Before the jet lag from the west coast finally catches up with me, I would like to take some time to recollect the experiences and insights I’ve obtained from attending BlogWorld in Las Vegas last week.

Last Wednesday, Sal Conca, Noelle Huter, Regina Black (Audible’s Marketing Manager) and I flew to Vegas to represent audible.com at BlogWorld & New Media Expo. The main reason we attended was to announce our brand new Podcast Sponsorship Program, in addition to finding bloggers who’d like to promote Audible through their affiliate program!

Regina, Sal, Val, Noelle at the Audible Booth

The Audible Podcast Sponsorship Program is a separate affiliate program just for podcasters. If you have a podcast and you’d like Audible to sponsor it, all you have to do is visit www.audibletrial.com/signup. Once you sign up, we’ll set you up with copy points and your own custom URL to refer your listeners to. If your subscribers visit your URL, they will receive a FREE audiobook download and a 14-day free trial of the AudibleListener Gold Plan. Podcasters have seen success with promoting Audible because people who listen to podcasts also have an affinity for listening to audiobooks.

For more information about the sponsorship program and Audible, listen to our very own Sal Conca’s interview with BlogWorld radio. He really killed it on here.

BlogWorld was the perfect place to find podcasters because they had a ton of sessions on podcasting. For example, there was a session specifically about how to sponsor your podcast!

In addition to the podcasting stuff, overall this was definitely an interesting conference because we met so many unique individuals and learned about new social media companies and tools. For example, at the BlogWorld party on Thursday night, we met Nomadic Matt (a blogger who records his journeys all over the world) and Benny the language hacker who goes to different countries with the goal of mastering the language of each.  What fun jobs!

One innovative social media company is Paper.li, which is great for Twitter users (like me) who have trouble keeping up with all of the links that their friends share.  Now you can turn your twitter  into a daily newspaper that makes content easily digestible by categorizing your articles. Additionally, we were happy to be “booth neighbors” with Plixi (formerly TweetPhoto), which is a photo sharing network that integrates with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and FourSquare!

Val, Sal, Noelle & Regina at the BlogWorld party at Liquid

Finally, the closing keynote made me really consider the “New Media” industry as a whole.  As Penn Jillette put it, “there is no new media.. it’s people.” He believes that, despite what critics may say, Twitter and social media actually INCREASE intimacy. They give people an outlet to talk about the things that matter the most to them and share their own opinions. His thoughts definitely made me reflect on how some businesses solely use social media to promote themselves or participate just because “everyone is doing it.” Instead, they should really learn to love New Media since it’s the closest they’ll ever get to their customers. A word of advice: embrace your followers, listen to their requests, and most of all: be honest.

BlogWorld Expo 2010 in my opinion was a great success and I hope to get the opportunity to attend next year. Thanks, Audible!

PS: Congrats to JohnnyJet for winning our booth giveaway – a brand new Amazon Kindle 3G!