Thanks so much for all your votes and feedback on our PRO Webinar Series over the holiday weekend. We received 285 responses and we're taking your suggestions very seriously and conducting the webinar as you've requested :-)
Here are the stats from the questionairre/form (you can still fill it out if you'd like to give more input):
Will you be able to attend the PRO Webinar on Dec. 10th at 11am Pacific (2pm Eastern, 7pm London)?
- 74% - Yes, I'm planning to attend!
- 20% - I'm unsure if I can make it (but would like to)
- 6% - No, I'm busy at that time (but would like to join in others in the future)
- 0% - I'm not attending (because I'm not a fan of webinars or uninterested in the subject matter)
What topics most interest you for the webinar (check all that apply)?
- 79% - Link Building & Link Acquisition
- 51% SEO Metrics, Analytics and Key Performance Indicators
- 44% - Social Media Marketing for SEO
- 41% - Keyword Research Tools & Processes
- 40% - Navigation & Site Architecture for SEO
- 35% - Content Creation & Optimization
- 24% - Avoiding Spam, Penalties & Filters
- 20% - Incenting UGC & User Participation for SEO
What webinar format would you prefer?
- 47% - 45 min. presentation, 45 min. Q+A (90 min. total)
- 37% - 30 min. presentation, 30 min. Q+A (60 min. total)
- 12% - 30 min. presentation, 60 min. Q+A (90 min. total)
- 4% - All Q+A (60 min. total)
Based on this, we're going to be running a 90 minute webinar, with a 45 minute slide deck presentation (and possibly video as well, though it will likely just be of me on the webcam) from 11am - 12:30pm Pacific (2pm - 3:30pm Eastern, 7pm-8:30pm London) on Thursday December 10th. The webinar will cover the following rough outline (obviously, in more detail):
- Link Building Strategies for 2010
- What Goals Can Link Building Help Us Achieve?
- Bolster Individual Rankings
- Improve a Domain's Ability to Rank Pages
- Achieve Full(er) Indexation
- Drive Direct Traffic & Branding
- The 8 Basic Link Building Food Groups (with examples)
- Manual Link Submissions/Requests
- Competitive Link Research + Acquisition
- Links via Embedded Content
- Content Based, Linkbait & Viral Link Attraction
- Content, Technology & API Licensing
- Link Exchanges & Trades-in-Kind
- Paid Links
- Link Reclamation
- What are the Right Kinds of Links to Accomplish my Goals?
- Links for Individual Rankings
- Links for Domain "Authority"
- Links for Indexation
- Links for Traffic & Branding
- How to Use Tools & Processes to Make Link Building Easier
- Tools for Competitive Link Research
- Metrics for Evaluating a Link's Value
- Building a Link Acquisition Process (i.e. the "Link Conversion Funnel")
- Making Processes Scalable
- Link Building Shortcuts to Take (and Avoid)
- How to Get Your Community Link Building for You
- How to Get the Anchor Text and Target You Want
- How to Avoid Links that You Think Are Helping Your Competition (but really aren't)
- How to Spot Strategies that the Engines May Devalue
- Wrap-Up / Q+A
I'm certainly open to feedback about what you'd like to see in there, and happy to make some inclusions where possible. All PRO members will receive an invite via email in the next 2-3 days with a link to register. You'll be able to dial-in or hear the webinar via your computer speakers/headphone and ask questions via a chat interface. You can see an examples of a past presentation I've made below:
This lengthy one came from my HostingCon keynote and serves as a fun introduction to SEO (BTW - let me strongly recommend against creating slide decks using photos of a whiteboard; it's fun and the audience likes it, but it took about 12 solid hours of surprisingly intensive whiteboard drawing and erasing, nevermind the editing, cropping and pasting):
I'm very much looking forward to spending the morning with our PRO members next week! If you're not yet PRO, Scott's got some pretty sweet offers still available including the SES Chicago ticket + 1 year of PRO for $799 (and you can trade in the Chicago pass for any SES event in 2010) and the Advanced Training DVD for PRO members at $199.
Note that the other topics that received lots of votes - SEO Metrics & KPIs, Social Media Marketing, etc. will likely be the topics for webinars in January, February and March.
It won't let me register at all. I'm really pissed right now.
I think this is bullshit. How can the number of registrations exceed the number of invitations?
If you invite more people than you're capable of acommodating, it's YOUR fault!
I tried to register this number of times and the system would not work for some reasons, now I am too late and I won’t be able to join the seminar.
I really do want to see this information, is there any chance you will record this information and enable pro members to see it? I am really rather disappointed I won’t be able to see it....
I never realised you would only accept so many people and that you have to pre-register?
I am also wanting to know if there will be anymore places, the demmand was always going to be huge?
Just tried to register for the Pro Webinar and can't because the virtual conference room is full! I mean surely HyperMeeting can organise a few extra virtual chairs from somewhere?
I'm running into the same issue. I took the survey saying I was planning on attending but didn't realize I had to additionally register - is there any way to make more room?
Hey Rand, all pro members will receive this email to attend the webinar, or only the ones that gave their email address in this previous post?
Good question! Yes - every PRO member will get an email invitation to join in; you don't need to have filled out the survey.
Just went Pro, how do I get the email link?
... The maximum number of registrations for this event has been reached.
I canceled a meeting today to be available for today :) Is there anyway randfish can help ?
Warm Regards, Matt
Had the same problem. Big shame - with 3 kids and hectic life, I moved things around big time and rearranged a meeting too for this...
Doesn't seem sensible having a limit to the numbers - surely the original email should have stated "only x numbers avail". Saying that I also had trouble with an email that "hypermeeting" sent me to confirm my reg - the email came without text!
Unfortunately, I can't make next Tuesday's additional webinar, so I guess that's me stuffed.
Not happy :-(
Link building is indeed a long and tedious process. But every now and then you get those tips/ideas from other peoples' examples that give you an 'aha' moment resulting in a couple great links. Looking forward to the webcast.
It said it was full when I tried to register aswell.
I've just called SEOmoz up now and apparently a lot more people signed up than they had expected and the 1,000 seats have all been taken. They arn't/can't encrease the number of seats for this particular webinar so they are going to be replaying it on Tuesday with another live Q and A.
Hope that helps anyone in the same situation as me.
Thanks for the info Lewis
Hi everyone! Sorry about the difficulty of getting into the first webinar. We didn't realize we'd fill 1000 seats so quickly! How exciting is that? :)
Since the demand was so high we decided to have a second session on Tuesday. You can find details about this webinar here. You'll only be able to access that page if you're a PRO member.
Thanks!
I did not get an invite. Is there any other way to register?
Thank you
A great post! It is very detailed! Thanks!
I haven't received any invite, where should I get it to my messages inbox in the pro-dashboard or to my registered email account?
Jennita, is seoMOZ going to archive the webinars so that pro members can view it again?
We recorded the session, and hope that it's good enough to set up a download. If so, it will be found here.
I just joined as a PRO member today and would like to attend the webinar - where can I get an invite or link?
I'm having the same issue, please help
the session is limited to 1000, they will re-run it next week..
I guess i cancelt my meeting 4nothing :P
At least there's a replay for all those who couldn't get in including myself :)
How do you sign-up for the replay?
I would also like to sign up for the reply - please let us know how/where we can do that,
Thanks,Heather
Great post Rand. I've enjoyed your slide show a lot. I will be considering a Pro membership!
I'm excited! Another first for SEOMoz. :) Just observing how you guys are trying out new things gives the rest of us some good ideas and it always makes it interesting for us. We're always guessing what you're going to do next.
The outline looks awesome. I'm really looking forward to the webinar.
This webinar combined with Advanced Training DVD that I just picked up should make me a world class link builder!
I'm a little disappointed. I think there's too much obssession with Links in SEO. Wish that we could gone into some site architecture and conversion optimization.
Oh well... sounds like the linkbuilding webinar will be thorough
I think what happens is that many SEOs end up hitting a wall. Of course I can't speak for everyone that voted for link building, but I think this may be why:
SEOs follow all the best advice on optimizing their pages, then they rework their site categories and navigation for optimal crawling/indexation and they see great results from that. Then, everything plateaus. The gains in rankings and traffic come slower now.
They know that links are the next step and they start link building, and it sucks. It's a slow going, time consuming, send-100-personalized-emails-get-1-link process, and they think "there must be a better way". I think that's where the obsession for more and more link building information comes from. We all know that links are critical to SEO success, and many of us have exhausted our options for directory links, blog comments, social bookmarking links, begging for links, and even paying for links. We're looking for new strategies to obtain those beautiful editorially given links, in the middle of relevant content, with perfect anchor text, from an authoritative site. We're all looking for this holy grail of links, but not just one of them, we're hoping to find that special secret strategy that will help us obtain thousands of them.
Rand, can you deliver on that in the webinar? That'd be great ;)
Secret to getting thousands of links for free with no work? Yeah, I'll try to fit that in right before the end :-)
Good comment, BTW!
WOW - holy grail of links! :)) Yeah.... for some reason I don't think that Rand is going to tell us all his secrets .... ;)
The holy grail of links - lol - guys seriously - if your hanging off the words of someone else - then you'll never figure it out... There is no holy grail, there is no push button solution to pos 1 - there is only you and you inspiration for good/ natural off site seo...
Looking forward to this webinar... =)
Link Building is always great!! But next do something about Outsourcing....Now that would be awesome!!....the all process..
Hi Rand,
Have you thought about opening the webcast to non-PRO members on a pay-per-view basis?
I haven't yet crossed the line to a PRO account yet, but I would be quite interested in participating in this webcast and would pay to view it.
As I'm sure the webcast will be great, it could help convert people to PRO as well.
:-)
Let me know if you decide to try it!
Thanks,
Justin
Definitely something we're considering, though the free webinars will likely be focused on using our tools and demo'ing PRO. These webinars take a lot of work to prepare (particularly the decks - a conference presentation might be 10-15min. but these are 45min. and I'm custom making them).
Thanks Justin!
Hey Rand, thanks for the response. Those free webinars sound cool also.
Just to clarify my thinking, in case it was misunderstood, I wasn't proposing that the PRO webinar actually be opened up for free.
[ Side note: my job is to product manage a line of professional development webcasts, so I know first hand how much labour is involved! :-) ]
What I was suggesting is that -- for non-pro members only -- you could just charge them a registration fee, say $35 to attend.
This way you can be compensated for your work, open the webcast to a larger audience, and still give subscribers the premium access they deserve.
Just a thought...when it becomes more of a business necessity for me, I would definitely go PRO anyways.
Looks great. Will the webinar be archived though so those of us not available at that time can watch it later? Thanks!
Eric
would be nice so that when i finally decide I have time to benifit from a pro membership i can play catchup
We're going to try recording it and possibly make it available in the future through PRO for download, but we're not sure about the functionality of Q+A or the quality/download time/bandwidth yet, so it's still a bit up in the air.
Thanks. Let us know if you can. I'd love to participate but it's just real hard to find a couple hours during the day. I love webinars because I can watch them at a convenient time. I lose the ability to ask a question, but at least I get to catch the fun!
And, I am willing to accept low production values for the benefit! : )
Eric
Cool - good to know; we'll certainly try to make that happen, though it may be a while.
Great, I'm looking forward to it.
Better use the business Pro account :)
It's always nice when your vote counts. I look forward to to the link-build-a-thon.
Sweet! Half of my team will be joining the webinar. Did you really have to ask to know that people probably wanted a webinar on link building?
Hi guys, great looking forward to the event and look forward to receving the invite
Cheers
Invite received when I was half way through reading this post (karma or what). So the plans for next Thursday night (in UK) are all ditched now! The webinar has to take presedence I'm affraid - looking forward to it :)
Hi Rand & Team --
Very excited and looking forward to this webinar! Hopefully I'll get some new tips for link building.
One question though: I'm in Indiana and my boss is in California and we share one company PRO account. If I register and participate in the webinar, is it possible for my boss to also register and attend at the same time?
Thanks!
Summer :)
I've got a similar issue - I hope to be in the office, and have one person off site. Can we both listen? Or just one of us?
Thanks!
Eric
I guess if we don't get a response from the SEOmoz team, we should just try it and see if it works? My boss told me to sign up for it first and then forward him the invitation and he'll try to sign up for it. It looks like it isn't held on the SEOmoz website, so having two people logged in might not be a problem. We'll see! Good luck!
Summer :)
would it be too early to ask in what region the pay per view would be if it is made available? I have picked up a couple of the pro guides but the commitment for a years pro is pretty heavy as I am at the moment more involved in this as a hobby than anything I can pick up a ROI on!
7pm is too late for us over in London mate, got families to go home to, and William being two years old, is far more into "bob the builder", than "rand the link builder"..
sorry, wont be attending, hopefully next time it could go at a more european friendly time.
EDIT: just in case that bob the builder reference means nothing across the pond, which I guess it doesnt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA16sqCusbY
Hi Rand,
I just enjoyed all your slides - it's amazing how much more fun it is to read those handmade edding-slides rather than ppt or even Keynote!
If I only could attend, but pretty busy over here in Germany.
All the best,
Tobias