Time has flown right past me so here is a double whammy of tips of the week.

September

“As many of you know, the words in H1 header tags are given weighting by search engine bots and contribute towards you ranking higher for those words.

If you think huge H1 fonts will make your web pages look ugly, you can use CSS to reduce their size. An example would be:
[STYLE TYPE="text/css"]
H1 {font-family: verdana,arial; font-size: 9pt; color:#ff4500}
[/STYLE] (replace [] with <>)”

Katie Harrod
Account Director

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As promised, I have some more new people to introduce after the charming Marta Casero a few weeks ago. Some more to come as well….

First up is Melanie Scheibner who has joined us as an Account Representative in Dipa’s team. We have stolen Melanie from our PriceRunner friends on the third floor. Secondly is Andrew Stephens who has joined as an Account Manager looking after the ValueClick/CJ short term campaigns.

So, let’s find out a little bit more about Melanie. Here she is….

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Alas I was not there at CJU this year so instead of telling you all about how sad that made me I thought it would be much more interesting to interview Luke Judge of Net Media Planet about his experiences there.

So how did you end up at CJU US?

One cold winter afternoon in early January my CJ UK Account Manager sent me news of a CJ UK competition that involved me taking a photo of the CJ UK team photo (wow – that’s a mouthful – Editor’s note, you can read all about it here) in an interesting place or situation. After racking my brains for 0.315624 seconds and generating 215.897034 results I had the smart idea of taking CJ UK to Las Vegas for the week. The next day I was off to London Heathrow and aboard a Virgin Atlantic flight. THe CJ UK team were with me at every stage, occupying the space in my inner jacket pocket between the pen, sunglasses and cuban cigar.

A few days later I had a handful of great photos with CJ UK all over Las Vegas. Thanks has to go to the brilliant support provided by photographer elect, Magnus Nilsson, for his creative input and support.

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What a fantastic couple of days it has been at the London A4U Expo. It genuinely does seem that each year gets better, with the usual faces and fresh new faces in abundance. The event must be one of the best networking events in the UK. We are usually such a reticent bunch – comparing US (where power networking is the norm) events to UK ones just highlights to me how bad we tend to be at chatting to people we don’t know. None of that has ever been in evidence at the A4U Expo’s though – where the atmosphere is always very welcoming and relaxed.

That said – the first thing I saw when I ascended up the escalator on the first morning was a short, menacing squirrel. Scary, really scary. The picture is blurry because my hands were literally shaking with fear!

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We have a wealth of new CJ starters for me to introduce to you over the next few weeks. I will start with the lovely Marta who has been employed as an Account Executive in Emmanuel’s team after a very successful internship. Yes, she joined us AFTER she had worked with us for a while. This means she must like us.

This is what Marta looks like (she is less blurry in real life!):

As Marta is not backward in coming forwards I will introduce her with a little interview.

I can tell from your accent (and the fact that you talk in Spanish with Brezo) that you are from Spain. Tell me about it:

Everytime someone asks me where I am from I think about making up a story about a terribley exciting place as nobody has heard of my home town, Logrono. I then explain to people that this is in the Rioja region. Automatically they smile, as if I am going to pull a bottle of red wine from my handbag.

Anyway, Logrono is a nice place worth a visit. There is a very popular road called Laurel Street where you can eat the most amazing tapas you could ever imagine – better than Brezo’s tortilla (Editor’s note – Marta is a liar, NOTHING is better than Brezo’s tortilla).

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Every so often we allow people to leave the CJ offices for important events and client meetings etc. A few weeks ago we allowed Roger, Cheryl and Tom out to go to the Argos Supplier Summit which was held at Wembley. They were joined by a few publishers and Argos’ other digital suppliers.

The event was a chance to discuss Argos’ website and promotional activities across all digital channels and to look at how that integrates with offline promotions.They discussed what they were seeing in terms of trends and then planned on how to capitalise on these trends. These events are key to Argos’ multi-channel success which was, in case you forgot, one of the two awards that they picked up at the A4U awards earlier this year.

The event also provided Roger with an opportunity to hold the FA Cup. He was very happy – look!

We are also allowing people out for the A4U Expo next week. We are sponsors and will be at all networking events as well as manning stand 20. We hope that you will be allowed out to join us – see you there!

It only seems like a blink of an eyelid has gone by since I was preparing Commission Junction for the first ever A4U Expo. Unbelievably though, this is now the 3rd year that the Expo has been running and, once again, Commission Junction has secured ourselves a sponsorship slot at the event. We will be there on stand 20 so come along to say hi.

As well as just exhibiting at the event we will also be speaking. Along with FusePump and TUI we will be talking  in a session called ‘Feeds can do WHAT?’. This is an overview of how feeds can be crucial to the success of an affiliate marketing programme. It is at 12 midday on the Tuesday so do try to pop along if you can – we have been working with the FusePump guys on some really interesting innovations.

Commission Junction and FusePump recently joined forces to develop advanced feed solutions. You can read about it here. In addition, FusePump have deveworked with TUI to develop an AdCreator tool which you can read more about here.

We hope to see lots of you there.

“Some affiliate networks have an invalid link tool. This allows publishers to determine if you are sending traffic to advertisers that is not earning you any commission. Use this tool on a regular basis to ensure you’re not losing valuable income.

In the case of CJ, this tool can easily be found on the page publishers see when they login. It is under the “Quick Tasks” section. You need to click on the “Review x click(s) from invalid links”.”

Florian Gramshammer

Senior Sales Manager

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Right – thanks Hannah and Celia. I am back now so I will take the final slot and let you all know how it ended!

Day 5

• Peterborough – Lowestoft
• Distance Travelled: 115 miles (yes, that’s right, 115 miles)

It was a long hard slog over to the east coast, I didn’t finish until after nine in the evening. My motivation was to complete the task before the weekend so that myself and the ’support team’ could enjoy a little family time.

As it was so late I met with Lee Bromley from Submission Technology on the Saturday (they donated an absolutely amazing £500!)

Jason, Lee from Submission Technology and Support team

Unfortunately Darren Loud who heads up the affiliate team was off with the flu. I had planned to interview him for the blog so instead I caught up with Director, Neil Durrant on Monday. Here is his interview:

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Hello everyone! As Hannah is on leave I have the dubious honour of sharing the latest installment from Jason’s adventure with you all. But before I pass over to Jason I’m going to grab my minute in the spotlight and introduce myself. My name’s Celia and I head up the PR over at Commission Junction (and across ValueClick) Right then, where was I? Oh yes Jason…

Wednesday’s report – in Jason’s words

• Leicester to Peterborough
• Distance – 42 miles

Day four was a very simple cycle route, no meetings booked for the morning so straight off we go, the only difference today was the weather – rain!!!!

Jason reaches Peterborough

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