Ed Walters, Fastcase CEO

Fastcase is a new legal research tool that is bringing cool lateral thinking to the traditional problem of serving up legal search results. The results are some highly impressive innovations both in the algorithms that sort and rank the results, as well as in how the results are presented.

Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase, gave me an interview to describe their process.

1) You found that legal research has a three way tension between cases with the most citations, cases from the highest courts, and recency of the decision. How does your algorithm solve that problem? (more…)

Sending cards is a cheap way to build goodwill, especially when personalized. Here are some nice examples I’ve received from my friends at Outsourced Program Management Pros, Milestone Internet Marketing, and Aweber Email Marketing. (more…)

I saw this flyer at the busstop and had to grab it to share with you guys. I think it’s brilliant advertising, and here’s why. (more…)

Beautiful as in, a beautiful mind.

1. & 2. The good gents at Ontolo do it again. Their tools keep expanding, and one of their latest is based on co-citation analysis of phone numbers. Based on that initial idea, they’ve developped the first local citation finder. Genius!

3. Darren Slatten, aka the World’s Greatest SEO, has some fascinating snippet experiments to share.

In fact, he seems to be running one right now, as you can see from this remarkable snippet screenshot (his current listing in Google).

Also check out his cool snippet optimizer tool!

If you like these advanced SEO ideas, you’ll probably enjoy my advanced SEO book. Preorder it now! Or get a free chapter if you haven’t already.

As you know, hubs are a great source of editorial links, i.e. they carry a lot of trust. Once you’ve found a type of hub with a hub finder though, do you need to keep wading through its results like a ridiculous automaton? (more…)

This is a guest post by John McElborough, who runs an SEO consultancy and Brighton web design company in the UK

In my last post here I shared some tactics for how you can cash in on long tail keywords using various content generation strategies. There’s no doubt that the long tail is where the traffic’s at but today I want to talk about the mid-tail which in many sectors is where the moneys at! (more…)

I have a problem with the ‘AIDA’ formula we as marketers use.

AIDA stands for ‘Attention, Interest, Desire, Action’ and is a rough summary of the buying process/marketing process. Unfortunately, it’s too vague of an instruction set for marketers, and vague instructions lead to screw-ups in carrying them out.

So I’m changing AIDA to QPBC. It’s less catchy, but a hell of a lot more practical as far as instructions go. It’s clearer.

QPBC stands for Question, Problem, Benefit, Call. (more…)