My Favorite Session at Affiliate Summit West: The Confluence of Search and Affiliate Marketing by Kris from Pepperjam

I apologize for not posting frequent, live Affiliate Summit West event coverage as I meant to. After a late, exhausted arrival I was playing catch up the whole time and didn’t get to blog as much as I’d hoped–I’ll try my best to do a better job of this at future events.

My adventure in Las Vegas ended on a great note—Kris Jones from Pepperjam gave an awesome presentation that was, without question, my favorite of the event. And I’m not just saying that because he mentioned my blog on one of his slides, although I admit that surprise did make my day (I know, I’m a loser) :).

Although things have been hectic, this event has caused me to reflect and think about what makes a presentation good—at least in my eyes. I came to the conclusion that the main reason I liked Kris’ session so much was because you could tell he does not ‘have a job.’ At these events, I find there’s a big difference between a speaker who is a creator / entrepreneur as compared to a speaker who is an employee. Why? A number of reasons, but I think the most important is that these are the people who give you something to take home—something you can’t find in a hundred business books. Not to mention that these presenters are, understandably, more comfortable speaking because they aren’t being judged or restricted by an employer.

Kris’ session reminded me a lot of Roger Montii’s at the last PubCon—it had my mind racing with ideas and made me take notes I’ll actually read and act on as soon as I get home, which is very rare for me :). I can appreciate and understand that other ‘employed’ speakers might be very intelligent, qualified, etc., but for me personally, hearing creators discuss the things they know so intimately is priceless—not to mention extremely fun and motivating. It’s always more interesting to have a conversation about something a person loves than something they feel forced to do as a ‘job’—and while I don’t know this as fact, I’d be willing to guess the majority (if not all) of the speakers I’ve enjoyed most don’t consider working on their projects or businesses to be ‘work,’ even if they might use the word.

I tried to find a transcript or audio file of Kris’ session (and some of the others) without success. If anyone knows where these are located please comment :).

I’ve never been a note taker because I feel like writing keeps me from truly listening to speakers, but I did jot down a few things. As soon as I find the slides / audio / transcripts I’ll give a more in depth write up of the points I found most enlightening. In the mean time, here are the few notes I didn’t want to forget (these are all from Kris):

Google Quality Score: Kris has found that having a privacy policy seems to improve the quality score a page is given by Google (Kris also mentions the more frequently cited concerns of substantial, quality content, navigable link structure, etc.).

Digital River (to be honest I can’t remember what they do and all I wrote down was “Digital River,” so I’ll have to elaborate on this point later or maybe we’ll get some comments with more info).

Keyword Tools – Kris recommends: Rapid Keyword, Keyword Discovery, Keycompete (Kris says this one is the best. If I understood him correctly, the tool somehow lets you identify what keywords competitors are bidding on. Wow, that makes work sound like a waste of time – just let someone else do it), Google Suggest and Yahoo Suggest.

Rejected Keywords: With Yahoo, Kris has found that they’ll reject about a third of any list for no apparent reason. Once you get the list of rejected keywords, just upload that one, and they’ll reject another third, and so on. I haven’t had a problem with this yet, because to be honest I haven’t played with Yahoo Search Marketing in three years or so (Overture back then).

Duplicate Clicks / Click Fraud: I actually asked this question near the end, and Kris’ reply was really helpful. Basically, I understood how I could detect the duplicate clicks, etc., but I had no idea how I could present that information to MSN/Yahoo/Google/etc. to get a refund. Do I put it in a spreadsheet or send server logs or..? Kris answered that the first step is, of course, to analyze the clicks yourself and identify any suspicious activity. If the damage appears to be substantial and worth pursuing, you should send an e-mail to the network explaining that you’ve found what appears to be duplicate clicking and make your case. Not surprisingly, Kris says the first reply is usually something along the lines of “We don’t see what you’re seeing,” so you will have to get a dialogue going and continue to make your case. Often times they will refund you for invalid clicks based on this communication. But if they don’t, the next step Kris recommends is to tell them you’re going to blog about this experience. Try not to make it sound like a threat, Kris warns, but let them know that blogging is the next step on your end if you can’t get this worked out. Apparently they appreciate the power of blogging and might acquiesce at this point.

* Please keep in mind that this is my recollection of Kris’ words and not an exact representation of what was said.