I’m currently sitting in a hotel room in San Francisco, where I have been decompressing over the last few days with my wife, following a whirlwind week in Las Vegas for New Media Expo, where I spoke on the subject of teaming up with virtual assistants to outsource the bulk of entrepreneurial content marketing tasks – it was a blast!

This was my third time to attend the conference (formerly known as BlogWorld) and my second time to speak.

I thought it would be a good idea to put together this quick post to point out a few highlights, report on my session, and to give a few mentions to those that I got to hang out with, as well as learn from myself.

My Presentation

As I mentioned, I spoke at the event. The full title of my session was 45 Things New Media Content Creators Can Outsourcing to Virtual Assistants to Grow Their Business – a bit of a mouthful, but the descriptive nature of the title seemed to work as I presented in front of a packed crowd in the same room as the Podcast Awards were held in.

The Q&A session rocked and the opportunity to meet so many readers of this blog and listeners of my podcast after the presentation was the real highlight for me – thank you for coming, everyone.

I also gave one lucky attendee the opportunity to win a full service sign-up for Virtual Staff Finder, so that (at any time this year) when they are ready to hire their full-time virtual assistant, they can do so for FREE. The lucky winner was Jason Bellomy from Lazy Bastard Life – congrats again, Jason!

There is video footage of my presentation. I’m looking forward to checking it out properly when I get back home (I fly tonight) and hope to at least post a clip compilation sometime soon. I am also seriously considering re-recording it as a downloadable webcast, too – would you be interested in this free 45-min resource? Please let me know in the comment section.

Both during and following my session, a shed-load of tweets went out in relation to my presentation and the takeaways from attendees. I was simply blown away with the sheer amount of them – I seriously lost count and tried my best to reply to everyone, thanking them for coming – if you tweeted me, and I missed getting back to you – there were THAT many!

Here’s are a few of ’em:

Favorable Mentions

Before landing with Vegas I was in LA for a couple of days on a few business meetings, including a dinner and chit-chat with online entrepreneur, Lewis Howes (listen to my podcast with with Lewis on LinkedIn).

Whilst at the conference, among others I got to spend a lot of time with the following people, all of which bring their own line of ‘awesome’ to the business world – be sure to check ’em all out and say ‘Hi!’ from me!

• Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income (Listent o my podcast chat with Pat!)
• Ralph Quintero – The Great Business Project
• Jaime Tardy – Eventual Millionaire
• Rich Brooks – The Marketing Agents
• Amy Porterfield – Amy Porterfield Dot Com (Listen to my podcast chat with Amy!)
• John Lee Dumas – Entrepreneur on Fire
• Leslie Samuel – Become a Blogger
• Caleb Wojcik – Pocket Changed
• Srini Rao – Blogcast FM
• Gary Arndt – Everything Everywhere
• Farnoosh Brock – Prolific Living

Biggest Takeaways from the Event

Over the course of any 3-day event there is always a lot going on. New Media Expo was no exception.

Although I attended lots of sessions myself, had many memorable conversations, as well as the pleasure of being at a number of great dinners and receptions, there were a few very important points that I took away from the event that I wanted to mention here, to close this quick write up – and they are as follows:

• Video is gonna be huge this year. Seriously huge.
• Podcasting is only just really getting started – so, get started with podcasting!
• The absence of business cards at this type of event is ridiculous.
• SEO is fundamentally dead – content is more ‘king’ today, than ever before.
• Networking with like-minded people will never grow old…

Did you attend New Media Expo in Vegas? If so, what was your biggest takeaway? If you didn’t come along, what were you doing this past week to grow your business? I’d love to know!