Affiliate Summit East 2008 may have come to a close, but a whole new line up of conferences and expos are still underway. Next month I will be attending IzeaFest (September 11-13th) in Florida, then BlogWorld a week later in Las Vegas. For anyone interested in attending IzeaFest, use coupon code “zacjohnson” to save $15 off your registration.

Here are just a few of the speakers lined up for IzeaFest next month:

At first I was hesitant on attending IzeaFest, just for the fact that I’ve been so busy and it’s a week before I have to head to across the country to Las Vegas for BlogWorld. However, it’s been a year since I last visit Florida, and in addition to a nice networking/learning opportunity, I’ll get to visit a few places and relax. I’ve already met and become friends with many of the speakers at the event, but there are a few on the list I’m looking forward to meeting for the first time, along with any interesting attendees that might show up.

Anyone else heading to IzeaFest? If you are in the Florida area, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try and attend the event, and the tickets are pretty cheap.

Better late than ever, so here is the Blog Revenue Report for July 2008. Travel and keeping busy delayed this report from being posted earlier. Since this is a one year case study for the blog and how you can generate money with a blog, I still wanted to make sure it was posted. I started generating revenue with this blog in December 2007 and the case study will conclude at the end of November 2008. Last month, the numbers for this blog ended up at  $5,142.72 profit, which just fell short of it’s previous high. The revenue numbers for July 2008 are shown below.

JULY 2008 BLOG REVENUE REPORT:

- Affiliate Sales/Referrals: $2,383.40
- Private Ad Sales: $1,300.33
- Reviews: $500.00
Total Revenue: $4,216.73

- Ad Spots on Blogs: $45.00
- Miva Ad Campaign: $70.55
Total Costs: $115.55

Total Blog Income for June 2008: $4,101.18

The Miva ad campaign is continually sending more traffic each month, but since the traffic is coming directly to the blog, I haven’t set anything up to test the quality of it. I may setup a few ad campaigns and send traffic to offers and follow up with a traffic quality post. Just targeting “affiliate” type keywords, the blog received 486 clicks in July from Miva. I will let the clicks keep coming through until I exhaust my initial $200 deposit I made into my account. Additional ad spots for ZacJohnson.com were purchased on a few smaller blogs that I read and wanted to show my support for.

If you haven’t already, follow me on Twitter and be sure to submit your questions and requests for future posts. Thanks for being a reader!

One of the best advantages to using Facebook Ads is their ability to send you a massive amount of traffic in a short period of time. Once you have some ads running with a decent click through rate, you can easily throw a bunch of new ads up to see what converts best. A couple of months ago I was running a weight loss targeted campaign that ended up serving over 30,324,503 impressions and 27,538 clicks. What I wanted to show you in this post, was how much of a difference an image can make in your advertising.

In the chart below you will see five of the images I was using in my ad campaign. The text for all five campaigns were the same, only the images were different.

	2,637,259 Impressions 3,288 Clicks (.12 CTR)
	3,205,582 Impressions 3,221 Clicks (.10 CTR)
	3,858,594 Impressions 3,092 Clicks (.08 CTR)
	3,962,476 Impressions 3,000 Clicks (.08 CTR)
	3,260,100 Impressions 2,251 Clicks (.07 CTR)

For those of you wondering what the total campaign stats looked like, here are the figures straight from Facebook.

Without any real explanation, (besides what people prefer to click)… the top ad was pulling in clicks at almost double the rate as the bottom image in the chart. This just goes to show you how important split testing is. Not only should you be testing your “text” ad copy multiple times… but definitely your “image” ad copy!

In what may have been one of the outrageous exhibitors at not only Affiliate Summit, but any other conference I have attended… AshleyMadison.com takes the cake. “Life is Short. Have an Affair“… that’s the slogan behind AshleyMadison.com, which is a dating network specialized towards people looking for “extra-marital affairs“. Instead of on the exhibit floor, maybe this one belonged in the “Ethics of Affiliate Marketing” Panel? I know I wouldn’t have wanted my $4,995 booth next to theirs!

While looking up more information on the company, I found another article on their business of making millions by connecting cheaters. For the CEO of the company… breaking up relationships is purely business.

“This is just a business to me. This is a market need, just like any other business that’s successful. There’s huge demand for it,” says Chief Operating Officer Noel Biderman, who is married with children. Biderman says he is faithful to his wife, but he doesn’t object to the fact that cheaters have helped his online business make more than $20 million since it started in 2002.

Flyers handed out at Ashley Madison Booth
“Thou Shall Make Money from Adultery”

I’m sure they would have had a lot more attendees at their booth if they had fellow adulterer John Edwards in the house… so, what are your thoughts on AshleyMadison and their attendance at Affiliate Summit East 2008?

Walking the exhibit floor at Affiliate Summit is probably the most beneficial part of the event. Not only will you get to see all of the people working at the exhibits and networks, but it’s where you will meet everyone else you were hoping to meet, and even more! I can’t count how many times people came up to me and introduced themselves just to let me know that they were blog readers of mine. I really appreciate and love meeting everyone in person. I was amazed at how many of my blog readers and Twitter followers were able to make the event. Here are just a few of the many I was fortunate enough to meet up with at Affiliate Summit East 08 in Boston.

It wasn’t til the last couple hours of the last day, that I actually got to start meeting everyone that I was hoping to run into. Here I’m pictured with my awesome Advaliant affiliate manager Rich. I wasn’t able to make their fishing cruise the day before the Summit, but I’m sure it was awesome.

The Blogger Room was a massive improvement this time around vs. it’s appearance and size at Affiliate Summit West 08 in Vegas. The room was a lot bigger this time, had enough table space for anyone wanting to come in and out of the room, and best of all… they had a huge tv with a Wii setup… so I had to school everyone on Wii Bowling a few times. Here I am with Affiliate Summit Veterans Jim Kukral, Shawn Collins, Todd Farmer and Debby of Market Leverage.

Even if you were to stay in the Blogger Room for a while, you were sure to meet up with new and old friends. Mark from 45n5.com was the Blogger Room captain again, and I’m also pictured with John Hasson and Ian Fernando.

In the Blogger Room with Charles Ngo

Walking the floor throughout the day, I also got to meet up with many other blog readers and bloggers of their own.

Andrew Payne, Benny Tejeda, Myself and Dave Martinez

Affiliate and Bloggers NickyCakes, Jonathan Volk

This was just a quick collection of a few of the people I met at Affiliate Summit. I would highly recommend you try and get to at least one of the Affiliate Summit events each year. There is no other networking experience like it.