So, if you haven’t heard already, the fine folks over at IMBroadcast.com are hosting what some are calling the blow out internet marketing conference of the year. IM Spring Break will be a hyper-networking/hyper-educational event. They are capping attendees to 200, which means that there will be very focused & intimate discussions revolving all aspects of internet marketing. [Read more...]
IM Spring Break is Going to Make You Pee Your Pants!
February 7, 2009 by · 1 Comment
Help a Charity and Get MASSIVE Amounts Of Links
December 12, 2008 by · 3 Comments
It’s the holiday season which means that its that time of year that I feel a bit generous (yes, just once a year, live with it). Here’s a great way that you can show your generosity by helping a charity in need and getting massive amounts of links for your good deed.
Here’s the secret: Give the charity of your choice a page on your web site. The vast majority of work that we do at jozsoft is web development for non-profits. From my experience there are LOTS of small non-profits and local charities that could greatly benefit from a web presence, however lack the funds required to make that presence a reality. If I could I would give away all my services for free to non-profits, but then I would be out of work and never finish with the TONS of them that need web help. Trust me they are out there, just start looking.
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Google Profiles Has SEO Friendly Links!
October 20, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
I just made my profile using the new Google Profiles. It appears to me that the links found inside the profiles are SEO friendly! Check out the screen shot I took below using FireBug to look at the code.
Am I dreaming here??
Links are making people go crazy!
September 17, 2008 by · 1 Comment
OK, I want to first start off by saying that this will be a short one because I am really busy today.
Lets start things off by pointing out a post at Michael Gray’s blog where he talks about Guy Kawasaki writing reviews for products that he has been given. This prompted the debate over the link aqquistion only for us all later to find out that Guy doesn’t really know that much about links to begin with!
Maybe Guy should take a look at Dave Snyder’s most recent post.
A local police department in Wisconsin opens up a criminal investigation after a woman links to their web site. The police department ordered a cease and desist of the link. The woman responded with a law suit against the city at large! Moral of the story here is what ever you do, don’t send any link juice to the Sheboygan Police Department (Oops!) What makes this get even more interesting is this article that describes this whole insanity. Scroll down to the bottom of the article and tell me if you see anything funny at the bottom right. 
Bloggers deserve real tips not stolen goods!
August 26, 2008 by · 2 Comments
Allen Stern just wrote a post in response to a post that Seth Godin wrote. Both of these men are exploring ways to compensate content creators, such as bloggers. They both are recommending that users click on the ads that bloggers display. Godin calls this a form of tipping. As you can assume there are quite a few that aren’t very happy about this.
Apparently Seth Godin has never worked for real tips, and might have never really appreciated any tips that he might have given. Why you ask? Real tips display gratitude based on transference of wealth. Click ads does not transfer any wealth from the person making the “tip” to the content creator.
To better understand this point lets pretend that I am at my favorite Italian restaurant “Gianotti’s”. If I have enjoyed my meal (which I always do) and if I have enjoyed the service then I enjoy leaving a tip for the server. This transference of wealth from my wallet to the server is genuine display of gratitude, because I am giving MY money for a service that I appreciate.
However, following the teachings of Godin and Stern, I should reach over to the guy sitting at the table beside me, take his wallet out and steal a few bucks from him and use it to tip my server.
If you have ever worked for tips you know that this is not only wrong for the obvious reason but it also looks disingenuous because you obviously haven’t valued their work enough to tip them with your own money, instead in the case of internet ads, you have made a simple click that require no extra effort or expense.
But there is a much deeper dangerous side to this practice that we as internet marketers should be concerned with. Click fraud devalues ad cost. If you really want to help the blogger then you will only click on the ads that you find useful and relevant. Why? Because the very basis for PPC is relevancy and if advertisers see a rise in CTR with out a rise in conversions then they will drop PPC ads like a bad habit FAST! Nobody likes wasting money on marketing!
So the question that Stern asked is still left unanswered. “How do you compensate content creators?” Here’s an idea: If content creators feel their content is valuable enough to receive compensation then why not add a PayPal Donate button to their side bar. This way visitors can actually give a real tip. Or if you would rather you could always give the content creator a bit more publicity by mentioning their post in your blog or telling folks about it There are numerous ways to compensate content creators with out cheating advertisers at the same time.
Hitwise data misses the mark when it comes to Real Estate.
July 28, 2008 by · 9 Comments
Not long ago, Marketing Pilgrim posted about some Hitwise data on real estate search terms and real estate web sites. As expected Realtor.com did very well ranking #1 as both the most visited real estate web site and the most used real estate search term. This wasn’t much of a surprise to those in the real estate industry. What surprised some (and still confuses me) is the list of most visited real estate web sites.
Hitwise Most Visited Real Estate Web Site Rankings
1. realtor.com – 9.08 percent
2. HomeGain – 2.44 percent
3. Yahoo Real Estate – 2.25 percent
4. RE/MAX real estate – 2.21 percent
5. Rent.com – 2.19 percent
6. Zillow – 2.06 percent
7. Apartments.com – 2 percent
8. Move.com – 1.91 percent
9. ZipRealty – 1.86 percent
10. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development – 1.42 percent.
When I first saw that list I had this gut feeling that something was off. If any of you are familiar with my work in the past you know that I love crunching the numbers. So, lets take a look at what the numbers say:
zillow.com trulia.com remax.com century21.com
As I expected my analysis shows Zillow.com doing better than REMAX.com. And, even more interesting is Trulia.com doing better than remax.com as well! Trulia.com isn’t even listed on Hitwise’s report!
Confused? So am I. But, don’t worry, I will explain all of this and more in a future guest post at Wolf-Howl.com….stay tuned!
Cuil’s Numbers Just Don’t Add Up!
July 28, 2008 by · 2 Comments
From Cuil:
Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.
Then maybe someone can help me understand these searches I ran:
Am I missing something?? Saying that you are bigger than Google is a damn big statement, and I would think that you should have some data to back yourself up!
Top 5 National Real Estate Franchise Web Sites
July 2, 2008 by · 9 Comments
UPDATE: I wrote an updated version of this post, with lots more data here.
Earlier today Janet Meiners posted an awesome post at MarketingPilgrim.com about the top ten most visited real estate web sites. One of the things that surprised me the most was that there was only one national franchise site in the list. I think that this is interesting because it shows something that I have been feeling for awhile. Most of the national real estate franchises are dropping the ball against more savey web 2.0 business that are attracting all the traffic.
Despite that it might be a good idea to get a grasp on who in the group of national franchises are doing better than the others. Therefore I have done a bit of research and put together what I think is a good assessment of the top 5 national franchise real estate web sites. To conduct my analysis, I used four different traffic firms to make averages for each. The list and results for all are below:
Top 5 National Real Estate Franchise Web Sites:
- remax.com
- century21.com
- coldwellbanker.com
- prudential.com
- kw.com
Google Trends for Web Sites
Quantcast.com
Alexa.com
Compete.com
ICANN Hands Out SEO Gold Nuggets to Large Corporations
June 27, 2008 by · 1 Comment
Internet regulator ICANN recently voted to over haul the way it handles web addresses. Starting next year they will allow companies the ability to register their brands as TLDs. Which means we can start to expect www.mickey.disney. You can read more about the decision here.
What I am concerned about is all of the large corps reaping the SEO benefits of these branded URLs. Think about it: www.trucks.ford is going to rank allot higher than a small used car dealer that sells Ford Trucks, even with geographic search terms. It won’t matter how much money he puts into SEO he will never be able to market his product like the corporate competitors! Now of course if you own a local Ford franchise then I suppose that corporate could set up a site for you at smithautos.trucks.ford but that only means that you need corporate affiliation to compete in the same market place. I think this move is a win for large corporations that want to dominate SERPs. And if you think this will be the last of this type of behavior from those that regulate the internet, think again, this is just the beginning!
Google Shows Gay Porn In Ads
June 19, 2008 by · 1 Comment
Search Engine Round Table just pointed out that Google is now displaying a gay rights flag with in the SERPs for the term “gay”. There is much interest in this for various reasons that I am not going to discuss here. In Search Engine Round Table’s original post they stated that the gay pride flag wasn’t coming up in certain states, including South Carolina. Living in SC myself i decided to run the search term and see for myself. Search Engine Round Table was wrong it is coming up in SC, like it probably is else were. My screen shot is below:
So where’s the porn?
Take a look at that screen shot again. The ad in the top right hand corner is for a lovely adult themed gay site (NSFW). Now, don’t get me wrong I have nothing against gays and lesbians. I think they deserve the same rights and privileges as anyone else. However, I think that if you are going to make a corporate decision not to allow adult content in your advertising network then you should stick by it.
Personally I am fine with the gay rights flag. But the porn has to go. I would like a search engine where my niece can do research on diversity and different cultures with out seeing those ads!
RE/MAX is the most searched for Real Estate company on the internet.
June 11, 2008 by · 4 Comments
A recent article at MarketingPilgrim.com shows that RE/MAX is the most searched for real estate company on Google. The article, which talks about how to best use an internet marketing technique known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), shows that RE/MAX beats all of it’s competitors including CENTURY 21, Prudential, Coldwell Banker, and Keller Williams in search volume.
The data used in the article comes from Google Trends. Google Trends charts how often a particular search term is entered into Google. The data shows that RE/MAX has dominated it’s competitors since at least 2004 which is as far back as Google Trends data exist. The data also shows that RE/MAX has not only dominated its competitors but has also shown significant gains in its search volume over the last four years.
While Google Trends only tracks data from Google, many industry experts agree that it acts as a good indicator for search engine activity as a whole because of Google’s prevailing market dominance.
It seems at least that it is no surprise that RE/MAX is doing so well on the internet given that in the 2007 Swanepoel Trends Report, Stefan Swanepoel, proclaimed RE/MAX to be the leader in cutting edge of technology in the industry.
RE/MAX International has a network of almost 115,000 agents in 65 different countries worldwide.
Just Checkin In…
June 17, 2007 by · Leave a Comment
Ok, so I know that I haven’t written anything here in a long time. I wonder how many times that last sentence is written in blogs? Well, anyways I am writing this entry to update those that care, about a few changes that have been going on. I am now on my second month as the IT Specialist/Web Developer at CENTURY 21 At The Beach. I never thought that I would ever work in Real Estate. However, one of the things that I have learned over the last year is that life is always full of surprises and those that open themselves up to the improbability of the future tend to be happier and more successful. I am not sure how long I will be at CENTURY 21, but I don’t think that Real Estate is an industry I want to make a career in.
I am still doing some web development for clients on the side but for the moment RBM is going pretty slow. I have a few projects that I want to work on. For example I ran across OpenLaszlo this morning and after previewing several of their example projects I am very interested in try to develop something in that platform. I also have been doing a lot of customization of WordPress 2.1.3 for a client and I am considering taking what I have done and packaging it as a separate product for sale.
Up until very recently I have been strictly opposed to Flash as a development platform for many reasons. However, I recently used it on the new site that I developed for my work. And I must admit that it is surprisingly fun to work with. I think that perhaps I will re-explore my issues with flash and maybe use it in the future….I will probably write a blog about it….so stay tuned!
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