I just attended Copyblogger’s Authority Intensive last week.
And yes, it’s taken me the whole weekend (Mother’s Day weekend, I might add) to decompress from all the information cramming on the latest and best in content marketing.
The verdict: About 99.5% of the information I was privy to was extremely useful. I loved how the Copyblogger peeps organized the whole thing and the speakers they had for each of the four sessions: design, content, traffic and conversion.
Denver, where the Authority Intensive took place last week
The only part that really wasn’t the stuff about HTML, CSS and other alphabet-soup acronyms about web programming and design that completely mystifies me. Don’t get me wrong – I think it’s important to have a working knowledge of this stuff. You just won’t find me doing the coding to any site, lest I completely mess it up.
But it was certainly time well spent. And because it was quite a bargain, given the caliber of the speakers who attended, the quality of the meals provided and the cocktail parties at the end of each day.
Surprisingly, I didn’t attend any of those after-parties, because the conference took place here in Denver, at the kitschy retro-cool Curtis. I simply just wanted to go home to the hubby and kids (even if I only saw them for less than an hour). That’s the one drawback of attending one of these conferences on your home turf.
While everything about the Intensive defied mere description in learning new content marketing strategies, I will say that only negative was the size of the audience. I felt a little anonymous in the crowd of about 400 to 500.
In fact, with the first speaker Seth Godin, some attendees (including me) had to stand alongside in the aisles. Just about everything he said was some nugget I wanted to write down, but I could only manage to chicken scratch something illegible on the old-school composition notebook. You know, the non-spiral binding kind that doesn’t fold over easily.
Then my feet gave out, and I couldn’t see him or even some of the screen very well. They did have overflow rooms, where I could watch him from a screen and excellent sound system. But it wouldn’t have been the same experience.
I later managed to grab a seat for the other talks, only leaving for the other rooms when I had a little work to do. That was for only two or three of them. Even then, I probably listened to what was being said more than getting anything done.
I’ll have to review his presentation online later. It was that good. Lee Odden, Darren Rowse, Ann Handley, and just about everyone else was a close second.
But I’m not sure how they could scale it down to something more personal. Then they would’ve had to create breakout sessions, which means you could attend some live presentations but missed others. Watching them on a video feed later just doesn’t cut it most of the time.
How good was this conference? Well, I’ve already signed up for next year’s. And if you can manage to make it to Denver a year from now and are serious about your content marketing, you should too.
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