Wednesday a Yahoo! Search Marketing Workshop was offered in Tampa. I attended being that this is my forte, to see what I could learn.

Skipping the morning session (and an additional $200) I arrived for the PM session. Session A was for beginners, an intro to paid marketing if you will. Being on a budget and already familiar with the PPC lingo, I gladly skipped this session.

Packing my portfolio with plenty of paper, brand new business cards, a working pen, and the hotel address I was off. I'd planned on networking as much as possible during the workshop, trying out some networking tips I'd recently picked up. I also wanted to see what I was missing in the paid ad world.

The workshop covered a lot of information: where to buy ads, how to buy them, how to write them, how to land your customers correctly, etc. We covered keywords and sales speak. The case studies were my favorite since we saw the results. Tracking was a great topic too.

We were offered suggested programs for cloaking our high bid from competitors, finding extensive keyword lists, tracking customers, etc. The information flowed well; comments and questions were gladly accepted and asked. There were quite a few key questioners and they offered up legitimate questions. It seemed like a learning experience for them.

Overall I'd rank it a B-. I was really hoping to learn something new rather than what I have experience doing. The second half of the session was more interesting as it included various tracking tools and case studies. I like seeing results and it's a kick back from studying anthropology in college.

The workshop was set as a classroom, a nice classroom, in a banquet hall with separators between our group and the next. Row after row of long tables set with clothes, goblets, and sterling silver (ok, probably not) pitchers full of ice water. Refreshments right outside consisted of Coke products, bottled water, Starbucks coffee and Tazo teas, plus cookies for good measure. A decent spread. A thick pamphlet, reminding me of the photocopied” textbooks" required in college, was offered at the door. This contained print shots of the PowerPoint with notes and extras. A pad of paper and pen were also strategically placed, unlike college you weren't punished for being unprepared.

I did enjoy going to this workshop, checking it out. I don't think I'll be on the mailing list to find all workshops in my area. Mainly this just confirmed all the things I knew I was doing correctly were actually correct. I did get a few resources to check out and an looking into a few mailing lists for updates, other than that it was a way to be out of the office for an afternoon. I do expect many others walked away with a lot more and I'm happy for them. This was a workshop I really could have used almost 2 years ago when starting from scratch as my previous company. I think trudging through it all really made me better understand the workings though so I'm happy to have had the opportunity (and the responsibility) to learn SEM techniques for myself.

If you've been to a workshop, what did you think?

Kristen
President
ContentWorth.com
blog@contentworth.com