This weekend, I was at Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher’s Traffic and Conversion summit in San Francisco. The material was great and I have a whole new level of respect for Mr. Deiss and Mr. Belcher. On Friday, they talked about traffic, so, of course, the Google Panda and Penguin updates were a big topic of discussion. They also talked about the normal stuff, keywords, press releases, etc., but with some new takes on it all that were fascinating.
On Saturday, the subject was conversion and the biggest thing that I was left with was that, before you even look at the conversion of your sales page or squeeze page, you need to go several levels up to all the steps it takes to get people to see either of them. Very logical, but it never really dawned on me.
Ryan Deiss Talks about Web Business
On Sunday, we dealt with business in a much more general way, but there was a lot about publishing. And talking about that were some very special guests. Guy Kawasaki talked about self publishing his latest book, APE. (Which is short for “Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur.) Tim Ferriss was a surprise guest on a panel about writing and publishing, but the real surprise for me was Tucker Max. I had heard a great deal about him before the event, and most of it wasn’t very complimentary. He’s known for being crude and a bit of a male chauvinist pig.
He was a bit crude, although not nearly as much as we had been repeatedly warned before he came up on the stage, but he was incredibly intelligent, articulate, respectful and had some great information about a whole new model of publishing that isn’t quite “traditional” and isn’t quite “self-publishing”.
If you don’t know who he is, he was one of the first bloggers (even before there was a word for it) and his first book, “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell“, a humorous and very vulgar take on his frat-boy college and post-collage shenanigans, became a surprise, runaway best-seller.
All in all, the weekend was great. I have to digest most of what I heard and saw, and go over my notes over the next several days, but I already know a lot of what I’m going to put into action in my business, and will begin that as soon as I can.
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