This year I was fortunate enough to attend both PubCon 2010 in Las Vegas and Affiliate Summit East 2011 in New York. I’d like to talk about how they compare for those considering either of these events in the future.

The Content:

PubCon is a huge conference held in the Las Vegas Convention Center. They have a lot of sessions (100-ish) covering SEO, SEM, PPC, Affiliate Marketing and the like. I actually struggled to pick which sessions to attend because inevitably there would be 2 or more sessions going on at the same time that I wanted to attend. Also, because there are so many more people at PubCon sometimes the rooms get full so people actually run from one session to the next to get a good seat. They don’t allow much time between the sessions but they do a good job at providing power strips for laptops at many of the tables.. You’ll also see industry heavy-hitters at PubCon like Matt Cutts, David Pogue, and others.

Affiliate Summit is a smaller event, there are three sessions going on at once and about 40 in total, mostly about Affiliate Marketing though I did attend a few good SEO sessions while here. One thing I noticed is that the Affiliate Summit sessions are a bit higher level, less beginner content compared to what you’ll hear at PubCon. Also, the sessions are spread out over the day with bigger gaps between them so you don’t have to rush however there are no power strips for laptops at the tables.

Winner: PubCon – the volume of choices is nice even though some of the content may be low-level

Logistics:

PubCon is not in a hotel but it’s ‘near’ a hotel but you can’t really walk to it so they have shuttles, which is a pain because at the end of the day everyone wants to take the shuttle back to the hotel at the same time so there were HUGE lines waiting to get back. Also, it was freezing cold and I did not fly out to Las Vegas thinking I would need a winter coat so I had none. On a positive note, the shuttle is yet another chance to do some networking. A few of my most memorable connections were made on the shuttle.

Affiliate Summit, on the other hand, is held inside the Hilton so if you stay in the Hilton you don’t have to even go outside to get to the sessions.

Winner: Affiliate Summit – no shuttles

Food:

PubCon gives you these tickets that are like money and you have choices of vendors to buy food from. The lines were long and some of the vendors were poorly prepared for the rush. It was basically a disaster.

Affiliate Summit hands out meal tickets, you hand them the ticket when you walk in. I never saw a line but I got to lunch kinda late. Hilton caters the lunch and provided a nice assortment of healthy food that was actually really good. Although the deserts were just okay for me dog.

Winner: Affiliate Summit – no lunch lines & better food choices

Audience:

PubCon typically hosts the big names in the industry. It’s common to see folks from Amazon, eBay and just about any other big web presence you can think of. It’s a professional environment and exciting to share ideas with these folks. That said, it’s a slightly older audience hosting people who are later in their careers.

At Affiliate Summit the crowd is younger. You’ll see folks in their clubbing outfits, fresh out of college – some look like they just got out of high school. Not as many heavy hitters but certainly a good collection of talent. Also, if you’re a single guy there are a LOT more beautiful women at Affiliate Summit.

Winner: TIE Affiliate Summit (if you’re single) PubCon if you want to be star-struck

With that said you really can’t go wrong with either of these events, depending on what industry you’re in. Enjoy!

Clicky is also amazingly handy whenever you launch a new initiative like a new website, ppc ad or send out an email blast with a link to a special offer. Watching how users navigate your website in real-time is like crack for a web junky like me. No more waiting for 3 hours for GA to update.

Additionally, if you manage multiple blogs or websites, Clicky offers a handy high-level view of all your sites that outlines your traffic at that exact moment, for the current day, and for the last 7 to 30 days. Not to mention that this view can be customized to your liking.

Furthermore, Clicky is ultra-easy to setup, similar to Google Analytics. Just place a snippet of code on your site and you’re done. If you use WordPress, this is even easier with their official plugin.

Finally, it’s totally free to get started. Track your first website (up to 3000 page views per day) with the free version for as long as you like. You only pay when you begin to add more sites and even then it’s only $4.99 / month. Give Clicky a try today. They even have a demo site setup so you can see what the reports are like before you install the code.

Already using Clicky? Awesome, share your thoughts below.

For a while I wasn’t sure of the best way to backup WordPress automatically to Dropbox so I decided to research this and share with you.

It’s really simple and only requires a few plugins and no programming on your part. Let’s get started.

First, you will need the following plugins:

1. WP Time Machine
2. Utopia Cron

Then, you will need a Dropbox account. Dropbox is a cloud-based storage service that allows you to save files to the web that you can access from any computer later on. I love it because I use 5 different computers and Dropbox allows me to synchronize files across all of them. Best of all, it’s free. Sign up here.

Once you have WP Time Machine installed you then must activate it & configure it to connect to your Dropbox account. Look under Settings – wp time machine. Simply enter the email address and password (don’t forget to click ‘save my password’) you use for Dropbox and a folder name where you wish to store the fies. I recommend something like “yourdomain.com” so that you know what those file are for. Also, this helps if you’re backing up more than one site to keep them separate. When you’re done click ‘Generate WP Time Machine archive’. This process will take a min or two to complete. Next, click on the ‘show instructions’ link at the top. This will reveal the details about what files are backed up and also will show you the cron job details you will need for the next step.

Next, install & activate Utopia Cron. Cron simply means a process or task that is run on a schedule. It’s a term specific to Linux-based servers, which is typically how WordPress is hosted. Look under Post – U-Cron for the settings page. Take the URL to the cron job you were provided in WP Time Machine and insert here under Full URL. Select a time for it to run, I recommend 3AM, which you would configure as 03:00 (military time). Set it to run every night by entering 24h under How Often. Click Add. I also recommend adding a 2nd job to clean up the cache files. You’ll see a URL for this under WP Time Machine as well. Set this one to run 3 mins later than the first job and you’ll be set. Click on the test button next to each entry once to make sure they run properly.

These are the URLs you wan to use for U-Cron:

http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-time-machine/cron.php

http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-time-machine/cron.php?clean=1

That’s really all there is to it. Now your WordPress blog will be backed up every night and you’ll be protected against hacks & server crashes. Below is a review of the pieces necessary for this to work. If you have any further questions please post them below and I’ll do my best to help you out. Enjoy!

• WP Time Machine
• Utopia Cron
• Dropbox