This part is much shorter: Ian and I just generally discuss related aspects of my work.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m hesitating whether to publish my own version of the interview. It has parts that don’t appear in Ian’s version (primarily explanations in layman’s terms of what I did as well as some elementary concepts that I mention), less technical stuff, and other things which simply did not belong in his interview. I think I will publish it, but do it at the same time I’m publishing another post, so readers will have something else to escape to in case it’s proving to be boring or too long. Based on the responses I got from my last post, I actually don’t think my readers found the post boring at all (somewhat surprising to me), but my version is long. So I won’t take any chances ;).
Edit: Oh, forgot to mention. My post will have links to movies, some mine, so not, that could be interesting to watch and will help illustrate the points made. Not sure how I’ll link to mine and whether they’re worthy of viewing, but the other stuff certainly is.
A while ago I was approached by Ian Ma, a guy who found me through my blog, and was interested in interviewing me for a Machine Learning community about my Ph.D. work – a project called Mosaic World. I warned Ian: ask an Academic – even an ex-academic – about his work, and don’t be surprised if you’ll get a really long answer.
Since I’ve been asked by several people “really, what is it that you did during your studies?” I thought of combining both. Therefore, I wrote a (very) long post about what I’ve done, in layman’s terms, took bits of it for Ian’s interview and added some bits that were not in my original post (mainly technical aspects). I planned to publish it together with another post, preferably a humorous one, in case I scare some readers away.
After reading my answers, Ian decided to break up my interview to two parts and politely asked me if I could not to publish my post until he publishes both parts of the interview. I’m actually wondering whether I’ll post my version at all, since much of it is the same… perhaps I’ll just do it “for the record” so if anyone ever asks me what I’ve done, I’ll have somewhere to point him at. If I do that, I’ll also post some links to some online movies (some mine, some not) which I think are cool and will help convey the points I make.
Either way, if you’re interested in what I’ve done, my answers to Ian are not very technical (only slightly more than my original version). If there’s any chance that you won’t find this interesting, feel free to skip ahead.
The third and final day started with a keynote presentation given by Peter Shankman (@SkyDiver). Peter claims to have ADOS (Attention Deficient Ooh Shiny!). I think this was one of the best talks I’ve ever heard, and I intend to write a separate post summarizing what I learned from it later on this week. Peter is a natural speaker and is also extremely funny (and you can tell that it was not rehearsed because he had very funny responses to some of the questions posed by the audience).
After that, I went to lunch with Paul Moss and Jenn Cmich. Moss Affiliate Marketing are a small affiliate network but one of my favorites. They are extremely attentive – and well – are just great. The lunch (which was planned this months ago) was with Paul, the owner (check out his Blog) and Jenn, my affiliate manager. It was great to finally meet them in person after several phone conversations and lots of emails. I highly recommend joining them – they are the most attentive network I participate in.
After this, I went for a final visit through the Meet Market, took some business cards, some souvenirs, made some more connections, and went home.
Later that night we had a 202 affiliate meetup (we do this every month here in NY) which was great, where I again met many of my friends and made some new ones. This was a great finale to a fantastic summit! (The picture was taken by Nils Friedman – whom I don’t think is on Twitter – but has a photography website)
Credit to both pictures here belong to Drew Bennett (@BenSpark), who shows everyday photos on his blog.
I was warned that day 2 is going to be even tougher than day 1, fortunately, this proved to be wrong. The day started by a very inspiring keynote presentation by Chris Brogan (@ChrisBrogan) and Julien Smith (@Julien)
The Meet Market, if anything, was less hectic than before even though there were (supposedly) more people and many new vendors. I spoke to representatives from Linkshare, Azoogleads, Commission Junction, Linkconnector, Clickbooth, Clickbank, Copeac, Shareasale, MediaWhiz and some other networks I’m not a member of (and probably some I am a member of and simply forgot). By now I was used to networking (not that I’m ever bad at it), but was handling it like a used car salesman. I literally patted myself on the back.
One of the nice thing about the summit is that they offered a mentor/mentee program. Since I’m new to this industry, and historically whenever I made mistakes, they were a result of lack of information (and because of not planning ahead or bad judgment), I figured this could be both helpful and fun. Jen Goode (@Jgoode), the organizer, assigned me to Jay Berkowitz (@JayBerkowitz), one of the speakers, and owner of Ten Golden Rules, an internet marketing consulting firm.
Jay turned out not only to be a superb mentor, but also a really, really nice guy. He also gave a very interesting talk where he discussed 10 emerging trends that will likely to dominate next year, 2010. After his talk was over, Jay and I had a very interesting discussion in which he interviewed me for his podcast series; in the podcast we discussed the advice he gave me, how I implemented it (“Perfectly” according to him), and how extremely helpful it could be for other people as well. I intend to dedicate a separate post to our discussions and the advice he gave me, as well as provide a link once it’s up.
Later I went on to MarketLeverage’s pizza party with John Chow (@JohnChow). This event was organized by Dina (@MLDina) and was a lot of fun.
It’s quite funny, the highlight of the summit – for me – were the two MarketLeverage events. However, I’m not even a MarketLeverage affiliate! How Ironic 😉
Even though there were plenty of parties afterwards, I really felt the need to go home, rest a bit, and see my son. What’s the point of living 15 minutes away from a conference if you don’t get to see your family? (By the time I got home on Sunday both my wife and son were already asleep). I mean, who can resist this cute little face? 😉
Before I begin: I took a lot of pictures from the day using my crappy phone camera (I know, I should’ve brought a camera), so when I met Drew Bennett, a professional photographer and the guy behind the “Photo a day” blog, I asked for his permission to use his photos. So all credit goes to him.
I know I said I’m going to be providing every day a summary of the summit. What I didn’t realize is how intense it is going to be, and how tired I’ll be at the end of every day. And once I returned, how much work and emails would’ve piled up. Excuses, excuses, I know. Anyway, I figure, better late than never. So here’s my perspective on the fantastic event that was Affiliate Summit East 2009.
The day started with the Meet Market. Basically a space filled with merchants, affiliate networks, affiliates and press all trying to talk to each other. I’m pretty used to similar events, but it was quite overwhelming (considering more than 3,000 people registered to ASE that should not be surprised). I started losing my voice after about 45 minutes – probably spoke to 15 people by this time. Nonetheless, I forced myself to network as much as possible, after all, this is what the summit is all about (I call this “Networking on Steroids”). And it was definitely worth it: I made so many contacts, some of which I hope have become new friends, which just proves how important these networking events are.
Of particular interest was meeting the PPCBully guys. PPCBully 2.0 is a fantastic research tool for PPC advertising which I bought, and watched their weekly webinars with great interest. So it was very cool meeting Emil Paz (@ppcbully), Ran Aroussi (@Aroussi) and Yefi Gureni (@yefig) in person.
But in the back of my mind I was just thinking of the evening. Why? Because of the Yacht Party! As I stated in a previous post, I won a ticket to the MarketLeverage Yacht Party.
Once it was evening, three limos (each with room for 28 people!) took us to the Valiant, the yacht where the party was to take place on. Although there were some hiccups, the first two limos were taken to the wrong address (fortunately I was on the third), this ruined none of our moods. Once we were all on the boat, we ate a delicious meal made by celebrity chef Casey Thompson.
Then the cruise started, we went from the east river southward, reached the statue of liberty, made a circle and got back to where we left.During this time I was introduced to many interesting, exciting and successful people. First I got to meet super blogger John Chow (@JohnChow), and even star at the beginning of his coverage of this trip (as you can see in the movie above). John is not just a super blogger, but also extremely friendly. He is also the man who defeated Google (I hope I’m linking to the right article).
I also met and had a long and insightful conversation with Drew Bennett (@BenSpark), the “Photo a day” blogger, Kim Rowley (@KIMarketing), an affiliate marketing mogul (been doing affiliate marketing longer than anyone I have ever met!). Heather Smith (@HeatherinBC), also known as the Blog Queen, who’s always up to a good laugh (we played my standard game of “guess where I’m from” based on my accent, and for the first time ever someone actually got it! Not heather ;), Murray Newlands (@MurrayNewlands), a cool guy who was quite shocked I’m not doing (yet!) email marketing. I also spoke to Richard Young, a publisher, and our conversation was one of the best I’ve had during the entire summit (not just the Yacht party) – what a great guy. There were many more. Apologies to anyone whom I’ve forgotten! Remind me if I forgot you? please?
All of this was made possible thanks to the amazing Dina Riccobono (@MLDina) who organized this entire event for MarketLeverage. Dina is not just a fantastic organizer, but a sweet and fun person.
The Affiliate Summit (Affiliate Summit East 2009) begins tomorrow. Although I’ve participated in a number of academic conferences (and presented in most), I have to admit I’m particularly excited for this one, as I’ve never been to this type of conference.
As a silver pass member, unfortunately I won’t be able to attend many of the lectures I would’ve liked. But it almost doesn’t matter: there are so many people I wish to meet, and have set up meetings with, and there are going to be plenty of networking events and parties (Missy Ward’s party list). This is definitely unlike any academic conference I’ve attended!
Since I won a ticket to MarketLeverage’sVIP Yacht Party, it’s obvious I’m particularly looking forward for this social event!
I’ll try and provide the highlights of every day from my perspective. Hopefully I won’t be too thrashed after a long day of networking and excitement!
This is going to be short so I’ll finish now. Can’t wait for the summit to start! And the coolest thing: unlike most visitors, since I’m a local – I get to sleep in my own bed at home every night. The hotel is about 15 minutes away by Subway from my home 😉
P.S. If you read this and see me in the summit, come say hello! I’d be very happy to meet you.
Since this is the first post on this brand new blog, I’m basically going to repeat what I wrote in my ‘About Me’ page.
This is my first attempt of having a blog on ‘serious’ matters. In the past I’ve had several personal blogs, and not only really enjoyed it, but was quite successful as well (one of them was the #1 blog for a small website for a period of several months).
Who am I? My name is Udi Schlessinger. I’m currently trying my luck as an entrepreneur. After working for several years as a software developer and a team lead, I realized that pure programming isn’t for me. So I went ahead, moved to London, and did a Ph.D. in Computer Science (specifically, biologically inspired computing: I created agents that have neural networks as brains and get smarter through evolution. You know, very sci-fi stuff, matrix-like evil-AI thingies).
Unfortunately, I graduated exactly when this recession started (Oct’ 2007 – which is a bit funny considering I finished my M.Sc. in May 2000 – when the previous recession started. In fact, I’ve never worked in a period that was not a recession!). So not only I was ‘fresh’ out of school in terms of my academic background, NY isn’t particularly a good place for people who want to work in areas that relate to my Ph.D. That is, unless you’re willing to work for a financial place that likes this sort of thing. Fortunately for me, I actually like finance (that was my focus at college). So I found myself working for a huge investment bank, which was a new experience for me, and yet unfortunately, one I did not like.
Therefore, in April I decided that I’m going to pursue my own thing. I set a 5-stage multi-year plan, and started. I won’t elaborate much on this, but I will say the first stage consists of getting enough passive income using affiliate marketing & website creation to survive on, and the second stage consists of creating tools for affiliate marketing (a market I think is far from mature). I’m still at stage 1 but hopefully will move past that soon.
After doing this for several months I realized I need to voice my opinions. I learned so so much. I met numerous interesting people in the NY affiliate meetups. I learned what to do and what not to (still remember my first Google slap). Since there’s only so much one can write in Facebook status lines or say to friends, I decided to create this blog!
My goal is to discuss various issues: affiliate marketing, SEO, Google vs Yahoo vs Bing, the market, Artificial Intelligence in affiliate marketing (and elsewhere) and basically everything I can think of. I hope you’ll find this interesting!
If you feel like sending me a note, please, by all means go ahead. My email is Udi at IndustryReview.org. Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/uschles
