Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

After being “tagged” by Rob and Ciaran I thought that it was time that I responded.. It’s taken a fair bit of time to think of 7 interesting facts about me (I’m quite boring in reality!) but hopefully they’ll help you get a further understanding of the ins and outs of my world.  Watch out to see if you’ve been tagged at the end of the post..

Interesting Fact 1: I was once attacked by a wild ape.
I used to work for an online gaming provider whose head office was in Gibraltar.  This meant a few trips across and on one of them I was taken up on the “rock” by some of the locals who worked in our office.  Despite a few warnings from them, I decided to attempt to touch / stroke one of the wild apes and it turned towards me and tried to attack me – luckily it didn’t get much further than scratching my jacket before it found something better to do, but I know to listen to advice next time!

Interesting Fact 2: I class myself as a professional dancer after winning a Michael Jackson dance competition.
Am sure I’ve mentioned this before, but all the same it’s one of my proudest moments so why not do so again? In my first year attending the fantastic AffiliateFuture  Barbados trip I managed to get myself entered in a Michael Jackson dance contest at one of the popular bars on the Island.   The concept was simple enough – 5 or 6 people got on the stage in front of a rather large crowd and danced to Michael Jackson – the winner was the person who got the most cheers & gets a £200 bar tab and bottle of fizzy wine as their prize.

On stage I managed to push at least one fellow contestant out the way (they were showing off with some good moves) and also stripped half naked, throwing my sweat soaked t-shirt to the adoring fans by the stage.  My last move was a rock knee dive towards the crowd and realistically I was the only dancer who got any kind of applause – and what an applause it was.  I’m almost shedding a tear of joy just writing about it so that’s enough for now.

Interesting Fact 3 :  I’ve blagged lots of freebies.
I’ve created websites in the past just to get some free stuff, the best of which was for a site I put together called “MusicBytes” (get it?).   I’d had the domain for a while before seeing that 3 Doors Down, one of the great bands to come out of the USA in recent times, were performing in London for the first time.

I was quite happy with this and ordered myself a ticket (I actually ordered two tickets, but the other person didn’t turn up on the night).  Not content with just seeing them I wondered how I would be able to meet the band and came up with MusicBytes becoming a new online magazine.. this was very early web days, probably back to at least 2001.  So I went ahead and phoned up their record label in the US, found the details of their agent and very easily managed to arrange an interview on the night of the gig.   Not only did I turn up for the interview but I purchased a fresh copy of their album and got it signed at the same time too!   I’ve blagged other free stuff in the past (such as a Tony Parsons book to review before it’s release) but I’ve not done it in the past few years as I felt a little guilty about not telling the truth!

Interesting Fact 4:  I was almost fired for phoning up sick with a hangover that I didn’t have.
This is a strange one.   Back when I was 18, around 9 moths into my 5 years at One.Tel, I had a bad migraine and called in work ill.  It’s not very often that I take off time sick (one of my pet hates these days infact) so I was a little worried about calling in to let the boss know that I wasn’t going to be able to make it, especially as I was still relatively new to the web development role.

I called up early in the morning, left a voicemail, closed all the curtains and went back to sleep.   When I got up, I noticed I had around 10 missed calls from one of my colleagues.  Worried, I immediately phoned her to see what was wrong and was informed that I had left a message to the boss saying I won’t be in due to a hangover.  Apparently the boss was livid and ready to fire me the next day (she’s Australian, perhaps that will help explain this reaction).

I still to this day have no idea why I said this – I had not been drinking the night but perhaps I was worried when calling it that it would be perceived that this was the case (as I drank a fair bit back then, so a logical explanation).

In the end, I got my dad to phone up my boss to convince her that I had been at home all night and not out and about.. I got a little warning about it when I came back into work the next day but other than that it was dripped and I think she believed me, but a scary few days none the less!

Interesting Fact 5:  I have my name by deep-poll because Facebook wouldn’t let me change it.
You may not realise this, but it’s actually exceptionally easy to change your name by deed-poll.  There are no meetings, no court orders, just a piece of paper that you can order online to officially renounce your old name and announce your new one to the world.

After a conversion in the pub the night before I decided that it would be a good idea to change my name from James Little to J Lil, my street dancing name that was given to me by Rob Berrisford.

So I found a site online, paid £5 and got an instant document where I just needed to fill in my old names and new names, got it signed by a witness and, officially, my name was changed.   I didn’t go to the expense of changing the bank documents, passport and various other forms and it went no further than putting the document somewhere safe (so safe I can’t find it!) but I did manage to scan it in to send to Facebook and finally get them to accept to my name change request.

Obviously I’m still really James Little, but I’ve make sure that enough people know my “real” street name that it’s now recognisable to me!

Interesting Fact 6:  I used to be an internet addict
The reason that my twitter (and previous blog url) is exwebjunkie is because for a long period of time my life pretty much revolved around the internet.   I used to be a chat “addict”, probably because when I came out of school I had very few friends (was heavily bullied) and the online world that I was propelled into gave me the opportunity to almost start afresh.

There were some great times – I used to attend meets where the general theme was to have a few drinks and make friends.   Not only did I make some fantastic friends who I am still very close with today, but I was also introduced to my now-wife through one of the close friends that I had made.  There were also a lot of young attractive women that I shared some wonderful experiences with – chat wasn’t just for geeks!!!

I’ve probably been online now for a very long time – being the early adapter that I am my first internet provider was Compuserve, who at the time only gave the facility to email other members, rather than the wider internet.   I was probably about 10 so a good 17 years ago.

Interesting Fact 7:  My goals in life
The last fact is far less interesting and a bit of a cop out, but I’m finding it difficult to find anything else to write about.

I have a few interlinked goals in life that I made a few years ago. I decided that after watching some of the passengers on the train with me every morning into London that I don’t want to be doing the rat-race thing for too long.  My overall goal is to semi-retire when I am 45 (so 18 years away) and move away from London, ideally towards the coast somewhere and work in some kind of local shop, having saved enough to not have to worry about living out the rest of my life in luxury.

There is still a long way to go on these!  My savings account sits there with around £0.60 in it however I’m pretty adamant that it will happen.

And that’s pretty much the end of my post.  The aim was to write a line for each and get it over and done with however it’s ended up almost as long as an essay and if you’ve read this far then not only am I impressed that you didn’t give up half way down but I’m also hopeful that you will now know a little more about my life and some of the experiences I’ve had.

Time for my tags now, so here goes:

Pete, Ste, Gav & Jonty

Please Click here to Sponsor me

I’ve been drinking far too much recently.  Some would even blame the fact that my bag was stolen from a pub near work last week on the fact that I had been drinking so to combat this I have decided, to give up alcohol for the entire month of May!

This means no beer, no rum and coke, no vodka, not even any chicken in red wine sauce!

Fortunately May is in-between The A4UExpo and the A4UAwards so as far as external work events are concerned (where I typically have a few drinks) I don’t have to worry.

As a side though I also remembered that Chris Bishop (of HoF fame) did something similar last year and managed to raise £500 for charity at the same time, so being a big fan of the work that Bullying UK do I’ve decided to do the same thing to hopefully give kids a much better chance of dealing with bullying.

I’ve setup a page on Justgiving so that you can help donate and if you pay tax then they also give 25% bonus in Gift Aid.

I’ll be giving up the booze none then less, but please give to Charity to give me that little bit more motivation!

As you may have noticed there has been a distinct lack of blog posts over the past few months because, quite frankly, I’ve had very little time – working late into the night and over the weekend seems to be commonplace at the moment but it’s all worth it in the end!

Life at AffiliateFuture is going very well – I’ve recently had a new guy (Sam) who has joined the team and is having a great impact; whilst there have been a few complaints about the interfaces there are some upgrades over the next two weeks which should see an end to these once and for all, which will be nice. Vegas for the Affiliate Summit was great and whilst I’ve yet to complete my write up there are a few blog posts that will be coming from that soon!

Family life is good but Connor has a tendency to cause my sleep deprivation; he only wakes once or twice a night, which is great but I’m definitely going to remember the long nights when Lindsey starts talking about number 4- something that is definitely not on the agenda for me! Our second youngest (Jacob) also started 5 days a week at the local state nursery before he goes up into Reception (full time school) in September.

Dietblog.tv is going to start again soon, once I have the info that I require from Rob B (if you’re reading this and wonder what that means Rob, it’s in reference to your tweet!).

Lastly I wanted to congratulate Matt Bailey for not only getting the IAB Chair but also for getting a blog up and running at last.

More posts to follow – don’t unsubscribe from the feed just yet!

I’ve not posted for what seems like forever, so my new years resolution will definately be to make a little more effort on the blog in 2009.

Anyhow - I wanted to take the time to let my readers know about a new addition to my family.

Lindsey gave birth to a healthy baby boy on Tuesday 16th December, weighing 7lb 6oz and born at 16:14 he’s doing well so far and should hopefully be out from hospital with mum later today.

With three boys in the house (four if you include me!) it’s certainly going to be a busy Christmas!

Also wanted to say a big thanks to everyone who’s sent their note of congratulations on Facebook/A4u/etc.

Have a great Christmas everyone!

Cheers
James

Just over a year ago I had decided that I wanted to grow my hair long; i’d never really grown it before so it was a new experience to me and it turned out that as my hair grows, it curls and gets a little out of control.  Eventually I started to get to the point where I was happy with it (after a year!) but I was taking part in a wedding just over a month ago and got it all cut off.

Now it’s starting to grow again and I’m unsure what to do - my wife is pleaing with me to get it cut but on the other fence many felt it added a bit of “character”.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to start a poll to help me decide which option to go with.

Here are a couple of photos to help you decide..

Me with Long hair in Barbados (also in the photo are Frosty, Tom and Lee).

At the wedding just after the haircut.

September is a big month for a few reasons.

1. The AffiliateFuture retail event on the 16th
2. Talk like a Pirate day on the 19th (Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr)
3. My Eldest sons 6th (yes, 6th!) Birthday

And starting tomorrow… Tacheback.  This is a charity style challenge throughout the month - trying to raise £1m for the Everyman charity.   It’s really simple to get involved - sign up via their website, get some sponsors and grow your tache all month long;  you can also do it in teams, so if anyone would like to join me in this then let me know and we can pop along to the Finale night on the 30th September.

If I can get 5 people to join in then i’ll keep it on the for Expo in October - much to my wifes dismay!  I’ve set up a team on the Tacheback site so drop me a message below with your name / email and i’ll invite you in!

Sign up & Join in now - if your a lady then you could always sponsor me instead.

My wife has been trying to make our family much more eco friendly over the past 6 months or so and has now started up her first ever website to try and preach about it to the world!

The site is Mums Going Green and at the moment is a blog with her experience of eco living and a little bit about websites and products that she likes.

If you have an eco-friendly site and want to swap links then please leave a comment with the details below and I’ll get it sorted out for you.

The interesting test will be to see if she continues writing content of gives up after 10 minutes like I tend to do with most of my sites (well, give up after buying the domain, at least).

Up until today I’ve been running on a desperately old version of wordpress and not only was I missing out on some of the new features but the database was also a little screwed so I was getting a few SQL errors popping up over the place.

Tonight I finally managed to sit down for an hour or so and upgrade - I’m using version 2.7 of wordpress which is still in beta so I’m sure there will still be a few bugs but it’s better than what I had.

I’ve also upgraded the theme - I’m not sure if I’m going to keep this one but it’ll do for now - comments appreciated.