You can read all about the PubCon sessions, but you may not have enough time to go through each session. Plus, just by reading the recaps it’s tough to find the gems, the nuggets of knowledge, that were shared. So…I thought it would be helpful to share with you what stood out to me as new, interesting, and insightful. Watch out for my rant in the middle.
– Social Media – Todd Malicoat discussed how in Social Media you need to not only attract the audience, but attract the webmasters (people who can actually link to you) of that audience. Without links you don’t get the residual affect from a social media surge.
– Local Search – For Local Businesses, Google Local (and probably others) lets you have a downloadable coupon, which is probably one of the easiest ways to track online to offline customers.
– Domaining – Use a 14-12-12 font size for best readability of parking pages, and make a simple but appealing logo.
– General/Rant – When speaking at PubCon, don’t give us a 15 minute commercial of your product (getmobile). It makes us despise you. WMW needs a new logo. (No offense Brett, just being honest.) It’s not cool to try to compliment someone but put them down by doing so because you have a huge ego (no link or specifics on purpose). Don’t leave the bathroom without washing your hands; you have a name tag on and there are still 2 days left of the conference for us to be around you. Large concrete rooms with poor acoustics are not designed for keynotes (Sorry Craig Newmark, but we left after 2 minutes of your keynote because all we heard from the back was garbled sounds). An Internet Marketing conference should have good, reliable, in every room and hall, and “free” Internet (from our conference fees or a sponsor), starting on the first day.
– Content – When creating content be sure to address these 4 items: (1) Independent Value, (2) Headline and a Hook, (3) Scannable Structure, and (4) What’s the Story. (Brian Clark)
– Content – It’s tough to get someone to link to a sales page, so make it a “pre-sell” page. Pre-sell pages have these elements: (1) Opening, (2) Empathy, (3) Solution, and (4) Call to Action. (Brian Clark, again)
– Competitive Intelligence – Andy Beal mentioned our IndexRank as a tool for competitive intelligence. (Okay, I knew that, just thought I’d mention where we were mentioned. :))
– Competitive Intelligence – Jake Baillie is a great animated speaker, very fun. One of the take-homes was look for unnatural traffic, like allinanchor: or link: searches. Then serve those visitors up something fun (error page, etc.).
– SEO Tools – Google Sets can be an interesting tool for keyword research. (Todd Malicoat; he also mentioned our tools in his presentation)
What did you learn from PubCon 2007?
