Your First Affiliate Summit. Back Home. So Now What?

Hopefully you read the previous part to this: Your First Affiliate Summit. You are There. So Now What? - If not, you may want to read it first.

So you're home now and depending on how you well you followed my advice, you may have 100 opportunities or you may have a few. Either way, now there's work to do.

If you did all according to plan while Affiliate Summit, you've made a lot of new friends. You must have, otherwise you totally ignored me, but I'll let you read on just in case you hadn't had a chance to read my post yet. 😉

You may have even talked about following up about something with somebody. Maybe you met someone that can help you finish building something you've been working on. Or maybe you found out one of the presenters lives 10 minutes from you and you guys talked about getting breakfast or lunch soon.

So now what?

Follow Up!

It is so easy to talk and talk. But very few people do, during one of the sessions I attended, a panel with John Rampton, Zac Johnson, John Chow and Syed Balkhi, it was said several times to follow up. I am guilty of doing it myself too and sometimes we genuinely run out of time, but this is why I highlighted a few scenarios just a minute ago. It is critical you follow up.

Follow up with all and everyone you talked about following up first. Even if it's an email or a message. This is your first thing to do. Follow up especially if there was some interest in partnering up or working for one an other at any level.

After you've done that, follow up with everyone else that you met even if you didn't tell them you would follow up with anything. Just follow up to stay in touch, if they haven't asked about your business yet, then don't tell them yet. Don't be that guy. Fell free to leave your signature as is, feel free to go on about your business, but just let them know that you remember them and wanted to make sure you two stayed in touch.

That simple gesture will go a long way. You've just planted the seed for a great friendship anything else after that is icing on the cake.

Following up can be as simple as sending a picture of you together, a short email, a short fb message, a quick phone text. Whatever you want but think about this. Each one of you met possibly 15 - 300 people. How many of those people do you think will follow up? Very few if any.

You will be remembered, and that is worth attending the entire event. So once you're finished following up?

Use the Information and Content

It's a given that you should start using the stuff you learned right away. These are cutting edge techniques and the latest information to hit the streets. The only other way you can find out the information here is if you follow the speakers and their work independently of Affiliate Summit. But as far as the public is concerned this is the first time most people are learning about this stuff.

Again, just like meeting people, learning and applying is a numbers game. If you go back home and apply what you've learned to your business, you'll be ahead of all your competitors. How many of them attended Affiliate Summit? How many of them know what you know? your time to own them is now.

Besides applying the lessons learned, you have a huge opportunity to write about the event. You might have heard me saying this before, or maybe heard other people say it too. Your company is now a media company, whatever you do you now need to add media to the end of it. Creating interesting, educational or entertaining media must be at the core of your marketing strategy. But we'll talk more about that later.

For now, take advantage of the pictures you took, any videos you recorded, notes you took during sessions and publish some stories on your blog. I do this for Affiliate Summit after each event and I still have tons of unpublished stuff, here's my Affiliate Summit section by the way. You have an opportunity to take a corner of your niche, a piece of your vertical and be the source of cutting edge information or strategies that will help your business and your clients. Get creative, but you should have enough raw content to last you for weeks!

If you don't think you have enough content of your own to write about or produce blogposts, then do some curation. Write about your experience and highilght the best parst of the events. Reneta from Siteground did that exact thing, adding a lot of insight and her own experience of the event to a blogpost.

Something I do with photos I take at Affiliate Summit is that I add it to my Affiliate Summit Photos Album. It's fun to look at and also reminds me to follow up with those people I've met in the past.

Plan the next Affiliate Summit

If you've done all of the stuff I mentioned earlier then it's time to plan the next one. Affiliate Summit happens every six months and every single time I've attended it is awesome. Worth every penny. I've made friends there for life, I've made thousands of dollars from working with people I met there and I've grown and learned more than I ever imagined possible.

Once you attend, you need to keep the momentum going and come back for a second one.

In case you didn't know, you can still buy the Video Pass for Affiliate Summit East 2014. But more importantly, you can start registering for Affiliate Summit West 2015, coming back to the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. Believe me, you want to be there. Get your tickets early because Vegas usually sells out. Video pass or ASW15 Registration link.