My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings » Brian Clark

Izeafest ’09 Day 1

Lisa — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:59:58 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

I’ve been trying to get this post up for a while, but real life seems to get in the way. How would I describe Izeafest? Awesome comes to mind. The best one yet does too (and I’ve been to every single one of these). It was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. Nothing irritates me more when I know more than the speakers on panels (which is one of my beefs about BlogHer). I pay a lot of money to go to conferences, and I want to learn — not just be told what I already know (or be given bad information). *off soap box*

Izeafest started off with a trip to Busch Gardens for Howl-O-Scream. Interesting is the best word I can use for it. We got to go through some haunted houses and ride some awesome roller coasters. I even got to do my souvenir shopping (which is so much better than airport shopping). We got back pretty late and went to bed.

Day one of Izeafest started off with me handing out Crocs and T-shirts and helping out the Izea crew. I missed the beginning of Ted’s keynote speech, but what I caught was good. It was about personal branding, and how you need to carefully pick your image. Next, there was 5 minutes of fame with Murray Newlands. This was about how he has gotten where he is. I’ll be honest — I could listen to him talk all day long (I’m a sucker for an accent. Also, on a sidenote, I got to hang out with Murray quite a bit and he’s one of the nicest people I’ve met). Brian Clark was our next speaker. His talk was about how design and content really do matter. Next, we had lunch. I have to admit that this was some of the best conference food too. Granted you don’t pick a conference based on what they serve for food, but the food was yummy. The afternoon started with Sarah Austin and Julia Roy for a session called Screen Gems. If you watched Twitter during this session, it was brutal. I basically got out of this session that you need to be 23, have perky boobs, and be cute if you want to do video. It was so bad that I actually walked out early and got a cookie. The sad thing is that I’ve heard how smart these two women are, and they just did a terrible job (Though I think Julia did see the twitter stream, because she started to try and answer things towards the end). I actually dubbed this session “2 girls and a video” and sadly everyone knew which session I was referring to. Next, another 5 minutes of fame with Xshot which is a product I love. The next session was on SEO and I loved it. Michael Gray and Rae Hoffman were the speakers, and they took sites from the audience to dissect. I was a chicken. There was no way I was submitting my site. Rae gave us ladies a good show of how a woman can give a great presentation. My only complaint is that they did a ton of business sites and no personal blogs. As a mom blogger, am I even shooting for SEO? Sarah Evans was next with Twitter and businesses, and why they need to be on Twitter. We closed out the first day with Lucretia Pruitt, David Binkowski, Chris Heuer, Wendy Piersall, and Warren Whitlock. This, by far, was one of the best panels I’ve ever seen. I could have listened to them all day. They really brought everything down to where most bloggers are right now and gave us some concrete ways to get better.

After the first day, we were able to all meet up at the IceBar and hang. It was very cool. Pun intended. LOL

Some karaoke took place too (no, I didn’t do it). This is Ted Murphy and Jeremy Wright singing the Backstreet Boys. The sad thing is that they knew most of the words without watching the screen:

We closed out the night in my friend Heather’s room with a little afterparty:

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Who’s going to Izeafest??? YOU!!!!

Lisa — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 22:02:52 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

This contest is now over. The winners are Anne and Rob! Congrats and I’ll be contacting them shortly!

As many of you know, I have gone to several conferences over the years (and you’ve all seen the pictures). Now, this will be my third year going to Izeafest, and I want to see you there! Yes, you! If you don’t come, you’ll be missing:

Speakers like Ted Murphy, Aaron Brazell, Arleen Anderson, Brett Bumeter, Brian Clark, Chris Brogan, Chris Heuer, David Binkowski, George Smith, Joseph Jaffe, Julia Roy, Lucretia Pruitt, Michael Gray, Rae Hoffman, Sarah Austin, Sarah Evans, Warren Whitlock, Wendy Piersall, and Zena Weist.
Learning how to blog better at the sessions that are offered like developing your brand and traffic strategies.
Awesome parties and food. (now this shouldn’t be the only reason you go to a conference, but it sure is a good one!)
Swag (need I say more?)
A free ticket to Howl O Scream at Busch Gardens for Thursday night
A free ticket to SeaWorld on Sunday

According to what I’ve been told, you need to pack flip-flops, sunscreen, a laptop, and…oh yeah…your fanciest coconut top. Now, I’ve managed without the coconut top, so you may survive without it. That being said, do you want to go to this conference?

If so, it takes place on October 1 – 4, and I can help you get there! I am giving away 2 tickets (each ticket valued at $229) to the Izeafest conference. You will need to get your own hotel and airfare (I highly recommend Southwest and special rates are being given at Renaissance Hotel.) but I can hook you up to get in.

Here’s what you need to do:

Leave a comment on this post. Look over my blog tell me something you learned like my kids ages for example. Also, I want to know why you want to win one of these tickets! You must do both for your entry to be valid.

Each of these gives you one additional entry:

1. Twitter about this contest. Please leave me your username so I can verify. Or use something like this:

RT @blm03 is giving away 2 Izeafest tickets! http://mythoughtsideasandramblings.com/2009/08/04/whos-going-to-izeafest-you/

2. Stumble this post and add this post to other social media sites like Digg, Kirtsy, Blogging Zoom, Reddit, Propeller, Etc. (1 entry for each social network).

Each of these gives you 5 additional entries:

1. Blog about this on your blog. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.

2. Add this to any forums you belong too. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.

3. Subscribe to this blog using either my email or RSS feed

4. Add my badge to your sidebar:

If this isn’t working, please let me know. For some reason, WordPress seems to be eating the code up when I post.

This will give you 10 additional entries:

1. Join my Spark E Crew at Social Spark. Click here to find out how to sign up. If you are on my crew, please leave your social spark ID, so I can verify it.

This contest will end at August 18nd at noon CST! Good Luck and I hope to see you there!!!!!

Izeafest: Day 1

Lisa — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:55:14 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

I’ve been meaning to get this online, but you know how real life gets in the way! LOL I do have to thank Christine for all the great pictures I am going to be using while I blog about this. I got to Orlando and found out that my camera had died. Right now, it is at Sony to get fixed!

Jeremy Schoemaker was our opening keynote speaker. He genuinely looked nervous to be up there. We were able to learn that in 4 short years he went from a nobody to a somebody. He gave us a lot on insight into his life and how he got to be where he was and possibly what we need to do to get where he is.

Susie Gardner was up next. Her presentation was about content. As a person who has blogged for two years, I personally did not care for her presentation. It was geared towards the beginner blogger, and I have moved well beyond that. I felt like half of us in the room could have given that speech. However, I did talk to some beginning bloggers, and they found her presentation helpful and interesting.

We got to go to lunch from there. We ate at The Globe on Wall Street since it was the least busy. The food was excellent. However, the service was slow. Very Slow. Though, I guess all the places were that way since some of the next speakers weren’t back in time for their presentations. However, we didn’t know that and ended up almost running to get back in time! I definitely did not need any weight loss pills for this trip. That walk/run back to the conference burned off my lunch no problem! In the picture (which Drew took!) is Drew, his wife Allison, Heather, me, and Christine (and yes, in that order).

Next up was the big money bloggers panel and Drew got to moderate it. We got to learn the tricks of how they all got where they are. On the panel was John Chow, Neil Patel, Stephanie Agresta, and Jeremy Schoemaker. This was a very interesting panel. One of the questions was what was your biggest mistake or surprise. The answer that surprised me the most was from John Chow — it was the lengths that Google went about scraping his site from their search engines. He’s a nobody compared to Google, and they went after them the way they did!

Next up was the growing traffic panel with Tony Hung, Lea Alcantara, Brian Clark, Alex Schek, Steve Spalding, and Tamar Weinberg. I’m going to tell you a funny story that you cannot repeat. I was listening to these speakers and was seriously confused. Finally, I leaned over to Christine and asked her what this had to do with what advertisers wanted. She informed me that that was the next panel. Whoops! Needless to say, I didn’t get a whole lot out of this. Being that I work freelance as a social media manager, I pretty much already knew what they were talking about. However, what I didn’t like was that they really didn’t talk about all the networks out there. You can get some really good traffic from sites like stumble, reddit, mixx, kirtsy, etc. Its not all digg all the time. I personally don’t get much traffic from there compared to the other sites.

The next panel was the “what advertisers want” panel. It included Jon Buschlen, Katia Adams, Michael Brito, Sean Jackson, Michael Jenkins, and Randall Richards. It was nice to hear what advertisers were looking for. However, anyone who has done any paid blogging already knew what they had to say. These were advertisers that “get it”. Unfortuntely, there is a whole ton of advertisers out there who do not and want 20 links for $5 and can’t figure out why the bloggers won’t do their opps.

After that, we had Ted announcement. This is when we learned about Cloud Shout, and we got our alpha keys for it! It was an awesome presentation. After that, we went to the hotel to get ready to go out!