What are people paying for?

Had to attend a business networking/training session today, and I'm somewhat bemused by how little some of the speakers seemed to know!

Heres a few examples from the worst offender:

Q) How do you handle negative feedbacks/comments on your blogs?
A) Oh I just edit the comment so its a positive one

Q) What should I call my blog, Im having real troubles thinking of a good name
A) Just go with your name, domains are so cheap it doesnt matter if you get no traffic

He also seemed to think invoicing clients for rebranded google alerts was good business practice...

Finally I felt the need to put my hand up and ask
Q) What about page rank and domain authority, just curious as to how important you think they are?
A) Not important at all. I've got 14 blogs and they all rank really well with a PR of 0!

At this point it almost seemed like a fight might break out on stage as one of the other speakers stepped forward and pointed out that:
1) it did matter what your URL was because google heavily weighted key words in a URL;
and 2) PR was important unless there's only a few sites writing about that subject.

I was then had to sit through the rest of the seminar wth him shooting me evil glares... But on the plus side a few people actually thanked me for asking that question



Think its seriously worth hiring an actor to play a charasmatic front man and forming my own Business to Business SEO company if that was in any way indicative of the competition in that sector!

I had a similar experience not too long ago. Some supposedly big wig lady in marketing and networking came in to talk in a seminar being given at the trade school I was attending. It was an after hours seminar, mainly made up of an older crowd between 40 - 60yrs.

She was telling them about facebook, linkedin, blogging, starting your own site, keywords and their useage etc. It really took all I had to bite my tongue and not throw this lady under the bus on some things she was advising.

What's worse is, she was priming them to sign up for her more advanced seminar at $900 plus a head, and they were lining up, more than ready to fork out that much cash to attend here "advanced" seminar.

It was a joke that this lady could charge so much and they were more than willing, but just proves how clueless most folks really are and what their willing to pay to learn more.

To tell you the truth, it's kind of amazing how much we take for granted, as far as our extended knowledge on the subjects and what their perceived value is to the next guy.

I say go for it, you'd probably be surprised.

Hello? People love to listen to / pay for unorthodox things. It feeds their dreams. Gives them a feeling that they can beat the big guys. They don't wan't to hear how slim their chances are defeating that PR7 competitor, they already know it.

That second speaker turned a great, encouraging seminar into a boring stuff worthy of eggheads attendance only.

I hope you recognize the sarcasm
The fact that real lectures on economics, programming, psychology are free (you don't have to be a student to go to them), and yet many prefer to pay thousands to listen to unprofessional nonsense, illustrates very nicely how to make money from nothing.

Got to say I've been thinking of starting something like this for local business people. Reading this just gives me a lot more encouragement.

I hope you did not pay to attend such crappy business training... :O

Exactly what Jay101 said, I take for granted everything I know when it comes to IM in general. I'll talk to some people and just try to explain the littlest thing about it and they stare at me like im some sort of computer nerd.

Oh wait...

I was given a free ticket to the search engine strategies conference this past year. I'm gonna go with 90% of the speakers there were only there because they gave the sponsors some free business or something. Most of the speakers were completely worthless.

Nope it was entirly free lol, seems to be a regular thing too, might see if i can go from time to time to show them up

It was really shcoking to me though, i've been to the business re:fresh thing in london once or twice and was really impressed by the level of knowledge some of them displayed (others were complete morons though...), but this local business group was seriously shocking!

I'm actually teaching a workshop of my own at the end of next month, and I was a little worried before, but if thats the level of competition I'm up against I seriously think I'm gonna clean up (and I only really consider myself to know the basics ).

I kinda wish I'd taken their business cards so I could check the page rank of these supposed experts in their field

Ok, I've taken a look at a few of the companies who were giving advice at the seminar, and two of them are PR0!
Who's gonna hire an SEO company with 0 Page Rank?!?!?!

Bizarely the bloke who was giving the shitty advice has a PR3