Darrell Freeman’s Internet Marketing Blog

I first went to A4U whilst SEO Manager at Prodo in late 2008. Good conference with plenty of quality sessions, good networking and a good vibe. Learnt loads of good stuff and really opened my eyes that working full time in affiliate marketing would be sweet.  6 months later I went to A4U in Amsterdam - not as good as London - too many of the same sessions as A4U London, however was worth it for just going to Amsterdam! Great City!

I missed A4U London 2009 as I was on holiday in Kenya and just looking at the details for A4U Munich now.  With the cost of €395 a ticket, over £150 for flights, £175 for a decent hotel and spends of around £200 I reckon I’ll get more benefit out of not shelling out the near £1,000 and also missing a few days of work.

However looking at the agenda, noticed a session by the guys at The Conversion Experts and thinking the cost maybe worth it for just that session.

Affiliate Marketing is great, the money and lifestyle of those working full time in Affiliate Marketing can be amazing (not mine though)!  However as with any job there are those things that I hate:

1. Voucher Code sites.  I would love to know how much my sites have lost out to voucher code sites as the user is on the checkout on the site and they open a new tab and go and get (or ty and get) a voucher code which overirdes my cookie.  My hard work lost at the last moment.  Obviously I could open a voucher code site but the market is quite saturated and also with new guidelines coming out all the time on voucher code websites, it seems a huge amount of work to get it working properly!
2. When merchants redesign their websites and do not tell the affiliates or give them enough notice. This usually leads to the structure of the urls changing and therefore the affiliate website is left directing the traffic to 404 pages, great!
3. Other affiliates in the same market ripping off your site.  I’ve even had other affiliates use my own banners on their own websites.   A few emails threatening legal action eventually sorted but how cheeky is that!
4. Merchants having poor checkout processes or poor lead generation pages.  On some offers I know I could generate a substantial amount of business but the problem is the merchant’s site or pages would have a very poor conversion rate due to design issues (e.g. generally asking the customer for too much info), so it is a no go.
5. Affiliate Network Interfaces - Lets be honest, most of the interfaces of the affiliate networks are confusing and are not easy to navigate around and find the info you want. I would say Webgains have the best interface out of the networks.