Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

Glimpses from the Elite Retreat, a blurry eyed, quick review of some of my memories.

(Full facebook write up coming soon!) (Pics from We Build Pages field trip to Facebook Below)

Eating at one perfect restaurant after another in Napa, Martini House, Carneros, Bouchon, and on and on over Valentines.
Knowing all the insiders were at Scott Richter’s cocktail party and getting a flat tire on the way back from Facebook.

Realizing I was going to be stuck in the rain waiting for AAA, and getting sushi, pizza, and playing pinball at the pizza place.
Showing up late at Hotel Vitale for Scott Richter’s cocktail party.
Hanging with some of the best people in the world.

Hearing some of Scott Richter’s numbers and having my head spin.
Remembering where I first saw Scott on the Daily Show.
Gary Vaynerchuk answering someones question about who his mentor is, Gary said approximately, “I look in the mirror and say, You are awesome!, then Let’s Go!”

Sitting and talking for an hour with Brian Norgard about my skill set and contacts and what I can do with it, and him uttering simple words of genius.
Being thrilled to hear both Gary V., Brian  Norgard, and Michael Brito bring up quality and integrity in marketing and it being the long term play. Remember, these guys were hand picked by Shoe to speak at E.R.
Michael doing a video of me walking through the Elite Retreat.

George at GetAds throwing an amazing party at Waterbar for everyone, buying a world class dinner, best I had all week for all attendees and their guests. George started up the company last year and if you knew the numbers they were hitting after just a few months it would blow your mind. George also is an ex professional hockey player, having played for the ducks and other teams. Him and Scott Richter grew up playing hockey together in Denver.

Justin Goff and Chris Winfield won best hair award.

Chris Jones from Pepperjam buying some extra 6 packs of beer to take on the bus after facebook. (It was legal.) Being impressed by Chris Jones book and how well it is selling.
Standing on the top of the Vitale with an open bar, great food, and an amazing view of the Bay Bridge, Alcatraz, and a blimp.

The whole downstairs of Boulevard the top rated restaurant in San Francisco set aside for us for dinner, hearing the stories of Jeremy Hermans childhood traveling through Papa New Guinea and hanging out with cannibals.

Having an hour and a half with Andy Liu who rode shotgun with me when I went to the Airport to switch Subarbans. Realizing he is now in the background of Fail Blog, which is probably my second favorite site on the web.

Watching Nate Whitehill of Unique Blog Designs busting out a hilarious custom theme with a retro 70’s look with a  Unicorn, Rainbow and my suggestion, a Leprecon.Hanging out with my wife at the Vitale bar on Saturday night, and within an hour having Slaven, Ari, Chris, Jim and a bevy of girls turning the bar into our own private party. Being the last one to go to sleep on Thursday and Friday night.

Facebook on Friday was life changing for many of us. Get in now or miss out, that’s all I can say.

Being so blurry eyed tired by Sunday on the drive home that I had to pull over and fell asleep in broad daylight in a gas station parking lot.
A lovely drive home with the wife while she did her Italian homework, snacking on good breads, fruit and Cowgirl Creamery cheeses from the Ferry Building in San Fran.
Just being super appreciative of Shoe for creating a masterful event of fun, brilliance, money, business and love. Trainsignal Scott and Search Engine Commander Scott giving me an impropmtu focus group on the ThinkTank and what it should become.

Neil pulling more crazy stuff in more crazy ways involving so many different people that an entire blog could be devoted just to his highjinx.

dk and Shoe at facebook

There is no way I could ever write everything that was packed into those days. It was nonstop for 20 hours per day, no time to sleep or you might miss out. It is like a speeding train, going around the corners on two wheels and nobody wants it to stop. If you can find a way to ever get to attend an Elite Retreat or the ThinkTank, then you don’t want to miss it. Whew!

On Tuesday I am going to Facebook.

There is quite a bit loaded into that statement.

I am going for actually a long list of reasons.

1. To make sure everything is smooth as silk for the Elite Reatreat “field trip” there on Thursday, with Magic Bus transportation provided by the ever cool Jim at We Build Pages.

2. To have some great food, and great meetings, with some truly first class people.

3. To become super educated on Facebook, so I can help them interface more smoothly with the internet marketing world.

4. To answer some questions they have for me on who the influencial internet business/marketing bloggers are, and whatever else they want to know from me.

5. To learn stuff to help with my own projects.

6. To stand in front of a tidal wave just before it hits.

I had a long talk with Michael Jenkins about this one morning last week. Michael is the Founder and CEO of Market Leverage Affiliate Network. Facebook reaches hundreds of millions of people each week. They also have more info about who each user is on a continental basis than any other site. They actually care more about the user experience than they do about making money. There was a lot more to this conversation that I am not at liberty to release, but boy oh boy is there a lot of opportunity here.

In no way would I imply that google has maxed out on their ability provide value to advertisers, but at the moment Facebook provides ridiculous value to advertisers if you can figure out how to utilize it properly. Jeremy, (Shoemoney) turned me onto this and we have been working on some early experiments on how to utilize facebook advertising for maximum value.

Recently I have been looking at what other medium has ever been able to be able to target demographically their users on such a wide scale. Answer? Nothing.

Google is cool that if you use adwords you can have a great understanding of their intent at that exact moment, but with Facebook you can find out if they like to dance, are 24 years old, live in Phoenix, and are in a relationship. Man if I had a romantic restaurant in Phoenix I would be spending everything I have on marketing to that group today for Valentines at my place.

The closest thing I have ever been to that had this type of detail is buying mailing lists and mailing to people, or e-mail lists. It is a huge difference because with those lists you are making assumptions about what the person is into, but with Facebook the person themselves has either said they are into that, or at least talked about it on their page.

The real future of facebook hasn’t even been unleashed yet. It will be when they fully develop their system for not only directing ads based on what the person is into, but also what their friends are into, and tying it in to whether their friends are allready users of a particular product or service or not.

Can you imagine if you were selling Zoomi Electric Bicycles and you could target a Facebook user who had 9 of his 45 friends allready riding Zoomi Electric Bicycles. Just imagine the ad saying something like,

John, C’mon allready!

All your friends are riding Zoomi Electrics to school,

why aren’t you!

And then it shows photos of his friends who allready ride them.

So maybe this is pushing it a bit too far, and impinging a bit on their personal privacy, but it really demonstrates the power that is available through their data.

Like I said in the beginning, one of the main reasons I am really excited to get to work closely with Facebook is that they actually put the users experience far ahead of their interest in making money. Long term this is going to put them I believe in a position that will be more powerful than even the mighty Google.

Shoemoney pointed my head to look in the right direction, and after my own studies and speaking with Michael, I can hear the rumbling. There are a few hundreds of millions of eyeballs, maybe billions? starting to look in this direction at our ads and we know more about each one of them than we ever have before.

I am putting myself right in front of that tidal wave right now, and looking forward to it breaking on me.

Stay posted next week, and you will hear more about what I learned at Facebook.

In case you haven’t heard of them, here is their site

Left to Right - Jo Klein, Rand Fishkin, Lauren "street fighter" Vaccarello, Geraldine Fishkin, dk, Todd Malicoat

Two years back when I went to Pubcon, I desperately wanted to be on the insider invite list so I could get invited to the insider dinner with the big shots. At any of the internet conferences, there’s a series of private events that you probably won’t even hear about and very few people get invited to. I used to hear about these private parties and small dinners, and wish that I would be one of the people who got invited. I finally figured out how to solve the problem. Throw the dinner yourself.
Saturday, I had dinner with Todd Malicoat, Lauren Vaccarello, Rand Fishkin and Geraldine, Rand’s wife. We all got together, and I was going to take them to a new Mexican place in San Diego, and found out that they already had fish tacos, of which Todd Malicoat is a huge fan, for lunch. So, I talked to the concierge at the Westin and had them recommend a great restaurant, and off we went to Rama Thai Food.

Lauren started getting excited when reading the menu, so I let her along with Rand do most of the ordering.

The dinner was amazing, the crowd was brilliant, my wife, Jo, came along, and hilarious, amazing and funny stories exchanged for hours. By the time we’ve gotten up, we’ve been sitting on the table for about 3 hours, and it felt like only 15 minutes have gone by.

The great thing about dinners like this is that you get the chance to really become friends with leaders of the industry. It’s unlikely that you’re going to get the biggest names in the industry to want to come have dinner with you if you haven’t acomplished much yet, but by being a good friend, being helpful, and following the basic rules of being a person, being polite, and being nice, you can slowly gain friendships with people in the industry over time. You may be surprised who will accept your invitation.
One of the big secrets to all of this is keeping secrets. Things get disclosed to every one of these insider dinners that can cause different individuals a lot of effort and a lot of money. So, in order to be invited back a second time or have people be willing to accept the invitation a second time is to learn how to be quiet at the right times, and how to take the information that’s given to you and keep it absolutely private and locked away in a safe place.

The whole game of the insider information reminds me almost of a bunch of james bond type operatives. Little bits of information can cause people to make or lost vast sums of money. Sometimes the really big shots will give you little bits of info to help you in your goals.

Sometimes the big shots can use this info to gain advantage, stop someones action or work together to accomplish some amazing things.

By the way at this particular dinner, nothing got exposed except everyone’s propensity for repeating the same bad jokes over, and over and over again!

I’ve wanted to get to hang out with Rand a bit for a long time. He is one of the nicest, most positive people I have seen in the industry. By the way, if you ever need really high end copywriting done, Geraldine is brilliant with words. Some of the jokes she made were so subtle, so complex, and just fricken ridiculous that it blew me  away!
It’s amazing how when you look at the people at the top of this industry, you’ll consistently find the nicest, friendliest, and smartest people that I’ve ever met anywhere. It’s an industry that tends to reward brilliance, friendship and warmth. More so than in any other industry I’ve ever seen. The people who are on the inside help each other a lot and in fact, it’s very difficult to really be successful online, unless you have a circle of good friends.

I have gotten to spend the last two days at a way fun conference in sunny, (or rainy at the moment), San Diego.

Aaron Kahlow threw the Online Marketing Summit this weekend.

At first I was a little unsure about this event. After all it takes place in San Diego, and other than hearing about it once, I had never heard my circle of internet friends mention it.

It is very different than Pubcon, SES, or the Elite Retreat. I have found myself really digging it.

It is a nice size, with maybe 300 or 400 people I am guessing.

The weird thing for me was showing up for the Keynote and really studying the crowd and finding exactly 0 people that I recognized. If it was a room at Pubcon or SES or Affiliate Summit I might know 5% of the room, or at at least a few people.

There have been fun touches like Jamba Juice on the breaks and bags of pretzels and what not.

The nicest touch was tonight when after dinner I went to meet Rand Fishkin, his wife Geraldine, Lauren Vaccarelloand Todd Malicoat on the top of the Ivy, behind the velvet ropes and all that. The bouncers were hesitating to let me in and Aaron left his party and came down personally to make sure I got in. Very cool, very personal, and won’t be forgotten.

It was really interesting for me too to look at Aarons facebook page.

He has over 1200 friends with only 9 in common with me. Take Shoe’s facebook page with his 1500 friends, I have about 10% in common. It is simply a really different crowd.

The highlight for me of the conference was dinner tonight with Rand Fishkin, Todd Malicoat, Geraldine Rand’s wife and Lauren a brilliant SEO and tough street fighter (She did the fight club at the Couture Gym in Vegas!) We had killer Thai Food to die for!

The other nice surprise was hearing Tim Ash speak. He graciously ripped one of my sites apart in front of 100 people to point out how to improve the landing page. As he spoke, he imediately impressed me with his knowledge of landing page optimization. In a perfect example of marketing that could not ever have been purchased, but happened because of hard work, the following happened.

Sitting behind me was a guy who I struck up a conversation with after the talk. We realized we both train occasionally at the Couture Gym in Vegas, and that he had just had a lesson from Joey Varner. If someone has the guts to train at the Couture gym, it tells me a lot. It is the kind of place where if you are a poser or of poor morals, you will never survive. You don’t have to be a great fighter to train there, but you do have to be respectful and polite in the presence of the great fighters who are there. This told me a lot about my new friend.

This guy behind me in the talk was sharp and quick and when asked told me about the online marketing company he works in and I believe directs. He went on to tell me that Tim Ash had come into their company to train the online marketing guys. When he was done the oline marketing guys applied what they learned to the clients sites. I asked this guy behind me what happened, and he said the clients results all improved as a result. He then told me that what Tim taught them was basically contained in Tim’s book Landing Page Optimization. Luckily Tim gave me a copy that is sitting next to me now. I plan on studying it immediately.

This was a perfect example of excellent marketing on every level.

Great event, and a bargain. There is definitely something for the novice and expert.

Aaron thank you for a great time!