Peter Anderson – One Man Went To Mow

A few months ago i spent a weekend in Copenhagen. I was lucky enough to find a small little drinks shop where i sampled Hancock Sports Cola for the first time. This drink tastes superb! Soon after arriving back in Berlin the cravings started. But no worries… the internet provides for every need right? Well not Hancock Sports Cola. After spending hours trying to hunt down a bottle, Willem Von Tinkel (from the Hipstery (a joint project of mine)) came up with the idea of asking our community (via Facebook) if anyone could supply us with some bottles. It turns out that Mads, a customer of the Hipstery (from Denmark) was taking a road trip via Hamburg and Berlin to Prague (in search of some rare cigarettes). Mads was kind enough to reserve some road trip space in the boat of the car for my Hancock Sports Cola. Thank you Mads.

The last few months have been jam packed. Ive been in Stockholm, London, Copenhagen, Munich, and Berlin (where i live). Ive been on conference calls with brokers, lawyers, tax advisors and potential buyers from half way round the world. Ive sold Spendless and i am close to launching some great joint projects in the upcoming weeks. And in the midst of all that the blog has been somewhat forgotten. I am hoping to write a review of how the Spendless sale went (depending on the buyer), a review (or at least brief round up) of the A4u in Munich, an article on designing websites on a budget and some notes on my upcoming projects. The first new project started a couple of days ago.

Wisdom of Fans: http://wisdom-of-fans.com

The site aims to predict the outcome of events (starting with the World Cup) based on the input of many. Wisdom of Fans collects peoples tweets about various events and then converts them into one “mass” prediction. The idea is that the many can be more accurate that the one (i.e. football pundits).

As an affiliate who likes to travel i have become a big fan of netbooks. For my 8 month, round the world trip i took the ASUS EEE as it weighs less than a kilo, is nice and robust and was powerfull enough to run all the programs i required to work on my websites. But now it is time to move on. In the next couple of weeks i will hopefully be getting a shared office here in Berlin and so i need a more powerful notebook. Up steps the Ferrari Hipstery Acer One. Ignoring the branding this laptop has some very nice stats. 2 gigs of ram, 11.6 inch screen and a very decent keyboard make this netbook the perfect travelling affiliates companion. Ideal for my upcoming trips to Stockholm, Munich and London.

This years Continental a4uexpo is in Munich on the 18th and 19th of May. Having attended the last 2 London a4uexpos (I missed last years Amsterdam expo as i was somewhere in South America) i thought i would give my thoughts on why i am attending as an affiliate.

1) Networking does work. See my last blog post here and a  slightly more impressive post from Ray on the same topic here.

2) The agenda looks pretty nice once again. A lot of the sessions you can take away a list of actionable tasks that can make a real difference to your sites. I also find that a lot of the sessions just get me thinking about new ways to market my sites or new niches to enter.

3) A bit of a lazy one this. I am actually Berlin based at the moment, so this is almost on home turf for me.

4) Meeting great people. Working as a lone affiliate can be uninspiring at times in terms of one not getting to bounce ideas off colleagues so i find it really important to get out and about and meet like minded people. My greatest worry before attending my first expo was that i wouldn’t know anyone or have anything interesting to contribute. However there are loads of parties and networking opportunities running throughout the day and by the end of my first night i had already met loads of interesting new people who i still keep in touch with today.

5) I get to try out my new German. I have been taking an intensive German course since January so this might be the perfect opportunity to try out my three new words.

Conferences can be expensive. Once you factor in the price of the ticket, transport, hotels etc then it can be easy to question whether this is really the best use of your hard earned cash. I recently pulled some numbers from my Mothers Day campaign for 2010 and was pleasantly surprised to see that my last attempt at networking has paid some pretty nice dividends.

Last October i attended the A4uexpo in London. The ticket cost me £171.35 plus flights, hotel etc. At the conference i got to meet with the affiliate manager of a program i was producing some decent results for. After a short but productive chat we agreed to run several promotions across my sites which included banner placement, increased exposure, newsletter placement etc in exchange for a unique promotional offer that i could give my readers.

So here are the numbers for the 14 day period running up to Mothers Day.

2009:

Sales: 175
Commission: £253.07

2010 (after the networking):

Sales: 725
Commission: £1076.48

So who will be joining me at the A4uexpo in Munich this May?