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Back in 2004, I read an article about how people were profiting from Google Adsense by creating small Web sites that targeted high-value topics and purchasing traffic from Google Adwords. Intrigued, I started what I called my Science Experiment and created my very first site. This little beauty of a site made me $95.96 in its first month.
This site, and a few more like it, became my hobby and distraction over the next 2 1/2 years. As I told friends about it, I boasted that it bought me dinner once per month, then it became a car payment, and eventually grew to become my vacation fund. By 2006, I grossed $20,000 for the year from this little cash machine, though what had been a fun side project to learn more about online marketing had turned into a giant timewaster for me. I would spend hours each day looking at the reams of data I was collecting, but didn't do a whole lot with it.
Then Google really pissed me off.
In November, 2006, they executed what became known as the Google Slap. Without warning or even announcement, all of my Adwords minimum bids shot up to a whopping $10.00 per click! Revenue from my little hobby and cash machine plummeted back down to the middling 3-figure per month range. I though about just throwing in the towel, but I was so mystified by what was happening. After a lot of research, I discovered a guy named Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) who laid out on his blog exactly what happened and how you could get around it.
I was intrigued. All of the sudden, I wasn't just tinkering around, but learning about truly effective online marketing strategies again! I started reading everything this guy had written and started emulating some of his techniques. Just off of what I learned on this blog, I scored my best month to date in January 2007, earning $3,000, mostly still from Adsense. I suddenly saw a very clear path on how to add a zero or two (or three or four) to that number, but still didn't know the nuts and bolts of how to get there. I sent Jeremy a thank you email and offered to pay him $500 per hour to coach me on how to really kick ass in online marketing. He politely declined my offer, but suggested I check out an event he was putting together called the Elite Retreat.
Two Days That Will Change Your Business Life!
Yeah, it's a bold statement and frankly one that lots of event marketers like to throw around. I attended the Elite Retreat in San Francisco last April with what I thought was a lofty goal: turn my $20,000 per year hobby into a $80,000 per year hobby. Accomplishing that would have certainly made the $5,000 tab a very worthwhile investment, but its a far cry from life-changing.
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Well, I have never been more wrong. Thanks to those two incredible days, my life really has changed forever.
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Taking what I learned at Elite Retreat, as well as the relationships I forged via Elite Retreat, I doubled my business every 90 days (or less) last year. I had blown past my $80,000 goal for the year by July 4th and by December was generating over $50,000 in revenue in just one month! Suffice it to say, my online marketing hobby has become a quite formidable and profitable business that continues to surpass every goal and expectation I set for it.
So What Did I Really Learn?
Elite Retreat is about learning the strategies and tactics that are working right now and how to apply them to your business. Look, online marketing is an incredibly secretive world where a few guys at the top have figured out the big keys to success, a handful of us in the middle have some of the pieces, and the masses at the bottom whine on Digital Point Forums about how everything sucks and is it good to get a $0.10 clink on Adsense. Jeremy and the panel of speakers he assemble are the real deal. The are those guys at the top who got there via relentless testing, improvement and re-testing. And they share it all with you: Let's look at exactly how I set up this campaign, this was my strategy and thinking in designing a page this way, this was the big breakthrough that lead me to believe I could scale something 100-fold. Everything you've really wanted to get your hands on is all right there for the asking.
There are four parts of Elite Retreat: speaker presentations, participant site reviews, one-on-one coaching and networking. Here are some the things I learned just at the speaker presentations alone:
- Jeremy Schoemaker simply showed us how to make more money from search engine marketing than you ever thought possible. Know how he gives away more knowledge than anyone on his blog? That's just crumbs compared to what he showed us at Elite Retreat. Every detail was covered - from live campaigns - on how he conceived of them, what he tested, what works and how to really scale things. And here's a backhanded compliment: Jeremy's presentation was probably the least valuable of the entire Elite Retreat.
- Neil Patel has got to be the savviest guy (kid) in social media, period. He just spent his time going through every site in 10 or 15 minutes. "Here's how you become a top 100 Digg member." "Here's how you get 10,000 visitors from Twitter." DURING his presentation I was able to create a brand new Stumble Upon account with 200 friends!
- Aaron Wall spent his time giving a data dump on anything SEO you'd ever want to know. To be honest, I don't do much SEO and had a hard time following him (the SEOs in the audience were lapping it up, though!) However, his simple tip on which paid directories will help get you top 10 search result rankings may have been the most valuable thing I learned!
- Lee Dodd told us about the incredible market for buying and selling Web sites and laid out the exact strategies, techniques and resources he uses make eye-popping profits in just weeks. I literally could not sleep the night I heard his presentation, as I was completely certain that he had given me everything I needed to make a million bucks per year doing this!
- Kris Jones casually went step-by-step-by-step through how you can market affiliate offers via paid-search and make more money than you ever thought possible. See my nifty Commission Junction report at the top of this page? Kris taught me everything I needed to know to wrack up those numbers in 90 minutes!
- Darren Rowse presented an incredibly professional and achievable roadmap to growing your blog readership and making tremendous profits off of them. I knew nothing about blogging prior to this presentation, but left armed with everything I need to be a successful blogger if I ever get around to starting one!
- Guy Kawasaki talked about venture capital and entrepreneurship. He is an engaging speaker, though being a part of that community, I didn't really learn anything new from him about that. Hearing his quest to become a Top 100 blogger was quite interesting, however!
So, all of those presentations took up just half of Elite Retreat!
Next, we did group site reviews where the panel dissected participant's Web sites like a team of expert transplant surgeons. Just imagine having Aaron Wall telling you how to massively boost your site's organic search rankings while Jeremy rattles off a dozen different ways to triple your revenue per page!
Next, it was one-on-one time. Your chance to sit with each member on the panel and ask them whatever you wanted about your sites and business. To be sure, I got more value from some people than others, and frankly the format of this needs some improvement. However, it was just an unparalleled opportunity and one that you will never, ever find anywhere else.
But None of This Was Even The Best Part
Sounds pretty incredible, right? Yeah it was, but none of it compares to the value I've gotten out of Elite Retreat since I attended my first event! Like most things in life, it's the people that make things worthwhile and that is absolutely the case with Elite Retreat.
I've kept in close touch with ten other Elite Retreat participants and we gather each and every week for a mastermind phone call where we talk about emerging trends and challenges and share our expertise and experiences from different corners of the online marketing world. This group is my single best resource for further expanding my business and staying ahead of the increasingly ferocious competition in our market (that may be you, dear reader!) We don't just share the common experience of a two day event, but the desire and commitment to become the very best in online marketing as well as the sanctity of a small and trustworthy group where no topic is out of bounds and every online marketing question gets a direct and thorough answer. These invaluable relationships are the single best value that I've taken away from Elite Retreat.
So, Is It For You?
Well, I've laid it all out for you as best I could. It's a year later and many of the topics and a few of the speakers will be different, but I know that I know that everyone in that room on those two days will be incredibly committed to growing you online marketing business.
Attending Elite Retreat was quite simply one of the best business decisions I have ever made.
The next Elite Retreat is April 3rd and 4th in San Francisco. What will your success story be?
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