If you can’t keep up with the conference of the month, last month SMX landed in the Big Apple. The Davits Center to be exact. Registration went smoothly, so I was off to the races and on to my first session.

It seems Internet marketing conferences sometimes struggle with balancing introductory, medium and advanced content in one event.

SMX advanced tends to lean more on the Intermediate level and that seems to fair well with most of the attendees.

That said, I still walked out of many of the sessions feeling like the 20 or so tips I gained made the cost well worth it. In fact, there is strong value there for most people.

Two speakers who really blew me away with new ideas, tools, and perspectives were Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts and Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link. As someone who has been at this for 10+ years, I often go to these events to network, but their sessions taught me a lot and gave me plenty of food for thought.

The big news of the show was the launch of SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool, which will attempt to level the playing field by providing information to Webmasters on linking. It is long overdue, as running a link search in Google might only show you 1-5% of your links. This tool’s launch was definitely the talk of SMX, but time will tell if it is a strong as it claims.

New to me were the 30-minute educational sessions in the expo hall, with hosts from Google, SEOmoz, Apogee Search, and others.

These presentations were an excellent way for exhibit hall attendees to get a condensed version of the full breakout session, which they wouldn’t typically get to experience. Topics included linking, paid search, and analytics. Since the expo hall was a bit on the small side, this was also a great attraction for those companies with booths.

Advanced and basic tracks were clearly defined and labeled, which made it easy for attendees to follow. The in-house track was also very useful. It was geared towards helping companies that manage search internally (in-house) and raised issues and solutions for their specific needs. I especially liked the panel on “How To Break Up With Your Agency.” This was a unique topic and one that I think is important for attendees to understand when structuring agreements.

One of the sessions unique to SMX is titled “Give It Up”, where the rule is you can’t blog about anything that is presented for 30 days. It provides some exclusivity on the content and makes SMX distinctive.

All in all, it was a great show. I learned a lot and got to see some of the SEO royalty.

Wil founded SEER Interactive, a Philadelphia-based SEO firm in 2002.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 4 here – http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue4.pdf
FeedFront issue 4 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/category/issue-4/

The clumsy and lucrative early days of PPC arbitrage

While it’s been a decade, I remember the indignance, clear as day. To some, it might have seemed unjust, mean, or unworthy (to borrow a definition). To others (including yours truly), it seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

A casino gone mad.

The bank broken… spilling into our pockets.

Once upon a time, Idealab delivered a goose that ate pennies and crapped out ten dollar bills.

Goto.com smacked the search engine world upside the head, turned it on its ear, and spun it around so quickly that all the enlightened could see were dollar signs (and you thought I was going to say stars).

At the inception of pay-per-click search engine marketing, I gleefully bought clicks for pennies and giddily pushed traffic to affiliate programs that paid out crazy terms for new customer bounties.

All was well and good while the milk and honey and bourbon flowed and the VC and IPO money held out, but as the boom turned to bust and the click values rose, it became tougher and tougher to ride those double-digit long shots drunkenly home for ten races every day.

As the temporary insanity and irrational exuberance self-corrected and bid levels rose, I found myself playing the nickel slots less and less frequently.

All that’s left now is the schwag.

The author of the ground-breaking “Complete Guide to Associate and Affiliate Programs on the Net” (McGraw-Hill/1999) and other fine and dusty tomes, Daniel Gray is currently a recovering raconteur and metaphor mixing breakfast cereal Internet entrepreneur.

Download issue 1 of FeedFront at http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue1.pdf.

We’ve wrapped up the first issue of FeedFront magazine and we’re sending it to the printer.

Issues will be mailed in June 2008. Here are the articles in the first issue:

• Editors Note: Missy Ward & Shawn Collins
• Five Ways to Evaluate a Merchant’s Landing Page: Dan Murray
• Pros & Cons of Utilizing Multiple Networks: Brian Littleton
• Twitter Grabs Attention: Lisa Picarille
• GTD in Affiliate Marketing with Web 2.0: Sam Harrelson
• Affiliate Marketers Give Back: Missy Ward
• Online Video Advertising: Tim Carter
• Nobody Would Use a Search Engine with Paid Results: Dan Gray
• Building Profitable Customer Relationships by Following These Simple Email Axioms: Tom Kulzer
• Are You the Next Super Affiliate Blogger?: Zac Johnson
• Ad Networks, Vertical Ad Networks, and Affiliate Networks: Peter Figueredo
• Affiliate Manager Compensation: Shawn Collins
• My 3 Favorite Blogs You May Not Visit: Wil Reynolds
• My 3 Favorite Tools You May Not be Using: Wil Reynolds
• Get Off Your Butt and Start Making Videos: Jim Kukral

Visit http://feedfront.com/free-subscription/ for details on getting your free subscription.