Meetup202 is now in Los Angeles, by popular demand. Our largest user base is actually in the Los Angeles area, and after going to Affiliate Summit East last week in Boston, we met tons of people from the LA area. We are excited to put a new meetup202 on the map, and this one is going to be big! We have not set an exact date on out first meetup yet, but you can join early, as we will probably be having an event every month, or every other month at the very least.

If you live or around the Los Angeles or South Cali area, please join us, click here to join the meetup group. We look forward to getting together with everyone. Theses are casual meetups at areas that provide food, drinks and most importantly internet access. Network, Associate and Meet with other PPC Super Affiliates in LA and around the area. See you there!

http://affiliate.meetup.com/49/

Three full days of glorious excitement for sure! Lots of things going down at these events and Affiliate Summit is definitely one of the best for networking and meeting other affiliates in the industry!

Arrival

Team202 arrived in Boston, MA, where Affiliate Summit East 08 took place this year a day early, on Saturday August 9th. We checked into our hotel along with the AffSpy team and Paul of UberAffiliate since they flew in with us on the same flight coming from the MediaBreakaway conference prior. We didn't get the chance to stay at the on-site hotel since it was completely booked over at the Seaport, but we're glad we chose to stay in the Westin (which was roughly 2-3 blocks away from the main hotel) because everyone else was there!

Affiliate Summit Day 1

The first day of the event was awesome. We had a table (#69) at the meet market to show everyone what 202 was all about. It was great meeting familiar faces and several new ones. It was definitely a lot more crowded in the meet market this time than it was last time (Affiliate Summit West in Vegas). They definitely crammed the tables close to each other and the ballroom was probably smaller but it also looked like there were more tables than last time (but I wouldn't quote myself on that). Some people came up to us to congratulate us on the awesome tool and tell us how much they loved it, others were completely new and wanted to know what 202 was all about. It was great meeting 202 users in person as well since we never ever see you guys otherwise.

We met lots of people, many were also non-affiliates (such as Merchants, Advertisers, or Networks) who were interested in knowing what 202 was about and how they can work with us directly. We definitely exchanged tons of business cards and loved networking with everyone who stopped by. We also gave away a ton of new Prosper202 shirts which some of you may have seen from videos or pictures John Chow posted on his blog. Those were completely gone within the first 2-3 hours. We ran out fast and the best part was, about a dozen guys sport those shirts around the meet market! There was some confusion because other people though we had a huge staff going when in reality, there was only two actual 202 members there!

Unfortunately we were at our table the entire day of the event so we didn't get to scope out anything else that went on except we did get to stop by several of the other tables that were in the meet market towards the end of the day. Of course we snagged ourselves tickets to the ShareASale boat party for later that night!

iPhone App

A few people were lucky enough to get a glance on our next project with is the iPhone App for 202. Although I don't want to spoil the surprise, it is definitely going to rock your world when this comes out. If you haven't gotten yourself an iPhone already, you might want to consider getting one just for this App (just kidding). We've received requests for a similar App on the Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones so for sure we'll hit those up as well. Since I won't get into specifics of what the iPhone App does here, you can be sure everyone who saw the demo is definitely excited about it and is anxiously waiting. We hope to have an estimated arrive sometime in the next few weeks or next month, depending on how backed up we are. So for now, no promises.

IANteract Dinner

We were personally invited by Ian Fernando to attend a private dinner he held at the Anthony Pier 4 Seafood Restaurant called IANteract dinner. About 22 people attended and naturally we talked about affiliate related stuff. I wanted to personally thank Ian for the wonderful dinner and perhaps in the near future, we'll consider doing a Dinners202 ourselves in Vegas or something ^_~

ShareASale - Under The Stars

Like the last affiliate summit event, ShareASale held their Under The Stars party, this time, on a big boat next to the docks. It was several stories high but only 3 were actually used for the party. There was lots of people who went and more networking occurred. Although I think their last party in Vegas was better, they definitely know how to throw a party each and everytime.

Affiliate Summit Day 2

The second day of Affiliate Summit meant the actual exhibit halls were open and booths were ready to be viewed. Unlike the first day, where we had a table, we were free to roam around and meet and network with people and there was definitely a lot more leg room and breathing room in the exhibit hall in stark comparison to the meet market. AffSpy was there with a booth and an announcement that their site was now in public beta. If you guys haven't already signed up, you should do so now as their software compare offers across different networks and it's 100% free to use!

I went ahead and stopped by several different booths to check out what was going on and had the pleasure to meet with more affiliates and affiliate managers, including some merchants. One of the best things about attending these events (and this has been said by many before) is the value in networking and striking conversations with so many people. I definitely tried to talk to a lot of people this time since I didn't get the chance to last time we attended Affiliate Summit West.

Meeting more Affiliates

I definitely got to meet more affiliates this time than I did last time at Affiliate Summit West, however a few faces I was hoping to run into (and they were there at ASE), I didn't see. This goes to show you how big the event is with thousands of people running around, sometimes trying to meet up with people is not probably. However I am sure I'll catch them again at Affiliate Summit West. We're also making plans to attend Ad Tech NY possibly since it came up during one of the conversations at Affiliate Summit. No plans yet but we're always looking to check out the next event (it gives us a really good excuse to get off our lazy butts and go out for once).

The real networking continued long after the exhibit hall was closed and LinkShare held their own private party at a local restaurant in the area called Tia's. It was limited food and drinks but it was a blast and we had time to catch up with some people we met earlier in the day or from the meet market.

Affiliate Summit Day 3

Before we left towards the conference for day 3, one of our friends mentioned that they read online that Cheers (the famous TV show and bar) was apparently located in Boston and the bar was what inspired the TV show. I wanted to go scope it out and check out downtown Boston. We had only ventured out to The Other Side cafe to meet with some friends the first night, but aside from that, remained fairly close to the hotel and event. That first night we met my friend Chrys, founder of Fliggo and supposedly his buddy, one of the founders of Napster. I told Chrys we'd catch up with him personally after he moves out to San Francisco next month!

Back on topic, we headed over to the exhibit hall again. Seeing as how I had the Press pass and was suppose to catch what was happening in the classroom sessions (one of which was held by John Hasson the night before which I caught up with during the IANteract dinner in person), I went ahead and tried to look for them. In the end, a few other people attended and scoped it out. Personally I find it irrelevant to attend these classrooms unless you are super new to the industry. For one, they usually film it and post it online, and for two, the information are very basic and targeted towards beginners. I find the value is more in talking to people face to face. Jonathan Volk was there was as well as some other big name affiliates but we won't start listing them here.

I spent most of my time the last day chatting up a storm with some people at the exhibit hall and really making the best of it. Of course during the entire event, the two most common questions we frequently get asked came up, and by now I'm sure you've all heard of these questions... How do you guys make money and what are your future plans for 202? As many of you know, we don't have a monetization plan and we are focusing on truly building a world class company that stands by what it stands for, helping affiliates and others. While we do have a list of things we're working on, everything is a wait to be seen. One of which I have already revealed at this point, an iPhone App! Stay tune for future announcements!

If you haven't already, please consider subscribing to our RSS feed and newsletters for important news and updates! As always, we hope you guys are making bank!

We'll post some pictures soon...

Recently we flew out to Denver, CO for a 2-day super affiliate get together with top affiliates from CPA Empire. It was definitely a blast talking to so many people. We've never been to Denver before so it was definitely an experience. All the affiliate managers were very hospitable and totally awesome. As always, Doug (my manager), was the best!

We got off at the airport and took a shuttle ride to get into Denver, roughly a 45-minutes drive. Once at the hotel, we checked in and was able to attend sessions held in the conference ballroom the first day. Major news were announced and a lot of industry related talk were discussed throughout the 2-day event. Some things were shared and lots of tips and networking were circulating. We met lots of affiliates, advertisers, merchants, and even other networks that work with CPA Empire and had a fantastic time. We even went out to a few bars and hit up the Rockies baseball game as a retreat and everyone just really connected.

One of the bigger news that was already announced by other affiliates that attended was that CPA Empire will be doing a complete rebranding of their company. They purchased affiliate.com and will be changing everything over to that. In addition, they hired a team of 12 professional coders to work full time on developing a new tracking system and slowly transition towards moving off DirectTrack in hopes to really take it to the next level.

This was the third annual conference and they're hoping to do this every year for their top affiliates. According to Scott Richter himself, the network made a gross revenue of $140 million last year and as a rough estimate, there was probably about 70-100 attendees who made it to the conference. I am just guessing but these 70-100 affiliates drive probably 90%-95% of the network revenue meaning some of these guys are doing MASSIVE volume. Of course this is all just an assumption but for sure everyone there was totally cool.

Some of the more known figures that showed up included Jeremy Schoemaker (ShoeMoney), Jon Fisher (WickedFire), Jonathan Van Clute (LP Gen), Gauher Chaudry (PPCFormula), Paul Bourque (UberAffiliate), Stephen Gill and Gabriel Malka (AffSpy), Eduardo (Viveli), Benny (GeekBlogger), etc... We apologize if we didn't include your name, the list would get quite long...

We thoroughly enjoyed the trip and is now currently in Boston, MA attending Affiliate Summit East 08. We will be blogging about everything that goes on here as well shortly. I wanted to do a personal special shout out to Roland who was totally cool to meet and hang out with both in Denver and Boston!

There is a new Affiliate Marketing Meetup202 Group in St. Louis, MO. It is being headed up by Clayton Williams. If you live in or near Missouri you are welcome to join in, more information can be found here: meetup202.com.

MeetUp202 is a place for affiliate marketers to meet with other like-minded marketers locally. Get together with super affiliates in your area, grow your personal network of contacts and share tips and tricks with fellow marketers. Each MeetUp202 event is different, headed by different organizers, they are generally causal networking events at placing that sell food and provide WiFi access.

St. Louis is now the fourth established MeetUp202 group following San Francisco, Seattle, and Signapore. Join the new St. Louis Affiliate Marketing MeetUp202 group here.

I think your going to love the new release of Prosper202, it now has a fully featured pixel and postback url tracking system. You can now use Prosper202 to track any PPC campaigns, regardless if your using an affiliate network with subid tracking or not.

The best part about the pixel tracking is you will now have a real-time view of your clicks and conversions happening live on your spy view! That also means if you install pixel tracking you don't have to manually update subids any more, it does it for you automatically as the leads come in!. This has been a highly requested feature by our users and it was only made possible because of your input. It now also supports post-back URLs, which previously before Justin Rumpf had made a script for, but there is now an official version of post-back urls embed into the software.

There is also an update to the spy view. The spy view will now show real time click throughs when a visitor comes to your landing page and then clicks through to the offer. Before it used to just show the potential path the vistior would have taken regardless if they actually clicked through. Now if a visitor clicks on your landing page and does nothing, the spy view will reflect that the visitor did not click through. And if the visitor did click through the spy view will only show the extra arrows, signifying that the visitor clicked through from your landing page to the acutal offer. This gives you a real-time view of visitors clicking through your landing page. Please note there is a 1 minute delay for clicks to be updated to reflect the click-through (if you click through to an offer it will take an extra minute for click to register a click-through). Start watching the spy view on the new version and you'll see what we mean!

PPV Affiliates! We have now added in support for tracking Media Traffic keywords automatically, with no extra work T202 will now pickup the keywords from the Media Traffic PPV network. Also we have added the pretty icons for the following networks; Media Traffic, Social Media, Zango, AdonNetwork, Clicksor and TrafficVance. Thanks to Mike Waldrum for submitting a list of the biggest PPV networks to us.

You'll also notice the Prosper202 width has been signficantly increased. We have moved from a 800px solid width to a liquid width that will go up to 1200px wide. This makes it so much easier looking at your stats on T202. We have fixed the bug that logs out users every-time they edit a text-ad as well. Also we have fixed a bug on the landing page analysis screen that would sometimes run a mysql error, and finally we have upgraded a few tables in your mysql database to help it scale better for the future.

And an important note about upgrading, this next update may take a long-time to compete please make sure you let once click update ONCE, and DO NOT STOP the update if it is running. Let the update finish, it may take longer than most updates.

We hope you enjoy this new version, try out the new pixel/postback url tracking and let us know what you think by saying hello on our Prosper202 Forums.

You can download the latest version 1.1.0 here, and you can find the upgrading instructions in our documentation docs.