15 GOLDEN Takeaways from BlueGlass LA

BlueGlass LA, held last week in Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles, marked the first of many upcoming BlueGlass conferences and events.  The BlueGlass team is now getting settled again after a whirlwind week of setting up the events, sessions, meetings and being the best hosts we could possibly be. I’d like to take this chance to give a warm thank you to all of you who made it, covered it, followed it and supported BlueGlass LA. All of you helped make this event one to remember forever.

This weekend, I was unwinding from the trip out to LA and reading over a good amount of the live blogging, webcasts (here’s one from SEM Synergy), and other coverage of the event and thought that not only would it be an awesome idea to list all of the coverage, but also the give you my key takeaways from the conference.

In terms of live blogging of BlueGlass LA, Alan Bleiweiss was a one man wrecking crew covering the event at Search Engine Journal and Virginia Nussey & Susan Esparza crushed the BlueGlass coverage on the Bruce Clay Blog.

Here’s a rundown of the sessions and the coverage for each :

• Blueglass LA Session: Marketing Metrics for your Business
• Analytics: Marketing Metrics for your Business – BlueGlass LA

• Blueglass LA Session: How to not FAIL at getting search traffic
• SEO: How to not FAIL at getting search traffic – BlueGlass LA

• When to raise money and when to bootstrap – BlueGlass LA

• Blueglass LA Session: Social Media Marketing
• Social Media Marketing – BlueGlass LA

• Landing Killer Deals – BlueGlass LA

• Blueglass LA Session: Building Communities that People Love
• Building Communities that People Love – BlueGlass LA

• Blueglass LA Session: Marketing Strategy: Don’t forget search
• Marketing Strategy: Don’t Forget Search – BlueGlass LA

• Blueglass LA Session: Links matter: How to measure and attain them
• Links Matter: How to Measure and Attain Them – BlueGlass LA

• Blueglass LA Session: InHouse SEO
• InHouse SEO – BlueGlass LA

5 Takeaways Which Were Pure GOLD

(and you have never heard them before):

1. Pay attention to meaningful metrics. This is NOT unregistered uniques or monthly subscribers. But the people who come in and view 2+ pages or stay 10+ secs, etc – those are the people who care – those who you want to pay attention to (by Dave McClure, Angel Investor, Session – Analytics: Marketing Metrics for your Business).
2. Every page of the site is the home page with search because you don’t know where people will first come to your site. You need to have an explanation and call to action on every page. State who you are, what the page is about. (by Vanessa Fox, Founder, Nine by Blue, Session – SEO: How to not FAIL at getting search traffic).
3. Don’t focus on active users only: You need to grow both the commenters and the people who don’t talk. That’s the whole community. Your community is not just the people who generate content: it’s the people who read and use it. (Ben Huh, CEO, Cheezburger Network, Session – Building Communities that People Love)
4. {Related to #3) Communities are made of up delicate layers of users. If you market to them as a monolithic thing, you’ll lose the ability to grow. Offer various ways to participate as well: active users comment, “silent” users prefer anonymous ranking or voting systems. (Ben Huh, CEO, Cheezburger Network, Session – Building Communities that People Love)
5. Get targeted feedback: If you get it from all the people who visit, feedback is useless. Lots of people who visit your site are not your target market so you get useless feedback. By getting feedback from returning visitors, you’re getting better information. (Neil Patel, Co-Founder, Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, Session – Marketing Metrics for your Business)

5 Useful Things You Need to Take Note Of:

1. Great content doesn’t guarantee traffic. Great content + great user experience + SEO = increased traffic. (Adam Audette, President/CEO, AudetteMedia, Session – SEO: How to not FAIL at getting search traffic);
2. You need to be authentic to successfully build a community. How many really big and powerful communities were created by a corporate brand? Yahoo and Google couldn’t have built Facebook. Corporations lack the authenticity. (JR Johnson, CEO and Founder, Lunch.com, Session – Building Communities that People Love)
3. Best solutions are simple: Human nature has a tendency to admire complexity but reward simplicity. Don’t overengineer things. (Ben Huh, CEO, Cheezburger Network, Session – Building Communities that People Love)
4. People link to things that they respond to emotionally: if I trust the source (Wikipedia), I’ll link to it. People will link to conspiracy theories – fear. It all relates to emotional response. So before creating content, define which emotion you want to evoke (Dave Snyder, SVP of Search at BlueGlass Interactive, Session – Links Matter: How to Measure and Attain Them)
5. Social media evolution: Power users are no longer power users, they’re influencers. It’s not submission based any more. All of your actions are visible to everyone. Every time you vote, comment, participate, it’s not distributed to a selective few, but to everyone that follows you. So now you have to be more careful about how you participate. (Brent Csutoras, SVP of Viral Marketing at BlueGlass Interactive, Session – Social Media Marketing)

5 things You Need to Know for Building an Efficient SEO Team or Business:

1. The single biggest problem in SEO is things not getting done: Get designers who know SEO. Give SEO teams their own dev resources.
2. Good SEO team accepts risks and encourages failure. SEO should fail quickly to succeed long term - Do It Wrong Quickly (Adam Audette, President/CEO, AudetteMedia, Session – SEO: How to not FAIL at getting search traffic)
3. Set up lines of defense incorporate SEO into every day activities. Push back when SEO isn’t included in deliverables sent to you.
4. Make sure the SEO is involved in company guidelines and standards. Incorporate them into the organizations overall standards so the organization is held accountable (Jessica Bowman, Founder, SEOinhouse.com, Session – InHouse SEO)
5. SEO should support the resource or product value, it shouldn’t drive it (Adam Audette, President, CEO AudetteMedia, Session – How to not FAIL at getting search traffic)

Other great conference coverage :

• Breaking Through The BlueGlass Ceiling of Search Marketing – Entrepreneur.com’s Jon Rognerud
• BlueGlassLA Goes Full Circle & Drops Knowledge – Joanna Lord or SEOmoz
• Blueglass LA Internet Marketing Conference Session Notes – Brian Chappell of Ignite Social Media
• Dana Does BlueGlass : Dana Lookadoo’s Coverage on SEO Dojo Radio
• Forget Search: Let’s Go Social – Yahoo’s Dave Roth on Search Engine Land
• Yahoo, Microsoft Search Update This Afternoon – MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan

Again, I’d like to thank everyone who made BlueGlass LA possible, especially Tony Adam – who’s LA presence and connections made BlueGlass LA even more successful (and fun!). We’ll have more videos and multimedia conference coverage published soon enough. In the meantime, stay tuned for our next BlueGlass Conference announcement, which is right around the corner

I’d recommend following us on Twitter here or joining the fun on Facebook here (we’ll also be announcing everything there first)….