February 2007

It’s that time again loyal Hatters…let’s celebrate this week’s Unbirthday in style! There was so much good stuff this week, I don’t have room put it all in. Just creating and going through this list every week takes several hours now because we’ve got so many good sources to look at. But without further ado…

* Found via AdRants, these guys want to be Playboy Mansion Pool Boys. I’d like to intern once they get the job.

* Mobile marketing…if you’re not paying attention every week I’ll try again. DigitalGhost has a brief post on cell phone ads, Search Engine Land has a breakdown on text message marketing, and Business Week has a good writeup on the battle for mobile search. This is one hot topic lately.

* Found via Battelle Media, Mark Fletcher (founder of Bloglines) has a new start up blog at Startupping.com. Probably will have some good info coming out of it. I’ll be updating as I see things come across.

* Graywolf is on fire this week. We have more craziness from personal search. I for one welcome our new Google SkyNet overlords. Even more Adwords quality score nonsense. Add in some good advice on building defensible income with multiple sites.

* Found via a YOUmoz post is the anatomy of a super digg showing the power of generating traffic via digg. On the other hand, we have a not-for-digg pledge from Andy. I’m in agreement here, I’m getting tired of top ten ways to write something pointless.

* Can’t figure out where to start your affiliate marketing? Here is a good starting point. Just don’t put it on your desktop. I for one welcome our new Google Communist overlords.

* Blog stuff: Problogger has 10 ways to kill your blog and running a blog competition. Dean again on Wordpress adding built-in Digg voting. Search Marketing Standard with keeping old posts alive.

* Here is a good post on the quick launch and quick sell startup Jumpcut.

* Running an affiliate program can be hard work (or no work at all, right Nate?). Rae tells us how to piss off your affiliates.

* SEOmoz has a couple good basic SEO posts, with 24 on-site checks for dummy’s and why you are a dummy in the first place.

* Links Links and More Links: Buy links and don’t get caught, don’t buy links because soon they won’t matter (that’s still far off I think), and content is still the King.

* Girl Scouts on MySpace?????? Sounds like a problem waiting to happen.

* Last but certainly not least, some forward thinking from StuntDubl.

That’s all she wrote for this Friday. Go look through the looking glass and see what you find.

SIDE NOTE: I’m going to try and post more frequently starting next week, hoping to get out 3-4 a week including the Tea Time so stay tuned. Also stay tuned for some technical posts on personalized search related topics with a joint effort from TheMadHat and my good friend Dave the Gypsy!

Registration opened today for the inaugural event of Danny Sullivan’s Search Marketing Expo with SMX Advanced 2007. This is bound to be an extraordinary event covering topics more advanced and in-depth that can be found at SES. The networking opportunities alone will be worth the cost. Apparently there is a limit to the number of attendees, as they have auditorium style seating with plenty of room for your laptops and other items. This is certainly not like SES where you’re crammed in and trying to breath while you listen to yet another person ask why their 250 site network isn’t doing well or why they can’t: get out of the sandbox / beat the minus thirty penalty / increase PR / $_GET[$n00b_Problem].

I registered this morning and am looking forward to this conference more than everything else I’ll be attending this year. I would suggest getting registered early so you don’t miss out, and you can save $400 with an early bird registration. Beers and ideas will be flowing out of every corner at this event, and it’s always exciting to be at the first show that is sure to be the most anticipated event of the year.

Unbirthday time for Friday…actually let’s call it UnValentine’s day instead. Here are my interesting and off the wall posts for the week. I was super ugly busy this week so I didn’t get to dig as deep as usual, but here’s the tea time anyway:

* Want some advice from a 12 year old on how to drive traffic to your blog? ProBlogger guest David Wilkinson from Techzi has the scoop.

* Mr. ThinkBait, DrinkBait, LinkBait, and now ManBait. Win a date with Hooley for V-Day.

* Check out 7 Rules for Landing Page Optimization and the response from Future Now about Big Red Buttons. Both make good points. And for the sake of testing:

* It’s not funny, but it has to be Alf or Calacanis.

* More props to Dave for a final breakdown PaIR Resources. Dave did several great posts on the subject and everyone will learn from them, so get over there. TheGypsy and I will be collaborating on some things soon…providing I actually have time to sleep or something first. Good job Dave!

* Do you want a shit ton of backlinks? Join the SEO Poker Tournament and ante up a link. Unfortunately I’m only at a PR 3 this early so I can’t participate, but I will totally be there if I hit 4 before then.

* Via Brian at copyblogger, the Wall Street Journal actually gets something correct about SEO. It’s about time mainstream media started paying attention.

* More cell phone wisdom from DigitalGhost. He’s in the tea time every week with evidence of the coming cell phone extravaganza so you should be paying attention. I am.

* According to Screenwerk, Google buys in-game ad company. Great, now I’m going to have Madden telling me to drink Coke during my Xbox game.

* Someone at SEOmoz had a good post on the 17 most common PPC mistakes, but the site seems to be down right now, so I don’t know who it was.

Peace out fellow hats of all shapes and colors. Join us next week where we’ll be celebrating Fat Tuesday and drinking a lot of beers and making complete fools of ourselves.

UPDATE: It isn’t really April yet…I think I was drinking heavily the day before I wrote this. But in wonderland, time goes forwards and backwards all the time, so it’s correct.

So what’s the deal with CNN? I can’t figure out their intentions on this one. As Loren reported a few weeks back, Google now has snippets from RSS feeds appearing on the personalized home pages. CNN doesn’t let you see some of the snippets. I don’t know if it’s a lack of understanding on how they work, or they just want to jack up their page view numbers. When the snippets first appeared, all of the stories were displaying “Read full story for latest details” as seen below:

Now some of the stories are showing the snippets:

What’s the deal CNN? Let’s go with one or the other. Page view numbers are soon to be an obsolete thing of the past anyway so just bite the bullet and use the snippets.

This is a lesson learned about keeping track of current news and what you’re bidding on. I’m running some arbitrage and affiliate stuff that deals with weight loss. I forgot to go in and search through my terms and remove all “Anna Nicole Smith” related terms (she did the TrimSpa thing so I was bidding on it). I didn’t even realize it until this morning, but yesterday afternoon I got killed. Traffic (and costs) went up about 1500% and it obviously didn’t convert since people weren’t looking to lose weight.

The buzz and current events can work for you or against you so make sure you’re not throwing away money. Keep on top of everything you’re bidding on or you might take a beating like I did. Time to go drown my losses with some beer. You can buy me one over on the left.