Bottom Line First

What’s most important to you in your Internet marketing campaign? Quick results? Long lasting results? High ROI? Use the AudetteMedia Marketing Cube to identify what tactics to use:

The AM Cube Live - Try It Yourself

 
Then head back here for more detailed information on what went in to building Da’ Cube.

Behind the Building of the Cube

Internet marketing offers a number of powerful tactics that can be employed to maximize the attainment of campaign goals. To use them most effectively, it’s important to develop an integrated strategy in advance that does the following:

1. Defines specific goals
2. Establishes a baseline
3. Defines specific tactics
4. Defines budget allocation
5. Defines implementation milestones, metrics and …

We recently had a small batch of t-shirts made and sent them out to our SEO friends. Here are some of the pictures we got back!

The t-shirt was accompanied with a letter asking for a photo of the recipient wearing it. Not everyone replied, but here are the ones that did.

Want an SEO Geek Shirt?

If you want a shirt do the following:

1. Follow me on twitter: @audette

2. Subscribe to our blog: http://www.audettemedia.com/feed

3. Comment here on the blog or send me a reply on twitter.

4. We’ll send you a shirt!

The SEO Geeks

The awesome Bruce Clay team

The classy Lee Odden…

Does the history of search engine optimization (SEO) even matter? I believe it does. In an industry that suffers from lack of structure and standardization, having a fuzzy history only turns the blinds another notch dimmer. Without having a clear frame of reference for where we originated, it makes it more difficult to chart progress and locate the path to where we’re going.

SEO as an industry has a lot of growing up to do, surely. It’s partly the reflection of the wild west mentality that permeates the early days of the Internet, and partly the result of a lot of geeks with keys to the castle. SEO can make companies a lot of money, and with no real law in …

Frak!! It’s getting tough out there, Apollo.

The economy is shrinking faster than the supply of Guinness in Ireland on a Saturday night. Economic cycles are typical, but this is something different, this looks more secular than cyclical - which means it probably won’t have a “V” shaped recovery and could continue for a while.

Which makes interactive/digital marketing a more vital business tool than ever.

The game has changed - and cost-effective ROI is even more important than usual. Interactive/digital marketing is simply the most cost-effective way to:

Develop a profound understanding of what customers and potential customers want.
Build customer relationships with by giving them what they want, such as useful content.
Deliver …

For my entire life I have wanted to be in a business that sells something tangible, something that I can hand or ship to a customer in exchange for their money. Weber barbecue grills, for example.
What a great product! And I would know exactly what I’m selling — and the customer would know exactly what they’re buying.

It was not to be. I’ve spent time as a stockbroker (glad that’s over); time as a Systems Integrator (glad that’s over); and many years providing Internet marketing services (still underway - I’ll keep you posted). Always dealing with intangibles. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve coined a new word - tangibilize …

… okay maybe not dirty, but you get the idea

Moderating email discussion lists - be they business-to-business, tech- or consumer-oriented - takes a great deal of skill, patience, and tact. Light touch is the goal with moderating, but it sometimes takes a heavy touch to steer the ship. Balancing that line is the art.

For a long time I’ve had the idea of a moderator’s touchstone, a small, quick reference guide I could refer to when a problem came up in one of the communities we manage. There’s no way to make a guide like this comprehensive. Moderating is an evolving, changing, all-various responsibility. It changes depending on the style of the community, the moderator, the list members and the …

A cornerstone of search engine optimization is the analysis of server log files. Analytical tools are essential, but we need direct access to the raw logs in order to study bot behaviour and spot errors, patterns and potential crawling issues GUI analytics can’t give us.

We use a number of tools to diagnose crawling and indexing patterns. Google’s webmaster console is excellent, but in my experience (especially with large sites) crawling errors are shown as indicators rather than comprehensive reports - good for a heads-up to delve into some deeper analysis. That’s where command line scripts come into the picture. They can parse huge log files for critical information, such as search engine spider behaviour, or error codes like 500s that …

This article will serve as a basic reference sheet for those doing email marketing campaigns. This is primarily aimed at newsletters, but can also be applied to sales messages, transactional emails, or even discussion lists.

There was a time when HTML email wasn’t widely accepted, with pushback for anything not delivered in plain text. That’s not true today. In fact, companies still using only plain text are missing opportunities in engagement and sales that richly formatted HTML email can provide.

I probably don’t need to mention this (but I will). Don’t spam. Spamming is stupid and annoying, and companies engaged in the practice don’t have a clue about doing business online. There’s a gray area of spam too (that I recently found …

This post will explore several arguments against using nofollow for internal PageRank™ sculpting. It is based on a presentation I did at SMX Advanced. You can view my presentation slides here, however the deck is very brief since I only had about 10 minutes to present my position. The bulk of the discussion is treated in this post.

Summary of My Position

Sculpting PageRank™ with nofollow is not going away. Limited use of nofollow is recommended. However, widespread use of the technique is usually a bad idea. I recommend slowing it down.

Nofollow sculpting is a tool to raise search rankings by distributing PageRank™ flow internally. However, PageRank™ is a patented, secret algorithm designed by Google that we can …

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a doctor. Not a real doctor mind you, but an alternative doctor - I wanted to heal with botanicals and homeopathy, with nutrition and philosophy. I was all about naturopathic medicine (to the great bewilderment of my parents). Once I came to my senses, realizing that 12 years of education wasn’t going to make me any smarter (and would probably put my family in debt forever), I abandoned the idea. Internet marketing is in my blood; it was always going to be my destiny. It just took me awhile to accept that (plus, studying during the day and working for clients at night sucked!).

Fast forward to the present, and I …