I've been going to SEARCH CONFERENCES since 2001. SES and PUBCON have valuable, valuable info for retailers. Even without the opportunity costs of missing a week of "work," it usually costs me $3000.00 easy out of pocket plus a week of my time to fly to these things, get a room in the conference hotel, eat out every meal, and then I have my pimpilicious wardrobe to think about, but EVERY TIME IT'S WORTH EVERY PENNY AND EVERY SECOND.

WHY? If I get one idea that moves the sales needle at home 1%, that's THOUSANDS of dollars in sales. One idea.

Multiply that by my group of revshare retailers, then throw in my clients, friends, former clients still in the loop, and then lump in blog readers, book buyers, and etc., and the trickle down is INSANE. From one idea.

(Example: Put best-seller in the NAME of a product that is a best-seller and conversion rate jumps up.) And I usually get at least 100x of those tactical ones, and as y'all know, I usually fill a 100 page notebook with ideas and conference notes from speakers AND from the real action after at the parties and hotel bars.

Yahoo! Store owners DO show up at these shows, but they don't know where to go, what to do, etc. And I bet less than 1% of retailers show up. So GO!

Site Clinic

This interactive session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their web sites live to provide general feedback about improving them to gain more traffic from search engines.

Moderator:
Elisabeth Osmeloski, Managing Editor, Search Engine Watch

Panelists:
Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Strategist, Acxiom Digital
Rob Snell, Partner, Snell Brothers