Two weeks ago, I made the journey to New Zealand to attend the well-known web conference, Webstock. On my first day there, I spotted a man wearing a bright yellow T-shirt which read: Remember me? I met you at Webstock looking for a job.

What a great idea! Here he is, wearing a T-shirt promoting himself in a fun way, looking for a web industry job in the perfect environment — a web conference. Little did I realize, until speaking with Chris, that there was more to the story.

You see, Chris heard about the conference only two weeks beforehand, and traveled from the other end of the globe — the UK — to spend a few days in Wellington looking for a job.

Here’s the story in Chris’s own words:

Hi Chris, thanks for speaking with me. Tell us some background as to your decision to quit your job and travel over 11,000 miles across the world to NZ.

My great-grandfather’s brother, Tom Garratt, who like me was from Liverpool, jumped ship in Wellington and set up a printing business in the 1930s — a business that, I believe, is still run by the Garratt family today. In his way he was a facilitator of mass communication and, I guess, so am I but in a 21st century context; so it feels like there’s a resonance there.

I’ve had family and friends in NZ all my life, and spent a year in Christchurch as a little kid, but I rediscovered the country for myself when my wife and I came over a few years ago on our honeymoon. It might sound a bit cheesy to say we fell in love with the place and the people — but we did, so I will!

Then a couple of years ago, after our daughter was born, we were looking at what we could do if we sold our two-bedroom flat in London. We considered buying a small three-bedroom house a bit further out of London, but then we realized we might be able to come over to NZ and have some real space.

It’s a long way to move — about as far as you can go (the moon’s yet to open for business) — but we thought if we let the opportunity slip by, we’d always wonder about what we missed.

So, you told me that you only heard about the conference two weeks ago — how did you prepare?

We’d been waiting in a queue with the NZ immigration service for quite a while, and knew that if one of us got a job offer over here that should speed things up. So we were just starting to research potential opportunities. My wife, Nikky was surfing around and said, “Ah, it’s a shame you missed that.” She’d found the Webstock site. I realized there were still two weeks to go and therefore it was possible to come over and meet everyone. So I threw together a bit of a personal marketing campaign.

I went straight online and ordered a bunch of T-shirts from spreadshirt.net that read, Remember me? I met you at Webstock looking for a job. As soon as they arrived a couple of days later, I went into my parent’s back garden (as we’d sold our flat!) to take photos of me in the shirts. I was balancing a camera on top of a snowman as I didn’t have a tripod; wish I had a picture of the snowman taking the picture of me! Ah well …

So, once I’d taken the pictures I fired up Photoshop and put together a set of business cards saying, Web monkey seeks job with my T-shirt photos and web address. Then I ordered a big pile of them through moo.com by special delivery. It was getting a bit tight for time by this stage, as I needed to be on a plane a couple of days later. I even had to order myself a new laptop bag and suitcase, as the ones I had were unsuitable for the flight. Fortunately everything arrived just in time.

I had to retrieve my passport from NZ House in London as it was with the immigration authorities and I was up in Liverpool. So I had a mate pick it up and I met him at Euston Station for a Cold War-style handover, on the way to Heathrow on the Friday morning before Webstock. I spent Valentine’s Day in the air and arrived in Wellington looking (and feeling) a bit bemused on Sunday afternoon.

Fantastic! So what inspired your T-shirt and business cards campaign?

I have absolutely no idea! It just popped into my head. The four colors of the cards were chosen because they were the only colors that Spreadshirt had in organic cotton for the T-shirts, and I was trying to be vaguely green.

Although, how I can say that and justify the carbon hit of flying halfway round the world I’m unsure — I’ll have to think that one over. I really wanted bamboo shirts as they’re so comfy, but the European Spreadshirt site has yet to produce them, which is a bit of a shame.

Come to think of it, icebreaker shirts would be the ultimate … maybe one day!

Once I knew I had four different colors I had a quick think about what I could do to tie the card set together. I had a copy of the Beatles’ Help! album with them doing semaphore flag signalling in the snow, and I thought maybe I could do that. I tried to copy their poses, but a friend tells me the cards actually spell “NUJD”, not “HELP” at all!

You’ve been in Wellington for a few days now — how do you feel you’ve been received?

Everyone’s been great! They are really welcoming and encouraging, apart from one lady who said, “I don’t think people are really doing business cards any more.” But hey, fair enough, each to their own. I’ve had a really warm reception, including the weather!

I’d like to say a really big thank-you to the local web community — it’s been a real pleasure to meet you all, and I hope we’ll be working together soon!

Thanks for your time, Chris, and I hope you’ll keep us up to date in your adventures towards landing that job.

This post first appeared as part of Issue 436 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

We’ve discussed Facebook, but there are plenty of other affordable, grass roots-style marketing strategies you can implement to build your business during lean times.

Many online marketing strategies boil down to having the time to work on them. They are often free (apart from the time spent), and so it’s a case of setting aside a block of time every week to work on them.

Here are just a handful of free or low-cost ideas to help reach existing clients and attract new prospects:

Create video tutorials or talks and post them on video-sharing sites. Most of you will have seen the great Will It Blend? video series — they reach out to millions of viewers for a tenth of the cost of a television advertisement.

Post screenshots of your work on photo-sharing sites. A good way to show off your design work is to post screen grabs on sites such as Flickr and the like. You can even make your username your business name or URL. Be careful though, of looking as if you’re spamming, as they all have strict terms of use.

Create an email newsletter. If you’ve yet to do so, I recommend creating an email newsletter to distribute to your clients. Crafting good content and adding forward to a friend tools means they are more likely to be read and forwarded to prospective clients.

Try out contextual advertising. Services such as Google Adwords allow for low budget, short-term, pay-per-click advertising, which you can trial and then track the results.

Spend time understanding SEO. Spending time on search engine optimization can dramatically increase your ranking and have a considerable effect on prospects making contact with you.

Then there are offline efforts as well:

Try asking for (and rewarding) referrals. Ask existing clients for leads, and reward them with a bottle of wine or movie tickets. Simple gifts like these make your clients feel appreciated, and helps to maximize your marketing efforts.

Become involved with public speaking. Offer your services to local business and industry groups, or hold your own talk at the office or nearby conference facilities, and invite everyone you know to attend.

Best of luck with the above ideas, and I wish you plenty of success!

This post first appeared as part of Issue 434 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

In a recent Tribune, I suggested looking at Facebook Pages as a free marketing medium for your business. Love or hate Facebook, it will be around for a while yet, and it’s very likely that many of your target audience are already on there. So how do you best leverage Facebook for your business?

Facebook have a few tools available for you to use the platform as a marketing medium. Firstly, the more traditional advertising system, where you pay for impressions or actions on text-based and image-based ads. The level of reporting and targeting is advanced; you can build a campaign to target only those who list certain interests (such as small business), or meet specific demographics (females, aged 25-40 in Canada only).

Then, there’s the simple Facebook Share button which can be integrated into your own web site, popular for content-based services.

Then, if you’re up for a challenge, you could use the Facebook API to build your own innovative application that works within Facebook. This does require a certain level of development experience though.

The one I’m focusing on today, however, is Facebook Pages. The Facebook Terms of Use prohibit organizations to have their own profiles, unlike individuals. Your options as an organization are better served with Pages, which are open to anyone to use.

You can create a company page from within your individual profile by clicking on the Advertising link in the footer. By choosing a category, naming the page, and completing a number of fields, your page will be created. You can then share it with others, and they can choose to Become a fan.

As people become fans of your organization’s page, it appears within their News Feed, revealing to the rest of their Facebook colleagues that you have added the page. It then links the page name with your page, driving more people to click on the link and have a look.

This is where your page can win or lose. I suggest that you consider your Facebook page as a micro-site; you should start adding more content to the page, encourage conversation within the discussion board, and ask fans to promote it using the Share feature.

Here are a few examples of how SitePoint Tribune readers are using Facebook Pages as part of their marketing strategy.

OntarioColleges.ca uses its Facebook Page to share details of events (120 events listed at the time of writing), as well as link their find-a-college program using a large graphic in the center of the page. They have also linked YouTube videos and lively discussion on their Wall and Discussion Board. Janice Henshall from ontariocolleges.ca says “With our fan base steadily increasing, we’re hoping that our target demographic (potential college applicants, many who are between 18 and 24 years of age) find it a useful communication tool. Time will tell.”

Chinese nightlife web site, Zhuhai Nights uses their Facebook page as a promotional tool to drive people to their web site. They have many videos (including fan videos) and photos to build rich content within the page.

Mark Clulow from Coos Creations, creators of the site, states “We use the page to generate interest and tell people about events. The most popular feature though, is photo tagging. Tagging people in photos from events we’re involved with lets them know about the site, as well as their friends and family — all in a subtle but effective way. Actually watermarking the photos with Facebook has proven very successful at dragging people over to our site.”

Chicago web design business, Addicott Web has a Facebook page to market their services to a wider audience. Hirsch Fishman from Addicott has a few great ideas on how to better utilize Facebook Pages for web professionals.

“I set up a Facebook page because I wanted to directly market my web design business to everyone I know on Facebook. The vast majority of my clients come through word of mouth, but only a few of these know about my web site. Then there are people where it’s been years since I’ve spoken to them so they’re unaware of what I’m up to now. Posting on the Facebook page allows for these situations — and help fuel the word of mouth and referrals that might come my way.

Overall my goal has to been to create a well-rounded marketing piece for Addicott Web on the Facebook page. As much as my web site serves that purpose, if people don’t visit, then it’s pointless. With so many people on Facebook, it seemed the perfect approach.

What am I doing in particular on my page?

I import my RSS feed to it, so that all blog posts display on Facebook as soon as I post them on my blog.

I’ve been using the photo gallery as my portfolio and in the caption of each web site that I feature, post the complete project details, taken word-for-word from my actual web site.

I’ve asked some past clients to post positive reviews of my work.

I specifically invite new clients to Become a fan of my Facebook page so that they can see all of this information (if they’ve yet to look at my web site).

The most positive aspect of all is that it’s given me a potential service that I can now offer clients as well — creating and consulting on their Facebook presence as a complement to the web site that I’m creating for them. Being able to offer services like this helps me as a professional, as I can offer clients more than just a web site — and that’s the value proposition of my business.”

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions, Janice, Mark, and Hirsch. It’s great to see businesses using a variety of methods on their Facebook Pages to increase their fan base and interact with audiences.

I trust this article has you thinking about how better to market your organization using Facebook Pages — best of luck with it!

This post first appeared as part of Issue 434 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

I’ve previously written blog posts and articles about some ethical dilemmas that face small businesses, particularly web companies, in the last few years, such as my posts about design theft particularly around websites copying our work. There’s another topic that I’ve now had some personal experience with; using trademarks or business names in advertising on Google results.

But first some quick background for those less web savvy. Google has a great system called AdWords, which we’ve worked with before, having used it for advertising both our business, as well as on behalf of a number of our clients. Basically, you can define what keywords and phrases you want to display your advertisement under, and craft an appropriate advertisement to show.

It’s all pay-per-click, so it’s low risk (if you know what you’re doing!), and can be great for short term promotions and the like.

Now, in the past, we’ve had clients become excited when you say they can choose the phrases the ad will appear under. For example, in our own case, we’ve used terms such as ‘Web design perth’, ‘website design perth’, ‘perth web design’ and so on.

It doesn’t take long for a few people to realise that you could do the nasty on a competitor by using their trademarks, business or product names as your target terms. Thankfully, this is where Google has a fairly good trademark policy in place. Not only is it unethical (which our clients normally quickly admit), it is against Google AdWords policy.

I’m not a lawyer, but it looks like it could be against Australian law, as claimed in that famous case a few years ago ‘Trading Post v ACCC‘, where the ACCC said that using a competitor’s trademark to target AdWords campaigns was considered misleading conduct.

So it came as somewhat a surprise recently to find out that two of our fellow Western Australian web design companies are doing the same thing to us.

See the screen grab above – when you search on Google Australia for “bam creative” you’ll currently see two advertisements targeting a trademark and company name which Bam Creative Pty Ltd owns.

On one hand, it could be considered flattery they’d go to all that trouble to target people searching our company name, however on the other, people could say it could be called devious, misleading and possibly, illegal.

What do you think? Is this sort of advertising fair game or not? Comments welcome!

Tonight I had the great opportunity to speak at the City of Stirling’s ‘Mind Your Arts’ workshop series.

It’s always great to impart some knowledge, and although I seriously dislike the term ’social media expert’, it was fun speaking about how artists can use social media to promote their work and network with other creative minds.

The slides are below. Although they aren’t as useful without the verbal cues, I hope that you find something useful in them. Thanks to the team at City of Stirling for inviting me, and for those who attended; thanks for making me feel welcome and for all the great questions!

The websites I mention in the talk were

Flickr
YouTube
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Blogging (such as Wordpress)

If you attended the workshop, I hope to see you trying out social media soon!

Christmas is just around the corner, and whether you celebrate it or not, the event happens to coincide nicely with the end of the calendar year — a great time to thank those who have supported your business over the last twelve months.

Not only that, but a well-timed Christmas message may end up reviving a waning business relationship. Given we’re halfway through November, we’d need to work fast to meet printing and postal deadlines, or alternatively, build an electronic Christmas message, if that’s preferred.

Let’s look at options. The traditional Christmas card is still well received. There are a few rules with these, though:

• Try to opt for your own professionally-designed company Christmas card, so that it’s unique to your business (and there’s no risk of a competitor sending the same image!)
• For the personal touch, hand-sign rather than print signatures in the card.
• It’s better to send earlier rather than later. Leaving it until December 20th isn’t a wise move. Ideally, the card should arrive in the first week of December.
• Cards should fly solo, rather than share the envelope with extra marketing material that makes the card less genuine.
• It’s fine to include a logo, but keep it small or put it on the back so that it’s not the main focus.
• If you must resort to off-the-shelf cards, buy them through a charity who uses the profits to help others.
• Consider a different concept, such as the products MOO offer, with varying shapes and an individual touch.

Electronic cards are great as well, and are considerably better for the environment. They do, however, suffer from low open rates, and may get read by people other than those it was actually intended for. Indeed, it’s possible less people will see it, compared to the paper versions which tend to sit in office reception areas, being read by all in the weeks leading up to the break.

If you do send an ecard, consider using email campaign software; it can provide a text version if required and track email open rates. There are plenty of options available on the market.

When designing that email card, consider your audience wisely, as well as the technical limitations of email. To see which email clients support what CSS, have a gander at the Email Standards Project web site.

Prefer to send something more substantial? There’s always the usual bottle of wine or gift hamper. Perhaps consider trying some branded promotional gear, such as USB flash drives with your logo, or similar.

Make sure though, that you either buy quality products or forget it. There’s nothing worse than spending all year building a reputation for quality, only to damage it by sending some cheap pen that never works, or has your logo printed badly on the side.

It’s unfortunate, but clients will remember it — more often than the times you worked all night to get a web site live for them.

This post first appeared as part of Issue 422 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

The great thing about writing your own book, is when it comes to reading other books, you have a new found appreciation to what effort has gone in to create what you’re holding.

There’s certainly some effort put in on SitePoint’s latest title, Online Marketing Inside Out. Two authors, Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley collaborated on this tome; their upbeat, personal styles intertwine fluently, and certainly not disjointed as you may expect when there’s two writers involved.

Pitched at business and website owners who are looking for the knowledge to promote their services or products online, this book is a great starter for those without intimate knowledge of traditional marketing techniques, or who don’t have a decade of social media and web development experience under their belts.

The 210 page colour book is divided into nine logically grouped chapters. Chapter one outlines the changing face of marketing; it covers the basic reasons why organisations can’t ignore online marketing as part of their mix, and wraps up with some great reasons why you’ll love online marketing.

Chapter two, ’21st Century Public Relations and Media’ covers the modern Press Release, blogs and importantly, how to monitor social media for mentions of you or your product.

The third chapter, ‘Turn Page Views into Profit’ may seem shallow for those hardcore technical types, but I’m sure just like me, you’ll learn something from it. The chapter covers those all important on-site tweaks that you can do, to improve accessibility, usability, browser testing, content, landing pages and testing.

Search Engine Optimisation is covered in chapter four, and is a fantastic read for both beginners and advanced SEO gurus alike. This would be a great stand alone chapter to give web development clients who want to know what SEO is, without needing a PhD.

Chapter five is very interesting, covering Social Media such as micro-blogging, photo and video sharing, social bookmarking, podcasts and more. This is a great guide for those wanting to build a social media strategy.

Email Marketing gets a nod in Chapter six. This takes you from building your recipient list, to creating the content, to designing the delivery (and choosing the method), and even covers those tricky frequency and scheduling questions. Great thing here is the very clear warnings about spamming and buying email lists.

Chapter seven takes us through the topic of ‘Affiliate Marketing’. For those with a clearly affiliate ready business model, this sure looks like an exciting avenue to take. This chapter clarifies what this mystical affiliate world is all about, and takes out the snake oil component.

This book wouldn’t be complete without a chapter on online advertising – here’s where the penultimate chapter eight steps in. Banner advertising, PPC, text links, cost per mille, agency relationships and more are clearly explained.

The ninth and final chapter, ‘Tying It All Together’ does just that. It asks and helps steer your strategy by reiterating what you’ve learnt, how to create an online marketing strategy, setting goals, and then encouraging you towards writing a detailed plan.

Although I found I knew much of the books content already (but then I have years of interest in marketing, both online and offline), it certainly helped polish my knowledge, so the book was still valuable for someone with more than a decade of experience. I also started seriously considering the possibilities of distributing copies of this book to a number of my clients.

Online Marketing Inside Out is a great book for those who want a no-hype understanding on the how and why of online marketing, written by two people who have succeeded in this field. Perfect for the web developer or indeed their clients, this book is easy to digest (I read it easily on a four hour flight), and is the perfect level for anyone yearning for online marketing knowledge, who would be happy without pages of geeky code snippets.

Well done, Brandon and Shayne!

Disclaimer: the publisher of this book also published my book. I was given a PDF copy of this title, however will not see any personal gain from writing this review. I feel no obligation to write a good review, and if I had, I wouldn’t be posting one here.

A while ago, I wrote a post, titled Book promotion on the web, which was a collection of thoughts about how Authors best promote their book(s) online.

I’ve had a few people ask me for more details on this subject, so here are s a few steps you can take when your book is being released (these concepts work just as well for other products as well – don’t just think books).

Start a blog
Ideally, you should buy a domain name, organise some website hosting and install (my favourite) blogging software, Wordpress. Then, choose one of the pre-existing free wordpress themes you can download, or organise a web designer to create your own individual design.

If you aren’t going to go to all of that trouble (remember, you can pay someone to do all of it for you), you can always fall back on wordpress.com, which is free Wordpress hosting, however you won’t have the same control over the back end and design templates of the blog using the latter option.

See my book’s blog as an example of the former, at The Principles of Successful Freelancing Blog

In either situation, it is important that you keep up a frequency that your readers will appreciate, and add real value content (such as excerpts, book signing dates, etc), not just a sales pitch rehashed over and over. Make sure you encourage people to subscribe to your feed, and encourage comments on your posts.

Create a Facebook page
Facebook is much more than individuals – it can be a great place to promote your product or business. Facebook marketing ideas can be found all over the web, however as a start, make sure that you have your own Facebook account, and then visit their Facebook Pages for Business page, which will get you set up with your own book’s Facebook page.

Once you’ve created the page, make sure you upload an image of the cover, and completed as much of the information fields as you can. Add your blog URL, along with any publisher contact detail and the like.

Once you’ve done that, go to ‘Applications’ in Facebook, and install Simply RSS. Once you’ve entered your RSS feed address into this application, it will display your blog post headlines on your Facebook page, increasing the frequency the page is updated, without any additional work for yourself.

Once the page is all polished and ready to promote, politely invite all of your Facebook friends to ‘fan the page’ and consider adding a link from your blog to this page, and encourage people to fan the page. Share the link using the Facebook ‘Share’ button, as well as send individual messages to friends you know who would be interested in the book.

You can see an example of a book Facebook page, at my book’s page: The Principles of Successful Freelancing on Facebook.

Remember to visit the page often, and add new content where you can. There are great stats available to you, which give you a greater insight into who is visiting the page. See the ‘Ads and Pages’ link in your Facebook homepage.

Create a Twitter account
If you haven’t already got a Twitter account, go and grab one. Twitter is a micro-blogging system which allows you to interact in real time with your readers and friends. Search Twitter for existing friends, and don’t hesitate to look for other Authors to connect with.

A handy tool available for Wordpress is Twitter Tools. This Plugin will allow you to notify your twitter followers every time you publish a new post on your blog, and you can even set it up to post your tweets back as blog posts.

Then add further value by joining in the conversation with others on Twitter, however remember the golden rule is be authentic – if you barge into conversations (both online and offline) for the pure purpose of selling copies of your book, you aren’t going to be very well received.

You can see an example of how I use this at The Principles of Successful Freelancing on Twitter. I have a personal Twitter account as well, which I have been using way before the book, which is here: @milesb (feel free to start following me!).

These tips should get you started promoting your book online – there are plenty of other ways to use online social media to market your book, if you’re interested in more, comment below!

In my last post, I linked to many blogs and websites which discussed how to present, both technically and tips on stage presence, etc. However, that’s only half the battle – how do you approach conference organisers, and what are they actually looking for? How should you prepare your pitch, and make sure your presentation is warmly received?

I have interviewed Web Directions organiser, and friend, Maxine Sherrin. Here’s what Maxine had to say, as a web conference organiser.

Hi Maxine, thanks for being able to answer a few questions for me. Can I start with; How do you go about choosing speakers for Web Directions North and South? Is it the traditional Call for Papers or asking around who’d be great, or attending other conferences perhaps?

John and I keep our ears to the ground in the industry right throughout the year. I’ve got a pretty broad collection of blogs I skim every day and I probably find reference to a person or an idea at least once a week that I add to a listing of “things to follow up later when we get serious”. I’d love to swan around the world attending conferences and scouting for talent, but sadly I normally just have to confine myself to watching things like TED Talks online.

While we’d never do anything as formal as a “Call for Papers”, I love it when people approach me with an idea. I just wish they would do so before the program is finalised :)

Seriously though, over the coming 12 months we want to get a lot more community involvement in this process. Without moving completely into Barcamp territory, ever since Mark Pesce’s closing keynote this year, we have been tossing around ideas for how you could produce “The Crowd Sourced Conference”.

So, what makes you typically notice the speakers who you invite?

Two things:

1. Do something interesting and successful on the web
2. Tell me about it

If you then strike me as being articulate and thoughtful on top of that, then you’re in with a very good shot.

Now, of course, the above does beg the question of what “interesting” is. That really does come down to the editorial judgement of John and myself, as influenced by what we hear back from the the concerns community we live in here in Australia. Gosh, I’m starting to sound like John Howard here…..

I’d love to see more Australian web folk find the time to document what they have been working on, and thinking about on their blogs (says she with no blog :). I think there’s a lot of interesting work that gets done, but no one hears about it outside the small circle of people who worked on the project.

In your opinion, what is the most important element for a speaker to get right, in order to be remembered (such as humour, stage presence, technical knowledge, etc)?

Tell the story that only you can tell and it’s almost impossible to go wrong. People love walking away with specific anecdotes they can share with others back at work, and apply to their own challenges. So, get up there and tell us “I worked on Project X. We faced this challenge. All our initial research lead us to come up with Solution Y. But then we realised XYZ because of ABC. So, ultimately we came up with the elegance of Solution Z.” Hearing this presentation at a conference is the best, and sometimes the only, way of learning about these kinds of solutions.

Let me emphasise this point by outlining the corollary of the above. Spend an absolute bare minimum of time explaining generalities or going on about how exciting your area of interest is. Or don’t do it at all. People get (rightly) irritated when they are patronised with a whole bunch of statistics and general comments about how great a particular technology is, or how big a certain sector is.

Stage presence and humour, if they come naturally to you, will be the icing on the cake, but whenever I see a bad presentation anywhere, it’s almost always because the speaker is just regurgitating a whole bunch of stuff that everyone in the room already knows.

There was some widely spread debate last year about how web conferences in particular, still have a heavy male bias in the speaker line ups. Is this something you’re concerned about, or not?

I think the fact that we have always been concerned enough about this to try to right the balance as best we can has more than a little to do with the fact that our events really don’t have the same blokey/nerdy atmosphere that they might otherwise have. We don’t exercise Equal Opportunity or a quota system in any sort of rigid fashion.

However, we do keep a slightly more assiduous eye open for women doing interesting things on the web. By and large men won’t be backward in speaking and writing about and publicising their work (not that there is anything wrong with that!), you just have to put in a bit of extra work and you’ll find women doing interesting things as well. This pays off in that better atmosphere I refer to above.

So, if you could give one piece of advice for conference speakers in the making, what would it be?

Do something cool and rock solid in the next 6 months and tell me about it :)

Any plans you’re willing to reveal about the next conference?

I don’t feel like any themes have emerged as yet content-wise. The biggest thing I am going to hint at now is that idea of participation by the community I speak of above. We’re in the business of providing content of the highest possible quality that people can take back to their workplaces and start implementing straight away.

We’re very different to events like Barcamp because I actually believe a lot of our attendees find that kind of atmosphere and pressure to contribute and participate on the spot a little bit intimidating. However, I do think there is some sort of hybrid event you can create that will harness the energy and expertise of those who do want to contribute and participate while not intimidating those who prefer to be spectators for now.

I hope these points that Maxine have raised are useful, and look forward to seeing more people attending conferences as speakers in the future. Please let me know how it goes for you.

Image: Flower, Puri Saraswati, Ubud, Bali.

After some of the great feedback I had from my recent post, 19 Tips for Public Speaking, I finally got my act together and interviewed a few folks, collated some public speaking tips, and here’s the first post in a series – over 200 presentation tips, 100 templates and themes and other links, wrapped up into one list…

Presentation Tips

• Speaking? Tips. (Mezzoblue)
• Public Speaking Tips by Andy Budd
• Really Bad Powerpoint, and how to avoid it by Seth Godin.
• Public speaking do’s and don’ts (from Lifehacker)
• Death by Powerpoint (and how to fight it) (Slideshare Presentation)
• Tips on public speaking
• Great Presentations by Tom Peters
• Presentation Tips by Garr Reynolds
• Don McMillan: All those PowerPoint Mistakes (Video)
• How to Get a Standing Ovation
• How to Make Your Speaking Easier and More Effective
• Advice for Presentations: It Happens!
• Getting over the jitters before you speak
• Rock Your Presentation with the Right Tools and Apps (from Lifehacker)
• 5 tips for exciting speeches
• The Law of Public Speaking: Positioning
• Plenty of PDF articles, from Communispond
• Conquering your fear of public speaking
• Special Delivery! Tips for Improving Your Humor
• Public Speaking Panic
• PPT – Powerful Presentation Techniques
• Speaking as a Performing Art
• How I made my presentations a little better
• To Done! How To Give A Great Presentation
• 5 Powerful Hacks to Immediately Improve Your Presentations
• Sound intelligent, powerful, polished, articulate, and confident

Presentation Blogs

• Beyond Bullets
• Presentation Zen

Presentation Software

• Apple Keynote
• Powerpoint
• s5, a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Presentation Templates and Themes
Apple Keynote:

• Keynote Theme Park, Free keynote themes
• Keynote Pro: Commercial Keynote themes
• Keynote Adventurer
• Commercial Keynote themes

Powerpoint:

• 720 Powerpoint Templates
• Brainy Betty: Free Powerpoint backgrounds and templates

S5:

• S5 Templates

Stay tuned for some further posts on this subject over the next few weeks…

Image: Beans for sale, Pasar Ubud, Bali.