London Affiliate Conference 2012
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London Affiliate Conference 2012

30th January 2012

The LAC2012 took place this weekend at the rather spectacular space at the Old Billingsgate Market, London. LAC is a four day event kicking off with the LAC Affiliate Awards on Thursday followed by speaker sessions on Friday and Saturday, and rounding up with a social on Sunday.

Heavily iGaming Centric as you would expect, and many of the speaker sessions were hardcore regulation sessions, but there were many sessions to help affiliates cover domaining, search tactics and ideas for how to work that audience.

Stand out speaker sessions came from our very own Bastian Grimm and Nichola Stott, and of course a Q&A with the mighty Dave Naylor, Judith Lewis, Dave Snyder and Peter Young – quite a lot of State of Searchers there! Due to the fact that Bastian and Nichola were on at the same time, I was unable to attend everything, however, the nice man on the sound booth is sending me a copy of the files and in fact the whole conference will be available on DVD to purchase in a few weeks.

LAC Saturday Sessions

  • WordPress & Expired Domains: How To Do It Right! – Bastian Grimm
  • How Can Affiliates Cash-in on the 2012 Olympics – Nichola Stott
  • The Future of SEO: How To Conquer Panda – Dave Naylor, Director & Head of SEO, Bronco Ltd; Dave Snyder, CEO, SteelCast; Judith Lewis, Head of Search, Beyond; Peter Young, Regional Head of SEO, Mediacom

The stand out session for me, and the area that I have the most trouble with is definately this one:

WordPress & Expired Domains: How To Do It Right!

If you want to take your WordPress and domaining skills to a whole new level, Bastian is your man! An essential insight into tools, tips and tricks of the trade in order to automate multi site production without making too much of a footprint.

7 WP Setup Tips from Bastian

  1. Use XCloner to multiply WP setup
  2. Manage multiple sites with ManageWP
  3. Use Yoast to take the headache out of multiple tasks
  4. Plugins FTW – Backup WP, WP Permalauts, redirection, Eclipse Link Cloaker, Custom image SRC
  5. Keep your security up to date or expect trouble x 1000
  6. Use WP Antivirus, Secure WordPress, Security Scan
  7. NEVER use free themes – there are affordable trustworthy theme creators such as: Elegant themes, Theme forest, Woo themes, Simple Themes, DIY themes, Studio Press

Content Creation

Once you have your head around all of that, you will need to think about how to fill that space with content and you may need to scale up quite quickly.

  • Text Broker (they have now also started a link service)
  • Auto rebuild content from the internet archive!

Avoiding FootPrints & Patterns

Do you have the same links in the same place, with the same amount of text all linked within the same Analytics account? If so, you could be heading for pattern related penalties. Some automation is unavoidable such as catalogue sites but if you are domaining as an affiliate, you have to be extra careful to not appear to be automated and non human. However, don’t overdo your ‘sculpting’.

Bastian has the slides available for a limited time on site here: http://gdig.de/lac12

Things not to do!

  • Put all of your domains in the same (Analytics) basket
  • If you are that way inclined – do not sell links too obviously in the footer or the sidebar
  • Don’t make Google look stupid!

Expired Domains

Selection is a science in itself, and you need to be looking at the entire domain history before purchase. This is a lot of work! Once you have purchased your domains (expireds.net, SnapNames, pool.com, namejet to name but a few). You will need to think about what to do. Bastian recommends:

  • Re-creating content & URL structures – rebuilding as closely as possible
  • Watch out for errors

The Future of SEO and how to conquer Panda

Wow a fast paced Q&A with a top panel (Dave Naylor, Dave Snyder, Judith Lewis & Pete Young). So fast in fact that it was hard to type it all up!

Here are the main pointers from the Q&A session

  • News should be PHAT not thin
  • Geo Update – link graph was really changed by the update – focus on site and content
  • The Ad update – backlink with banners are going to get hit with Panda update
  • Don’t suddenly start taking stuff down start thinking about where search is going
  • Bought links – if you have to you need to have a long term strategy you have to keep up link budget and continue to find – exponential growth
  • It’s all about your brand
  • Initiate the conversation – send signals to google influence factor
  • Diversification – you can’t rely on a botlink network – build brand
  • Sounds like real work this brand thing but it is!
  • Links are not everything anymore – many sites are ranking with way less links than competitors
  • You don’t have to worry about where your domain is hosted anymore
  • If you have millions of pages to re-direct, the chop off and drop off route may be more effective for you than re-directing loads of pages that are not important
  • There is no risk with re-inclusion requests – keep asking
  • Yes Webmaster tools does have a problem with mis-reporting
  • +1’s are infectious so if you are buying them off fiverr, it is only a matter of time before their sole use of being a pad +1 infects your own pages
  • The same for reviews, one bad review can bring down all of the good reviews

 

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Written By
Jackie Hole is an Award Winning Search Marketing consultant specialising in Paid Search, Conversion Improvement and Organic Search / SEO for the USA, Canada and European markets. Starting out in Multimedia & Interface Design, Jackie has over 15 years experience in online marketing and was recently awarded European Search Personality...
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