What Internet Marketing Seminars Will Do For You

If you've gone to other seminars and conventions, you know the drill: boring speakers all day, chatting with people later, maybe a bar run at the end, and you go back home having learned nothing. You do nothing with it, in most cases.

That's the old way. In the new media, things are changing and shifting so frequently that you almost have to go to Internet marketing seminars just to keep up with today, let alone look at tomorrow. Here are four great reasons you need to go to Internet marketing seminars:

1. Learning: In most other seminars, you find that what they're teaching can be found in books or videos. Not the new media. The publishing industry is not capable of keeping up with what's happening online. If you want to know what the current trends are in online marketing and keep your site optimized for future trends, you have to learn your Internet tricks from the people who are actually creating them, and you'll find them at seminars.

2. Exposure to new ideas: Old-style seminars focus on one thing, targeting a single topic. Seminars in the new media world can't do that; it's not clear yet where the borders between marketing and content are, or what the real difference is between Web 2.0 and the old Internet, or how new innovations are going to change the way you do things. While you can learn some of these things online yourself by subscribing to the right sites, your best learning experience will be immersion in the soup of ideas you'll find at good Internet marketing seminars, where you can make creative idea connections you would never make otherwise.

3. Networking: This is the best part of Internet marketing seminars. Where else can you meet all the people you need to know, both as your peers and as your future clients? Because so many online marketers work in their pajamas at home, it's hard to make the right connections at work, and these seminars bring together hundreds of people hungry for human contact, right there where you can meet them.

4. Finding new jobs: Seminars have people looking for web professionals, affiliate marketers, bloggers, designers, SEO experts, and creative people for web work. Be bold. If you're going to a casual-dress seminar, put together a T-shirt announcing “SEO Expert” (or whatever your specialty is) and your website, and just see how many people start chatting you up for help. This aspect alone will pay for the seminar, if you're good at what you do.