1) “Domain Monetization Strategies” – Bill Sweetman

Bill Sweetman is the General Manger of YummyNames. This is a service that offers people the opportunity to purchase or lease premium domain names. Bill is a highly respected authority in the Internet marketing industry and it was very interesting to hear his tips on making the most from domain names.

Besides regular monetization tactics such as sales, leasing and basic parking, Bill’s presentation covered two parking services that enable a greater level of control over the content and presentation of the parked pages.

The first of these services is WhyPark. WhyPark is different to conventional parking services in that it assists in the establishment of the domain’s brand. The WhyPark service includes pages of real content that are based on keywords provided by the domain owner. This content is updated on a regular basis. This means that relevant information is provided for visitors on the WhyPark site and they are not simply redirected to other sites. This is a significant value added service compared to traditional parking services that just provide links to other sites.

The second parking service that Bill discussed was DevHub. DevHub is a service that provides domain owners with the ability to build quality web pages that are of high value to both the users and owners. DevHub advises domain owners on site content, monetization modules, design and editing. This is a huge improvement on other domain parking services that regularly produce mediocre sites that are at risk of being designated as spam or not recognized by search engines.

2) “Development Tools” – Christian Heilmann

Christian Heilmann is a professional web developer who has worked for several agencies including Yahoo, where he was responsible for delivering Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Maps Europe. Christian’s presentation at the Domain Convergence Conference outlined several of the amazing web development tools that are available to the general public at no cost.

Christian spoke about the advantages of distributing data on many of the free information-sharing websites in order to direct traffic back to a specific website. Examples of ways to do this include uploading photos or videos onto Flickr and YouTube, tagging URLs at Delicious and linking addressed on Google Maps. Doing this means that the information reaches many different internet communities and that the data is spread over multiple servers, thus increasing its accessibility.

Another interesting tool that Christian discussed was Chat Catcher. This is a WordPress plug-in that monitors social networking sites for updates that provide a link to a specific website. Site owners can use Chat Catcher to have Twitter updates or Facebook statuses that link to their site as comments in their blog.

Chris posted the notes for the presentation on his blog.

Online web development resources are great, however you should keep in mind that when you are using web development tools or open source platforms they must be monitored and kept up to date so as to decrease the chances of the website getting hacked.

The keynote address of this year’s conference was presented by Michael and David Castello (CEO and COO of the Castello Cities Internet Network) and was titled “The Future of Domaining – Building Your Brand”.  The Castello brothers highlighted the importance of memory retention in branding.  They emphasized the importance of creating and building a brand that visitors are able to remember so that the site is not reliant upon search engines to direct traffic.

Justin Hayward (Communications Director of Telnic) then gave a very interesting presentation regarding new TLDs and .TEL.  The .TEL service is a communication hub that enables businesses and individuals to store and control their keywords and important contact information in a real time database.  It does not require hosting, coding or managing a website, however all the information is accessible over the web.  This new service has already proven to be very popular with 100,000 new .TEL domain names being sold within the first 72 hours since  .TEL  extension became available on March 24, 2009 and a further 200,000 new domain names were sold in the following two months.

Mr Hayward also detailed the new technology that is being developed by Telnic and their innovative plans to hold user community events.  The first of these events will be “TelCamp” which will take place at the Royal Ontario Museum on 15 August 2009.  The objective of TelCamp is to exhibit the attributes of the .TEL domain and the TelCamp.tel site.  This is a newly created site that facilitates event management by automating registration, attendee lists and agendas.

Rick Silver then spoke about Domain Development 2.0.  In particular, he discussed a business review site called “n49″.  This is a site that allows community members to review local businesses and share their opinions with other members. The site utilizes many generic .CA domain names by forwarding the domain name to a relevant category of the site.

In the afternoon of the first day of the Domain Convergence Conference the Domain Owners Association of Canada (DOAC) held its General Meeting.  The DOAC is a new organization (founded in 2009) that was established to represent the corporations and individuals in the domain industry in Canada.  This includes domain owners, parking providers, the media, registrars, advertising agencies and lawyers.  They aim to promote the use of .ca domain names and enhance their value, as well as protect members from fraud in relation to domain names.  Membership of the DOAC is increasing, however they are still looking for ways to increase member sign-ups and this was the main focus of the General Meeting.

Looking forward to day two of the conference.

I walked away from the event with three important tips:

1. Reminded me of the importance of setting your goals from the very beginning. Understand what data is important to analyze and which information and actions are important to track.  There are many web analytics tools available nowadays for gathering all kinds of data and that can make it difficult to keep track of the right metrics.

2. Track the “assist clicks”, do not give all the credit to the last click. Also include offline tracking in the analytics. This will require more resources but you can allocate funds accordingly.

3. Your site should provide proper content and experience for all types of visitors. You need to understand those types of visitors and recognize them. Segmenting your traffic by geo location, psychographics, demographics, and other criteria can help.

Though the search marketing conferences didn’t have a high attendance, the sessions were nevertheless very educational and worthwhile.

The conference was a great opportunity to see and learn about the strategies and techniques being used in the SEO industry nowadays and to get some fresh ideas. Although the quality of the speakers was great, I think the advanced sessions could have been more technical.

Social Networking and Social Media are hot topics that were discussed during many of the sessions. A lot of Internet marketers use this to drive traffic to theirs sites. How do you determine if the campaign was successful? Orion panel: “Measuring Success in a 2.0 World” was an attempt to answer this question. Some parameters are easy to track, like unique visitors and profit. However not all traffic is equal. The main idea was that you need to setup your metrics and measure your success according to your business plan and business strategy. Apparently there is not a universal solution yet.

Topics such as search user behaviour, universal and blended search, getting found on maps and local searches, and tracking social media success, caught a lot of attention. Gordon Hotchkiss talked about the evolution of the “golden triangle” and could not refrain from mentioning how Rogers forgot to buy paid search traffic to support their iPhone announcement in Canada.

SEM Canada is the next big industry event this year. I hope more Canadian businesses will recognize the importance of Internet Marketing and as a result we will see more recognition and more events like SES Toronto in Canada.