So it is not too long to the A4U expo in Europe! In fact it is 27 sleeps away and after a bit of hair pulling we have decided who is going from the CJ team in the UK. The lucky ones are Cheryl Ingram, Dan Powel, Jason Baker, Dipa Shah and my good self (well someone has to manage the logistics of the stand!) On top of that we have people coming from the German and French offices.

Cheryl and I will be coming in on the Monday and are staying at the Holiday Inn with a few clients.  The other guys will join us on the Tuesday. Anyone who is looking for a friend then just email us at admin@cjblog.co.uk. If you haven’t booked your ticket yet (shame on you) then email as well as we have an exclusive discount code as we are sponsors.

We are stand 13 which may spell doom for some but I am optimistic. We also have a fair few speaker slots which I will go into more detail about closer to the event. Do take a look at the agenda though – it looks like it will be a great event.

For those of you who didn’t know – lastminute.com launched their affiliate blog a few weeks back. Being a blog lover myself I am pleased to see this latest affiliate ommunication tool from lastminute.com.

They also have a couple of competitions running offering up some theatre tickets and some vouchers so take a look at their blog and details of how to enter the competition here

We have a new member of staff ! Linda joined us  to work in the account development team – she is splitting her time between the advertiser and agency teams and is generally bolstering the quota of hugely glamourous, strong, intelligent and beautiful women in the office

Linda hails from Germany – specifically she is from a place called Koblenz which is apparently near to Cologne and Frankfurt. She has been in London since the 17th of January and at CJ for a few weeks. We have been keeping her busy with our particular brand of ValueClick entertainment – she is particularly well-versed in the pubs and bars of Putney already. She said ‘CJ is a warm, welcoming team – everybody is nice and helpful. I enjoy seeing that it’s possible to work and play hard at the same time. Nice mixture of different characters’ (ahh – we like Linda )

Linda has just finished her studies at the University of Trier (which is apparently a small town in West Germany, near to the border of Luxemburg – for those of you who need a geographical reference point). She studied sociology with a specialisation in marketing  so it is great to continue to broaden our already wide marketing expertise.

She is looking forward to learning the ins and outs of affiliate marketing and is interested in seeing the effect of the channel on the more established, traditional channels that she learnt about whilst studying. ‘It’s clearly a profitable aspect of sales and marketing strategies, very important for the future’.

We welcome Linda to the team.

A couple of weeks ago, Mediaplex our as serving company exhibited at TFM&A for the second year in a row.  Again, I was really pleasantly surprised that the show was so busy. The events organiser really did a great job, I was half expecting doom and gloom, half empty stands etc but it was packed to the rafters.

We were positioned right by the Online advertising theatre which we were also sponsoring, and quite often the queues to get in went way past our stand. Lots of people couldn’t get into sessions because they were so busy – but fret not! If you missed anything then you can get all of the content here. There were some great speaker sessions, especially (even if I do say so myself) Mediaplex’s Donal Kane talking about  ’The Importance of ad serving’ and ValueClick Media’s Richard Sharp talking about the new wave of behavioural targeting (very apt given all the major, mainstream coverage of it in the last few days).

Another one I would recommend is Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy who has to be one of the industry’s best speakers, he never disappoints.

Here are tips of the week for February. I hope that you enjoy

“If you haven’t done so already, set up a blog to support your affiliate marketing efforts. Blogs can increase organic search listings, attract more customers and enhance brand awareness. The most user-friendly one is Wordpress – we use it for this blog.

Create a ‘blog schedule’ to keep your blog updated with regular news, trends and product information.”

Emmanuel Ogidan

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