CAC Amsterdam 2008
This year the CAC Amsterdam was held from the 3rd until the 5th of April, again in the magnificent NH Grand Krasnapolsky Hotel, one of the top hotels in Amsterdam. Our Dutch affiliateprogramadvice.com rep Wouter Mols went along and here is his report.
When I arrived there was a bit of a problem at the registration desk as badges had gotten mixed up and were no longer stacked alphabetically so it took a while for them to locate my badge. But hey, organising an event as big as the CAC is not easy and things do go wrong sometimes.
It seems that every year this event is getting bigger and better. I got the feeling they broke records with regards to the number of exhibitors as well as the number of attendees.
I always have a problem with these kind of events, they have many workshops and often the ones you are interested in take place at the same time. Most importantly though I find the networking, meeting affiliate managers from the various casino networks and find out what is going on at their casinos, poker rooms and so on and in the industry in general.
I attended the White hat SEO vs Black hat SEO debate with in the panel Marcus Tandler, Bob Rains and Jason Duke. During this debate you could, if you dared, give the guys your URL and they would analyse your site and tell you what was wrong / right about your SEO. One guy asked them to have a look at his site and unfortunately for him they took his site to pieces. Apparently he was buying the wrong kind of links, from the wrong sites, they looked spammy and they thought his positioning in Google would not last long.
Speaking about buying links, apparently buying links from the bigger link networks is now a big no no as Google no longer gives you value for these links. If I understood correctly it can even harm you. The best way to get links is by getting them look as natural as possible in the content of a page. You can do this by writing articles and place links in them to your site(s) and give them away to other webmasters to use as content on their site.
Some other advise was that you don’t buy a new domain name for your new website, but instead search in Google for the terms you want to rank for and find a website in the top rankings that seems to be abandoned. They can be as ugly as hell and might not have been updated for ages, but that is what makes them interesting as you can then most likely strike a good deal with the owner of the domain. The best way to do this would be to leave things in tact as much as possible. Don’t change to much to the site itself, keep the content. Even don’t change hosting and if possible lease the domain for a long period of time from the owner so that even the WhoIs details don’t change. The question was though that if you can not change anything on the site, what value does it have then. Apparently you can add stuff to it, make small changes, add some links here and there, but be very careful what you do.
The rest of the afternoon I spent networking with the various people I work with in the industry and had a couple of good chats. It became quite clear that the impact of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Funding Act has not only affected the webmasters, but that a big ripple has gone through the entire industry. Not only the casinos themselves were heavily affected by it, but the affiliate networks and other providers have been hit badly as well. Having said that much, this already became clear by all the mergers and acquisitions taking place over the past year and a half and the number of affiliate managers and so on moving from one company to the next or even leaving the industry in general.
Most people were however quite positive about the industry as they expect that the US will move to legalising the industry and regulating it. Something I never understood why they did not do that in the first place, but maybe the market was saturated with internet casinos that had the experience of internet marketing making it difficult for the US land based casinos to enter and dominate the market?
At 5PM there was the GPWA cocktail event, something I as a member of the association of course had to attend. This was again an excellent get together event for networking and I spoke to a lots of people including a couple of webmasters who had made the move to opening their own poker room. For them it was still early days, but apparently they were happy with the results so far. Before we knew it the GPWA event was over so we had to continue our meeting in a nearby bar. However, this I had to cut short as I had to travel back home that same evening.
Finally something funny. As is clear from the above, one of the things I like about the CAC is all the networking you do. You approach people, try to find out what there role in the industry is and from there take things further. On one of my cigarette breaks I sat next to a woman and I tried to find out whether she worked for a casino group or was a webmaster. But she spoke no English. From what she said I understood she spoke German, well at least that’s what I thought she said, so I tried once more in German. But that did not work either as she spoke no German either. It then became clear she spoke Hungarian and some other language I could not make up what it was. Needless to say I don’t speak Hungarian. What I was wondering though is how is a person going to communicate with all these networks and affiliates if the common language spoken is English? A bit baffled by that.
Wouter Mols
On the Bingo Scene there are mergers and acquisitions happening all about us.
Gtech grabs Boss and StMinvers and closer to home affiliateprogramadvice.com will be issuing a press release about one of their clients shortly.
AffiliateProgramAdvice.com has now secured the contract for http://www.bingosky.co.uk having impressed the powers that be with cyberbingo’s entry into main stream affiliate marketing. Cyberbingo.co.uk hit the ground running and in just a few short weeks have already made the leap from zero to making money for all parties concerned and even affiliateprogramadvice.com was surprised at how quickly this program kicked in. Of course it helps having those clever chaps at PaidOnResults.com
who rise to the tracking challanges we throw at them every time, guys… another APA inovating tracking challange coming at you very soon!Hollywood Buddha movie
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