sites. This time I think I am going to bring cards for each of my websites.  Not only will it help Merchants to remember why to contact me, but it helps me remember what to look for on the showroom floor.

Flyers for my new Affiliate program, Pagemodo.  This program completely kicks butt.  I highly recommend you join and use it yourself to build a free Facebook Fanpage.  It is a seriously easy to use tool complete with apps and more.  It is part of the webs.com program on Share a Sale.

Here is a checklist of what to pack for Affiliate Summit and here is my list of how to prepare for Affiliate Summit.

Sessions to attend at Affiliate Summit West 2012.

My Session called Are Your Affiliates Adding Value. It is on Sunday in the Emperors I room and from 12:30pm – 1:30pm.  I’ll be covering everything from coupon sites to PPC trademark bidders, adware, theft, SEO and everything in between.  I am also redoing my slides from the last show a bit to be able to get through them all as well as the adware video shot by Kellie Stevens from Affiliate Fair Play and have time for questions.

Sunday:

25 ways you can improve your website by Vinny O’hare.  Vinny is an awesome speaker and someone who more than knows his stuff.  He is one of the people that always teaches me something new at these shows and I highly recommend going to his session from 11am to noon.

Recruiting Non Traditional Value Adding Affiliates with Angel Djambazov and Robert Glazer.    I was originally on this panel until I got my own session and it is one I am very excited about.  Angel and Robert are both excellent at recruiting incredible Affiliates and are both all about showing where the value comes from.  I will definitely be at this one after my session is over.

SEO Clinic with Rae Hoffman, Michael Gray and the usual group.  This is always a fun session to watch and scary to submit your sites too.  The people on this panel will help you figure out why you aren’t ranking and also give you a ton of great advice from link building to design and more.

Affiliate Improv.  If you don’t want to go to the SEO site clinic above, I recommend Affiliate Improv.  It is sort of audience participation and can help you to generate new ideas for your own sites, programs, etc…

Monday:

Whiteboarding with Eric Nagel.  If you aren’t to hungover or you have the energy to get out of bed, Eric’s whiteboarding session at 8am is perfect for you.  You’ll get to learn a lot and have people help with your ecommerce sites, affiliate sites and affiliate programs.

Masterminds Groups Exposed from 11:30 to 12:30 with Tricia Meyers, Todd Farmer and Eric Nagel.  These three are experts at networking and learning how to get the most out of a crowd.  This session is a must attend if you want to learn how to Network to find partners, sites for backlinks and work a room of internet marketers.

Affiliate Under Fire from 2pm – 3pm.  This session is an important one to attend if your company is worried about Nexus laws that effect Affiliates. It is being presented by Venable Law.

If you don’t want to go to Affiliates Under Fire, try Stop Doing it Wrong.  Eric, Liz, Kim and Erik are all expert long time industry veterans.   They’ll go over why you should sell honestly and stop the whole spam/scam websites and tactics that are causing the Affiliate Industry to not always look that clean.

12 out of the box Affiliate promotions.  This should be a great panel to learn some ways to get your Affiliates active and motivated to promote your program.  It’s from 3:30 to 4:30 and features Missy Ward, Jared Saunders and Lindsy Savoie.

Tuesday:

8am whiteboarding with Eric Nagel.  I probably won’t be awake for this one, but I highly recommend going if you are up.

I really don’t know which session I would attend from 11:30 to 12:30, but the two you may learn from are Does your program have Juice and the one about driving calls from mobile search.   I’m torn between them.

Affiliate Marketing in the Age of Social Media with Dave Taylor from 2 – 3.  Dave is a great speaker who you can always learn from.  This should be a good one.

Anyways, those are my recommendations for Affiliate Summit West 2012.  Hope to see you all there!