Those of you who work with me and a few of you that don’t are probably aware that my main area is fashion, as you may appreciate there are a lot of fashion merchants out there and its a often a case of me picking the easy options when choosing what to write about, if I have content about a merchant I am more likely to give them prominence than if I have to do my own research and totally write articles from scratch.

Don’t get me wrong I am not against writing stuff from the ground up and probably between 6 and 12 articles daily are all my own work.

So what do I require to push your programme?

In a word CONTENT!!!

Unique content is best and it will push you to the top of the pile, I have a wonderful agency person who sends me 3 unique articles a week for one of the merchants she looks after, consequently 3 articles a week get published for that merchant.

So what kind of stuff am I looking for?

Well the answer is absolutely anything fashion related, short articles work best for me in the 150 – 200 word region.

One article will get you exposure, one a month gets you regular exposure, one a week… etc you get the picture.

Tell me and my users about your brands, your ranges, your new stuff, your best sellers, your clearance department, celebrities that use your products, media attention they have gained, anything really, it is all useful.

If you send me unique content I will use it.

If you send me generic content I may use it.

If you send me nothing I don’t have a starting point.

What else can you do?

Let me know when your products have been on TV or in the papers and magazines, the fresher the better, I got a heads up about a range of products that were featured on a Channel 4 programme recently, so I wrote a short piece about them, it wasn’t fashion incidentally but a health product which I could use on the main fashion site, from the moment I published they literally started flying off the shelves and I know for a fact a lot more publishers than me benefited, as the product was not unique to one merchant, a few more sales were diverted in the direction of the one I promoted thanks to being guided by the agency looking after them.

I have just realised it is a year as of yesterday that I wrote about this very same subject How To Push My Buttons And Get Me To Promote Your Wares just shows not a lot has changed.

A big thank you to everyone who sends me content, has already sent me content and is about to send me content.

Being a bit of a lazy blogger its unusual for me to post more than 3 or 4 times a month on Keith’s Affiliate Marketing Blog often its a lot less, so it takes something special to make me do two posts in one day.

I had just hit publish on the Hootsuite article when my daughter told me Interlink had left a package for me, think she was a bit disappointed it wasn’t for her as she is 18 tomorrow and covered in chicken pox so not able to celebrate with her mates.

Well the mystery package turned out to be my prize from The All Up And On What Would You Buy Challenge run by Existem Affiliate Management.

I have always been of the mindset that you have to be in it to win it although with this one it was a little different, I had been looking for an angle to promote all-up-and-on and here was the perfect hook 3 products from their range in 3 different price bands, so I spent a little time sifting through the site and couldn’t come up with inspiration for a single post, no it spawned two The All Up And On Challenge and In the Kitchen with All Up And On.

Anyway come judgment day I was lucky enough to be one of the winners and today took delivery of the awesome Hucks designchain™ which you can see below stuffed with a few affiliate essentials.

Thanks to @allupandon and @Existem_AM for this fabulous prize and for running such a fantastic winnable incentive.

For some time I have been pulling in the rss feeds from some of the very best UK affiliate marketing blogs and publishing them in an aggregated form on Internet Marketing Blogs, I set this site up simply for myself to use in January 2007 although I suspect one or two others do find it useful.

Last Saturday I decided to set up IMB with its own twitter @affiliateblogs, I mentioned it to my good friend Purple and he suggested automating the tweets by putting the rss feed through HootSuite, somewhat skeptical I took a look to see what was involved. It couldn’t have been easier to set up the account and plugin in the rss from IMB, maximum setting is 5 automated tweets / hour, so I put it on that, can always throttle it back if it seems too intusive or spammy.

Thats all there is to it, and so far it has gone pretty well, @affiliateblogs has picked up 300 followers in the week and at time of writing there have been 400 clicks through the twitter links.

The stats that Hootsuite provide are pretty good too here is the full week by click and location;

It also lets me know which blog articles have been most popular;

All in all a satisfactory first week, the jury is out whether I use similar automation on other projects but there is a fantastic potential, just hope Hootsuite keep an eye on their users to prevent it getting too spammy.

Ever wanted to submit your wordpress blog to a reader or blog service or even subscribe to someone elses blog, but felt that too much of it was off topic?

Well with wordpress it is possible to just submit or subscribe to the rss of individual categories.

All you do is navigate to the category you are interested in and add feed after the url.

For example;

Say on this site you are only interested in the Affiliate Marketing category

1. navigate to the appropriate category http://www.keithbond.co.uk/category/affiliate-marketing/
2. Add feed to the end of the url http://www.keithbond.co.uk/category/affiliate-marketing/feed and subscribe in your favourite reader.

Incidentally if anyone has a UK affiliate blog or a blog which is pretty general but does contain one category with an internet marketing / affiliate marketing slant let me know and I will add it to Internet Marketing Blogs which also has of yesterday has a twitter account @AffiliateBlogs which tweets new articles as they are published, this is set to a maximum of 5 per hour so you shouldn’t get over run although at busy times the odd one may slip through the net.

Another service to add the affiliate category of your blog to is the blogs section ofaffiliates4u.com simply click on the My Profile link at the top of the page and navigate to the blogs section and add your blog (or category) feed url.

The first a4uexpo Europe in Amsterdam was amazing, I knew it would be good but it exceeded my expectations, the venue was ideal, the timetable well structured and the quality of the speakers was of a very high standard. The delegates were naturally of a more international flavour than at the London events however there was still good representation from the UK.

In all I attended a full 12 sessions over the 2 days of the conference, I managed in the main to stick to my timetable the only change I made was the first slot on day two where I ventured into “As Online continues to take its valid slice of the performance cake, what does the future hold for performance advertising in general?” presented by Nicky Iapino, this was by choice I might add not some mis-navigation due to the effects of a heavy night.

Regrets, thats easy I missed a further 7 sessions due to not being able to be in two places at once, however I’m hoping that these will be all available on video at some point.

In general highlights were many and disappointments were few, suffice to say I have a whole host of ideas, from link building to site structure to producing effective content and many other little gems, I have already implemented a couple of things with many more to do, hopefully the rewards will follow.

Changes I’d like to see

• difficult one but maybe a few more minutes between end of lunchtime sessions and start of afternoon sessions
• a way of asking questions without having to use the microphone (some of us are shy) possibly a tear off strip at the bottom of the feedback form.

Highlight of the exhibition hall for me was Conversion Rate Experts who were giving free eyetracking reviews of delegates websites, very illuminating.

I would now like to publicly thank Matthew Wood and his team from a4uevents / Existem for putting on an excellent event and all the speakers, exhibitors, other delegates, back room staff etc for making it a resounding success.

See you all in London in October.