I was delighted to meet with Alison Guise and Cheryl Ingram for lunch yesterday in Edinburgh. With family life meaning that I’m no longer all that keen on trips to London it was really nice for a network to take the time to travel here instead. Especially since I’m far from being a high value affiliate to CJ, in fact I don’t think I’ve earned a payment this year from them as I’ve been working on other things.
Alison, Cheryl and the rest of the team have been working hard to improve things at CJ UK as the podcast with Alison also shows. Amongst others Doug and Nadeem seem to enjoying dealing with CJ again too.
Overall it’s good to see one of the older networks moving forward again and taking positive steps.
p.s. The other thing I learned yesterday is that ostrich is really tasty
If you are in the Edinburgh area or if you want to make the trip then I’m organising an informal Christmas drinks event this Thursday - more details and free registration on the eventbrite page.
Today seems a bit dull compared to the events of yesterday. Late last week I found out about the Vodafone Liveguy campaign and so I kept an eye on the blog and followed @vodafoneliveguy on twitter. Basically Liveguy is spending a day in different cities with 3 netbooks plus a year of mobile broadband to give away if you find him.
The competition kicked off at 9am in Edinburgh yesterday and so during the morning I thought I would follow events and see how quickly he was found but in the end no-one apart from the social media whirlwind that is Mike Coulter managed to catch up with him.
With that in mind I thought it was time to hit the road so accompanied by my wife and one year old daughter we drove into town, abandoned the car and took off up the High Street in search of his last known position. I think we managed to get ahead of liveguy and ended up on the castle esplanade where all the staff & stewards were wearing liveguy style bright read coats just to confuse the issue.
We started to wander back down the High Street and suddenly spotted him standing on the corner so I ended up sprinting down the road to greet him with “You’re liveguy and I’m a Vodafone winner”. After a bit of hesitation liveguy confirmed I was a winner but only because the morning netbook had not been claimed by Mike so it was carried over.
The afternoon netbook had been claimed five mins earlier by Jay from Freak Marketing author of a really interesting facebook app called Get Them In so that’s worth a look too.
We had to hang around for another ten minutes or so to sign a model release form! We filled in the paper work and then headed home. The only slight down side was that we now have to wait for up to a month to actually get the netbook sent out It would have been more exciting to go home with it there and then but that’s just a minor issue.
All in all it was great to meet liveguy and leave a winner and it’s a great promotion and demonstration of the capabilities of the Vodafone Netbook. It was also good to meet Stylist Brighton from Shiny Media who was also on the trail of liveguy and here is her video from the day. I arrive near the end!
Check out the liveguy website and see if liveguy is visiting your home city as it could be well worth getting out there to look for him!
Day two kicked off just a little too early but I made it over to the Excel for the presentation about mydeco. It looks like it’s going to be an amazing site but it was interesting to hear that the retailers couldn’t provide them with a reasonable quality of data feed so they just had to build code to scrape their sites.
I then had some time to take in the exhibition and hang around at the Existem-AM stand which seemed to be where you could find the affiliates throughout the conference!
Next session was about PR by 10yetis and once again it was an excellent presentation with some great tips. I was surprised to hear that free newspaper The Metro is consider the most influential newspaper.
From there I moved on to the presentation by Nora from Sedo which was interesting as I’ve been getting more into domaining recently. The number of cases studies of businesses which have rebranded just to match a generic domain was pretty amazing.
Finally I made it along to the Super Affiliates session which was both entertaining and inspiring. In some ways it wasn’t so much about learning new information (apart from Shak’s story which was new to me!) but about being inspired about what is actually possible.
The second night party was really enjoyable although the private Sky party did mean things were a bit disjointed which was a shame. Maybe that’s just because I didn’t get in but it did mean I couldn’t catch up with those who were behind the closed doors!
All in all it was a fantastic couple of days and a job well done by all at Existem.
Getting started on day 2 of the expo so time for a quick blog post about the events of yesterday.
I had an early start but got down to London in time for the intro by Matthew Wood from Existem and the keynote by Michael Nutley from NMA then the full programme started at 11am.
I went to the Wordpress SEO session by Joost de Valk which was excellent and packed full of useful tips. I think I probably need to set aside a couple of days to install about 20 plugins now though! The most useful tip that I took away was to look at hardcoding certain parts of the wordpress theme like the blog title instead of causing another database query for something that never changes. Load time has always been the one area of Wordpress I’ve been disappointed with so I’m hoping that making these changes will help.
I went to the bonus lunchtime session held by sunshine.co.uk where they released their sunpress plugin which looks pretty impressive and will be a great starting point for a Wordpress travel site.
Next session I went to was the Extreme SEO session which was fairly lively and in between the chaos there were some great tips. Lots of chat about taking out your competitors with negative SEO rather than improving your own site though which was slightly disturbing! The dominate subject was link building and it does seem to show that as long as you take care of some basic on page SEO issues the main thing you should be worrying about is links.
The final session of the day was the Affiliate State of the Nation panel which I moderated. It seemed to go pretty well and there was some good discussion about issues facing the industry. Most interesting for me was the issues about affiliates either wanting to grow large businesses or keep it as a lifestyle business. Thanks to Kieron for speaking up on that point of view. I was also amused to be sitting on the stage watching Shane Robinson fall asleep in the second row.
It was great at the end of that session to bump in to Pete Sipple from Frequencycast which is a podcast I have been listening to for some time and which I would highly recommend.
Finally the night finished with a cruise on the Silver Sturgeon which made for a great end to the day.
It’s nearly time for the a4uexpo 2008 so I spoke to Matthew Wood to see what we could all look forward to. The podcast is just over 20 mins long and rattles through some highlights and tips to make the most of the expo. Here are some of the sessions, people & companies we mention briefly along the way.
WordPress SEO & Optimisation Strategies with Joost de Valk
David Vs Goliath, Affiliate Marketing for SME’s - Robert Glasgow, Webgains
It would have been more exciting to go home with it there and then but that’s just a minor issue.
but it did mean I couldn’t catch up with those who were behind the closed doors!
