Jason Murphy

Shouts Fired at Affiliate Summit

Jan 22, 2007 Affiliate Marketing

Today I left my comfort zone (which exists behind the desk) and was able to get out and put some faces to names at the Affiliate Summit West show happening here in my home town. I was able to meet many new faces, and catch up with several friends and former co-workers in the industry.

So to celebrate a successful Day 1 of Affiliate Summit, I’d like to fire out a few shout outs to the many people I met today (check it out, free linkage!). This will also be a good BUZZ monitor to see who’s tracking their reputation. So, here goes:

First to a good friend in the industry Michael Stark from PostYourProperty.com and LookForProperty.com. Once again Michael provided me with a great dinner and an intellectually stimulating conversation about the industry, politics, business, and our families. Thanks again Michael. Cheers.

Next to Brandon Phillips and Tim Kastner from Lashback. For those who don’t know, Lashback is a brilliant compliance monitoring service that tracks live email campaigns for CAN-SPAM compliance and suppression file abuse. Through my employer I’ve been a Lashback client for 3 months now and they have been a crucial support lifeline for my job function. I don’t know how we ever managed without them.

Now a shout out to my peeps from Virtumundo, where I used to work, in Kansas City. I was able to visit with Robyn Gearheart and Dena Ocampo, two fantastic ladies who are big-time movers and shakers in the affiliate industry. If you are in affiliate marketing and you haven’t worked with them at one point, I’m sure your time isn’t too far away. There was also several new faces at the company and it’s great to see the growth that is occurring there. I also bumped into Greg Loeffelholz in the hall, whom for whatever reason I keep calling Brian (I always knew him as “Loeffelholz”), who is now the president of FreeScholarshipGuide.com. It was nice to bump into you Brian, I mean Greg, hope to talk with you a bit more tomorrow.

A shout to Brent and Erik (hope I recall your names correctly) from CSN Stores from Boston, who’s Superbowl dreams were smashed when Manning decided to start playing like a pro on Sunday. I’d wish you luck next year, but my Broncos are taking the AFC Championship game. Sorry, you might as well accept it now. It was still cool to meet up with you guys and I hope we can do some business in the near future.

And last, but definitely not least, are the speakers from the Super Affiliate session. It was a Q&A session with Jon F. (mook_jon) from WickedFire, Jeremy Shoemaker from ShoeMoney Media Group and a ton of other projects like Elite Retreat, and Andrew Johnson from Web Publishing Blog. They all did great job, especially considering the cannon-fodder questions that were lobbed their way from the audience. I enjoyed visiting with each of them one-on-one after or before the panel. I’ve had online discussions with a couple of them, but finally was able to put a face to the name. They’re all great guys with a lot of energy for this industry. They each have a very wide array of different projects going on, but what was defining of this group is they “get” self-branding. They each have a fairly decent following of readers and subscribers that eat up any information that is thrown their ways. Shout to Shoemoney’s sister, Andrea from Planet Andrea who is become a big leaguer pretty fast in this industry. She’s now the director of sales for WickedFire, but you know she’s still lurking on DigitalPoint and I’m sure she’ll be involved in Elite Retreat still. I also met with SEO_Mike who’s a crazy WF member who is getting the WF logo tattooed on his forearm. That’s hardcore dedication bro! It’s good publicity for the WF community and a new definition of “brand loyalty”. I always knew that WF members were a crazy crowd.

I met many other faces at the show, but if I didn’t collect your business card it makes it difficult to remember who was where with what company. This show has been great so far, and I’ll do another series of shouts tomorrow for sure (so bury me with your business cards please). I’ll see everyone tomorrow!