Bruce Marler on WebmasterRadio.FM Domain Masters Show Tonight At 7pm ET

While at the Affiliate Convention I had the pleasure of sitting down with Victor Pitts from Moniker who is the host of the Domain Masters show that is aired on WebmasterRadio.FM.

I had been on once before, which is actually how I ended up at the Affiliate Convention ironically enough, and thought it would be fun to sit down with Victor again.

We covered plenty of ground, everything from .ME domains, to current status of Localtek/Missouri.me and also the various thoughts behind some of my latest blog posts.

The show will air on WebmasterRadio.FM tonight at 7 ET, while there make sure you listen to Morgan Lintons interview who was also there when I did mine.

Oh yeah, and Chef Patrick comes up : )

Final Thoughts On The Affiliate Convention

Today was the closing day of the Affiliate Convention and I must say it was an absolutely great experience. Sitting with some of the top affiliate marketing people on the web the past few days along with some of the top SEO experts was absolutely great. And if you ever want to hear a person that is passionate about their business listen to the President of SEOmoz talk.

I am wore out so this post will be a bit random but here are some thoughts:

First off thanks to Victor Pitts from Moniker for interviewing both Morgan Linton from Domainvestors.tv and myself for future shows on WebmasterRadio.fm , the interview with Victor today hits on alot of the topics I have discussed on my blog lately so I hope you find it interesting.

One thing that was said over and over again as we talked to some of the convention promoters here and some of the top affiliates was how close our two industries are and how little we interact at this level. There is a lot both industries can learn from each other and the past couple days of interaction showed it over and over. If you want to learn more about monetizing your domains I would suggest going to the Affiliate Convention in Denver next year.

Today I spoke in the AM on a panel with Jamal Haque from Though Convergence, Victor Pitts from Moniker/Oversee, Jon Waterman of Findology (moderator), David Duckwitz from Citizen Hawk (and also a founder of CJ.com) the topic was New TLDs and Domain Asset Management.  There were some good conversation with the audience after the talk as well.

There was an absolutely incredible discussion about Whitehat vs Blackhat SEO that was just simply amazing (have I emphasized that enough?). Listening to the discussion around what Google can and cannot do compared to they actually say was pretty nifty. And hearing someone that plays the pure Whitehat game go back an forth with people that are willing to go a bit more towards black or grey was very entertaining. One of the best lines ever was from Patrick Sexton of SEOish.com who said "I am a drunk lazy ba***** who just wants to wake up in the morning have more money." Basically he was explaining how doing SEO right will help drive continuous traffic to your site. I also saw him speak the day before concerning other examples of what he was done, he is absolutely great to watch and listen too.

I really think the free concept around the show was great, the sponsors want people there so it makes sense to offer the show to free for attendees to the sponsors get their value. Daron Babin who is Co-Founder of WebmasterRadio.FM said it best when he said that someone should not have to pay to get the information they need in a convention like this. Very cool.

I also want to give a shout out to Kevin McKim of DnUrls.com and Bob Olea who owns Oceanside.com , we all hung out and had a great time. Bob really led a lot of the questions in the last session of the show. He was asking what a lot of people were afraid too.

In the next couple days I will be posting some videos and pics of the Affiliate Bash after party where Morgan, Jason, Victor and I got to watch Digital Underground do the Humpty Dance. Awesome party!

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).

Quick Notes From The Affiliate Convention Day One

Not a lot of time before the next session but thought I would throw out a few notes and thoughts after the first two sessions, Morgan Linton and I have had a great morning and some very interesting conversations with several companies but Clickbank.com and InsuranceLeads.com really stick out at this point.

One of the first things that should be pointed out and Morgan and I both thought immediately is why are there no domainers here? Once again it comes down to the fact we like to educate each other about our products and talk to each other about how to monetize but if we continue to talk about CPA, Affiliates, etc as the new way to monetize doesn't it make sense that domainers should attend such conferences.

Also, as we all know targeted traffic converts best, seems a booth here to promote our targeted type in traffic would be value.

OK, enough about that.

One of the great things we heard in the first few minutes was that the convention thought that the people promoting affiliate products should get in for free, in otherwords the conference is free to the people actually promoting the industry and working in the industry. The money to run the conference comes from the sponsors. This means the people that are out there making money with the products learn from free and in turn promote the industry. Interesting concept compared to other conferences that cost thousands to get in too. Great turn out seems to ensue.

They consider the free access to info a "Stimulus package" to those in the industry. Very inclusive rather exclusive.

Although the first presentation today that was around driving traffic from alternate sources (Twitter, etc) was somewhat repetitive compared to what many of us already know there were a few points that stuck out:

Youtube.com is technically the second largest search engine, losing out only to its parent Google. I should point out that I have not confirmed this but it does seem to make sense with the large numbers of videos that are viewed daily.

In 6 months Youtube had more content uploaded than the big 3 networks did in 60 years. Although some of it may not be good I would say neither is much of the TV networks.

Real time search is something that is popping up everywhere, although we are all aware of the growth of realtime search it is becoming an SEO specialty all of its own. Good thing I own SEORealtime.com

One presenter is calling Adwords old school, social media new school.

And I have to love the comments from one of the presenters about traffic becoming local. Local Local Local. I may be biased there but I could not agree more:)

The fastest growing Facebook demographic is 50 to 64 year old women. That is important because those are people with disposable income. They are referring products and sites to their friends.

There are many more things that actually are likely more interesting but we have to head to the next session. Morgan is likely typing many of the same things (he is across the table here). Look for more later, we will be headed to the Affiliate Bash at the Aqualounge in Beverly Hills tonight, I really need to make sure I stay sober for my speech tomorrow AM...

Heading To LA for the Affiliate Convention

I have spent the past couple days going hard trying to get loose ends tied up before I head out to LA in the morning for the Affiliate Convention. Looks to be some great sessions at the event even if they did let me on the agenda (although they made up for that error in judgement by putting Victor Pitts on, good save on their part).

I look to be spending a lot of time with Morgan Linton while in town as he offered to be my tour guide and host (sorry Hyatt, glad I did not pre-pay).  And it looks like this trip will end up much like my trip to West Palm Beach did when I hung with Chef Patrick as we have a couple other local domainers wanting to get together, one of them being fellow domain blogger Jason from DNPimping.com.

I use to speak at events in my "old industry" but this is my first speaking engagement at a convention in my "new industry". The topic is "New TLDs", and anyone who knows me knows that me fitting anything into 18 to 22 minutes can be a little interesting. Should be interesting. Actually though I am very excited about some of the other speakers on the agenda as I have been working on honing my affiliate skills. Even though my main focus is on building Localtek we still have many domains that we are not fully developing at this point and we know some would be very good with affiliate revenues but when doing that conversions are key and I want to get it right before we go hard at it. We are making big progress and this convention is right on time to take it to the level I want.

What I just realized though is this is the first flight I have been on since August when I hung out with the West Palm domainers for a couple days. That is a major difference compared to the schedule I had for the past 10 years. I am just 20 thousand miles or so shy of hitting 1 million miles on American Airlines and I have around 400 thousand miles total on other airlines combined. Now days it is more windshield time. I cannot say I miss the travel though....

Anyway, I have no idea how many blog posts will get out the next several days. I hope to have some good info coming from the convention though.

Speaking At The Affiliate Convention in LA December 4th

I have been invited and accepted the opportunity to speak at the Affiliate Convention in Los Angeles, CA which is being held December 3rd and 4th. I really look forward to this and if you are in LA or plan on attending the convention let me know, it would be great to meet up.

The topic I will be discussing will be "New TLDs".  This is something that should be fun and interesting to put together after the experience launching a business on an alternative extension like .ME.

For more information check out AffiliateConvention.com

For detailed agenda information check the Affiliate Convention Agenda

Also, here are a few tidbits from the site:

Affiliate Convention bases its conference and tradeshow series on the idea that actionable information, business building and networking opportunities should be freely available to everyone in the affiliate marketing industry, especially to working affiliate marketers. Sporting a growing line-up of thought leaders in the affiliate and search engine marketing sectors, Affiliate Convention LA is a unique opportunity to meet and share ideas with the brightest business people in the affiliate marketing industry. Affiliate Convention is the only event in the affiliate marketing industry which gives affiliate marketers free access to the movers and shakers in the sector.