So I’m back from Blog World Expo.

While some of the A-List Bloggers are already starting to post that the event was a major success, with huge growth from last year and reports of attendance doubling, I wasn’t as impressed.

I don’t want to sound like a party pooper, but I know for a lot of people attending an event like this is fairly expensive due to the travel costs involved.  Not everyone lives in Vegas, and not everyone makes +$30k/month, so I want to give my account of my experience at my first Blog World Expo so that if you decide to come next year you have a better idea of what to expect.

First Impressions

My first impressions of the expo were pretty good.  We arrived and were asked to go upstairs to register to get our badges.  Walking in to register, we were greeted and pointed towards computer terminals where we put in our names and with the push of a single button we were signed in and directed to the badge station to pickup our badges.

Thirty seconds later, we had our badges around our necks ready to go.  This was the easiest “check-in” I’ve ever seen, by far.  Whoever setup that system deserves a pat on the back.

Going to the Sessions

Our first stop was to head over to the 11am session on “Making Money Online With a Blog“.  The session was basically setup as a panel, where John Chow, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson, Jim Kukral, Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) and Jeremy Shoemaker (Shoemoney) answered questions from the audience on the topic of monetizing your Blog.

Thinking that this would be an awesome session to get some good tips on how to further monetize my Blog from a panel of experts that obviously know what they’re talking about and have the track records to prove it, I whipped out my video camera to record the session and ensure I wouldn’t miss a thing.

About 15-20 minutes into it though, I realized that for the most part the audience attending was very much beginner level and the questions being asked were very elementary.  Obviously there is nothing wrong with that, as there are a lot of people out there that don’t really know how to monetize a Blog at all, but really I did not hear a single question asked that hasn’t been answered repeatedly by the guys on the panel in numerous Blog posts on their Blogs.

The panel did a great job of answering the questions being asked, but honestly there was nothing said in this session that hasn’t been written about on all their Blogs a few hundred times already.  For total beginners there may have been some value here, but this session really didn’t do much for me.

Prior to heading to Vegas, Tyler Cruz told me that he expected the sessions to be really elementary, but I already paid for my $300 pass by then so I figured I might as well attend at least one session to see how it goes.  Tyler was right.  That was the last session I attended during the conference.  I figured my time would be better spent networking with all the exhibitors.

Meeting Tyler Cruz

Right after the first session, we went over to the cafeteria to grab a sandwich and a pop while we waited to meet up with Tyler Cruz.  A few bites into my sandwich, I saw Tyler walking up, sporting his new suit jacket, getting a drink with his girlfriend Lisa.  This was the first time I met Tyler in person.  We sat down at one of the tables and had a chat about the conference, Blogging, Affiliate Marketing, Vegas etc.

Tyler is pretty much exactly like he is on his Blog.  It was great to finally meet up with him and put a face to the name.

Meeting the Exhibitors

Next we headed over to the exhibition floor and started walking around looking at all the exhibitor booths.

This was probably the most disapointing part of the expo for me.  I expected there to be a lot more exhibitors.  Looking at last years exhibitor list (just under 90 exhibitors), I saw names like Microsoft and Yahoo! and figured that this year there would be DOUBLE the amount of exhibitors with all the big names (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! etc.) showing up to talk about things like AdSense etc.

The Blogosphere has grown tremendously since last year, and reportedly the number of attendees to the conference has supposedly doubled as well, so you’d think that exhibitors would be lined up for a chance to strut their stuff in this growing marketplace.

So while I’m thinking that probably 180-200 exhibitors are going to show up with names like Yahoo! and Google and Microsoft sporting huge booths with some amazing new Blogging technology to unveil which will take over the Blogosphere and everyone at the Expo will get the first sneak peak… guess how many exhibitors really showed up?

According to the Blog World Expo website, I counted seventy-two.  Nevermind double, that’s less than last year!  Google wasn’t there.  Microsoft didn’t show up.  Yahoo! didn’t bother coming either.  It wasn’t just the big guns that pulled out either… by my count, out of the 86 exhibitors that were there last year, 70% did not come back this year.

Why wasn’t Google there selling Bloggers on putting AdSense on their sites? Doesn’t their content network rely heavily on the millions of Blogs out there that use AdSense?  Google couldn’t find a few bucks in their budget to at least put one guy in a small booth there?  Unique Blog Designs, the guys who designed my Blog theme could afford to be there…why couldn’t Google?

Why wasn’t Microsoft there trying to get Bloggers to switch away from Google? Did they run out of money after paying Seinfeld and Gates for those commercials or something?

Why weren’t the guys from Pure Digital Technologies there to sell me on the new Flip Video? Are Bloggers not the absolute perfect client for their product?  If they were there, I would have bought one on the spot because I still haven’t got myself a Flip yet.  I don’t get it.

Why wasn’t Apple there selling Bloggers on the benefits of their awesome, lightweight laptops? At the nearby mall in Vegas, their Apple store had like 32 employees in the store harassing chatting it up with customers and they couldn’t spare ONE dude and a table to show off Apple’s line of laptops for Bloggers? I don’t get it.

I can think of 100 other companies that should have been there as Bloggers are their perfect target market… I don’t understand why they weren’t there.

Who Was There

Let me quickly go through a few exhibitors that were there, showing their support for Bloggers and the Blogosphere.

Firstly, Market Leverage was there with their Cashinator machine.  These guys clearly understand how to tap into and connect with Bloggers.  They’re an affiliate network company, but they don’t just show up to affiliate shows, they show up to a Blogging show.  Why?  Because they understand how important Bloggers are.

Another affiliate network company, Copeac, was also there and the two guys they had there (Rick and Frank) really impressed me.  They were super friendly, started talking to me right away, asked the right questions and I’ll be signing up with them this week to check out their network.

Another company that I was really impressed with was someone called Woopra.  They’re developing a really neat web analytics software which looks super cool.

If you currently use Google Analytics, then you’ll be familiar with this type of software.  Woopra looks much cooler than Google Analytics and I’ve already signed up for an account myself.

Once I try it out for a while, maybe I’ll write a full review of the features it has compared to something like Google Analytics.

The software is currently in beta, and they are accepting a limited number of testers at this time.  I was told that the software will most likely be offered free of charge, except for really large enterprise clients.

IdeaBlob was another company that I really liked there.  They have a pretty cool business idea.  Basically, if you have a business idea you can go to their website and post your idea for people to vote on.  At the end of the month, they tally up the votes and the idea which gets the most number of votes gets $10,000.

So, if the only thing holding you back from becoming an Inspired Money Maker is lack of startup capital, here’s your chance to win $10,000.  You can check out their site for more details.

My friends from Unique Blog Designs there were there looking to snag a few more clients for their blog design portfolio.

It was nice to meet them in person as well.  They are the guys who designed my current Blog design (not the mascot), and it was good to see them there.  If you look in the picture, they had a bunch of t-shirts from other companies they designed Blog themes for that they were giving away.  I snagged a Market Leverage one to add to my collection from the conference.

So who else was there?  Well, there were a few other exhibitors that I spoke to and anyone who I thought might be interesting to look into for my readers I snapped a picture of for you guys.  Here’s two more pictures from a company called Lijit and ViewBug.

Meeting Darren Rowse (ProBlogger)

While walking around and looking at the exhibitors, I saw Darren Rowse from ProBlogger walking down one of the isles.  To me, Darren is the original Pro Blogger.  I read his Blog all the time and so does everyone I know that has a successful Blog.  He’s been a big inspiration to my Blogging career.

As soon as I saw him I knew I had to introduce myself, so I did.  I said hi, introduced myself and had a quick chat with Darren.  We chatted for a bit about his Blog, my Blog, his book and exchanged business cards.  He seemed like a super nice guy, and it was awesome to meet him in person after reading his Blog for so many years.

Did Blog World Suck?

So the question still remains.  Did Blog World Suck in my opinion?

Yes and No.

It did kind of suck because it could have been so much better if there were more exhibitors.  I planned on being there for two full days (Saturday and Sunday) to have enough time to visit all the booths and talk to everyone that seemed interesting, but instead I was finished walking the floor after only a few hours.  I didn’t even bother coming back on Sunday.

As far as the sessions go, I think I wasn’t really the type of audience they were targetting.  We talked about this with Tyler Cruz as well.  Tyler and I are kind of in a unique place in our Blogging careers.  We aren’t total beginners just starting out so we don’t really belong in the audience during these conference sessions as we mostly already know all the stuff being taught.  However, we’re also not successful enough yet to be the speakers at these sessions.  Those spots are filled by guys like Shoemoney, John Chow and Zac Johnson (for now).

Blog World didn’t really offer much for people somewhere in the middle of their Blogging career – at least not from what I saw.

Now, I also said “No” it didn’t suck for me and I’ll tell you why.

1. I met Darren Rowse from ProBlogger in person.  That’s worth the trip right there for me.  He’s a huge inspiration, and making contact with a guy like him in person is not something everyone gets a chance to do very often, especially since he’s from Australia and probably doesn’t travel to the states all that often.  Not only did I meet him, he also met me, which may help me to stick out in his mind should I ever have some type of win/win idea to contact him about.
2. I finally met Tyler Cruz in person as well.  Even though we’ve conversed via email for a quite a while now, and I’ve written several guest posts on Tyler’s Blog, there’s no substitute for meeting someone in person.
3. I also met some of the people at Market Leverage, met the guys from Unique Blog Designs, met John Chow again and exchanged business cards with all of the above.  I’m convinced that networking with people in this industry is one of the keys to success, so it was definitely great to be able to do that.

Of course I also met a bunch of other exhibitors, and exchanged cards with them, but I just wish there were a lot more of them to meet.

So all in all, I’d have to say that next year I’m probably going to pay more closer attention to the exhibitor list to see who’s going to be there before making my decision to go or not.  If someone only had $500-$1000 to spend on improving their Blog though, and they were to ask me if investing that money into going to Blog World Expo was the best way to spend that money, I would probaly say no.  I would say that you’re better off spending your money on buying Darren’s Book, taking the Blog Mastermind Course from Yaro Starak and getting a copy of Traffic Secrets 2.0 from John Reese.