As a professional speaker and instructor, I spend a lot of my time at conferences, and the more I attend, the more I come to realize that there’s a direct correlation between the number of attendees and the value of the event:
      The smaller the event, the more valuable it is.
It’s logical if you think about it. What would be the ultimate in valuable communication with a leader or instructor? One-on-one time. It’s why people mob good speakers after a session: everyone wants to have that few minutes of valuable interaction, that ability to talk about their own situation and hope to gain some insight, even if just a tiny taste.
That’s why my colleagues Lee Dodd, Jeremy Schoemaker, Aaron Wall and I have pulled together our own, very different, Internet marketing brainstorming, one-on-one unconference, the Elite Retreat. It’s unlike any marketing and business event you’ve ever attended, and it’s going to be amazing.
We’re capping attendance at 35, regardless of how many apply to join us in San Antonio. If you’re interested, you might want to apply right now, actually. We’re already filling up!
Let me explain how it works and share with you the background of my co-hosts so you can fully understand why this is going to be a rockin’ two days in Texas…

First off, the event will be December 18-19 at the beautiful Marriott RiverCenter in San Antonio, Texas. If you’re not familiar with San Antonio, The River Walk is a delightful area with lots of restaurants, clubs, and touristy places along — logically enough — a river front. The river is the historic San Antonio, and just past the River Walk area it joins the Guadalupe River and flows right to the Gulf.
Don’t think cost, think value…
I’ll be candid here, the four of us spent a lot of time talking about pricing, and quickly agreed that one of the greatest frustrations with typical marketing and business conferences is that they end up being pitchfests, smart speakers offering up these often laughably inane “closings” where they try to motivate audience members to whip out credit cards and buy, buy, buy!
Now, sometimes the offers really can be a decent deal, but when you spend your valuable time (often the most expensive commodity to a business person) and are stuck being pitched by speaker after speaker, well, that can really suck.
My druthers: I want to focus on education, on information, on sharing what I’ve figured out and learned from my twenty-six years of being involved with business and the Internet, without having to worry about recouping my time, travel and business costs through product sales.
Cost for participating in the Elite Retreat? $4850.00 per person.
Hold on a second, though, and recognize that if you wanted to sit down in a room and spend one hour with Lee, Jeremy, Aaron and myself, you’d be looking at a multi-thousand dollar invoice. Compare that to two days of us collectively exploring your business ideas, vision and plans, helping you crystalize and set up solid partnerships with other attendees and growing your business by leaps and bounds and suddenly it seems like the great deal we know it is.
We really want every attendee to get the most they can out of the event, so your admission includes an Apple iPod Nano that we’ll load up with over ten hours of audio content from the four of us, supplemental information that will help you attain your goals after leaving our Retreat. You’ll also get four certificates good for one-on-one coaching calls with any of us that you’d like (yes, you can use all four to chat with me, or split ’em between Jeremy and Aaron, or whatever you’d like). If you actually listen to all the audio material and use even three of these coaching certificates, that’s a value of over $2000.
The Elite Retreat team
A wee bit more about my co-hosts before I talk a bit about the event itself:

• Jeremy Schoemaker (widely known by his nickname of ShoeMoney) is an important player in the search engine marketing world, and his knowledge and expertise make him one of the top go-to guys for PPC advertising and online income optimization. His weekly Internet radio show Net Income allows listeners to hear Jeremy’s honest assessment about his failures and successes in the online marketing space.
• Lee Dodd loves forums and they love him back. He is a leading expert in the forum industry and has built several large forums including SprintUsers.Com, which boasts more than 95,000 registered members. He currently consults with forum owners and administrators, and offers cutting edge advice on community management and monetization on his blog, forumtrends.com.
• Aaron Wall is a search engine optimization expert who blogs about search at SeoBook.com. He also wrote a popular book by the same name, publishes numerous other websites, and has consulted clients large and small about how to increase their search exposure.

Quite a lineup, isn’t it? I know that I’m quite eager to spend two days really digging into business ideas and opportunities with these three experts, but more importantly, I’m also really looking forward to learning about your business and how the four of us can help you leapfrog not just to the next stage, but maybe even leap two or three stages ahead in the fastest possible time.
I won’t go on too long writing about the Elite Retreat, other than to say that if you’re interested in joining the four of us, you really can’t go wrong. It’s going to be great, and it’s been quite gratifying to see that reaction throughout the blogosphere has been universally that “with these four guys involved, it’ll definitely be worth the price!”.
Actually, I like what affiliate guru Shawn Collins says: the Elite Retreat “is a unique opportunity, and one where a motivated entrepreneur could flip that cost into a significant profit.”
One tip, though: we’ve already received quite a few applications for attendance (we aren’t accepting the first 35 who come in the door, we’re really putting in the effort to pull together the 35 best entrepreneurs and business people to make the Retreat the very best possible event we can create). If you want to join us, however, please, apply sooner, not later!
I hope to see you at the Retreat!
But remember, you can’t get there unless you start out by applying to join us.