My 1st PubCon! After wanting to go for several years, ever since I did SEO for a living back in the old days, I finally made it. Very well organized conference by Brett Tabke and crew. Kudos to the team for pulling off a great event!

Wanted to share some thoughts from the affiliate marketing perspective since lots of people have already covered it from the SEO and other perspectives. This year there was only one session on affiliate marketing, which I will talk about in a minute. The conference was heavily focused on SEO and SEM but there were also good sessions covering blogging, community building and other webmaster topics. One of the key things I came away with regarding affiliate marketing is something we all know, but it was nice to hear it officially from people like Matt Cutts from Google and other top Search Engine representatives. So I want to re-enforce this message LOUD & CLEAR! The search engines do NOT hate affiliate sites per se, they hate duplicate content and sites that provide NO added value. Affiliate sites are fine as long as they provide unique, additional and helpful content. Banner farms and cookie cutter datafeed sites are not going to cut it. But if you are an affiliate and have sites that contain affiliate links along with good content, reviews, forums, ratings, comparisons and/or other unique content that provides value you are cool.

AFFILIATE TIP – Go sign up for a Google Analytics account TODAY! That’s the 1st thing I did when I got home. Due to the overload it will take a few days for you to get stats. But the KEY is, you will be able to see how many people are clicking and what links they are clicking on. Great for conversion testing. AB ad testing and checking ad placement on your pages. Very cool tool and FREE!

OK – just a little feedback about the one session on affiliate marketing. SEE full session details below. I finally got to meet Buckworks, so that was very cool! She does affiliate marketing the way most of the affiliates I work with do and the way I advocate. High integrity marketing, good content designed with users in mind and optimized for the long haul. Her sites offer value to the user so they want to bookmark and come back. One person on the panel talked about creating “burn and churn” gray or black hat sites, skirting or outright violating the search engine’s TOS. He basically pointed out (in my words) that the blacker the site, the shorter the life span of the site. But when the search engines drop you for cloaking or KW stuffing or whatever, you just move on and create a new site. Sounds like he makes lots of money this way, but I’m more with Buckworks style. If I wanted to do affiliate marketing full-time and if I went to the trouble to keep creating content, I would want it to be good long term content that would stand the test of the search engines and that customers would want to come back to over and over again for more. That’s just me.

Affiliate Site Marketing and Optimization
Session Description “Optimization for an affiliate program-based site is vastly different than for other types of sites. This session will deal specifically with what differentiates affiliate sites from other sites. We will also go through the actual process of identifying and joining programs from a management view point.”

The session was Moderated by Catherine Seda from Seda Communication Inc. and the panelists included Joe from Commission Junction, John Coronella OnlineMarketer, Elisabeth Archambault AKA Buckworks, a Freelance Affiliate Marketer and Adam Jewell, a Search Engine Marketing Specialist from NetPlus Marketing Inc.

Barry AKA RustyBrick from Search Engine Roundtable did a great job as always, by taking great notes and covering the topic in-depth, so I will just link to his blog. Read all the details about what the panelists discussed here. Affiliate Site Marketing and Optimization.

Were you at the conference and we weren’t able to hook up and meet in person? Come share your viewpoints about the event or this blog entry in our forums.