Have you gone to any affiliate conferences? Have you been to PubCon? Face to face meetings/informal talks always seem to be more productive than firing off emails and endless phone calls.

Does Pubcon offers the same facilities, if you are not able to make it to meetings but still you want rope in quality affiliates? As I am from a different country but want affiliates from all over world.

I've never been to an affiliate conference, and I would love to go to one. Do you think That reps for Chase, BOA, Cap One would hang out at an affiliate conference?

cap one is on this list of reg'd companies: affiliatesummit.com

you'll also likely find many companies who do lead gen for the big boys, who you might want to affiliate with.

PubCon and Aff Summit are your best bets, imo.

disclaimer: i am an unpaid advisory board member for Aff Summit.

I guess I am a little intimidated about going to one of these events. Whereas I have been blessed with my websites, I have been running them for about 5 years, and they are supporting my family of 7.

I am still pretty naive as to a to a lot about this business. I mean, just reading these boards, I'm lost half of the time.

Obviously, I'm doing enough of the right things to be successful, but according to a lot of the posts I have read on various subjects, I am royally screwing the pooch on quite a few things too.

I guess I'm scared to death to get my shot to talk to one of the big boys, and then expose how green I really am by saying the wrong thing ....

they're not all geniuses either. :-)

your learning curve will accelerate geometrically by networking with others - it did for me.

Thanks Rhino, that sounds like good advice ... so that begs to question: Where will I make the best contacts affiliate summit or pub con? Pub-con looks like it would have the most "geniuses" where affiliate summit would have the most publishers like me ...?

i've been to both, they're both great!

at PubCon, you'll find more seo experts, and in-house people who do sem and webmastering of all kinds, definitely more diverse positions / jobs / skills. the sessions will have a wider scope as a result. not to say they're fluffy, they are focused and very high quality, they just cover more ground than Summit, because the audience is more varied and not constrained to an aff focus.

at Aff Summ, obviously, more focus on affiliate activities, and great networking specifically centered on aff-merchant relationships. there's great diversity here too, affs and merchants of all flavors, and far fewer employee types. nice breadth to their sessions too, often ranging outside pure aff focus, but still more narrowly focused on aff activities than PubCon is, for sure.

networking as an aff, doesn't just mean knowing affs, so don't dismiss PubCon just because your focus is mainly as an affiliate.

between hotel and airfare and conf fees, it adds up - your travel costs and timing may be a big factor, given how good both conferences are.

one guarantee i can make, these shows are fun! if you work in this sphere, you will be amazed at how open people are to discussions that will interest you, how great networking is, and how extensive the partying is - it's our chance to socialize and cut loose - and we do that in spades!