A4U get2gether in London

On Friday there was another A4U get2gether held in London. It started at around 10 a.m. when we all gathered on the ‚Dixie Queen’. I think around 450 people attended the 6 hour trip. It was a nice opportunity to catch up with people who I only knew from email or phone contact and of course to get to know more people in this business as well as just to spread our name (unlike in Germany most people don’t seem to have heard of Spreadshirt before).

The event was perfectly organized and among those 450 people there were even around 120 affiliates. Seemed like everyone was looking out for red badges (affiliates) whereas yellow badges (agencies) seemed least exciting – at least to me.

However the whole thing was a little disappointing though. It helped making me finally realise that the UK market indeed is quite different from the German one. I did not see one single SEO (= no content websites) but the vast majority of professional affiliates promote advertisers either on ppc basis (usually little companies with 5-50 people) or they just focus on casino / gaming / betting / bingo websites which appears to be a huge business in the UK.

Now we’ve got to adjust our plans and strategies to the situation. Other people I spoke to made exactly the same experience. The great thing is I’ve learned a lot.

After getting off the boat maybe 200 people headed to ‚The Tower’ which is a hotel including a nice bar right next to the Tower Bridge. An Indian restaurant is where this day ended with a few guys from Commission Junction as well as some other guests.

For pictures please see below.

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6 Comments so far

[…] Patrick Hundt - great to meet you and sorry I don’t have any relevant sites for Spreadshirt yet! Some good photos on the blog […]

[…] Die Damen und Herren von Sprödshört waren auch mit einem kleinen Stand und Patrick vertreten: […]

Hi Patrick, I wonder if the German market is so different? I thought the same thing about the US Market b4 I went to the summit in July. I found that affiliates by and large shared a lot in common as did merchants and networks. There were SEO affiliates but I guess you just need to know them as most will not advertise the fact. I would urge you to revisit a UK Get 2 gether but this time have a chat with a few folks from the a4uforum b4 hand. I would love to attend a German get2gether thats for sure. Hope you have a great week - Jess

[…] Patrick […]

Hi Jess,

Thank you for your input. I really appreciate it.
I’m sure you’re right.. there have to be SEOs in the UK as well
However I didn’t meet any and therefore was a little disappointed.
We will give it another shot though

I’ll let you know when there’s another major German affiliate event is coming up.

Cheers
Patrick

[…] I remember really well two online marketing get2gethers which were really different from each other. The first one took place in Düsseldorf, Germany in the middle of September. Back then I still was the affiliate manager at Spreadshirt. As always keeping my eyes open for affiliates that might be interesting for our programme. There weren’t too many however apart from some affiliates whose business it was to recruit other affiliates the majority would call themselves SEO. I think those people can generate a lot of sales. They don’t seem so interested in the t-shirt business as there’s less money to make than elsewhere but I’d say just give it some time until the more profitable markets become too competitive. Anyway, only one week later I got the great opportunity to attend the ad-tech as well as the famous a4u get2gether in London. Guess what: not even once I heard the word ‘SEO’. Instead everyone seemed to be into PPC. In the end I barely bothered asking as the answer would have been PPC anyway. I was pretty disappointed about that as I knew we already had some PPC affiliates promoting and there’s only a very limited number of positions on Google and Yahoo. Now I’m back to this subject. Since I launched my UK coupon website recently but haven’t done anything to push it in the search engines I thought it might be time to check out the backlink structure of my competitors. I have checked out like 7 or 8 already and only two of them have at least some serious backlinks at all. All the others don’t seem to care at alle. Nothing that deserves to be called a backlink structure. The websites themselves aren’t optimised either (as far as I can tell). Of course this is good news for me and it might explain why I’m satisfied with my rankings already (although I also expect it to be a newbie bonus from Google). I’m gonna focus more on the UK site. I’d need more time to do it properly but for starters I’ll just do my best with the resources given and I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to make some additional pocket money. Btw, I don’t know many UK SEO blogs either (if any at all). […]

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