Welcome to the home of the Official Direct Online Marketing™ Blog. This blog features mostly daily commentary from Paul Woodhouse and Justin Seibert on internet marketing news, pitfalls, and tactics. Learn internet marketing tips and tricks useful whether you're an industry pro or a business looking to learn more.
By now you’ve probably heard the story about Lois Feldman. If not, here’s a quick recap:
Lois was arrested for doing her Humpty Hump (of Digital Underground fame) Burger King bathroom impression in the stall of a public bathroom at a college football game recently. That’s pretty embarrasing, especially in today’s internet age.
By hook or by crook I’ve always managed to avoid public speaking engagements. Whether it’s a case of getting lost in London during rush hour, or just being on the wrong side of the pond at any particular invite, my air of international blogger of mystery has remained fairly intact.
You see, I never thought that writing a business blog about a small sheet metal shop in the backend of nowhere would cause such a fuss. I neither expected nor particularly wanted to appear in newspapers or have to explain The Tinbasher as a business blogging case study to an all-knowing throng at SES Chicago on December 10th. But, such is the indirect effect of blogging.
We’ve been thinking about how we can bring more value to our readers on this here internet marketing blog and settled on running an occasional series of guest posts penned by various marketing thought leaders. This remained filed in our Good Ideas We Feel Like We’re Too Busy to Implement drawer until now. What finally got me out of my hammock to implement this series was being featured in a post by Donna FontenotSEO Scoop as part of a series meant to spread some love and introduce the search engine marketing community to other and often newer voices.
DazzlinDonna as she is better known on the internets has been involved in this industry for quite some time and really knows her stuff. I am personally delighted to have Donna kick off our The Marketing Experts series and now present her post on a very specific way you can improve your own search engine optimization efforts (or stay on top of your SEO firm). — Justin
Over two years ago, way back in September, 2006, Google let us know that they were changing the way they display cache dates for our pages. Specifically, Vanessa Fox said:
Earlier this week I visited Chicago and met up with our Google agency reps. Our reps are actually based out of California, but were in town at the same time for other matters, so it afforded us the opportunity to sit down face to face to discuss some new campaigns for a couple clients.
Because Google often dresses in a body suit woven with mystery, secrecy, and opaqueness, I thought I’d share what it’s like inside the Internet Giant, or at least its Windy City ops.
President-elect Barack Obama to have his Blackberry-induced smile wiped off his face?
The world is made up of two types of people – those who think Barack Obama is the Messiah, and those who think he’s a very naughty boy. In amongst that lot are a curious group of Web 2.0 evangelists who think the election was really a win for social media.
“It’s like a jungle, sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.” Grandmaster Flash – “The Message”
Oh Circuit City – we’ll surely miss you. Well, we might not miss your insistence on trying to sell hdtvs by splitting the signal 423 ways and displaying SD content on them, or demoing surround sound systems by bunching all the speakers together at different heights and directions. But, those are just minor things ignoring the unique selling points of your big box items. It’s nothing that other major electronics retailers don’t do; albeit, never as cack-handedly as you guys.
We try to stick on topic on our internet marketing blog, but this Veteran’s Day marks an exception.
Bob Coffield wrote a great post on his health care law blog today honoring his family that served in the military and all our veterans. I was so moved I wanted to share my appreciation here and allow this to serve as an open thread for anyone else that wants to share their thanks or memories of their loved ones. I apologize for being off topic.
I don’t know whether you’ve been following the Yahoo! soap opera of late, but I bet you’ve seen the latest installment of the on-off-on again bizarre love triangle played out between Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google. (Well, in this particular instance between Yahoo! and Google.)
Yesterday saw Google and Yahoo! break up again over their Internet advertising partnership. In a nutshell, Google was to display their AdWords advertising across Yahoo!’s entire Web network with Yahoo Inc. receiving an $800 million yearly boost in revenue for the privilege.
AP has the story in full here if you want more details before obliging us by answering the poll below.
Don’t know if you’re aware, but there’s some sort of election thing going on today. Apparently one of the things you can vote on is President of the United States of America, which sounds like an important post.
With that, let’s take a fairly extensive look into what the candidates are doing today in their paid search campaigns, shall we?
On Halloween, we cited some Harris Interactive research regarding how consumers like to find answers to their healthcare questions. We also asked you “What are the most used online resources to gather information on a health question / concern?” Probably a bit of a misleading question since some people answered what they used while others answered what they thought most people used.
Either way, the results of the survey and the actual data from HI after the jump.
