July 2007
MediaWiki and VBSeo on Affiliates4u
It’s been a busy week of new features on Affiliates4u. Not only have we been busy adding and customising a brand new affiliate marketing Wiki, but also plugging in various neat SEO bits and pieces including much nicer looking URLs and some rather cool social networking buttons.
The Wiki software is actually the same as that used by the real Wikipedia.org and thanks to a very neat vBulletin plugin called vbwiki Pro from nuHit.com, we were able to integrate this into our existing vbulletin installation. It took quite a bit of tinkering to then make this work and to interface with our custom built communities software, but I hope you’ll agree the end result is worth it. The new Affiliates4u wiki should (I hope) be a really useful resource for the affiliate marketing community. It does of course rely on the fact that our members won’t abuse the system, but the fact that people have to be logged in to edit articles should prevent this, or they will be named and shamed on a4u! ;)
affiliates4u forges partnership with Incisive Media for this year’s a4uexpo Affiliate Marketing Conference & Exhibition
We are excited to announce that the respected search engine marketing series, Search Engine Strategies (SES) will be running a one day search track at the a4uexpo in October.
Here is the official press release.
London, England, 26 July 07– affiliates4u and Incisive Media today announced their official partnership for the 2007 a4uexpo, which will see the inaugural Affiliate Marketing Conference & Exhibition become the UK’s first combined Search & Affiliate Marketing event. a4uexpo takes place on October 25 – 26 at ExCel London. See www.a4uexpo.com.
The two day event is being co-ordinated by affiliates4u, founders of the a4uForum, the UK’s No.1 portal for Affiliate Marketing. a4uexpo is the UK’s first Affiliate Marketing specific event bringing together all those working in or around the sector in a professional environment. Delegates will be able to learn about, and debate, the key issues currently facing the channel, via the event’s structured and formal educational Conference programme as well as the Workshop sessions and Networking opportunities on both days. A carefully selected Exhibition and dedicated Awards ceremony are also included in the Delegate package.
Search Engine Strategies (SES) will feature on Day Two of the a4uexpo Conference Programme, and be co-ordinated by Kevin Ryan, Vice President of Global Content at Incisive Media. The SES programme will include seminars and panel discussions offering expert advice and information on how to grow business and improve ROI using the latest solutions in Search Engine Marketing. The sessions will be hosted by world leaders in Search Marketing. The full agenda will be announced shortly.
Matthew Wood, founder of affiliates4u, says: “The launch of the UK’s very own Affiliate Marketing event has already ignited lots of interest within the industry and I am therefore delighted that Incisive Media has decided to join a4uexpo and together we can now deliver a one-stop shop event for everyone who is involved, or thinking of becoming involved, in both the Search and Affiliate Marketing sectors.”
Kevin Ryan, vice president of global content at Incisive Media, says: “Historically, affiliates and search marketing have formed a symbiotic and tightly connected relationship. We are very excited to be participating in this event for this reason.”
-ENDS-
About affiliates4u
affiliates4u is the organisation behind the widely respected a4uForum, the UK’s No.1 portal for Affiliate Marketing. The Forum, Blog and Community which currently has a membership of over 14,000 Affiliate Marketing professionals, has been a pivotal part of the sector for almost 10 years and provides a focal point for Affiliates to meet, share experience and do business together.
Via its a4uEvents brand, affiliates4u also co-ordinates a series of very successful Affiliate Marketing events around the Country each year.
Building on this highly regarded series of Networking events, a4uexpo will provide a more structured and formal educational Conference programme as well as a carefully selected Exhibition and dedicated Awards Ceremony.
About Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC — A Division of Incisive Media PLC
Incisive Media PLC is a fast-growing specialist business information provider, based in the UK with offices in North America, Hong Kong, India and Mainland China. The company’s activities are currently built around ten core industry sectors - mortgages; marketing services; financial technology; retail investment; capital markets; risk management; insurance; legal services; private equity and photography. Information is provided via a wide range of channels–in print, in person and online.
Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC is the marketing services division of the company and incorporates leading websites Search Engine Watch, the ClickZ Network and their associated events series including Search Engine Strategies. These properties were acquired from Jupiter Media in 2005.
For media enquiries contact:
Julie York
a4uexpo
julie@fyassoc.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 1208 851982/07774 207870
Debbie Kimpton
Reality PR
debbie@realitypr.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8663 6111
Matt McGowan
Incisive Media plc
matthew.mcgowan@incisivemedia.com
Tel: +1 212 925 6990
existem team @ a4uevents Bristol
On Friday evening the existem team all helped out with our event held in the @Bristol science centre.
The event, designed to bring together the elite in affiliate marketing was one of a series of events we have organised this year. This networking event however will be the last in 2007, as we concentrate all our effors on the up-coming a4uexpo conference and exhibition at ExCeL in London.
Despite the awful travelling conditions from London and from the north we had a good number of people turn up to what was one of our best events yet. A huge thanks to all the team who put in hours of work to make the event a success! especially to our events manager Claire who did a great job of pulling everything together.
I would also like to thank our sponsors for the evening Affiliate Window, Buy.at, Prezzybox and Yahoo! Search Marketing.
Rather than waffle on too much here, take a look at some of the blogs from those who attended over at affiliates4u.com
We have a large selection of photos available, expertly taken by Pete which can be found over at a4uevents.com
Using the Google Maps API to add maps to your site
The basics….
Adding Google Maps to your own websites is very simple and straightforward and can be done by completing the following steps:
1. Goto http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ (requires that you have a Google account)
2. Click on the link to sign up for a Google Maps API Key
3. Specify the domain name of your website, agree to the terms and conditions and click on the link to generate the API key.
You now have your Google Maps API key which is valid for all pages under the domain name you entered (and is also valid for testing on your local machine when accessed using localhost).
4. Copy and paste the example web page which Google provides into a new file and upload this to your webserver. Try it out and see what you get… it should look something like this: View Example Page
Google provide a very extensive library of documentation and examples which you can use to alter the appearance of the map, add markers to locations, calculate routes between 2 or more locations and lots more. You can find all this here: Google Maps API Documentation
UK geocoding…
One problem many people face when using Google Maps with UK addresses is that you cannot get the geocodes (longitude and latitude) for UK postcodes. The reason behind this is that the UK Post Office has the rights to all UK postcodes and charge for converting them to their geocodes.
There have been many attempted free solutions to this problem but from my experience none of them work very well or are not long term solutions. After lots of searching I did find one solution which works using the Google AJAX Search API.
Please visit this tutorial by Tom Anthony which details how to do this.
I hope this brief introduction to Google Maps has been helpful - happy mapping!
affiliates4u.com RSS for News & Blogs
Yesterday we launched an RSS feed to syndicate the latest news and blogs from our guest and expert bloggers at affiliates4u.com
Here is the feed, feel free to subscribe
http://www.affiliates4u.com/blog/feed.php
