After missing the first two Startup Weekends in Boulder (including the first Startup Weekend *ever*), I was finally able to sneak away for a weekend and join in the fun…

Eric and I are both into technology and we love our gadgets, but until recently we really haven’t been that into mobile stuff. (This could have something to do with Eric putting his last two phones through the washing machine…)

IMU wrapped up with presentations on old-school email marketing campaigns and web analytics and both speakers managed to provide meaningful suggestions, tips and tricks for small, medium, and large businesses.

Inbound Marketing University kicked off with two presentations focusing on the fundamentals: getting started with a blog and SEO basics. Both presentations were excellent introductions to the topic and I know that I’ll be using them as quick reference guides the next time someone asks me “Should I be blogging? How do I get started?” Here’s my summary of these first classes…

I didn’t make an actual count of Chris’ mentions/celebrations of other people’s ideas, products, and successes, but based on my rough notes I think he was getting pretty close to his oft stated Twitter goal of 15:1 (their stuff:your stuff)…

Although the information presented in this session was valuable, I would have rather visited the LinkedIn Learning Center and/or the Facebook “About” page to learn more about these topics. Having someone try and walk me through basics and setup steps via PowerPoint is just painful for me. If it’s helpful to you, then maybe you’ll enjoy this one.

David packed a ton of useful content into this presentation, but if you can only see the slides you’re missing at least half of the story. There’s a reason this guy speaks for a living! This was, by far, my favorite presentation at IMU.

The community guy praised others, the marketing guy told stories, and the SEO guy pounded us with data. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised! Rand’s slideshow (below) is packed with helpful information and I know that I’ll be spending some more time digging into it in depth. In the meantime, here are a few of the highlights…

My takeaway from this presentation: The folks at Marketing Experiments really know their stuff and if I ever have a business that needs (and can afford) their services, I would definitely sign up. Other than that, we seemed to spend most of our time breezing through examples without as much time digging into the details (those questions always seemed to be answered with “It depends…”)

Your lead generation efforts have really paid off and you have a full database of people just waiting to hear from you, but maybe not buy from you, not yet. What do you do next? Continue blasting them with email and phone calls? Or, maybe you’re ignoring them altogether? Brian Carrol from InTouch gave us another idea during his IMU presentation – you should nurture those leads through your pipeline.

Welcome to my new digs! I’ve completed my move to Wordpress.org and will be taking down my site at Wordpress.com in the near future.