Final Thoughts on Affiliate Summit
- January 26th, 2007 /
Blake and I had a great time in Vegas (its really hard not too), and came away from the Affiliate Summit really excited about where we are headed with siteMighty. We received very solid feedback from the affiliate networks that we approached about integrating their offers into siteMighty. Look for new offers to be integrated into siteMighty over the coming months from a variety of affiliate networks. Our philosophy for siteMighty is that we are building a software platform, and we are affiliate network agnostic. We want to integrate any and all networks into siteMighty. We will be building out an API for networks to feed their offers to siteMighty, but right now we are custom integrating networks so that we learn what is the best way to fit affiliate offer data into our publishing platform.
On that note, we met briefly with Vinny Lingham, someone we have tremendous respect for, who is developing Synthasite. He is taking a very interesting approach to tackling the same problem we are. We all agreed that web-based publishing platforms are undoubtedly the future of affiliate marketing and web publishing in overall.
We also really enjoyed meeting Jerry and Dave from one our affiliate partners on our credit card sites, NCS. We’ve been in business with these guys for a long time, and it was great to finally meet them. Additionally, we spent a lot of time with Scot from iCommissions, who has been instrumental in helping siteMighty get off the ground. He has been a partner from the beginning and has really helped shape what siteMighty has become.
As far as the conference itself, I want to give props to Shawn Collins and the Affiliate Summit team for bringing together a lot of the top people in this industry. The networking was incredible for us, and having the opportunity to meet face-to-face with partners is something that even in this age of Skype videoconferencing is irreplaceable. We attended the opening session with remarks by Michael Sanchez, CEO of ClubMom. The trade show was impressive but not so large it was overwhelming, and I would guess that for the exhibitors it was well worthwhile, as the booths were packed at all times. Half of the trade show hall was filled with round tables for meetings, and these were packed at all times as well. This was a very thoughtful addition, and one that many trade shows forgo. We were able to sit down at one table on Tuesday and meet with iCommissions, CJ, and Vinny, all based on bumping into them.
We’re looking forward to the next Affiliate Summit in Miami, and look forward to seeing even more people there.
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