I was working with a Squarespace site recently and needed to put some tracking code on the success page after a contact form.

I’m not as familiar with SquareSpace as WordPress and had to write some javascript code to run on a contact form tracking page.  Since no PHP was available to write, Eric and I did it strictly in Javascript.  Here’s the final code:

<script type="text/javascript">
if ((location.href)=="http:www.yoursite.com/trackingpage") {
/* <![CDATA[ */
var google_conversion_id = xxxxxxxx;
var google_conversion_language = "en";
var google_conversion_format = "1";
var google_conversion_color = "000000";
var google_conversion_label = "xxxxxxxxxxx";
var google_conversion_value = 0;
/* ]]> */
}
</script>

Naturally you’ll need to change these three values:

1. Change http:www.yoursite.com/trackingpage to the exact URL of the transaction URL.
2. Replace the xxxxxxxx after google_conversion_id to whatever your actual conversion is is.
3. You’ll also need to change xxxxxxxx after google_conversion_label to whatever your actual label is, too.

Javascript Conditional Code for Conversion Tracking in Google Adwords is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Without the proper protection, comment spam is an absolute nightmare in WordPress.  Fortunately, the proper protections are very easy to come by.

As a primer, comment spam is any comment left on your blog that adds nothing to the conversation and was likely mass posted.  These comments sometimes look like:

Great post!  This makes me really think.

Or something like….

Wow, I couldn’t have said it better myself!

You can spot spam comments because they are usually positive in vibe and could fit just about any blog post.  The spammers do this in the hopes that the link behind their name will help their website rank better.  So if you aren’t sure if the comment is spam, a good way to tell is to look at where their name links to.  If it looks fishy, then you’ve got a spam commenter on your hands.

How Bad is the Spam Industry?

I was amazed and what I found this evening when searching through “WordPress” related keywords.  Check this out:

Top Searched Keyword Terms for WordPress

If you look closely at the terms with the red arrows, you’ll see a disturbing pattern.  These are all terms that spammers would use to locate blogs that are powered by WordPress and accept comments.

What’s most disturbing is the fact that the relative volumes of the 5 spam terms add up to 72, while people legitamately searching for WordPress are only 88 in relative volume.  That means the spammers almost outnumber real people searching for WordPress!

But this article isn’t meant to employ scare tactics.  It’s not a scary situation once you get your blog setup correctly.  So let’s talk about setting your WP blog up to avoid comment spam.

How to Kill Comment Spam

1. Have Akismet Set-Up
2. The stats above would imply you should remove the ‘powered by wordpress’ and ‘leave a comment’ text from your site.  I’ve never tested it before, but it can’t hurt!
3. Finally, if your spam is coming from a contact form and not from a comment form, read Protecting Contact Form 7 from Spam.  It’s a bit more involved to protect your contact form than your comments form, but it’s well worth the time.

WordPress Comment Spam: How to get less comment spam on your WP Blog is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

There is a lot of of advice about recovering from Panda, but I felt like this advice from Mike Gordon, the Toronto SEO Guy, was the most elegant:

In most cases, sites that have been hit with Panda were over-optimizing their on-page factors (keyword spamming) with the intention of ‘gaming’ Google while offering no additional value (or lesser value) to visitors. Other sites got hit for using link farms and other forms of paid links that are against Google’s policies, and again, are designed to manipulate the engine without offering benefit to the user.

For sites in the above scenario, it’s time to recognize that they’ve gotten away with undeserved traffic for a long time and now they’re paying the price. What they need to do is kill the link farms and paid links (which are almost always crappy links anyway) and edit their pages to remove the over-optimization.

So, for example, there’s no need for a 5-10% ‘keyword density’ (keyword density is a myth anyway). Bottom line here is to just write naturally without thinking much about keyword usage and you’ll be fine. Of course, you do need your primary keyword(s) in the title tag, body text, etc., but 2-3 instances of the keyword in the body text is all you need. More than that really doesn’t help contrary to popular belief – but it might hurt (and probably will).

Most importantly, sites need to pay more attention to structural issues (which in most cases haven’t been an issue for Panda, but having a good site structure will go a long way to helping a site prevail post Panda). For example: ensure that there are no duplicate content issues (the vast majority of sites have this problem to some degree in Google’s eyes and don’t even know it e.g. URL issues, parameter issues, etc.); ensure that there are minimal pages returning 404s or other errors; have a user friendly and consistent global navigation; remove unnecessary keyword-rich footer links sitewide; etc.

In a nutshell, site owners/webmasters need to ask themselves this question when creating/editing anything on their website: Does the change I’m about to make help Google *and* users, or just Google? If it’s the latter, you need to seriously reconsider whether it’s a wise move. Making websites easier for Google to crawl, understand the content, and index pages – and making sites more relevant for users – are still the keys.

Yes, I know, I sound soooo white hat – and I am – but I truly believe that in the long term, that’s what works best (though there will always be smart black hat guys out there who succeed for a period of time, but it’s getting *much* tougher).

Unfortunately, some legitimate sites got undeservedly Panda’d. Beyond doing all the kinds of things I’ve outlined above, they should attempt to contact Google and make their best case. For most of us, this isn’t easy as Google is not the most responsive company to the little guys (surprise surprise). If you can develop a Google contact through a friend or even via an AdWords rep, you may have a better chance of your message being responded to, and if the request is reasonable then you have a much better chance of a reversal of penalties on the SEO field.

SEO Tip: How To Recover From Panda is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

That's my kind of farm!

I’d like to contribute my personal two cents to the hot topic of the last week: Google’s Content Farm Algorithm Change.

The Background:

Google makes algorithm changes a few times per week. Usually their effects are pretty small, but this latest change was relatively big. Google makes a big show of it and lots of webmasters feel wrongly targetted.

But why should this algorithm change be any more public than the others?

I believe Google intended to make a big public statement with this change. It was a PR move as much as an algorithm change. There have been grumblings over the last few months that Google’s results are bad and getting worse. The allegation is that SEO’s are building pages specifically to rank high, and they are doing so successfully. The grumblings got loud enough that Google’s Search Quality group stepped in and made some comments.

The Algo Change:

So Google made a big scene with a ‘Content Farm’ algo change. The search results shift and push ‘content farms’ out of the top rankings.

What exactly is a content farm anyways? We might want to define ‘content farm‘ because good SEO writing looks surpringly similar to what everyone is calling a content farm.

SEOBook.com make an excellent point about the similarity between content farms and all other SEO writing:

“a lot of SEO content in not that different, and any algorithm that targets Demand Media’s [an alleged content farm] content isn’t going to see any difference. Keyword traffic stream identical to title tag? Yep. A couple of hundred words? Yep. SEO format? Yep. Repeats keywords and keyword phrases a few times? Yep.”

What makes these guys a content farm and the rest of us just followers of Search Engine best practices? Is it funding? Our SE ranking success? At what point does a ‘well-SEO’d site’ turn into a content farm?

A Mental Experiment:

Let’s do a mental experiment.

Let’s imagine for a moment that these content farms aren’t stuck in ‘content farm mode’. They can change their content at any time and are well-funded enough to make that happen at the drop of a hat.

And let’s, for a moment, refer to them as ‘Highly Agile Content Producers’. Why would we call them that? Because these are organizations who know very well what Google ranks well. They also write to capitalize on that knowledge. So that makes them smart, and since they tend to stay at the top over hundreds or thousands of algo changes, that implies they are agile.

Finally, let’s imagine these content farms have been prepared for this change for a while. Maybe they are surprised that Google, in 2011, still ranked crappy formulaic articles above everything else. But they didn’t change their content because it was working. Maybe they breathed a big sigh of relief when this algo change happened and now they are ready to unravel the new algo.

You’ve probably already realized where this mental experiment is headed: What we call ‘content farms’ are just highly agile, well-funded, organizations who are excellent at producing content that search engines like. And I’m sure that any CEO worth his salt saw this change coming for years.

The Conclusion:

When all the dust has settles, I suspect everything will return to normal. Google gets to make a show of how they are concerned about Search Quality and all of the ‘content farms’ re-write their content to rank again. Commenter James Bauer at sistrix puts it this way:

“Kudos to the changes. But like many Google changes in the past, marketers will soon “discover” the new algorithm and employ immediate changes to “beat” Google at their own game. Google will change the rules again. And the entire cycle repeats itself. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.”

If you were keeping track of the rhetorical questions, you’ll notice that there is one outstanding. It’s “At what point does a ‘well-SEO’d site’ turn into a content farm?” Unfortunately, I think the answer is: “When you do a good job of it.”

Much ado about nothing: Google targets content farms in a recent algorithm change is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Lately I’ve been reflecting a lot on the things I’ve learned from the last round of projects and websites I’ve been working on.  I wanted to distill some advice from the experiences so as to avoid making the same mistakes again in the future.  Hopefully this list helps you, too.

7 Things NOT to Do When You Start a Business Online

1. Make projections based on the size of the market.

When you are predicting the revenues for your business, don’t start with the size of the market.

Let’s take an offline example of a Lawn Mowing company:

In Columbus, where I live, let’s do a very rough estimate and say that the amount of money spent on commercial lawnmowing in Columbus is 20 Million dollars per year.

$20,000,000 spent on lawnmowing

So the aspiring lawnmower comes in and says, ‘Geez, if I just get 5% of the market then I’ll be bringing in 1 million dollars per year.’ You can do the math as many times as you want and it will always be a million bucks. And 5% doesn’t really sound like that high of a number, right?

$20,000,000 x 5% = $1,000,000

The truth is that getting 5% of the lawnmowing market would be very difficult. While this may be apparent in an industry as transparent and easy to understand as lawnmowing, the same idea holds true in an online business. But, for some reason, online entrepreneurs tend to consistently overestimate their future revenues this way.

So what should you do instead?

I suggest preparing your projections the opposite way. On day one, you have no clients. If you are a lawnmower, you may be able to hand out 300 flyers in one day. Maybe 1% of these will call you for an estimate.

300 flyers x 1%= 3 Estimates per day

Of those people who get an estimate, lets say 2/3 will sign on as a customer.

3 estimates x (2/3) Turn into clients= 2 Clients per day

So if you do an eight hour day of handing out 300 flyers, you’ll hopefully get 2 clients. Add to this that there may only be one month per year when people are looking for a lawnmower (early spring), and that means that (assuming you aren’t hiring a flyer company) you can get about 60 clients your first year.

30 days x 2 Clients per day x 1 Month = 60 clients per year

As you can see we worked the complete opposite way and came up with a much smaller number.

This process isn’t meant to depress you. It isn’t meant to put down your business idea. The idea is that if you can find a business that still makes financial sense when you create projections based on the 2nd formula, you’ve really found something.

2. Think your concept/product is unique

I can’t help but smile when I think of the Segway. The Segway is maybe the most extreme example of thinking a product is unique. I’ll bet the guy who created the Segway truly thought everyone would be using them by 2011. We all know how that turned out.

A lot of people talk about their business or product before its launch and almost all of them think their’s will break the mold. Launching something is so exciting, and thinking it’s going to break records is part of the fun. But it’s rarely true.

I’ve learned this the hard way. Almost every business I’ve been a part of seemed to have a glimmer of this ‘break the mold’ at the start. The early numbers all came back amazing. Or the business model just seemed so viral… it had to go big.

But none have defied gravity or broken the mold or set a new record. Each business eventually matured and- in the best cases- profited some. And in the worst cases the businesses failed. Most businesses fail. That’s OK.

Create your projections using industry standards. If the industry average bounce rate is 70%, assume your website’s bounce rate will be 80%. If the idea still works or the profit margins are still there, you may be on to something.

3. Overestimate the value of the idea and underestimate the importance of execution

I’ll upset a lot of people for saying this, but:

Ideas are almost worthless. Execution is everything.

I’m sure a lot of people had the idea of brightening up a room after the sun went down, but Edison made it happen. Friendster is the facebook that didn’t make it. There are so many fantastic ideas out in the world, but if there isn’t precise execution and a bit of luck to give the idea legs, they just remain ideas.

If you don’t believe me, consider this: When you think of the most successful companies and organizations, do they have better ideas or better execution? 99 out of 100 times it is better execution.

• Donatoes isn’t doing anything that special with pizza, but they make a lot of money.
• My electric company is the same as all of the others, but they are made what could be considered an obscene profit.
• Google did a great job with paid search, but they didn’t think of it.

The list goes on and on. The moral of the story is to become someone who executes an idea well and you’ll be better off than ‘the idea guy’.

4. Partner Unwisely

I think partners are a good thing. Partners hold you accountable for delivering what & when you say you are going to. Partners share your ups and downs. Without partners, it’s easy to lose motivation and quit. Partners are good.

But you have to choose those partners wisely.

Before signing any contracts, I would suggest doing a few pre-projects to get a good feel for how you work with someone. Pay attention to their email response time and how well they handle stress. Are they easy to work with? Do you trust them? Do they deliver what they say they are going to?

The unfortunate truth is that most people who have enough free time in their lives to start a new business probably aren’t a good partner. Of course this isn’t always the case or else finding a partner would be useless. But people who are responsible and smart and social and want to start a business usually get picked up by another team or start a business pretty quickly. It’s kind of like dating… there is a long line of people waiting to date the best of the bunch. They usually don’t stay single for long.

So assume that 9 out of 10 potential partners aren’t a good fit. Try out 10 different people before you settle on one. It’ll make a world of difference.

5. Skimp on system-building

If you can make an automated system for any part of your business, do it. I’ll show you a great example why:

Whenever someone wants me to change their WordPress site, I always have to send an email explaining all of the logins I need, where to send my payment, how to contact me, etc.

For the first few years (yes, years) of business, I always avoided making a template version of this email. I was afraid it would seem impersonal or would take a long time to make.

But one day I was looking over my outbound emails and discovered that over time I’d gotten lazy and wasn’t explaining myself as well as I could in these emails. Since I’d written the same email 50 times, I was skipping over stuff and hurrying through it. Once I realized that not automating (making a template of) this email was actually making clients’ experience worse, I made a template in 15 minutes that kicked butt and have used it ever since.

After making a template for that email, I started making a template for just about anything I have to type more than I care to. Some examples are:

- I have an email for people who write and ask me to do something on a website that seems like a good idea but that I don’t have time to do now. It’s kind of a ‘Thanks for that great idea, I’ll put it on my list of todos.’

- I have an email that explains how to put together a scope of work for a WordPress project. So when people write me and say, ‘I have a WordPress site I want to customize, how much will it cost?’ I can send this email off to them explains how to put together a scope of work.

So take the extra time to make a template of something… a really good template… and then use it over and over if you can. You can always edit the template and fine tune it to make it wonderful.

6. Expect your business to run on auto-pilot

The holy grail of every business- particularly online businesses- is that they will run on autopilot. From the ads you see around the web, you’d think that just about anyone could build a business that ‘runs on autopilot’ online. I have yet to see even one business that runs by itself.

The nice thing about web businesses is that they are live 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. So they do exist by themselves. But a business needs to do more than exist to turn a profit.

The more I work on websites and web businesses, the more they seem like just regular brick and mortar businesses. Many of the problems and hurdles are the same.

7. Give up too early

This website, BradleySpencer.com, has been around for about 5 years now. For the first couple of years, it didn’t bring me very many leads. For the last three years it has done pretty well. And it continues to bring more leads with each passing month. I expect it do be doing even better a year from now and into the forseeable future.

But for the first two years (years!), I was working hard on building content and building links with almost no positive reinforcement. During that time I waited tables and did other odd jobs to make ends meet.

Can your new web business survive if you don’t get new clients or customers for two years?

The good news is that if you work your butt off for a couple of years, you can start to slack off a bit afte those two years and you’ll still be getting leads. But making it to the two year mark can be tough.

I hope this list has been helpful.  Please leave your own ‘Thing NOT to do’ in the comments below.

7 Things NOT to Do When You Start a Business Online is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Contact Form 7 is my favorite free WordPress plugin for making (you guessed it…) Contact Forms.  It’s a very popular plugin, and that means that spammers have decided it’s worth their hassle to write some scripts to spam you through Contact Form 7.

Assuming your viagra need are sufficiently filled, you won’t be needing to see these emails.  So let’s figure out how to stop those spam messages from getting to you without making life more difficult for the real people who might want to use your form.

Based on my experience, these three changes should help really cut down on spam in Contact Form 7.

1. Spam filtering with Akismet: Follow these instructions to make Contact Form 7 use akismet to test and see if the submission is spam.
2. Install Bad Behavior Plugin: Install Bad Behavior.  You can read more about BB, but it works in a unique way to test for spam.
3. Install Cookies for Comments: Because most spam bots’ browsers can’t accept cookies, this plugin will try to set a cookie on a user and if the cookie isn’t there then it considers it spam.  The plugin also tests to see how long it took the user to leave the comment.  If the commenter took a very short time (think a second or two) to leave a comment, chances are it’s spam.

Once these three changes have been made, your contact form should let much less spam through.  Of course, if you want to try a paid plugin for contact forms, I personally really love Gravity Forms.

Protecting Contact Form 7 from Spam is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Premise:

There are plenty of times when you’d want to tell somehow how they can improve the Search Engine rankings of their site quickly. I’ve found that with most lay-people, you have about one minute before their eyes gloss over.

So below is my attempt at giving someone the best tips for SEO that can be read in about a minute. Of course it isn’t all-encompassing, nor is it meant to be. But hell, it’s short.

The One-Minute SEO Plan:

SEO means ‘search engine optimization’. The goal is to get more targetted traffic to your website specifically through Search Engines.

There are two parts to SEO. These are 1) What is happening ON your site that the search engines can scan and see and that helps them determine what your website is about and 2) What and who are linking to your site on other parts of the internet. The Search Engines look the number of links to your site as a gauge of how popular your site is. Search Engines tend to like sites with many links from other popular websites.

Improving #1: Your On-Site Factors

Write interesting content you believe people would like to share and link to. Try to use the same words when you are writing that other people would use when they are searching for your article. If you aren’t sure what words other people use to search, you can us keyword research tools to help narrow it down.

Your page titles are especially important, so make sure the titles have a lot of the words that other people would use to search for a page like the one you are writing.

Add interesting and new content often. Make content that humans will like, and the search engines should follow.

Improving #2: Other Sites Linking to You

You want lots of sites to link to your site.

Think about organizations, clubs, or websites that may benefit from linking to you and then email them asking for a link. If you are part of a forum, you’ll want to add a link to your site in your signature. If you run multiple websites, you may want to link from each website to each of the other websites. If you have friends with websites, ask them to link to your website or you can trade links with each other.

There are many ways to get links to your site that you can come across online. So keep your eyes open and try to get lots of links.

Remember this with both on-page and off-page factors: Making a great website that people like is the best starting point for a site that does well in the search engines. So never sacrafice the user’s experience in favor of something for the search engines.

The One-Minute SEO Plan is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

‘It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.’ -Frank Luntz

Last week they were running a deal at AppSumo that made the cost of user testing low enough that it would be silly not to try it.  So I decided to give it a go and I learned a lot about how people use my websites as a result. I’m going to share the 5 most intriguing with you today.

As an SEO, I’m usually way more focused on just getting traffic than what happens to that traffic when it hits the site. But even rough ‘back-of-the-napkin’ math can convince the most skeptical that user testing is cheaper and more effective than trying to get more traffic to a poorly-designed site.

For that reason, I encourage everyone to try user testing on their own sites.  Yes, this means you.  Try it.  You’ll be amazed what you find.

Without further ado, let’s dive in…

5 Things I Learned With User Testing

Quick Links:

1. It’s all above the fold, baby.
2. Common sense won’t help you here
3. 400% Changes are Possible
4. Make everything clickable
5. Simplify

1.  It’s all above the fold, baby.

Software Used: Crazyegg makes software that you can add to your site to see where people click.  Here is what the heatmap looks like for my site:

Click to Enlarge

Crazy Egg data can also be viewed a couple of other (really cool) ways:

Confetti View. Click to enlarge.

This is called the confetti view and gives a more granular look at where people are clicking.

List View. Click to enlarge.

And this is the list view which gives even more refined data about your user’s click path.

The Lesson: If you want someone to see something, put it above the fold.

This lesson sounds so simple, but it’s so easy to forget.  People don’t tend to go below the fold unless they are really interested in what they are reading.  And how do they get interested?  Something above the fold grabs their attention.

2.  Common sense won’t help you here.

The Software: Visual Website Optimizer is a fantastic web application that allows you to split-test different versions of a page and see which one does best.  Of course, you get to decide what ‘does best’ means, and exactly what you want to test too.  So it’s a very versatile tool.

For my first test, I set-up a test to see how the ‘Secure’ image in the sidebar (screenshots below) of a coupon site worked.  We tested to see what effect the ‘Secure’ image had on people clicking on the coupon button.

With the secure image... Click to enlarge

The thumbnail above HAS the secure image.  The thumbnail below does NOT have the secure image.

This does NOT have the secure image. Click to enlarge.

Visual Website Optimizer gave half of the visitors one version, and half the other version and then keeps track of who clicked on the coupon button.  Ready for the results?

The Lesson: Can you guess which version won?  It was the version without the secure button.  And the difference between the two versions is HUGE.  (I’ll tell you exactly how big the difference once in Lesson #3.)

So with the knowledge that a small change can make a huge difference, I’m trying tests on many sites.  In fact, I’m currently running a test to see if having my photo in the sidebar of this very site makes people stick around longer.

Studies say that it should keep people on site longer (they feel like you are a real person if they see your photo), but maybe for this site (and this face… haha) it won’t help.  We’ll just have to see!

3.  400% Changes are Possible

The Software: Used Visual Website Optimizer and the testing conditions as described in Lesson #2 above…

The Lesson: If you think that user testing is a matter of very small changes over a long time, you might be surprised to learn that I had a 400% increase in conversions in 3 days.

By simply removing the ‘Secure’ button in the sidebar of the coupon site described above, a whopping 40% more people clicked on the coupon link.  It seems possible that almost every site has a few elements that, if added or removed, would make equally as large a difference.  What does your site have that is stopping it from converting 4x more users?

4.  Make everything clickable

The Software: I used CrazyEgg as described in Lesson #1 (above) to learn this lesson.

The Lesson: People click on everything that interests them.  Header images, titles, pictures, everything.  If you can, make something happen when they click on it or hover over it.  Give the user some interaction to show that they CAN click it.

A site that does this really well without sacraficing simplicity is Daring Fireball.  When you roll around the screen, the background color of the links changes.  It’s subtle and elegant.  And you never are wondering if something is a link or not.

5.  Simplify

The Software: We used UserTesting.com to learn this lesson.  UserTesting.com will take your website and a set of questions you create about your website and send a real-live user through your website.  They user is equipped with a microphone and screen recording software and ‘talks’ their way through your site.  It was a huge eye-opener.

The Lesson: Every site can benefit from simplicity.  99% of users are on your site to learn something, get some info, or maybe check something off of their todo list.  People don’t want to learn a new design when they come to your site. So make it easy as hell to use your site.

Additional Resources:

If user testing sounds like it might help your site, I would really suggest you check out these resources:

• BrianCray.com A Usability Guru
• UseIt.com The usability bible
• PHP AB Test This lets you split test on the server-side
• Yahoo Design LibraryA reference for how people expect your site to work.

5 Surprising Lessons Learned by User Testing is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Affiliate Summit East, 2010

Affiliate Summit East is a conference for affiliate marketing. It took place in New York City over the last few days. My two business partners and I took some days off from our day jobs and headed to the conference to strike some deals and learn some tricks that we hoped would improve our business model. Since our business is only 4 months old (though profitable already!) we hoped that getting infused with some good networking and awesome speeches would improve our company’s trajectory.

The experience was a lot different than I had expected and I’ve come away with some lessons that may be helpful to young business owners and people new to conferences. So if you are a veteran conference-goer, you may disagree with my assumptions. For the rest of us, maybe you can learn from my mistakes.

First of all, I want to say that the trip was a ton of fun. The folks who put it on are brilliant and the quality of the conference isn’t in question at all. So kudos to all of the folks behind ASE.

If I had it To Do Over Again…

Get The Good Pass:

We chose the silver passes because they were the cheapest (although they were still $99 for early bird). The cheap passes got us into the lobbies and area with all of the vendors and a few keynotes. That’s it.

If you are mainly coming to strike up some deals, then maybe this is the only badge you need. But if you want to see anyone speak, you’d better go up to at least the diamond or platinum. My partner had a Gold pass and that still only got him access to a handful of speeches.

Know What You Want:

We went into the conference expecting there to be a lot more direction. But basically it’s like a huge bizaare of vendors and people trying to get you to do whatever makes them money… whether or not that makes you money too is for you to decide.

We realized after walking the ‘Meet Market’ that our business is fortunate in that we can grow to about 20x our current size without having to make one handshake or in-person deal. So the Vendors really had nothing to offer us.

Although this meant that the conference may have been less valuable for us, it is a good feeling to know we won’t have to hit the pavement searching for deals for a long time… if ever.

Enjoy the Freebies:

I actually did enjoy the freebies a lot, but would have liked to more. There were a lot of open-bar type situations that looked like a lot of fun. We did end up going to the free Share-A-Sale party on the rooftop of the Empire Hotel. This was the highlight of my trip, and it helped me to remember how much I love Vodka Gimlets.

Enjoy The City:

Make sure to take off from the conference and enjoy the city. My partners and I did just that on Monday and it was the best day of the trip for me. This isn’t to say that the conference wasn’t great, but you have to enjoy the place you are staying too!

Use Twitter More:

I thought twitter was so dumb when it started, but now I love it. Watching the stream of #ASE10 on twitter would give anyone a never-ending source of stuff to do, people to meet, and insight into what others think about a speech or dinner or anything. Twitter and conferences are like peanut buttter and jelly.

Maybe Don’t Go:

Truthfully, maybe you don’t need to go at all. We likely could have stayed home and gotten a lot more work done in the same amount of time as what we spent in NYC and saved a lot of money. But we are a newish company and there is plenty more for us to do without outside infulence. If you are a larger and more mature company that needs to expand and can’t without in-person sales, then conferences like this are a no-brainer.

Conclusion:

ASE was a great time all-and-all. I’ce come away knowing that our business can scale a lot without having to do any of the things you need a conference for. And that’s a great feeling.

I also learned that there are a lot of people making really good money doing affiliate marketing. That’s good for my partners and me to see, because it shows you that it’s do-able.

What do you think?

Did you go to Affiliate Summit East? What would you do differently?

7 Things I Learned from Attending the Affiliate Summit East Conference. is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

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