I was at a conference for event planners last Wednesday, and I was surprised in a session about social media that I was the only one using a blog, Twitter or Facebook to market a conference. There must have been 100+ people in the room.

They were all locked into the old, expensive ways of promoting their businesses, yet seemed anxious to get a grip on social media.

That got me thinking that there is an opportunity there to run seminars for all of these verticals that would jump at the chance to pay for a half day primer.

Then I came to my senses and realized I don’t have time to launch a new project like that. However, a great resource came to mind: Mari Smith.

I met Mari at Affiliate Summit West 2009 and was excited to chat with her, as she’s a wealth of information on social media, and somebody who shares plenty of insight.

So, if you’re looking to learn more about this space, especially how to make the most of Facebook, I’d suggest you follow @marismith on Twitter.

There is a new WordPress plugin called Max Banner Ads that enables affiliates to add and rotate banners in blogs without editing themes or monkeying with the codes.

I have been a user of OpenX to serve ads for quite some time, and I’m very happy with the OpenX hosted solution. But I’d say there are more bells and whistles than needed with OpenX for the average affiliate.

If you’re simply looking for a means to easily insert and rotate ads, as well as tracking impressions and clicks, Max Banner Ads looks like an ideal solution.

I just got back from running some errands and got an idea while filling up at the gas pump.

As the dollars ticked up at a rate of more than $4 per gallon, I thought his gas crisis could make for a good affiliate site.

After all, if people have to spend a gallon or three to get to the local mall, the cost to go shopping becomes prohibitive to lots of folks.

So I thought I’d put together a mall or coupon site that touched on the cost of gas as another reason to shop online.

Plus, the site could espouse the virtues of shopping online as a more green way to shop.

I was about to jump into WordTracker to research popular searches regarding gas, fuel, etc. to get ideas for a domain, and then I realized that I just don’t have time for a new project.

So here it is – a site I think could do well with the right positioning and PR efforts.

It’s all yours to leverage the unfavorable gas prices.

I have this habit of monitoring domain registrations for various niches, and I regularly notice domains without the dot (i.e. wwwcompany.com) being registered for affiliates, merchants, and networks.

This is a very common typo, and if you don’t have that domain, you might be surprised to find that somebody else does, and they’re monetizing your oblivion.

I blogged about this years ago, but I’m still seeing this issue play out constantly for affiliate marketers.

Check whether your “no dot domains” are still available or whether you’re going to have to recapture them through action with ICANN.

Also, there’s another domain typo that’s easier to fix, but still results in your rightful traffic missing you.

It’s common for users to only type two W’s or an extra W before the dot. So just set up subdomains that redirect to your main site(s) with two and four W’s before your domain name (i.e. ww.company.com and wwww.company.com).

There is a really entertaining video blog on wine called Wine Library TV, hosted by Gary Vaynerchuk.

The whole series of videos focuses on wines that are available at the Wine Library in Springfield, NJ.

I’d seen a billboard for the show on Route 78 West on the way back from Newark Airport a few times, and finally checked it out about a month ago. Now it’s my favorite vlog, and I don’t even drink wine.

Anyhow, the Wine Library doesn’t have an affiliate program, but if they did, I think these videos would make for some great affiliate creative.

(Hey affiliate networks – you should give these guys a call about getting an affiliate program going!)

Check out Wine Library TV host, Gary Vaynerchuk, on the Conan O’Brien show tonight.

There is a lot of talk about Affiliate 2.0 and harnessing technology to grow affiliate businesses, but how can you really do it?

Video is showing lots of potential, and mobile phone marketing has an exciting future, but both have associated learning curves and other barriers to entry.

How about t-shirts? Doesn’t sound so glorious, right? Well maybe that’s because you haven’t heard of Reactee.

Reactee is a company that enables you to create a t-shirt with a call to action to send a text message to get more information about a given subject.

When people text a word of your choosing, they get an auto-response to their phone of up to 120 characters from you.

For instance, you could create a shirt with the name of your favorite band, wear it to a concert for them, and have your affiliate link in the text response to sell their ringtones or something.

Reactee provides you with a log of all of the SMS requests, messages posted by people to your account, and more. Give it a try.

Who just said something about your site? Keep track of what people are writing about your site with Technorati.

Technorati is a dynamic directory of posts from many millions of blogs and other forms of user generated content, like photos and videos.

You can search on the Technorati site for keywords to see who is writing about the topic. But if you want to narrow it down specifically to your site(s), you can also search for a specific domain.

That’s sort of a hassle, though. You don’t have time to constantly visit the site to run queries, so set up RSS subscriptions for your domain(s).

It’s quick and easy – just a matter of subscribing to RSS feeds in this format: http://feeds.technorati.com/search/affiliatetip.com

Do that and you can easily stay up to date on who is writing about your site(s) and what they are saying.

Sam Harrelson of Cost Per News has created a new blog tag virus thing where he’s asking people to share the business cards they are going to use at Affiliate Summit next week.

It’s timely in that if you who haven’t gotten a whole bunch of business cards set aside for Affiliate Summit, you’d better act on it now. Lots of places can still get them with quick turnaround – iPrint, Vista Print, your local print shop, etc.

Anyhow, Sam explains how he makes a custom business card for every person he meets.

My horrible handwriting would never stand up to that sort of effort, so I’ve gone in a bit of a different direction, and I’m doing an experiment of sorts with my cards.

The are modeled after a football card with a big picture, name and stuff on the front and then some details on the back.

I got these from the Cubicle Card Company. While they cost more than typical business cards, I love them because they look and feel like football cards. I used some back in 2004 and a lot of people have told me they still have that one pinned up at their desk.

Anyhow, mine was focused on my past experience and then my colleague, Amy Rodriguez, has one that is more focused on her personality.

I’m curious to see if there is a different reaction from people when they receive the two approaches.

Maybe Amy’s “style” of throwing a football without having her hand on the laces(!) can even be a conversation starter. Forgive her, she’s a Redskins fan.

Since Sam made this a virus, here are three people I’ll sneeze it on over to share their business card strategy:

Marty M. Fahncke
Scott Jangro
Vinny Lingham

Every year around this time there are a deluge of studies and reports about the biggest shopping days for Christmas. The correct, big shopping dates are key for affiliates to maximize their revenue potential this time of year.

You hear a lot of jibber jabber about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but are these really the gargantuan shopping days on the Internet?

Not so, according to a report from Internet News. On the contrary, while Cyber Monday is expected to see the highest traffic of the season, CoreMetrics predicts sales on the following Monday (December 4th) will be 19 percent higher than Cyber Monday.

That stat is based largely on data from last year when sales on the second Monday after Thanksgiving were up to 22 percent higher than Cyber Monday.

Further, a new study by MasterCard Worldwide claims that neither Black Friday nor Cyber Monday ranks within the Top 5 busiest shopping days.

In fact, the MasterCard study found an increasing number of consumers are putting off the bulk of their Christmas shopping until the final week, and predicts that Dec. 23 will be the busiest shopping day of the year.

Two words: gift cards. Feature them on your site(s), drop a newsletter about them on December 23, do whatever you need to do to make them easy to buy through you.

By the way – in my inbox this morning: LinkShare has a page dedicated to holiday promotions and Amazon affiliates are now eligible to earn referral fees on Amazon.com Gift Certificates through December 31, 2006.

The great news: CoreMetrics is predicting that the 2006 overall holiday retail sales will increase 16 percent over last year’s holiday season.

Pass the eggnog!