I was convinced to go to the conference earlier this year when meeting up with Dom, Ray and Jason at the London Affiliate Conference and as a ThinkVisibility virgin I was unsure of what to expect, despite hearing good things about it from other previous attendees.

After a few meetings in Leeds in the day I got to the conference venue, the Alea Casino around 8pm for a few pre-event networking drinks. Apparently it was due to be held elsewhere (as there is usually a pool tournament) but there was a double booking and I would say that another venue might have been nicer for the first night but it was still great to catch up with some old friends and meet a whole different set of digital experts that Leeds & the north seem to be hiding!

The conference itself started bright and early on Saturday and out of all the conferences I’ve been too it was easy to see why ThinkVis is so well talked about – Dom is a fantastic (and occasionally even funny) host who helps everyone get the most out of the day.

My first session was Lets talk about Links, Baby by Distilled’s Paddy Moogan.  Probaly one of my favourite and useful sessions of the day it had a few gems that I took away.  Paddy has already blogged about the conference so head over to the Distilled ThinkVisibility review for more info.   I’ll also be blogging my notes from his session later in the week.

Next was Mind Games: Using Brainwashing, Psychology and Cults to Boost your Conversion rates by everyone’s favourite conversion rate guru, Stephen Pavlovich.   My experience of optimising conversion rates is very old school/basic where things like the size of the buttons are thought to make a difference.   In a very interactive session (despite the lack of Wifi!) Stephen talked more about the way in which the brain works and how it can be manipulated during the conversion funnel.  Again, I took a bunch of notes and I’ll put a separate blog post up about soon.

I missed both Tina’s Performance Marketing session (where apparently she made a cake during her talk!) and Paul Madden’s outsourcing talk as I got chatting to Jason Duke over at Pzyche (who’s product looks very good) – I’m hoping that Dom puts these online at some point though as everything was recorded.

Next up for me was the Twitchhiker Story from Paul Smith.   Nothing to do with SEO but most of the twitters I’ve seen out in the ecosystem have stated it was one of the best presentations of the day.  I won’t write anything about this and suggest that you go and buy the book instead.  I got it a month or so ago and read it in a few days – funny, witty, exciting and as someone who reads a lot I have to say it’s probably one of the best books that I’ve read in a long time (and Paul didn’t even have to pay me for writing that).

The second to last session that I attended was One Domain, One Hundred Days, One Result by Gary Taylor.  Gary was a very good speaker but I have to say that the results from this experiment were a bit of a let down.   He wanted to essentially try working on two different sites.   One new one (3dreadytv.co.uk) that he built and another site which was already established that he purchased for £1.5k (http://www.rottweilers.co.uk/).

At the end of the challenge Gary showed the results from the past seven days.  3dreadytv.co.uk had 125 visits in that period and had generated about 90p revenue.  The Rottweiler site had generated slightly more – about £3.50 via adsense and amazon combined.

The results, Gary suggested, shows that it’s very difficult to establish and make money from a new site and often better to buy one instead.  I’m not so sure this is the case – after all, the Rottweiler site had been established for over 3 years and was only making a very small amount of revenue and at the rate it was going would take quite some time to make it back.   I don’t think that the days of handtyping a domain is at an end just yet!

Finally it was time for Dave Den by Dave Naylor.  Weirdly with all the conferences I’ve been at I’ve not actually had a chance to see Dave speak before and I have to say that it was very, very good.   A number of sites had put themselves forward for inspection before the conference and Dave showed them lots of great tips on how they can be improved.  He’s a very funny and engaging speaker too.

In the conference wrap up Dom also announced a new SEO award, the Jaamit Award, in memory of a previous speaker, Jaamit Durrani who was popular in the SEO community and passed away back in November 2010.

Finally Saturday evening saw a party also held in the Casino.

I was feeling rather rough (which I blame on food poising from the restaurant that evening) but took part in the Charity Poker match and enjoyed playing a little Guitar Hero on the big screen that had been setup.   Funniest moment of the night had to be seeing Richard Kershaw rock out on the drums!  Pure quality!

The next ThinkVis is planned for September and after attending for the first time I’d definitely say that it’s an event which I hope is around for a long time to come and one that I will become a regular attendee of.

Here’s the list – please leave a comment if I’m missing some out that the world should know about, especially UK specific ones. I’ll have a look through them all when I have some spare time and find out if they are all still active (and free).

Prolink Directory
aCotm Directory
DirAll Directory
Free Website Directory
Free Web Directory
Optimize Directory
Increase Directory
Open Link Directory
Cute Directory
The Free Directory
Add Site Free
Best Net Sites
Fresh TV
Info Tiger
Great Web Directory
Klottra
18 and 35
W3Moz
Directory Free
Ablaze Directory
Red Lava Directory
Klottra
Double Directory
Top Dot
Webdirectory Netorado
Add 2Us
Zopso
Bee Directory
Name Directory
WebDir Addsite SubmitFree
UC33
New Concept Directory
777 Media
Directory Slick
Gain Web
Links Guru
Domain Link Exchange
Fat 64
The Web Directory
Creative Agency

Now if I could only submit to them automatically!