By Christine Churchill
This year’s PubCon was the biggest to date with five different tracks going on simultaneously. The tracks included Social Media, Linking and WebMasterWorld, SEO:Organic Search, SEM: Search Marketing, and the Advertising Track. The traditional networking pub crawl started on the Friday after the show.
Domainers Round Table
I spoke and/or moderated on four different panels. One of the sessions I moderated that didn’t get a lot of press, but should have, was the Domainers Round Table. Panelists Jeff Libert, Moniker’s Victor Pitts and Dale Porter from TheNameStore.com lead an open discussion on domain related issues. Victor Pitts provided an overview presentation on the world of domains.
In the first picture you can see myself, Victor Pitts and Dale Porter. Photo credit for these first two pictures goes to my long time friend Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim.com. In addition to being a great photographer, Andy is one of the smartest and kindest guys in the industry.
During the Domainer Round Table, panelist Jeff Libert (pictured above) aka WebWork the moderator for the Domain forum at Webmasterworld, told the audience its not too late to buy good domain names.
Jeff showed numerous examples of keyword-rich domains he has purchased in the last six months. Jeff encouraged listeners to monitor trends and social developments and to try and incorporate these trends when selecting domain names.
After the panel, Moniker hosted a live domain auction on an impressive list of domains including taxes.com and stockquotes.com.
Vegas Is The Town For Hot Shows
This conference was made extra special by the generous donations of Vegas show tickets to visiting SEOs. I’ve been to a number of conferences in Vegas and I’m embarrassed to say this, but until the free ticket offer, I’d never been to a Vegas show. Attending a few shows converted me to a Vegas fan. I’m not a gambler, but the Vegas shows are first rate, so I’ll be back and will bring my family with me.
Joe Morin arranged for several hunderd tickets to be given to SEOs to introduce them to some of the best shows in Vegas. The shows included the Blue Man Group, Cirque Du Soleil, and shows at the MGM Grand, Treasure Island and The Wynn Las Vegas.
To kick things off, the first night Joe hosted a Spamalot party for SEOs in town for PubCon in his private suite at the Las Vegas Wynn Hotel.
The suite was impressively lavish. In fact, the word decadent kept coming into my mind – I mean that in a good way. The suite was stunning and the party was a great way to meet up with friends before heading to the show.
While at the party I had a chance to visit with one of best gal pals in the industry, Rae Hoffman aka Sugarrae. Rae and Jimmy Furland started a new business called mfeInteractive awhile back and I was thrilled to hear it was doing well.
Although I’d seen Spamalot before, I thought the show was excellent and I throughly enjoyed getting a dose of Monty Python to get in the right frame of mind for PubCon.
The second night a large contingent of SEOs gathered for dinner and the Blue Man Group show. What a fun show! And lots of audience participation. One of the Bule Man guys was gracious enough to pose with us after the show.
Pictured with the Blue man are Jill Whalen, Jessica Bowman, Lyndsay Walker, Blue Man, Christine Churchill and Andrea Harris.
On Wednesday night Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl organized an SEO outing to the Penn and Teller show. I love magic tricks and am a long time fan of them so I definitely wanted to see their show and I wasn’t disappointed. This will give you some insight into my warped home life, but when we eat out at nice resturants, we have been known to participate in the parsley game from Penn and Teller’s book “How to play with your food.” Below you can see Bill Slawski and me with some friends posing with Penn Jillete. That would only happen in Vegas.
