Might I just say, "Wow!" In a week and a day, 130 of you put your best foot forward and submitted your ideas for community speaker slots at this year's MozCon, July 8th-10th. In comparison, we received 150 last year in two and a half weeks.

Everyone upped their quality this year, and it made this choice incredibly tough. Like when there were six of us going over the best of the best, we'd narrowed it down to five. Then everyone threw up their hands and looked at each other as I remember looking at flavors of ice cream and wanting them all as a child.

Lol.

Anyway, without further ado, our four Community Speakers are:

Sha Menz, Lead Architect at rmoov Link Removal Software, on Link Removal Tips 

A. Litsa, Lead User Experience Designer at Bazaarvoice, on Email Campaign Conversions

Mike Arnesen, SEO Team Manager at SwellPath, on Solo Link Building

Kelsey Libert, Director of Promotions at Fractl, on Viral Content

Honorable mentions to Erica Douglass on the People Side of SEO, Zeph Snapp on International Link Building, and Adrian Vender on Universal Analytics.

Congratulations to them, and a big thank you to everyone who submitted for MozCon 2013. Get ready for that 2014 call. :) And don't forget to buy your MozCon ticket today so you can support these wonderful community speakers and more!

For those of you curious about what the "perfect" pitch looks like, I thought I'd share A's. Her entry, in my opinion, was exactly what we looked for in conveying what she wanted to talk about and what her presentation would look like. 

(Note, some words have been redacted since I don't want to completely give away her talk!)

We figured out how to increase email-campaign conversion by 146%!

My team spent all of last summer experimenting with post-transaction email to see if we could encourage online shoppers to review the products they purchased. After testing various motivators and visual designs with no real impact, we discovered a technique that would increase product review submissions by 146%: smartphone-optimized design.

This eureka moment motivated the team to explore the relationship between smartphones, email campaigns, and website traffic.  Here's what we learned:

- With [redacted], email traffic to retail websites can climb to ~60% (Our own tests, Experian).

- ~40% of all email is opened on mobile devices (Litmus).

- Desktop-oriented email design best practices [redacted], while smartphone-oriented designs [redacted] (Our own tests).

- We believe there must be a similar relationship between mobile and referral traffic from [redacted].

In the talk, I would like to share our testing experience and stats from our subsequent research, and then review the design decisions behind the email template that increased conversion 146%.

A also chose a topic which was underrepresented at MozCon. But we still might've skimmed over her if her pitch wasn't so concise and hit on the actionable points that she'd be delivering at MozCon. We could also see how A could deliver her talk in the allotted 15 minutes. 

And let me tell you, friends, the bar has definitely been raised a lot compared to the previous year. Not only were there amazing pitches, but people also went above-and-beyond.

Andre Van Kets put together a great video.

And I can't ever say that I'll forget Matthew Egan's Ryan Gosling "Hey Girl" meme about me:

(Don't worry, all facts about me were taken from my social media accounts, so no state secrets. And yes, it's much bigger than I could display here.)

Thanks again to everyone who submitted to be MozCon 2013 Community Speakers. Everyone who submitted should've received an email from me, and even though, we couldn't chose all you, many topics will make their appearance either here on the blog or in our weekly free Mozinars. Each and every one of you rocks my world! I hope to see you this July.