Tuesday 27 September 2016

Traffic & Conversion Summit 2013

Every year there’s a hand full of conferences and events I love to attend. At the top of that list is the Traffic & Conversion Summit. Development is only part of creating a successful app. This year’s summit was once again, full of useful information for the growth hacker in me.

Many developers tend to overlook marketing or have little interest in marketing. It isn’t for everyone. However, being an experienced marketer and an experienced coder definitely has it’s benefits in today’s age. If you’re a coder who isn’t interested in marketing, you best have a good marketer on your team.

But enough about coding + marketing, back to the conference. Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher have been hardcore Internet marketers since the early days of the web and it’s evident to me after attending three of their conferences that they know their stuff.

What makes Ryan and Perry special is that they love to share the things they learn. Sure, it works out for them too; they have a fanatical base of followers who bring them new products and services to market. But attend one of these conferences and you’ll walk away with dozens or ideas to begin implementing as soon as possible. I do every year, without fail.

Day One

The first session of the day, Ryan opens the conference with what direction Internet Marketing is going in. Ryan’s opening was followed by a guest appearance and discussion with William Shatner. Next up was Eric Lancheres discussing SEO post Panda and Penguin. Then Ryan Deiss & Chris Oyolokor discuss leading performance indicators and tactics for generating cheap, targeted traffic.

The final segment of the day was the “traffic hacks” panel.
The panel of 11 speakers presented techniques covering a multitude of channels.

    Michael Taggart talked about ranking press releases and YouTube videos in minutes.
    Victoria Gibson delved into Facebook offer ads and custom audiences.
    Brandon Olson revealed external link annotations in YouTube marketing.
    Cory Shanes discussed ways he has been using Pinterest to drive giveaway traffic.
    Carl White disclosed a tactic for helping others monetize their lists.
    Dustin Brooke uncovered how he 10x’d a local dentists sales with PPC.
    James Schramko laid out a plan for keeping list subscribers longer.
    Deagan Smith discussed curiosity and opt in rates.
    Scott Boulach talked about incentivised viral promotion.
    Jeff Usner discussed guerrilla traffic techniques in Facebook.
    “Ivan” revealed black hat SEO tricks.

As is always the case with Traffic & Conversion Summit, the first day alone proved to be worth more than the price of admission.

Day Two

Day two started off with Perry & Ryan discussing conversion hacks. Conversion optimization is always a fascinating subject. You can have the best product online in your space, but if potential customers bounce continually bounce off your landing page without giving it a chance, you’ll fail. Your competitors with inferior products will convert more, take over the market and eventually hire you to work for them. Don’t go to work for your competitor! Study conversion optimization. :-)

In the second session Perry talked about why people buy, points of belief, features vs benefits, call to action and why people don’t buy in his “Secret Selling System” session.

After lunch Ezra Firestone took the stage and revealed tremendous successes in e-commerce that are still possible today. His slides can be found here.

In the fourth and final session of the day, Ryan took the stage for the Mobile Voodoo session. Mobile is a sweeping wave of change in the Internet marketing space. Over 30% of email is opened on a mobile device and growing quickly. These days you need mobile optimized landing pages or you’re throwing away marketing dollars. Definitely some great and timely information in this session.

Day Three

Day three, the final day of Traffic & Conversion 2013. The third day started off with an amazing presentation from Vincent Fisher & Mark Jenny on building a massive affiliate marketing army. Vincent & Mark started BrainHost.com and did 30+ million in revenue their first 12 months. That’s an amazing number for a company starting out in the hosting space, a highly competitive arena online. They have 240,000 customers and 350,000 domains hosted. And they built it all by focusing their marketing efforts towards building an army of affiliate marketers. Their presentation was packet with quality information on building and keeping an army of affiliate marketers. If you sell products or services online, you owe it to yourself to grab the videos of this event and watch this segment.

Next up, Perry gave a presentation on the “100 year company”. Perry covered many good business practices that are simply crucial for building a long lasting and growth oriented business.

The day wrapped up with a presentation from Guy Kawasaki on publishing and a panel of Guy Kawasaki, Tucker Max and Tim Ferris on publishing.

Overall the conference was packed with great information suitable for any level of Growth Hacker. If you’re a developer who hasn’t taken the plunge into the marketing world, I highly recommend you dive in. Being a developer makes you valuable. Learning how to market makes you dangerous.

I’ve already bought my tickets for next year and will definitely be looking forward to it.