SEO, VC & Blogging - Comparing Events, Crowds & Comfort Levels

I attended Darren Rowse's ProBlogger meetup in NYC a few weeks back, and met almost everyone in the room. And he took over almost an entire floor of a popular New York City bar. I was totally comfortable and in my element, as folks like Keith Levenson of Vibrator.com went around popping promo stickers on people's shoulders. I was like "yeah... I can personally meet everyone in this room." Keith pretty much set the tone.

Then a few weeks later, I attended a Venture Capitalist event at a prestigious Union League sponsored by Red Herring. It was the Monday before Search Engine Strategies, and I was trying to get into social mode (sometimes difficult for me). High on ProBlogger, I felt it would be a breeze. Brrrrr, was I wrong. The button-down'd VCs were decidedly NOT the same profile as the rabid blogorati of the NYC area. And my education into how to work dramatically different crowds began. Not that it was bad. Just that it's not "me". I guess if it was, I'd be a VC and not one of the Web developer / executive cross-overs types that they like to fund.

I struck it off very well with the cross-over crowd, such as Laird Popkin, the CTO of Pando, a P2P torrent-like file sharer, with whom I could talk tech. Equally engaging was Angelo Valenti, an Executive and Entrepreneurial Coach, who immediately identified me as someone needing coaching, and gave the invaluable advice to play the "billionaire card". Those who look most out of place are often the ones with the best ideas and most money. They don't know you from a Web 2.0 billionaire. Use it. And if you wanted to play the Sesame Street game "which one of these is not like the other," there was the aventurista, Sarah Tavel, who turned out to be a VC AND a blogger. So, there were some nice highlights.

And of course, the host, Alex Vieux, the publisher of Red Herring, was an absolute pleasure to meet. But the majority of the room was an inscrutable mystery to me. I guess that's why I've hitched my apple cart to Connie's wagon.

And finally, there was SES, which while I only attended one day (Thursday), turned out to be one of the most auspicious events I ever attended. It's amazing the difference between being someone and not being someone can make. If I was a nobody at the VC event, and I was a pseudo-celebrity at the ProBlogger event, then I was half-way in-between at Search Engine Strategies. Fortunately, Danny Sullivan, Lee Odden, and a few of the other panelists knew me. But this mainstream marketing crowd curious about how to use search most decidedly doesn't know the "in the know cool sites."

Working the SES crowd was harder than ProBloggers (really our sweet spot), but WAY easier than the VC crowd. There's no intro like: here's a tool to build your natural search traffic. Oh yeah, it's free. The auspicious part was that I was meeting people left and right who I worked years previously to meet. I coincidentally met Neil Patel, "blogmaster" behind Guy Kawasaki's sites, who I've been in touch with on and off for years. This was from a random walk-up intro to a panelist, who in-turn recognized my name! I'd love to go on and name everyone, but let me just shout out to Stan Barett and Marshall Sponder, the look-alike's who don't know eachother, but whom I see at the same events, and sometimes have to wait until I hear an English accent before I say "Hi Stan" or "Hi Marshall".

Bottom line lesson of this blog: every event is like a life form manifestation of the event's host and their audience. Some you take to, as if they're old friends. Some are just tough to figure out. And some just take a little warming up to.

HitTail's 30 Second Elevator Pitch at SES NYC 2007

This was perhaps the best Search Engine Strategies (SES) I ever attended, in great part, instead of being one undifferentiated SEO in the crowd, I was Mike Levin the HitTail guy. Unlike previous years, where I attended all four days and came away with only enough to make it worth it, this time I only attended yesterday (Thursday), and came away with a lot. I mean, an awful lot.

I'd love to share all the funny anecdotes that were packed into just one day. But the first thing I want to get out of my mind and into the blogosphere is the highly effective 30-second elevator pitch.

HitTail is a writing suggestion tool for bloggers and website owners of all sorts -- to help you grow your natural search traffic... free.

It works much like analytics software with a simple line of JavaScript code. For users of major platforms (Blogger, TypePad and WordPad), there are plug-ins to facilitate installation of the code, making it easy for even total newbies.

Every website has some search-life in it. Every website is trying to tell you something.

Most analytics packages overlook the most important event: when some determined visitor finds you buried several pages into search. This tells you two things:

1. There is actual traffic occurring on this term, and you CAN/ARE being found on it.
2. There are several pages of crap ahead of you which didn’t satisfy the visitor. The hit was probably coincidental, often a result of unlikely word combos from archive pages.

So the reasoning goes, if you intentionally target it, you can bring yourself from several pages in on that term to the first page.

Keep this up over time, and you will grow your search engine traffic, naturally.
It may even free you (being marketers) from reliance on Google AdWords to drive traffic.

Oh yeah. It’s free.

Works every time.

Search Engine Strategies

Search Engine Strategies starts today. I'll be in attendance at the conference on Thursday, but in town all week. If anyone wants chat about HitTail while you're in town, just email hittail at connors dot com, and we can sync up on what evening events we're attending.