a4uexpo thoughts

a4uexpospeaking

Last week was the 3rd annual A4U Expo and I thought I would share some thoughts on it here.

For me, the real benefit of the conference was the opportunity to network, have meetings with people that I don’t normally have the opportunity to and also to catch up with old friends. Because I’m based in Sunderland and the companies that I work close with or predominantly based in the South then the Expo was a great chance to meet up with them in the same location and cram as many meetings in a couple of days.It was also great to just wander round the exhibition and catch up with friends who I normally only get the chance to speak to at these events.

As I was on 3 panels over the 2 days I thought I’d give my impressions on how they went:

The Affiliate Doctors Live - Day 1, 12pm to 1pm

Myself, Chris Garrett, Duncan Jennings, Jamie Harwood and Dixon Jones gave our honest opinions and ideas for a whole range of websites that were submitted in advance to us via this blog. Some of the sites we talked about were Sletoh.com, DVDBoxsets.co.uk, HomeandGardengifts.co.uk, Geekery.in, MobileMentalism.com and WhereCanIBuyOnline.com. Speaking to some of the site owners after the session, they seemed happy with the advice we had given out. Overall this was a fun session to run and I hope everyone thought we gave some useful tips.

Start-up And Launch Strategy - Day 2, 12.15pm to 1.15pm

I was really pleased to be on this panel as it was the “music” panel with me representing ShareMyPlaylists.com, Seatwave, GigLocator and Spotify in attendance. We were asked questions from the audience as well as our moderator, Pamir, who did an excellent job of keeping the conversation running. Feedback after the session was absolutely fantastic and it was brilliant to see a full room for this session. For me it was interesting to hear how other companies in this space were affected with similar issues to myself, especially around getting word out for your business, boot strapping, investment etc.

Meet The Super Affiliates - Day 2, 4pm to 5pm

As this was the second last panel on the last day and there were more than a few people in the audience who had clearly suffered “death by Powerpoint” from previous sessions I knew that it would be a bit of a challenge to get the audience participating. So after a slow start I invited questions via Twitter which seemed to get things going and also helped out those in the audience who were a bit shy or hesitant to speak out to a room full of people. Sessions like this are always a bit out of my control as we rely completely on the audience asking us good questions. Hopefully we answered as honestly and entertaining as we could and nobody was disappointed. If anybody was wondering why I gave the guy in the front of the audience a bit of a hard time when he asked about what would we do when Google ban all affiliate sites it was because he spent the WHOLE of the session talking to the person next to him and was very distracting. In fact I was very close to asking him to leave.

The 3 sessions that I would have liked to have seen but unfortunately missed were Joanna Butler’s “Barriers to Conversion and Discovering Untapped Opportunities with Analytics” - mainly because Joanna is a good friend, knows her stuff and it was me who persuaded her to talk Judging by the feedback I heard about her talk afterwards she did a great job. I was also gutted I missed Dom’s, Naomi and Mel’s talk entitled “You want to Tweet What!? - Social Media, Twitter and Affiliate Marketing” which was very entertaining by all accounts. Finally, Nadeem’s “My 12 biggest mistakes in 12 years” was very well received, most probably because he used a quote from me in his first slide

What were your thoughts on the a4uexpo? Do you have any feedback from any of the sessions that I was involved in? Please leave your comments below, I’d love to hear from you

What I’m listening to right now: Polly Scattergood - “Please Don’t Touch”

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a4uexpo thoughts

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