Yesterday, I described what I saw as a trend towards content communities becoming commodified. We ended on the question – how do you build a competitive advantage in such a case? (more…)

Ads are increasingly being bought to promote content, rather than to create brand awareness or sell directly. What’s interesting to me about this is that it’s a trend growing in parallel with a trend amongst large, SEO-driven sites towards building blog-focused communities. (more…)

Good copywriting does more than just explain the details of a website’s products or services. It needs to speak to a person on an emotional level, giving them hope while getting the point across fast. It also needs to compel a person to take action. (more…)

And I’m lucky to have been nominated in two categories!

1. My post, “The 4.5 Personas of My SEO Site,” is nominated in the SEO category! If I get into the Finalists round, I’d love for you to vote for me to win!

The post has also made it as a reference for Full Sail’s Internet Marketing Master’s Degree.

2. My article on 101 advanced tips to buy text links also got nominated in the Link Building category.

Here’s hoping the judges will consider my writing good enough to go through and win!

Surprising people forces a reaction, and if it’s a silly surprise, that reaction is laughter. That’s why list-jokes or series-jokes are a staple of comedians everywhere.

In high school, I remember my friend Johnny Shanaan giving a speech to our English class for his public speaking assignment. He was talking about body language, and handshakes in particular. He said,

“There are different types of shakes. There’s

• The firm shake,
• The weak shake,
• The clammy shake,
• The power shake,
• And the milkshake.”

What’s nice about series jokes like that is that the first items in the list create an expectation. And when you know what people expect, it’s easy to throw in an oddball item that surprises them.

That’s also true of humor generally. If you can set up an expectation, it’s easy to find the unexpected.

A favourite line of mine when I want to loosen people up is that I shower regularly… first of every month. (Stolen from a Get Fuzzy comic strip, to be honest.)

So the next time you want to lighten your writing, your small-talk, whatever… look for what should follow from what you said, and say the opposite. Look at what people relate to, their social reference points (like showering daily) and step outside of them.

If you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader or check out some other content posts.

Reading is the best investment you can make in yourself, and it’s also incredibly enjoyable. So to share the fun and help you build your businesses, I’m giving away a copy of The Knack, a fantastic business book by Bo Burlingham and Norm Brodsky. (Here’s my review of The Knack.) (more…)

My friend Geno Prussakov wrote a fascinating book entitled, Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes. This is my review of Geno’s book, for those who might like to buy it.

(more…)

One is at Search Engine Journal: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-mythbusters-content/12810/

The other is at Blogue Marketing Interactif: http://www.bloguemarketinginteractif.com/flogue-collette-judy/ (in French)

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…)

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!” . 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

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!

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

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…)

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

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…)

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…)

Aaron Wall hasn’t written extensively on WP blog security in the past, to my knowledge. However, he knows it’s a topic likely to be popular with the general blogger community and not too technical to push them away, while still being meaty and fresh enough to appeal to his regular SEO audience. (more…)

Google has officially announced first-click free, it’s new attempt to fist clueless fools for all they’re worth.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html
Huh? What? Read on to find out how Google is encouraging content producers to lose a little more control over their content in its ongoing efforts to fight copyright. (more…)

Noticed this through Sphinn, and I have to say, Miriam Ellis of Solas Web Design has really hit a home run with her recent (more…)

25) 25 Tips on writing good titles. (more…)

Aaron Wall claimed, in Strategic Content Based Link Building, that you could gain $10,000 worth of links with two days of work. That’s a lot of hyperbole, which goes back to how I didn’t make 3K in a week. My 3K post and my criticism in the comments on Aaron’s post is at the heart of this post’s idea: (more…)

So I got the following pitch in an email, in summary:

We will create personas and add value to communities around your topic and get links to you from members of those communities. Each link costs $xyzabcd.

When link buying turns into genuine, valuable editorial content that people would be happy to find in a SERP, which content only indirectly affects the links you built… is link buying still problematic?

Update: See more on what google wants, from the horses’ mouth.

Have a look – yours truly is in a Web Pro News video on buying sites, and at SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday, where I shared some local search stuff!

Here are some of my most popular posts that I’ve published on this blog. You’ll probably find a few that you never read before, and if that’s the case, then I encourage you to dig through my archives. I hope you enjoy!

Social Media Analytics – How to Measure Social Media Activity (more…)

You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. (more…)

Welcome Search Newz visitors! It seems that Search Newz’s syndicated version of my article, “If You Listened When Google Announced Submarine Crawling,” which follows up the one you’re seeing now, forgot to link to an important Matt Cutts video. So there’s the link to help you out. Anyways, on with the show – here’s what submarine crawling is all about, as interpreted from Matt Cutts’ explanations.

Matt Cutts’ post and this Webmaster Central post recently explained that “high quality” sites are being given special treatment – submarine crawling.

We all know that links from high quality sites are more valuable than those from average or mediocre sites. Now, Matt and Google have given us a new measurement for finding high quality sites – submarine crawling – and thus high quality link prospects.

Russian Submarine courtesy of Orpheus Grey.

So WHAT is Submarine Crawling? (more…)

If you live in Montreal, you’ve probably seen Silver Star print ads. But you’d be a lot less likely to see them in search results on any major search engine because their search marketing effort is nonexistent (well OK, maybe MSN might return them). Not only is their SEO (What is SEO?) non-existent, it’s a near-100% duplicate of Mercedes-Benz Canada’s site!

If you’re Google and some random Canadian searches for “Buy Mercedes Benz car,” would you rather return the more authoritative Mercedes-Benz website or a total copy on a subdomain?

The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think. (more…)

Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl SEO Consulting and Clientside SEM), Michael Gray (Graywolf’s SEO blog) and Rae Hoffman (Sugarrae Website Audits & SEO) were lucky enough to kick back with me at SMX West, so in my infinite generosity I decided to let them school me on some of the finer points of being an independent webmaster. This is intermediate level stuff mostly (my fault for not having better questions; see the end of this post for your chance to followup with your own questions), but there are a few nuggets in here for those of you who pay attention. (more…)

Scratchpad, for those of you who don’t know, is my informal column. Take the ideas for what they’re worth and ignore the style.

Questions

Q1: What is the best measure of attention equity? Links? Daily visitors? Repeat visitors? Subscribers? Trends in the prior statistics? Something else?

Q2: Is scannable content contributing to (more…)

Here’s my effort to share original resources that haven’t received wide attention/link love on other blogs. Hence I haven’t shared Aaron Wall’s tools (how useful would one more mention be?), Xenu Link Sleuth or SEOmoz’s tools (though I had to put them in the Friends section). Here is search marketing’s BIGGEST, BADDEST, RESOURCE BONANZA BAR NONE! (If you enjoy it, subscribe – there’s lots more where this came from .)

The SEO Business

What makes Web sites credible?

Proposal layout and design

Five Simple Ways to Make Your Proposal More Competitive

Canada Business – Starting a Consulting Business – Interesting item for my fellow SEO consultants here (more…)

Hey gang,

I’m back from SMX West – the best three days of my life EVER – and have got some great material to share with you guys. Here are some highlights of what’s coming: (more…)

I wanted to write about bigger picture strategies – plans featuring big ideas – rather than tactics. What follows is a mix of such plans and big picture ideas that, while not quite tactics, don’t fit as strategy either. At the same time, I’m trying to be more concise, so this is shorter than other things I’ve been writing. (more…)

Actually, I didn’t. And that’s why this post matters. (more…)

Here’s a refreshing interview with Kat French, well known in the SEOmoz and Sphinn community and certainly a person to keep an eye out for in search marketing. We cover online community moderation, the strength of social media and of personal networks, and much more. (more…)

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