If you’ve been thinking about going to Affiliate Summit West this year, you may have to wait for some cancellations to happen for spots to open up first. I saw a Twitter update this morning from @MissyWard that Affiliate Summit West 2010 is sold out.
According to the website, the ASW crew is busy processing cancellations to open up spots, but with the event being less than two weeks away, I would imagine that things will continue to be tight.
Christopher and I just barely secured our Affiliate Summit West (ASW) 2010 tickets yesterday morning.
Here’s how it all went down.
We’ve actually been trying to decide for a couple of months now if we were going to attend the summit. Before we could commit to attending any outside industry events, we wanted to get all of our in-house goals accomplished first.
Last year we launched several new affiliate sites, managed an offline Meetup group, took on a ton of new clients, opened up the Open Source Marketer Coaching Program, and launched our own affiliate program all before the end of the year. So with everything checked off our list and on schedule now seemed like a good time to go.
Personally, I’ve been wanting to go to Affiliate Summit for a couple of years now. So when I received an email over the weekend that said the event organizers expected to sell out soon, I immediately called up Christopher to see if he was still interested in going. He said he was onboard if we could also do some skydiving on the trip. I totally agreed and it was on.
Affiliate Summit should be a great place to meet potential joint venture partners, find affiliates for the Coaching Program, pick up some affiliate marketing information, and just get out and have some fun. There’ll be tons of companies there, along with representatives from the major affiliate networks, not to mention all the individual affiliates who will be attending the conference.
So, on January 17th we’ll be flying from Dallas into Vegas for three days of affiliate marketing fun.
Having an Internet business is as much about living life the way you want to as it is about making money. That’s why Christopher and I are both students of lifestyle design.
While we work to build our online business interests, we also want to make sure that we are constantly looking for ways to integrate those activities into our lives. We want to purposely blur the lines to end up with lives that are profitable in all areas. Very few people in the 9 to 5 world get to blend their life with their work without loosing a piece of themselves in the process. That’s why we decided that this trip needed to include a little extra curricular wind tunnel skydiving.
Originally we had planned to drive from Dallas to Las Vegas to attend the conference.
Along the way we were going to stop in at Eloy Arizona for a few hours of indoor wind tunnel skydiving at the SkyVenture Arizona facility. They’ve got a state of the art wind tunnel there where they teach people how to skydive in a controlled environment.
If you’ve never actually seen someone take flight in a wind tunnel, then here’s a short 3 minute video that shows what the experience is like.
One day last year, after discussing our bucket lists with each other, Christopher and I discovered that we both share a life long desire to experience the thrill of skydiving in an indoor wind tunnel. I don’t know why, but it just looks like something that would be awesome to do. So we agreed that if we were going to be traveling out west anyway, we definitely had to stop in Eloy on the way.
After researching the route, calculating the round trip mileage and drive time though, we decided we didn’t want to spend 23 hours, one way, in the car. That would have been fun ten years ago, but now it just sounds like a sharp stick in the eye. So we started researching flights and hotel packages to see if we could fly straight into Vegas and stay at the Rio Hotel and Casino where all the action will take place.
Christopher learned that there is an indoor skydiving outfit in Las Vegas that’s less than two miles from the Rio and I discovered that if I cashed in some of my American Express Membership Rewards points we could save almost $500 on $1200 worth of airline tickets and hotel stays. Bonus! So we bought the Affiliate Summit tickets, booked the flights, confirmed the hotel reservations, and agreed to take some time out during the conference to visit Las Vegas Indoor Skydiving.
With all that taken care of, now the real excitement begins. The clock is ticking and we have less than two weeks to create our Twitter lists, follow key influencers, compile a list of vendors to visit on the showroom floor, decide what to wear for three days, and learn what after hours events we should be trying to get into.
Man, how cool is that?
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
P.S. They say, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Well, if Christopher screams like a girl in the wind tunnel and I get it on video, it’s going on YouTube baby!
Benefit from your profitable ideas.