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Internet Marketing Strategy Day
May 24 Copenhagen year 2000
Copenhagen, what a treat! The evaluation forms from the 120 visitors gave us 4,2 out of a possible 5. Thank you Mikkel, Helle, Pernille and all our Danish friends at Snabel/3enigheden for making our first international conference such a success!
If you missed the event there is a possibility to see it directly on your PC on three individual CD-ROMs with Power Point presentations and links to online resources.
All in all we had 16 hours of presentations, panel debates, partying and networking in the beautiful Alleröd Conference Park. The day was divided into seven themes, with different speakers and panels:
a.. Directories
b.. Search Engines
c.. Domain Strategies
d.. Affiliate Programs
e.. Banners & Traffic Quality
f.. Search Engine Optimization
g.. JimWorld - The art of building a community
The day's narrator was also the first speaker: Mikkel De Mib Svendsen, co-founder of IMS and author of Search Engines for the Webmaster. Mikkel explained the differences between Directories and Search Engines and
why they are so important in internet marketing.
Joe Sullivan aka Flame Meta Editor of Open Directory Project, was first out of the Directories. Flame explained what you have to do in order to get in to the ODP. He also gave us a very good picture on how the ODP works and how other search engines such as Alta Vista, Netscape, Google, etc. use ODP.
Sören explained how the largest directory in Denmark, Jubii, organizes the submissions and catalogs their database. Jubii is the starting page for every second Dane.
Ned Wally came from LookSmart, and gave an exellent view into how you should work with this strong growing directory.
We also had an interesting session with Scandinavia OnLine, which runs hybrid search engine/directories Evreka and Passagen.
This was followed by a Panel consisting of the above representatives, with questions answered such as what to do if you can´t get in to a category or how you can get your title and description changed.
Opasia is the largest search engine in Denmark with an AltaVista-based index. We learned how different branded search engines can vary the way they use AltaVista.
Daron Babin revealed some extraordinary information on how you work with Reversed Engineering. He downloaded and ran the programs needed to graphically see the different algorithms for each search word and each
search engine.
Lennart Svanberg, co-founder of IMS, who is reporting from the ICANN circus gave away his best bookmarks. He also discussed why you should not pay more then 12 dollars for a domain registration, and how you
can park domains and point them to get traffic.
Thorbjörn Hellerstad, CEO of Aktiv IT, has had a domain strategy since 1996. With more then five hundred domains, Aktiv IT receives more than 800,000 visitors a month. He informed us about how to use domain names in order to get generic traffic.
Thorbjörn was followed by a small panel about domain names and the domain name trade. We were taught that there are companies running robots that pick up and register any domain that you do not immediately book.
FastPartner has a new system for Affiliate Marketing. How to sell on affiliation and gain hundreds or thousands of resellers all around the web. Affiliation Marketing can be done easy and is very profitable for all parties involved.
Henrik Anton, co-founder of IMS and strategist at b-seen.com, told us how to work with traffic quality measuring and how to calculate ROI on marketing. Is the banner dead? No, but heavily overvalued. Henrik spoke
about measuring quality on traffic, not just looking at the number of visitors.
Irene Stenfors, PhD Department of Cognitive Research at Lund University, was a real surprise. Her research consists of measuring eye movements with a laser when using the internet. It suggests that experienced surfers actively avoid looking at banner ads.
Afterwards, a panel discussed questions on banner research and effectiveness.
Ted Wilmarsgård, co-founder of b-seen and search engine specialist, explained what to do and what not to do when optimizing a website for search engines. He also revealed some stunning statistics on how important
search engines are as interactive marketing tools.
Daron Babin reappeared in this theme to tell us how he works with Alternative HTML. This technique solves many problems, such as frames, Flash, and an extraordinary way to avoid cloaking, yet have a good position in the search engines. Daron proved to be a great show man and
took pride in that he sold more than 4 million dollars gross of Viagra in one year, by positioning the single word Viagra with no other promotion!
Fredrik is an experienced web master from one of the most competitive industries: adult web sites. He told us how that industry is inventing internet marketing and how we can learn from them.
The Search Engine Optimization theme was followed by a panel where hot issues where discussed such as cloaking, site snatching and link farming.
Jim Wilson, the man behind JimWorld, the most vivid internet marketing community, was the highlight of the day. Jim has a background in teaching marketing at the University of California. He told us how he built JimWorld with sites such as VirtualPromote and JimTools. Jim has built a strong community in his 250,000 subscriber newsletter The Gazette and two forums: Search Engine Forum and Get High Traffic Forum. For one hour and nine minutes Jim told us the story behind this community and why many major dot-com companies miss out on getting the community.
Jim and many of the moderators making the Search Engine Forums happen then sat in a panel and answered questions from the public. Very nice to see Rod Buemont, aka RodB come all the way from South Africa to participate. Mikkel De Mib Svendsen and Henrik Anton, both moderators, also participated.
The long day ended with a networking party including a free bar and snacks. Very nice to be able to talk to both speakers and participants. It was also a good chance to learn what works, in order to make the next conference even better.
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