The morning session today was a panel discussion with three well-known superaffiliates - John Chow, Zac Johnson, and Amit Mehta.

I was looking forward to this session because it was one of the only ones that sounded like it was going to be specifically targeted to affiliates, rather than a combination of affiliates, merchants and vendors.

It was a little disappointing however.

The moderator, Kristopher Jones of Pepperjam.com, had each of the panelists tell a little bit of the story of how they got to where they are today, and then asked a couple of questions. After which, he opened it up to questions from the audience.

Amit Mehta had said he mostly drives his traffic with pay-per-click during his introduction, and that seemed to be the topic of the day for the audience questions. Almost all the questions asked were related to PPC which meant Amit did most of the talking.

Zac and John added their 2 cents when they could, but since their traffic is not primarily PPC it meant they didn't get much of a chance to speak.

While each of the panelists did share a little bit about what got them to where they are, there weren't really any true strategies shared - more of a 10,000 foot view of the process.

There was also significant angst in the room over the keynote yesterday from Jason Calacanis, not the least of which was because he had singled out Zac Johnson in his rant about people who post pictures with their big cheques. I thought it was going to degenerate into an anti-Calacanis session at one point, but the moderator did a good job of steering it back on track.

The few nuggets I got out of the session were mostly about pay-per-click:

• As a general rule, traffic from MSN converts the best, Yahoo is second and Google third. This varies in different markets, but that's what Amit has seen in many of the markets he's in (which he didn't share).

  It's interesting to me because that's the exact opposite of the order most people roll out their PPC campaigns.

• Put in a bid price of $20-30 when you're setting up your ad groups so you can see what the highest bid price is. Once you know how much #1 would cost, you can scale it back to find the #2-8 position costs, depending on where you want to be in the results.
• As most other PPC people will tell you, Amit said positions 3-5 tend to have the best ROI. He'll even shoot for 5-8 in some cases.

There was also an amusing question from one of the audience members who basically asked if he can make money using black hat tactics, why not do so? What would be the downside for him?

The answer to that was essentially that you could be breaking the terms of service of the merchant and you might not get paid.

So if you're using grey or black hat techniques to market affiliate products, it's something to think about. Make sure you've read the TOS for the merchant to be sure that you're not overstepping their bounds and setting yourself up to lose all those commissions.