Rafael Cosentino of Congoo noted in a kickoff address that in co-branded networks "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," meaning that partnerships oftentimes lead to unexpected relationships that turn out to be mutually productive. With technology techniques a co-branded site can be hosted online in a way that the relationship can look to be fairly transparent to the user and accessible to search engines. An example can be seen in a Yahoo search that shows how organic placements for partners of healthology get excellent search engine placement off of co-branded site presences. Although co-branding can be win-win, relationships can get cloudy (what happens when a parent company has potential conflicts with partners?) and others will catch on to dilute the uniqueness of these relationships. But the net effect is that online properties can collaborate to draw traffic away from other pools of competitors and help to reinforce the value of each others' properties to form an extended community of related users.

Matt Hong of Thomson Gale stressed two sub-themes: Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing and advertising, which combine to make content previously behind the subscription firewall to generate new revenue streams. He sees SEO/SEM strategy as the key to an effective marketing strategy which needs not scrap old strategies but opens up new opportunities for publishers to build multi-layered monetization techniques. Pam Springer of ECNext emphasized that you need a broad approach to SEO/SEM, noting that "you can't just sit and look at Google," especially when you're trying to get users beyond a site's landing page and using specific content targeted at specific audiences. Once you're there the user experience is all, making content highly usable and any purchasing experience efficient. David Scott observed that publishers need to remember that search is the one marketing technique that does not require interruption: it reaches people at the precise moment that people have a need. He sees good search engine strategies look for search engines that aggregate audiences, ones that aggregate buyers effectively. Instead of looking at it from a product-centric perspective, David sees good SEO/SEM requiring marketing that tries to get inside the heads of prospective buyers and to target their interests and behaviors - a marketing approach rather than a sales approach.

More sophisticated techniques are also in order. Pam notes that testing many different search schemes, pricing schemes, access methods, and balancing free access to convert pay-per-view. Sometimes pricing needs to go up in this environment rather than down to ensure that people take content seriously: "People are not going to take out their credit card for a two-dollar record of business information, but they will for a six-dollar record." And if it doesn't work? "Just turn it right off," David observes. SEM needs to be used carefully for content sales: "You don't want to be seen as being desperate," Rafael notes.

Paid search can work for individual pieces of content, David notes, such as an eBook that can demonstrate thought leadership on a given topic. But Pam Springer, who just published and eBook polished that point to make sure that you have both highly descriptive metadata and very careful selection of ad keywords on the "long tail" of paid search keyword inventories. This will help to maximize matches both on the paid search and organic search sides of the marketing equation. Breaking down content into subchapters, graphs and other sectioning of content such as research reports you also have an opportunity to get SEO/SEM to focus on even more ways to market premium content via search.

Jeff Cutler of Answers.com noted that co-branding can indeed impact SEO/SEM efforts by search engines finding duplicate content elsewhere and getting "blackballed" by search engines that are on the lookout for sites that take content from other sites to drain off ad revenues from other sites. Paul Gerbino of Thomas Publishing underscored this concern of partners taking content and getting the source site on the wrong end of search engine blacklisting. Search engine awareness of content licensing seems to be the key to solving the issue of blacklisting, but it seems to be a far-off mark for many publishers. SEO/SEM has transformed premium and free content marketing, but it's a transformation still under way in many critical aspects.