WebmasterWorld of Search Conference, Day 3
I may, or may not, have made it to the keynote today. I will say this: I don’t have anything to report on it. I plea the fifth.

I did, however, manage to stumble into today’s Affiliate Smack Down (You won’t see or hear sessions like this at SES, folks.) and the Super Session of the day, Running With the Big Dogs! Are you the master of your domain?

Affiliate Smack Down

The affiliate smack down had a lot of great information for both marketers and affiliate managers. It was very much a sex, drugs, and rock and roll session; no holds barred. Oh, and apparently gay porn sells well in the UK market.

A lot of emphasis was placed on trying to get affiliate managers to better understand affiliates and their needs. As an affiliate, customer service is absolutely essential. Building that positive relationship may reap rewards by several orders of magnitude later on down the road.

In addition to building relationships with affiliates, a great deal of importance was placed on setting up simple, easy-to-use, backend systems – if you don’t make your service easy to use, you’re sure to lose great affiliates.

Adam Jewell, from NetPlus Marketing, spoke on affiliate marketing directly through AdWords. Some absolutely great points were made about how to properly manage PPC accounts, bids, and working with seasonality. Adam noted that by properly setting up ad creatives for seasonal products, he has been able to achieve 10-40% clickthrough rates on his ads during those times. PPC managers take note.

Running With the Big Dogs! Are you the master of your domain?

This closing session did an excellent job of outlining, and explaining how to address, common problems with small Internet marketing firms. If I had to pick one thing that best summed up the session, it would be: You have to do more than just take care of your customers.

Christine Churchill started by emphasizing the importance of building trust with your customers, or prospects. She followed by outlining several ways that you can do this on your website:

• Professional site design
  
• Having, and displaying, a physical address and phone number
  
• Displaying trust seals
  
• Having, and displaying, a privacy policy
  
• Testimonials
  
• Product reviews and awards
  
• Guarantees
  

Next, Jessie Stricchiola spoke on three main issues in small business development; reliance on word of mouth for new business, lack of top 10 positions for your key terms, and limited cash flow.

She then outlined how her company, Alchemist Media, practiced SEO customer retention management:

• Client Selection. Several times, she noted that having quality clients reaps many more rewards than a client who ends up taking up all of your time, or has incredibly unreasonable expectations
  
• Prior SEO Engagements. I thought this was a great point in that serial SEO service users (companies that have been through a few SEO companies before) have often been through several SEOs for a reason.
  
• Client Development Resources. While it is nice to be able to fix all of a clients website needs, it is often not the case that a smaller company will have the resources to provide, for free, website redesigns, URL rewriting, etc. Knowing your clients’ development resources is key in possibly finding alternative ways of attacking a problem, or can be a red flag for a campaign that won’t succeed. (ie: no amount of traffic would lead to sales due to a poor website design, and the client doesn’t have the resources to make the necessary changes.)
  
• Communication and Expectations. This is something that I feel is common throughout the industry, be it that you’re working in a large or small SEO company. Understanding that SEO as a marketing channel is relatively new, there’s often a great deal of education that goes into building a client’s relationship so that they understand that getting ranked number one for “car” would both lead to very miniscule conversions, and would also take quite a long time to get into that position.
  

Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink reflected many of the same sentiments, and had some great cartoon slides to emphasize each point. ;)

• Collaboration with clients is essential.
  
• Build strategic alliances with your clients.
  
• Protect your reputation.
  
• Choose your clients carefully.
  
• Match the solution to the problem.
  
• Don’t overplay your hand.
  

After the session, Brett asked for a show of hands as to where to have the next conference: San Francisco, Austin, or New Orleans. New Orleans won by a large margin, so word on the streets is that the next conference will be in New Orleans between April 15th and May 30th. Brett also said that next fall, the conference will, again, be in Las Vegas. I don’t think too many people will have a problem with that. ;)

The classic “Pub Session” is today at 4:00 at New York, New York at some bar that I can’t pronounce, let alone spell.

All in all this was definitely the best conference I’ve been to, as the information was very raw, in-the-trenches, sort of information that was incredibly valuable to all attendees.

And on that note, while I’ve got 2 hours to burn, I’m heading to the book store for some books on rock climbing in the legendary Red Rock Canyon. I like to climb rocks.
Ben Wills | permalink | +marktd |