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

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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!

Just wanted to say a massive thanks to everyone who was involved in the Affiliate GTG on Thursday Night; one of the best affiliate events I have attended yet.

It was a fantastic night and there are a few individual thanks to make:

Kevin & Jess:   As the two main organisers who managed to pull it all together both before and on the night!

Josh from Great UK Surveys:  I was tired and ready for going, then you got us THAT cocktail that turned me into a maniac for the rest of the night!

Tom, Kitty (Maximiles) & James (Flightmapping): For attending the pre-networking drinks at the ship!

Hannah, Mike and Mark:  For keeping team Xtreme alive! Hopefully some parts of the gay nightclub will be forgotten sooner than others… the helicopter, arfgh.

Graham: For sharing the Taxi home – hope your coat turns up or at the very least that your wife doesn’t kill you!

Look forward to the next one!

The 2009 series of The Apprentice kicks off tomorrow at 9pm on BBC1 and the line up of this year’s 15 contenders has been announced.

In all honestly last year was the first year that I’d really had a chance to watch the series after reading Kierons blog post about how good it was and for the first few episodes I could not stand it – the arrogance of some of the people on the show was absolutely astounding but as the series developed I got into it and was relieved when Alan didn’t give the job to Claire, one of the most annoying people I’ve ever seen on TV.

In advance of the launch tomorrow I’d like to wish one of the contestants, James McQuillan all the best of luck in the show.

I worked with James about 8 years ago at One.Tel and whilst we were in different teams (I was lead web developer and he was head of buying) we were at pretty much the same level management wise and shared many a beer together.

I’ve not spoken to James since I left One.Tel a number of years ago but am sure that he will do well and am looking forward to the start of the season!

I recently decided to get rid of my dedicated server that I have in Germany as I could not really justify the cost or time spend on administration of it, especially with the Euro getting stronger so the costs going up.  In the end I opted for some low cost hosting with Hostgator who I’ve had a very positive experience with recently.

With that being the case, I needed to work out how to easily migrate a number of Wordpress blogs across to a new server and thought it was worth sharing the experience here for others in the same situation as I seem to have got it just about right after two or three migrations.

So here is my step by step guide – hope it’s helpful for others in the same situation:

1. Get the new version of wordpress setup first – I would suggest using a temporary domain / sub-domain for this (test.domain.com or something like this). If you have Cpanel included in your hosting then Wordpress is a 1 click install which makes life even easier.
2. Login to both the new and old wordpress admin sections – check what plugins you have activated and install them onto the new version of wordpress – this step is important as if you’re using Viper Quicktags for YouTube videos and import your posts BEFORE you add the plugins then they won’t work.
3. Replicate the settings of your plugins (google analytics, seo for wordpress, etc) and your permalinks.
4. Next go to Tools > Export and export all your posts and comments to a file on your old version of wordpress.. if it’s not the latest version it may not be under tools but you should find it easy enough.
5. Next go back into the new version of wordpress, select Tools > Import.  It’s a fairly simple step by step process and make sure you assign the posts to the correct user account / create one as part of this process if required.
6. All your posts and comments should be setup now – the only thing left to sort out should be the theme so let’s do that next.  First, you’ll need to FTP into your old host and go to the wp-content > themes folder and download the theme that you have been using to your local drive.
7. Next FTP into the new site and put the theme back in the same location on the new server (in the wp-content folder).  Go into the new version of the wordpress admin, select Appearance and you should be able to select your theme.
8. If you’ve previously setup Widgets for your theme you’ll need to add these all in again – you can go into your old version of Wordpress and make sure you put them all back into the same order again here.
9. Now the new version of Wordpress is an exact copy – the only thing left to change is under Settings.  As this is on a temporary domain you’ll need to change your Wordpress Address (URL) and Blog Address (URL) to the correct URL’s.  You’ll be logged out and send to the old version of your wordpress when you click on the save button.
10. Last step – change your DNS settings (you’re host or register will either give you a control panel to do this yourself or do it for you) so that you point your domain to the new server… This typically can take up to  12-24 hours to propagate across the internet but is usually a fair bit faster than that for most DNS servers.

That’s the lot – I’ve managed to get it down to a fine art and can do it in around 10 minutes now without any problems and the main things to look out for are getting the plugins activated at the right step and getting all the settings and widgets included… Using this method is a hell of a lot easier than exporting tables from an SQL database as others have suggested in the past!

Hannah has been bugging me for a while to post these for almost a year, so here goes..

Clearing up the pile of papers on my desk I managed to find an old notepad and one of the things it contained was the 2008 Barbados awards!   These were written by a few of us on the flight back to the UK and the highlights of which cane be found below:

• Lord Lucan Award – Shaun (who disappeared for pretty much the whole week after a heavy second night out)
• Best use of Color – Sarah (for the sunburn)
• Best Piece of Art – MikeeT
• Best Celebrity Lookalike – Keith Bond for the Buddy Holly glasses
• Worse Driving Award – Lee McCoy
• Under the thumb award – Steve
• Diamond Geezer Award – Aldo
• Best Villain – The Worminator
• Dreams bed Award – Sinead
• Best Irish Accent – Siri
• Clean Nose Award – Joe
• Tourist of the Year – Keith
• Harbour Lights No 1 Fan Award – James
• Most Buoyant Award – Hannah
• Random Stranger Award – Chris
• Most reformed Award – Chris Frost (for not getting kidnapped again)
• Most disappointing performance – Tom Quinn (for NOT making it to the Ship every day)
• Pretty Boy Award – Lee McCoy

Make sure you head over to the refreshed AffiliateFuture blog to find out more about some of this years competitions to win a place on the trip in June!

I had the opportunity to visit Vegas for the first time a few weeks ago for the Affiliate Summit, where I was also lucky enough to speak (presentation will be online soon); previously I’ve only been on panels and whilst there was a small amount of stage fright it seemed to go well.

Vegas as a city was fantastic – the nightlife was amazing and the grandeur of the casinos was a world apart; even though I’d seen it on the TV before I was still mesmerised by the fact that New York, New York had a rollercoaster going around it!
Overall the conference was good – I was there for just two days but managed to get a number of meetings organised and continued to extend our relationships with affiliates over the other side of the pond – there were also a couple of UK representatives out there who it’s always good to catch up with. The only regret that I have is that I didn’t manage to attend as many of the conferences sessions that I would have liked (I think other than my own I got to two of them) but there is always next time for that.

One thing I did notice (and plenty may disagree with me) is that Vegas is the worse place ever to hold a conference! There are so many temptations that meant that visitors seemed to disappear quite early in the day – after visiting the Boston Expo I have to say that I felt this was better located and with the A4UExpo being completely out of the way from, err, everything, it tends to ensure that people stick around all day (and night).

The end of the conference also saw the first Affiliate Triathlon – a charity event where affiliates got the chance to test themselves against others in the industry, including, it seemed, me.

Someone had paid $100 to enter me without warning me in advance, meaning my name was read out after I’d already had a couple of beers and had another in my hand. Drink driving didn’t go my way and I ran over someone whilst competing in the bike race, whilst some managed to get 30 or so balls into the basket in the second test I only managed two and finally out of 5 go’s at hitting a golf ball to test its speed, only one registered and this was lower than everyone elses, even the girls. I finished last. Vengeance will be mine when I find out who registered me for this competition, that’s a real, 100% warning!

The next Affiliate Summit is planned for New York and if you want to learn more about the US market then there really is no better place. Thanks to Missy and Shawn for organising the event and for giving me the opportunity to speak.

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

It’s 9.30pm and the aim is to get to bed as soon as I’ve finished this blog post as I am absolutely shattered – I think ‘Expo Lag’ is worse than jetlag and I’m only 20 minutes away in a cab from the conference centre!

So – first things first, a few messages of thanks..

Thanks to Claire, Matt, Chris, Pete and everyone else from Existem for what was, in my mind, the best conference that I’ve ever attended – it’s a glorious thing that our industry has this event and the news of the European version to be hosted in April is very exciting indeed (though even with so much work getting done at these events, the trips away are going to get me divorced!).

Thanks secondly to everyone who turned up to the two panels that I was part of –I was just filling in for our sick MD on the first one (State of the Affiliate Nation) and hope that I did a good job of it, especially with such a huge turnout.   As for my second panel on voucher codes, Duncan made a comment earlier to say that he’d never seen it so busy that people were sitting on the floor and it’s just a shame we ran out of time so quickly and could not take any more questions.

Lastly a big thank you to everyone that sponsored the event, especially the evening parties, giving us all a chance to network – I’ve pretty much lost my voice now but it was absolutely worth it!

So onto the Roundup..

• I don’t want to discourage any other merchants from being innovative, but I think Sunshine.co.uk may already have a just cause to think that they will have another couple of A4UAwards in the bag next year!
   
• I wrote a whole post about the sessions I wanted to attend but only managed to two sessions outside of the ones I was participating in; I guess it’s always going to be the case, especially when I was described by a colleague as a “power-networker who doesn’t stop talking”.   Hopefully I’ll make a few more next year!
• I may have moaned about the lack of preparation time I had to think about the panel where I was filling in for Tom, but I secretly cherished being on another panel, especially one of that calibre;  not sure how it will come out on camera though!
• It was amazing to meet so many people that I’ve not had the chance to before, especially the likes of Doug and Kirsty whose blogs I read every day! 
• Affiliate Marketing is definitely changing – there were some big “traditional” publishers in attendance that last year may have dismissed Affiliate Marketing as a way of increasing revenue but are now actively engaging it.
• If blogging from an iPhone in the pub can get me linked to from e-consultancy and Search Engine Land then I have to do it more often!
• The cruise was good but needed more music earlier to get people in the mood, rather than sitting at the tables all night – a big thanks to DFDS and I’m looking forward to the free cruise already!
• The last night was the best of them all – I have one word to say to Tom Quinn from iPoints though – well, two words mate, Team Extreme!
• I said I’d blog it and I will – the only downer was the Sky VIP bar – I’m really against segregation and I was a little frustrated about it, even if I did manage to blag a way in!
• Can whoever has the photo of my kissing Aldo please burn it so that it doesn’t tarnish his street cred! 

That’s it for now – A successful year that I really enjoyed that was even better than my expectations, now I just need a new liver and a bit of sleep to get ready for the next one.  I’ll add links in to people’s names later etc later when I can function correctly!