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HDTV and MOJO – Television Made in Paradise

I love High Definition television! And when you combine HDTV with a DVR, you end up with the ultimate tool for wasting time, burning brain cells and enticing the senses. My fanaticism for NFL football went from a solid 9.5 to 11 after adding HD and a DVR. Currently, my setup looks like this:

  • 42″ Phillips LCD HDTV (only 1080i though)
  • Kenwood AV Receiver
  • Comcast HD DVR
  • Sony Progressive Scan DVD/CD
  • Apple TV 2.0
  • Wii
  • 6 piece Boston Acoustics Speakers

Probably not going to impress a major audiophile, but it works out pretty well for me. So anyhow, HDNet and HD Movie (Mark Cuban’s networks) are great for HD, however when it comes to quality of programs, it’s getting hard to beat the MOJO Network! Do you get MOJO? If not, you gotta call someone and ask for it!

Three shows that you shouldn’t miss (watch them online if you don’t get MOJO):

  • Bobby G: Adventure Capitalist – Follows around Bobby Genovese, founder and owner of BG Capital Group, Ltd. and BG Capital Management Corp. Bobby is an adventure loving and filthy rich, a bit eccentric and genuinely a good guy (it seems). It’s a great snapshot of the life of a person who has made it in business and still manages to have fun – and he isn’t full of himself or an a-hole. He’s Canadian, they’re all cute and cuddly, right?
  • Wall Street Warriors – This show follows the life of several Wall Street folks ranging from hedge fund managers, stockbrokers, floor traders and day traders. The “characters” are very diverse and you can actually learn something about how deal makers function and a bit about their personalities.
  • Three Sheets - It’s drinking show, it’s a travel show, it’s about people and cultures. All great things that are even better when combined, like gumbo.

I also dig Start-Up Junkies, but I’ve worked for an Internet start-up and it’s all just a little too familiar for me. Plus the internet marketing guy on the show makes me want to throw things at him, and that would hurt my HDTV.

Posted 21 March 2008 † Aaron § Other ‡ Comments (3) °

How do You Find the Best Airfares?

Between search, meta-search, customer review sites, aggregators, OTAs and everything else the internet can throw at us – it’s actually getting harder to make travel arrangements on the web.  What??  What I mean is, the more information to sift through, the harder it is for most people to make a decision on what to buy.  It’s a fact that when faced with an overwhelming amount of choices, many people opt for no choice at all.

Airfare, however, still seems to offer limited choice – and therefore should be simpler to decide on.  And it is, for the most part.  Generally, from most cities, there are 1 or 2 choices that fit my schedule and my budget.  But if you’re a flexible traveler, how do you decide when to travel and when to buy your ticket to ensure that you get the best deal available?
Here is my method:

  1. Search for my ideal travel dates in Orbitz, using flexible dates to see the fares for the days around my ideal travel date.
  2. Pick the best rate that works for the day(s) I need to be in my destination.
  3. Make sure that if I’m staying an extra night at the destination that the extra hotel night and/or expenses don’t exceed the extra cost of traveling on my ideal travel day.
  4. Proceed to the airline’s own website to book the ticket directly and thereby avoiding the $5 service charge (and possibly getting some bonus miles in the process).

The thing my method doesn’t account for is knowing WHEN to buy the ticket…  2-3 months out is usually not possible for most business travel.  I just finished a book where the author recommends only booking 4-5 days out and using Orbitz pricing to determine where you should start bidding on a Priceline (Name you Own Price) ticket.

Farecast.com gives you a recommendation of when to “Buy Now” or “Wait”, but it doesn’t really give you a flexible dates option.  I recently ran across flyspy.com (beta) which let’s you look at rates on a graph for up to 30 days and lets you adjust for day and length while highlighting the lowest fare. But it doesn’t really give you an idea of what the fare may do if you wait to buy your ticket later (like farecast).

It seems to me like there is an opportunity for a main-stream air-only search engine that encompasses the best of these two models.  However, with little or no commissions given on air-only bookings, a revenue model might be difficult to come up with.

How do you find the best deals on airfare?  Let me know in the comments and maybe we can create an aggregated list of sites and/or suggestions…

Posted 10 March 2008 † Aaron § Travel Marketing ‡ Comments (2) °

SEO for Wordpress Blogs

Here is a free white paper released by Blizzard Internet Marketing and written by my Pubcon friends Mary Bowling and Carrie Hill.  If you’re blogging – or getting ready to start – this white paper is an easy to follow guide on setting up your blog with Wordpress and tweaking it in order to maximize your search engine exposure and reap the rewards of a well optimized blog.  There is also a great list of plugins that help you get the most out of your blog.  In fact, after reading the white paper I setup the contextual related posts plugin, which you will now see under the comment section of my posts.

And, if you’re planning to attend Search Engine Strategies in New York next month, be sure to stop in on the workshop that Mary will be teaching, A Crash Course in Local Search, on Friday the 22nd.

Thanks, Mary!

New White Paper Released- SEO for Wordpress Blogs

Posted 18 February 2008 † Aaron § Blogging § Optimization Tips § SEO § Search Engine Strategies § WebMasterWorld ‡ Comments (0) °

Simplified SEO in Three Steps

Disclaimer: I know that this is a completely over-simplified version of search engine optimization and an SEO expert is really what most sites need to kick their search engine marketing into high gear… But, I wanted to boil it down to just a few things that any site owner can do to help out their rankings with just a little effort. Depending on a number of factors, these changes may make significant increses in your ability to drive search engine traffic, or it may be much more subtle. But with the time that you’ll invest, it’s surely worth a shot…

  1. Make sure the engines can see your content. The simplest way to do this is to use your web browser to view > source. Do you see your content in the code? More than 2 or 3 times in the last few months I’ve had people ask me to take a look at their site and I’ve found that the entire site was nothing more than images or was completely constructed in frames. If you view the source of your site and don’t see your page copy, neither can the search engines. Also, make sure you’re using keyword phrases that users are actually searching for in your page copy. To help figure out what those keywords are, visit: freekeywords.wordtracker.com.
  2. Rewrite your title tags. The title tags on your site serve two purposes. One is to help the engines know what your pages are about, the other is to encourage users to click on your listing in the search engine results. Write a unique title tag for each page of your site that includes one or two of those keywords from step one. In fact, use that keyword first in your title and stick your company name at the end (unless you’re specifically targeting your company/brand name). Keep titles to around 70 characters. Send that list to your web developer or update them yourself, but make sure each page has a title that is unique to its content and assures users that your site is what they are looking for when they see it in their results.
  3. Get more incoming links. Link building is a discipline in and of its own. Very simply put, you need quality incoming links to your site in order to obtain top rankings. To start ask friends to link to your site, next ask strangers to link to your site. Don’t spam strangers (or friends!), ask them nicely to trade or add a link to your site because you have complementary businesses or content. Join the chamber of commerce to get a link from their member directory. Put out your press releases through PRWeb or send them to bloggers and publishers of newsletters in your industry. There are hundreds of ways to build links, if you commit a few hours to it every week you will soon be reaping the rewards.

There you have it. Just a few simple steps that anyone can do to help their search engine rankings. Again, you won’t replace a search engine marketing expert with these, but they may help you get to the place where you can afford to hire one…

Posted 12 February 2008 † Aaron § Link Building § Optimization Tips § PR § SEO ‡ Comments (1) °

If David Lee Roth tried out for American Idol…

It might sound something like this:

Runnin’ With The Devil (DLR vocal track)

That was bloody brilliant!

Posted 25 January 2008 † Aaron § Music § Other ‡ Comments (0) °

The Perfect Internet Marketing Conference

Today a guest post from SEO Mary Bowling, who I had the pleasure of meeting at PubCon last month:

I’ve attended 3 unique internet marketing conferences this year, each hosted by a different big-name producer. Each had their own strong and weak points and none of them were ideal. So, I started thinking about all the best things that would go into planning the absolutely perfect conference.

Here are the ingredients I crave:

Registration

  • A really enticing preregistration discount. Give me some ammo to take to the controller to get her to shake the money loose to pay for this.
  • Quick and easy registration. Maybe even online.? Self service kiosks where you can print your own pass?

Venue

  • The venue’s in a big hotel or directly adjacent to one. It is so much more relaxing to be able to go to your room if you need to during the day than it is to have to commute to the conference area and make your headquarters there.
  • Free wireless in the hotel rooms. Come on, the internet is a required utility for the set of people who go to an INTERNET marketing conference. You don’t charge them extra for water or electricity. Why make them pay $10-15 a day for internet access? And no, if we’re going to get any work done at all during the conference, please don’t expect us to conduct it in noisy and distracting common areas, so free internet in the lobby doesn’t count. If you can’t negotiate free internet, then at least get the hotel to include it in the room price. Then, we’ll never have to know.
  • Free wireless internet access in the conference area and adequate bandwidth to accommodate all the laptops in the audience. A lot of the people typing away are blogging about what’s going on at the conference. Do you want them complaining about inadequate internet service?

Amenities

  • Power to the people! Electrical outlets would be everywhere so that we could stay fully charged throughout the day and into the evening sessions and events.
  • Good food. You will be judged by the food you serve and the way it is served. A cold box lunch from a long table? or a long buffet of catered food we’ll all be blogging about?
  • Comfortable chairs. We can sit on hard plastic chairs all day, including at lunch, but we won’t be comfortable. Can we have a bit of padding, please?
  • Tables, as well as chairs in every session room. They call them laptops, that’s not really the preferred way to use them.

Sessions

  • Good acoustics and audio equipment. We want to hear what everyone says in every session. That’s what you’re selling and that’s what we’re here for.
  • Prepared presentations. No matter how celebrated a speaker may be, it ‘s disrespectful of the audience if they do not make any effort to prepare for their conference role.
  • Coordinated sessions. It’s a total waste of time when more than one speaker in a session gives us the same information. The moderator should review and coordinate the presentations to insure against the dreaded duplicate content.
  • No pitches. Nothing ruins a session faster than a speaker trying to sell the audience on their product or service.

Networking

  • Networking opportunities. Give us plenty of meals together, parties, evening sessions, exhibit hall time and creative events, like charity poker tourneys and roll-playing extravaganzas. Who we hook up with is often as important as what we learn.
  • Friendly, accessible speakers. It is so cool to have breakfast with an SEO hero or two. Meeting and speaking with the speakers is a highlight of any conference.

Here are a few niceties I’ll throw in, too: dimmable overhead lighting in the session rooms; comfortable temperature; snacks and drinks available throughout the day and at least a 10-15 minute break between sessions.

Mary Bowling is the senior SEO for Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc and blogs about optimization.

Posted 02 January 2008 † Guest Poster § Blogging § Online Marketing § Other § Search Engine Strategies § WebMasterWorld ‡ Comments (8) °

Why You Need Top 3 Rankings, Not Top 5, Not Top 10

Here is Why:

Eyetools Eyetracking Research

This eye tracking research by Eyetools, Enquiro, and Did-it states that 100% of users look at the top three organic listings on Google’s search results page. Only 85% even LOOK at the number four listing and after that it’s all down hill to number 10, which only 20% of searchers even take a peak at.

In addition, the importance of managing SEO along with PPC campaigns is further strengthened by the fact that only 50% of users are even giving a glance to sponsored ad units on the search results pages.

“We see a marked difference in how people say they search and what they actually do. Previous research had indicated that people were considered searchers and spent some time before choosing a link. The past few studies we’ve done, this one included, shows that there’s a huge importance placed on where the eyeballs end up on the page. Clicks happen pretty quickly. It just shows that search marketing is a real estate game. It’s all about location, location, location.” – Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss

Posted 27 December 2007 † Aaron § Google § Online Marketing § SEM § SEO § Search Engines ‡ Comments (1) °

PubCon 2007 – Raising the Standard of SEO and Web Marketing

I just got back from PubCon Las Vegas. As usual, this was a great conference if you make your living in e-Commerce, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing. I was very impressed by the presenters this year, and I want to take a moment to recognize several by name and to highlight why they made such a strong impression on me:

Robin Liss

Robin gave a highly informative presentation of content production for the web. She used a beautiful manufacturing analogy to illustrate her points. To summarize, she informed us that creating quality content is like manufacturing any product. As a manufacturing endeavor, both the quality of your end product and the efficiency of getting it to market depends heavily on the process you use to get there.

Robin is founder of Reviewed.com, a network of independent product review sites, including CamcorderInfo.com and DigitalCameraInfo.com. Her sites are known for their high journalistic quality, their stringent independence of thought and for meticulously sticking to a consumer advocacy mindset.

I was impressed with the discipline and attention to detail that Robin’s company brings to the content they put on the web. Not only does Robin understand the process to drive a piece of content from Assignment to Research, Research to First Draft, Draft to Edit and down the pipeline to a finished, ready for web document. She also has an expert grasp of the economics of this kind of endeavor. By meticulously tracking each step of the process, Robin insists you can arrive at a very accurate understanding of the resources necessary to keep your content pipeline full, whether you want to generate one or two quality articles and postings a week or ten million words of high-quality, valuable content per year.

Robin Liss is a bright light, and I was personally very impressed with and appreciative of her insights.

Michael Stebbins

Some people impress you by their breadth of knowledge and marketing acumen. Some people impress you with their generosity of mind and their willingness to share what they know in order to raise the overall level of our craft to new heights. In Michael Stebbins PubCon presentations, I was impressed with both. Clearly Michael and his colleagues at MarketMotive are doing excellent research, which benefits both their clients and the rest of the web marketing profession. His willingness to share key insights in a plain and easily executed manner is quite refreshing, and I really appreciated Michael Stebbins’s contribution to the conference.

I had a chance to visit with Michael at one of the cocktail receptions, and he is also a hell of a good guy.

Ted Ulle

Talk about a veteran of SEO and someone with a fantastic ability to convey in a clear manner the importance of adhering to sound Information Architecture and Design principles.

Ted encouraged and argued strongly that folks interested in creating websites should look at key resources from Information Architecture and print typography to gain an understanding of the appropriate methods of organizing and semantically categorizing information and for displaying the written word. As always, content is king, but Ted Ulle adds the important caveat that content is king, if and only if users can navigate and find your high-quality content and search engines can crawl and index your content appropriately.

Take a hard look at your design process was Ted’s big message that resonated with me. Consider the purpose of your website and of most websites. You are trying to provide valuable information to a user, or you want them to trust you enough to make a purchase from your company instead of a dozen other options. You are presenting your content to those users, one way or another. The way you organize and structure your website and its pages effects both the end-user’s ability to find what he or she wants and the ability of the search engines to appropriately identify, crawl, and index what is most important and meaningful about your site.

ALL aspects of your Information Architecture, Graphic Design, and coding should support the proper organization and display of your content. Page navigation, headers, sub-headers, internal page linking structure, and graphical page elements all need to support the user’s ability to quickly find what he needs and take the appropriate action to get from first step to final step in a logical and intuitive manner.

I was very impressed with Ted Ulle’s undeniable expertise in his profession, but I was more impressed with his ability to convey his wisdom in a largely unequivocal and authoritative way backed up by clear examples of why and how this matters.

And I have to say that I also appreciated Ted’s very humorous cautionary tales about things as simple as your site’s error messages. They’re important, and if your IT geeks wrote them, please review them today!

I wanted to call these three indivuals out in the marketing community. I learned a lot. I appreciate their contributions to our profession.

Patrick Soch
Marketing Manager
www.eBags.com

Posted 07 December 2007 † Patrick § Online Marketing § Optimization Tips § SEM § SEO § Search Engine Strategies § Search Engines § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Is Blackhat SEO Wrong?

Shawn over at diydollars.com has a great post on Blackhat SEO. I largely agree with Shawn’s conclusions about Google and blackhat vs. whitehat. I’ve been known to say, “Google is not the boss of me!” at times. And, I tend to get a little tired of “Matt Cutts said this” posts all over the SEO blogs and forums (I do like Matt, though – really good guy), so this is a nice change of pace.

There could be some lively debate shaping up in the comments at diy, so click over and chime in:

Is Blackhat SEO Wrong? | diydollars.com

Posted 08 November 2007 † Aaron § Google § SEO § Search Engines § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (1) °

PubCon 2007 info

I realized after yesterday’s post about hotels in Las Vegas for Pubcon, I may have left out some who haven’t yet experienced a WebmasterWorld event. Here is a press release about the upcoming event in Las Vegas (Registration is now open):

WebmasterWorld’s PubCon Returns to Las Vegas with Craig Newmark of craigslist as a Keynote Speaker

Posted 21 September 2007 † Aaron § WebMasterWorld ‡ Comments (0) °