Why the A4U Expo sucked!

With so many people blogging about how great the A4Uexpo was, it seems a little boring to follow the crowd. So i thought i would look at things from another point of view…

1. The event just wasn’t long enough! Although i did manage to say hi to alot of the people i find inspiring in this industry, there were soooo many other interesting people i wanted to talk to, but didnt have the time. To be fair, i would be surprised if anyone had the stamina make it through more than 2 (and a bit) action packed days, so not sure how to get around that one!
2. Far too many interesting seminars! I managed to get along to all of the allotted time slots, and still only saw half the talks i was interested in! Again, to be fair, alot of the sessions were recorded, so looking forward to catching them when they appear online.
3. Having to wait one year for the next A4u event! But this shouldn’t be a problem for most people, as they can attend the A4u Amsterdam event! (but i’m going be on another continent )
4. OK, i’m going to stop now… this event was amazing! It’s no good trying to pretent otherwise.

So here are my highlights from the A4Uexpo.

Seminars:

I won’t go into detail on every session i attended, but just to say i didnt find any of them boring! Highlights:

1. Yoast, and his SEO for Wordpress presentation. Fantastic! I made so many notes, i don’t even know where to begin! He has made the slides available here.
2. Million Dollar Blogging Strategies, by Al Carlton. A great presentation from an inspiring blogger. The room was packed, and Al answered loads of great questions at the end.
3. So, you don’t do travel? – A great session where Sunshine.co.uk revealed their new amazing looking wordpress tool, Sunpress. Something i am definitely going to look into in the upcoming weeks. It was great that they gave a live demonstration of how it worked.
4. Internal (get the slides here (thanks Roy!)) & External linking strategies – Great! I have loads of notes to work through.
5. Seo, PPC, & competitor analysis tools uncovered – Again, a very helpful session, with loads of things that i need to implement in the upcoming weeks.

Networking:

I didn’t make it to the ICE party on the final night, but by all accounts it was superb. I did manage to attend both the Ignite, and the Thames Cruise, which were both fantastic! I got to talk to loads of people, drink loads of free beer, and eat lots of tasty snacks. I thought both events were superbly well organised.

I would like to say a big thank you to Matthew Wood and his team for a truly amazing couple of days.

Pictures:

Here are my photos:

I didn’t really have time to take many snapshots, so if you are interested in seeing some great photos, then check out the bandannas here, and some great photos below.