I caught myself slouching, already! Maybe I should have tried to quit smoking as my new years resolution. Well to be fair, I do keep trying to sit up straight. And Eli is still doing great. Out of all the toys he has, by far his favorite is our cell phone and remote control.
It amazes me how lucky I am. I recently went away to Vegas for work. My husband, the wonderful man that he is, took such incredible care of the baby. It's remarkable that, as a mother away from her family, it never occurred to me to be worried or concerned. I had every bit on confidence in my husband and all I felt was homesick. But to be fair, my husband took lots of pictures and sent them to my phone and email. When I spoke with colleagues about our children, they showed me pictures from their wallet that were torn on the corners and a few months old. I whipped out my phone and said, this is my son, ten minutes ago.
While I was away, I remained focused and involved in the Affiliate Summit. There was a small disappointment on my part - I didn't get to attend as many panels and speaker sessions. However, there was such a buzz in the exhibiting area. The room was very alive, and there was a certain comfort feeling being submerged in a group of individuals who share knowledge of the industry. I had the most interesting conversations, met a lot of great people and had some fabulous dinners.
I kept wondering to myself - where's affiliate going? What's the next step? There's speculations and comments and buzz words - and self proclaimed legends who still think Web 2.0 is just a re invention of early 2000 net trends. Maybe I'm just a little naive and positive - but I see the glass half full. Look at fashion, for example. Each trend that comes back, is a reinvented style from two decades before. I mean, really - can you believe women are wearing leggings again? I think it's cool to bring something back and add a little color to it. At least, that's the way I'm viewing things in the industry. Email is making a comeback. Email was like a baby to me. I enjoyed working on it as a product. I feel confident that permission based email marketing will be a successful form of advertising. Mobile messaging is also coming back. I remember I used to send mobile ads out, years and years ago. This must have been back in late 2000. I don't remember what happened to it, maybe it wasn't right timing. But the idea of targeting mobile messages fascinates me. Imagine being on the road, kinda hungry and all of a sudden you get a text message: "Buy on get one free taco at Taco Bell - next left". It's amazing how targeted mobile messages will be able to get, and maybe there will be some privacy issues. Yikes, now I'm scared and anyways, I was talking about affiliate.
And why can't I stop thinking about RSS feeds? I keep seeing all the possibilities in the world for this. I still believe that RSS will be a huge part of affiliate. Think about how easy it would be to send an ad that is specifically targeted to the reader. For example, I use the Google feeder for all my RSS topics. I created folders and I'm able to essentially group my feeds. My "celebrity gossip" folder is just a group of site feeds with similar content. Is there a technology out there, and maybe Pheedo knows how to do this, to target me as a reader? I'm unsure of how the company operates their banner serving technology. Can they target the audience or are the publishers pulling the ads and placing them in the feed. Maybe I need to do more research before I even post things like this. But then again, I don't claim to know more than I actually do.
