Tech News
My week at PubCon 2007 Review
by Sandor Panton
Intro: Pubcon is an annual (and sometimes twice-annual) conference and networking event for Internet professionals (particularly Search Engine Optimization Specialists and Affiliate Marketers). This time around, it was December 4-7 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada.
=========================
Day 1 – Tuesday, December 4
Pubcon got off to a slowish start, with Craig Newmark (Founder of Craigslist.Com) delivering a somewhat boring Keynote Address. Quite a few people (including myself) left mid-way or before the end of his presentation.
Then it was on to a full day of presentation sessions. There were five separate tracks of these sessions to choose from:
Track 1 – Social Media
Track 2 – Linking & WebmasterWorld
Track 3 – SEO: Organic Search
Track 4 – SEM: Search Marketing
Track 5 – Advertising
There were a total of five sessions for each track, two before lunch and three after lunch. Before lunch, I stuck to the Social Media track sessions, namely “Social Marketing 101: The Playing Field” and “Monetizing Social Media Traffic”. Social Marketing 101 was very useful and the presenters (particularly Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.Org) excellent presentations with lots of useful information and tips. The second session about Monetizing Social Media Traffic was a bit disappointing, as none of the Presenters really delivered enough specifics about how you can actually monetize this type of traffic.
After lunch, I stuck to the Linking and WebmasterWorld track, where the specific sessions were “Link Building Campaigns & Strategies”, “Link Baiting: 96 Different Strategies” and “Link Buying”. The Link Baiting session was particularly useful and interesting, with Todd Malicoat (stuntdubl.com) offering some great tips and ways to create link bait. In the Link Building session, Roger Monti (martinibuster.com) presented some interesting ideas on linking strategies to gain links to your site from .gov and .edu domains.
=========================
Day 2 – Wednesday, December 5
Again, there were five separate session tracks to choose from:
Track 1 – SEO: Search Optimization
Track 2 – SEM: Search Marketing
Track 3 – Domains & Domaining
Track 4 – Web Hosting
Track 5 – Site Reviews (live reviews of sites owned by audience members)
I stuck to the Domaining track, where the specific sessions were “Domain Names & Trademarks: Legal Issues”, “Effective Domaining Strategies” and “Domainers Round Table”. The Trademarks & Legal Issues session was the best of the lot for me, as two lawyers (Clarke Walton – waltonweblaw.com and John Dozier – cybertriallawyer.com) who are experts in Internet Law, gave good details and examples of the actual and potential legal issues that a domain owner may face, and solutions.
Day 2 ended with a live domain name auction which was hosted by Moniker.Com
Some of the domains sold were: Grandpa.com ($55,000), DisabilityPolicy.com ($7,000), MortgageRates.org ($17,000), PinkLemonade.com ($4,300)
=========================
Day 3 began with a Keynote by Matt Cutts (Senior Google Engineer) which I missed. After that, the session tracks of choice were:
Track 1 – Webmaster World (coding, blogging, tracking conversions etc.)
Track 2 – New Marketing Tech (Ecommerce & Shopping Carts, Word of Mouth marketing, Press & PR etc.)
Track 3 – Video & Multimedia (Video Search Engines, Podcasting, Video creation for the web etc.)
Track 4 – Potpourri (Copy writing, affiliate strategies, keyword research etc.)
Track 5 – Site Reviews (more live reviews of sites owned by audience members)
Nothing much to report here, except that a few of the Sessions were affected in terms of Presenters being no-shows (presumably because they still hadn’t recovered from the previous night’s drinking and partying)
=========================
Day 4, the best part of the Event, actually starts tomorrow at 1:30pm … at a pub/bar somewhere in Las Vegas, and this is where the Attendees will have a chance to interact and network over a glass of beer, rum or whatever.
=========================
Note also. There were quite a few Exhibitors/Sponsors with their products, services and free giveaways on display in a special area at the Conference. The list included the Big Three (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) along with almost 50 other companies (most of them web-based).