My Essential Notes from PubCon Vegas 2007

• Posted by B Jones on December 14th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

I’ve had several requests over the past week to give up some of the info that I learned at last week’s WebmasterWorld Pubcon Vegas conference.

Well, I’m definitely not going to go over every single session, because:
A) I didn’t attend every session. I only attended about 1/5 of the sessions.
B) It’s already been done. If you’re looking fore complete coverage, then your best bet is over at Search Engine Roundtable: PubCon Day 1, PubCon Day 2, and PubCon Day 3.

I’m going to just share, 3 topics here that I felt were the most important things I heard at PubCon 2007. Basically, 3 things that I’m definitely going to be trying to implement more the months to come.

1. Social Marketing
   The topic of Social Media Marketing, or at least some aspect of it, seemed to pop up in a lot of the sessions at Pubcon.

   A. Social Marketing is not just Digg.com, Reddit.com, Stumbleupon.com and Del.icio.us.
   There are now scores of active Social Bookmarking sites available. I posted a list of Social Bookmarking Sites last month, which contains over 30 sites, organized by category, that you can submit to.

   B. You don’t need tech blog, or funny pictures/ videos blog, to be popular on sites like Digg.com
   I hear a lot of people say, “But I have a (Fill in the blank) site. It could never be featured on Digg”.

   For those people, I would say that you just need to think more outside the box. I’ve heard so many great ideas for submitting topics that you would never expect to be on Digg. Michael Gray of Wolf-Howl.com gave a great example of what sort of articles that a site that sells paint could create to submit to several big Social sites.

        1. Article targeted for digg.com : “How to paint the digg logo on your wall”
        2. Article targeted for propeller.com: “What does the color of your walls say about your personality?”
        3. Article targeted for lifehacker.com: “How to paint your living room in a weekend”
        4. Article targeted for hugg.com: “how to pick environmental paint”

2. Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking
   If you’re not doing it, then you’re stupid… Just kidding

   A. Testing and Improving conversion rates is 100x easier than increasing traffic.
   Rand Fishkin gave a great presentation on testing, and spoke about the SEOmoz Landing Page Contest, which is just a great example of why you should be testing multiple versions of your content. Read it.

   B. Use Google Website Optimizer. It’s free, and is an amazing tool for multivariate testing.
   You may have to do some reading and learning to get started, but it is well worth the time.

   I recently wrote an article on using Google Website Optimizer to improve conversions, which shows a test I did, and the results.

3. Web 2.0 and User Generatd Content

   A. Widgets
   I know that Pubcon isn’t a Web 2.0 conference by any means, but there were a lot of people attending and speaking (the Forums and Communities: Building Management and Optimization session) who live in the hub of Web 2.0 activity (The San Francisco, Silicon valley area). It was very interesting to get a glimpse of how different things in that world are.

   I think it was Lawrence Coburn who said that there are some Web 2.0 Purists who think that sites like Stumbleupon.com and RateItAll.com shouldn’t even have a website. They should only exist in widgets. Pretty extreme.

   Widgets, even the most simple, like my dnscoop widget (bottom right of this page), are extremely powerful tools. Think about it. You make a widget, and it gets put on a site that gets hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pageviews per day. You can imagine the benefits.

   Facebook Apps is one huge opportunity that is pretty much wide open. Anyone can submit an app, and you immediately be put in front of the entire Facebook community.

   B. User Generated Content
   If you’re using WordPress, or some other blog, that’s a start, but if you are a programmer, and have the skills to build your own web apps, you should take advantage of that. Build a better Digg, craigslist, or mySpace. Or at least try to implement some of the features from these sites into your own site.

   If you are struggling in a competitive niche or market (retail or selling some product that a thousand other people sell), you absolutely must add value to your site to even stand a chance to copete with other sites. User comments and reviews are one of the best ways to stand out from the crowd in a positive way.

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If anyone has any specific questions about Pubcon, feel free to shoot me an email via the contact form. Otherwise, start planning right now to go to the next PubCon. I am.

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