Affiliate Networking May 12th, 2005 10:38 am

Off to London for the A4U and Buy.at affiliate meetings. A chance to catch up with other affiliates and also do some of that dreaded networking. I’ve never liked networking - in my old life of science and research we had to attend conferences and spend many an hour looking interested in someone else’s results and theories simply because of who they were, the research group they were in, or because they knew someone who knew someone, or even more to the point they had money to spend!

Fortunately, compared to partition coefficients of phenols at high temperatures and pressures plus oil field waters (more on this another day), affiliate marketing does have a slight advantage of being more interesting - and of course there’s the little aspect of you are earning a living from this (as opposed to science where you did all the work and others got to publish the results - several years after the work was done).

That said, i’m not a networky type person - it’s something I know needs to be done and as my business partner Kirsty hates doing it more than me, I get to do it! The one advantage is that it does give myself and Jude a break for a couple of days.

Whilst affiliate events have opened up a wider field for affiliate marketing for us, I’m reluctant to say networking has dramatically helped our business - in fact all our best deals have been done email/phone first on a “let’s get straight to the point” basis. The better events for us have been one to one meetings or workshops with a single merchants - sadly these are few and far between as many companies are trapped by a mysterious force field that surrounds London.

Staying with meetings… a network is inviting affiliates to a meeting next week for an electrical merchant. Given that there will be numerous affiliates around London this week why couldn’t they have got their organisational butts in gear and set aside a meeting then? “Hey, there’s a bunch of affiliates in town, let’s kill two birds with one stone and do it this week - that way we’ll get people attending and not have to drag affiliates into London at their own expense from around the country next weekend too” - Oh hang on… organisation, network, meeting - no chance!!

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