Dominic "The Hodge" Hodgson

After reading Becky’s review yesterday I decided to get my arse into gear and finish typing up my thoughts on the Expo, for those that don’t know I spoke on a Panel about Twitter and had a 10 minute presentation (I’m going to do some slideshare magic later and record it).

(Disclaimer : As with all conference reviews, I have to put a disclaimer that I also run a conference that touches quite heavily on affiliate marketing so my opinions may or may not be swayed by that)

• Sessions - I didn’t go to many sessions to be honest, between sorting out my patter for the first day and trying to meet as many of the people I met last year as possible… Sessions are always difficult at a conference with this audience, not only do have you a lot of first timers who don’t really know about the long arguments of click to reveal but you’ve got seasoned pro’s who the last thing they want to hear about is ‘the best way to rank is good backlinks’ or similar advice, Site Clinics and things like that don’t tend to work in this enviroment because… noone wants to out the inner workings of there site  to 400 potentional competitors (oh and a couple of Google Employees) but as soon as the sessions were over, the ones that I attended were swamped with people asking questions privately
• Exhibitionists – It was nice to see so many different companies with a stand in the expo hall, although some had different techniques when it came to getting people to the stand, some would wait in the middle of the gangway and pounce… ARE YOU PROMOTING US? No? WHY NOT?… because I’ve no idea who you are?.. I’ve a very specialized need with affiliate programs for the moment so I’ve not joined networks that don’t have programs that appeal to me but still some were saying how much money I could make by promoting a certain merchant on a completely unrelated site… the opposite of that were people that well.. just didn’t interact at all, a company in the corner (who shall remain nameless but lets just say they were next to OMG) but I walked up to the stand.. read the contents looked around for a handout or something and they just stared… not engaging at all (some would say #fail!).. However some fantastic people there Market Ace, Shopzilla and Entropay were all engaging without being overlay sales.
• What Comes Before Part B? – The heart and soul of an event like this… is the networking parties and A4U does it well, A Pre Party, A Middle Party and an After Party.. the friday night venue was a good call although there was a heck of a lot of people there, many have already blogged about the 02 venue so I won’t moan too much about that but I’m never a fan of music at a networking event and the venue itself lost a lot of money that night, we left about 20 minutes after we arrived and spent the rest of the evening in the hotel bar with a LOT more attendees, mind you, I saw a sign in the 02..

CHEAPEST BEERS IN THE 02, ONLY £3.95 A PINT

• … no wonder they ran out, they must only sell 5 a day
• The link swap shop wall –  What’s possibly the worse thing that could happen to that? with a Google employee there… with a camera… hope you’ve all got a clean backlink history.
• Conference Schwag –  Damn the recession, Schwag is usually the first thing that goes… so picked up a couple of USB sticks, A Frisbee, A Teddy Bear, a weird screen cleaner bloke, an Awesome world clock… oh an I won an MP4 player from Entropay.

I’ve also got to thank Keith Bond for giving me the 30p for the toilet, I really needed a wee.

So, The next one is in May and Munich, I’ve had some good feedback from my session so who knows, I might try and put something similar together to submit again…

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Tags: affiliate marketing, affiliate programs, different companies, expo hall, minute presentation
Posted In: Events