Now that I’m back home in Houston, I wanted to put together a list of my thoughts on attending my first Affiliate Summit. I learned a great deal of awesome stuff, met some totally cool people, and basically had an all-around great learning experience.

Here we go:

• As far as location goes, I cannot imagine a better venue than the Rio. Great casino, great conference center, and very nice suites. The casino staff was very helpful (for the most part, but that’s another story for another day) and went out of their way to make sure our time was enjoyable. This was my first time in Vegas, and it was very enjoyable — especially since I came home with over $3,000 in my pocket that wasn’t there when I arrived. I enjoyed all the eateries, but my favorite (by far) was McFaddens; I had a bleu cheese bacon burger there that I would have to rate as one of the top three burgers I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.
• The Rio’s conference center was outstanding. Great rooms, great seating, and very good sound systems in most of the sessions. The daily luncheon food was good; on Monday they had a buffet line with steak that was absolutely awesome, especially for a buffet, and a potato/tomato salad with champagne mustard dressing that was divine. Oh, and I can’t forget the twice-baked potatoes! The convention hall layout was nice in that it wasn’t gigantic and every booth was close to each other, which allowed for some great networking between companies.
• The Affiliate Summit staff was very helpful, especially Shawn Collins. As I discussed in my post about the Wil Reynolds SEO session, I tried three separate times to get a blogger pass to the conference, and had zero luck. I understand where they were coming from; my blog didn’t have a ton of posts about the affiliate marketing industry, but I did expansive coverage of Ad:Tech NYC and thought that would be enough to get me a pass. Apparently not, as I was denied three times. But I decided to do coverage anyway, and Shawn noticed that I was blogging non-stop from sessions and posting constant updates on Twitter about the conference. He gave me a blogger pass, which allowed me access to all the sessions and the BlogHaus — he even sent a message to the registration desk with my details. I went to the reg desk and Yvonne set me up with my new pass, which gave me freedom to go into all the sessions and provide live coverage, which I was happy to do. Shawn was very helpful, and I extend a warm thank you to him for making me feel at home.
• The sessions were great. From the Affiliate Classroom Live class and the keynote speech with Jason Calacanis to the Super Affiliate Strategies panel, everything I attended was full of great information and lots of takeaways. My only wish is that I’d been able to attend more sessions, but you can’t be everywhere at once and it’s a testament to the setup that Shawn and the gang did that there were so many great sessions to choose from. My two favorite sessions were the Calacanis keynote and the Super Affiliate Strategies panel; Jason made some valid points in his grating style that really gave a lot of people in the industry food for thought, and the Super Affiliates panel was just one great piece of information after another. Kudos to the Affiliate Summit gang for putting together a great event list.
• Networking was awesome. As mentioned before, I met so many great people who I can either do new business with or learn something from. While the sessions were great, I think the true value of Affiliate Summit comes from the ability network easily. All you have to do is walk around the conference and you’re bound to meet great people with great insight into the business. It would take years to do the kind of networking you can do at Affiliate Summit in just a few days, and that’s worth any price tag they put on the conference.
• It was good to meet some of the “super affiliates” (and even one “uber affiliate”, Paul Bourque), but it was most heartening to meet people like myself, who don’t make $500,000 a month. It was great to sit down with people who are trying to make a living from this stuff and discuss strategy, offers and the various affiliate networks. I seem to get more insight from talking with people in person than I would by spending years on ABestWeb (which I finally joined over the weekend). I found lots of new RSS feeds to subscribe to and lots of Twitterers to follow.
• The Affiliate Summit Twitter action was hot and heavy. The choice of having a “master” Twitter account (asw0 for everyone attending the event to tweet on was an awesome idea, and I’m almost positive they’ll bring it back for Affiliate Summit East. I personally used Twitter at this event more than I ever have; I posted 84 updates during the conference, the majority of those to the AWS08 Twitter account, and it was very interesting to get real-time feedback from various people on the sessions. My phone was going crazy during the Calacanis keynote due to all the Twitter action, to the point where I had to turn off my SMS and just read the updates every few minutes via the web browser. I’d never seen the real power of Twitter until Affiliate Summit, but I sure see it now.

Overall, I really enjoyed my first Affiliate Summit. And it won’t be my last — I’m already booked for Affiliate Summit East in August, which takes place in Boston. I’m going to try to buy tickets to a Red Sox game while I’m there; just have to check the MLB schedule and see if the Sox will be in town while I’m there. I’ve always wanted to go to Fenway.

I’ll also be attending Ad:Tech in San Francisco in April, and I’m looking forward to that one as well.