feed hat blog

Nuus.com is a new site that gets its news from its user base. User can submit stories they find on the web to Nuus.com to share with other users. Now, you might be thinking this sounds a lot like Digg.com. However, there are several differences. The first is there’s no voting system. Stories are published based on what Nuus.com editors think. If they like your submission, it gets published. If they don’t like it, your story will never see the light of day.

Make $1 Per Story

Here’s the neat part. If your story gets published, you get a $1USD sent to your PayPal account. There’s no limit on the number of stories you can submit. The creators of the site gave the following key points:

• It’s similar to digg, except that people are PAID if their news is pubblished on our main page.
• It a little revolution for the world of news.
• We want to give the people the opportunity to earn money, just for sharing their passions.
• It’s a great opportunity for people that like to blog about something, but they don’t have time to keep up with an entire blog on a daily basis.
• It’s a way to get your content to a large audience without paying for the traffic.

Nuus.com is a brand new site and all the stories so far has been submitted by the in house editorial team. They are hoping to change that however as more and more people discover the site and submit stories. The end goal is to be a big news site that rewards both the site owner and the site users.

The concept is a neat one and I think it can take off if the site’s built in viral nature starts to take hold. However, before it can do that I think Nuus.com needs to tidy up the site a bit. For one thing, the about page is still in its default “This is an example of a WordPress page” mode and the contact page doesn’t appear to be in English. Stuff like this really takes away from the professionalism of the site.

Those two nick picks aside, I do like the concept of Nuus.com. Rewarding users for content isn’t new but Nuus.com has done it in a very easy to use fashion and that’s the key. The question now is will users submit their story for the promise of a dollar? Would you?

Nuus.com – New for Us That Makes Money for You

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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Nuus.com – New for Us That Makes Money for You

On the night before Affiliate Summit West was to begin, I joined a group of bloggers for a dinner at Diablo’s Cantina at the Monte Carlo Hotel. The dinner and drinks were sponsored by Market Leverage and The Light Group.

Diablo’s is a Mexican restaurant that makes food that is well below average compared to Mexican restaurants in Vancouver. Fortunately, their margaritas are really good. If you go there, I recommend you just drink and don’t eat anything other than the free nacho chips and various dips every table gets. My pull pork sandwich was dry, tasteless and overpowered by BBQ sauce. The fries weren’t bad however.

The party started with bottomless margaritas for everyone. Every time I got close to finishing my margarita, the server would come over and top it up. On top of that, Dina ordered me some crazy tequila shots that came in a cup and not a shot glass. After that, I don’t remember much of what happen. However, Tim Jone took a video of me taking a normal tequila shot of Drew Bennett’s neck.

Now before you say the video displays creepy and strange behavior, keep in mind that I had already consumed three cup size tequila shots and who knows how many margaritas already. You have to be drunk to take a neck shot of Drew Bennett!

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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Taking A Tequila Shot Off Drew Bennett’s Neck At #ASW10

Do you remember the doubt on Luke Skywalker’s face when he first held the cool metal of an inert light saber? Looking up at Obi-Wan, he believed it when he said, “I can’t go with you to Alderaan.”

Last summer, we felt just like young Skywalker as we waded waist-deep into the bog of online writing. There was much to learn, forces at work looking to sway us to the dark side, and at times, it was hard to believe in ourselves or our path.

What a difference one year makes. Our business is taking off, we have great clients who appreciate our personal attention to their projects, and we’re actually living the dream of doing what we want to do for a living — writing.

But the path to online success wasn’t easy. We’ve run fast and fallen flat on our faces, then got right back up to battle again.

Would you like to unleash The Force in your content? Here are 10 ways you can become a direct response marketing Jedi.

1. Be a deliberate Paduan learner

Jedis are recognized for their innate ability to harness the power of The Force.

Unearth the exceptional inside you and nurture it constantly. Find your Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, listen to the wisdom these established Jedi masters have to share. They were once where you are now, and understand the dangers and temptations lurking ahead. Be willing to listen, and they can help guide you toward the proper path.

2. Beware the dark side

Fear, anger, aggression, envy, pettiness, and insecurity — they are all natural feelings.

It’s easy to look at the empire building done by your competitors and wonder why you’re not having the same kind of success. Often, we are unable to see the work behind the successes, so it’s easy to believe that someone else got something undeservedly.

But you weren’t there on their journey. You don’t know the long hours, hard work, or embarrassing failures that have been poured into their current successes.

Nothing happens overnight. You will succeed in due time. Shortcuts might lead to a black helmet. Patience and dedication to learning are necessary elements in any good Jedi. You may be a phenomenal writer, or innately good at social media, but you must do your time like everyone else. Anakin fell to the dark side because he believed he was above his teaching.

3. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for

With a wave of his hand, Obi-Wan Kenobi was able to get a hover car full of fugitives past a trio of heavily armed storm troopers.

Writing persuasive copy can pull your reader into your point of view and create a mutually beneficial situation. It’s not enough to convince your prospect, you must also make sure they feel good about their decision if you want them to happily return for more.

4. Do or do not. There is no try

If you want to be an awesome writer, write awesome stuff.

Don’t try to be great. Be great.

That doesn’t mean fake it till you make it, but rather learn what you need to do and then do it to the best of your ability. Always seek to better yourself. Perfecting your craft will ensure that you are not simply trying to be a Jedi master, but are actually growing into one.

5. Use the force

Who needs a computer to hit the target? Trust your well-honed instincts.

As you progress on your path to Jedi master, your instincts will continually sharpen from the experiences and knowledge you accumulate. You’ll know the right things to do, the clients to avoid, and what to do when you make mistakes. A significant slice of success is due to how sharp you can keep the edge of your instinct. Make sure you know when to trust that inner voice.

6. Show empathy

Find out where your prospect is from, what he/she does, and what’s important to them. Just because you’re writing for an online audience doesn’t mean you can’t utilize the web equivalent of good eye contact.

This doesn’t mean being a phony; people can usually smell a Lando Calrissian a mile away. Find a way to relate to people that is genuine. Most well-rounded writers should have varied enough interests and experience to connect with others authentically.

7. I know there’s still good in you, I can sense it

Luke believed there was good in his father all the way until the end. Who knows if it would have been buried without the young Jedi’s belief.

Project the traits you desire for your prospects and watch how well they respond.

8. Don’t be a Sith

A Jedi is always looking out for others; the Sith only look out for themselves.

Develop content that puts others first and you will always come out a winner. We’ve all had experience with shady operators who use content scrapers, pass off others’ work as their own, and look to sell you on half-baked info products with no substance. Not only are these actions bad business, but word will get out about what kind of person you are. Whatever success you have will likely be short-lived.

9. Beware the clones

A Jedi can part a sea of storm troopers with a light saber in one hand and a wave of the other.

Do everything you can to stand apart and make your name synonymous with individual character and quality work. This means not only ensuring that your work sets the standard by which your competitors are compared, but also hiring only the most qualified freelancers when heading to battle.

Just because you can hire cheap labor doesn’t mean you should. Your good name is on the line, don’t exchange short-term benefits for long-term goals.

10. Be direct

A Jedi is never mealy mouthed. They say precisely what they mean and mean every word they say.

Be straight with your clients. Tell them what you can do for them and be honest when there’s something you can’t. Your clients deserve your honesty and will appreciate you more for looking past your immediate interests to help them.

If you want to be a direct response marketing Jedi and gather quality clients for the dollars you deserve, you need to train hard, constantly sharpen your skill set, and follow the rules just long enough to know when and where to break them.

Got a favorite tip for Jedi mastery as a freelancer? Let us know about it in the comments.

For much more advice about how to avoid the “Dark Side” of direct marketing, subscribe to the Copyblogger email newsletter, Internet Marketing for Smart People. It starts with a 20-lesson e-course on how to marketing online while staying on the light side of the force. Click here to get started.

About the Authors: David Wright has been told he looks like Chewbacca, while Sean Platt spent his formative years running around his back yard in a tattered Boba Fett Halloween costume. Together, they are independent publishers who also write direct response copy.

See the original post here:
The Force is Strong With This One: 10 Ways to be a Direct Response Jedi

In the past few months all of the search engines, but especially Google have released or started supporting new ways of fixing site architecture issues. However IMHO these are band-aid solutions for bad site architecture, and not something you should rely on … at all.

In 2009 some of the big advances we’ve had the major search engines announce support for are things like the “rel=canonical” tag which allows you to tell a search engine this content at this URL may exist in more than one place, but you should credit it to one URL. Another new item is the ability to tell the search engines to ignore certain URL parameters. So if you’re using tracking parameters, session ID’s or other items you can now tell the search engines to ignore them entirely. There are many people who are happy to have these new tools, as it allows them to fix “issues” they have had for years. However I think these tools are crutches for lazy and incompetent programmers and developers, and should be avoided like the plague … and I’ll tell you why …

In the dawn of the public internet there where dozens of search engines that webmasters and publishers had to deal with, combine this with a lack of standards and the online publishing community had a lot of growing pains. When the dot-com bubble burst and the market consolidated we where really left with four big search engines. As Google pursued it’s relentless market domination, under the guise of a garage start-up bathed in the light of primary colored lava lamps, they stole the thunder of everyone else (coincidentally of course) and, established themselves as the ruling organization and defacto standards setting body, the rest of the world be dammed.

This is bad, as sloppy publishers and slip shod developers, now use google’s band-aid solutions, instead of developing websites and applications that don’t introduce problems that don’t need to exist in the first place. Case and point look at this URL from Forbes Magazine:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/20/live-well-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-hermes-paris-london-new-york.html?feed=rss_news

Notice the [feed=rss_news] part at the end, that enables Forbes to track where visitors came from, in this case RSS, most likely a feed reader. But now there’s the problem of that same content existing at two URL’s, remove the feed parameter and it still works:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/20/live-well-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-hermes-paris-london-new-york.html

Not to worry we can use the “rel=canonical” to point to the URL without the parameter, we can also use webmaster tools to tell it to ignore the “feed” parameter and we’re good to go right … wrong junior that’s two band-aids you needed to use instead of solving the problem properly. What you should have done is issue a 301 redirect at the server level to the correct URL, and not rely on the client or bot to figure things out. Need that parameter for tracking drop it in a cookie.

Why does this matter … as publishers we want to foster and build an environment that’s friendly for more than one search engine. Here’s an experiment, go try and append a meaningless imaginary parameter or two to a URL and submit it to a social site like Digg or Stumbleupon and see what happens. The simple fact is they aren’t sophisticated enough to parse it out as tracking parameter. Lots of other social sites are trying to gain access to your content as well, and by using substandard architecture you aren’t helping yourself. Your story will get votes in two places, decreasing its ability to go “go hot” or “popular” as its votes are spread over two URL’s.

While social search may be in it’s infancy, and may never overtake traditional search, the easier you make your content to crawl and understand for everyone and not just google, the better off you’ll be in the long run. Get out of the habit of relying on the crawling and indexing band-aids of search engines for your survival, learn to write clean code that makes you self reliant for your long term lively hood and success.

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Bad Architecture and Band-Aid Solutions

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Bad Architecture and Band-Aid Solutions

Good afternoon from the Big Apple. Ready for an amazing session? Amazing PPC Tactics is a safe bet, wouldn’t you say? Roll call:

Moderator: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Speakers:
Addie Conner, Director of Search Marketing, Course Advisor Inc.
Brad Geddes, Founder, bg Theory, LLC
Dan Soha, CEO, Five Mill, Inc.
David Szetela, CEO, Clix Marketing

Brad Geddes’s up first and he’s going to look at location targeting, specifically for national companies. He asks the audience who advertises across the country. A majority. Do you write ads tailored to the location? Just a few hands go up. This presentation is for those with their hands up for the first question but not the second.

Have you heard of Coca Cola Light? You can’t get it in the U.S., where we call it Diet Coke. Meanwhile in Japan they sell diet beer, and no one would buy that in the U.S. There’s a city, state and country level of cultural differences.

“Convenient locations near you” doesn’t speak to people in rural Pennsylvania but speaks well to NJ consumers. A Geographic Report in Google AdWords helps you see this. See the metro areas, the ad spend and the conversions.

Google Analytics Map Overlay helps you drill down into goals per location. Google Trends is a good place to look for info on local targeting. An area that searches most for a product often has a higher conversion rate for that product. When you have a limited ad budget, target just the areas where you have high response rates and create campaigns based on those geographies.

About 1 in 3 people live in top-20 metros. If you have a limited budget and want to reach a broad audience, increase your budgets in the areas where you have high ROI. Or, find promising locations with low conversion rates and re-tailor your ads for those markets.

Dan Soha steps up.

Did you know:

• With “broad-phrase” match, the order of the words does affect your results.
• Headlines are usually 25 characters but 28 character headlines can be created with dynamic keyword insertion.
• Google always gives you one chance. When you’re advertising with a domain that Google has not seen before, your ad will always get a chance. Google will assume your ads perform at the CTR of the average ad on the page. Even if your ad is malformed, no matter what your landing page, you’ll get a chance even if you use a new account, new user, new credit card, etc.

Yahoo! Adgroups

• The Quality Index is at the Adgroup level. You’ll benefit from highly targeted adgroups. Keywords should be similar to each other as well as the ad.
• There is no broad match. Advanced match is not the same as broad match. The more keywords the better.

Divide and conquer:

1. Analyze keywords’ CTR performance in an adgroup. Note the ones with high CTR relative to position and ones with low CTR relative to position.
2. Pause all low CTR keywords.
3. Duplicate adgroup.
4. In the new adgroup, delete the active keywords and unpause the remainder.
5. The result is a higher CTR adgroup. If done properly the Quality Index of this campaign will increase.
6. Hopefully you can find the common denominator between these keywords and write/find an ad that is more appropriate. Analyze the search landscape on these keywords and you’ll probably find commonalities.

Yahoo! Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Why would you want to use DKI? DKI will increase Quality Index because Yahoo! gives extra credit to DKI. With two exact same ads where one has DKI and the other doesn’t, the one with DKI will have a higher Quality Index. He gives us several examples of this at work.

And next is David Szetela. He’ll be talking about winning at PPC content advertising. He asks who in the audience ever advertised on Google’s content network, if they’re still advertising on Google’s content network, and if they’re making good money advertising on Google’s content network. Hands went up high for the first question and gradually decreased along with the questions.

While Google’s content network has not traditionally performed that well, he says content advertising doesn’t actually suck.

Why care about contextual advertising?

• Growing faster than search click inventory.
• Clicks are cheaper.
• Faster/easier to create successful campaigns.

Google’s ad network just doubled in sized and over the last few years, most advertisers have seen their CPC for the program go up. While the cost of paid search advertising is going up, it’s staying steady for contextual advertising.

Why content advertisers lose money:

• Ads appear on irrelevant pages and get bad clicks (low conversion rates).
• Ads don’t distract attention from site content.
• Search and content should never exist in the same campaign.

Contextual is not search:

• Readers are not searching for you.
• More like banner or print advertsing.
• The first job of your ad is to distract.

Three AdWords content flavors:

• Keyword-targeted
• Placement targeted
• Enhanced (combination of first two)

Keyword-targeted campaigns:

• A keyword-targeted ad group’s keywords should describe the kinds of pages where you want your ads to appear.
• Keyword list = the words that appear most frequently on such pages.
• Keyword list need not — and frequently should not — include names of your products/services.

Keyword considerations:

• No more than 2 to 10 keywords per ad group
• Match types are irrelevant (except negative)
• Individual keyword bids are irrelevant
• Negative keywords are almost the same

Google Placement Performance Report shows performance (clicks, conversions) by site where ads are served. Use the site exclusion tool to remove your ad from sites where you’re not getting quality leads.

Addie Conner is going to talk about, well, Matt says, we shall see… Her presentation is going to be way over my head, isn’t it?

ANOVA: Analysis of Variance. It’s a statistical technique for comparing means for multiple (usually 3) independent populations. It’s used to answer the question: are there any main effects or interactions between three independent variables?

A three-factor ANOVA (analysis of the variation) has seven significance tests: 3 mean effects, 3 two-way interaction effects, and 1 three-way interaction effect. To make it simple, we restrict each factor to have only 2 possible designs. In this case, we have 2 x 2 x 2 = 8 possible “appearance” of the ads. We then start to collect the data of their conversion rate.

Take your data and create a graph, where the control the Title is controlled so you can see whether body text and image interact. If there are two parallel lines, there’s no interaction between the two factors. If the two lines aren’t parallel, there is likely to be interaction.

Reasons to split by match type:

• Uniform bid either understates or overstates value leading to inefficient bidding.
• Bidding on a more granular level allows you to maximize the good and minimize the bad.

Did you get all that? I see fellow liveblogger Marty Weintraub covering this session for Search Engine Roundtable as well, so there’s a chance he’s got some complementary info that might help you get a more complete picture of the presentation.

Read more here: 
Amazing PPC Tactics

Blogging isn’t as idealistic as it used to be, but there are still plenty of us “Kumbaya” bloggers out there.

If that term isn’t familiar to you, it basically means a community-embracing, tribe-building group of bloggers with a dangerous tendency to overuse the word “conversation.”

Kumbaya bloggers know that the phrase “social web” is redundant, because the web is inherently social. We’re into people and a human connection.

This month will mark my 20th year in online community (that’s what we used to call it in the olden days), and I thought I’d share some of my ideas about what I think we Kumbaya types should keep in mind.

(I must tip my hat to Chris Brogan, who uses the term “Kumbaya” to describe my people a lot, and who is, let’s face it, our patron saint.)

1. You’re on the right track

You put your audience first and you spend more time listening than talking. You know it’s not about you, except to the degree that you can help foster connection. You’ve seen how powerful (and complicated, and messy) community can be, and you respect it.

Kumbaya is the future, because it’s how we’re wired. We’re social monkeys, and we’ll form a community given the least excuse to do so.

Combine mass communication technology with that hard wiring and you’ve got a potent combination.

2. You have a tremendous advantage

Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman has a great description for what’s happening with advertising — it’s metastasizing. In other words, communication is proliferating much faster than our attention spans can handle.

Kumbaya folks know how to cut through the clutter. You know how to create inviting small spaces where you can actually be heard, and where you can give others a voice. You know how to shut out the noise so we can actually say something meaningful.

3. If you build it, they will not (necessarily) come

Sincerity is wonderful. A powerful message is wonderful.

Spending hundreds of hours on a blog no one reads is not wonderful.

The Kumbaya crowd gets a little grossed out at the thought of “self promotion,” but if your ideas are going to find their community, you need to get over that temptation to hide your light under a bushel.

There are more resources every day for people who want to self promote without turning into sleazeballs. Keep your eyes open for models, and learn to get comfortable shining the spotlight on yourself every once in awhile.

4. Small is beautiful

A lot of people look at big blogs (like this one) and think they’re the holy grail.

If only you had 1,000 subscribers. Then, once that threshold’s been crossed, if only you had 10,000. Then 100,000.

I’ll take a small, involved community any day over a big, unresponsive one. There’s nothing inherently wrong with getting big. Big has certain advantages, especially when you can maintain a real sense of connection.

But engagement matters a lot more than gross numbers.

There are few endeavors more pointless than collecting 100,000 followers on Twitter, none of whom have the slightest real interest in what you have to say.

5. There’s only so much “you” to go around

One way you can start to attract a lot more participants to your community is to put yourself out there. Be authentic. Be transparent. Put plenty of you into your work.

But there’s not an infinite amount of you. The day will come when you’re going to need to put up some boundaries so you can have a life, and not just a community.

However close you are to crossing that line (for a lot of you, the line is behind you), start thinking now about ways to honor your own need for a little peace and privacy.

6. Authenticity isn’t the same as self-centeredness

It’s a balance. You have to put enough of yourself into your project so people can feel a connection with a real human being.

But too much you becomes, well, tedious. A few extremely talented bloggers can riff endlessly on their own quirks and neuroses. They’re essentially standup comedians.

I’m not saying you can’t pull it off. I am saying that the odds aren’t necessarily in your favor.

7. It’s not immoral to make a living

Everyone in the Kumbaya world has at least a few folks in their community who violently hate anyone “trying to make a buck.”

(This is true even in communities of, say, professional copywriters. I find this endlessly amusing.)

Here’s what I think.

I think you have every right to keep a decent, comfortable roof over your family’s head. I think it’s a good thing to be able to afford access to quality healthcare. I think it’s useful and pleasurable to be able to broaden your experiences. I don’t think it’s sinful or bad or wrong to enjoy material comfort. I think donating to a charity that turns you on is one of the more significant and lasting legal highs around.

Interestingly enough, I’ve also seen “making a buck” give people the freedom to stop doing things they don’t believe in.

8. If you leap, the net will not (necessarily) appear

When Kumbaya bloggers do take that leap into trying to make a living, too often we feel like our relationship with the community is so strong, surely it will just support us. “We’ll figure it out.”

The reality is, leap (without some planning and effective techniques) and the floor will appear.

Creating community and making money are related but different skill sets. Both can be learned.

9. You don’t help anyone else when you put yourself last

Honoring and respecting your community doesn’t mean you don’t get anything out of it.

If you’re in a relationship and you’re always last (or you’re not in the equation at all, except as an unappreciated servant), that’s a pretty horrible relationship. That goes for your community as much as it does for your family and friendships.

Martyrdom sucks. It’s not helping you or your community.

10. The best way for a Kumbaya blogger to make a living is by helping people

When you solve actual problems, even if you (yikes) make a buck on it, you’re doing good work.

There’s no shortage of problems on planet Earth, so the opportunities are endless. Find one that pulls at you, figure out a solution that really helps, and learn enough business techniques so you don’t make a mess of the whole thing.

How about you? What’s your favorite tip for the Kumbaya crowd? We’re all here around the campfire waiting to hear what you have to say, so let us know in the comments.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication. She’s on a mission to make marketing a little less gross for Kumbaya businesses.

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10 Things Every Kumbaya Blogger Should Know

This is just a heads up that posting may be a bit slower than normal during the coming week or two. I’m beyond swamped at the moment, so if you’re trying to reach me please be patient.

Advertisement: Improve your website rankings and traffic in just 15 mins/day! LotusJump will show you how to do your own professional-grade SEO. Find Out How Today!

This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Light Posting

Related posts:

1. Light posting / back soon…
2. Light posting / travel
3. Note to Readers: Light Posting Ahead

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Light Posting

The introduction of the Internet touched off a business revolution. But for some, adaptation has been slow going.

On the SEM Synergy podcast today, Bruce talked a bit about his time at ad:tech Chicago last week. From the general vibe of the digital marketing conference and in his conversations with attendees, Bruce observed a definite interest in online-offline marketing integration — a good first step.

But there was also a confused understanding of how to implement effective marketing online. Eager to make the digital crossover, traditionally trained marketers are keeping their old-school marketing frame of mind in tact. Unfortunately, online marketing and offline marketing are two different beasts.

Here are a few ways I see the differences between online and offline business playing out.

Adjusting to the Big Pond

It used to be that in a local market, one business could be the king. With little competition and a captive audience, some businesses found their niche and thrived. Today’s online business environment is obviously much more competitive and the fight for customers is fierce.

Internet marketer Todd Friesen recently wrote about the challenge of getting business owners to understand that SEO isn’t all about rankings — it’s also about making your site stand apart. “Why should your site rank #1?” he asked prospective clients. Adding value to the marketplace, filling a gap in the marketplace, offering quality or services that aren’t available any where else — that’s how you get your business to float to the top in a big pond.

Reaching Across the Aisle

Online, marketers are working in a halo media environment. While offline, it was more-or-less fine to section off different platforms — radio folks in this corner, TV folks over there, print stays over here, and none of your paths will ever meet — online marketing requires cooperation and communication between departments.

Any message that goes out over marketing channels can be shared in any way online. A TV commercial gets recorded and posted on YouTube. A print ad gets photographed and posted on Facebook. Marketers in SEO, PPC, email, display, social media and the other online marketing specialties should be working together, as well as with traditional marketing departments and all facets of the Web development team. This allows for a supported and unified message. Media is becoming ubiquitous, so it’s especially important that the efforts among departments align and come together for amplified effect.

Moving at the Speed of Light

Today it’s social media. Tomorrow it’s mobile apps. Next week, who knows. It used to be that marketers learned the ropes and then got creative within the constraints of the current platforms. Now marketers have to be looking several steps ahead — at least! Today’s innovation is tomorrow’s must-have. Are you going to be ready when it comes?

The solution to this is staying up on the news and participating in regular training and education events. Marketers that understand the speed of the Internet won’t miss more than a few week’s worth of news before catching up on the latest tech developments and changes. Training and conferences are great ways to keep informed on current best practices.

Quick note: One of the next search conferences on the horizon is SMX East. Use the discount code smx15bruceclay to receive a 15 percent discount on an All Access Pass. You may also want to check out the SEO training Bruce is teaching during the conference. And read Bruce’s advanced SEO dream agenda to find out where he’ll be during SMX East.

Thanks, on behalf of Bruce Clay, Inc. and myself, to Dr. Ralph Wilson, publisher and editor-in-chief of Web Marketing Today. The site and newsletter is one of the longest running and largest online resources for e-commerce.

Dr. Wilson’s interviews on Web Marketing Today cover a range of online marketing topics for many different experience levels. So it was nice to get Dr. Wilson in the interviewee chair for once! His recommendations for online retailers, on using PayPal, and the business world’s shift to digital is full of practical tips as well as high-level analysis. Thanks, Dr. Wilson, and thanks to everyone for tuning in!

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Business’s Online Adaptation and SEO - SEM Synergy Extras

So this summer Matt decided to try biking to work for 30 days, Quadszilla tried blogging for 30 days, both worth while endeavors but I was looking for something to do that had value that would last longer than the 30 days … so I decided to reduce my inbox.

Like most of you I’d wake up every morning with 50-100 emails sitting in my inbox, to be honest most of them where crap and got deleted. Which got me thinking how much time do I waste deleting emails over and over again from the same companies that I am never going to use. So here was my plan.

• If the sender was legit unsubscribe the correct way
• If not set up a rule/filter to auto delete all email from them
• If  unsubscribe attempts failed set up a rule/filter to auto delete

The first 2 weeks of my experiment was brutal I was visiting hundreds of websites, trying to unsubscribe, remember and recover lost passwords it was just awful, However eventually I did see the light of day, and I was waking up to a smaller and smaller inbox. Here are some things I noticed:

• Smaller companies are much easier to unsubscribe from
• Larger companies have segregated lists making it much harder to unsubscribe
• Larger companies abuse take advantage of the 10 day grace period to remove you from their list
• In some cases it’s completely impossible to stop promotional emails (I like you ClickZ and iEntry but looking in your direction here)

This is absolutely an experiment I recommend that you take part in I can definitely say it’s been pretty successful and a huge win for me as I am usually waking up to 25 or less new email messages in the morning. The first weeks are definitely the hardest, and it’s probably going to take you longer than 30 days, but the rewards will give you more time to get things done in the future.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

My Email Inbox Reduction Experiment

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My Email Inbox Reduction Experiment