I thought the rest of this year was going to be smooth sailing as far as public speaking. Boy was I wrong!

Last week I did two presentation for the VISI Data Center 2.0 event in St. Paul. The topic was, "The Truth About Search Engine Optimization" and it went VERY well. Sans the technical glitch with at the beginning that is. I had about 20 companies request a follow up conversation about TopRank possibly providing search engine optimization consulting and about another 20 people requested copies of the presentation.

In two weeks I'll be speaking twice at the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas. One session is about public relations and the media with Robin Liss of CamcorderInfo.com, Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR and David McInnis of PRWeb/Vocus.

My presentation will focus on combining press release optimization with the new media press release and social media. I will also talk about using blogs for PR.

The second session at Pubcon is an open panel called, "News and SEO Bloggers Forum" with Mike McDonald of WebProNews, Barry Schwartz (RustyBrick) of SERoundtable and Search Engine Watch, Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz and Andy Beal from MarketingPilgrim. This should be a fun one since we all know each other somewhat. At least I know all the other speakers.

I will be brining two of our Account/Project Managers (Karen Sams and Jolina Pettice) to Vegas for Pubcon as well so it should be a good trip.

In 6 weeks I will be participating on a panel at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago that deals with Social Media Optimization. Other panelists include: Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, Andy Hagans and Todd Malicoat - all of them are very accomplished at using social media to drive traffic.

Thomas McMahon from TopRank will be coming to SES Chicago and possibly another member of our team, Amie Krone.

2007 is wide open so I guess we'll see. Hopefully it will include more specialized DMA conferences as well as an appearance at Ad:Tech. We'll see.