The agenda for this year’s A4UExpo is all but complete and now that it’s only about a month away now is a good time to start having a look through what’s on offer and decide which sessions you’d like to attend. The more organised you are the better – especially if you’re planning meetings with affiliates or merchants – as you don’t want to be missing your “must see” seminar.

As ever Matt and the Existem team have put together an intriguing mix of talks aimed at merchants and affiliates.

The first highlight is the lack of keynote speaker at the start of the event. Praise be to the affiliate marketing gods! I can’t even remember who did it last year, but it really didn’t electrify the audience. The only downside is there’s no “welcome intro” by Matt, but I’m sure he’ll say a few words at some point during proceedings.

So this year it’s straight into the nitty gritty with talks about Red Letter Days (sounds a great idea, but I’m afraid I’m out), affiliate marketing and media (sounds merchanty) and SEO strategies with Dave Naylor (recommended as Dave is an interesting speaker).

Following Dave is one of the stand out talk titles of the whole two days is “Are Networks Dying?”! It’s a panel session and includes a network, an agency, a publisher and an advertiser. It promises to be an intriguing session and hopefully discussion. From our experience, network earnings have been getting worse whilst independents improve.

One network has gone from best earner to worst performer in less than 12 months. It does make you wonder if it’s just us or a reflection of other affiliates across the board, so this session will be of interest.

Sessions for affiliates and with affiliates on the panel are always busy, and “The Affiliate Doctors Live!” involving Duncan Jennings, Kieron Donoghue and Chris Garrett shouldn’t be an exception. They will be offering “frank advice on issues within affiliate marketing, start-up strategy, conversion, blogging and SEO”. Sounds good, but have to say I’d like to see other affiliates involved (Lee, Kirsty, Joe, Matt, A Struggling or Successful Newbie?) as well as the usual suspects.

The next “sounds good” session involves Kevin Edwards and Michelle Boxall (Affiliate Window) – “The Truth Will Out: Disproving Common Misconceptions In Affiliate Marketing”. Although the blurb says that this session is aimed “at affiliate managers and merchants” I’d have thought that affiliates would also be interested in knowing the truth about the the myths and legends of voucher code sites, cashbacks and brand bidders.

For newbies Nadeem’s “12 Biggest Affiliate Marketing Mistakes” could be worth checking out in the 4pm slot, but for those who have probably made them already then “Advanced Site Architecture And Product Feed SEO” with Judith Lewis looks a good alternative option. Judith got rave reviews via Twitter about her Thinkvisibility session so hopefully this will be more of the same (plus even more hopefully free chocolate).

The final session of the day will probably be “You want to Tweet What!?”! This could be the weirdest session of the whole expo as by this time most of the delegates would have been on Twitter at least once to say they’re at A4UExpo. If Thinkvisibility was anything to go by, no one was listening to the talks as they were too busy Twittering to each other

Still, it sounds a fun session and so hopefully we’ll all learn how to tweet better in time for Day 2 (coming later).

If there’s a good session on Day 1 I’ve not mentioned why not leave a comment and say why it’s worth attending?