Paddy Moogan Blog

Think Visibility September 2009

15th September 2009 · Paddy · 3 Comments »

Some of you may have read my post last week about going to my first Think Visibility conference.  I promised I’d do a follow up post so here goes!

I left Birmingham stupidly early on Saturday morning (who gets up at 6.30am on a Saturday?!) and had a nice easy drive to Leeds with a cup of coffee and hash browns in hand, ready for the long day of talks ahead.  The format was my preferred choice of giving each speaker an hour to do their stuff rather than a panel having 15-20 minutes each.  The only downside is that it can make the day feel very long.

The great thing about Think Visibility which came through right from the start was the fun factor.  Everyone was very relaxed and laid back and there were plenty of laughs on and off stage throughout the day.

My Favourite Talks…

I’d been looking forward to talks from Joost, Judith Lewis and Zoe Piper.  None of them disappointed, I’ll admit that the most of the points covered were things I’d heard before but the content of everyones presentations were excellent. 

Zoe was a little quiet and obviously nervous but she still delivered a good talk about the Google Content Network.  Judith’s best moment was when she stepped away from the mic for some unofficial tips on optimising for Google Universal Search.  Joost has one of the coolest accents I’ve ever heard, it seems to change as time goes on .    He sure knows WordPress inside out and made me think about how my own WordPress blogs could be sped up a little – something I’d never really worried about.

One guy I hadn’t heard off prior to Think Visibility was Tim Nash.  He made me laugh as moderator (or host!) of the lunchtime panel Q&A session – along with Al Carlton who came out with the following reply to the question  “Whats your best secret tactic you can share with us?” – “Don’t give away your secrets.”

Al’s website  Conference Calendar was also one of the sponsors of Think Visibility which was never mentioned at all during the day.  Neither was Share My Playlist

Tim talked about the value of links and made some good points about the value of looking at PageRank and proximity of links on a page as a factor of their value.

People I met…

I chatted to a number of people throughout the day, unfortunately most of which were in passing rather than in depth chats.

I did however meet a clever guy called Dan Harrison who I enjoyed chatting to about website usability and split testing websites.  I couldn’t get as techy as I would have liked as my knowledge of PHP is limited but he had some cool ideas for tests and tools he was using.  Apologies to Dan for having to bail out of a trip to Pizza Express, I regretted it about an hour later driving with a rumbling stomach!

Later on in the day I had a good chat with Martin Wright who is a software developer who also runs small seminars designed to help businesses get more out of their websites.  I definitely think there is a call for seminars such as this for businesses who have not taken that big step online yet or have done but with little success or focus.

Although I can’t say I came out of Think Visibility with any golden nuggets of info I didn’t know before, it was still a great conference and well worth the less than £100 ticket price.  Dom did a great job of organising and chances are I’ll be attending the next conference in March 2010.  I’d recommend it for those who are really looking to get into affiliate marketing rather than pure SEO/PPC but still worth going on both fronts.