The SES in San Jose was the third year I’ve been there (2005-2008 minus 2006) and I tell you,

it was only about the networking… meeting old buddies and friends and meeting TONs of new people represented more than 90% worth

for me to fly over 22 hours from Vienna. The sessions were simply repeats or just weak rehashes of what I’ve heard at one of the previous conferences…

Well – attending 3-4 conferences a year ONLY makes sense for networking, especially if you’re up to date and work 24/7 in online marketing anyway.

So while there’ve been PLENTY of talk and blogposts about the SES and it’s sessions on the web now, the most valuable nuggets of information I got came from all those off with SEO rockstars like

• Jim Boykin (congrats Jim on your success again, you got a great team – cheers to all Ninjas and thanks!)
• Greg Boser (thanks Greg for all the time and insights)
• Dave Naylor (this was SUPER-INTENSE content, every sentence like gold, no fluff, just facts – thanks Dave!)
• Shoemoney (had fun at dinner! and love the USE ME t-shirt pic man!)
• Neil Patel (wow, didn’t know you work so much into Europe – and thanks for the dinner dude)
• Loren Baker
• Chris Winfield (nice to meet you Chris)
• Lauren Vacarello (was great meeting you again Lauren – I enjoyed the chat we had)
• Dave Davies (thanks for sharing your consulting experience with me)
• Todd Malicoat (awesome party! actually the ONLY real party – in European standards… or what is an open bar that closes after your first drink… LOL)
• Tim Ash (loved the website optimizer session – and congrats on your recent successes you told me about – looking forward to … )
• Aaron Wall (was nice to meet you and your wife at the party the first night)
• Bob Rains (wow, I was puzzled to hear your Malta story… but great move BTW! and thanks for the awesome dinner, too!)

• many more include Avi Wilensky and his great sister Sheara, Becky Ryan, Pascal, Mediadonis, “Chris Boggs”, Jens, Marc, Tim, etc…

But that wasn’t it all …

I even met so many new great guys that I’ve a hard time keeping up to follow up with all of them via Mail, LinkedIn, Xing … just got my inbox down to 289 unread today, so I thought it’s time for this post

Cheers and a link shoutout to

• Francois – man you rock – had a brilliant time w you and Monte, looking forward to work with you for some time to come – and see you in Vegas
• Lydia – was great meeting you Lydia, I found it pretty interesting that you are yet another US SEO to work into Europe… time to pay a lot more attention to the markets over here I guess
• the Playboy team
• sooo many german SEOs and sailors like Jens, Marc, Andreas, Axel (need to dig up those linkbacks) – awesome to find we share a hobby… remember our plans?

• David funny how we met finally so long after the last session – thanks for sharing so much details as well

I took quite a couple nice shots, but I’ll try keep up even more with my mails now as I’m off for sailing next week,

and I still got more interviews coming up tomorrow…

Interest in our persona links was massive… even stronger than after the SMX in Seattle… to bad we’re booked out until October…

So this week I already hired two new linkbuilders for our persona building service and will interview many more til Friday. Based on the maths I did I also had to increase prices a bit to maintain our quality – since we also started to increase the work and time we spend with each persona …

but you know, if you spend money on time to build good personas, it’s worth every penny…

after all you want NATURAL looking personas, for relevant and NATURAL looking links…

Cheers!

Original post by Marketing Fan