The Search Doctors delivered a booster shot to SMBs and freelancers

State of Search 2016 was bigger and better than we ever could have hoped for, but one of the stand-out presentations was a Q/A session with Duane Forrester (Bruce Clay International), Wil Reynolds (SEER Interactive, whose keynote we covered earlier), and Zeph Snapp (Altura Interactive), moderated by Sean Dolan (Pushfire). Things got up close and personal as the panelists each shared their journeys toward building their brands and businesses, while delivering candid, meaningful advice as to how the audience could do the same.

But back to the beginnings – did you know Duane started out as the guy who crawled behind ATMs to fix them back when banks first started rolling them out? He remembered one time a lady put her card in the machine and it fell through, and he silently picked it up and pushed it back through without her ever knowing. Zeph used to be a Dippin’ Dots salesman – you heard that right, he used to see the ice cream of the future. And Wil started out as a paperboy, which taught him how to “get out of bed and get the hard work done.” After that, he went to school to be a high school economics teacher!

Nobody likes a dull report…

State of Search has come and gone, but everyone is still buzzing with excitement over the amazing venue, incredible speakers, and killer happy hours. There was so much goodness at this year’s conference, I’m not sure it’ll ever get out of my system (nor would I want it to!), but you’ve got to get back to work at some point. Thankfully, Ryan McLaughlin was there to deliver a phenomenal presentation – Custom Marketing Dashboards in Google Sheets – where he took us all back to school about our reporting.