Just got back from Affiliate Summit and it was clearly the best webmaster meeting that I have attended so far. The main reason... Hard Hitting Presenters Giving One Hour Presentations. Second reason... the conference was designed to help you connect with other people.

** Anne Holland, Publisher of MarketingSherpa outlined the Top Five Affiliate Marketing Opportunities for 2006 - a top notch look into the future (snippet available here).

** Declan Dunn founder of Dunn Direct gave a fantastic and energetic show on podcasting - this guy is a live wire - one of the top speakers that I have heard anywhere and he made everyone in the room want to take up podcasting. (Rand, I think that podcasting has some great potential for linkbait - but more importantly branding if you can get an energetic voice behind the podcasts). He's got a blog sales pitch here (also see Paul Colligan's notes).

** Ben Edelman, PhD candidate at Harvard gave an educational presentation on Spyware (more here and here). Good research and a very relevant presentation for this meeting. Every affiliate, merchant and network needs to know more about this topic.

** James Martell (see his site here) founder of Net Guides Publishing explained in detail using first hand examples - How to Make a Living with Affiliate Programs. This presentation was loaded with great info and I am revising my personal startup page to include my personal goals. A really valuable part of this meeting for me was an opportunity to talk with Mr. Martell between presentations and get his opinion on a couple of specific questions about my sites.

** Joel Comm (blog here), author of Google Adsense Secrets, explained his philosophy of monetizing websites but the real treat was a backdoor view of the content management system that he uses to run dealofday.com. I've got to get a programmer to build one for me.

** Fredrick Marckini founder and CEO of iProspect (profile here - see right margin for good white paper links) spoke on Search Trends for 2006 - this one really sent me away thinking about some great opportunities for my sites.

When I go to these meetings I want nuts and bolts info for my time and money and the one hour presentation by a person who has something to show and say beats the panel discussion by a mile - at least for me. Each person on a panel has just a few minutes and by the time that they give an introduction and close with their personal sales pitch that leaves very little time for meat - they can state broad ideas but not enough for me to apply on my own sites. However, the one hour presentations allow time to go into great detail and take enough questions for anyone intererested to take home something useful. Also very important here was the Affiliate Summit team getting some really great speakers. Nice Job!

The meeting had a few other great ideas...

** Speed Networking - this was a two hour sequence of ten minute meetings with folks that you requested to connect with in advance of the conference. Enough time to learn enough about the other person or their business and make a decision if a profitable relationship might happen. I met a few good prospects and since this was the first activity of the meeting you got to know these folks and could strike up conversations with them for the next two days.

** There were also lots of exhibitors - mostly companies offering website services and merchants looking for affiliates who might promote their products. One smart thing that the AS organizers did was code the conference name badges with "affiliate" or "merchant". This was a good idea because with one glance you knew the background of anybody at the meeting. I had "affiliate" on my badge and "merchants" were constantly approaching me to see if I had any interest in their program. I felt like a tourist on main street Cozumel with merchants trying to yank me into their store.

** Fantastic food! No kidding! I normally don't have much to say on this topic but the food at this meeting was great. And the sit-down meals were yet another great opportunity to meet people or have extended discussions.

This meeting was really good for me. I had three times the amount of interaction with other smart people and the presentations were either very useful or very informative.