Geno Prussakov’s new baby, Affiliate Management Days, launched today in San Francisco. The new two-day conference aims to educate affiliate managers in a professional environment focused on the needs of merchants and advertisers. The show opened with landing-page guru Tim Ash as keynote, with sessions featuring luminaries such as Todd Crawford, Karen Garcia, Jason Spievak and Sarah Bundy running through the day.

Tim Ash’s keynote set the tone for the day: serious content yet still upbeat and entertaining. With a big grin Tim used an opening sequence of photographs to explained that super-affiliates are mercenaries only in it for themselves; buzy, lazy and greedy.

(My personal favorite line of the day: "super-affiliates are lazy. They just want to move to Florida and get a neck tattoo." Of course, that just shows my odd taste in quotes. YMMV)

More seriously, Tim focused in on the 7 Deadly Sins of horrible landing pages:

  1. Unclear call to action.
  2. Too many options, "people are paralyzed by choice".
  3. Give to get – give much more value to prospects than you asking in return.
  4. Too much text. Always simplify.
  5. Keep your promises – don’t offer something in your search ad and then fail to deliver.
  6. Avoid visual distractions.
  7. Lack of trust.

With a only $1 typically spent on landing page optimization for every $83 spent on generating traffic, there is lots of scope for the average affiliate or merchant site to improve their conversion rate dramatically. Tim’s ideas aren’t rocket science, but they are important enough that they should be nailed up above every web designers desk.

Affiliate Management Days has the potential to be a very useful addition to the list of performance marketing trade shows. Affiliate managers have a complex job and most conferences in the space are publisher-focused so there’s no question that there is a niche to be filled.