The kind folks at internet marketing company IM Ninjas (formerly We Build Pages) sent me some nice clothes including a tshirt, polo and sweater (can’t show pics since they went to my address in Canada and I’m living in Israel) and to Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO link tools and Receptional SEO for treating myself and a number of other SEOs to dinner during last week’s SMX Israel show.

It’s no secret that editorial links are typically relationship driven, but who has time to build relationships? That’s why we talk at each other in ephemeral tweets that last 140 characters … if you had that kind of lasting power in your relations with your wife, a divorce would not be long in coming! (more…)

Via Eric Ward’s newsletter, I found out that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently testified (PDF) before Congress about claims that Google is anti-competitive. Amongst his remarks are some truly amusing statements for anyone that knows Google and/or the current state of the web. Other things were less amusing and more amazing in what they revealed.
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Short tip for today, scratchpad style:

Retargeting ads are very successful … because they target an audience that already visited your site, and because they tend to offer deals to people who almost bought, but for whatever reason left before purchasing. These deals help push people across the threshold and get them to buy.

What if you did that offline? Someone comes into your car dealership and walks away with no keys… Call them back the next day with another offer based on what you think would close the deal. Don’t start chasing the next prospect [yet].

Have you guys ever done this? Or taken other online tactics offline?

An infographic that provoked my curiosity, by longtime expert in the linkbait field, Muhammad Saleem: (more…)

Social media generates ROI in the form of networking benefits.

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I’ve been digging into online marketing tools and to my chagrin, most want an annual fee (or one time payment usually roughly equivalent). It’s the rise of SAAS…

Email: (more…)

From LiveCity: “LiveCity provides a website building service, which is both easy to use by novice website builders, and robust enough to allow skilled customers to express themselves by accessing the background code. The LiveCity system was developed by us, and with more than 200,000 websites already opened with our website builder, we are glad to be a leading service provider in the field of CMS systems for websites.”

I spoke with CEO Nir Alloush about his company’s product and how they’re helping SMBs. Of most note is his eye for how customers will use the product and providing room to grow with his company’s tool, as well as their thorough QA/usability testing process… For the advanced folks reading, you can skip over the marketing tips as you’ll know them.

1) What is wrong with other website builders that you saw the need to create another tool? What does your tool solve?
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M.-J. Taylor is a moderator on V7N’s forums and has been working in SEO since 1997. She’s recently launched a SEO & social blog and offers services via her site Cyber-Key , focused on the web design and SEO in the Florida Keys.

How did you get involved with V7N?

I was a moderator on WebProWorld and kept hearing about V7N from other members. I checked it out. It wasn’t the most learned forum I’d ever visited, but it was the friendliest. I was made to feel welcome and a “part of.” And I felt I was needed, as well as wanted. (more…)

In yet another fascinating case study, Mr Green’s blog shares a mobile marketing campaign aimed at recruiting panel members for a demographic research service. (more…)

The IM scene here in Israel is growing and is ripe for a monthly meetup for schmoozing and having fun with your peers. That was most evident this Sunday at SphinnCon, which was very well-attended and featured some pretty impressive presentations from the likes of Barry Schwartz of Rustybrick Web Dev and Adir Regev of Go Internet Marketing in particular.
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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…)

Recently, Sphinn has changed from a vote-driven (read:clique) system to editor-driven (read:non-social) system. This explains any things that seem out of place, as well as Twitter not being mentioned). Besides that, this continues our Sphinn Interview series, which previously featured Bob Gladstein, Pat Altoft, Sebastian, and Dave Harry.

Wiep runs the popular Link Building Blog aka Wiep.net, and co-founded LinkBuilding.nl which you’ll agree is pretty self-explanatory. (It’s part of the inspiration for me to get off my ass and do something with linkbuilding.ca …)

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?

Sphinn turned out to be not only a great networking tool, but also the perfect place to find outstanding SEO related info. (more…)

Do you want to make 15% – 25% commission, recurring month to month?

If so, contact me for more info! For details, read on.

Here are some other benefits of working as a salesman for SEO ROI Services:

• Professional development with training on product, industry, lead gen techniques, analytics etc
• Work anywhere – home, your car, the local internet cafe
• Be proud of your work: 10% of all profits go to charity
• Services that clients rave about, so you can feel confident in every sales call

Here’s a sample testimonial, from Dave Davis of Red Fly Marketing.

“We’ve used the link building services of Gab Goldenberg and SEOROI for the past four months and we have found the service absolutely amazing. The quality of the links we got was astonishing and nothing that we could have gotten without incredible effort on our parts. Probably not at all. I would highly recommend Gab and SEOROI for any link building or SEO services. The knowledge, quality and attention to detail provided is an extremely rare thing.”

Contact me for more info!

If you work with anyone else, watch this video. Via Got Safety.net, Michael Roberts, and its creators, Cognitive Media Graphics / TheRSA.org. Cognitive does the graphics fwiw. (more…)

This is a guest post by Troy Redington. Find him on Twitter @TroyRedington !

I’ve been into web development since 1995. I started dabbling in high school and just couldn’t stop. I felt comforted, and challenged by the vast sea of knowledge that I could learn. Plus, since the languages, technologies, and trends were always changing – I knew I wouldn’t get bored with it. (more…)

For those of you who don’t know, my name’s Gab Goldenberg and I run SEO ROI Services. There are a few practices that I’d like to share, which give me both pleasure and pride in running this business. (more…)

Mixergy.com is one of my new faourite sites, because it’s got a huge archive of high quality interviews with fascinating people! The guy making it happen first and foremost is Andrew Warner, whom I got to interview. Here’s what we discussed.
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Patrick Altoft directs search for Branded3, a Leeds-based full service digital agency. He also runs the popular Blogstorm SEO blog and is a pretty interesting guy to chat to overall! Hit him up if you’re looking for search services in the UK!
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Sebastian is the technical genius and SEO behind Sebastian’s Pamphlets. This warm fellow’s well-known avatar is rather ironic – a crab! (more…)

Jake was a quick-witted entrepreneur oozing with creativity.

He made decent money working for others at the agency that employed him. Somewhere along the way, Jake decided that he should come up with his own product.

So he did. Jake spent all his free time for the better part of a summer in quiet isolation. While he kept up his day job, as soon as the clock struck 5:00 everyday, the fire in Jake’s seat at his desk burned him right out the door to his hatchback.
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A long, long time ago… almost 2 years to the month… I asked a bunch of cool Sphinners I was getting to know for their advice and insights on that great search marketing network we know as Sphinn. For various reasons, I never published those interviews – until now! (SEOptimise reminded me.) In light of Twitter and Facebook‘s exponential growth in the past 2 years, the changes in the link graph this has engendered, and related developments, these answers are pretty interesting.

Dave runs the seo training center known as the Dojo. He’s got some remarkable testimonials, not least of which because of who is giving them. I recognized 4-5 names.

“Well sheee-it there monsieur Gabs, not sure what use this will be but I said I would give ‘er a go and I shall…. Right away I just wanted to say that while I appreciate your kind words and invitation to get social, I spend as much time playing the devil’s advocate in the world of Social Media Marketing as I do supporting it. I am certainly not a social media darling ( almost a Social Media Ninja though….)

Without further ado… let’s get into it;

What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn ?

Well, I suppose the real benefits have been;

1. Making new friends
2. Padding my address book
3. Maxing out my reader
4. Some increased visibility
5. And of course access to learning something new every day (more…)

This is a guest post by Troy Redington. Find him on Twitter @TroyRedington, and his wife, an architect and photographer, at Johwey!

As the solo in-house SEO for Fatwallet, it is important that I keep up with the constant changes of the industry. My two staple conferences have been SESNY and Pubcon Vegas. Last spring I was toying with the idea of attending Pubcon South instead of SES when Danny Sullivan told me to skip both and go to SMX Advanced. I decided to go to New York. Big mistake. SES sucked, and the SMX Advanced conference was blessed with the nofollow pagerank evaporation announcement. (more…)

This is the continuation of yesterday’s post featuring my deadblogging coverage of SphinnCon, the recent SMX-affiliated 1 day conference here in Jerusalem, Israel (where I’m currently living).

Ophir Cohen – Compucall Web Marketing (more…)

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…)

Let’s face it – you’re only worth as much as it costs to replace you. Most businesses are going through budget cuts and lay-offs, or have at some point in the last two years, which makes it more important than ever to prove your value to your company or client.

They could hire another SEO for your salary… but they can’t hire another SEO; and a merchandising analyst; and a marketplace analyst; and a PR firm; and a blogger; and a customer service rep for your salary. Yet, a good SEO will be ALL of these things! (more…)

Check it out at Wolf Howl:
7 Tips To Make Training Your Web Team Merry

This is a guest post by Arnold Zafra for TopHost.gr, a hosting company offering shared web hosting plans as well as dedicated servers. The English is a little awkward at points, but Arnold still shares some valuable tips.

So, you just snagged a deal with a client. Everything seems to flow smoothly and according to plan. You’re able to deliver the goods, but somewhere along the way, you client become restless and starts playing hardball.

And you wonder what could you be possibly doing wrong? Why is the deal running not so smoothly, where in fact you’re doing everything that you promised to do. How can you re-establish rapport with your client especially when your SEO deal is still ongoing? (more…)

…Hacked websites are really no big deal. Sit back, kick your feet up on the desk, grab your coffee and let me tell you a story about Mrs. Yona Sussnovitch and I. (more…)

In June I spoke at SMX Advanced. Earlier this week I spoke at Affiliate Summit East. Time to show some love to the folks I met! Here they are,  in no particular order: (more…)

I’ve got a new piece up over at Michael Gray’s Wolf Howl, rebutting Seth Godin on why journalists should or should not get paid. (more…)

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

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

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

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…)

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

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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

Here’s the dream team of folks that I outsource work to and recommend. Get in touch with them if you need search marketing services, be it SEO, PPC, reputation management, etc. You should also consider the editors working with me on Best of the Z List, who are a terrific bunch of experts. (more…)

In the world of business, lots of figures are thrown around. There’s a whole school of thought in the world of investing that only looks at a company’s financial statements and decides whether or not to buy their stock based on those numbers. The most important factor of all, (more…)