BlogWorld Expo 2010 – Done and Gone, Still Reeling from the Feeling

I just got home yesterday morning 5:45am and then did my full time job before I even got a chance to get home and visit the family. I’m running all my travel plans by my wife in the future so I don’t go and do a red eye before a day of work ever again. I was destroyed that day. But why? Because of BlogWorld & New Media Expo. It kicked my butt up and down the Vegas strip. But in a good way.

I’ve attended every BlogWorld convention that has been held. Each one elevates the attendee experience to great levels of awesome. This year started off with a fantastic keynote by Scott Stratten. I was pumped from that moment on and never stopped running from session to session throughout the weekend. I was even running around like crazy up to the moment that I got to my own session called Content You Care About. Here is the presentation with the links to all of the resources that I talked about in my session.

If you ‘d rather download that you can do so by downloading my session as an ebook. Through this session and speaking again at a conference I learned a few cool things.

1. Always have your presentation on a spare flash drive in case it is not pre-loaded on the laptop as it was supposed to be.

2. Google Presentations is decent for making presentations, ebooks and slideshows. Very simple interface. It can also save your session as a powerpoint set.

3. Practice your session, things will go smoother if you do.

4. Smile when you present, you are there to have a great time and give people great information on things that you enjoy so smile about that.

5. Attend as much as you can, push yourself. I totally spaced on a few sessions where I should have attended.

6. Participate in PhotoWalks, if there isn’t one already then organize one because it is a great way to meet more people and also to get into photos yourself.

7. The greatest thing is being there. Get to an industry event, they are a must. Make sure you get photographed while there too.

Me with Murray Newlands

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Blog Monetization Tips at Blog World

We just finished our 60 Question in 60 Minutes Blog Monetization Panel at Blog World. It was a really fun and great panel… and not to toot my own horn, but it was definitely the best session at BlogWorld because we focused all of our efforts at the audience, and had so much audience participation. Go into any other session and you will get a few questions if you are lucky, our session had a ton of user submitted questions, which the panel then answered. I don’t think we ended up getting anywhere near 60 questions answered, but it was a great session full of quality content.

The Blog Monetization panel was made up of John Chow, Ryan Gray, Jonathan Volk, DK and myself. We covered a wide variety of questions such as how to find advertisers for a blog, how much a blog should make vs. the amount of traffic it has, how to monetize non-US traffic and outside methods for revenue generation besides on site advertising and through ebooks, to name a few.

This session was excellent not only because of the awesome collection of speakers we had on the panel, but also because of how the audience always reminds us that it’s never too late to start blogging or start a new business online. How many attendees at BlogWorld this year will have just started their blog or business, and come back next year with a killer success story, or the results they were only dreaming of. The best way to reach these goals is to get out their, put your thoughts into action and network with some of the best people in the game.

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Performance Marketing Expo Recap

Today was the first day of the Performance Marketing Expo event in Miami, Florida. Last night I arrived with a bunch of other speakers and friends, like John Chow, Ian Fernando and Eric Schechter to mention a few. PMA sponsored a nice dinner for all of the speakers at a classy restaurant. It was great for all of us to meet up again… especially since we were all just together last week at ThinkTank in Del Mar, CA!

As for the event, it was smaller than most affiliate conferences, with around 80 attendees, but these are the smaller types of conferences I enjoy. Instead of getting lost in a sea of hundreds of attendees, you actually can meet up with everyone at the event and meet some new people. If Performance Marketing Expo decides to hold another event next year, I’m sure it will at least double in size, as inaugural events usually start off slow, then grow a decent amount in the following years.

The day kicked off with a keynote from Michael Tchong of UberCool, who is an excellent speaker. I first saw Michael Chong speak a decade ago at CJU 2000! At that time, Tchong was actually the first keynote I ever saw, since CJU 2000 was my first conference, and he always stood out as one of my favorite and best speakers. It was great to see Michael still has it, as he delivered an excellent session on how social networking and technology is changing the world we live in.

Next we had Stephanie Nelson from CouponMom, who delivered a more personal session and told her story of how she went from building a small site about how to clip coupons, save money and help provide food for food drives and shelters, to building the massive web site CouponMom.com is today. Stephanie also has quite the list of television appearances, with 17 appearances on Good Morning America and even Oprah. Oh yea… did I mention all of this was accomplished by Stephanie while being a stay at home mom? This was a great story and Stephanie did a great job delivering it to the audience.

After lunch was the keynote panel “Getting on the Affiliate Fast Track“, which included Eddie Alberty, Matthew Cherif, Greg Brynes and myself. This session also went very well. We actually couldn’t fit everything we wanted to talk about into the one hour session, but a lot of content and Q&A was covered. Main discussions were on coupon advertising, market / customer trends and Facebook advertising. John Chow did a good job of blogging the session while it was going on.

The last session I made it to was “If You Build It, They Will Come: How I Lost $500,000” with Sherry Comes of CoffeeCakes.com. The title sounds awesome enough, and the session was packed with the full story. In short, back in 1995 Sherry had the idea for an internet cafe and spent around half a million dollars building and implementing her idea. With many problems, such as hiring and dealing with staff, the world not really being ready for the internet yet, and not enough market research… the business failed. Sherry then took her idea online and is now killing it with CoffeeCakes.com. I talked with Sherry a bit on how she can improve her existing web site and hit even better number by adding her own affiliate program. I’m looking forward to hearing back from Sherry and how much her business grows after having an army of affiliates pushing traffic ans sales to her site.

I’m heading back home in the morning, but it was great to attend the first Performance Marketing Expo event and I look forward to seeing what they have in store for next year. Photo credits to John Chow, and Thank you PME for the invite!

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