“50 told me go ‘head and switch the style up” – Kanye West
I think speaking at conferences is a constant opportunity to revise, get better, tweak over and over again, and just when you start feeling good, TWEAK AGAIN!
Thats why getting your hands on video of yourself is so critical. Studying yourself and your flaws is one of the only ways to improve. People are not going to tell you “you suck” 99% of the time.
Something I have been wanting to write about for a LONG time, is advanced SEO for the sake of advanced SEO and how that trend at times appears to overtake actually adding VALUE for the conference participants.
No matter what anyone says, most people who consider themselves “advanced” SEOs suffer from the same problem as thinking you are ugly or that you are in the top 10 percent of your workforce (something like 50% of people think they are in the top 10% of their workforce). Could you imagine if todays teachers taught to only the super gifted students in their classes thus leaving the remaining 80-90 percent behind?
Remember, I went to college to teach economics (a complicated concept) to high school kids (who don’t always want to be there). The challenge I have devoted myself to is taking something complex, with an audience who may not be interested, and turning them into enagaged, motivated, learners. If I never got that job at NetMarketing doing SEO in 1999, I’d be using this same style to teach kids about how AVC/ATC curves or laws of diminishing returns impact the cost of their sneakers.
People often compliment me on my presentation style, and I am finally comfortable saying “yup, I am pretty good on stage” – but in spite of the fact that I am consistently given high reviews at most places I am invited to speak, I am never content, I want to get better, and I want to add value to as many attendees as possible – not just my SEO pals who are truly the gifted students (as well as the teachers).
I would say that over the last 18 months, I have been “tweaking” my style trying to take even the advanced mashup stuff and breaking it down (hopefully) in a way that the advanced guys and gals say wow, and even the noobies and intermediate folks walk away feeling like…this is something I can do.
What is most important to me is and always has been adding value to as many people as possible when given the opportunity to speak. While my style is high energy, rah-rah, cheerleader – the CORE has always been here are things you can do tomorrow, heck today to improve.
In the future you will see more and more presentations where I find things sitting right underneath your nose, things you see everyday and are not using to your advantage to grow your business and build your links. I don’t want to take you through 10 different tools you have to mash up in order to produce results, you know why? Its simple, you’ll be wowed but deep down I know 1 in every 60 might actually do it, and it is not because you don’t want to. It’s because you don’t have the time, resources or dollars to do it, I’ve been in house I know what that feels like.
I think the biggest change I will be making is in challenging myself to develop concepts that people can do in hours instead of weeks and in days instead of months, with Excel instead of PHP, this actually is going to mean I am going to have to spend more time on my presentations not less.
I truly want to see you all learn things from me you can go do TOMORROW!
Now does that mean everything will be like that…NOPE. But expect my presentations to have a sharper focus on … hey this stuff is sitting right here for the taking and I know you can do it in 2 hours.
I’m going to challenge you, the people out there, to go do these things.I’m going to ask you to skip 2 lunch breaks and knock this stuff out in 2 hours.
I was much more purposeful in the second half of my last presentation at search exchange in Charlotte, NC this week the first half is a bit philosophical (not typically my style, but was necessary).
The last half is like…do you have 10 minutes? Here are things you can DO in 10, 60, 120 minutes.
Again I think this is a minor tweak, if it doesn’t work for you please tell me, its my intent to load as much of my presentation up with concepts that can be implemented manually by intermediate folks, and the more advanced people can use all the APIs and advanced stuff.
Think about it, Richard Baxter and the SEOgadget team does this great…instead of trying to teach you all the advanced VBA scripting you need, they just build the tool and make it free for anyone to use. I have also always thought that Rand Fishkin does this well. People walk away from his presentations feeling empowered, feeling like – yeah I can do this vs overwhelmed like, whats a Vlookup, IMPORTXML, and how the heck do I use Javascript – I know I do. The REAL technical stuff is powerful in a room of people who already know how to use all those functions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone present something that is VERY smart, but I don’t know 75% of what they did, and I am a pretty “advanced” SEO chap.
Luckily when I see those advanced items I have a team of people who know those things or I can send for a training to learn them. But that is ATYPICAL, most of us doing SEO can’t just tell the boss, hey take programmer X and take her of of project Y so she can learn some new technology that may or may not help us.
Hit me up after any of the following conferences, and let me know what you think…you might not even notice the difference as I’ve been doing this more and more in the last 18 months.
I’m going to the following conferences soon:
- SearchLove London – Oct 24 – http://www.distilled.net/events/searchlove-london/
- SearchLove NYC – Nov 1 – http://www.distilled.net/events/searchlove-new-york/
- Pubcon Vegas – Nov 8th – http://www.pubcon.com/pubcon-vegas-2011
- Soical Media Plus – Philly – Nov 16th – http://socialmediaplus.com/