The venue itself remained the same as that used for the Think Visibility 2 conference in Sept 2009; the Alea Casino (near the Royal Armouries museum) in a very smart and clean Clarence Dock area of Leeds. Upon arrival to the event we received our ID badges and just from that you know that you’re in for an event with a bit of character – the organisers had only gone and created our very own “Twitter Top Trumps” from the statistics of our Twitter accounts! These made for a great talking point during the whole event as you met up with different people that you already knew and even more importantly with people you didn’t – this was a great way to break the ice I thought, so well done to the Think Visibility team for coming up with that idea!

Think Visibility Speakers

Local SEO Strategies – Tom Critchlow (@TomCritchlow)
Do you have a local-based business? Well this was the presentation for you as Tom talked about how you could improve your Google Local business listing and what the best practice is when submitting your details- for example, simply use your proper business name rather than be tempted to stuff keywords into its title as this appears spammy and can hurt your ranking.

SEO Case Studies – Judith Lewis (@JudithLewis)
I’ve now heard Judith speak a few times and I’ve enjoyed each of her sessions as they contain some really great insight and advice regarding SEO, in this session she presented us with some real-world examples and as such asked that we didn’t disclose any details, but all I will say is if you have chance to hear her speak at an event like this, try and get to it!

Eye Tracking – Simple Usability (@SimpleUsability)
Back at Think Visibility 1 (a whole year ago now), one of the sessions that I sat in on and enjoyed was all about eye tracking and how it can be used to improve your website design to make it a better experience for your visitors. Well having bought a ticket for Think Visibility, you could apply for one of the limited number of slots to have your website analysed so that you could get a better understanding of what a new visitor’s experience is when they browse around your site.

I’d submitted Zath and luckily we got picked to be part of this session along with Coolest Gadgets and another gadget site. It was definitely an interesting experience to see your website shown on a big cinema screen with a circle moving around it to signify whereabouts people’s eyes had been looking. It highlighted a few issues that perhaps need tweaking, but also confirmed that some other things that I’d purposefully laid out in a certain way actually worked, so overall this was a very useful session.

Getting The Links That Matter – Patrick Moogan (@paddymoogan)
I actually met Patrick for the first time about a month ago at an Indoor Go-Karting session we both attended and been looking forward to hearing him talk about link building and some of his approaches he uses in his work ever since. This was the first time he’d done a presentation at an event such as this, but you’d never have guessed as it was very professionally delivered throughout and the information he discussed was very useful, I took a lot of thoughts and notes away from this session.

Making More Hours With Outsourcing And Automation – Al Carlton (@AlCarlton)
I’ve known Al for at least two years now and it’s fair to say that he’s a very inspiring guy when you realise what he’s accomplished in a relatively short space of time and he must now be one of the most successful bloggers in the UK. This session was all about how he’s managed to scale up his websites by outsourcing and automating less enjoyable tasks and gain more time for himself to concentrate on what he does enjoy. This is something that I definitely need to try and do more of!

If you’re interested about finding out more about blogging and being inspired, check out his Self Made Minds blog and I’d definitely recommend catching one of his speaking gigs if possible and taking a look at his websites as there’s lots there to learn from!

When The BBC Met SEO – John O’Donovan
The BBC’s website is one of the biggest and most trusted on the Internet, so obviously how you approach design and SEO to increase your web traffic may be different to that of a much smaller website, but there’s still things to be learnt from it and interesting concepts to think about. I think this compared well to the session at Think Visibility 2 which about another large website; The Telegraph, I found this talk to be interesting and informative, especially around how they’re now writing headlines with SEO in mind. John did a great job of presenting an engaging session despite it being the last of the day by which point some attendees might be flagging – I’m still amazed that a huge source of BBC traffic comes from their embeddable widgets which syndicate their news stories across the web.

Summary

Overall, I think that Think Visibility 3 has had another successful event, Dom Hodgson and his Hodgetastic team have done a great job in organising a cool event, the likes of which you don’t often see up here in the north that much, so to have two of these a year is great and the facilities, both the venue itself and the recommended hotel of the City Inn made for a really enjoyable weekend!

As well as the sessions themselves, Think Visibility provides a great networking opportunity and it was great to see some familiar faces such as Joanna Butler, Nick Walker, Amrit Gill, Gary Hartley, Karyn Fleeting, Elaine Forth and also meet some new cool people such as Martin Wright, Paul Madden Dan Harrison, Annabel Hodges. It was great seeing everyone, gambling with pretend money and thanks to Affiliate Window for sponsoring the after-party; Drink Visibility as the free bar drinks were much appreciated by all! Also, thanks to sk8geek for taking some great photos of Think Visibilility!

If you’ve got an interest in any (or all) of the topics that Think Visibility covers then I’d definitely recommend you get yourself a ticket for Think Visibility 4 booked as early as possible as they do sell out – I know some people who wanted to attend, but couldn’t in the end as they left it too late!

Other Think Visibility Coverage

Don’t just take my word for it, there’s plenty of other people out there who attended this event and you can find out what some of them thought by checking out their Think Visibility reactions below (if you’ve also written about this event and would like adding to my list below, then just let me know)…

• Self Made Minds
• Patrick Moogan
• Piggynap
• Dan Harrison
• Martin Wright
• Sorbet Digital
• Good Web Practices
• Befuddled
• Lee Bandoni
• Paul Carpenter
• MediaEdge:cia Manchester
• Pin Digital
• Azam Marketing Blog
• Bloom Media
• Kung Fu Digital

Related Pages:

1. Think Visibility 3 Preview – Final Speaker Announced! (March 2010)
2. Think Visibility Review (Sept 2009)
3. a4u Expo London 2009 Conference Review
4. a4u Expo London 2009 Preview

You can take a look at the first of the “Hodge on the Run” videos below in which he’s dressed up as a pilot…errr chauffeur even! It looks like a lot of fun (to watch) and if you’d like to sponsor Dom, you can do that at his Hodge on the Run webpage!

Related Pages:

1. Charity Donations Online
2. Microsoft Office 2010: The Movie Trailer
3. BAFTA Video Games Awards 2010 – Watch The Live Stream Online!
4. Think Visibility 3 Review (March 2010)

You may get the opportunity to attend quite a few of these kind of events if you’re based in the south, especially around London, but obviously there’s less of these available here in the north, so if you’re based up here, then here’s your chance to attend a conference without having to travel so far as you might normally have to, plus it’s also takes place on a Saturday, so you don’t even have to take a day off work! Think Visibility 3 is taking place on the 13th March 2010 at the Alea Casino Conference Centre in Leeds, West Yorkshire and tickets are priced at £119 (cheaper than some other similar conferences).

I’ve been to the previous two conferences that took place last year and took a lot of knowledge, networking and motivation away from these events, so for example, if your work involves websites or if you’re a northern blogger looking to learn more, Think Visibility 3 could be ideal for you. You can take a look at my Think Visibility 2 Review (Sep 2009) which covers all the sessions that I attended and find out the kinds of things that got on at this event.

Think Visibility 3 Speakers

The list of speakers that will be giving speaking at Think Visibility 3 is a combination of established names as well as some new to these kind of events, which is another of the great things about “Think Vis” – you really do get a good mixture of people talking about whatever areas that they have expertise in. Here’s the list of those people who have already been announced as speakers. (click through to their bio page on the Think Visibility website for more information)

• Judith Lewis
• Tom Critchlow
• John O’Donovan
• Al Carlton
• Paul Carpenter
• Illiya Vjestica
• Patrick Moogan
• Sarah Goodwin
• Alun Rowe
• Dom Hodgson
• Kenny Goodman
• Stephen Pavlovich

The Final Think Visibility Speaker is Announced!

In addition to that impressive list of individuals, here on Zath we now get to exclusively announce the final speaker to be confirmed for Think Visibility 3 is….Andrew Burnett…

Andrew helped Macromedia clients solve their software problems (it’s a feature, not a bug), until the company was taken over by Adobe.

When Andrew’s not staring into the internets he enjoys the music of James Brown (on original American vinyl, of course). Despite being both Scottish & Swiss he neither yodels nor plays the bagpipes but does have penchant for fondue & single malt whisky.

Think Visibility Preview Summary

In addition to the speakers’ sessions, there will also be the opportunity for attendees to have a Free Eyetracking session done on one of their websites (places for this are limited to a set number on a first-come, first-tested basis), it’s a chance to improve your website, it could be a real “eye-opener” for your website and this is a free potential benefit of attending.

At the Think Visibility events there are normally plenty of opportunities to talk to like-minded (and perhaps equally beneficial, some different-minded) people and do some good old-fashioned networking, both during the event itself and also at the two organised Think Visibility networking parties that are being held the night before and the night of the event.

So there you have it, details of the previous Think Visibility events, why you should perhaps be going, information on who’ll be speaking and oh yeah…just one more thing…if you get in quick to register and buy your Think Visibility ticket before the end of 31st January 2010, you can save £20 on the cost of your ticket and get it for £99 instead of the normal price of £119.

Are you planning on attending Think Visibility? I’m planning on being there, so I hope to see you there too! Clearly these people/websites are also going to be attending Think Visibility 3 as they have also blogged about attending this event, so I’m looking forward to meeting and talking with these people…

• SEO Idiot
• Sorbet Digital
• It’s A Family Thing

Related Pages:

1. Think Visibility 3 Review (March 2010)
2. Think Visibility Review (Sept 2009)
3. a4u Expo London 2009 Preview
4. a4u Expo London 2009 Conference Review

This year has really flown by, things have been really busy here in the last few months and moving in the right direction! We’ve got lots of exciting developments and plans for 2010, so we hope that you keep on coming back to the site, be sure that you’ve subscribed to our RSS feed, become a fan on Facebook and/or follow Zath on Twitter.

Anyway, we hope you all have a great time over Christmas and that Santa brings you all exactly what you’re hoping for, although let’s hope he isn’t too delayed by Jack Bauer interrogating him…well I mean let’s hope Santa doesn’t lose track of time while helping Jack with his enquiries!

Via – Bett-zi

Related Pages:

1. Merry Stargate Christmas!!!
2. A Zath Christmas!
3. Global Secret Santa Idea & World Record Attempt From Firebox
4. 5 Christmas Gadget Present / Gift Ideas For Dad (2009)

It’s now over 2.5 years since I started up this blog here on Zath covering various aspects of technology, gadgets and gaming and in that time there’s certainly been highs and lows in writing and running this blog, but it’s certainly nice to get this kind of recognition by being nominated for a blog award from what is one of the top technology publications out there!

The next stage to this award process is that the readers of Computer Weekly and ComputerWeekly.com will vote for the winner of this award from a shortlist of contenders – hopefully Zath will be on that list! Voting will begin on the 2nd November 2009.

The shortlisted entries will then be invited down to Shoreditch House in London to attend the official Computer Weekly Blog Awards Evening on the 25th November 2009 – it all sounds like it’ll be a real honour to be a part of, thanks to whoever nominated Zath and here’s hoping that I get shortlisted to the next stage, it’ll be a tough contest no doubt!

Related Pages:

1. Write For Zath Hi-Tech Gadget and Technology Blog?
2. Webby Awards 2009
3. BAFTA Video Games Awards Winners 2009
4. BAFTA Video Games Awards 2009 Nominations – Part 2

The main point of argument some seem to keep having is that people, especially women, don’t need to be taking off their clothes in order to make a point or raise money for charity. They need to use their brains, obviously. However, on the same vein, it appears it’s completely acceptable for men to do whatever they like. This argument has never and will never ring true for me for the simple fact that if you look around you, sex, in some form or other, is everywhere. Why are people still so outraged about this? I would’ve thought that, by now, it was quite clear to see that we actually quite like nudity and naked flesh – and that we’re not living in the 1950s! Both men and women can, and like to, look good naked. And, we like looking at them.

Recently, Eileen Burbridge (@eileentso) ranted, second-guessed herself (a lot!) and raved about why it was so bad for this calendar to occur, especially for the ladies involved. That if they pose for this calendar and take off all their clothes, they are somehow undermining their talents as professionals in the tech industry. Surely, if this were the case, then nobody would be jumping on the so-called nude bandwagon at all? If it were that bad it wouldn’t happen, no? If Eileen were to rule the world then I’d shudder to think what life would look like through her eyes. In a society where we spend so much time working, stressing and finding new ways to wage war on our neighbours and fellow countries, aren’t we allowed to have a little fun anymore? This project is about helping people; it’s as simple as that. It just appears as if she has personal issues with removing clothing and thus has let loose on a teeny tiny project which has the simple end outcome of wanting to raise money for a good cause.

A little more recently than that, Sian Meades made a very good point about women who choose to take off their clothes and do so because they want to. This argument brings home the idea that women are in control of their bodies, their lives, their careers and hence, their destiny. I’d honestly much prefer to see this way of thinking, to be quite frank. Given that women can (and do do) whatever they want, whenever they want to nowadays without any interference or pressure from menfolk, why do we still have the mind frame that men still control us? If Eileen herself, who appears to be a very successful lady, has a problem with taking off her clothes and thinks that it’s demeaning to do so, then fair enough – she shouldn’t do it. But, I really don’t think she’s got as far as she has in life by thinking that men control the world. So, the view that they somehow control us is a little outdated, to say the least.

If you’re successful and professional in your day-to-day activities and actually happen to think you also look good aesthetically, does that automatically make you evil? I can look around me and decide which people I find attractive and do the same for those I don’t. I don’t judge them anymore or less because of the way they look (unless I plan to date them, then ‘looking good’ is definitely something I take into consideration). The same goes for looking in the mirror; it’s up to me to decide whether or not what I’m looking at is worthwhile and whether or not I would like others to see it, whole or clothed. Just take a look around you and see people in positions of power, authority and/or of certain influence. Chances are that they’re hardworking and gorgeous to boot. Because that’s how we prefer it as a society. Naked/nude/semi-clothed people are everywhere. But, is that necessarily a bad thing?

A very amusing post by Chief Silicon Stiletto (@huddlesuz), Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, goes into why she would actually really like to get naked. Her top ten reasons of why she’s happy to get naked are an honest and humorous take on the entire idea and go very far in reminding us ladies why it’s important we remember to have a laugh and not take things so seriously. Another brilliant mind that has been supportive of the entire idea is Tech Fluff’s Hermione Way (@hermioneway). She has a splendid way to see life and I believe she’s successful because she’s a barrel of laughs and she works every hour she possibly can. She reminds you how to enjoy your days, and a little more than that, she isn’t a stranger to building her career. And, if you’ve ever worked with her, you’d know how professional she actually is – and the same goes for the other ladies mentioned.

Does the fact Hermione Way’s decided to strip off naked make her any less of a successful entrepreneur? In all honesty, it doesn’t. Because if it did, I’m fairly sure she wouldn’t do it. All of the ladies I’ve drawn attention to in this post are hardworking and successful. Some would like to remove their clothes and some would not. They all have two things in common though; they’re ladies and they’re all shaped differently. If they don’t care about that, then why do the Eileens of the world care?

So many people are caught up in the fact that once upon a time women weren’t allowed to work, vote or were simply used as sexual objects. Concerning the first two, it’d really be a helpful idea for people to see we are well past those times. With regards to the latter, times have changed and society has evolved. Women now do things because they choose to, not because they are told to. In fact, so much so, that it’s probably a good idea to see that Playgirl didn’t exist for no apparent reason. It was a big f*ck you to the male world – whereby it portrayed men in the same light as women… and because the men chose to.

Some have commented that this is simply an ego trip for those involved. I think it’s probably best to realise here that a good proportion of the people involved in this project were put forward. I also ask again, why is a (controlled) ego trip bad thing? It’s not a crime to want to show yourself off to the world if you happen to think your body is a worthwhile endeavour (clothed or unclothed). The entire fabric of society is based around aesthetic features – we strive to make things “look good” and everyday more and more products (so, not even relating to people here) are released which do just that. If you happen to realise that looking good is part of your day’s adventures and make an effort with your appearance, does that automatically make you a spawn of the devil? People are now so caught up in how easy it is to offend others that they’re afraid to say what they feel – and if that’s “I look damn good today!”, then so be it. If you now start destroying people’s right to express themselves personally, as well as verbally, we’re going to end up with a society that isn’t allowed to do anything at all. And, it isn’t hard to look around you around the world to see what happens to societies with that culture in place.

My main problem with the entire debate is that people are forgetting the end outcome. Charities are there to help those around you. I’m not even going to use the term “less fortunate” because I feel that’s demeaning in itself. People around the world survive with whatever they have. I support this project whole-heartedly for a number of reasons (and should probably point out that I’m not in it). Perhaps it’s because I am a woman in the tech industry? Or maybe it’s also because I’m an actress and have no qualms about taking my kit off? Or maybe it’s because I personally know some of the people involved (and nominated) and support their cause without question? Or maybe the reason I care so much about this project is because it supports a cause which happens to be in my mother country?

Whatever my reason, you are in no position to judge me (or those involved); be it one, none or all of those reasons. What would be really cool, though, is if tonight, you take off all your clothes, look in the mirror and be proud of what you see.

UPDATE: The calendar photos have been taken and you can now pre-order your London Nude Tech Calendar from Firebox.com with all proceeds going to charity. You can read a recent article about this over at the London Evening Standard which also includes a sneak peek preview of one of the calendar photos in question, that of Hermione Way naked with just a microphone!

Related Pages:

1. Lego Advent Calendar
2. Tech News Video Podcast
3. Hi-Tech Gadgets
4. Write For Zath Hi-Tech Gadget and Technology Blog?

The only other conferences that I’ve attended for the online marketing industry have been the Think Visibility conferences that have been run in the relatively local location of Leeds, so I was expecting a4u Expo to be somewhat different not only given its size but also the fact that it’s more focussed around online affiliate marketing. However, as I was to find, these days that also involves a lot of work in terms of analytics, social media, generating useful and unique content for visitors and ensuring that your website is optimally set up for search engine optimisation – all interesting stuff!

a4u Expo Venue

The choice of venue seemed to work very well, the ExCel conference centre is obvious a “well oiled machine” when it comes to hosting a variety of conferences and exhibitions. Despite there being large numbers of people at the event, there weren’t really any times where you felt it was too crowded to be able to move or speak to people.

The sessions themselves were spread across three main conference rooms, each of which were pretty much large enough to accommodate all the attendees for each session and had all the necessary technology at hand for the whatever was required, including people running around with microphones for the Q&A segments – the only strange thing with regard to the facilities were the ill-timed automated announcements that occasionally occurred, but everyone seemed to take those in good humour, so it wasn’t a great issue.

With regard to the food on offer for lunch, I found it quite refreshing to be served up ‘a warm meal in a box’ on both days (the large pizza we each got on the second day was particular welcome!) instead of the usual boring buffet you normally get, but this way of doing things made it easy to carry around should you wanted to finish it off while attending one of the lunchtime sessions or have a look around the expo hall.

Around the ExCel centre, you are also literally spoilt for choice for the additional facilities, whether it’s finding somewhere to grab a coffee/sandwich or heading to the local 2-storey bar called “The Fox”. There’s also a variety of hotels on offer within around 5 minutes walking distance from the venue, so you don’t need to be getting up too early to ensure that you can make it to the event for the first session of the day…especially welcome if you’re nursing a hangover from the night before!

Just one thing I would say is that if you’re arriving into London at Kings Cross station like I did, I’d perhaps avoid taking the London Underground next time as it took me around 90mins to get to my hotel, whereas it’s only around 30mins in a taxi – on the way home, I opted for the taxi option despite the additional cost!

a4u Expo Notable Sessions/Speakers

Strategies To Make A Splash in SEO – Dave Naylor (@davenaylor)
This was the first session of the first day for me and as always, not only is Dave great value as a personality during his talks, but he also gives out a lot of good information, I made a lot of notes from his sessions during the course of the event . In the Search Engine session he even made an impromptu appearance as a would-be Yahoo employee at the last minute when there was no Yahoo person in attendance at the event – how did he fill his segment? He told us how you could get links from Flickr by commenting, unfortunately once that information hit Twitter, Yahoo had closed that loophole by the end of the day, but good fun all the same!

Google Site Clinic – Matthew Trewhella, Kasper Syzmanski, Fili Wiese
Well you know that you’re at a high profile conference when Google sends not one, not two, but three of their engineers along to speak in a site clinic session. I’ve seen a couple of videos of these kinds of sessions on the Internet, usually with Matt Cutts, so it was good to actually attend one for myself and see what the Google guys were saying in terms of best practice for the sites submitted for evaluation and advice.

You Want To Tweet What!? – Social Media, Twitter & Affiliate Marketing – Dom Hodgson (@thehodge), Naomi Brown (@naomiMB)
This was the last session of the first day, but no-one was flagging here, it was full of energy and pace, especially how it started out with Dom, whose exploits on Twitter and other social media you could easily listen to for at least an hour, somebody should follow this guy around with a camera is all I’ll say! Naomi also gave an impressive talk on how the online gift retailer; Firebox has utilised Twitter to communicate and help its customers, one example is by giving out short-term voucher codes that can be used by their followers, for instance like the one that we wrote about earlier in the year 20% off until the end of the day – who wouldn’t admit that’s a real benefit of following a company on Twitter!

Killer Link Building Strategies – Christoph Cemper (@cemper), Lyndon Antcliff (@lyndoman), Patrick Altoft (@patrickaltoft), Jon Myers (@JonDMyers)
Everyone wants to know the secrets of getting some good links to your websites and these guys gave some great advice on how you can go about writing content that people will want to link to and tell others about – this session was the first on the second day and for the people who managed to get up for it after the previous night’s festivities, this was definitely worthwhile in attending!

Barriers to Conversion & Discovering Untapped Opportunities With Analytics – Joanna Butler (@joannabutler), Will Critchlow (@WillCritchlow), Lisa Myers (@LisaDMyers)
Right well I have a confession to make first of all…I’m kind of a stats junkie, so having the chance to go an analytics session was a no-brainer for me – lots of good tips were given which means I’ve got lots more things to try out and research more now I’m back home. The only problem with this session? It was too short! I could easily have listened to these speakers for an hour each, but maybe that’s just me being an #analyticsaddict! Next time, more cool analytics people like these please!

‘Productization’ For Fun And Profit – Gillian Muessig (@SEOmom)
This was one of the lunch time sessions on offer to us and I must say that I’m pleased that I went along! Gillian was full of energy as a speaker and took some examples from members of the audience to show how you can take your existing business and products and ’spin them off’ into new businesses or markets.

Meet The Super Affiliates – Moderated Q&A – Kieron Donoghue (@kierondonoghue), Tina Judic (@artemis8), Phillip Wilkinson, Sri Sharma
This session was entirely put over to allowing the audience to ask their questions to these highly experienced affiliates anything they wanted, as often is the case, questions were a little slow to get going to begin with, but Kieron also allowed questions via Twitter which certainly helped as well. Lots of useful information came out of this session!

a4u Expo Exhibition

The actual exhibition hall was perhaps the one area I didn’t look round as fully as I’d wanted to, perhaps because it was possible to bypass it entirely in moving between sessions as I found I was doing. However, on the few occasions I purposefully investigated the exhibition, I did find that it was a good way of saying hello and meeting up with some affiliate networks who you might normally only communicate via email, especially in the case of Buy.at who also gave me some free beer, which is always a welcome thing!

a4u Expo Networking Events/Parties

With regard to the a4u Expo networking opportunities/events, it was a bit of a mixed bag really. The first night’s Breakout Party at the O2 Arena was essentially in a dark nightclub, quite crowded with loud music – not the best of environments to be honest with you, the free beer ran out quite early by all accounts, incidentally around the time a bunch of us headed off back to the hotels for further drinks and networking in a quieter place. A shame as I hadn’t been to the O2 Arena before, but it seemed a decent venue as a whole and I did have an enjoyable meal with a group of around 15 SEO people in Pizza Express before heading to the Breakout Party, so it was still worthwhile going!

However the second evening’s event, the Ice Party that was much better, a more convenient venue to start with, it was held at the “The Fox” bar, a short walk from the ExCel centre. The volume level there allowed you to actually chat with people, some decent food was put on for us and the free bar went on for most of the party. A bunch of us then headed over to the Novatel hotel and continued our networking (and drinking) into the early hours of the morning, a very enjoyable evening!

So overall I can overlook the somewhat shortlived (for some of us) Breakout Party as all in all, I met lots of great people at this event and had a fun time as well, the Ice Party certainly made up for the previous night’s slight disappointment, so I’m looking back on it quite happily.

a4u Expo Summary

The a4u Expo London 2009 has been a real eye-opener for me (thanks again to Kieron Donoghue for running the competition that gave away a free ticket for this even), I’ve learnt various new things, met some cool new people and come away with new ideas and motivation. It’s definitely something I’ll be attending in future in London and hopefully also the next a4u Expo Europe being held in Munich, Germany!

Other a4u Expo Coverage

If you’d like to read what other attendees thought of this event, then take a look at the following a4u Expo write-ups (let me if you’ve also written about it and I’ve not seen it yet and I’ll add you to the list).

• Top 10 Quotes – A4U Expo Hall of Fame @ Search Cowboys
• a4uexpo Thoughts @ here.org.uk
• A4UExpo London 2009 Review @ The Hodge
• A4U Expo Roundup @ Verve Search
• My Review of A4U Expo 2009 @ GeoffBlog.com
• A4U Expo London 2009 Slides – Web Analytics – Joanna Butler @ Search Engine Chocolate
• A4U Expo London Diary @ BeckyNaylor.com
• a4u Expo 2009 – Piggynap’s Review @ Piggynap
• A4UExpo Review @ murraynewlands.com
• A4U Expo 2009 Roundup and Review @ Messy Desk
• What Makes for a Great SEO Conference? @ SEO Gadget
• A4U London 2009 @ Commission Junction Blog
• A4uexpo Antics! @ Shopzilla
• A Tale of Two Conferences @ Elaine’s Space
• I’ve Got The Taste And Want A Lot More @ Befuddled
• A4U Expo – the best bits @ Bearded Warrior
• You Know You Make Me Want To Shout – A4U Expo 2009! @ One Little Duck
• My Best Bits of 4U Expo 2009 @ MichelleCrofts.com

Related Pages:

1. a4u Expo London 2009 Preview
2. Think Visibility Review (Sept 2009)
3. Eurogamer Expo 2009 Review (London Gaming Show)
4. Think Visibility 3 Review (March 2010)

The a4u Expo is a big 2 day affiliate marketing conference and exhibition being held at the ExCel Centre in London that features over 40 conference sessions and no doubt some tough decisions will need to be made as to which ones you attend as there are some great speakers and sessions being held across both days.

By the end of the competition, there had been such interest in it, Kieron kindly decided to give away two free tickets and I was lucky enough chosen as one of those a4u Expo ticket winners who had left a comment explaining why I’d like to attend and done so in a creative or entertaining way, here’s my comment that I left in full:

With the Think Visibility conferences being the only ones that I’ve attended so far, this would be a great chance to meet some more great people like I have already here “up north”. But I’ve heard that most people tend to just end up talking about ShareMyPlaylists.com!

In terms of the sessions to listen to, Dave Naylor talk some more good SEO stuff (I learnt a lot from his appearance at Think Vis) and obviously I want to hear more about you starting up ShareMyPlaylists.com!

Also, I missed Joanna Butler’s presentation at the first Think Visibility, I’m quite a bit of a stats geek so was gutted when I realised I missed that, another chance to see her talk analytics would be great! – Perhaps it’ll help me figure out how best to feed some of my spotify traffic to ShareMyPlaylists.com!

Oh yeah and obviously I’d be attending the event wearing a ShareMyPlaylists.com T-Shirt and labelling every bottle of beer I drink with a ShareMyPlaylists.com sticker!

You may notice that I mentioned ShareMyPlaylists.com once or twice in my entry, that’s because Kieron is also the guy behind that site where users can quite literally share their Spotify playlists with others and also find new music for themselves.

Thanks again Kieron, I wasn’t planning on attending an event such as a4u Expo until perhaps 2010, but this has allowed me to attend a year earlier, I’ve really enjoyed the Think Visibility conferences I’ve attended so far this year and I’m sure this will be a great experience too where I’ll get lots of value out of the sessions having looked at the agenda in full – I also look forward to meeting other readers of here.org.uk there too!

If you’re also interested in attending and haven’t yet got your ticket, then you’ll need to be quick as there aren’t many tickets left, so register using the banner below!

Related Pages:

1. a4u Expo London 2009 Conference Review
2. Think Visibility 3 Preview – Final Speaker Announced! (March 2010)
3. Think Visibility Review (Sept 2009)
4. Eurogamer Expo 2009 Review (London Gaming Show)

1) Log in to your Blogger account – you don’t need to do anything there, it will simply save time later.

2) Log in to your WordPress dashboard. In the sidebar on the left look for the section marked ‘Tools’, and click on ‘Import’.

3) You’ll now find yourself on a new page with a list of blogging platforms which can be imported into WordPress, select Blogger – it’s the one at the top of the list so easy to find.

4) At this point you have to get Blogger and WordPress talking to each other, so click the ‘Authorise’ button, then ‘Grant Access’ on the following page. If you logged in to Blogger earlier you’ll be taken to a page listing all your blogs – assuming you have more than one, doesn’t everybody?!

5) Scroll down to the one you want, and click the ‘Import’ button on the right. WordPress will automatically import all your posts and comments. If there are a lot this can take several minutes so be patient. And don’t worry, nothing will be deleted at Blogger’s end, your Blogspot blog will still be there if you ever decide you want to go back to it, but why would you? WordPress is wonderful!

6) Finally, you are given the option of assigning authors, if you are a solo blogger just click ‘Save Changes’. If you do have multiple authors, you are given the option of adding them then coming back to this page to match them up with their posts.

Troubleshooting: Occasionally, the import function can get stuck. Don’t panic! Simply restart the import, you won’t lose anything and it won’t import duplicate copies.

So, now you know how easy it is, what are you waiting for? If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment!

Related Pages:

1. How To Get Wordpress Gravatars For Comments
2. Digg Wordpress Theme – Digs’em
3. Garry Conn Reviews Zath for BlogsWeLuv!
4. Do You Feel Lucky?

First of all, I think it’s always good to see these types of events happening outside of London for a change and giving us northern bloggers and online, web-type people to experience an event such as this without having to necessarily travel all the way down south – not there’s anything wrong with that, but the chance to meet other people is always good!

Having attended the first Think Visibility conference back in March 2009 and found it very useful, I did think that it would be worthwhile attending again and what with the upgrade in venue (from the previous Old Broadcasting House location) and another impressive list of speakers, along I went and here’s what I thought of the presentations that I attended…

Think Visibility Speakers

Wordpress SEO Strategies – Joost de Valk (@yoast)
First of the keynote speakers was Joost de Valk, well known to many of us who run Wordpress to power our blogs, not only for his optimisation and SEO tips that he writes about, but also for the plugins that he develops and many of us use on a daily basis. His talk focussed on optimising your Wordpress site and covered areas such as page load times and their relationship to readers and Google, caching, image size etc. Lots of great ideas here and I was making notes during the whole presentation and now have a list of things to address off the back of this great talk! I even got to have a quick chat with him at lunchtime, a very approachable guy and was great to see him at Think Visibility in Leeds.

Big Site SEO: The Telegraph.co.uk – Julian Sambles (@JulianSambles)
In recent years you’ve probably heard a lot about how newspapers have been struggling to come to terms with the new world of online media and how many of them just aren’t approaching from the right angle – from listening to Julian go through the process that The Telegraph has implemented over the last few years, you can see that they’ve had a real success story thanks to how they’ve approached online publishing of their content from teaching their journalists to consider the basics of SEO to embracing social bookmarking networks and even teaching their readers about what these Digg and StumbleUpon are.

Maximising Universal Search – Judith Lewis – (@JudithLewis)
Judith gave a very interesting talk on how search engine results (specifically Google) are changing over time and that more of the results pages are displaying results from different sources, instead of just a list of ten webpages. You’re now getting pictures, videos and map results for instance – therefore it’s important to have a presence in these areas as well, otherwise you could quite easily be missing off the frontpage of Google results where historically you may have been 6th or 7th – these days you could be relegated to page 2. Lots of tips to be had here, including the fact that YouTube is actually the second largest search engine after Google, a fact that most people don’t seem to consider when looking at the search market. Oh and she also passed tins of chocolates round the room as that was the basis of her examples being a chocolate fan – thanks Judith!

Lunch & Entertainment
As well as providing plenty of food and drink for everyone, at lunchtime there was Q&A panel segment with Al Carlton, Chris Garrett, Tim Nash, Kieron Donoghue and Patrick Altoft Dom Hodgson – an interesting and fun panel which even gave away some prizes in the form of low-flying T-shirts!

After this entertainment, the single large room was then turned into three separate rooms – not only did this work well in terms of there being plenty of space still, but I was also impressed at how well sound-proofed they were, the only sound that got through from the other rooms was the applause at the end of a talk.

Advanced Geekery Made Simple, for the Purposes of Profit – Paul Robinson
Right I admit it; I like stats and analytics, so Paul’s talk on this subject was definitely something that interested me. It certainly made you think about the analytical work that goes into recommendation systems and assuming you have certain demographic information about people, for instance on your website, you can then target them for maximum profit, just like Tesco do with their Clubcard system!

One Link to Rule Them All – Tim Nash (@tnash)
Tim’s talks are always worth listening to, not only do you hear interesting and useful information on a topic, but he’s got a great presentation style too which makes it all the better to hear – I just wish I could have attended his Friday afternoon pre-conference session he held. In this talk, he covered the fact that not all links are made equal, links from certain sites can be worth a lot more and depending where they are on the page, that could also now be a determining factor in their value – links in content are the best!

How to Win at the Content Network – Zoe Piper (@savamaloy)
Zoe is an expert on Adwords, something that I’ve never really looked into, so I thought that this was the ideal opportunity to learn more and I wasn’t disappointed. This talk had lots of useful how-to information on running PPC campaigns specifically centred around content and I’ll definitely go back to her slides if and when I start using Adwords myself. This was Zoe’s first speaking event and she did remarkably well as you wouldn’t have thought it, she came across very knowledgeable and confident in what she was talking about, I look forward to hearing her future talks.

Accessibility and Disability: A History of Innovation – Artur Ortega (@DesignByBlind)
I was looking forward to hearing Artur’s talk and wasn’t disappointed, he’s a blind software engineer for Yahoo and it was interesting to hear the history of so many of our office equipment. Be it computers, telephones, scanners etc have all originated from the original inventions being applications to aid accessibility for disabled people. I also found it very intriguing how many inventions were either directly created by Alexander Graham Bell or indirectly through his organisation.

Summary

Overall, I think it’s fair to say that Think Visibility in Leeds has been a real success this year, this latest conference in September 2009 building on the success of the first back in March 2009 and definitely improving on it to create an event that was professional, well organised, enjoyable and informative. Thanks to everyone at Think Visibility, Hodgetastic and Dom “The Hodge” Hodgson for putting this event together!

If you’ve got any interest in these topics, I’d definitely suggest you consider attending the next one, Think Visibiliity 3 in March 2010 as not only do you learn important new things, but get to meet and chat with some great people such as Gaj, Gary Hartley, Andrew Mason, Joanna Butler, David Lindop and by the end of the day I’m sure you’ll leave with a real motivation boost to move forward just like I did!

If you are interested in this and other conferences, then there is a great new website called Conference Calendar that will help you organise and keep track of all these kinds of events that are happening around the world.

Other Think Visibility Coverage

If you’d like to read what other people have been writing about this event, then also take a look at the following Think Visibility write-ups (let me know if you’ve also written about it and would like adding to this list).

• Photos by sk8geek
• Piggynap
• Yoast
• Chris Garrett’s Blog
• Northern Web
• Burn Down Easy
• Sorbet Digital
• PoLR
• Sink the Rock

Related Pages:

1. Think Visibility 3 Preview – Final Speaker Announced! (March 2010)
2. Think Visibility 3 Review (March 2010)
3. a4u Expo London 2009 Conference Review
4. a4u Expo London 2009 Preview