For the second year running I was lucky enough to secure my place at the Affiliate Future Barbados Event, and a very memorable event it was too for a variety of reasons.

Last year I said that I had regretted not being able to go diving or indeed visit the infamous Harbour Lights this year I managed both although the copious drinking, dancing and making merry at the latter was the most successful of the two pursuits.

Again it was great to spend some quality time networking and having fun with some fantastic people some of whom are great friends of long standing, and of the people I met for the first time I’m sure a few of them will also become more than just casual holiday acquaintances.

The Affiliate Future Barbados  event is invaluable for the Affiliate Marketing Industry, long standing business relationships and fantastic friendships are born out of it.

Thanks to the Affiliate Future team for organising the trip and being fantastic hosts, Pete, Alex, Jess and especially the wonderful J Lil who went out of his way to find me alternative accommodation when the first room proved unsuitable, thanks also to Chris Clarkson of Sunshine.co.uk for sponsoring my place yet again.

This awesome video sums up the whole Barbados experience:

The first full month of the @AffiliateBlogs twitter account retweeting Internet Marketing Blogs is over the twitter account now has 901 followers. As promised here is what has been popular throughout June.

Top 10 Tweets via @AffiliateBlogs in June 2009

One Problem I have found since developing Keith’s Easy Rss Wordpress Plugin has been the lack of decent up to date merchant RSS feeds, but no longer is that an issue thanks to those awesome guys at Easy Content Units as they have made unit feeds available via rss*, and after consulting with yours truly they have ensured they are compatible with the aforementioned plugin.

*available only to ecu pro members.

An example feed can be seen here.

To use these feeds with Keith’s Easy Rss Wordpress Plugin include in your wordpress post in this format.

[ker]rss url,number of results required[/ker]

as so

[ker]http://www.easycontentunits.com/rss/6553/3/rss2.rss,10[/ker]

Click here for full details of this wordpress plugin and to download.

More about the Easy Content units rss feed can be found on the ECU blog >> ECU goes RSS – Pro Feature

Example of an ECU rss feed in a blog post Denner Cashmere voucher code

Browsing facebook last night I came across a friends status which mentioned she was playing with Konami Code so I made a comment about the geekiness of it and she revealed that facebook has hidden an “easter egg” on the site which can be accessed using said code.

Suitably impressed I had a little dig round google and found a number of other sites which have there own hidden easter eggs, the most impressive being http://paulirish.com/2009/cornify-easter-egg-with-jquery/

Anyway this morning when I woke up I was still thinking about Konami Code and wondered if there was a wordpress plugin so I could try it for myself (cant be arsed with hard coding anymore), well I was in luck I found this little gem Konami Easter Egg so there is now a hidden message on this site.

Type in up,up,down,down,left,right,left,right,b,a then hit [Enter]

The affiliate in me cant help thinking this could be used for business, what do you reckon?

As special occasions go you would be hard pushed to beat the glitz and the glamour of the A4uAwards held on Tuesday 2nd June at London’s Park Lane Hilton.

The UK affiliate marketing industry was well represented across all sectors, and everyone was done up to the nines, which proves that even us “grubby affiliates” do on occasion scrub up well.

I had the honour of being invited to the event by DFDS Seaways, so a big thank you to my hosts Andrew Cooper and Tom Fotheringham.

Basically this article is a whole bunch of plaudits, the venue was excellent, the meal was adequate, catering for 500 is never going to be the same as individual attention in a Michelin star restaurant.

The entertainment was great, and the awards themselves well presented.

Of course the company was fabulous so many good friends and acquaintances packed together in one room to applaud and honour the best of the best.

While all the awards are worthy of our fine industry and the winners richly deserving, my particular favourites  are the Publishers’ Choice Awards and Community Choice Awards which were voted for only by members of affiliates4u, my bias toward these awards comes from the fact that many of the winners, highly commended and indeed nominees are very dear friends of mine.

Publishers’ Choice Awards

Publishers’ Choice of Affiliate Network

Winner: Affiliate Window

Highly Commended: DGM

Publishers’ Choice of Account Manager

Winner: Hannah Swift (Existem A.M.)

Highly Commended: Julie Wood (Affiliate Window) & Agnieszka Marchewka (buy.at / Platform A)

Publisher’s Choice of Affiliate Manager 2009

Winner: Chris Clarkson (sunshine.co.uk)

Highly Commended: Naomi Brown (Firebox)

Community Choice Awards

Affiliate Management Agency of 2009

Winner: Existem Affiliate Management

Highly Commended: Azam Marketing

Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2009

Winner: Kirsty McCubbin (affiliatestuff.co.uk)

Highly Commended: Lee McCoy (leemccoy.co.uk)

Congratulations to each and every one of you.

The full list of awards and winners can be found here

Finally massive congratulations must go to  Matthew Wood a young man (he only hit the big 30 a couple of days after this years awards) who has helped shape the entire UK Affiliate Marketing Industry over the past seven or so years, he and his fine team at Existem do such sterling work. Without Matt and the team events like this and the popular a4uexpo may never have been established.

As you can probably tell by the tone of my humble roundup I loved each and every minute of the night, and am already looking forward to next year.

Only change I would like to see is the smaller affiliates and merchants being honoured in some of the verticals, people who wouldn’t necessarily put themselves up for nomination, how this could be achieved is anybodies guess, food for thought.