WordCamp Las Vegas!!

Well, WordCamp Las Vegas has come and gone. Dre (@dremeda) and I had the opportunity to attend this year. And I think you can say that we were both really excited we did. Definitely sounds like one that we’ll mark as a requirement in the out years.

A small shout out to 9Seeds (@9seeds) for a hell of a job putting the event together. Tremendous job gentlemen, tremendous job indeed.

That being said, I did want to share some insight I gained while at the conference. Well, that’s insight I gained before the cerveza’s started to kick in..:)

I personally enjoyed, well at least these two stuck out in my mind (probably because these made it in before the fluids starting flowing), two presentations. First one was by Doug Daulton (@dougdaulton) on Meatspace and second was by John Lynn (@techguy) on becoming a professional blogger. Both offered a lot of great information, so I’ll try to keep it short and sweet.

With Doug, I really enjoyed how he framed the discussion to kick things off. He set the tone by talking about WP as a solution that serves to change and compliment your business. He alluded to challenges open source has in business, but I too see a paradigm shift in the way businesses in general use and implement these technologies.

.. most important thing you can do is create a community around your product, your brain.. by @dougdaulton

Another great take away was his emphasis on community; specifically the importance of contributing to the community but also around creating communities. Another tidbit was his comments around the differences around ‘Control’ and ‘Influence’. All in all, great presentations, I’ll have to go back and listen to the video to see what I missed.

With John, not sure which I enjoyed more – the content or his energy. I enjoyed it so much that I might have to get him down to WordCamp San Diego to present his lessons learned again. I also enjoyed how structured his slide deck was, it was obvious he’s spent a good amount of time presenting this information. Let me prophase this by saying he had a lot of good info, so it’s going to be hard to hit on all of it.

His top level lessons learned from moving to a Full Time blogger was

Have Goals, Don’t be Afraid of Failure, Became a stats Addict, Stats Motivate

He also talked to how blogging is so much more than just writing, but instead he sees it as driving / influencing traffic. Around this he offered four key take aways:

SEO Plugin, Good Title (keywords), Good Tags / Categories that match title and internal linking.

In general both these gentlemen provided great presentations. They engaged us with great insight and energy, while still contributing good insight back to the WP community. Stellar jobs gentlemen and thank you for sharing with us.

As for the rest of the WCLV experience, well that will have to a separate post as I’m not sure it belongs in this category..:)..

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