Last week I attended my first a4uexpo at ExCeL. Overall the event was fantastic and I would definitely recommend it to any SEO or affiliate marketers next time.
Day 1
The first session I attended was WordPress SEO & Optimisation Strategies (click to view presentation) by Joost de Valk. With lots of good tips, plugins and a slick presentation this was an ideal overview for the growing number of affiliates using Wordpress as a CMS for their websites.
Following a break for lunch and an hour walking round the stands in the main hall it was time to watch the Extreme SEO Strategies for Affiliates session with Dave Naylor, Rob Kerry, Joost De Valk, Marcus Tandler and moderation by Ciaran Norris.
Starting with reputation management and finishing with how certain finance websites are using the Digital Point Coop Network this was high level SEO at its very best.
The evenings entertainment was a luxury cruise down the Thames followed by drinks in the hotel bar.
Day 2
Following a late start waiting for Al Carlton to cure his hangover with lager I watched him deliver an excellent Million Dollar Blogging Strategies for Affiliates presentation. Well worth watching the video when it’s available online.
The majority of questions directed towards Al were related to which Wordpress plugins he was using which was interesting.
Next on the schedule was Affiliate Doctors’ Live! with Dave Naylor, Joost De Valk, Marcus Tandler and Chris Garrett.
This session was focussed on doing reviews of affiliate sites suggested by the audience. Most of them were quite poor in terms of design which for an affiliate site is a very basic requirement – generating trust and brand is hard enough for affiliates without suffering from poor design as well.
Next year I believe it would be better to showcase how good sites work rather than ripping apart sites that 90% of people in the room thought were quite low level.
The final session of the conference was Meet The Super Affiliates with Kieron Donoghue, Doug Scott and Jamie Harwood.
The format was questions from the floor and lots of great information was shared during the session.
SEO Dinner
On the final day I was pleased to attend Dave Naylors SEO Dinner along with Becky, Anthony Shapley, Mel Carson, Todd Crawford, Joost De Valk, Marcus Tandler and Al Carlton.
We shared a few advanced SEO strategies and ate some excellent Thai food. Thanks Dave!
Summary
This was my first time at an a4u event and I was very impressed at the professionalism of the event and the passion of some of the affiliates. Definitely a conference you should attend next time.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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“Following a late start waiting for Al Carlton to cure his hangover with lager”, cheeky bastard. To put the record straight I awoke at 10am totally fresh and wide awake, Patrick however surfaced at 11 and looked rough
sounds great patrick. nice to see the uk’s finest all in one place
noticed your new url structure aswell? this for google news etc… purposes?
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Yes, Google News is the reason.
More comments from Patrick AltoftI’m thinking I should probably attend one of these sort of upcoming events, is there a best place to find out about them or at least which ones should you should consider going to?
Also, I’ve thinking of changing my permalink structure to one like your’s Patrick, have you or are you planning a tutorial post on this? The last time I tried it, the plugin I used didn’t work properly and I lost Google traffic for around 5 months!
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Zath changing permalinks was hit or miss for me. Tried 3 plugins and finally found Permalink Redirect worked perfectly.
The issue with lots of plugins is that they don’t get updated when WP changes.
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