My Keynote Speaking Setup for The 2010 SATW Convention

I've been invited to give the keynote address to the 2010 Society of American Travel Writers convention in Germany. This will be one of the most important keynotes I will ever do. From what I can tell, the SATW holds their convention in a different place every year and cities bid for them to come. This actually makes a lot of sense. If you're the head of tourism for your country, wouldn't you want 400+ travel writers to come and write about how great your cities are? The convention is spread across two cities. We will start in Dresden and finish in Leipzig. The final gala dinner will be held at the Porsche factory. It's pretty clear to me that Germany is going all out to give these travel writers a truly memorable experience. For the past few days, I've been working on a keynote that I hope will be up to the standards of a convention at this level. Helping me deliver this speech is an awesome lineup of Apple technology. I'll be delivering the slides using Apple Keynote and a Macbook Pro. To make sure I stay on track, I loaded up Teleprompt+ onto my iPad. Teleprompt+ is an awesome iPad app and one I recommend to every keynote speaker. It has a wide range of speed adjustments and can even record your voice as well. I'll be flying to Germany this Thursday and speaking on Saturday. Wish me luck!

Social Bookmarking the WyzoMarketing Way Internet marketing takes on many different forms, but just about all of them boil down to one very simple and measurable statistic: traffic. Without traffic, no online business is going to find any kind of real success. While it shouldn't be your only tactic, social bookmarking services are a good place to market your site too. Building up those links can be very time-consuming though. That is, unless you turn to the folks at WyzoMarketing to do the work for you. Over the course of this review, we'll take a look at what they, how much it costs, and whether it's worth the investment. Social Bookmark Submission The main service offered by WyzoMarketing is its social bookmarking service. The task itself is very simple and just about anyone with an Internet connection can do it. The trouble is that it takes way too much time. You may encounter some other services on the Internet that seemingly do the same thing, but the vast majority of these use automated systems and other kinds of software to perform the actions. This is not the case with WyzoMarketing. They submit your links manually. By doing so, it is less likely that the submitted links will be rejected or marked as spam. WyzoMarketing employs a staff of ten people dedicated to this task and they guarantee that the submissions will be completed in no more than 48 hours. And yes, they work on weekends too. Where Do My Links Go? Part of it has to do with accountability, but WyzoMarketing will send you an Excel spreadsheet containing all the social bookmarking sites and profile URLs where your link has been submitted. It's up to you how you want to use this service. You can submit your blog, video, specific blog post, web 2.0 property, or any other kind of site. Listed on the website description of the social bookmark submission service are such sites as MisterWong.de, Slashdot.org, Reddit.com, Digg.com, Tumblr.com, Blinklist.com, Multiply.com and InvestorLinks.com. Looking through the sample report that was sent to me for the purposes of this review, I also see quite a few international TLDs on the list. I see Russian sites, French sites, Serbian sites, Chinese sites, and more. It's quite the variety. How Many Sites Get My Bookmark? For the main social bookmark submission service, WyzoMarketing offers two packages. The smaller of the two gives you 300 backlinks from "high quality social sites." That's quite a lot. If you want to bump it up to the next level, there is also a package with 600 social bookmarks. Pricing depends on the number of URLs that you would like to have submitted. There is a discount with additional volume. If you submit just one URL to 300 social sites, it'll cost you $9.90. That's quite cheap considering how much time it would take you to do the same work yourself. Send more than two URLs to 300 sites and it'll cost you $7.90 each. In addition to the social bookmark service, WyzoMarketing also has a social account creation service and an adult social bookmarking service. In its entirety, WyzoMarketing has quite positive feedback on forums like Blackhatworld and Warriorforum. Is It Worth Your Money? It's debatable how much traffic you'll actually garner from having your links on these social bookmarking sites, but having a large number of backlinks can be helpful for off-site search engine optimization. According to WyzoMarketing, these services can have your site indexed in Google in just one hour. Considering that having your site submitted to over 300 social bookmarking services costs less than ten bucks, it can't hurt to give WyzoMarketing a try. Your time is worth at least that much to you, right?