Come See Us At SES NYC

If you’re attending SES in NYC right now, stop by and say hi to our crew!

Jerri, Steve, Amanda & Matt (not pictured) will link you long time...
Jerri, Steve, Amanda & Matt (not pictured) will link you long time...

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SES New York City 2010

pdf_iconIt’s a new year and we have quite a few conferences lined up for 2010. Of course, there are the usual staples of each year, like PubCon in Vegas, but we’re switching things up a little this year. New places and maybe a few new shows we’ve never done. It’s not all set in stone, but I can tell you we will be attending SES NYC (Search Engine Strategies in New York City) on March 22-26. The expo hall will be the 23rd and 24th.

If you are in the area or want to attend this show, we have a discount coupon you can download and use for purchase online or at the show. If paying at the show, print it and take it with you. It’s a 20% discount off of a Conference Passport or 20% off of a 1 day pass. Incisive Media, who puts the show on, doesn’t give discounts on passes, other than early bird registration, so this is a pretty hip thing they do for their exhibitors, which we get to pass on to you.

If buying your pass, or passes online, the code you need is 20LINK. This will make all of your wildest dreams come true…if those dreams consist of getting a discounted pass to SES NYC 2010! Or you can click the PDF icon above to download the actual coupon to print or save and if you have any troubles with the format use this pdf converter.

We hope to see you in wonderful New York City.

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Pubcon: The after-party

Drinks, new friends, dinners, tattoos, meetings, old friends, situs poker online tournaments, fake mustaches, and a few more drinks. That about sums up this year’s Pubcon show in Las Vegas.

I’ll be the first to admit that as soon as we rolled into the exhibit hall to set up our booth, I was underwhelmed. By my count, there were only 19 exhibitor displays in total. I was thinking to myself, “Wow…this one could be hard to justify.” It’s expensive business flying 6 people out to Vegas, after all, especially when you consider the way we tend to do things around here. But leave it to the salty-dogs of Pubcon to come through once again. Brett, my apologies for doubting you. Sure there might have been fewer exhibitors, but that sure didn’t seem to slow things down for us. All in all, I’ll have to say it was a great success yet again.

Wednesday was fantastic. We connected with friends and associates from the past and a bunch of new ones, too. I enjoyed chatting with everyone that came by the booth and for those of you that came to our happy hour at The Wynn…thanks for showing up! I hope you had as much fun as we did. I heard I had an especially good time. (Just kidding…I remember everything. Seriously.)

Things seemed to slow down at the show on Thursday, but that’s usually the case on day 2. Thursday night, however, we (err….most of us…I couldn’t make it) hooked up with the legendary DK to sponsor the bar tab at his annual Texas Holdem Poker Tournament, which I heard was a lot fun. Always great seeing you, bud. Congrats to the sbobet winner, whoever that was. I also heard we had some rather large “branding opportunities” as a result of our sponsorship…

Friday was epic. The big networking event was at a pretty cool pub in the Monte Carlo and, as usual, it lived up to its’ billing. It seemed like everyone from the show was there…all in one room…and conversation (and beer) flowed easily. It was there that we decided to crank things up a notch and put on our fake mustaches. There are certain folks in the industry that frown on some of the services we provide so we thought it best to be “incognito.” Or even more accurately, we just enjoy being silly and that we were. My hat is off to the girls on our team who played along. You wore them well Christine, Robin, Jerri & Amanda! We definitely got our share of strange looks, didn’t we???

But wait…we’re not done yet. Friday sort of flowed right into Friday night where we found ourselves enjoying an incredible dinner at N9NE at the Palms. It was awesome, but not as awesome as our two newest inductees to the InkWorth Hall of Fame. Yes, that’s right, there are now at least 6 people walking the earth with our logo forever stamped on them. And these two are women! Jerri and Amanda, we love your spirit and those tats look fantastic. I think we should start getting bulk discounts at Hart & Huntington! All of our pictures can be seen here on Flickr.

Don’t ask me what happened after that because I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that we made our flight on Saturday morning and all arrived home safely.

See you in March for Pubcon Dallas!

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PubCon – Vegas – 2009

PubconAnother year, another trip planned for Vegas to attend the popular PubCon show.

If you’ve been before, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s the “old dog” show, meaning all of us that have been around for years always make a point to attend this show because the networking is better than any other show you’ll attend.

We were given data showing trade shows this year have averaged a 30% drop in attendance, but something tells me PubCon probably will be kicking it as usual.

If you plan on going, we have a couple discount coupons available:

  • 15% Discount – li-81315 (only 9 of these left)
  • 10% Discount – li-21710

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LinkWorth Exhibiting at DMA 09

dma09-banner

LinkWorth will be exhibiting at the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) trade show, October 18-20. The actual conference goes from October 17-22, in San Diego, California. We’ll be at booth #2943 in the online marketing section of the exhibit floor.

We would like to invite our customers to attend this event where you can learn new marketing best practices through the many partners and vendors. They also have over 150 educational sessions covering every aspect of direct and interactive marketing, dozens of targeted networking events, keynote speakers including Martha Stewart, and over 500 exhibits.

If you would like to attend, we can currently offer a $300 discount PLUS 1 free night hotel stay for those that register for the full conference. To take advantage of this awesome discount, register through this page and be sure to use the discount code “AN610“. This offer expires Friday, September 25, so hurry to get this deal before it ends.

If you prefer to just attend the exhibit hall only, we have many “Preferred Exhibit Hall Passes” on hand to give out to those interested. Or you can go to the normal register page and use the discount code: DMSD9. This discount gives you a $250 value for only $30.

Please stop by our booth if you make it out!

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LinkWorth at SMX East – NYC

smxe_120_240_weWe’re making the trip again to New York City for SMX East. It was a good show last year and we’re coming back for more. The dates are October 5-7.

If you are thinking about going and haven’t registered yet, register with our SMX discount coupon:

smx10linkworth

New York City is the center of it all. Millions of people in a small area and the shows always turn out great. If you’re in the area, or within a quick train or cab ride, do yourself a favor and make it there. If you make it there, stop by our booth and say “Hi”. We’re always happy to see familiar faces and/or names.

The venue is:

Jacob K. Javits Convention Center
655 West 34th Street
New York, NY 10001

For more details on the agenda and everything else around it, visit the Search Marketing Expo East site.

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Ad:Tech San Francisco – Next Week

adtech_sf_logo_small1Ad:tech San Francisco is starting up next week (April 21-23) with the actual exhibit hall being Tuesday the 22nd & Wednesday the 23rd. LinkWorth will have a booth on the 2nd floor right as you walk in the entrance, booth 2545.

This is our first trip to one of the ad:tech conferences. We’ve always chosen other conferences in the past but this year we wanted to give it a shot. We hear it’s one of the busiest, as far as foot traffic, and also a really good time, but we’ll see how things go.

If you’re attending, please stop by and ask Jeffrey about his hair.

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Quest RV – Hall of Shame Award

It’s taken us weeks to build up to this one. In our last post, we were so full of excitement…so optimistic…because we had rented this awesome RV to take our employees down to Austin for the SXSW show. Well, excitement and optimism wanes quickly into pessimism and dismay in this post.

I’ll start from the beginning and try to be brief. We rented what we thought was a killer RV from a reputable RV rental company, Quest RV. It was a 39 foot, 2007 Ventana and judging by looks alone, this thing was PIMP. Unfortunately, pimp turned into to pimp-slap 45 minutes into our journey. Yes, that’s right…just south of Dallas the son-of-a-bitch broke down. The dashboard lit up with warnings like “STOP ENGINE” and alarms were sounding. You know, the kind of stuff you don’t exactly want to see when driving a $300,000 vehicle. (Not to mention, driving something that big isn’t exactly what we were used to…so we’re a bit nervous to begin with.) So, we pull over and call Quest who says they’ll send help. They did and 3 1/2 hours later, we’re back on the road.

Ok, so yeah, we’re off to a bad start. It was Friday the 13th. Maybe that had something to do with it. Who knows? Oh well, press on, right? This is still gonna be a blast. Until…OOPS! 5 miles later, the alarms sound again with the same warnings but we’re told to keep going and that it “should be nothing.” Awesome. Was it “nothing” last time, too? Glad we burned a 3 1/2 hour segment for “nothing.”

We do finally make it to Austin, we pay our $130 a day to park, we do our trade show. On Sunday Ron and I bail from the tradeshow in the RV to take our families camping in our expensive motor home for a couple nights…leaving our employees to run the trade show. This part of the trip went off without a hitch. Then we go back to Austin to pick up crew #1 to return them to Dallas where crew #2 anxiously awaits so we can bring them back down to Austin for the second leg of SXSW. We’re rolling now, right? Wrong.

On our way home, we make it as far as Hillsboro, which is about an hour south of Dallas. I pull in to a truck stop to fill up with diesel and mistakenly turn off the engine. Why is that a mistake? Because the RV won’t start again, that’s why. Turns out the push-button transmission is now on the fritz. So we’re stuck there AT THE GAS PUMP for 5 hours while Quest RV brings us a different RV. This completely screws our schedule and crew #2 had to drive down to Hillsboro to meet us so crew #1 could drive themselves back to Dallas. BEATING! (And thanks to all of the LinkWorthers that helped us through that!!)

To everyone’s credit (except mine and maybe Ron’s), they all took it in stride and were super-excited to be heading down to Austin in this nice rig. Ron takes the wheel for this leg and no sooner had we gotten on the highway before an entirely new set of alarms lit up the dashboard like a Christmas tree. Seriously??? Are you joking??? Another call to Quest’s weary service tech assures us that this must be nothing and to simply “keep an eye on the gauges.” Wonderful….confidence abounds. NOT!

Again we make it to Austin (although MUCH later than we had planned) and parked the RV. (It does work perfectly while parked, I should add.) We do the rest of the trade show, we pack up the crew and all of our stuff, and we depart Austin. Heading home now, killer. It’s been a long week!

Ahem…we’re approaching Hillsboro again. Guess what? All of our lights (including headlights) begin to grow alarmingly dim. It’s 10pm…we can’t see a thing….and we must pull this f*$#in’ bus over AGAIN. This time, though, we’re not in the cozy bosom of a truck stop. No, sadly, we’re in the seedy confines of a XXX shop’s parking lot. (KILL ME NOW.) Another phone call to Quest, whose number I still have memorized, results in our using a backup power-system on board the RV that “should” get us home without problem. It does. Now for the fun stuff….

At some point in our journey, I put a nasty scrape on the driver’s side of the RV. Not exactly sure how it happened, but it’s there and I am more than happy to part ways with the $1000 deductible for the insurance we had purchased. I just wanted to be done with it. But, Quest felt a little differently. In addition to the deductible, they wish to charge me an additional $2400 for “loss of use” while the RV is being repaired. Mind you, this thing is not out of commission…it’s scratched! It had some scratches when we got it, too, but they sure as hell still let us drive off in it. So, that’s a LOAD OF SHIT, to put it mildly. Did I ask for reimbursement for the 12 hours of our “loss of use”??? No. Hell, I didn’t even ask for an apology, but they were more than happy to slap me in the face with this ridiculous charge.

In the end, we had to split this “loss of use” charge with them in addition to paying our deductible. We’re none too happy and as a result, we have bestowed upon Quest RV a LinkWorth Hall of Shame award.

RV really does stand for “ruins vacations.”

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It is Time For A ROAD TRIP!

Tomorrow (Friday March 13th) we will be loading up and heading to Austin, TX for the SXSW Interactive and Music conferences. It is, by far, the most fun conference we go to each year. You can go and check this to know more about the musical festival.

We have lots of fun things to give away at the booth and we are looking forward to meeting everyone and having a great time.

If you see this coming down the road, throw us your best rocker horns!

LinkWorth Tour Bus
LinkWorth Tour Bus

It’s going to be a ton of fun. We also have day passes to the SXSW Interactive trade show floor. It’s a $75 value, so if you are interested in coming to the floor, let us know and we can hook you up with a free pass.

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SXSW 2009: Shwag Sneak Peek

I’m really, really, really fired up for SXSW in a couple weeks. In fact, our entire company is because the vast majority of us will be there for at least part of it. Last year was our virgin SXSW experience and we pretty much knew the instant we got there that this would become a staple of our annual trade-show tour.

Because it’s Austin, because it’s SXSW, and because there is such a unique vibe to this event, you can’t help but want to do something extra cool for this show. And while last year we did things pretty modestly; I think this year we’re poised to make a bigger splash. For example, we’re not just getting a garden variety hotel room; we’ve rented a block of rooms with an adjoining party suite. We’re not just going to caravan down there or jump on a Southwest flight; we’re loading up the entire staff in a friggin’ tour bus and taking a road trip! And we’re not just handing out the same old shwag at the booth; we’re feeling more SXSW-y and have come up with some cool stuff in order to embrace what this event is really all about.

I won’t reveal everything we have in store, but I’m so happy with the way one of our gimmicks has turned out that I wanted to share it with the whole LinkWorth community. Check these out…
sxsw-pick1 sxsw-pick22

Get it? SXSW? Music? Guitars? Guitar picks???

LinkWorth is ready to rock SXSW. Come see us and pick up a few picks and other surprises…you might even find yourself with some new ink and cold hard cash in your pocket!

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