There’s a topic in our community that rarely gets discussed out loud and mostly lives in smoke breaks and kitchen-table talks. Conferences. Are they needed at all, or are they just an expensive excuse to drink? Who should actually go? What to expect? How to behave? What goals to set, and how to hit them?
I’ve been building software for affiliate marketing for more than ten years now, and the job has dragged me through a pile of conferences. I’ve listened to the talks, chatted at the booths, met thousands of new people and looked for ways to effectively pitch my baby — software for affiliate networks, a platform for media buyers, a CRM for advertisers — AlterCPA.
In this piece I’ll try to lay out my experience in some kind of order. Hopefully I’ll save many of you the nerves and money you’d have spent on unjustified expectations.
Why should an affiliate go to a conference?
If the answer that pops into your head is “to listen to the talks”, that head needs a smack. Many years ago, back when the industry wasn’t mainstream and was strictly for insiders, the share of useful info in the talks was already approaching zero. Today it has finally hit it.
There are a few types of speakers:
- Those who want to get their face out there and farm followers for their Instagram or Telegram. These are the most harmless characters.
- Snake-oil gurus. They’ll do the warm-up on stage so that some sucker buys their course after the conference.
- Service owners advertising their product. These are occasionally useful. Maybe I’ll speak someday too, but that’s not certain.
- Affiliate network managers advertising their unique offers that will deliver 666% ROI by tomorrow.
Which of these fine gentlemen is going to give away any real tricks? Which of them knows anything at all? At most the service owners, and even then not always. In the best case, they’ll tell you about an interesting topic while leaving out the key details without which it simply won’t work.
Very rarely, about as often as it snows in Somalia, you come across a speaker who gives genuinely useful info. But never count on that when buying a conference ticket.
Talks stopped being useful a long time ago and remain purely as a tribute to tradition and one of the “events” that keep the guests from drinking themselves under the table too quickly. Remember: in affiliate marketing, a scheme that’s been leaked is a scheme that’s dead. People who had enough brains to make it to the stage on their own are smart enough not to kill their source of income for a moment of vanity. Everyone knows the talks are useless, except the newbies. So the advertising in the talks is aimed at exactly them.
So what is an affiliate supposed to do?
- Walk up to the interesting booths and switch on the ad filter in your head. Listen to the pitch and judge whether this company could be useful. If yes, make personal contact with the rep.
- Drink. It’s fun, and it helps with points 3 and 4.
- Meet people. The best value is in meeting folks at your own level or slightly above. That makes swapping info easier. Plus you’ll grow together, and by the next conference you’ll be meeting as friends who can be maximally useful to each other.
- Catch up with old acquaintances from other cities and countries whom you’d hardly manage to meet outside a conference.
The main value of a conference for an affiliate is finding affiliate networks, direct advertisers and services that can actually be useful and give you better terms; networking and buddies; plus booze, girls/boys and other pleasures.
By the way, in 2023, ten days after this piece was first published, I went to BroConf and tested point 3 in the field. The talks, as always, were useless and only got in the way of talking to people. But the Speed Dating session turned out to be the best part of the entire conference: in one evening I handed out almost a hundred business cards. For a company as niche as AlterCPA, that’s an excellent result. If your conference has anything resembling speed networking, go there instead of the lecture hall.
While we’re at it, tickets. VIP is utterly useless crap, dixi. The party ticket is an acquired taste: if you want to smoke a hookah and sip nice cocktails in good company, gather that company and go to a hookah bar. You don’t need a conference for that; it’s expensive and pointless. I go to conferences to work, not to party, so I buy the cheapest ticket and quietly head home in the evening. That doesn’t cancel point 2 from the list above: the booths pour drinks without any VIP.
How a business can actually use conferences
If you’re interested in the newbie audience, give a talk, get on stage, and you’ll have a stream of untrained but very demanding customers.
For everyone else, life is a bit harder.
There’s the booth option. Booths are usually unreasonably expensive. But I wouldn’t rule that option out: you can try taking a booth once or twice to see what kind of payoff this tool brings. Need I say that the manager at the booth must know the product perfectly and talk to people nicely, even without a few shots of whiskey in them? If you already have a CMO on staff, conferences are literally their job: let them decide whether to take a booth and pick who to put on it.
Since AlterCPA is a niche service and my target audience is extremely narrow, booths aren’t really my thing.
I said that once, and then stood at a BroConf booth for three years in a row…
In 2023, at that same conference with the hundred business cards, I raffled off a lifetime license for AlterCPA Pro — about five thousand dollars’ worth of software — among everyone who found me in the crowd. In 2024 I ran a full-blown booth with a bar: I poured the drinks personally, and the proof that AlterCPA is the best software came bundled with a cocktail. In 2025 we set up a joint “ALTER x VISION” booth with the Vision anti-detect browser and handed out plush cats. Contradicting myself? Big time. But one paragraph up I advised trying a booth once or twice and watching the payoff. So I tried. Three times.
Here’s the payoff: a booth only makes sense if your audience is affiliates. If affiliates aren’t your audience, the cost will be too high and pointless. Sponsoring a conference is even more useless than the VIP tickets from part one. Even a banner on the affiliate news site Partnerkin does more good: 0.00001 is still more than zero.
And in 2026 the irony came full circle. That same BroConf where I stood at a booth three years running announced its autumn conference — BROCONF-7½, October 7, 2026, Moscow — in a new format: one day, no booths, just wall-to-wall networking. I won’t promise the booths are gone for good. But a fact is a fact: this time the organizers kept exactly the thing this very article told you to go to conferences for.
But back to the niche service with the narrow audience. Booths aside, conferences bring me most of their value in two other ways.
My own two ways of getting value out of conferences
The first way is a bit of a pimp move. I bring along to the conference anywhere from one to infinity pretty girls whom the good Lord blessed not only with looks but with a technical mind and communication skills. Of course, there are fewer pretty techie girls in the world than I dreamed of as a kid, so usually I have one companion with me. Also because more than one is too expensive.
The lady’s job is to walk the crowd, strike up conversations and pick out those who are interested in AlterCPA. She brings them to me, where I, as the most expert person on my product, work the “lead” with my charisma and intellect. Charisma and intellect are leveled up in advance at the booths that pour drinks.
This life hack genuinely helps my business get value out of conferences. Feel free to adopt it: the more pretty girls at the conference, the better.
The second way is, I think, common to all services. The most stable version of AlterCPA shows up a couple of days before a conference. It’s a personal deadline and extra motivation to improve the product, to take a couple (hundred) steps forward. To a large extent I go to affiliate conferences simply because I know it will be an excuse to work 24/7 to improve the software faster.
Conclusion
Let’s boil the article down to the main points:
- Don’t count on the talks. It’s all advertising aimed at newbies.
- Talk to people. At the bar and at the booths alike. And if the organizers brought in Speed Dating, run there: there’s no faster way to swap contacts.
- Bring pretty girls who’ll sell your product.
- Use conferences as an excuse to seriously level up your product on a tight deadline.
Three years later BroConf announced an autumn conference with no booths — nothing but networking. It’s nice when the industry reads your article to the end. Even if not on the first try.