Hey glorious comrades/readers. Halloween soon.

Been a while. I think it’s time to maybe start writing again.

So here I am. New writing motivation. New indoor plant on my desk and a reinvigorated love of life. Lets do this.

It’s conference season and with the colossus that is #SearchLove recently finishing I thought I’d come up with a few ways an up and coming conference (0110fest?) could top it and it’s compatriots. Granted, I didn’t go to #SearchLove due to crippling anxiety and money issues, in fact I’ve only been to one SEO conference but this experience has given me enough insight to come up with a few ideas to improve an SEO conference or make an up and coming one stand out.

Basically the goal is to help improve future conferences from the users perspective, at the end of the day that’s what these conferences are for right?

1 – Le voting process – Social media voting for speakers – Like a micro x-factor. Good marketing for the online marketing masses. Imagine if Moz or Distilled gave an option for people to choose certain speakers? Give people the opportunity to choose who presents and what they talk about. Give the power back to the people and you’ll sell tickets as well as having an interesting angle.

2 – Increase content value – Ban tweets/live blogging/wifi etc – This isn’t because 99% of tweets or posts written during or straight after a presentation are vacuous, attention seeking bullshit but because > > > A valuable presentation = something interesting and/or useful. Presenters shy away from sharing anything of real value because their brilliant ideas will be tweeted and written about given to any old community manager to try and replicate. Obviously this puts a speaker off when it comes to sharing the ‘secret sauce’. Would they be more willing to share an idea with 100/200 people over something that will be instantly tweeted/written about/slideshared. Nearly definitely 🙂 “But, but, but, Sean they’d share the idea or write a post about it on their very own SEO blog!” Possibly but unlikely. If so this person goes on the blacklist and is outed as an idea thief, who can live with that?

3 – Maintain quality/quality control – So you’ve got your favourite presenter on board discussing the latest/coolest tactic but their presentation is incredibly simple/boring/going over old ground. You can either encourage booing, throwing objects or attaching the speaker to an electrical device that increases in voltage over the period that they don’t say anything of interest. The person in control of the device is the SEO that has slated the speaker the most in private emails.

4 – Social lubrication – Make alcohol/drugs available – O.k. so this may be influenced by myself but I come up with some of my best ideas when drunk and obviously conversing with people about schema is infinitely easier and more interesting after a few Jaegerbombs. Drinking bottles/pints also give you a decent weapon to throw if your favourite SEO superstar isn’t producing the goods. Besides, to keep it budget-friendly, you can consider looking at a price comparison website. For instance, if you want a famous grouse 1l, you may be benefitted from sites similar to https://mysupermarketcompare.co.uk/product/the-famous-grouse-scotch-whisky-1-litre/. You can look for a similar site depending on the product you want. Both combined can make it a complete win win for your event.

5 – Party bags – Including DA50 links, sherbet dip, social shares for your awesome content for 6 months and a mini bottle of whisky.

So yeah, thanks for reading, bye bye.