Affiliate Convention Day One Closes With Great Keynote By Danny Sullivan

What a great day, met a ton of very interesting people and picked up some VERY interesting tips from some of the top affiliate marketing people on the web as well as SEO company leaders and experts.

Got to meet the Thought Convergence team (caught Ammar Kubba at sign in by luck). Very small domainer showing at the conference but I would encourage anyone that is looking to build the monetization side of their business to attend one of these in the future. Even if you are an expert at traffic monetization you will find useful tips and the networking was great.

A few notes before we head out for dinner, these are all comments and thoughts put out by leaders in the industry (all paraphrased and not exact quotes, it is my fault if something is lost in translation), much of this is info we know all ready but it is always good to repeat so we do not forget what is happening:

Social media is starting to give search a run for its money (paraphrasing), although search is not disappearing anytime soon people telling their friends about products converts better.

If you have affiliate sites do not put 10 links in 1 page. Just do not, Google knows (I am sure we all know this already but we all can be guilty of it). Although people that do land on it may click fact of the matter is your revenue will drop because you get less traffic because the big G is not stupid.

Even though know one can every confirm it there was at least some thinking by Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineLand.com that it would make sense for Google to give preference to Adsense users since they know the quality of the traffic and can thus determine ranking in search. This is not to say it is happening but it would make sense.

What your search traffic and tweak your campaigns accordingly, some really cool ideas about how to take advantage of Google Custom Search, before I give the details I want to test and will let you know the details if it works. This came from a guy that once ranked above Google for the term Google Webmaster Guidelines and has been linked to buy Matt Cutts. He knows his stuff.

A really great point Danny Sullivan made in relation to Rupert Murdoch wanting Google to pay for indexing his news sites is that the newspapers and news sites never pay to have people quoted in articles and never link back to the person quoted. Seems like the news sites are being a little hypocritical. Very good point.

Also, on the topic of the WSJ not being able to convert the millions of visitors they get from Google, shouldn't they hire somebody that can figure that out, shouldn't they have people that know how to make money of visitors (some sarcasm there).

SEO firms are turning more and more into conversion analysts as most customers do not know what to do with the targeted traffic once they receive it, this is something I have posted on a couple times.

Got to see Hamlet Batista talk about his success doing $923K in PROFITS from viagra affiliates over a few year period of time (letter confirming shown from the affiliate company). By proper link building he made it to the first page of Google for the term Viagra but started with long tail terms. Oh yeah, NO PAID ADVERTISING.

Research what the competitors are doing before you launch, figure out what they are doing and emulate it. If they are paying thousands for ads over a period of a few weeks something is converting....

I hear Morgan typing away, I know he is typing up a great post so I will let him fill you in on the rest of the details. There is so much to tell but only so much this little mind can remember.

We are headed out to the Affiliate Bash at the Aqualounge in Beverly Hills, Jason Thompson from DNPimping is going, and more importantly Shock G from Digital Underground is doing a whole set (OLD SCHOOL HIP HOP!!!! Humpty Dance).