Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

Matt, Claire, Chris and everyone else at who had a hand in organising the A4U Expo should get a massive pat on the bank for what turned out to be the best affiliate event that I have had the pleasure of attending (and I’ve attended a fair few).

Day 1

My roundup is potentially going to be quite different to others who went as I only managed to make a small handful of the actually talks throughout the day after being left with Ken (who did a fantastic job) to man the stall that we decided to purchase at the last minute.

It all started on Wednesday night when we left the office just after 9pm after managing to get our network, Altogether Ads (which I’ll talk more about in a further post) launched just in time for the big day.

As our office is pretty near to the Jubilee line we managed to make it to the Buy.at pre-event party about 10pm when it was in full swing.

Thank you to buy.at for the drinks and the party.  It was great to catch up with old friends who I’ve not seen in a while and enjoy a few beers with some familiar and non-familiar faces.  I ended up giving up at Canning Town search for a cab with some other people who had managed to miss the last Jubilee line and promised to myself not to do the same thing again the next day.

Day 2

So after a few hours sleep and arriving back in the office to pick up the last bits and pieces for our stall at 7.30am we managed to get down to the event at 8.30, setup and start talking about some of the things that as a company we try and do well.

The stands were an excellent mix of Merchants (Sky, Littlewoods Direct and BT to name a few), Networks (AltogetherAds, Buy.at, Affiliate Window, DGM, Affilinet, Affiliate Future, OMG, CJ and Paid on Results) and even Affiliates (UK Web Media had one of the best).

I managed to make it along to my first session of the day to see fellow Altogether Digital staff member Ciaran Norris, a man I never get tired of listening talk, and a close friend Lee Mccoy in €œLets get social€, a session aimed at encouraging both merchants and affiliates at thinking outside of the box and embracing the social media to help improve both traffic and online acquisitions.

Both Ciaran and Lee have their own very unique styles and it was in my mind one of the best sessions of the entire event and I certainly came away buzzing with ideas - if only I had not given up my affiliate sites recently!

Most of the rest of the day was spent at the stall but I did make it to the final session entitled Extreme SEO which talked about the values (or not) of paid links, negative SEO and a battle between the white and black hats.  The Q&A from the audience went well and the only grumble I had was when I managed to get the microphone to ask the final question I got heckled from some of the speakers themselves!

The event wrapped up around 6pm when most people headed down to the after party and awards event.

I’m going to keep my views on the awards short and sweet - the only comment I will make is that it was a complete and utter tragedy that:

a)    Fraser didn’t win anything after single handily helping the industry develop with his great series of podcasts and

b)    Next winning an award.  Anyone that voted for the high street store can I please remind you of the following.  (1)  How can they be the best new affiliate program when they have had one for a few years and (2) They have decided, in their great wisdom, to LOWER the commission values just before the Christmas rush - great for them that they have to pay out less but come on guys - how on earth is this setting a good sign?  I’d love to hear from anyone who voted for them for the reasons behind it€¦

Day 3

Whilst it is the 3rd day that I’m writing this blog post on (sitting on the bus home) I find it hard to write too much about this day as the only session that I managed to attend was my own, a discussion panel on if we would need networks for 2008.

The day was great and I managed to find the time to take a better look around the stalls and continue my Nintendo Wii dominance by winning Tennis on the UK Web Media stall!   Business was good and I found myself thankful that I once again got the opportunity to speak to a great mix of people while hurting my feet standing up all day.

3pm shortly arrived and I found myself slightly nervous and apprehensive on being included in a panel with some industry heavy weights.

The €œWill you need a network in 2008€ session went over a number of points but the one I was potentially more vocal about was the differences between large and small networks with David Hall (from Affiliate Window) managing to suggest that smaller networks suffered from Spyware, Duplicate Sales and a general lack of decent tracking.

I disagreed with this strongly and mentioned to what seemed to be applause from Clarke that the size of the network has absolutely nothing to do with the technical aspects that that the network can bring to the equation.

As I said at the time - in terms of staff numbers commission junction is much bigger than Paid on results, for example, but CJ’s only recent tracking innovation was to try (and fail) to introduce JavaScript links, while Paid on results became the first UK network to actively promote video banners.

Anyhow - after packing up the stall I managed just about an hour at the after show party before getting home to spend some much needed time with the wife and kids.

Congrats once again to Matt and the Existem team - every single person I spoke to agreed it was above expectations and I look forward to seeing this progress once again in the 2008 show, pencilled in for early October.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Affiliates . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.