Finally, the day we’d all been waiting for.
Not only were we all due to take turns staffing the SEOButler booth—handing out swag and chatting with customers—but this was also the day Jonathan was to deliver his Sleeping Giant presentation.
Jonathan and Lyndsay got to Le Meridien early to set up our booth—we were fortunate enough to get the best possible location, and our t-shirts and stickers turned out fabulous.
Florian, Jonathan, Sean, Zeke, Frankie, and Lyndsay
Standup comedian and CMSEO MC Adam Palmeter—one of the originators of Saigon’s open mic comedy scene recently featured in The New York Times—officially kicked off the conference by introducing Matt Diggity, who delivered the keynote speech.
Matt is not only the founder of CMSEO, but he also owns numerous successful digital marketing businesses—including Diggity Marketing, The Search Initiative, and LeadSpring.
He’s also the creator of one of the best-known affiliate marketing courses: The Lab.
Matt gave a short but incisive state-of-the-SEO-industry address that set the tone perfectly for the rest of the conference.
E-Commerce SEO
Client SEO
Affiliate SEO
Kyle is one of the most thoughtful and innovative SEOs out there. He invented PageOptimizerPro and is lead SEO at High Voltage SEO.
But Kyle is perhaps best known—infamous, even—for an SEO experiment involving the search term “rhinoplasty Plano.”
What started as part of a “Rank or Go Home” challenge on Stephen Kang’s popular SEO Signals Lab Facebook group turned many an SEO’s notions of how Google’s algorithm evaluates and ranks content on its head.
That’s because Kyle managed to get the search term “rhinoplasty Plano” ranked number one on Google with a site written—except for strategically placed keywords—entirely in Lorem Ipsum.
As Search Engine Journal put it, ““It mocks everything Google says about authority and quality content. Google ranking a site written in Latin is analogous to the wheels falling off a car.”
Four days after the Search Engine Journal article was published, Google de-indexed Kyle’s page and hit it with a manual penalty, ending his Lorem Ipsum site’s reign at the top of the SERPs.
A conference highlight, Kyle’s polished and entertaining presentation at CMSEO involved a personal recounting of the rhinoplasty Plano “scandal,” its aftermath, and what it tells us about Google’s ranking algorithm.
Empire Flippers is one of the best-known, well-established website brokers and online business marketplaces in the industry.
If you’ve ever built an affiliate site or SaaS and dreamed of flipping it for six or seven figures, odds are you’re familiar with Empire Flippers.
For anyone interested in how to arrive at an accurate valuation of an online business and the steps required to prepare a company for sale, the Empire Flippers blog is a terrific resource.
Likewise for anyone interested in purchasing and growing an existing online business.
Greg Elfrink is the director of marketing and content guru for Empire Flippers.
In his brief presentation, he outlined the process of building and selling a profitable content site.
Barry has been in the SEO game for a long time—since 1998.
He’s the founder of the award-winning Polemic Digital, widely considered one of the top small SEO agencies in Europe.
(Source: James Clear)
To be honest, not being a technical SEO, much of Barry’s presentation went over my head. ?
You can find more of Barry’s technical SEO insights here and here.
Not surprisingly, Jonathan’s presentation was the biggest moment of CMSEO for myself and the rest of the SEOButler team.
Jonathan, Lyndsay, and I worked on The Sleeping Giant for months. We found a talented fantasy illustrator in Saigon to create original graphics and honed the presentation to deliver as much value as possible in the 45-minute time slot.
The whole team had seen Jonathan rehearse the presentation, so we felt confident that it would go well.
Still, you never know how an audience will react—particularly given that Jonathan chose to cover very different territory from the other speakers.
There were no quick hacks for getting to the top of the SERPs.
The Sleeping Giant Strategy is about the bigger picture of building and scaling a successful business.
Jonathan began by sharing his own journey as an entrepreneur. How it took him a long time to realize that the key to successfully scaling a business isn’t to carry all the responsibilities and burdens on your shoulders alone.
Instead, a founder’s duty is to awaken the giant that a business can become.
As Jonathan puts it, “Every new business is a Sleeping Giant—it’s up to you to wake it up.”
He then outlined the six steps entrepreneurs can take in the next 12 months to help their business reach its full potential:
Jonathan provided actionable tactics and examples for each step.
He then challenged the founders in the room to implement the Sleeping Giant Strategy in their own businesses over the next 12 months and measure the results.
Obviously, I’m far from objective about The Sleeping Giant Strategy, but the presentation went off without a hitch. It was entertaining and delivered valuable, hard-won insight for entrepreneurs—especially those in the early stages of their business journey.
The overwhelmingly positive feedback we received from attendees after the presentation suggested that the Sleeping Giant Strategy really resonated with founders and helped them look at their own businesses in a different light.
If I had to pick just one takeaway, I’d go with Jonathan’s emphasis on the value of building an “empathy culture” into a business.
According to him, being a leader doesn’t mean being a dictator or tyrant: “You serve your team. Your team serves the customer.”
Having been part of the SEOButler team for over six months, I’ve seen how Jonathan puts those words into action every day and the positive effect it has on morale and productivity.
Not only is the right thing to do, but it’s also good for business.
Once known as the God of SEO, Charles Floate is a black-hat SEO legend.
Founder of DFYLinks and The Proper SEO Group—as mentioned here—his presentation was highly anticipated, and he didn’t disappoint.
That wraps up our coverage of the first day of CMSEO 2019. Watch out for speaker summaries and more from Day 2 tomorrow!
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