Peter William Anderson

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?

So firstly, the site is still mine. Offers have come in, but nothing I would be willing to accept. If you missed the post about the sale then you read it here.

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* This is not a blog post about Liverpools anonymous season…

The new a4u has been live a few days now and one of the most improved sections is “The Pool“. Previously you had to wade through the constant onslaught of network promotions as the blog section was fed via RSS. Now that The Pool is fed via user submissions 99% of the articles seem to be interesting and relevant. There has also been a change in the way articles get voted on. Previously if you liked an article your name/gravatar got associated with it, and likewise if you “disliked” and article. The advantage was that it quickly becomes apparent when a blog post was being “spammed” to the top, but it might have put people off either voting against the post (as they don’t want to appear negative) or voting for it (as they cant be associated with the post for whatever reason).

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The big news in the Affiliate world is the sale/purchase of Buy.at and the launch of the new a4u website. Both have been covered with more insight and detail elsewhere (check out “The Pool” section on the a4u.)

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