The Digital Footprint Conference can really help you with your business. This is not 100% 3D printing related, but if you are running a 3D print business or are considering starting a 3D print business, this information is really critical and can help you a great deal.
Let’s talk about how we heard about this. Our friend Ken Courtright has a podcast called Today’s Growth. We love it. It is an awesome one. He has the best stories, and he is such a great storyteller. Our favorite thing to do at this conference is hang out in the bar and listen to him tell his stories. We have heard many of these. But now with the podcast, you get to hear them.
Ken is the CEO of The Income Store, which sounds cheesy, I know. The first time I heard it, it sounded like one of those commercials that throws you money on TV. But it is so not cheesy. It’s really cool. He has been in business for over 20 years in helping businesses grow their businesses strategically. The Income Store is a part of it, and Today’s Growth is a part of it. They are hand-in-hand, the two companies. Today’s Growth is the predecessor to The Income Store. Really they are the modern version of helping companies grow their businesses, and it’s all about doing it through income-generating websites.
I want to say that we are not getting paid in any way by Ken. This is not a commercial. This is nothing like that. This is just something you should know about.
Listen to the podcast here:
Digital Footprint, or Our Lack Thereof in the Beginning
I wrote 60 blogs in four years. That’s only on our Hazz Design website. That was prior to last summer. I swear only my father read these blogs. It was frustrating because I could not drive traffic to our website. I tried everything, but I couldn’t do it. We launch our podcast, and traffic starts coming to it, and finally those blogs are getting read. I am finally starting to see the power of various other forms of traffic generation. Then what we start to notice is those blogs are starting to rank on Google, which is interesting. I do some more research into everything I’ve been doing wrong, not keywording properly, all of those things. To be honest with you, I was doing a lot of those things right. It still wasn’t working. I realized it was taking an inordinate amount of time and effort to do this.
Somewhere along the line, I bumped into someone and said, “What I really want is to drive traffic to my website. I have all these great blogs, and no one ever reads them.” They referred me to Ken Courtright. When I was done listening to Ken and his team and they showed us the video of how they make sites rank, which is what they do, they get them to Google Rank.
I want to interject here and say that these people really know what they are talking about. They have almost 700 significantly revenue-generating websites. It’s interesting because I knew enough to be dangerous, and I knew enough to know that the value they were providing was tremendous that I could not keep up and do it myself. I couldn’t do it and run our business at the same time. We very eagerly became partners with them. It has just been a wonderful experience because we have gotten to know the guys behind the scenes, and they are so knowledgeable. They are rocket scientists of the Internet.
But they are not performing any tricks. This is not just about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) although that is important. And it’s not about buying traffic or tricking the system. They have cracked the code and learned what it takes to make valuable content that gets organically ranked properly and ranks above websites from huge corporations and people you would think should have all the traffic.
The interesting thing was that we were the only website that they had at the time that already had an existing podcast. When we came in with our podcast, what we discovered is that our website is ranking faster than any of the other websites they built from scratch. It catapulted up to the level that they usually have when they start it from scratch and hit the six-month mark. We’re hitting that six-month mark way before the six-month period because we already had this heavy, intense content-generating system of our podcast. That’s what I’m going to talk about at this conference.
Tom with Ken and Kerri Courtwright of Today’s Growth
Digital Footprint Conference
This conference is the Digital Footprint Conference. They are experts. They talk about exactly what they do to help make stuff rank. While Income Store and Today’s Growth are businesses that are working with site partners and they have these revenue-generating websites and their primary function is to operate those sites so they rank and get advertising revenue, affiliate marketing revenue, etc., this conference is where they are putting up a large panel of speakers, some from within their company who are subject matter experts in what they do.
Sean Kavanaugh is going to speak. He is a blogging expert. His blogs are amazing. Allen Wilterdink, the COO, is the rocket scientist of the event, and he will speak. Others will be in marketing aspects and design aspects.
The point here is they are at this conference to teach. They are giving openly and freely the information. They are not holding anything back. They will teach the fundamentals of what a website today should be: how it should be constructed, what type of information should be there, what works and what doesn’t, among many other issues.
They have some branding experts there, too. One of my favorite people to talk to is Karen Leland. She is an amazing branding expert, and she has three or four bestseller books about branding. She has more beyond that. She will be speaking there. She has such great stories about the impact of brand and content and the two things connecting.
Karen and other speakers are not employees of Income Store. They are just real experts in their fields. There are finance people and branding people.
Ross Halleck is another branding one. I wrote an Inc. article that featured him. I have to say that going to the conference is worth the wine tasting he gives you. He has this fabulous winery that is such a great brand within itself.
Ross is a great guy. He had a marketing firm in Silicon Valley doing branding for Sun Microsystems and HP and Agilent and all these different companies. He is a very high-level branding expert of premium brands. During that time he worked in Silicon Valley, he bought a winery in Napa at one point, and it was a side gig. Then as he retired from his Silicon Valley firm, he did the winery full-time and built his own brand, which has catapulted to a premium wine brand. He does a great tasting at these events. I’d hope he does. I’m not even a wine drinker, but I would do anything to get a taste of Ross’s wine. It has love in it.
There is also Nick Nanton. He is an Emmy award-winning director, so I’m sure he will be talking about video content. A lot of people who are marketing on Facebook know that.
David Corbin out mentor who kicked us in the butt and got us going, changing our podcast to be more real and energetic.
My absolute favorite person to hang out with is David Corbin. He was our mentor, and he got us kicked in the butt and got us going, changing our podcast to be more real and energetic. He is so influential. Just a day with him really changes your life, and he has a great book called Illuminate, which I love. It’s a very short book, but it’s such an important lesson that you and I have learned over the course of our careers. A lot of times you have to find that negative in order to solve a problem. You can’t ignore it. While I appreciate the power of positive thinking, sometimes you have to shine a light in those negative places in order to fix something fundamental.
Trying to capture this in a nutshell is hard. Digital Footprint is a must-attend conference. Forbes has ranked it in the top ten. It was voted a Can’t-Miss event for 2016. Income Store is an Inc. 5000 category, one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. They definitely know what they are doing. But the Digital Footprint conference, whether you have a business that you have raised a good amount of money for and you have a plan that you’re executing on, or if you are starting something from scratch and you’re boot-strapping it, it does not matter. You can go to this conference and learn so many critical things about how you need to operate your business online to succeed today. They are teaching you the tactics. It’s interactive.
At the last event, they built a website in front of you, including having a marketplace with a lot of affiliate marketing links where people can buy products through your website. They’re not even your products; they are related to your field.
The event is in Philadelphia. It’s in April. It is four weeks away: April 8-10 in Philadelphia. There is a cost to attend the event; however, we know these people really well, and they gave all of our listeners a huge discount. If you go to digitalfootprint.net and go to the bottom of that page where you can buy a ticket, there are three different levels of tickets: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Most people do the Bronze or Silver. Silver has an advance Facebook workshop, which we are really looking forward to.
The Bronze pass is $2,997; the Silver pass is $3,997, but there is a coupon code. On the sign-up page, if you type in capital letters “WTFFF,” and put “Check Coupon,” it takes $2,000 off of that cost. At the entry level, the Bronze pass, which is worth doing, even if you can’t afford to do any of the upper-level ones, is now $997 to attend the three-day conference. It includes meals and all of the learning. It is well worth it. If you are on the East Coast anywhere within driving distance, you can just drive there. We are flying from the West Coast, and you can stay at the hotel. They have a fairly reasonable rate, and you can get the Digital Footprint rate.
We wanted to let you know about it on Business Monday because this is really the thing that has catapulted and shifted our business to so much success. I am so glad that we took a week with them.
The other thing is I am a big believer in learning conferences. I don’t like just motivational speakers. This is the kind where I fill up an entire notebook while sitting there the whole day, and I get all these ideas. Even though I have been to it before, if you are at a different stage in your business, all of a sudden you hear these new things again.
That is the kind of opportunity I want to bring to you guys as listeners. These are the things that change. You guys are listening to a learning podcast, so I think you want to learn something. Hopefully, for those of you who are starting a business, running a business, or doing something online, this might be something for you.
We highly recommend it. Everybody has their own priorities, but we hope that if this is of interest to you, you consider checking it out. There is a video that shows you the highlights of the 2014 event. Well worth it.
Important Links
- Digitial Footprint Conference
- Today’s Growth Podcast with Ken Courtright
- The Income Store
- Karen Leland
- Halleck Vineyard
- Celebrity Branding Agency with Nick Nanton
- Illuminate by David Corbin
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