Networking doesn’t stop mattering once you’ve “made it,” and it doesn’t start mattering only once you have. I learned that lesson at my first-ever affiliate show, Affiliate Summit in Vegas, back when I was making an unstable $4k a month.
I remember standing in rooms full of people who were clearly doing better than me, some of them by a lot, and instead of hanging back, I went and talked to them anyway. My bank account at the time didn’t stop me from walking up to the ballers in the room. That’s the whole point of networking: you don’t wait until you’re at someone’s level to start the conversation. You start the conversation because you want to get there.
Twenty-plus years later, I don’t hit the circuit like I used to. But a bunch of people reached out about the shows happening this July, and I decided to just book the flights and show face at three of them: Affiliate World Europe (AWE) in Budapest, Affiliate Sauna – a wellness mastermind in Finland, and Affiliate Takeover (ATO) in Barcelona.
Why Showing Face Still Beats a Telegram Chat
I could have had most of these conversations over Telegram. I didn’t, and I’m glad I didn’t, because a chat window and a table at 1am are not the same thing. In text, you get someone’s edited version of themselves — the pitch, the highlight reel, the careful phrasing. In person, you get the pauses, the “off the record” version of the story, the way someone’s face changes when you ask the follow-up question they weren’t expecting. Trust in this industry gets built in rooms, not group chats. You can close a deal over text, but the relationship that makes the next five deals possible gets built sitting across from someone.
Messaging gives you a fixed personality and a fixed mood, whatever version of themselves someone decided to type out that day. In person, you get the real range: how they carry themselves, how they dress when nobody told them to dress a certain way, what their face does when they’re actually amused versus when they’re being polite.
Add a few drinks to the mix and the polish comes off entirely, that’s when the real opinions and the real secrets start coming out, and that’s genuinely what relationships in this business get built on. I’ve said before that it’s never the professional version of someone I’m actually evaluating. It’s who they are once the professional atmosphere is over.
What’s happening at the bar later. Which dinner spot they pick, and who they pick to bring with them. Those things tell me far more about a person than anything they’d ever say on stage or in a pitch deck, and that’s the read I actually use to figure out how to work with someone.
Budapest: Affiliate World Europe
It had been a while since I’d been to an AWE event, and going back mostly confirmed what I’ve said in past posts: the quality of the crowd has been slipping, with gambling and black-hat operators increasingly crowding out the kind of people I actually want to talk to. That said, the trip wasn’t wasted. I was there with the Avanto team, and it was good to finally put faces to names.
As usual, the after-events are where the real connections got made. I ran into old friends at the side events I never would have caught otherwise. And there’s something I genuinely appreciate every time I do one of these: people I’ve met, and plenty I’ve never met in person, telling me I’ve helped them over the years.
One guy told me straight up that he should have listened to me back when I said what I said, but he needed to go through it himself to actually learn the lesson. Called himself a rough learner. Small moments of appreciation like that are a real part of why I keep coming back to these things. I haven’t posted on this blog in a long time, and hearing that stuff still means something to me.
Ducking into the smaller bars and clubs around Budapest ended up being one of the best parts of the trip too — talking about anything but business, looking back on what’s happened, and figuring out what’s next. Budapest is also just a genuinely great city to be doing that in.
Finland: Affiliate Sauna and Nature that Speaks
This one was billed as a wellness mastermind, but it played out more like a retreat with close friends. There was time to talk shop, but the real value was in the saunas and the boat trip — a small enough group that you could actually go deep with people on how to keep growing together, instead of the usual mastermind format of structured pitches and note-taking.
The trees got me, though. I’m not a nature person, never have been, and something about being surrounded by that much forest for that long left me feeling almost lightheaded, in a good way. Turns out there’s a real explanation for that. Trees release compounds called phytoncides, and forests carry higher concentrations of negative ions than cities do — both have been linked in research to lower cortisol and a calmer nervous system.
On top of that, when you’re not used to that much green, quiet, and unfiltered sensory input, your brain treats it almost like a novelty, similar to how a city person gets a little disoriented, in a good way, the first time they see a truly dark sky full of stars. For someone who’s spent two decades staring at dashboards and hotel conference rooms, standing in actual wilderness apparently short-circuits something. I’ll take it.
One of the best topics of the private event was with Ian B from Avanto Media, who drew a comparison between Finland’s Winter War against the Soviets in 1939 and how we operate in affiliate marketing. Massively outnumbered, the Finns won by knowing their own terrain better than the invading force ever could — dense forest, frozen lakes, and winters the Soviets weren’t built for.
Small, mobile units broke larger columns into isolated pockets and hit them before melting back into the trees, instead of ever trying to fight head-on in a battle they couldn’t win on numbers alone. Ian’s point was that this is basically the job in affiliate marketing too.
You’re rarely the biggest player on the field — networks, platforms, and bigger-budget competitors will always outspend you. You don’t win by trying to out-muscle anyone. You win by knowing your terrain (your niche, your traffic, your audience) better than anyone else does, staying mobile enough to move before the ground shifts under you, and never taking your eye off what the competition is doing.
Adapt to the terrain you’re actually standing on, and keep watching the tree line.
Barcelona: Affiliate Takeover
ATO was solid. The show floor itself was slower than usual, but the side events and the networking around them were high quality. I want to give a real thank you to Alex for having me at his pre-ATO gathering, Circle — we got into a great conversation there, and it’s clear he’s just as passionate about this industry as I am. He’s exactly the kind of person you want steering this conference into its next chapter.
Funny enough, I ran into some of the same people from Budapest in Barcelona too — the industry really is a small, repeating cast of characters. But the vibe at ATO was different. The crowd here skewed more white-hat and grey-hat, less aggressive, and the conversations felt longer-term and more strategic than the quick-money energy you get at some other shows. I’ve been through the quick-money phase already.
At this point I just want to build.
I wish the show had been more crowded — my guess is the World Cup pulled some of the usual July conference traffic away this year. But in terms of lead quality, ATO beat AWE by a wide margin. I saw more of my actual long-term friends at ATO than I did at AWE, which tells me something: even some of the old-school crowd is drifting toward a cleaner, more sustainable style of advertising. Not all the way there yet, but the direction is noticeable.
Exhausted !!!
Networking is still the thing that moves the needle, no matter what level you’re at, and showing face still beats a Telegram thread every time. Between Budapest, Finland, and Barcelona, I got what I came for. But I’m conferenced out for now — I’ll see everyone again next year.
