The morning started out great with a buffet breakfast of rosemary potatoes, scrambled eggs, chicken apple sausage, thick sliced bacon, and an assortment of bagels and breakfast breads. I’m typically not a breakfast eater but I’ll never turn down something like this, and I piled my plate high and when into our private dining room.

Taking my place at the table between a poker affiliate from Ohio, and a local San Francisco search marketer, I was surprised to find that four of the eight people at my table had been here before at Elite Retreat.

Overall, I would say that the general search knowledge of people at my table was far higher than the average conference lunch table I’d sat at before, and by the end of the meal and was totally impressed with what I learned, and completely stuffed, which for me is always a good combination.

As we made our way into the room, and I headed for the usual front row / aisle spot that I try to snag, I was pretty disappointed to find out that they had laid out our name tags alphabetically, so I walked up and down the rows until I found my tag in the middle of the third or fourth row of seats. With only 32 attendees, it wasn’t a bad seat by any means, but I’m a little bit obsessive about sitting on an aisle whenever I can.

Laid out with our name tags was an impressive array of swag, starting with a leather portfolio (padfolio?). Had I not forgotten to bring digital camera on this trip you’d see a nice picture here.

Inside the portfolio was a really nice fat silver and black pen, also engraved with the elite retreat logo. Very heavy and with a spring action tip, it’s definitely a nice writing instrument, that I’ll be sure to lose quickly. Sitting right on top, and waiting for us to sign with our new pen was the nondisclosure agreement.

I sort of assumed the NDA was coming, and it basically just said “no live blogging” and “respect people’s privacy”, and show some common sense.

The next item sitting there was a video Ipod Nano, engraved on the back with “Elite Retreat 2008 – San Francisco”. Even letter, the Ipod was filled with all kinds of audio files, from Shoemoney’s Webmaster radio episodes, to Donald Trump’s, “How to think like a Billionaire”.

Our master of ceremonies, David Klein, started us off by introducing Jeremy as the first speaker. Shoe talked about his own personal history, and it was a really interesting story. He began after he wrote a guide for how to put pics on cell phone, and that turned into an online application that ended up sorting, storing, and sizing photos for putting on your cell phones, and then that ultimately turned into the NextPimp ring-tone business that helped make him famous.

He discussed the ring tone site and development history, talked a bit about AdSense, and then more about some contextual advertising and affiliate stuff, and then about his current project, fighters.com, in an upcoming one that I shouldn’t mention, that has to do with dating, but I think it’s absolutely brilliant.

Shoe is an entertaining speaker, and a smart guy, and the story he told about someone who should have been his partner was a class act, but there weren’t really a lot of details or specifics. Still, I was riveted, and I thought he gave a good talk.

The biggest takeaways for me were to be creative, incentivize users, and to try to think out of the box and far beyond typical traffic generation methods.

For example, with Auction Ads, he offered people 5 bucks to try it, and he went to websites and offered to replace their Adsense income to show his ads instead, trying to gain visibility for the brand. That high visibility is likely what enabled him to sell off Auction Ads less than four months after launch.

Neil Patel was up next and he didn’t disappoint. Due to the NDA, I can’t disclose a lot of what he said, but let me tell you that I do think this guy is brilliant. I’ve seen him speak before, and his rapid fire style is definitely appealing. If you ever get the opportunity to hear him at a session don’t skip that one.

He reinforced a lot of ideas that I had about social media networks, and he also straightened me out on some misconceptions I had. I have nearly a full page of notes, but he kept coming back to the fact that you have to tailor your content and style to each particular community you might be dealing with.

During the Q&A, he asked if anyone had any particular industries they were having trouble getting social with, so he could offer some link-bait suggestions. For each industry mentioned he came back with a really quick answer, with funny and entertaining ideas that I have no doubt will work well on these communities.

He gave some specific examples of successful campaigns, and gave some very clear steps on how to work some of the individual networks, from Digg to Yahoo Answers, and his talk was well worth the cost of admission…

Lunch was great, with an assortment of sandwiches and salads, and everyone ate quickly in order to get back in and hear the next speaker during our “working lunch break”. I sat next to Brian Clark from Copyblogger, who is speaking today. He told me a little bit about his membership site, Teaching sells, but mostly I tried to eavesdrop on his conversations with Aaron Wall and Matt Mullenweg, which was an easy because it was really loud in there.

Next, Matt Mullenweg the fouder of worlds best SEO machine (WordPress) gave an interesting history about how he started, why he started, and some general philosophy about the open source community. WordPress is even bigger than I thought, with 2.8 million users, 15 to 20,000 downloads daily, and over 600 million page views on WordPress.com blogs last month. Absolutely astounding.

His company has 24 people all of whom work from their own home office, so they are truly a virtual company. He discussed his plans for the future including Word press becoming even more of a content management system and some additional new features coming out any time now, but he specifically asked us to keep them quiet for now.

My favorite quote from his session was related to adding certain features into the back end and how difficult it is to keep clean and easy to use, because “everyone wants their 15 pixels of fame”

Andy Liu from Buddy TV was next, and his discussion had to do with raising venture capital. the detailed information on exactly how to do it was phenomenal, with great tips and lots of bullet points to pay attention to.

I have no doubt that the notes I took could come in very handy someday, but it’s just not applicable to what I’m doing these days, and I probably could’ve done without that session. Still, it was amazing information to have presented so concise and I appreciated his tips.

For the last session of the day they ask for URLs to put websites up on the screen and talk about ways of improving conversions and engaging visitors. I learned a little bit, and as various attendees spoke, it was interesting to hear all of their opinions too, and see all of the different businesses they were involved with.

When one of the attendees brought up their website, the guy next to me said “That sounds familiar, I think I pitched him a couple of years ago”. Within just a few seconds, he brought up an e-mail that he’d sent this same guy in 2006, with some specific details and recommendations about how he would improve their site. The funny thing was many of the changes and recommendations still had not been made, and the panelists touched on nearly every one.

The other thing I learned from this site review session, was that the SEM Hot Seat events that we put on here in Portland are truly world-class.

Immediately following the close of sessions at 5pm, they opened up the hospitality suite where they were offering free snacks and alcohol for the next 3 1/2 hours before the limousines were scheduled to arrive to take us to dinner.

As appealing as the thought of shmoozing and drinking was, I had made a point of not answering any of my e-mails all day and had a few things I needed to attend to. I walked the two short blocks back to my hotel and proceeded to plow through all of my necessary responses while my battery drained away.

When I went to my backpack to get my power cord for my laptop, I discovered that I had apparently forgotten it in the conference room. Panic set in, because my battery was already dead and being in early-morning riser, I find myself with nothing to do and very far behind if I didn’t find some juice, so I walked back to the conference hotel.

Of course when I got up to the room my power adapter was nowhere to be found, even though I knew exactly where I had left it after unplugging it from the power strip. Remembering that there was a computer store across the street, I went over there and was able to buy a $60 universal adapter to get some power.

I went back to my room, changed for dinner, and walked back over to the cocktail party to network with the other attendees.

Two big Hummer limousines arrived to take all 40 of us to a great restaurant, we had our choice of Chilean sea bass, or filet mignon. It was a nice restaurant with impeccable service, and the obligatory tiny portions in the center of the plate. I love gourmet food as much as the next guy, but why do the portions have to be so friggin’ small?

At dinner I sat next to Aaron Wall and his new wife Giovanna, who has an amazing knowledge of the industry. Just like the rest of us here, she has a true passion for what she does, and is incredibly knowledgeable. I’m sure she’s involved in all kinds of projects with Aaron, and besides the romantic aspect, marrying her seems to have been a wise business decision

Aaron’s presentation is this morning, and he said he still had to put a lot of finishing touches on his PowerPoint so he wanted to go work on it after dinner. However, he says he hates working without a mouse and had forgotten to bring one, so the three of us walked to my hotel and I loaned him mine for the night.

So far the Elite Retreat has been great, but as I suspected, the true value in attending has been networking with new people and forging relationships that could go on for years.

Elite Retreat Day 0
Elite retreat Day 2

In January of 2007 I joined StomperNet under the belief that I would get the personal attention of their world-class faculty.

I assumed that for the nearly $10,000 I was going to pay for the year, I would not only learn everything I wanted to know, but I would establish some personal relationships that I could continue to nurture over time.

Admittedly I learned an awful lot, but primarily what I got was sales pitch after sales pitch, and “new program” after “new program”, and far too many different forums that offered practically no participation by the original faculty members that were the catalyst to my joining.

The primary reason for my joining was to hear directly from certain faculty members, and overall, as a group, their participation was shamelessly poor. The whole experience at StomperNet basically sucked my time dry, and left me wanting for much, much more.

To be clear, I’m not saying StomperNet sucked, or that StomperNet wasn’t worth the money for anyone, just that it wasn’t worth the money for me, because I didn’t have four hours a day to wade through their ever growing and poorly organized volumes of crap looking for the “good stuff”.

At PubCon In December I was discussing my disappointment with someone, and telling him that I was not going to renew Stomper after January 1. I’d put in a year, and was fed up. That’s when he told me that he had gone to Elite Retreat, and it changed his life.

Elite Retreat
The more he talked about Elite Retreat, the more I realized that I had really blown it making my decision to skip it last year. Everything he claimed to have gotten out of ER was exactly what I had been looking for.

Last week I was on vacation with my family in Mexico, and I spent nearly three hours every day doing email, and dealing with work issues by phone and by web.

After getting back this weekend, and immediately spending nearly 2 hours on three separate unproductive phone calls this past Monday morning, I hung up from the last one and immediately signed up for Elite Retreat.

It’s not “productivity” that’s my problem, it’s that I’m focusing on the wrong things. With only so many hours in a day, my business model really isn’t scalable, and more growth as an “SEO Consultant” isn’t something I really want any longer.

One of my Internet Marketers New Year’s Resolutions was to do more of my own affiliate sites, and while I’ve been managing to keep two people fairly busy, we just haven’t made nearly the progress I expected to make nearly 2 months into the year, and have been bogged down by little details. I’m counting on this conference to change that.

Elite Retreat will be held April 2 & 3 2008 in San Francisco, and will be a conference unlike any other I’ve ever attended. To begin with, it’s only comprised of 35 attendees, instead of the hundreds thousands that attend Search Engine Strategies and Webmaster World’s Pubcon.

Elite Retreat is more what I would call an “interactive session”, as opposed to a conference, and I expect to be learning far more in this two days that I would in an entire year of Pubcon and SES conferences and learning it in a much different way.

Along with only 35 attendees there are six world-class experts in their fields, including the keynote speaker, Guy Kawasaki. The entire faculty will be there the whole two days, which means lots of face-to-face quality time with some of the brightest minds in the world.

I’ve spent nearly half of my entire 2008 education & travel budget on this event, and I’m specifically skipping SMX West and SES San Jose as a result, but I have no doubt it’s going to be worth it.

Here’s who’s running the show in San Francisco…

Guy Kawasaki
I was riveted by Guy’s keynote at the 2006 Pubcon, and it remains the best I’ve seen. He’s motivating, inspirational, and dare I say brilliant? I remember trying to get near him just to say hi, and to be perfectly honest, I had an easier time talking to Google’s Matt Cutts than I did getting close enough to Guy because of the crowd.

Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College

Jeremy Schoemaker
Since I ran across Jeremy’s blog a little over a year ago, I’ve found some of his posts to be incredibly inspirational for me, and it’s clear that there’s a reason he’s holding that big fat AdSense check, and it’s not because he just got lucky. This guy is the real deal, and while his “no bullshit” style may not be everyone’s cup of tea, he’s exactly what I need.

Jeremy Schoemaker (widely known by his nickname of ShoeMoney) is an important player in the search engine marketing world, and his knowledge and expertise make him one of the top go-to guys for PPC, arbitrage, SEM, branding, and online income optimization. His weekly Internet radio show Net Income allows listeners to hear Jeremy’s honest assessment about his failures and successes in the online marketing space.

Neil Patel
Having seen Neal speak three or four times now, I can say that he is one of my favorite speakers, and I’m really looking forward to getting to know him. His presentations are always rapid fire fast, totally enlightning, and given with such total confidence and enthusiasm, that you can’t help but realize that he’s bursting at the seams with killer information.

Neil Patel is an Internet marketing consultant and the founder of Advantage Consulting Services which was started in 2002. He has lead Internet marketing strategies for small and medium sized businesses as well as top companies such as Hewlett Packard and Wal-Mart. His experiences include search engine optimization, social media optimization, reputation management, and viral marketing.

Aaron Wall
This is the guy that actually “wrote the book” on search engine optimization, and while it may not have been the first, (or was he?) I do believe it’s been the best, to ever come out.

At PubCon in Las Vegas, Rand Fishkin said that Aaron was one of the smartest people he’d ever heard, and “if there’s one blog you should be reading every day, it’s Aaron’s”.

Aaron Wall is a search engine optimization expert who blogs about search at SeoBook.com. He also wrote a popular book by the same name, publishes numerous other websites, and has consulted clients large and small about how to increase their search exposure.

Brian Clark
Being a conversion expert, I expect to learn a lot from Brian not only in the area of usability but in measuring and quantifying results.

Learning how to use the tools I already have, like stats, logs and Google Analytics, to better identify exactly where and how conversion rates can be improved upon has never been a more valuable skill.

One of the best quotes I heard at PubCon last year was that “it’s a lot easier to double conversions than it is to double your traffic”, and I’m taking it to heart, not only for my own sites, but for my clients as well.

Brian Clark is an Internet marketing strategist, content developer, entrepreneur, and recovering attorney. In addition to building three successful offline businesses using online marketing techniques, he has sold scores of products and services online via joint venture and affiliate arrangements. He founded Copyblogger in January of 2006, and continues to develop successful web properties with a variety of partners.

Andy Liu
Andy’s name did not sound familiar to me at all, and I can’t even find anywhere online to link his name to. However, anyone not living under a rock has heard of Net Conversions, (now aQuantive, err, Microsoft) and as the President of an Internet company way back in 1999, he undoubtedly has a lot to offer.

As a startup expert, I think he rounds out the faculty perfectly for me, because I have some of my own ideas far beyond simple affiliate sites, and I’m really looking forward to meeting and hearing from him.

Andy Liu is CEO of BuddyTV, the largest independently held TV site on the Internet reaching over 4.3MM monthly uniques. Prior to BuddyTV, Andy served as President and CEO of NetConversions from 1999-2004 prior to its sale to aQuantive and served as VP and GM of its Site Optimization unit from 2004-2005.

He’s also a founder of a non-profit focused on technology in developing countries and is very passionate about entrepreneurship. He brings deep experience in building companies, site optimization, SEO, community building, and product development. In 2003, he was named to Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 under 40 and holds an MBA from Wharton.

What do I really hope to gain?
By paying approximately $300 per hour for two days of “coaching”, I’m hoping that I can get any specific question I might have answered, and believe me I have a lot of them. I have three pages on the front page of Google for a “Internet consultant”, yet what I DON’T know could fill volumes of Encyclopedia thick books, and I don’t expect to hear many “I don’t know”s from the student questions this crowd gets asked.

I hope to gain the confidence I need to try new things. I’ve continued to stay in my comfort zone for the past couple of years, both in my personal projects and in dealing with clients. I’ve turned down dozens of consulting opportunities, simply because I didn’t like their platform, or I didn’t know anything about their technical setups, and I hope to gain the confidence to break out of that comfort zone and accept those challenges if I choose to.

I hope to gain lasting relationships with these guys, and because they continue to hold weekly conference calls for past attendees, I expect that will happen. The insights that I got from having a conversation with one of their ATTENDEES was enough to keep my buying the drinks in Las Vegas.

I hope to gain some sanity in my affiliate business, as I continue to flounder making just a few bucks here and there on several of my own domains, while I continue to leave dozens of other domains that I own undeveloped. With what I know ALREADY, this shouldn’t be the case, yet it is, and I’m tired of it.

I hope to gain some insight on better ways of scaling some of the mundane tasks that are necessary, like outsourcing decent content, getting that content into pages, and obtaining inbound links. I have developed my own methods out of necessity, but the time involved in doing this successfully when dealing with a dozens of affiliate sites is astronomical, and paying employees to do it is not cost effective. There’s got to be a better way.

Above all, I hope to gain more of the knowledge and the networking connections necessary in this industry that will allow me to write my own ticket (but upgraded, of course) and continue making a living online, without the need to get out and “sell” my SEO services – That’s just not a game I want to play any longer.

Since I live eat and breathe for search, and I’m truly passionate about what I do, for me, this is going to be like going to a fantasy baseball camp. There’s literally nothing I’d rather be doing… If you’d care to join me, there are still a few seats left to sign up.