Here’s am updated schedule of where I’ll hang out and/or speak in the next months

Now that the really awesome Seo De Janeiro in Rio, Seo Campixx in Berlin and SES in NYC are over,

I thought it’s time to update my event schedule for the next weeks… Looking forward to you meet you

on any of these conferences!

The two top things I’m looking forward to most at the moment is my speaking engangement in Amsterdam

and our SEO Roadtrip which will be a trip with some top notch SEOs to combine the SMX advanced in Seattle, an affiliate bar camp in Vancouver/.ca A TON OF FUN on a luxury RV, some sailing, a beach house on the west coast, and of course the FOUND Alternative conference in San Francisco.

Rio / Brazil	SEO de Janeiro	Feb 18-27	The frickin best event the whole industry talks about read more and only 16 days left
Berlin	SEO Campixx	Mar 6-7	more a BarCamp - looking forward to meeting a lot of german friends and clients – not been to Berlin for 5 years or so!
New York City	SES NYC	Mar 21-27	after two years I decided I have to add New York to my schedule again – after all I met so many great guys in 2007 there that I just can’t miss out again this year again! Looking forward to see you all there, especially at the great IM Charity Party of Todd Malicoat & co
Munich	SMX Munich	April 22-23	a must do event – might even speak there – Rand Fishkin is going to do the keynote …
Amsterdam	A4U EXPO Europe	April 27-28	The best european conference for sure, since the start in 2007 Matt did an awesome job putting this show together! I’m going to speak on advanced linkbuilding and how to find and get those real juicy links in 2009, reveal some of our internal tools and methods… This will be the first time ever I speak on a conference in the online marketing world and SEO scene, altough I did already speak in my last career in IT …
Amsterdam	Amsterdam Affiliate Conference	April 30-May3	The iGaming conference is something relatively new to me but there are a lot of clients, partners, fellow SEOs there, also speaking, so I HAVE to see it (and it’s a perfect match with the A4U and QueensDay in Holland!
Hannover	SEOSEO	May 15	but only for Networking
Seattle	SMX Advanced	Jun 2-3	The classic SMX Advanced and I’m getting there, since we combine this with the SEO Road Trip with a bunch of other cool guys anyway. SMX did drop the “give it up panel” this year, which was THE main selling point for many – so this might really be the last time for a lot people visiting rainy ugly Seattle there (does anyone really like that place?)
Toronto	SES Toronto	Jun 8-10	The SES Torontoe would be a favorite show to visit, especially since I’ve never been to Toronto before to meetup with local marketers. Unfortunately I can’t go there, despite an invite I got in favor of the O’Reilly Found, now Found Alternative Conference
San Francisco	Found Alternative	Jun 10-11	After O’reilly cancelled the original FOUND confernece, some cool old-school SEOs that were supposed to speak there are doing an alternative conference in a barcamp style for Jun 10. It’s a must-be-there because of the small group IMHO
London	Pubcon	Jul 4	Classic PubCon in London
Budapest	Budapest Affiliate Conference	Sep 10-13	I will be speaking at the Budapest Affiliate Conference on Friday, September 11, on 13:30. Have a look at the other SEO and affiliate experts that will speak during the event and the Q&A site about me.
Munich	SEOktoberfest	Sep 21-25
London	a4uexpo London	Oct 12-14
London	SEOMoz Pro Training	Oct 19-20	At the moment it is not sure if I will be speaking at the event.
Berlin	SES Berlin	Nov 23-25	I will be speaking at the event in Berlin and there will also be a link building training day.

In short, no big surprises – the agenda was published ahead of time, and only very few SEO & Linkbuilding sessions were planned for at all. This means all the “usual” high profile SEOs like Greg Boser, Todd Malicoat, Aaron Wall, Jim Boykin, etc. are missing here. I mean literally ALL are missing. Not even not speaking, but also not even here for the networking.

• FACEBOOK – ok, FB is big, and has a lot of potential for targetting ads, but their cheesy booth and the even chessier presentation called “optimizing FB ads for the social graph” was a joke. Literally they had this two college girls out there in front of 3000 people and showed us how to use the self service ad booking form. COME ON! I’m sure NOBODY - nobody – paid 2 grands (over $2000 conference attendee fee here!) to hear this basic crap. Then facebook has a booth with some logos put up and again some cute college chicks. This appears to be the only reason why the booth was so packed with people…

• TWITTER – ok, Twitter is big too, growing exponentially, all sorts of rumours of Google or M$ or some other biggie buying Twitter, and most of all, a great “how to spam Twitter”-Keynote by Guy Kawasaki, who was brilliant yesterday – quote: “If they do it to me, it’s spam, but if I do it, it’s brilliant marketing”… controversial attitude and the right answer “UFM” (you f*ckin moron, or in nice-speak on the panel: Lisa “Un Follow Me” if you don’t like my spam…) Guy gave away some nice tips to and tools that he uses to automate building his twitter account and most impressive, some random crap link about peanut butter stuff he tweeted was clicked on by 200+ people in the next minute or so…

I might be totally wrong, but the overall audience here has become even more corporate, even more agency crowd, even more distanced from the “technical internet marketing” that SEO and affiliate marketing is so much about…

So as expected and once again, the networking and meeting of new or old friends is the REAL value for me here. It once again shows that some talk inbetween the sessions is worth a lot more than a whole presentation made for the masses. We had great dinner at the Spice Market on Monday, have been to awesome russian restaurant and that’s what I believe is the value of the conference for me – and a lot others.

There’s yet another conference day tomorrow, but the expo has already shut down today. I heard from some exhibiting companies that the interest in their product was pretty good (200+ leads) and I’ve seen the expo hall packed all the time. Looking forward to get some insights on how those leads convert.

If you’re interested in reading more details, make sure you follow me on twitter.com/cemper or checkout the pics uploaded to my facebook profile

We got a convertible and spent a great time driving all the way to the parks, had great views, great talks and laughs and almost ran out of fuel at night… even the GPS sucked as it had no detail data about the park, so we went back to the old school paper map to find the fuel station…

All went good and I finally arrived back to the hotel at 2:30, to pack all my stuff, worry about carry on luggage worth of $10k (DSLR Nikon D200, tons of expensive lenses, Sony Laptop) that I’d need to check in (and probably break) and go all the way back to Austria… Fortunately all went good, I could take my carry on with me as ususal.

I uploaded a lot of great pics of that Yosemite Trip to My Flickr Account

As you probably can imagine, spending 15+ hours with great guys like Jim or Dave was a really enlightning experience and apart from a great load of fun we could discuss a lot of SEO and business topics in depth…

I enjoyed this a lot and want to thank Dave and Jim here for that! Cheers Guys!

[img_assist|nid=1067|title=Shawn Hogan Owner of Digitalpoint and Christoph C. Cemper|desc=Shawn Hogan is the owner of the famous DP forums and the hero that went to court against the MPAA for false MP3 download accusations|link=node|width=160|height=130]

Greg Boser at Webmaster Bash getting outranked at the Studio 8 bar by a link spammer

Jake from TrueLocal – Dana from Webmasterradio and Becky from BruceClay doing the Sumo at the webmaster bash 2006