Archives for April 2018

Darren Blatt, CEO of Affiliate Ball, joined me to chat on my podcast, This is Affiliate Marketing with Shawn Collins.

I wanted to learn more about the real Darren, so I asked him a variety of questions I figured he had not been asked in previous interviews.

We discussed…

Topics included…

• The last movie he watched
• How he got the nickname D-Money
• Perry Farrell
• His days at Ohio State
• When he was a Greek in college
• Why he moved from Ohio to Los Angeles
• Halal Guys – red or white sauce?

Links from this episode

• Darren on Facebook
• Darren on Instagram
• Darren on LinkedIn
• Affiliate Ball

If you enjoyed this episode of This is Affiliate Marketing with Shawn Collins, please share it.

This is Affiliate Marketing with Shawn Collins is focused on the people behind the affiliate management/OPM companies, advertisers/merchants, affiliates/publishers, and affiliate networks.

On each episode, Shawn interviews a new guest related to the industry, so you can learn more about the people of affiliate marketing.

After all, affiliate marketing is about the people; not the companies.

Back when we started Affiliate Summit in 2003, we didn’t have money or experience in running conferences. But we had an even more valuable asset, the desire to be better than the other options out there.

At the time, the standard for affiliate marketing conferences was an event called Affiliate Force. There were positives to it, but Missy Ward and I saw lots of areas for improvement, and we wanted to create something we would want to attend.

A lot of the early feedback was focused on what we were doing “wrong”. Well, the perception from some people that we were doing things wrong was because it was different from what they were used to.

We had no plans to emulate what we saw as a broken model. Sure, it was the most successful of the affiliate marketing events out there at the time, but that wasn’t saying much.

This was a passion project that we had to squeeze in on evenings and weekends while we paid the bills with our day jobs. There was no way we were going to sacrifice our time and opportunities to champion mediocrity and be another Affiliate Force.

No, we were going to be Affiliate Summit.

One important lesson we learned was that we didn’t know how to do it the “right way”, so we just did it the way we thought it should be done.

Based on our own experiences and tapping into our friends in affiliate marketing, we worked up a list of the problems with conferences and figured out solutions. That made more sense to us.

We employed a five-step process: listen, adapt, pivot, rinse, repeat.

Simply by asking people what they wanted and giving it to them (within reason) became our secret sauce. And people liked the taste from the start because it was literally what they wanted in a conference and tradeshow.

We still focus on feedback to evolve, and it’s genuinely odd to me that people are surprised that we ask for feedback and then follow-up with more questions to double down on the good stuff and fix the bad stuff.

Missy and I had frustrations with the tunnel vision of Affiliate Force, and that led to more of a crowdsourced approach for Affiliate Summit. Despite being admonished by people for doing things differently, we continued on our path. We didn’t want to be them, we wanted to beat them.

And it’s a good thing because by the time Affiliate Summit was a year old, Affiliate Force ceased to exist.

Over the years I’ve heard from lots of people at Affiliate Summit that they only want to meet certain types of attendees.

People focused on sales of products and services in a revenue share arrangement want to stay with their tribe and the same with lead generation folks. The belief that the other side has nothing to offer them is ingrained in a lot of people, and that’s a shame.

When you’re dismissing a whole group like that, you’re diminishing your own opportunities.

At Affiliate Summit East 2017, 58% of attendees self-identified as focusing on Sales of Products or Services. The remaining 42% chose Lead Generation. Those people painting the other side with a broad brush are missing out on around half of the crowd, and that’s a mistake.

Come back with me for a minute to the spring of 1992 at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC.

U2 was going to be in the stadium in the late summer, and a bunch of us in my fraternity went to wait out for tickets for days before they went on sale. Frat boys from the University of Maryland working for a ticket broker.

After we arrived and took our place in line, another group of guys came up and said they were going to be first. They looked to be homeless, and I was thinking we were in for an ugly few days.

Soon after, a burgundy and gold custom van rolled up. It was covered in a mix of Washington Redskins player names and numbers, as well as Bible verses. In big letters on the side it read “Redskin Rob”.

This guy, Rob, gets out of the van and approaches the group that just arrived and tells them the plan for getting all of the best tickets. Our crew approaches to say we were there first. And in that moment, I thought we were headed for a fight. That would have sucked because I am a bad fighter and all I wanted to do was chill out and drink cheap beer.

But a funny thing happened. We decided to work together — unlikely allies ended up alternating spots in line to take over the top twenty spots. A unified group to keep back any new people who wanted to overrun the line.

We became fast friends. We drank, ate, talked, played football, and laughed with each other for three days. When it was all done, I genuinely missed these guys. Strangers who I looked at with disdain days before.

In the end, we were just a bunch of people looking to earn some money and get by.

Innovation is happening in all corners of the industry, and in many cases, you don’t know who you don’t know. Change that up and reach out to some strangers. You could learn a thing or two.