Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

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Speed Dating Networking

Have you ever speed dated? I’ve been married long enough that I’ve not ever had the opportunityneed to attend a speed dating meeting, yet I’ve seen it on TV. (wow I feel like I just almost made a bad quote, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.”)

Last Night I attended Charity Speed Networking as part of Small Business Marketing: Unleashed and it was FUN. Honestly, if I were single, I may seriously consider speed dating if I was looking for someone with common interests.

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Buying software is so 1999. I mean seriously, who wants to buck up and spend upwards of $500 on an office suite when you have bills to pay and lattes to drink. Plus, with everyone’s exciting New Year’s resolutions in full swing, saving money may be even more appealing. Enter the world of free web-based software and open source software. This list is obviously not comprehensive, nor authoritative, however, these ten programs are the ones I found most useful during 2007.

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Thanks to PubCon and the Sales and Marketing department of Treasure Island in Las Vegas, I was able to finally take in my first real production in Sin City last week – “Mystère” …for no cost at all.

This Cirque Du Soleil show has been creating an awe-inspiring visual spectacular for over 10 years. I found the quality and level of entertainment provided by the musicians, acrobats, dancers and those handling the staging and lights to be astounding. Mystère provided the opportunity to the viewer to interpret the performance in many ways. Was it is intended to share the potential of the individual as one makes her way through life…or was it all the dream of a small child?

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• Grip Your Readers With These 7 Knock-out Opening Sentences
• Five Common Paid Search Mistakes That Can Sink Your Campaign

• PPC Success in Five Steps
• The Importance of Images In Linkbait Articles
• 11 Link Usability Tips

I have survived Day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies 2007 conference … albeit on information overload. It isn’t really that there was so much information that it was overwhelming. Taken in small pieces everything is perfectly digestible. It’s when I over fill myself that I waddle away overloaded. All that aside, I have to say that my first day was pretty good. I attended 4 sessions and learned something new from each of them.

Stoney introduced Rob and me to some pretty fun people. Rob asked me how it felt to be going to dinner with 12 guys, and I said: “Popular.” I also felt quite popular with all the rubber necking our Pole Position Marketing team shirts caused. We were quite the collective object of many a heads turning and fingers pointing. You could read people’s lips Check out the cool shirts. I bet next year there will be impersonators.

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Want to waste the next couple hours?

If you’re interested in Viral Marketing and understanding how it works, you may want to head over to the Ultimate Meme Database [link no longer available] (before they called it viral marketing they were called “memes”). What does or doesn’t go viral is a subject that can leave your mind pretty boggled- especially for someone trying to spread the word about a product or service, rather than just fishing for attention on the internet.

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I’m starting a new series here at EMP dedicated solely to the horrible “black hole” experiences we all have from time to time- Really Bad Adventures in Search. Join me, won’t you, while we explore our latest, the Case of the Round Bed.

Lately my wife and I have been giving our place a makeover of sorts (translation: tossing out all our crap and buying stuff we actually want.) Last week she threw me a bit of a curveball.

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What do you do when you have to incorporate too many keywords in too little copy or you have a group of keywords that don’t easily fit into the existing web page? Besides the obvious solution of creating more copy to accommodate these situations, use your right brain to help you out here.

What do you do when you have key phrases that are personal in nature i.e. “make my writing better” as a core term? You could use it as a headline to spark your readers curiosity, but at times that may be an awkward act to follow. The most simple way to do this is to use customer quotes or testimonials.

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There has been a bit of hubub for a while about persona based marketing plans and what that really means. Personas are templates used to identify a customer on a wants and needs level, so that you can adjust your site’s user experience to be as well matched to your customer as possible. Persona based marketing is the art of identifying those personas in a way that you can build out several templates and see things from the users point of view.

The creation of personas is not an easy task, but with some online resources that you may not have thought of, it can be done quickly and efficiently. Social outlets such as myspace, facebook, flickr, technorati, wordpress, live journal, and blogger (just to name a handful) can be a great way to find out how customers interact with you. Just do a search on any two of those services for your top keywords and your brand name and you should be able to find a wealth of information.

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