Photo Cred: DK

UPDATE: The 2009 Elite Retreat is now accepting applications.  I’ve already signed up, and seriously can’t wait to go again.  If you’re interested check out the site now.  It’s more than worth it.

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Justin’s Elite Retreat Review

I posted a few months ago that I was planning to attend Elite Retreat (aff link) this week. It’s got a $5k price tag, which I think is great because it weeds out all the people who aren’t serious. Everyone coming to this conference wants to make a real change in their business and their lives so it was an awesome group of people to be around.

The speakers at the event were awesome and they really went out of their way to help. The guys leading it were Brian Clark, Aaron Wall, Neil Patel, Andy Liu, Jeremy and there was a special segment by Guy Kawasaki and Matt Mullenweg. Some of the speakers had full presentations prepared and then did a Q&A. Some of them stood up and just spoke about whatever was on their mind and then took questions as they went along. It was a nice mix and I learned a lot from the speakers. I’ll go over some specifics…

• Brian – He was a HUGE help to me. Prolly more so than anyone else at the conference. I told him a bit about my new site and he pulled me aside the first day and went over a bunch of frameworks and business model setups with me that would set the foundation for our business. If you dont know Brian yet, he runs CopyBlogger.com and has had some great success with membership sites, joint ventures, affiliate marketing and I’m assuming consulting as well. My new fitness site is going to be a very similar business model to a lot of his sites and he was able to really relate to what I was doing. He opened my eyes to the idea of joint ventures, which I think will be money when we launch new projects.

• Aaron Wall – I’ve been reading SEObook for the past year or so now and have always thought Aaron had the best search marketing blog out there. His search knowledge is amazing, and he tests so many things that he really knows specifics when he talks about SEO. I think the biggest thing I learned from him was promoting 4-5 pieces of great content on your site to draw links. He does really well with the tools and guides on his site which draw him massive amounts of links.

• Neil Patel – Neil is the social media guru. He was a bit haphazard with his presentation, but he really opened up my eyes to the power of social media for gaining links. Some of his specific YouTube and Facebook examples were pretty startling and I got some great traffic driving ideas from him.

• Andy Liu – I knew nothing about Andy Liu before the conference. He’s the CEO of BuddyTv.com, and one of the smartest all around people I’ve ever talked to. A lot of the guys in online marketing are very smart in online marketing but when it comes to other business areas they’re lost. Andy is a flat out genius when it comes to all areas of business. He really made me see the value in being analytical and testing stuff to no end. I’ve never been into testing ideas, but it’s amazing how big of a difference testing can make in your business.

• Jeremy – Shoe talked a lot about his new project Fighters.com. It’s gonna be a social network(ish) type site for mixed martial arts. There’s some big competition in the MMA space, but knowing Jeremy’s past success he’ll make this project an industry leader within a year or two. Jeremy helped me a bit one on one when we were talking about my new fitness site. He gave me some great ideas for viraling our videos on YouTube and driving traffic to them.

• Guy Kawasaki – Guy talked a bunch about his new projects Truemors and AllTop. He’s one of the best public speakers I’ve ever seen. He really has that engaging charismatic type personality that’s easy to get sucked into. I asked Guy a question about how he’s developed so many benficial relationships over the years, and he really gave a good answer which went into depth about how you really just need to care a lot about other people and help them all the time. If you help people out, they’ll be more than willing to help you down the road. Being the slight narcissist that I am, this was a wake up call for me, and I’m really gonna start actively working at being more like Guy in this sense.

• Matt Mullenweg – Matt is the creator of Wordpress. He’s a pretty smart kid, and I think his best quality is his passion for open source. He really loves the wordpress brand and he has a real zest for helping other people. It shines through in his love for Wordpress.

Those were all the guys who spoke at the event. I took a lot away from the 1 on 1 sessions and the site critiques from everyone on the panel. Some things I never thought about with design and how people use a site were brought up by Brian and Aaron a lot. Both of them really seem to understand site architecture and how it affects the user. Thats a wrap on the speakers. Overall it would have been worth it had we just had the speakers there, but add to it the networking I got to do with the other attendees and it was definitely worth it. There were some absolute baller attendees there. Tons of guys were pulling middles 6 figures every month from a wide variety of stuff that ranged from affiliate marketing to membership sites to PPC to e-commerce sites. It was pretty impressive to say the least. Here’s a few of the guys I got to know pretty well…

• DK – He helped with the conference and was in charge of getting anything the attendees needed. He runs a San Diego chiropractic clinic and has been working to drive traffic through Google. He ranks #1 for the term, so he must be learning. I got to talk to him a bit, and I think he has some cool conference ideas in the works.

• Harrison – This is the 15 year old affiliate marketing phenom. Yeh thats right 15. Lord knows I wouldn’t have been mature enough or even close to smart enough to run a business at 15, but he definitely is. Funny dude too…

• Jeremy H – Jeremy used to do SEO and PPC for big corporate companies. Now he runs his own search marketing company and seems to be doing very well. He was a very cool guy and also the first guy I’ve ever met to crash his own plane.

• Arjun (AJ) – AJ’s one of the big dogs behind AffiliatePrograms.com, PAP and CAP. He’s only 21, but he’s doing some big things along with his partners. It was cool to talk poker affiliating with him and hear some of the big plans they have for all 3 brands. They have some great ideas rolling out in the future.

• Scott – Scott makes information products for the IT sector. He knows a lot about getting DVDs and CDs produced so I’ll be droppin him some emails when I get that part cracking on my new site.

• Slaven – This fella is a badass at PPC. Ive never done any PPC before, and Im planning to with my new site, so I think Slaven will be a great help when I have some questions on more advanced stuff.

• Brian M – Brian was a fellow Columbus guy who’s working full time right now, but he has some big goals for the future that entail working for himself. Right now he runs a Black celeb blog which I think has potential to be a great niche if he wants to elevate it into an “African American Gawker” type network.

• Zac Johnson – Zac has a pretty well known affiliate blog out there right now. He put up one of his sites for critique and to get some ideas from the panel. It was a MySpace layout/widget/picture type site that’s done well for him, but he said it’s been sitting stagnant for a while, and now theres things out there like RockYou and Slide that are taking the space over. Zac’s got a pretty big network of sites right now, and his blog is very solid. I highly recommend checkin it out…

• Giovanna Wall - Giovanna is Aaron’s wife. She told me how they met and it was though SEObook which I have to say is pretty cool. I talked to her a bit about SEObook and how they are doing with the transition to the new membership training site. It’s taken a lot of stress off of Aaron, but the profits are down right now (still makin $50k a month, haha). I told her about my fitness site and she said her and Aaron would be interested in helpin beta test since they both want to get back to working out regularly. I told her we’d be glad to help em out.

Overall thoughts

So was the conference worth $5,000+? Absolutely. There’s tons of single ideas that I got from Elite Retreat that will make up $5k in no time. The overall business models that I learned will pay dividends for a long time, and the contacts I’ll have to network with now are all willing to help each other out. I’m looking forward to getting my fitness site up and running and getting some feedback from all of the guys I met, along with all of you guys who read my blog every day… I’m pretty pumped to say the least…. If you have any questions throw ‘em at me in the comments….

If you’re interested in going to Elite Retreat 2009, they’re taking applications now.  I already signed up, so I’ll see ya there if ya come.  This was without a doubt the best choice I made in 2008.  Check it out… (Full disclosure, this is an affiliate link.  I get a cut if you attend.  I’ll be spending $5000 myself to go to the conference so don’t think I’m just trying to make a quick buck promoting.)

-Justin