When the mail dropped on the mat this morning I was pleased so see my train tickets had arrived for my trip to London the for a4uexpo (why in this crazy mixed up county are 2 first class singles cheaper than a standard return).

I’m not yet caught up with work after last weeks Affiliate Summit and it has dawned on me that a4uexpo affiliate marketing conference at Excel London is just 3 weeks away.

Unless you have been living a a box for most of the year you will have seen the advertising:

40 presentations, 40 exhibitors, 1 awards ceremony, 3 networking parties and SES @ a4uexpo.

It is going to be massive, the biggest event in the history of UK affiliate marketing. So what am I looking forward to on Day one?

Can’t leave out Wednesday night even though it is really day -1 so here goes.

Wednesday 24th October

Firstly my Hotel, when I knew for certain I would be attending in the middle of last month I checked out all the hotels on the Excel complex which include the likes of Novotel and Ibis, however the one that caught my attention was Sunborn Yacht - The world’s first custom-built Yacht Hotel, set within a stunning waterfront environment in the historic Royal Docks.

Moving on the highlight of Wednesday 24th October will be the pre-event networking party, hosted by A4u/buy.at, this is sure to be very popular amongst delegates so if you haven’t registered yet do it now before its too late.

Thursday 25th October

First day of the a4uexpo, there are sure to be a lot of thick heads and zombie like creatures shuffling around following the Wednesday night party.

Day 1 Agenda here.

What I’m looking forward to on day 1 of the conference is:

• The keynote speech - Our Digital Landscape - speaker Guy Phillipson CEO of Internet Advertising Bureau.
• Lets Get Social - speakers Ciaran Norris of Altogether Digital and Lee McCoy. This is a subject close to my heart, how to make money from Blogging and Social Media.
• Lunch - I haven’t yet picked out anything from the Lunchtime sessions, I may just have a leisurely meal, do a bit of networking and check out the Exhibition.
• Introducing New Technologies To Affiliate Marketing - speaker Dr Steven Brown founder and Chief Operating Officer of buy.at. New technology always fascinates me, and we have had a good year so far for innovation in affiliate marketing, hopefully Steven will give a tantalizing glimpse of the future.
• For the 3:30 session I’m going to have to make a choice I’d like to attend both - Conversion Rate Optimisation and Five Digital Strategies for Increasing Revenue & Decreasing Cost - difficult choice, I’ll either have to get cloned or compare notes with someone who attends the other one.
• How To Avoid Conflict With Your Affiliates - speaker Jessica Luthi of Affiliate Program Advice - looking forward to Jess getting the message over to both affiliates and merchants that we are all on the same side, and should work together towards the common goal.

Wow 6pm already and a very packed first day is still not complete, the Exhibition will be open for another hour, and at 8pm the venue is the The Fox for the a4uAwards Ceremony & Networking Party, another great chance to meet friends forge relationships over a beer or three with an award ceremony thrown in, I’m not going to share my nominations with you, however if you are a member of the a4u forum and haven’t voted yet get over there and do it.

Must pause for breath now will blog about what I’m looking forward to on Day 2 within the next couple of days, watch this space.

Click here to register for a4uexpo

Popularity: 22% [?]

Co-registration aka coreg is something that I have never really looked at in the past, it has always seemed to me to be a bit of an enigma shrouded in mystery, and commissions of 10p and 20p that were being touted didn’t give me the impetus to find out more, after all it takes a hell of a lot of 10p’s to pay the mortgage.

I was intrigued yesterday morning when I saw this on John Lammerton’s Blog Making money just got easier which explains how John and his company Big Idea Media, based in Plymouth, had become disillusioned with their existing coreg provider and decided to develop their own system to use on their PrizeBug site (PrizeBug is on Affiliate Future) all this happened back in 2005 and Big Idea Media quickly found that they were getting better statistics and better returns through this custom co-registration system than with their previous partner’s system, so the decision was made to develop a fully fledged coreg system for everyone to use.

The result is easycoreg, launched yesterday 1st October, an easy to implement co-registration system with much higher payouts, while there is still a couple of low coreg’s in certain sectors (Big Idea Media is a business not a charity) in other area’s the coreg payouts grow to a respectable £10, £20 and even £30 per coreg, and there are far more of these higher payouts than there are at the lower end of the scale.

As I’m so much of a numpty about the whole coreg thing and I noticed John Lammerton was on messenger I decided to congratulate him on the launch and get a bit more info, John talked me through the whole easycoreg system, how it worked how easy it was to implement etc, etc.

So I signed up and it really is simple to get started, all you have to do is register a website then go to the coreg wizard and it generates the code for your site, customization is simple, you can pick and choose coreg’s to suit your site or opt for the top ones in a certain sector, parameters such as quantities, colours form width can all be configured to fit seamlessly into your website.

Here is an example of what easycoreg can do:

ADD COREG FORM

Popularity: 20% [?]

Time to give you a short update as to how things are progressing with Blog Experiment Buying Content.

The Original four articles on HD Advice have been on the site twelve days now with a fifth outsourced article published yesterday.

In order to maximize potential revenue I have added a few static pages using the excellent content generators from Paid on results and Buy.at, a couple of examples - DVD Players utilizes content from Advanced MP3 Players which I made using the Paid on Results Content Creator and Blu-Ray DVDs was created using the Buy.at Content Engine, pages using these excellent tools are dynamic and update automatically when the respective product feeds are updated (so merchants keep your feeds fresh).

Additionally the Dixons programme on Affiliate Window announced that a £5 bonus would be added for any sales between 24th and 29th September of their Sky - Pay Once Watch Forever package so I deemed it relevant content and banged up an article about it. It worked I have generated 2 sales for the campaign sadly both came yesterday (30th) after the bonus period had expired.

In addition to the above Sky package sales the HD Advice site has also generated 2 small Amazon sales, both of which came yesterday too.

Four sales in the first 11 days may not seem much to many of you, however I’m pretty pleased with the result so far, considering all traffic is via SEO and my link building activities have been negligible and hey if none of them get rejected thats the domain name paid for :o).

The site has also got a nice position in Google for its name http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1B2GGGL_enGB175&q=hd+advice&btnG=Search&meta=

A quick look at AW Stats for September reveals that visitors have found the site using 42 different key phrases, 9 of them more than once with “ps3 vs xbox 360″ the clear leader on 8 searches.

Visitors are also on the rise with the last 5 days producing 14, 16, 16, 22 and 35 although I suspect this blog post may skew that a bit.

All in all I’m happy with the way things are panning out, with traffic rising more sales are sure to follow, and another 3 outsourced articles due for publication in the next couple of weeks will help keep the content fresh.

Popularity: 18% [?]