… posted at Search Engine Journal: Landing Pages On A SMB Budget.

See here for details: #Iran Election: “Mousavi likely winner” - Google Trends.

I’ve pinged feedburner, but it doesn’t seem to change the fact that when I view this site’s RSS feed via Google reader, it’s out of date and stuck with posts from April…

Any ideas how to fix this?

Does the legal team or your boss absolutely insist on having a splash page? Here’s a tip to rank the homepage in the search engines despite the splash. It’s untested as of yet, but I feel it’s good enough to be worth a try.

Are you ready?
(more…)

PageRank was supposed to be a probability distribution of the likelihood of someone clicking a link.

When that changed, (more…)

I recently had the opportunity to discuss some information retrieval theory with Dr Edel Garcia, who is a researcher and professor in the field, as well as a longtime SEW Forum moderator (aka Orion). He helped me understand what Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) is, and what it has been used for in the information retrieval field. Dr. Garcia generously agreed to let me publish our conversations on this blog.

(Update: Apparently Dr. Garcia is no longer active at SEW as a moderator.) (more…)

Carolyn Nolte, Customer Service Manager at Footshox, a company that sells insoles and shoe inserts, understands what it takes to seriously impress customers. (more…)

by One Good Bumblebee
From the Seattle Times today (read in print version) comes a story headlined: “Google Says It Will Challenge Amazon On Electronic Books.” Loyal readers of mine would have known this was coming 7 months ago. Here are a few choice excerpts from my old post: (more…)

To all my readers: If you’re going to SMX Advanced, I’d love to meet you. I’ll probably check comments on this post etc Monday n see what’s up, but the easiest way to meet is to: (more…)

De-Fense! [Thump Thump] De-Fense! [Clap Clap]:

Alex Chudnovsky killed it with this awesome guest-post at Huomah, featuring 3 tools to find bad SEO neighbours and protect your site.

In the same frame of mind, Nick Wilsdon has 12 tips to protect your sites and income.

Not far distant topically, we have Malcolm on Court Orders Restricting Publication… in the Internet age

Branko Rihtman explains why Google News may drop your articles. It’s an issue my own theme has, and is something I know I need to fix when I redesign.

Mike Tekula shares mistakes he’s made and how to minimize risk in SMB internet marketing

Twitter takes on…

Sean Hacking on Email vs Twitter

Andrew Keen on Wolfram Alpha v Twitter

Random

Yahoo tees off another SEM, calls small customers “fools who we like to steal from.”

Changing speeds now, my friends and fellow Canuck SEO Dev Basu has great tips on Canadian SEO. Speaking of which, my friend Melanie Nathan owns Canadian SEO, literally and figuratively :).

Hendry Lee On Working Smarter - Shoulda been obvious, but it only hit me when I read it…

Chris Sherman shares what being a conference guru is all about

Ben McKay rocks our collective socks with 80 (!) SEO Interview Questions.

Bob Potter has an interesting case study on the ROI of socializing your media.

Nick Carr: Google is getting a little carried away with self-importance, maybe? (more…)

Ruud Hein and I conducted this interview by email, which is why some of the tantalizing bits he leaves off on don’t see a followup - it was a preset bunch of questions. In any case, the interview is about business, but gets personal too - all of which makes for a great read, imho. Enjoy! -Gab

You’re known as a technically savvy SEO, as seen via your Search Explained series. Does that interest come from your programming background? Either way, can you share some detail?

Sure. (more…)

Actually, this post should be titled: “How did I cloak my way to lower rankings?!” Because the truth is that it was completely unintentional - as evidenced by it causing my traffic to drop like a rock. (more…)

This is a guest post from Ian Lurie, who runs a Seattle SEO shop, on behalf of Groomstand Groomsmen Gifts. They have such items as personalized pub signs and engraved cufflinks.

A number of problems set back the usability of various sites in the wedding vertical, and particularly those catering to Groomsmen. Here are some case studies on things to avoid, so that your site’s checkout isn’t avoided like a sweaty marathon runner…

The basic paradigm we need to assume is that laid out in Steve Krug’s excellent “Don’t Make Me Think.” People browsing the web: (more…)

Been doing some local events lately. Last night I had the pleasure of meeting… (more…)

Some awesome reading on conversion and time management: (more…)

Bruce, how did you make the transition from being an SEO consultant to an SEO agency?

Photo credit: Jon Hochman of Hochman Internet Marketing Consultants (more…)

Affiliate-management-for-beginners-attributing-credit-for-the-sale/

Attributing-credit-when-email-and-affiliates-overlap

Hope you enjoy!

I’m currently being worn out by a confluence of taxes, client work, personal projects and preparations for SMX Advanced. So please excuse the disorganization of this blogrolling post. Consider it a scratchpad link love post, if you will.

Is your site a one-visit wonder? by Ben McKay, UK SEO Consultant. See also SEP’s 3 Ways to Get PPL Talking About You - by Cindy Alvarez, product manager and user experience pro. (more…)

You NEED to attend SMX Advanced. It’s that simple. The single best investment you can make in your search education and professional life this year will be happening in Seattle, June 2-3, 2009. Here are 5 sweet reasons to attend. (more…)

The defining mantra of OG SEOs, which I’ve read time and again, when it comes to paid links: “Do what it takes to rank.” Keep that in mind. (more…)

I’ve seen variations on this link building trick, but it’s the first time I see it producing additional links beyond the value you already have. (more…)

For school, work and taxes. Therefore, posting will be light or nonexistent for the next two weeks. When I return, I’ve got some massively juicy content for you, including interviews I did at SMX West with Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Internet Marketing and Gillian Fishkin of SEOmoz. (more…)

Thinking and Ideas:

Jimmy Wales is a big thinker, and I give him a lot of respect. The founder of Wikipedia recently did some great interviews: (more…)

For a long time, I resisted using Feedburner for my rss feed analytics, but I’ve finally given in. Ok, fine, Borgle - you can have another data point on me. For now. Until a non-Google entity provides comparable analytics. (more…)

On TechCrunch, Borgle CEO Eric Schmidt told Charlie Rose that (more…)

By observing patterns in visitor intent and demographics, conversion optimization and redesigns can be planned more intelligently. The patterns you identify can be used to create personas. Through my use of 4Q visitor surveys, I’ve learned the top reasons people visit SEO ROI Services and developed corresponding personas.

What’s a persona? (more…)

by detritus My friend Gyutae Park recently blogged about making money by tasting domain names based on Google Hot Trends. It’s a neat idea, but there are some caveats you should know.

Tasting domain names is the practice of buying them with the intent to return them during the 5 day grace period, while profiting off the typein traffic the domains get during those 5 days. It’s the web equivalent of buying a prom dress for prom then returning it. Google Hot Trends, for those who don’t know, shows you the 100 keywords with the greatest change in search volume in the past 24 hours.

Anyways, trendy domaining is something I’ve done in the past. From personal experience, I can confirm that there is money there to be made … but very little, if you’re not automating things. That’s because: (more…)

Normally, a 404 Not Found error is shown to visitors when they try to visit a non-existent page. But what about when there is a page there, only it doesn’t have what they want - what do you do then? One solution is to offer them a link to the right page, duh! Sounds simple, but it can actually be a bit tricky. Another is to update the page and answer people’s question. (more…)

Hey SEO ROI readers - time for another Friday Photos! Today I’ve got analytics stuff for you, advertising tidbits, some interesting/miscellaneous calls-to-action stuff, and some SEO material. This post is filed in the case studies category fyi. (more…)

Then you’re way ahead of the curve and understand what Matt Cutts is talking about, late in this video, on getting crawled and indexed more rapidly and deeply. If not, it’s time to understand search like Matt Cutts and read up on submarine crawling. This also goes back to what I was writing about thinking like search engineers and what Google wants. These are not merely abstract ideas, despite appearances. Grasping these notions puts you a step higher on the ladder, closer to “SEO Director” and further from “SEO data entry monkey,” because you can solve problems rather than merely execute other people’s solutions. (more…)

by Josh Russell People keep promoting the tactic of getting tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, for the sake of having massive influence with any single tweet. The catch is that if everyone followed everyone else - the ultimate expression of this influence-by-broadcasting tactic - then the tactic dies. Because the actual attention given to any single tweet would be so infinitesimally small that it would be meaningless.

Your Twitter stream would amount to a blur of tweets. In that case, no one would have very much broadcasting influence, even though everyone has millions of followers.

So I came up with some simple math to calculate your true Twitter broadcasting reach / influence. (more…)

You all know I hate spam email. And chances are you get annoyed by those too. But people don’t have a problem with opt-in email newsletters … or do they? Here’s an April Fools trick to get your friends spammed by legitimate email newsletters!
by Tancread
(more…)

I want to flip the tables and this time ask you, my dear readers, for some advice. What can I do to sell more one-hour consultations? It’s my favourite service to provide, typically clarifies a lot of stuff for the client and provides them with great value, and it’s quite convenient as far as overhead/organization goes. I’m open to anything, so don’t be intimidated or feel like it’s a “stupid” suggestion or “too obvious.” (more…)

I’ve long had All In One SEO, but I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with it. It only handles posts, not pages, it won’t auto-301 posts when you change the permalink, and doesn’t let you mass-edit titles/descriptions. Not that I’m ungrateful, as it’s been good to me, but it’s kind of annoying having an All In One tool that isn’t all in one. (more…)

A little while ago, Willy Franzen of One Day One Job was doing a 1-hour phone consultation with me, and he asked whether a second link from any given page would also boost the page’s ranking. (more…)

1. You need social proof? “As Seen In [the following media]” is a popular and well-trusted form of social proof. So next time you run a campaign, why not hit up Google News for inspiration, plus the internal search functions of major news networks and trade publications? (more…)

I’m starting a new column, Friday Photos, featuring observations from around the web. This week, we have some interesting advertising, analytics, email and ranking factor material. I left the ranking material stuff for the end, because, like any mother will tell you, save dessert for last! (more…)

Bruce Clay scooped a great link building ‘crm’ or perhaps more accurately, ‘prospect relationship manager’. Sphinn it like it’s hot! (more…)

A visitor dropped by my site asking whether Google cared about a link’s styling. I got in touch with Matt Cutts, and he was nice enough to take a few minutes to share an answer. Here’s what Matt said: (more…)

Aha! I finally realized why measuring relationships is the best way to measure social media results! Two words: Opportunity Cost. (more…)

Toys

by Patrick Q Toys’R'Us just bought Toys.com for $5.1 million. And it was a genius domain name buy, too. Here’s why. (more…)

I spent all day Sunday with a buddy driving around Montreal’s most popular streets, photographing the city’s potholes and locations. Now, I’m combining that information with Google Maps, and particularly the K-Pack, in order to show Montrealers a map of the city’s potholes. Here’s what Google Maps K-packs normally look like (courtesy of Google LatLong).

(more…)

For all you internet marketing pros out there, here’s the only brand building guide you’ll ever need. I’ll begin with some brief introductory notes, then get into meaty examples you can sink your teeth into. (more…)

The government’s ad campaign sucks, but what can you do? Well, you can check out Search Engine Journal, where I’ve covered this Canada.gc.ca/taxinfo fiasco - the post should be up Monday, March 2nd.. In any case, the information you probably want is at http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/menu-eng.html. (more…)

Gray Hat Hacking - The Ethical Hacker's Handbook

by Trond Viggo Håpnes

Should I disclose the risk for potential penalties in Google to people who I’m approaching to buy links? This is something that’s been bothering me, since I’ve started buying links.

I’m not concerned about “competitive differentiation” as an “ethical whitehat” - that’s a stupid notion that confuses search engine guidelines with moral codes… particularly dangerous considering the search engine guidelines are motivated by profit. I’m a grey hat, and proud of it - it means I can think outside the box and get creative.

My concern is that I may be treating the potential link sellers in an unfair way, and my personal happiness depends on being able to see myself as a fundamentally ethical guy.

(more…)

The following is what you’ve been telling me via 4Q visitor feedback forms, verbatim. Note that I don’t know how to make these surveys popup at the end of a visit as opposed to the beginning, and 4Q’s folks still haven’t gotten that part down yet, unfortunately. (more…)

by jalb If you’re using captchas to protect your forms, or other forms of logic, you’re probably finding that you’re still getting spammed despite the captcha.
Well, here is a new idea for you to beat those captcha cracka bots, and some ways to implement it. (more…)

A client’s site ranks for some keywords that aren’t core to any of its themes, and it keeps getting bounced back to page 2. This is my hypothesis of what’s going on.

The page ranks by fluke, really. It’s propped up by site authority and the unique content having attracted nice links. The problem is that the content only tangentially touches on the keywords it’s ranking for, but doesn’t quite satisfy the user intent of the query. As a result, the bounce rate is astronomical. (more…)

I’m accumulating a list of beefs I have with the current iteration of the site and am already at over 20 grievances. I would love to hear your problems with the site. Nothing is too small or too big or too trivial or too stupid. Often the ’stupid’ ideas are the million dollar “Why didn’t I think of that?” ideas.

Great answers get a free download of my super secret PPC plugin for managing multiple landing pages off a single wordpress minisite. Plus you can have the satisfaction of seeing your ideas implemented in the redesign :D.

Also, the title’s questions are just a starting point. Feel free to recommend plugins, highlight usability problems, suggest superior seo tactics, advocate for how I should use the header space currently taken up by varying taglines/testimonials (besides the search bar), different graphics, different conversion paths/tactics … anything!

UPDATE: In response to complaints about the font, I changed a global style in the stylesheet so the first font listed in the font family reads “Arial”. Please tell me if this is easier for you to read!

I wrote about poor man’s retargeting tools for Search Engine Journal. Well, guess who picked up on the article and gave it top billing in their weekly roundup? Hello Media Post! I think this is where the 1337 gamer in me shouts, “W000000000t!” :D. On a related note, a previous post I did on how to be creative got picked up and linked to by Aaron Wall in a roundup post titled, “Worth Sharing.” I’m looking to expand my distribution this year and build my brand as a leading search/internet marketing expert so if you have a hot property (online or print or trade show) with wide distribution, do give me a call (438-882-3017) or write gab at the domain you’re visiting (can’t spell it out because spammers would send me even more junk then).

Gab Goldenberg in Media Post

Officially, SEO best practices say you can’t use those beautiful branded fonts in those pictures-of-text for your headings. And conversion best practices say that you may not always want to use keywords in the headings - just use whatever converts best. So wrapping an image with keyword-rich text in h1 tags is not the solution.

So how do you make the web designers and brand managers and conversion experts and SEO pros play nice and get along? Make the SEO boss and force the others to do his bidding, lest he throw fire and brimstone at them from his raging chariot, duh.

More seriously, here’s a neat little workaround. (more…)

SMX West was great, folks liked my presentation on what’s new in social media marketing (though they said I spoke too fast) and I met a whole load of awesome people, (more…)

A reader from Singapour asked this to Google and then came to my blog: “Why is search tied to ROI?” ROI means return on investment, an essential business “metric,” or “measurement standard.” The answer to why search marketing is tied to ROI is in the full post (click read more for access). (more…)

From this interview with Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, I found out that the Borgle’s leading economist (and California university professor) has also noticed the trend towards data commodification. (more…)

Susan Gunelius recently published her third book, Google Blogger For Dummies (aff). Susan’s a friend, expert copywriter and marketing consultant, business and personal blogger (and About.com weblogs guide), and she has graciously granted me this interview. You can download some free sample chapters she has courteously provided, with Wiley Publishing’s approval (and encouragement!). (more…)

No, you shouldn’t buy GenericKeyword.ExoticExtension domain names. The only people making money there are ICANN and the registrars responsible for those extensions. This includes extensins like .pro, .aero, .travel, .asia, .me etc. Watch my new video for more. The production quality isn’t tremendous, but I’m slowly getting the hang of this.

I’m a member of the Montreal, Quebec internet marketing community and as such, I like to participate in monthly meetups we have, aka Yulbiz. I met a bunch of people and had a fantastic time catching up with old friends. I also had the pleasure of bringing my friend Victor Benaderette, who is an expert salesman and who happens to be looking for work now, if you’re in the market. Contact me and I’ll put you in touch with him.

Here are the interesting folks I met, in no particular order. (more…)

The Complete Newbie Guide to SEOmoz

Three Tools For Retargeting Ads, a followup to my first post on poor man’s retargeting.

Leave some comments there folks!

Malware is the music industry’s saviour. I’ve just had an epiphany. (more…)

(more…)

Over the past year I’ve had this site rank for a number of terms, after blogging about them, mostly on the strength of its own domain authority. The catch is that over time, (more…)

A while back someone in the search community recommended I get a form fill extension (more…)

Aaron Wall, cuz I love reading his blog and in particular when he releases new fantastic tools like this. Even better when those tools let me gloat about my call on the trend towards  data commodification. (more…)

I was very fortunate with my Internal Link Building plugin to have many East European folks talk about it and give me links, but this time it’s a full post I’ve got translated. Now, by the looks of it, it’s probably done by machine and spammy crap… but if it’s not this is cool. Anyone here speak Japanese?

http://web-tan.forum.impressrd.jp/e/2009/01/13/4760

The following is copy-pasted from my Sitemeter logs. Can you spot the 3 little non-traditional details that tell me about the real quality of this visitor? (more…)

Here’s what I’ve experienced and learned in the past year. Feel free to skim, but as with my scratchpad first discussing submarine crawling, what you read here today may be industry-changing search news in 6 months… (more…)

Link buying advice often sounds something like, “Get links from relevant sites and pages for the greatest boost to your rankings.” Link buying advice is often wrong.

According to everyone’s favourite content network guru, keyword selection on the content network needs to be based on demographics. That’s why I saw the following weight loss ads on a page that had nothing to do with weight loss, and nor did the site hosting the page. (more…)

I can’t be the only one who comments on a photo and wants to see what responses, if any, the comment gets. And with Facebook expanding commenting to anything that can show up in the news feed, such as status updates, shared video/audio/image content, this app is even more important. This could easily be a top 10 app. The question is just how would you monetize it? Make it a branding move for your blog platform, maybe?

Footnote: This would help those users with naked pics of themselves on Facebook…

The Pirate Bay - the world’s largest peer-to-peer site, which focuses on torrent technology - lets you view what people are searching for (Not Safe For Work (NSFW)) as well as its tag cloud (NSFW), which I presume is what people are sharing, in the most literal sense.

At the risk of stating what may be obvious to most SEOs, when pirates share their booty, keyword research is a lot easier. (more…)

I’ve written before about what I see as the correct paradigm for measuring social media success: the strength of the relationships you’ve built. I’ve been aware of FriendFeed for a while, but I wasn’t aware what it was precisely. And more importantly, I didn’t know that it had an API.

I’m aware of both now. So FYI: you can create a basic social media analytics software/platform. (more…)

As the summer wound down on my hybrid consulting/in-house SEO job with Ice.com, I had to hire my replacement. The boss wanted an SEO rockstar and champion who would make SEO front-and-center in the web dev process as well as continue to improve the current situation! Here’s how I hired an elite SEO. (more…)

That’s a pretty inflammatory statement, isn’t it? But why is it any less inflammatory than “Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach.” You hear that all the time in internet marketing circles (especially affiliate ones) and it’s pretty silly. (more…)

Kevin Kelly recently wrote about how you can sell something that might otherwise be obtained for free. I disagree with his premises: (more…)

The classic formula for copywriters, AIDA - attention, interest, desire, action - can be applied easily with banner ads. I’m thinking of 125×125 ads and larger here, so microbanner advertisers may find this more challenging - but then, why are you using microbanners to begin with?

Attention: Frame 1: Ask a question that relates to the prospect’s need. “Want more sales, more easily?” (more…)

Standard conversion advice says remove navigation from the landing page (at least for lead generation landers). Standard SEO says use links. The next best thing would be to put the navigation out of sight, in the footer, and have your calls to action above that so visitors won’t use your navigation to leave your page.

But if you put the nav in the footer, it might get less search engine trust, precisely because folks don’t use footer navigation. What’s a conversion minded SEO to do? Here are 4 options to play navigation peekaboo with search engines and humans to convert your SEO traffic better. Blackhats use some forms of this, but I think I’ve also thought of original twists too. (more…)

Nothing new here for the marketing pros in the audience, but you intermediate guys and newbies will like today’s post on why you need to rank for purchasing oriented terms rather than selling ones, imho… I want to expand on Seth Godin’s bit on making a new market vs taking a share of an existing market. (more…)

“roi- are you kidding! did columbus know what the roi was before he went out and discovered the new world?”

Sounds like an inhouse sem tasked with doing SEO projections.

I just got turned down for an extension on a paper that I had hoped to extend from the 15th of December to the 25th. My prof was good for it, but apparently faculty policy is no extensions except for medical reasons. Meaning I need to bust my chops to get this done. I apologize in advance if this blog gets a little quiet, but if you look around the seo blogs and other quality material I’ve linked to here, you shouldn’t want for content. I messed up my time management this term and it’s time to pay the price .

My first impression of Guy Kawasaki was that he was a genius writing brilliant blog posts. My second impression of Guy Kawasaki was that he was arrogant and gratuitously mean. Turns out I was right on both counts, as Guy’s new book, Reality Check, proves. (more…)

The video with my thoughts and questions is after the jump. Please give me some feedback on this - what can I do for you guys? (more…)

The NYTimes’ recent bit on the Borgle’s censorship included the following entertaining excerpt: (more…)

Since the first time he impressed me with his SEO experiments, Marios Alexandrou of All Things SEM has consistently been one of the people whose blogging I most respect for being original and intelligent. He won’t rehash old stuff everyone’s said… he’ll make a statistical analysis of what topics come up most frequently, tie it to Matt’s blog posts, and thus prove that Matt is really the center of the [SEO] universe ;D. Unfortunately I’m lazy about using my Feedreader, so I don’t get to enjoy his writing as often as I should. But I got into it today and found these little gems: (more…)

Update: These are no longer being offered; I got an immediate response and booked all the spots. Link building inquiries with budgets for the service are still welcome, however.

While I’ve been doing online marketing for a while now, I’ve had little to do with the link buying aspects of link building so far. That isn’t to say I haven’t read about it or even shared some new ideas on disguising text link ads … but my clients to date and my own sites have been able to rank using Google-approved tactics. Not to say I haven’t done it on my own test sites, but I’m admittedly short on experience here. (more…)

Jim’s thinking on buying links can’t be that far different from Aaron Wall’s or Greg Boser’s or Todd Malicoat’s thinking, imho. They’re all part of the Vet SEO independent webmaster school of thought. And if you have done any reading at all on search, you’d know that Aaron, Greg, Todd and others encourage big brands to buy text links to rank higher. Now consider that Jim and We Build Pages have got an excellent reputation in the search marketing business, and thus likely have attracted some big name brands to their client roster. Why would WBP not buy links for them? (more…)

More on Trust Agents - This great post by fellow Montrealer Julien Smith is quite related to my ideas on social media analytics - I strongly encourage you to read it! Julien’s also got an intro on social capital which I’m hoping to listen to soon, but which I’m linking to now because the Trust Agents post impressed me so much. (more…)

Angelo Racoma wrote an excellent piece at Performancing on how the web affects our social skills in the offline world. His point is that it makes us shy to meet people face to face and kind of lazy about actually communicating with folks. I tried posting the following comment, but it didn’t work…

“I’ll bet that’s why there are so many web-oriented conferences! BlogWorld Expo, Web 2.0, SMX series, SES Series, WebmasterWorld Pubcon, AdTech, Affiliates4U, Traffic, TechCrunch 40, … People want to connect with their friends for real!

“I’ve been on both sides of this (more…)

Pepperjam Network, you’re really, really useless. I have proof that you’re stealing commissions from affiliates and not paying them for all the sales they generate. I have proof that when a merchant’s tracking screws up, you do nothing to solve the issue for affiliates, let alone pay (more…)

Some of you might have noticed I set up my clicktracking script to track clicks on feeds. If you click a link to get my rss feed, for instance, then a little statcounter tells me someone [anonymous] out there clicked the link to subscribe to my blog. Yay! Thanks :). From a business perspective though, this solution is way less-than-optimal. (more…)

Survey Gizmo have powered my contact and quote forms for as long as I can remember. Recently, I upgraded to pro and thought I’d share my thoughts with you guys on what I like about their software. Full disclosure - I have dealt with Survey Gizmo, but am getting no money for this nor was I required or even asked to link as part of our business. (more…)

Trademark Productions steal other people’s content, edit it for the sake of passing through search engine duplicate content filters, and try to pass themselves off as experts you should trust? (more…)

… while the Bloc Quebecois are seen on AdSense blocks on Cyberpresse, (more…)

I’ve been bookmarking and saving a whole bunch of things and figured it’s about time to start sharing the link love. For some reason these are StumbleUpon sourced only… I can’t seem to access my regular bookmarks library in FFX anymore. There’s still a whole whack of awesome tools, tips, news and resources here. (more…)

What is crowd clout? It’s a trend identified by Trend Watching whereby consumers congregate at a given merchant’s store and get a discount for buying in bulk. As I was reading Inc magazine’s article on a restaurant saving money and again when I dropped by Cesar Serna’s blog , I was reminded of this idea I had to adapt the restaurant’s technique and crowd clout to online marketing. (more…)

1) You “send” me stuff too frequently. That little red number indicating things friends have shared on SU feels compelling - and if you’re compelling me to pay attention too frequently, it feels abusive and/or needy. Go away.

2) You send me a) junk or b) untargeted non-junk or worst of all c) untargeted junk. Fortunately for you, I’m going to keep it simple so it’s easy to understand: I’ll remove you in all of the above situations. Clear, huh?

Friends don’t annoy friends.

This post is about search… but first, a little anecdote. I was playing poker with some buddies this weekend, and it reminded me of a thought I have often had about my friend Jon’s bluffs: he’s very succesful at finding that threshold “pain level” above which our other friend Will and I are hesitant to call the bluff. That is, he knows what the minimum raise is that he needs to make to intimidate us out of the pot. Typically it’s about 3-4 times the big blind. (more…)

It’s not secret that Canadian businesses are strongly affected by how the Canadian dollar fares against the US dollar. Search marketing businesses are like others in this respect, and here are some of the responses I got over Twitter when asking some Canadian and international friends about how they dealt with international currency fluctuations. (more…)