What I Did At San Jose SES 2006

Before SES I had spent the last 4 crazy days in Las Vegas going to sessions and partying pretty good at DefCon. For San Jose I left straight from Las Vegas to San Jose and Rendevous with my wife, my 7 week old baby, my business manager, my photographer, and my Developer. Yes I brought a posse this time. And they came from all over the country. My wife and baby of course came from Lincoln, NE where we live. My business manager, Susan, comes from Omaha,. My Photographer, Chris aka aitek is out of orange county California My Developer, Dave aka Dillsmack is out of Minnesota Ok on to the show What a incredible conference. In this business there are literally less then 10 people that I completely trust. I know I can reveal things to them and it will never go any farther then that. David Naylor, Jen Slegg, Shawn Hogan, Kris and Mike Jones, BOTW guys – Brian, Rob, and the the new and improved pretty boy Greg Hartnet are the real deal and I really enjoy the time I spend with them. Luckily this show I don’t think there was much time I was not around them. We partied hard and had some awesome times. The first day in San Jose I went to the bodog.com party that Greg boser hooked me up with. I also brought my photographer and we had a rocking time. Bodog really knows how to throw a party and I think a good time was had by all. If you missed this its really a shame. It was nice to talk a bit with others in the area without getting mobbed or rushed. Thanks to Greg Boser for making this happen. Monday The first day of ses (Monday) is kind of a blur. I woke up at 6:30 am with a page saying one of my web gateways was having issues so I had to get that straightened out. Not too much fun that early. While I was up I ended up checking email and stuff as well as approving comments on the blog. (Usually I approve all then mark spam the ones that are clearly spam). I ended up going back to bed then got up about noon and rushed over to the convention center to meet up with Natala from Microsoft Adcenter, Jensense and the Oilman for lunch. After lunch I headed back to the hotel. My wife got in about 2:30 so I chilled out and waited to help her get settled down with the baby. I headed over to the conference for a bit and said hi to people and gave out some shoemoney shirts. It was very cool people actually recognized me and asked for them. I think out of the 100 shirts we brought I only went home with about 6 and they were all smalls. Monday night We went to the Pepperjam, Hitwise, and Vintage Tub and Bath Party. This was a really really classy joint and I actually took a shower for it. After all there was people there like the Editor in Chief of Wired Mag, people from the wall street journal, Even Catherine Zeta, prolific author and current writer from entrepenur magazine. It was at this honoko guardens place where they filmed Memoirs Of A Geisha . SO ya it was pretty nice. They were nice enough to extend my invite to my wife, photographer, and developer that were with me. We left the baby with Susan, my business manager, back at the hotel. The food at this party was just unreal. Its one of those times I wish I would not have had weight loss surgery so I could have eaten my weight in sushi. The entertainment was really funny too. As most people know when you attend a party like that usually you get a 1 hour boring presentation on each sponsors products but they geared this a little differently. Alan explained to everyone that the sponsors of the event were going to give there presentations in the form of a haku – you know the 5 line so many sylibol things. It was pretty hilarious and honestly the whole presentations lasted like 10 mins COMBINED. Then they drew for prizes that they had from this Chinese auction. I put all my tickets in for the baby prize donated by babyage.com. Also Dillsmack put all his tix in there too. Low and behold when they drew for prizes I was the winner (thanks to Dillsmack). Tuesday Tuesday was a really big day for me. I had 2 morning sessions I wanted to goto. PPC landing pages and PPC Arbitrage issues. The PPC Arbitrage issues session was really good. This Tim Daily guy kept trying to attack Jake Bailey for what Truelocal.com does with arbitrage but Jake made him look like a idiot several times. I honestly do not know Tim’ Dailys back ground but as soon as he said his client I was like ok that makes sense. This guy is constantly trying to explain to his “clientsâ€? why people like Jake are owning him. Now wonder he seems so pent up. I think Tim just got more frustrated when the crowd erupted with applause as jake gave excellent answers to tims attacks. After that session I had to hustle down to meet my wife and baby then hookup with Chantelle from AzoogleAds for lunch. We went to this crazy good Italian place and the food was just unreal. Then I had to bust ass over to the exhibit hall because I was going to do a live show of netincome from the exhibit hall. I quickly grabbed Greg Hartnet to co-host with me and we did it right there from the floor. We had quite the crowd as it was being broadcasted throughout the entire exhibit hall. After my show I hung around to heckle the seo rock stars. These guys are so good they had great guests and were totally comfortable. They had a great show. I can’t wait to listen to it on the podcast. I hung around and drank a few beers before heading back to my room to get ready for the Google dance. As always the Google dance was great. I was really glad I was able to take my wife this year. I wanted her to have a little googleplex experience and I think she had a really good time. As a webmaster radio show host I got to do some really neat things being interviewed about some of the Google products. I am not sure what exactly they are going to do with it but it seemed like a pretty big deal as we were escorted around and asked our opinions. I was trying to give honest answers unlike some other hosts (*cough* daveN *cough) who just kept saying everything sucked a$$ lol. Anyway most of the night my wife and I hung out with the pepperjam guys, Shawn Hogan, David Naylor, BOTW guys, Mikkel Demib and others. It was a great time and WOW was I tired from a long day. Wednesday I rolled out of bed about 9am ish my wife had already got me steak and eggs from room service!! Woot!! Checked email and various other daily tasks. I cruised over to the convention center around 11:30 where I ran into my friends Patrick Gavin, Todd Malicoat, and Andy Hagans. They were headed to lunch and invited me along. I gotta say these guys are total money. We had a great lunch and talked everything from what Patrick and his company is working on to you name it. Good time. PatrickGavin HQ is located pretty close to where my family is from so I might buzz by the GavinPlex and say hi to them sometime. After lunch I put on my text-link-ads.com shirt and went to the session on buying and selling links. This was pretty good. Patrick of course talked about buying and selling links… how they value links and stuff like that. You can all view the slides from the main ses sites so I really ill just say what I got about it. Everyone there seemed to be in agreement that its ok to buy links for click traffic but for search engine traffic you could be possibly playing with fire. This Eric Ward guy who was on the panel was like so fricking annoying. He talked about how he was a dmoz editor so therefore he understood how to decide what a relevant link was a good link and crap like that I was like blah blah blah blah blah blah UMM OK DUDE SAY NO MORE DMOZ EDITOR………….. That’s all I have to say about that. Wednesday night was SEARCH BASH. Everyone told me webmaster radio throws the ILLEST parties but I never had been to one before. This time it was at studio 8 and I got to say it was all it was cracked up to be. I drank a lot of Capt Morgan and even put on a sumo suit and wrestled rob from best of the web. It was a really good time. Nice job WMR putting that together and thanks to all the sponsors. Wraping up All in all the coolest thing about the show was the endless people who came up and said they were at the show because of what I said about how they really needed to go and they were all like thanking me telling me how much inside info they received and stuff like that. Very Cool. Its really neat… I mean like how I said before this was the first show I had ever attended only 1 year ago and now its like people know who I am.