Affiliate Summit East Boston

Posted on June 4th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing

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Well, it’s June already, which means Affiliate Summit East is just 2 months away. In case you missed nickycakes’ post about Affiliate Summit West in Vegas in January, go take a look. It was a really great time and def worth the money. This Summer the conference is going to be in Boston at the Boston Seaport Hotel. Boston, of course, is where Nickycakes lives, so that makes this summers ASE especially awesome.

What can you expect at Affiliate Summit? Well, you’re going to have trouble finding this many other people involved with Affiliate Marketing in the same place at the same time. Pretty much every name in the industry shows up to these things. If you want to hang out with your favorite affiliate blogger or whatever, this is your chance. All the big name networks have booths. Want to meet your favorite AM, or the CEO maybe. Here’s your chance. There are a bunch of sessions given by industry folks with topics from beginner to advanced (although most seem beginner-ish) which are worth attending if you want to learn more and get motivated (or re-motivated) to make some more money. All the networks give away free stuff at their booths ranging from crappy business cards to free skateboards, shirts, hats, pens, etc. There are free raffles for cars, electronics, cash, whatever. At Affiliate Summit West, Nickycakes walked away with like 3 big bags of free crap (so much he had to buy an extra suitcase to haul it home.)

After the stuff going on at the conference in the daytime, there are tons of things going on at night. Generally there are 2 or 3 parties every night at nightclubs, expensive hotel suites, whatever, rented out by the big networks. Open bars are common, and it’s an awesome time to meet other people doing the same thing you are, regardless of your level of experience. It’s one thing to talk to someone online, but meeting them in person offers a completely different level of trust and will help you build lasting business relationships that will certainly help you make more money, no joke.

If you’re planning on going, you should take a look at getting everything going now before the hotels are booked up and the conf is sold out, like it did in vegas. Before June 6th, the full conference pass costs $949, after which it goes up to $1,449 until the conference starts at which point it will cost you $1,949 at the door for the whole package. If you just want access to the exhibit hall, the respective prices for the same time periods are $99, $199, and $299. Click here for info/prices, etc.

What’s the difference between the full pass and the exhibit hall only pass? The full pass includes a lot of stuff the exhibit hall doesn’t (duh). You get to go to all the sessions, basically, and get free breakfast and lunch (usually pretty good). There are some sessions that don’t require full passes, which are generally run by affiliate networks. Nickycakes has never been to one of these, but they probably are glorified network recruiting sessions if they’re free. Maybe worth checking out, though. But the sessions that you need to have the full pass to get into look pretty good this year. There are, of course, some pretty lame sounding ones, but this years lineup looks better than ASW. ASW had some pretty crappy sessions, like the Jason Calacanis one, and the joke of a panel with John Chow, Zac Johnson, and Amit Mehta in which Chow told everyone he didn’t do much affiliate marketing, and Zac Johnson told everyone he didn’t do much PPC, and stumbled over his words a lot (they’ve both made a name for themselves as authorities on this topic, which is a little surprising.)

Some of the sessions that look like yawnfests at ASE Boston are:

• Which PPC Engines Work and How?
  Most likely a very basic intro to adwords, ysm, and adcenter. Has been rehashed a million times on crappy blogs. Maybe good for an absolute beginner, though.
• The State of Ad Networks
  Yep, affiliate marketing is a growing industry. What a surprise.
• PPC Super Strategies You MUST Know
  Being done by Amit Mehta, which should be enough to tell you it’s going to suck. Probably going to talk about some ppc tricks that have been run into the ground by blackhats years ago and are now swirling at the bottom of the bucket on digitalpoint. Maybe good for a laugh, however.

Some of the sessions that look f’n rad at ASE Boston are:

• Affiliate Marketing Basics For Merchants
  As an affiliate, this is your chance to understand the merchant side of the business. Without at least a little knowledge on this topic, you are at a disadvantage and much more open to getting screwed over. This will also help you out if you someday want to start doing work on the merchant side of things.
• Content That Kills
  Did you outsource your landing page copy to India and now can’t get any sales? Maybe this session will teach you how to stop writing like a pre-schooler and start actually selling something.
• Legal 2.0: Hot Topics in Affiliate Marketing
  They’re going to be talking about what you can, and can’t do, legally, in affiliate marketing. This is being run by 2 lawyers and a representative from the FTC. No joke. You want to cover your ass, and you also want to listen to these guys. Legal battles are the anti-fun.

Lucky for you, there are multiple sessions going on at one time, so you can pick and choose between them to suit your needs, or just hang out in the exhibit hall and get free stuff/talk to affiliate network peeps.

Ok, so enough about the conference itself, time to talk travel. Nickycakes, being a Boston resident, will be making some more posts at a later date about what to actually DO in Boston, but for now, you need to know a few things about hotels and transportation.

The hotel the conference is being held at is not in the middle of the city. It’s about 2 miles away from the middle of the city. The subway system in Boston is AMAZING. Nickycakes had his car here for a few months when he first moved, and promptly drove it back to Maryland and gave it to his sister because it was a waste of space/money. Nickycakes can get anywhere in the city in about 15 mins to half an hour on the T (Boston’s name for the subway). It’s very, very convenient. Unfortunately, there is no T stop at/near the Boston Seaport Hotel where ASE is being held. The hotel is about half way between the airport and the city, so there is a bus that runs every 10 minutes from one part of the city (not the middle) to the hotel and back, which means you CAN get downtown when you need to, but it will likely turn into a nightmare if you plan on going into the city and back to the hotel for meals and stuff a lot during the day. Here’s a small portion of the Boston T map to illustrate (the colored lines are subway and the gray line is the silver bus line):

So here’s what most people will probably be doing with their time: Wake up, get breakfast, attend stuff at the conference, grab lunch, do some more stuff at the conference, leave around 4 or 5pm to get dinner, hang out for a while, go to some clubs and parties till around 2 am, then afterparty type stuff until early morning, get a couple hours of sleep, and repeat. If you’re at the seaport hotel, you will need to get breakfast at the conference, which is fine if you paid for the whole shebang, but won’t do if you just paid for the exhibit hall, meaning you will have to eat in a hotel restaurant or something. Not a big deal, unless they’re all full of people from the conference eating and you can’t get a seat. Lunch is the same idea. Once you leave the hotel to go do stuff in the city, getting back to your room to change or grab something is going to be a pain, as in a 45min to 1hour minimum ordeal round trip. If you plan on staying out past 1 am (which you will be), the bus line to the hotel will have stopped running, so there will be a required cab ride. It won’t be expensive really, but when all the bars are getting out at night, good luck getting a cab. If you plan on driving, and staying at the hotel, you will have no problem parking at the hotel itself, but good luck finding a spot in the city, seriously. Not to mention, the seaport hotel costs like twice as much as most of the good hotels right in downtown boston.

Nickycakes recommends staying at a hotel around Boston Common, near the Park Street T Stop. This is pretty much the hub of the city, transportation wise. Most of the high-end bars/clubs in the city are around here, you’re within walking distance of some of the best food in the country, as well as the biggest pile of scenic old-school ivy covered history-packed crap that exists in the US. And, you will only need to take the bus thing to the conference twice, once in the morning, and once in the afternoon, all during the time when the bus is actually available. After that, you can get back to your hotel, change, walk out the door, and be near all the good spots for dinner, clubbing, walking, movie-watching, whatever.

Here are some really good hotel choices to look at:

• Nine Zero Hotel - Probably the closest to the Park Street T, really convenient place to be in, especially for getting to the conference. Get on the T right outside the hotel, take the red line to south station, get on the bus and you’re at the hotel.
• Four-Seasons Boston - On the other side of the Boston Common from Nine Zero, so a 3-5 minute walk from Park Street T. Right in the middle of some good clubs where all the hotties go on the weekends, and in the middle of some great eating spots. Real close to Chinatown where they have some bangin’ restaurants open till 5 AM.
• Hyatt Regency - Right near the Boston Common as well.
• There are a few more real expensive ones (well about as expensive as the conference hotel, which is nearly as overpriced as ubercamp) if you wanna drop some big dollars. Fifteen Beacon is right near Park Street and looks amazing as far as quality goes. And you can’t go wrong with Ritz-Carlton Boston Common.

Also worth noting, the conference is strictly 21+ at this point. At ASW there were a few people able to slip through the cracks and get in although they were under 21, but Shawn Collins (the awesome dude who is one of the 2 people that started the thing) has said that they’ll be cracking down this year, so if you do decide to come and you’re under 21, don’t be mad when you don’t get in. Some people, are coming just to hang out, which is awesome, since there are plenty of things going on around the city after the conference hours which are awesome. Can’t get into bars or whatever, but theres plenty of other stuff happening.

More posts to come, of course, as Affiliate Summit East Boston gets closer. Click here to get more info and buy a conference pass.

Keep it real.