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…)

When you and a busload of friends have had several long hours of championship partying in the club where you gave 110%, and you’re still so pumped for overtime that you go over the top for the win – you’re a Hall of Fame member of the Pro Partying Association. (more…)

Here’s just a partial rundown of the awesome folks I had the privilege of meeting and talking to at SMX Advanced! Once again, I also want to thank the wonderful people at Third Door Media for providing kosher lunches, for giving me the opportunity to speak at Search Marketing Expo and for being class acts generally. Big shout outs to Michelle Robbins and Claire Schoen especially. (more…)

A while ago, I wrote a post whereby I thought that Rich Schefren’s customers were spamming Sphinn. Unfortunately, as shown to me recently by Andy Beard, I screwed that one up pretty badly and need to apologize to Rich for sullying his name unfairly, when the reality is that I didn’t (more…)

Some of you might have noticed that I recently picked up Ice.com and Diamond.com as clients. Well, for any of you interested in working with me and with the other great people here, I have good news: Ice.com’s recruiting SEO experts, SEM specialists, analytics smartiepants, and web developers / coders / programmers (particularly if you’ve done ecommerce work before)! If you’re looking for a job in search marketing and/or analytics, write to Shmuel at ice, or send me your cv/cover letter and I’ll forward them.

Update: In response to some questions – the work requires people to be in Montreal, Canada. There may be monetary assistance for you to move (emphasis on may because I don’t know), but the bottom line is that Ice.com wants people working in their physical offices. As to the job being full/part-time, I’ll ask and update. I’d lean towards saying it’s full time work though.

In addition, (more…)

I’d love to hear your thoughts and I’ll bet that conference organizers would too. So go share your thoughts at Sphinn (and feel free to sphinn the discussion ) on whether you’d attend a greyhat SEO panel at SMX/SES/Sphinncon/Pubcon/SEM Canada etc. (more…)

I’m in a crap situation, and I need to learn to say no. First, because saying yes is eating into my own time and second because I’m embarassed to admit that I voted for friends’ submissions that were average and not really deserving of votes. (more…)

First, I present to you this amusing little email: (more…)

SMX West was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. In large part, that was due to all the great people I got to meet. It was quite literally networking on steroids. If you want to learn more about SEO or chat with some bright people in the field, have a look at these people and the sites they back.

And if you want to have any success at all, be it in SEO or otherwise, invest in your network. Why was Guy Kawasaki able to launch a succesful site and get 200K pageviews in 24 hours? Because he spent, in his own words, “24 years of schmoozing and paying it forward.” In English: He made friends. Lots of em. Genuine friends. Pretty good reason to go to SMX Social Media, in my humble opinion.

Rand Fishkin, Sarah Bird, Rebecca Kelley, Jane Copland, Scott Willoughby, Jeff Pollard, Gillian Fishkin, Evan Fishkin - SEOmoz (Evan, let me know when you put your own site up) – Finally! I think that meeting you guys and hanging out with you was probably one of the biggest highlights of the whole trip for me. And if that weren’t enough, the awesome business/community you guys run allowed me to have/meet a whole bunch of other friends at SMX! I learned a lot, had a blast, and of course, I can’t thank you guys enough for your help getting my lost laptop back! Friends in need, are friends indeed …

Will Critchlow, Duncan Morris – Distilled – Guys, it was very nice of you to say hi and have drinks with me at the “Expo Hall Networking Reception,” and chat it up at Gillian’s table. Next conference we need to spend more time hanging out though! Distilled are doing big things in the UK, so if you’re in that part of the world, give ‘em a ring!

Tamar Weinberg – Techipedia / Mashable – Tamar has got to be one of the biggest social media power users you’ve ever seen. She’s on SU, Sphinn, Flickr and does awesome stuff at all of those places! And so I was totally surprised and flattered when this superstar walked over and said hello at the reception. Fun hanging out with ya Tamar!

Chris Winfield – 10e20 – Chris, thanks for sharing some tips and concrete pointers with me at SMX and for twittering my post on being an independent webmaster – that brought it to most votes in upcoming at Sphinn literally overnight! You’d think that Chris would be a pretentious guy (not to mention his frequent mentions and citations in the mass media and stature as a social media powerhouse) but he was very down to earth. Great to meet you Chris!

Sean Maguire – 360 Sell – Great of you to say hi, Sean, and nice to meet the man behind the moz comments! I appreciated the offer of a ride to the airport as well!

Hamlet Batista – Ranksense SEO Software – Hamlet, your software demo was really impressive and I’m looking forward to testing it out in depth once my exams are done! Also, funny story about the t-shirts .

John Carcutt – Applied SEO – I read Stuntdubl’s tips on attending a conference, and brought a notepad with me to my chat with him and Mike Gray and Rae Hoffman. I only wish I’d done the same when chatting with you, John, because you kept making me say “wow, that’s a great idea” and sharing these sweet tactics that have unfortunately vanished from memory. Sigh… Great idea with putting your social media profiles on the back of your card though!

Jordan Kasteler, Stephen K Hansen and Brian Utley - Utah Web Services (& SEO) – Jordan, thanks so much for saying hi. It was really nice to meet you, Steve and your other teammate (who didn’t have any cards, hence the blank), and I had fun chatting with you dudes .

Jon Kelly, Scott Schedek; President, BizDev Manager – Sure Hits Insurance and Loans – Nice to meet a fellow Mozzer, Jon!

Ralph and Jason Thompson – Ad Customers (PPC) – Ralph’s a former lawyer and real estate agent (very cool, imho) and got online back in the 90s, sensing the next wave. Pleasure chatting with you two and whenever you have a question on local, let me know!

Ken Jurina, Damian Finlay; President and Consultant – Epiar Industrial Strength Keyword Research – Ken, it was cool to finally meet you and I hope the stuff with MatchCraft works out. Damian, thanks for teaching me a bundle, and I also hope those references pan out .

A, Renee Henry and Janet Prado – Matchcraft SEM – A pleasure singing along with you guys during Karaoke, guys, and chatting afterwards (even if we were all a bit tired/hoarse).

Miguel Salcido, Stephen Peron and Mike Cheslar – eVisibility – Awesome chatting with you folks and smooth moves on the rel=nofollow shirts! Also, thanks for being a sport on the paid drinks stuff Miguel.

Jay Young, Big Kahuna - Str0ud LLC / Linkfish Media – Nice chatting with you Jay, and congrats to you for the success you’re having!

Tyler Shears, Online Marketing Manager – Databanq Media – Tyler, thanks for coming up after the panel and introducing yourself dude! Honestly, it was awesome to see someone else my age there, not to mention how well you’re obviously doing! Keep it up .

Fionn Downhill, President & CEO – Elixir Systems – Talk about being an Influential! Fionn, you taught me (and everyone at that growing your firm panel/lunch) a whole lot, not to mention changed my perception of SEMPO! Thanks a lot, and here’s to some more chats in the future!

Amy Konefal, Sandra Niehaus, Lance Loveday – Closed Loop Marketing – Amy, that was an eye-opener PPC presentation and Sandra those were great practical details you shared on MV testing. And Web Design 4 ROI is awesome !

Loren Baker, Eric Lander – Advance Rankings – At first I didn’t even realize Loren was the Loren Baker from SEJ, but obviously that changed when I saw his card! Eric was my co-panelist on the local SEO panel, and brought a fresh perspective to the table given his industrial strength work doing hundreds and thousands of local listings (whereas most local clients are small and have a single location).

Eric Wu, Fernanda Dorsey; Salpi Bilanjian; Sr. Product Manager of Search Audience Product & Services, Product Manager Search & Commerce, Sr. Product Manager & Account Manager – Earthlink – Glad you liked the paid drinks bit, bud, and I look forward to seeing what you’re doing with G Custom search. You guys win the award for team with the shortest names and longest job titles ! Or perhaps you’re all working for two people’s worth and need a raise? My $0.02…

Li Evans, Editor and Director of Internet Marketing - Search Marketing Gurus and Key Relevance – Just like Tamar, Li paid me the huge compliment of coming over to say hi! To this little pisher! Awesome meeting Li, and thanks for making me feel welcome at the conference .

At this point, it’s getting a little tedious writing this out for everyone I met, so I hope you guys’ll understand if I just link and mention your names.

Nate Poupko CX Digital Affiliate Network (Awesome AM if any of you guys want to join; incidentally, that’s a thankyou link for Nate’s help in researching offers. It’s his affiliate signup link.)

Harrison Gevirtz – Gevirtz Media / CPA Share A pleasure meeting and chatting with you dude . Let’s talk more on MSN!

Lisa A Williams Media Forte Marketing

Daniel Riveong e-storm

Chris Silver Smith (awesome doing the panel with you and chatting afterwards!) and Stephen Spencer – Net Concepts

David Mihm – David Mihm web design (yet another SEOmoz friend I get to meet!)

Carlos del Rio (you naughty spammer ) - 100 Dollar SEO – Yeah, you all wish you could hire Carlos for $100! (Hey, I kinda wish too, cuz I’d outsource everything to him!)

Jim Hedger – Markland Media – See also the words of wisdom from Jim at the end of this post.

Andrew Shotland – Sphinn buddy and Local SEO Guide

Ryan Miller, President – Etna Interactive Cosmetic Surgery Marketing – Ryan, I appreciate the tip on improving the follow-up direct mail to clients! To everyone else reading this, Ryan came forward after my local panel and suggested to me that if I wanted to make better use of direct mail to get reviews from past clients, that the cards send visitors to a redirect on your client’s site, instead of sending them to the Yelp/IYP or other review site. The point being that if Yelp etc. change their URL conventions and your review page changes location, the cards will still be valid (because you just need to change where your redirect points to).

Brian Gil, Director of Yahoo Local Product Mgm’t – Yahoo local – Great meeting you and doing the panel with you Brian, and kickass interview at Matt’s!

Colin Stevens, Director – Better Bathrooms and Jacuzzis – Next time you’re this side of the pond, I’ll take you to see the Montreal Impact.

Lindsey Walsh – Search Engine PPC – B2B PPC Management

Michael Dorausch (Sphinn nick: planetc1) – Los Angeles Chiropractic

Jason “Just Fred” Englert – SEOmoz nick Just Fred – Just Fred Works (yay, another SEOmoz buddy I meet )

Ian Lurie – Portent Interactive – Great sense of humour .

Xavier Dao – Avery (Office Products) Dennison – Nice to meet you, Xavier; let’s chat a little longer next time! (Ok, that was my fault, but still!)

Jonah Stein – Newly Indie SEO Consultant Who Understands ROI (a man after my own business plan!) – That reference from Aaron Wall is just about the best expression of how valuable your network can be when something big changes and you need to start from scratch!

Omer Shoval – Net Working SEM Expert

Mike McDonald, Tiffany Doughty – Web Pro News

Brian LaFrance – BootsnAll

Greg and Barbara Boser – 3 Dog Media (SEO, SMM, WP, Reputation Mgm’t)

Andy Shaw - Lincoln Property Company

Tony Adam – Tony Adam SEO and Social Media

Keri Morgret – Morgret Designs, Search and Analytics

Andy Beal – Marketing Pilgrim

The following three chaps were fun talking to in terms of growing an SEO business .

Kathi Buettner – Resort Quest Hawaii

Gary Senser – Net Advantage

Kathy Barlow - Travel Insurance

David Holmes – Digital Hospitality

Brad Rowe – Buy & Sell Colorado (You can buy and sell states now? When did that market open up??! )

Dennis Mortensen – Index Tools
John Epp – Webmaster Radio (aff)

Emily Spence – Enquisite Search Analytics

Ever see that classic gag of a couple of people standing around staring upwards at nothing and pointing in the same direction? A crowd grows around them, and gets gradually bigger. The point is just to see how many people they can attract into their crowd of starers (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’m a Bookworm. Really. So I’d say I’m reasonably well-placed to give out some Charity Awards for for Search Education. The way it’s going to work is that everyone who wins an award gets a shiny badge and has their name added to the donation I’m making to the Africa Is Real charity. They’re a Montreal group started by some friends I met at the OWN conference. (more…)

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
- Sir Winston Churchill (more…)

Last month, I attended StartupCamp Montreal and Yulbiz, and I’ll be discussing the people from Montreal’s business community whom I met below. You’ll recall that I spoke at FacebookCamp Montreal. Now, most of you reading this are not in Montreal (though considering the attention my competitors pay this blog, perhaps that’s not quite so) – so why should you care? Well, two reasons. (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…)

Do you know your SEO consultants? Read this through for your guide to the good, the rad and the sexy of internet marketing’s most in demand professional – the SEO consultant. (more…)

Today’s scratchpad is going to cover some new how to ideas in link building, the ROI on Google’s user generated content (UGC) properties, influence and then do some linking oot n aboot. If you enjoy this, please subscribe. (more…)

I was chatting with Ann (she of the SEO Smarts) the other day about measuring social media efforts. What follows are a few ideas on how measure that, as well as a related metric that might help you identify linkerati who’ve visited your blog. If you like this post, I encourage you to subscribe. My other material is just like this. (more…)

Duncan Watts claims that the Influentials theory is nonsense, yet if he were to think critically about his own work, he’d see that there are many flaws to it. (Hat tip to Maki for sphinning the Fast Company piece on Watts.) Influence still matters.

Was Mass Marketing Effective Or Was It Personal Networks Operating? (more…)

What follows is a letter I wrote late one night out of anger, frustration, depression, pain and a desire to get my feelings off my chest so that I could finally fall asleep. I’ll be using it to illustrate and explain the two most important elements of human behaviour: motivation and influence.
The former is the explanation as to why someone behaves a certain way, and the latter explains (more…)

I’d like to share some quick news on the SEO ROI blog, its commenters and other stuff. (Update: If you saw this post already and are returning here for my latest posts, you can click here to skip to them.) (more…)

Mikkel deMib Svendsen is an expert SEM and he’s been kind enough to share his thoughts with me on SEO business models. Interestingly, he’s going against the popular grain (more…)

A Further 26% Shop Online and Make Their Purchases Offline

Facebook Polling has discovered that 55% of Facebook users aged 35-49 have shopped and bought at least a couple of things online this year. Those who said that they shop and buy online regularly comprised the largest group of poll respondents, at 31%. This new data reveals a trend away from the scepticism about ecommerce that was more prevalent in past years.

The poll, conducted through Facebook by search engine optimization and internet marketing firm SEO ROI, reveals growing comfort with ecommerce amongst consumers. (more…)