PubCon Vegas 2006 - Day One Recap

Guy Kawasaki

Today kicked off with a keynote by startup guru Guy Kawasaki. In his presentation, entitled “The Art of Innovation,” he talked about the necessary elements of successful innovation. I particularly liked what he had to say about defining yourself with a mantra, a two to three word phrase that encapsulates your purpose and reaon for being. I’m a firm believer that you have to know where you’re going if you ever want to get there, and so mch the better if you can actually remember that purpose. Guy spent some quality time making fun of mission statements, and the MBAs who create them, which reenforced his ideas about having a mantra. From a product development standpoint, he really emphasized that the best products are created by people who are trying to create something that they would want to use themselves. Overall, highly entertaining and inspiring.

PPC Ad and Landing Page Optimization

Christine Churchill - PPC Ad Copy

Here’s a breakdown of relevant points

1. Make your ads stand out by providing differentiating information - price, guarantees, service, etc.
2. Provide incentive to click - compelling headlines, etc.
3. Add a sense of urgency - “limited time”
4. Use the keyword in your title - It will be bolded in Google. This is the single biggest factor in CTR.
5. Talk about the benefits to the customer
6. Add a call to action. What do you want them to do?
7. Use brands when possible
8. Avoid self-centered copy
9. Prequalify visitors by providing information to eliminate freebie hunters, etc. Prices, age limits, etc.

Brad Geddes - AdWords Quality Score

I didn’t realize this, but Adwords has different quality scoring guidelines for content and search advertising. Apparently the landing page doesn’t figure in search ranking, only in the minimum bid, whereas with content, there is no minimum bid, but the quality score is important. Also, when inserting dynamic keywords, the quality score is based on the alternative that you provide with the dynamic code.

Tony Wright - PPC Ad Testing

This is an interesting concept I hadn’t really considered before. Tony suggested setting aside a small percentage of your advertising budget strictly for testing, allowing you to test out new areas and strategies with keywords and ads without putting your main budget at risk. One of these days when I work for someone who doesn’t allow AdWords to be self-perpetuating, this will come in handy.

Link Development and Optimization

Rae Hoffman - Managing Your Linkbuilding Team

This was an awesome presentation. She went pretty quick, but there was a ton of good information. She talked a lot about how to outsource your linkbuilding, but along the way, she dropped some important ideas about the things you should look for in links, even if you’re doing it yourself.

1. List the type of links you want to obtain
2. Track competitor backlinks to see where YOU should be linking
3. Decide what you’re looking for in reciprocal partners
4. Be goal-oriented as far as requests and actual links are concerned

Joel Lesser - Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking has kind of become the red-headed stepchild of SEO. It used to work well, but in recent years, its reputation has become tarnished as a completely useless way of building search engine rankings. Joes contends that relevant reciprocal linking is still helpful in search, and he also feels that it’s a good source of traffic as well. I tend to agree that having reciprocal links with related sites probably isn’t going to hurt you in the SERPs, but as to whether its going to help you very much, I’m a little skeptical. I’m going to have to test this myself.

Roger Montti, “Martinibuster” - Alternative Linkbuilding Strategies

Here’s the list:

1. Advertising or Linkbuys - He thinks that CPM is still a valuable hat tip in G, whether it’s an image or text, particularly if the ads are running on relevant sites. He also was very much against PageRank-based inquiries and advertising.
2. Buying websites outside your network. Look for inactive or underperforming sites.
3. Enter your sites into site of the month/day/week directories.
4. Get included in online-archived newsletters. It’s worth the small price.
5. Sponsorships - and if you sponsor a college event, you might even pick up some .edu links.
6. Proxy sites are good. Try leaving insightful comments on blogs, use trackbacks, blogrolls, and DMOZ listings.
7. YouTube and Google Video. Apparently, if you put your URL in the body of the description, YouTube and Google Video will turn it into a real, indexable link.

Copywriting

Ted Ulle - Managing Copywriting Teams

This presentation is obviously geared toward how to manage a whole team of copywriters, but the ideas about process are applicable to one-person operations as well as copywriting teams.

1. Have clarity of purpose. This is your guiding light.
2. Build a pile of content using forums keyword neighborhoods and emails to get a feel for the community.
3. Decide on metrics and goals at the beginning.
4. Build a solid information architecture. if you don’t know about how to do this, you should learn.
5. Build solid menus for your content.
6. Do graphic design last.
7. Now do the final HTML web edit to pull it all together.

Jennifer Slegg - Unique Content

There’s really only one thing to say about this: write unique content. That’s it.

Byron White - 30 Tips For Web Writing

Byron talked a lot about building community. A couple of points I liked:

1. The necessity of a good story. If you have a great story, you have a much easier time getting other people (your readers, most importantly) to believe in your message. There’s something about a great story that grabs people.
2. Related to the last point, part of finding a great story is taking a list of all the things that you’re not but you would like to be, plugging it into the following sentence: “We are not _____,” cross out the negatives, and tell the story of why the new sentence is true.
3. Try to get to your audience.
4. Respect intelligence.
5. Mine data anywhere you can get it. Search boxes, FAQ emails, site question submission forms, etc. are all good sources of data about what your readers are looking for.