T’is an exciting day for I have two things to tell you.

First things first. We have launched a new offers portal which you can find on www.cjblog.co.uk/offers . This has lots of improved functionality including the ability to set up vertical feeds so you are only getting the offers which are most pertinent to yuo. Also, once you have entered your PID it is automatically entered into all the urls which means that you can just copy and paste. Take a look!

Secondly we have launched our twitter account. You can find us on http://twitter.com/CJUKNetwork.

We hope that you find both these things useful and welcome any feedback you have - just email me at admin@cjblog.co.uk

12 of the biggest networks have got together to host a summer bbq for affiliates, advertisers and agencies. It is taking place on the 29th July and we would like to invite you to attend. The only stipulation is that it is only two people per company as there are space limitations.

For more details and to register to attend please click here. Not sure who is going from CJ just yet but would be great to see lots of you there,

Better late than never here are May’s tips of the week.

“Shakespeare may have said that rough winds shake the darling buds of May, but SEOs will tell you code bloat blows aways the likelihood of prominent rankings in the SERPs.

Software like Dreamweaver, as handy as it can be, generates line upon line of erroneous code which gets in the way of search engine bots finding what they are looking for. Therefore analyse the source code on your pages and ruthlessly cull anything unnecessary.”

Florian Gramshammer

Senior Sales Manager

“According to a MarketingSherpa report, an astronomical 48% of customers abandon a purchase at the checkout phase. It is therefore critical for merchants to take a long hard look at their shopping cart process and get others to offer feedback. No business can afford to lose half their customers at the point of purchase in an economic downturn.

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Daniel wrote a while ago about the importance of the IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council to help regulate and drive best practices within the industry (see here).

The IAB is running a seminar on Affiliate Marketing on Wednesday 24th June at its offices near Holborn in London. The event is a quick look into affiliate marketing - an introduction by Matt Bailey (AMC Chair) covers what the industry is doing to standardise and self regulate. This is followed by two short case studies, one of which is with Daniel Powel from CJ and Lina Patel from lastminute.com who recently won the best use of affiliate marketing within the travel&leisure categories.

Daniel and Lina are also speaking as part of a panel which closes the event. Questions for the panel are submitted beforehand to dan@iabuk.net.

Full details of the agenda can be found on the IAB site here

Claire from existem sent around the promotional buttons for a4u award winners yesterday which acted as a reminder that I had not yet blogged about it. So I will  take this opportunity to congratulate:

• Argos - who won in both categories they entered; the retail award and best use of affiliate marketing as part of an integrated campaign
• lastminute.com who won in the travel and leisure category. Fingers crossed that they also win at the NMA awards in a couple of weeks. Lina will also be presenting this at the IAB affiliate marketing seminar on the 24th of June. I will blog about that shortly
• Payday who were shortlisted in the Finance section
• Hildegunn who was shortlisted as Publisher’s Choice of Account Manager

Congratulations must also go to all of the other winners, advertisers, affiliates and agencies alike.

I was actually at the awards, kindly invited by Payday UK  which is a rare treat for a marketing person in this industry (boo sob). The event was great  - loads of people, lots and lots of CJers from over the years who have gone on to do great things at networks, agencies and affiliate companies. A bit of a family reunion.

I did attempt to take photos to show you all and whilst I would never claim to be the best photographer in the world I can usually do a bit better than a blurred shot of the floor which is what my camera is now full of. I toyed with uploading a photo to show you how very poor they were but then I felt this would diminish the outstanding success of the award winners and shortlisted companies. So I am not going to!

Well done everyone. Thanks A4U. Over

There is a fantastic special offer on A4U Expo tickets. The first 50 to register receive not only the early bird discount of £100 but also an additional £100 off which is over 50% off for affiliates. The early-bird discount is available until the 31st August. Register here

Commission Junction are sponsoring the event for the third year in a row. The conference has always had top-notch speakers and the networking has always been extremely useful. If you need convincing you can see the post about last years A4U London here and the posts about A4U Europe here and here.

Also - a quick good luck to everyone (ummm….perhaps I don’t mean EVERYONE ;-)) at the awards tonight. Looks set to be a great evening - I am already dreading tomorrow.

The CJ UK team and our clients have been sprinkled with award dust. Let me tell you all about them:

You already know that the exceptionally talented Hildegunn has been nominated for the Publisher’s Choice of Account manager award at the A4U awards.  What you don’t know is that we have have worked with our clients and are shortlisted for more:

• Payday UK for the finance vertical
• lastminute.com for the travel vertical
• Argos for TWO awards -  the retail vertical and for the best use of affiliate marketing as part of an integrated campaign.

In addition - lastminute.com with CJ have been shortlisted for an NMA Award: “Championing affiliates for lastminute.com”

It is very exciting. Congratulations to all. Fingers crossed……:-) See you at the A4U Awards.

As many of you know from following Hannah’s posts, this year CJ attended and presented at the A4U Expo in Amsterdam. As well as being one of the attendees and ’stand hands’ I was also lucky enough to present a session with David Harding from Argos on a very topical subject - “Managing Success in a Downturn”. You can find a copy of the presentation here but I thought it would be helpful for those that didn’t attend if I provided a quick recap of it.

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I have been somewhat remiss and for that I apologise. Life has been busy however that should not have prevented me from sharing the news that no less than two CJ’ers completed the London Marathon a few weeks back.

James Lamb and Roger Lee both trained for many months and made many sacrafices (namely beer) to take part.

Roger does a Rocky

James looking a tad cocky

Here is the race in their words:
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Calling all affiliates…

Matt Bailey at i-level is running a new initiative - the ‘i-level Affiliate Surgeries’. These are open to all affiliates - you don’t need to have worked with i-level to get a place.

The first session is about SEO and Content and will be held on May 26th from 5 - 7pm at i-level’s offices in Oxford Circus. It will be run by Matt Bailey and also joining him will be Judith Lewis, i-level’s Search Director.

All details can be found here. If you want to attend you need to email matt.bailey@i-level.com. Only 30 spots up for grabs so get in early. Happy learning