My first official session of the day today was Super Affiliate Strategies That Work. The session was a who’s who of “check picture” affiliates (too bad Calacanis isn’t attending this session). Namely John Chow, Zac Johnson, and Amit Patel along with Pepperjam president Kristopher Jones acting as moderator.

I ended up arriving late to this session (thanks again to the less than adequate signage), but once I did get in, it was the start of the Q&A section of the session. Here are some highlights of what was asked:

• Not surprisingly, many of the first questions focused in on black, white and grey hat tactics...focusing more on the dark than the light.
• One guy asked a question about the benefits and pitfalls of black hat techniques as an affiliate - which pulled the veil on the “pissing in pond” mindset that, no matter what Jason C. says, we can’t seem to get away from. John Chow pointed out that we are all marketers, and black or white, it’s still marketing (not sure if I am a fan of that).
• Trademark bidding was discussed a bit - with all panelists agreeing that it isn’t a huge deal for them personally, which I found a bit surprising.
• Someone asked Amit about the best places to do PPC and he confirmed what I’ve experienced - Google, Yahoo! and MSN are the places to be...the smaller engines/content networks are not worth the effort/aggravation.
• Winner Alert - a tool that can be set up in 5 minutes that will help you better understand which of your ads have better click-through rates on PPC. Winner Alert emails you daily with the winning ads.
• For PPC, you can day-part depending on which days convert the best. Amit sees that the best converting days differ based on the niche - so you should track daily conversions and day-part based off of that.
• Zac suggest having a close relationship with your affiliate managers - it helps you keep up on the latest info for the offer and gives you a better chance of getting higher payouts
• Due to the increased use of quality score by Google, affiliates need to be doing well from an organic standpoint as well...if not, you will have a hard time keeping up your quality score.
• Amit is a huge fan of AdWords Editor - it is the only thing he uses to manage his PPC.

Overall, it was a pretty decent session. I was glad to see that the self promotion was held to a minimum, and the tips given would be valuable to most affiliates.