Hi this is Jonathan Goodman from Halyard Consulting, and this is the World of Internet Marketing. Today, we’re going to talk about “keep calm and carry on.” That’s the focus of today’s conversation. I had a couple of interesting things happen over the week and I want to talk about them and how they kind of all interrelate to this idea that when you’re in a very high stress business, when you’re running your own business, you can become very high stressed. Particularly with me I’m working very fast, emails are coming in that need to be responded to, my workers are doing stuff that needs to be checked, all of that and then you kind of hit a roadblock – you get an email. So we’re going to talk about that, go through the entire thing.

Contemporary rendering of a poster from the United Kingdom reading “Keep Calm and Carry On”, created during World War II. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m going to be speaking at the Affiliate Summit East 2013. It’s really quite an honor. Anytime that you put a proposal together for a major convention like this, and you have the opportunity to speak and you get in, it’s really a very nice pat on the back, because a panel reviewed your proposal, they looked at your credentials and they said, yes, we’d like to take time in our convention – which is a packed convention – and a lot of people are going to be talking. A lot of really intelligent and industry-focused people, and we’d like to include you. It’s really quite a nod, right? I’ve gone from kind of shouting at the wind to try to gain clients to having people call me to do work with me, so it’s taken years, and that’s really what this conversation is, about keep calm and carry on. And we’re going to get to where my thinking is in that, in a second. But I want to explain what the story was here and then lead you through to how it happened, what happened, how it was resolved, and how I take that exact example and kind of apply it to everything I’m doing.

Being able to speak at the Affiliate Summit East 2013 in Philadelphia, I got an email that said we would also like you to be an affiliate, so that when you’re talking about the conference, you can be an affiliate for that. Of course, what affiliate means, then, if you come to my website and I have the link on my page and then you go over to the Affiliate Summit and you purchase a ticket, that I am the sales guy behind that, and as a sales rep, I get a certain percentage. I’m not looking to get rich off of that, but I am speaking, I am going to talk about it, so it would be great if one or two people go through and they find the website and click through and I got ten bucks or whatever it might be. It’s more the idea that you want to be affiliated with them; you want to have a good relationship with them. So I went on, I applied and I’m already part of the network that they have this affiliate management with. I went through the process, told them who I was, that I was going to be speaking, and I applied. At the beginning of the week, I got a response that said, “ We’ve reviewed your website and we don’t feel that it matches with our conference.” And I looked at it and I was absolutely shocked. I thought about it for a second and thought, “Is it me? Is it the website? Is there some kind of confusion as to that I’m going to be speaking there? Is there something wrong with my website?” All these different kind of questions. And then, I kind of internalized this frenetic feeling about this – well, wait a second. You kind of go through the steps of realization. You think, “Well, wait a second. Maybe, they’re really telling me they don’t want me to speak.”

So I sent off an email, very aggressively, and said, “Well, if you’re not going to let me in your affiliate program, then maybe I shouldn’t speak at your convention.” First of all, that’s going to wake them up and have them give me a response and have them really look at the information that I provided. Surely, they’ll reconsider and put me back in the affiliate program. I got an email back fairly quickly from one of the heads of the company that said, “Let me show you what you applied with.” I looked at it and realized I had applied not under HalyardConsulting.com but under a site completely unrelated to affiliate marketing. It has affiliate marketing on that website, but it’s not an SEO or internet marketing or affiliate marketing website. Of course at the bottom of that email was, “But if you don’t want to speak for us, we understand and we’ll find somebody else.” So now I have to send this apology that says, “I am so sorry. I thought I was applying under Halyard Consulting and obviously I hit the wrong button and logged in with the wrong information. Of course you’re going to deny that one. Here’s the URL for my company.” And of course they emailed back immediately and said, “Of course, you’re approved. Would you still like to speak for us?” And I said, “Of course I’d love to speak for you, and I’m really upset that this all kind of transpired.” And now this kind of goes into the keep calm and carry on.

My approach, and I admit, I can be reactionary. I think anybody who knows me will say I’ve gotten mellow over the years, but I do tend to explode if I don’t understand what is going on or I feel I’m treated in a hostile manner. I don’t react well. What I’ve had to learn over all these years is that I don’t completely know what is going on on the other side of the conversation. Particularly, with email, I have been in so many bad email conversations that have really led to just disastrous results, because one person wasn’t explaining themselves correctly or they didn’t mean what was conveyed. Email is so much more dangerous in these explosive types of conversations than even on the phone. Face to face you can see a person’s facial expression, what their body expressions are – you get all of those senses. You diminish that when you’re on the phone, but you can get the inflection and you kind of understand where they’re going in the conversation. You can immediately stop if it’s not a good conversation; you can kind of change the subject or reformat what you’re saying. In email, it’s one person, sending out a conversation, their side of the conversation, and then someone else reading that. It’s almost – even though it happens and transpires much quicker than 100 years ago – it’s very similar to a letter that would take weeks to get to its destination. You read the letter and they’re saying this and that happened. Well, that actually happened months ago and you’re finally just hearing about it. Email is kind of this thing where it’s happening so quickly that things can get scrambled and confused very, very quickly. So let’s take a break and when we come back, we’ll talk about my experiences with the keep clam and carry on theme today. We’ll be right back.

Welcome back. This is Jonathan Goodman. I’m the President of Halyard Consulting and this is my podcast, The World of Internet Marketing, and we’re going to keep going with the conversation about keep calm and carry on. So I just relayed to you the story behind one of these miscommunications that, thankfully, ended very positively. But, I’ve had the experience where it hasn’t  Now, I want to take the idea of keep calm and carry on and focus on the carry on bit. Because I’ve been running my company for several years, close to a decade. In the beginning, it was very, very slow. I didn’t understand how to get a client, make the client happy, keep the client, and it’s really been an amazing education for me to not only successfully have clients that have been clients successful through the work that I’m doing for them, but also to move up the rung and the ladder in the type of client that I have now, and the type of conversations and the information that I’m involved now with. I started off my business thinking that, like a barbershop, you put your shingle out and people are immediately going to come to you. I think a lot of lawyers think about it that way too. They did this amazing thing, passed the Bar, and of course everybody is going to use them. They immediately raise their rates to an extraordinary amount. I think about my lawyer. My lawyer worked for an incredible firm here in New Jersey. He and his wife, both lawyers, just decided, that they’re going to step out and create their own business. I met him about 24 hours after the sign on the door was posted. It’s been this amazing journey that he’s taken to get clients, get good clients, get even better clients, all while juggling life, house, family. The wife is also part of the business, so both of them kind of leapt into their own law firm. Now, they’re really seeing the fruit of those original labors, and now they’ve been able to slowly increment from going to a cheap and inexpensive lawyer, to heading up the path of getting the better clients and raising their hourly and I think I’m very excited for them. I’ve been working with them for years. They’ve helped me on numerous occasions, and I’ve kind of taken the same journey, where you start off with maybe businesses and companies that you really don’t have any interest in. You kind of deal with people who are difficult and you just hope that as you continue and as you proceed, you’ll gain a wider audience and a better clientele. But, it’s amazing, the sea of shouts out there, trying to grab business away from you, corrupt the clients that you currently have. There’s so much that goes into retaining a client and holding onto that client for such a long time. I’ve now thankfully had some clients with me for years, from the beginning, so it’s very exciting to now be able to kind of marketing myself, both with this podcast obviously and the book and speaking engagements, which are critical. One of the things I say in my book is this fact that a very important person in my industry once said to me, “If you want to climb the ladder of success in this industry, there are two things you have to do. You have to speak at conferences, and you have to write a book.” And I’ve written the first book. It’s a small book, and I will absolutely write the second and third book in the installment. I am speaking at good conferences now. But, those things kind of bubble you up to the top of the industry. I’m certainly nowhere. I’m that little bubble of champagne that is making its way to the top but it’s taking a very slow journey. Others have taken a very quick journey, whether it’s the connections they have or whatever they might be. I’ve had to persevere.

I think if you’re in this industry and you’re listening, you already know this, but there are very shadowy companies out there that are selling their wares and promising things that are not only not possible, but are extremely dangerous to anybody who is going to hire them. So, like a salmon, I’m constantly swimming upstream and trying to fight against companies that are saying, “We’ll get you the top rank of Google.” Which is amazing to me that anybody still even listens to it when somebody says that, but I think there’s such an ignorance from small business on what it takes to get to the top of Google, that when somebody out of the list of people that you’re talking to, when somebody says we’ll get you to the top of Google, regardless, they don’t take into consideration what that means. Because, you’re most likely dealing with a black hat that is going to pour visits in, ruin your SEO and six months later, after you’ve written all the big checks, they’re walking out the door. I’ve had to carry on in these conversations, going up against why can’t I get you to the top of Google in a month. Why can’t I get you 100 conversions on your website instantly? It’s very hard to have those conversations with potential clients that have already kind of convinced themselves that this guy over there can get me top ranking and 100 conversions in a month. It’s all BS, and it’s all lies, and it’s not until they’ve destroyed that person’s website that the guy is left holding a bag of something that he worked on and it’s now worthless because it’s been de-indexed or whatever it might be. We’re going to take another short break and I want to introduce you – if you are on WordPress – I’m going to introduce you to a website. Last week I said we were going to start this trend of every week I highlight another website or plug-in. This week it’s going to be a plug-in, and I’m excited to introduce this to you when we get back from the break. We’ll be right back.

We’re back. This is Jonathan Goodman. I’m the President of Halyard Consulting and this is The World of Internet Marketing. Today we’re talking about keep calm and carry on. One of the funny things, I didn’t even think about it before the break, but the idea of keep calm and carry on fits perfectly in with the plug-in we’re going to talk about. The plug-in is Authy. You can find it at authy.com. This is a WordPress plug-in. Now that I’m looking at the site, they also have an enterprise version and a developer version that might work for other websites other than WordPress. But I’ve been using it for WordPress. I’m going to try something fun here. I’m going to see if I press the play, if that sound actually comes in so you can hear it. Give me two seconds and let’s see.

So that’s Authy. I didn’t mean that to be a commercial for them, but congratulations to Authy, they got me to click through. Hopefully you were able to hear that. It might be a little low and we’ll have to fix it in the post, but that’s basically why I’m so excited about this. It’s a very easy way for you to have a secondary authentication to the backend of your site. This stuff, when you’re looking at two forms of password authentication, and you go to anything other than this plug-in, in my experience, it’s costing you tens of thousands of dollars. I’ve never found a plug-in or a website or an add-on to a website that has this capability for this amount of money. It’s very, very cheap. I use it for WordPress. All of my WordPress now have Authy on it, which is really helping to secure all of these websites. It’s amazing. And as long as my phone is near me, I have the plug-in on my Apple iPhone and I’m able to immediately open up that app and it provides me with a code, that is the secondary sign-on. It fits into that keep calm and carry on, because what’s the number one panic that everyone has? It’s that your website is going to get hacked. It’s a very, very big concern. There are obviously other ways hackers can get into your website. The number one, the biggest thing you can do to help your website not get hacked, is to constantly be making sure that the PHP and the access, that the server, the programs that reside on the server side, are up to date. PHP is always getting updated. Security on servers is always going to get updated. And if you’re going to spend any type of money on your website, in addition to building a great website, get a great technician, or get your site onto a secure server that has a very good history of bouncing attacks from hackers. That’s really the number one thing you want to do.

So that’s my conversation about Authy, and I think I was clear on the keep calm and carry on idea, for today’s episode. So let’s go through. We’re almost through with this episode, so just to remind you, I’m going to be speaking at SFIMA Pubcon, which is in Davie, Florida, on this Tuesday. And I’m also going to be speaking at the Affiliate Summit East, which is August 18-20 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. And I’m also a professor at the School of Internet Marketing, which is an online website for classes. They have great experts and all of the professors actually have an hour conversation every single week where we talk about how the school is going, what’s the feedback from the students, what’s the next step we need to take, and that’s really helpful and really building up that school. Of course I’ve written The World of Internet Marketing, the book, the first one being the basic. And actually, very exciting news, just today, the audible version of that book is available on Amazon. So, if you’re an audible subscriber, if you listen to books on audible, you’ll be able to get this book. I actually got a professional voice guy to read the book and it sounds great. So you should definitely check that out. I think it’s on iTunes as well. I know of course that it’s on Audible as well. So you have audible.com, amazon.com, and I believe it’s on iTunes as well. So check that out. And, that’ll wrap it up for me. I’ve finished a little early and let’s end with a commercial. Thank you so much.

Related articles

• The Risks of Cloud Computing (halyardconsulting.com)
• The Google Affiliate Network Conspiracy (halyardconsulting.com)
• The Marketplace Fairness Act (halyardconsulting.com)

Keep Calm and Carry On is a post from: Halyard Consulting

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

School of Internet Marketing Instructor to Speak on Future of Search at South Florida Conference

Fort Lauderdale, Florida (May 10th, 2013)

English: SFIMA Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On Tuesday, May 14th, the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association (SFIMA) will hold a summit at the Miniaci Performing Arts Center on the Nova Southeastern University campus in Davie, Florida. Jonathan Goodman, professor at The School of Internet Marketing and President of Halyard Consulting, will speak about the future of search. His talk will highlight Schema, a new game-changer in the world of search. His lecture will go beyond the basics to explore new ways companies can leverage this tool in order to increase their website’s presence and rankings within the search engines.

The conference will also include three session tracks covering the latest local social media and search-related research. Keynote addresses include Melanie Mitchell and Rob Snell. Snell wrote the popular book, “Starting a Yahoo Business For Dummies,” and testified before the United States Congress as an industry expert in 2008. Melanie Mitchell was vice president of optimization and search engine marketing at AOL.

SFIMA Summit 2013 (http://www.sfimasummit.com/)

School of Internet Marketing Instructor to Speak on Future of Search at South Florida Conference is a post from: Halyard Consulting

Hi everyone. This is Jonathan Goodman from Halyard Consulting. This is the World of Internet Marketing, the podcast. Today we’re going to talk about the Marketplace Fairness Act. You may remember, in the last two podcasts, that I was talking about my conspiracy theory about why Google, and now SEOmoz, may have left the affiliate marketing area. And I decided to do a lot of research on this, and I can kind of refute what I originally said was a possibility. I don’t think that’s probable anymore. But, what I did to kind of prepare myself to say whether or not this was a possibility is I really educated myself on what’s going on with Congress and the Senate and internet tax.

So today, we’re going to talk about the Marketplace Fairness Act, which is currently in the Senate and it’s looking like its most likely going to easily pass the Senate. The President is supporting it, and Congress seems to be supporting it. In fact, even businesses like Amazon and online companies like that seem to feel that this is the right way to go. The final vote is on May 6, and it’s actually the second time it’s coming up to the Senate. We’re going to talk a little bit about the history, but first let’s focus on what the Marketplace Fairness Act is.

Currently, only online retailers with brick and mortar stores, in the states that the individual lives in, gets charged for tax on their online purchase. So, for instance, originally I used in my notes Wal-Mart, but I realized we can’t do that because Wal-Mart seems to be in pretty much every single state. So let’s take a company, a retail company, like K-Mart, that has seen its number of stores dwindle over the years and they’ve tried to re-brand themselves and everything. But, K-Mart, I don’t believe, let’s say for this instance, isn’t in every single state. So, let’s say if I lived in Pennsylvania and I ordered on kmart.com, and I lived in Pennsylvania and K-Mart wasn’t in Pennsylvania, previously I wouldn’t have to pay tax on that. So, you can see where there’s a big gap. A brand or store out in California that is marketing on the internet and making sales, and doesn’t have a physical location in New York or New Jersey, and people are coming in to buy their goods from New York and New Jersey, they don’t get a tax, but people who live in California are being taxed on that.

This is a lot of burden on both ends. It’s unfair from the person buying the product, depending on where they’re living, but even worse it’s unfair for the companies to now try to finagle 6,000 different types of taxation, according to the state. And in California’s case, according to the zone of which they’re in. I think California has an unbelievable number of different taxes based on the community of which you’re living in. I’m not exactly sure how that works. So now, the Marketplace Fairness Act is trying to level the playing field. So if this bill passes, your state will collect sales tax from all of your online purchases that you make. There are a couple of caveats, but we’ll get to that in a second. But that basically means that if you buy something from a store that doesn’t have a physical location in your state, you’re still going to wind up paying taxes. Now, this only applies to tangible goods, and it doesn’t affect services or subscriptions. And, if a company makes less than $1 million a year, they’re going to be exempt as well, which you would think eBay would be very happy with. But they’re actually one of the opponents against this bill. What they’re saying is we need to raise that limit, from $1 million to $10 million. What’s got me, in all the research that I’m doing on this, is what is the percentage of eBay sellers that are doing over $1 million, and close to $10 million? You want to talk about the one percent of the one percent? It’s those people. Because I can’t even sell my comic books on eBay without getting ripped off by a buyer.

So, if there are sellers out there, on eBay, who are doing close to $10 million in sales, I’d love to talk to them and I’d love to understand what that is, and why they don’t have their own website then, because the fees you’re now paying out to eBay on $10 million worth of sales, it seems compared to everyone else selling on eBay, you’re giving the store away. And, the other question that comes up in this is, what about the states that don’t currently have any sales tax? There’s Oregon and Montana and New Hampshire and they have no sales tax. So I can only imagine that their senators are pretty annoyed with this if now sales tax is going to be imposed. Think about somebody from New Hampshire who has the ability to go to their Wal-Mart and not pay sales tax, but Wal-Mart has certain things that are exclusive to their website, so to get the best price you go and buy something on the internet, but now that person from New Hampshire is going to be taxed on it? It sounds very complicated, and it sounds like it might even turn certain people within certain states off to selling.

Now, the reverse of that would be, I live in New Jersey and I’m pretty sure we have an eight percent sales tax here. So if we have an eight percent sales tax, let’s assume, and I go to Wal-Mart and I make a purchase, but then I decide that there’s a better product on walmart.com, and I make a purchase and that sales tax is less, I guess that would be the incentive then to buy everything online. Which I kind of do already, but certainly for people looking to not pay that sales tax, this is a great way to pay less sales tax. Now in New Jersey, we have a UEZ, an enterprise zone because a lot of New Jersey has manufacturing in it from back in the day, so now they’re trying to get both condos and houses and businesses to come back into these areas that basically had large manufacturing and now the large manufacturing has either gone to Canada or Mexico or to some other cheaper state. Those towns are now suffering, so they created the UEZ zone or something, I don’t want to embarrass myself because I don’t know, but it’s a zone that actually caps the tax rate, so you can buy something in one of these zones and you’re going to pay 3.5 percent tax instead of seven or eight percent tax. It’s one thing when you’re buying a pair of pants or, let’s say, something for $100. The difference between six and eight percent on that isn’t going to make a large difference.

But if I’m buying, let’s say a car. If I make the purchase of that car over the internet and it’s a $20,000 car, eight percent on $20,000 is a lot of money. If I could save two percent by buying it online and still walk down to my Honda and pick the car up, it gets very, very complicated very, very quickly. And I just wonder if everybody has kind of thought this out, because what could wind up happening is a further shot in the arm to physical brick and mortar retailers. Right now, all these different taxes are based on where the individual lives and if there’s a physical presence of that company in that state. But now you go ahead and tax everybody equally online, it’s going to be a plus or a minus. Either they’re going to be more willing to go to a different business that has the same product that’s closer to them and has less tax or no tax in some cases, like New Hampshire, or it’s going to push everybody online and the brick and mortar stores are going to suffer even more than they’re suffering now.

That is what is coming up in the Senate now. Winston Churchill had a great saying, which was, “The Americans get it right after they’ve tried all other options.” We’re going to go into a little bit of the history of online taxation and we’re going to look at how we’ve gotten to this point so far, after we take a break. We’re going to take a break now, come back and talk about the history of online taxation. We’ll go through Quill Corp v. North Dakota, Streamline Sales and Use tax, the Main Street Fairness Act and where we are today with the Marketplace Fairness Act. Okay, we’ll be right back.

Okay. So, let’s walk through the history of how we’ve gotten to this tax. First, we need to talk about Quill Corp v. North Dakota, which was where the Supreme Court decided that retailers need only collect sales tax for states where they have a physical presence. This was prior to the internet coming on board. So, the internet looked at that and said now all internet sales are going to be tax-free. Then, in 1999, the Streamline Sales and Use tax was created. Again, fairly early on in the internet world, but the purpose was to streamline and simplify the sales tax collection for businesses located and operating in different states. Local brick and mortar stores were subject to their state sales tax laws, and they had to make the collections, while remote sellers like businesses that sold online across states, even including mail order or through the telephone, they didn’t have to collect or pay taxes. Then, the Main Street Fairness Act was introduced by Congress, and that bill overruled the 1992 Quill ruling and it allowed for 21 states to voluntarily adopt the Streamline Sales and Use tax agreement and require large internet and mail order retailers to collect taxes for local sales.

Now, during this whole time, something called the Affiliate Nexus Tax was created. And if anything really affected the Affiliates, and we’re going to get into who is affected by this upcoming tax and did Google back out, which we know now that they didn’t because of this tax, but the Affiliate Nexus Tax did far more harm to affiliates. It supposedly affected 60,000 small businesses that then their incomes became constrained by the tax, and affiliates were dropped left and right. A perfect example of this is Amazon’s decision to terminate all affiliate relationships with any Illinois-based affiliates. I believe that what happened is that the Affiliate Nexus Tax essentially started in Illinois, and I think before it grew any further, an Illinois Circuit Court judge struck down the law. But, during that time, and there’s quite a bit of time between this law being enacted and it being struck down, companies that were solely supported or partially supported by affiliate marketing and were in Illinois were essentially told by Amazon or other affiliate marketing companies that they weren’t going to do business with them anymore. This caused a lot of companies to either close or move across the border, away from Illinois, of course impacting Illinois’ ability to collect any state tax whatsoever, including all these people buying houses or cars across the border or another state. So, now what you have, after that, came kind of a combination of two bills that were being worked on at the same time, and that’s now where we get this new tax, the Marketplace Fairness Act. And, what’s interesting is that Amazon is for it, Senators are for it, it seems like most of consumers are okay with it – in fact it might be a benefit to them in the end – but where does it leave the affiliate?

Originally, my whole conspiracy idea was, and you kind of have to follow me in my thinking, it really turned out that the Affiliate Nexus Tax was trying to do this but failed. Which was, to say back to the federal government, that wherever the affiliates themselves were located, that in and of itself created a nexus in and of itself for the affiliate network. Then, that made them collect tax. So in other words, backing up on what the Affiliate Nexus Tax was, it essentially said if you have an affiliate – in this case in Illinois – that your business is out in California, but you have an affiliate relationship with a company out in Illinois, the nexus then becomes, as well as California, it also becomes Illinois. So, I guess in hindsight, had the Affiliate Nexus Tax taken over and we weren’t now seeing a Marketplace Fairness Act, that would have significantly impacted affiliate marketing and you would be now seeing Google exiting the marketplace and all these others. So it seems that Google’s exit of the affiliate networks is completely due to that it simply wasn’t making as much money as some of these other large enterprises that Google runs, like the Android app and phones, that they’re making huge amounts on, and Google advertising, which is obviously the mainstream piece where it’s revenue is coming from.

So, that is the Marketplace Fairness Act conversation. I think that we’ve gone through, looked at the history and how it’s come to be, and I guess, if asked, I would say that I would then support it. I think that it’s the best solution for now. I just hope it doesn’t now steamroll over either brick and mortar retail, online sales for individuals and consumers that live in states that there is no sales tax, but hopefully it’s the best that we can do at this point. We’re going to take another very short break, and when we come back we’re going to talk about another couple of issues and I want to introduce you to a really fun website that I just found out about last night and I really have to introduce it to you because I think you’re going to love. Okay? We’ll be right back.

Okay, we are back. So I went to the affiliate summit meetup in New York, and if you’re not familiar with meetup.com, it is a great place for you to find the niche group across the board, whether it’s technology, whether it’s dating or tourism or religion or whatever it might be, meetup.com is a really great avenue for you to find groups of people that are interesting and unique and fit what it is that you’re interested in and molded to. I’ve been attending the WordPress New York City meet-up for two years, almost three years, and it’s the third Tuesday of every month. It never changes, the location changes, but that in itself doesn’t change. It’s always the third Tuesday of every month, and it’s a great way. The people who come in to speak – I’ve spoken there – it’s great information, it’s a great group of people. Last time, this past month, there were 118 people, which is really incredible. I’ve always wanted to be involved with the affiliate summit meet-up, but their schedule moves around a little bit. The location stays the same, so kind of the opposite of what WordPress New York City is doing, but now that I know the people that are there, I’ve explained to them, this is the one day that I have another meet-up that I go to, so please just don’t make it the third Tuesday of the month. So now hopefully I’ll be able to attend the affiliate summit.

While I was there, afterword, there was networking before, networking after the lecture, and I met – I’m going to mispronounce this name completely – Anton Velikanov, and he has created a website … first of all, he came in and he’s about six-foot-four, lanky, and he came in a little bit late with one of these drones that you can get now, these four propeller helicopters that you can put a camera to, so very cool. He sat in the back and then I got to speak to him toward the very end. Aside from that, he introduced me to his company, which is sandsign.com. I told him I’d mention it, because I was really impressed with it. What it is, sandsign.com, allows you to go on and for a small fee, hire someone to write a message in the sand of various different locations. You would choose which location you wanted to have somebody write a message in the sand. And they’ve got people in Hawaii, they’ve got people in South America, in I think Australia, Costa Rica, Ko Samui, I don’t even know where that is, I’m an American, I can’t find anything on a map! Svatý Kryštof, which I think might just be the Russian translation of the Dominican Republic or something else, so he’s got theses people. Basically you pay a fee, and there are people around the world, waiting for the money to come in and the order to come in. You can go in and tell them what you want. If you want a heart, if it’s Valentine’s Day. They even have a drawing app, you can draw out a little sketch, and then someone will go down to the beach and take a photograph of that and post it up for you to then send over. You could do a photo or video, they’ll do it a stone sign, have musicians signing in the background, like calypso musicians. They’ve just added signs and candles, where they put all these different candles and signs and everything. It’s very cool, very fun. You should really check it out. And that is my fun website for the week. Maybe that will be a trend now; at the end of every podcast I’ll introduce you to a new cool website. I certainly have a ton of them to show you.

So, to wrap up here, we’re about done, remember that I’m giving a talk at SFIMA, at Pubcon, which is a Pubcon summit. Not the official Pubcon in Las Vegas, but it’s at the Nova Southeastern campus in Davie, Florida. And I’ll be speaking on May 14. It’s a day long event that features both day and afternoon, keynote presentation, along with three session tracks, covering the latest social media and search related research. I’ll be speaking in one of those sessions, in one of those tracks, about schema. I’ll also be speaking at the Affiliate Summit East, 2013, which is taking place August 18-20, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. It’s a three-day conference that includes an exhibit hall with affiliates, merchants, vendors and networks, as well as multiple tracks of educational sessions, covering the latest trends and information from affiliate marketing experts. I teach at the School of Internet Marketing, and I’ll be teaching a class on web analytics and Google adwords and a couple of others, but the first one that we’re going to get off the ground for me is web analytics. It’s filled with a staff, school of experts in their field and they’re dedicated to providing their experience and knowledge to you as you grow your business. And of course, I’ve written The World of Internet Marketing, which is the first in the three-part series. This book takes the reader on a journey from building an online presence to enhancing your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn strategies. For the novice, this book is a stepping-stone into the adventure of online marketing and for the expert this book serves as a refresher for critical areas needed to succeed.

I thank you so much. We’re toward the end of our podcast and I appreciate you listening. Thanks so much.

Related articles

• The Google Affiliate Network Conspiracy (halyardconsulting.com)
• The Risks of Cloud Computing (halyardconsulting.com)

The Marketplace Fairness Act is a post from: Halyard Consulting

Hello, and welcome to the World of Internet Marketing. I’m your host Jonathan Goodman and along for the ride is my wonderful dog Max, who’s once again snoring behind me. Today, we are going to talk about several different things, including the risk of cloud computing, LinkedIn’s new acquisition with the Pulse acquisition, Google Affiliate Network, we’ll have an update with that, and we will talk about SEOmoz’s new decision to leave their affiliate program and we’ll end with an interesting conspiracy about affiliate marketing again.

So, let’s first talk about the risks of cloud computing. This is an interesting story coming out of Huffington Post Live today about a woman who was locked out of her Google Cloud account for a week because she stored her client’s password in a document on the Google Cloud Drive. Which it seems to be against the terms of service which is interesting. First, I didn’t even know that, that was something that you could have your Google Cloud shut down for. It seems like, I think if you’re working with consultants then there is more of a likelihood, if you have multiple consultants and you are especially managing their social media or you need to access various information because you are helping them, that this would then be something that they would see, that would be a problem. Now, my understanding, the reasons why that is in the terms of service is because I guess, hackers, will kind of create large excel spreadsheets and include data with passwords and usernames. So, it’s their way of going through and preventing all of that.

I understand that when you are looking at a terms of service what you are generally looking at is copyright issues, explicit material issues, passwords just seem to be something that they should maybe bold and maybe just have an immediate outline as you are signing up for Google Cloud that kind of says, okay, in addition to the explicit content and the copyright material here’s the other immediate five things that get people banned, just to kind of help out, right?

So, this is just another example, and I don’t want this podcast to turn into Google bashing right? I think Google does a great job, I think Amazon does a great job, both of those always seem to be in my crosshairs because of just some of the methodology and some of the business techniques that they implement. We have to realize that these are the 500-pound gorillas in the room that are able to control. We need that, we want to put up our information just to make it easier and more accessible to us everywhere, so we put it up in the Google Cloud. There are significant drawbacks to giving somebody else your data.

Image via CrunchBase

So, obviously when I heard about this I immediately did two things. First, any document that had a title in it that included the word password and then I went further to find any excel spreadsheets that might be listing any of my passwords. I immediately went in there and I changed that word. Hopefully, that will alleviate the problem but the second most important thing that I do is I use Backupify, which is a software that backs up all of your data in the cloud. Now Backupify is great but I don’t want this to be a commercial for them, I just want to read you their tagline so you can kind of see what they do. Their tagline is:

“If your business depends on the cloud, your data should have a parachute. Backupify keeps your cloud data safe from malicious deletions, unpredictable hackers and user errors.”

That really says it all to me, that’s what I use to make sure that my data is backed up every single day and if Google decides to turn my account off or if a hacker gets in there somehow and is able to manipulate the data, I’ve got a backup of that.

So, let’s stop for a second we are going to take a commercial break and we will be right back after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

Okay we are back and now we are going to talk about LinkedIn’s new acquisition of Pulse. LinkedIn recently posted Pulse, which is a mobile reading application. It has 30 million users and last week they relaunched their iPhone app to focus on personalized news in an effort to engage with LinkedIn’s audience. But you know, one of the things I’ve talked about in my book is Google’s attempts, they seem to, their focus is to try to thwart Facebook’s growth, which is the wrong focus. What they should be doing is focusing in on the customer and the clientele that they currently have, which is the business man or woman. The person who is focused on connecting with their business network, not with their high school friends and college friends and going back and mom and brother and all these people. They would do much better and obviously they’ve had programs like the influencers, which had Richard Branson and president Obama. It’s interesting and it’s at the right level but LinkedIn, here’s the question, is LinkedIn a news service. Does it provide, is it trying to provide a resource for information within the business community or is it trying to build out connections between individuals who work within certain industries? I think that they would be much better off to focus their attention there.

Now you can look at the data and their page views grew 67% in the 4th quarter based on this news feed. These news feeds. You know, I don’t check LinkedIn very often, the only time that I really check LinkedIn is when somebody has recommended me in that profile piece. You can be recommended for different key words and every week one or two people hit that button, which is a very annoying thing at the top of the LinkedIn profile. When you go into LinkedIn it has four people and it says is this person an expert in this, this, or this and you feel like you have to kind of. Most of the time I don’t know the people, so I close out that bar. But every once in a while like twice a week or something I would get an email that says oh this person recommends you for Internet marketing or this person recommends for SEO. That leads me back into LinkedIn and I look and I see who it is and I look at the numbers and if they are growing and just review my profile. I don’t use LinkedIn as a news source. I have so many news sources out there. There’s so much data and information available that I don’t really see that LinkedIn is going to be the composite for all that.

Nederlands: Linked In icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

More to what I’m talking about is, should the competitor in LinkedIn’s mind be Facebook? They really shouldn’t. They are two different animals. Two completely different beasts. So, we’ll see how that works out for them. Let’s continue on, you know the Google affiliate network and again bashing on Google is the ripple effect is amazing. Now that they’ve announced that the Google Affiliate Network, the GAN is going to be closing there’s so much chatter in industry and there is so much questioning of why and where, where are people going to go now that you know there’s all this data and everybody is kind of searching. The advertisers are searching, the affiliates are searching and when we get back from a break I’m going to talk to you about an affiliate that I use. Again, I’m very new to this industry but still I think, I think they are doing it right and I think the more people start searching and finding the right company out there the happier they are going to be to do work with them. So we’ll be right back after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

Okay so we were talking about the Google Affiliate Network and I wanted to for those listening that are in the affiliate market space. Now if you are on the affiliate side you are saying to yourself I lost all of my merchant relationships and if you are on the merchant advertising side you are, and unfortunately if you are in this boat that Google was the only affiliate network that you went with you are really not sure what to do. So, I do a lot of work with Impact Radius and they’ve got on their main page now they are advertising directly to anyone who has been affected by the GAN decision, the Google Affiliate Network decision to close. They’ve got some great clients. They have American Airlines, Tommy Hilfiger, Caesar’s Entertainment, which I work with and many others. What they offer is a 50 to 80 perfect cost savings when compared to previous legacy networks.

They have direct affiliate ownerships, which is probably the most important aspect of everything that they are doing. They allow a one to one relationship between the merchants and the affiliates and other networks own that affiliate relationship which means that in Google case the merchants now need to reestablish themselves in a relationship again with even their current affiliates, which to me is crazy, right? If my relationship with Caesar’s entertainment, if Impact Radius suddenly went away the idea that within Google Affiliate Network that, that relationship that I have with Caesar’s would now completely disappear is shocking. So, what they are doing, what impact radius has, it allows the managers of the affiliate merchants to directly have the relationship with the affiliates themselves. That’s a very powerful thing. Right? I don’t need a middleman. If I need a certain promotion or if I need something that you know a banner or something to that degree, I need to be able to have the contact and have the relationship directly with that affiliate manager. Not Google Network is then going to get in contact with or however GAN did their work, right? However that was done. But in Impact Radius essentially allows you to have that one to one which is critical.

They have great technology from both the advertising merchant side and from the affiliate side and I can tell you first hand that once you get over the slight learning curve, and I have a slight learning curve only in the sense that I’m not a seasoned affiliate. So, some of these terms and some of the nuances of programs are really foreign to me. I’ll give you a perfect example I was working with an affiliate merchant and Impact Radius has these little one square images that go along with the banner and I wasn’t sure because I do advertising using the affiliate merchants banners, if it was a requirement to have that one square by one square pixel in when I provide it to my advertising. So, I was able to get on to have a conversation with their support and it took me a while to explain to them even what I was asking because I didn’t even understand what that one pixel was but essentially once they understood what I was asking, you know it was the dumbest child doesn’t even know how to ask a question or the youngest child doesn’t even know how to ask a question, it’s that they were able to very easily say no look it’s just used from the merchant side, it’s nothing to do with you, if you are doing banner advertising on an exterior site go ahead, you don’t need use that one by one pixel. It’s all for tracking purposes. But that pixel itself then they kind of told me, they went into detail as to what that pixel is really meant for. That is for better analytics and it really allows more detail to be provided both to the merchants and the affiliates side. So, it’s good. Then of course, just to kind of go back into the Impact Radius of what they offer, it’s free migration, free setup and full support. Again, I do work with them and I think they do a great job. So, let’s take another small little break and we will be right back and we’ll talk about SEOmoz, okay?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

Image via CrunchBase

Okay, great, so let’s talk about this week SEOmoz sent out an email to all of their affiliates and honestly, I was an affiliate years ago but I guess I was still on the email mailing list but I don’t really, I’m not an affiliate of SEOmoz, but they sent out this message that they are pausing their affiliate program as of April 30th and they talk about technical changes and improvements. They don’t really go into much detail as to what made them shut something off. It’s always interesting to me that a company will decide to turn something off and in SEOmoz’s case they are saying turn something off for a limited amount of time and then it’s going to come back, well, that isn’t really always the case right? That’s what they want to make you feel but given Rand Fishkin his prop, he’s very good in the business, let’s assume it is going to come back. Why stop that momentum? If the affiliate program is doing well, assuming it was doing well then what provoke this kind of automatic change? Now they are not affiliated, they are not an affiliate of Google Affiliate Network. They are actually powered with HasOffers, I’m not familiar with HasOffers but they are just another one of those affiliate networks out there.

So, it’s separate from that so what I wanted to kind of put out there was my conspiracy theory of the week and I kind of wish I had a boom mic that can echo that and just say conspiracy theory of the week. But now we have GAN and SEOmoz exiting the affiliate industry. Let’s say that SEOmoz never goes back to the affiliate marketing. It’s interesting that the time frame is very similar. So, is there something coming down the pike and here is the conspiracy theory. Is there something coming down the pike that some of us are unaware of that could some way either affect affiliate marketing or is there some type of data that is circling out around there and secretly being passed to certain individuals or certain corporations about maybe, the way that the affiliate sales have previously been calculated and is that scaring people out of the market? Are they, you know, because look there is a lot of black hat stuff that can be done regardless whether you are doing internet marketing, SEO, SEM, affiliate marketing, that can you know, ramp up your numbers of traffic or increase the number of Facebook users that you have or you know promote you to an audience that’s never been promoted to before or whatever? Or skew the number of whatever it is?

It’s black hat meaning that it’s done unethically. Right? There is black hat, gray hat and white hat and black hat is really you are kind of using things and doing things against the wishes of Google. Gray hat is you are really pushing the envelope and white hat is really is you are really doing everything to stay within the confines of what Google wants. What Google wants always constantly changes so that is a problem in it of itself. But let’s take one and two. One is there some type of legislation that is coming down now and I haven’t really done the research and I’m talking about of ignorance. But is there some time of maybe it has to do with the taxation that’s coming into the internet. Maybe affiliates are going to be handled a certain way differently than a full sale. Now that I’ve said that it sounds extremely realistic and I will do some research by the time that this podcast airs next week. Or, is there some type of black hat software out there that is skewing the numbers of sales being presented to the merchant back allowing the affiliate to gain more sales and a larger percentage than what they are really actually producing for the merchant.

I think this is all very interesting that this is all happening now and the more that I think about it the more that taxation legislation that’s going to be coming up for the next couple of months for the Internet, that might really be the reason why some of these companies are jumping ship but it’s definitely the number one thing that’s being talked about. So, we are almost at the end and I just want to remind you, I’m Jonathan Goodman and I’m the President of Halyard Consulting. I didn’t say that too well, Halyard Consulting. Halyard is the rope that hoists the sail in a sail boat and I always like to say that we hoist our clients’ traffic and conversation and everything like that. Boats have a very big part of my life and maybe one day I’ll get into all of that at some point. You can find me on Twitter @HalyardConsult on Twitter. You can find us on Facebook.com. Our website is Halyardconsulting.com.

My book is The World of Internet Marketing, The Basics and I am working on the second book as we speak I just got a pile of work on my desk but I’m slowly building out that next book. I’m going to be speaking at the Affiliate Summit East in Philadelphia on August 18 – 20th at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I am going to be speaking at SFIMA, PubCon 2013 on May 14th at the Nova South East Campus in Davey, Florida and I’m also a professor at the School of Internet Marketing. You can check out, I’m about ready to launch my Google Analytics class and then I’ll be working on my, on the Google Webmaster Tools class followed by The Google Adwords class. So, that about wraps it up here. I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. This is the second one and as you can see I’ve gotten much better. We are taking commercial breaks now instead of long pauses and I really hope that you help me grow this podcast and I look forward to the next time, next Friday where we will talk about a whole bunch of other news, affiliates and SEO information.

Take Care. Thanks so much.

The Risks of Cloud Computing is a post from: Halyard Consulting

Hi, this is Jonathan Goodman and welcome to the very first episode of The World of Internet Marketing. This is the podcast for the work that I do in the Internet marketing industry. I’m going to start off by telling you a little bit about myself then we are going to talk about what the podcast is going to be and what my hopes for the future of the podcast are. The name of this specific podcast today is The Google Affiliate Network Conspiracy.  We will get into a little bit about what I think is really going on with Google and their decision to close their affiliate network. Then we will talk a little more about the projects I am currently working on and where I am speaking next.

Let’s get started. Again, my name is Jonathan Goodman. This is the first podcast for The World of Internet Marketing and my background; I’ve been in the internet marketing industry for over 10 years; nope closer to 15 years. I don’t want to date myself though. I started off at MicroWarehouse even before there were any dot.com databases or things like that. Then I went on to EarthWeb. They went public during the dot.com boom and then everything crashed during the dot.com bust. I worked for Suburban Propane and built their e-commerce system. For each company I was building an e-commerce system for them. Now I run Halyard Consulting and that’s an Internet marketing company where small and large companies work with me and I assist them building out their site, exclusively using WordPress and I help them to get ranked. We will go into that in a later episode where I go into how we get our clients to gain the best momentum in the search engines.

Let’s talk about what I want this podcast to be. Obviously, every one and their mother is Podcasting. So what do I want to do for you? I want to particularly provide great information, both news and a resource with my historical knowledgebase. I think that’s critically important and as this grows I’d like to bring on various interviewees and talk to them about the industry and other aspects of what’s out there. Like affiliate marketing, pay per click, areas that I might not have an expertise in but I know people within the industry that really do and they really do a great job on what they are focused on.

Now let’s get to the heart of this episode. Google made an announcement this week that really shook the ground underneath a lot of affiliate marketers and if you are not sure what affiliate marketing is well I’m certainly very green to that industry too.  I’m just stepping my big toe into the pond of that type of work… but what it basically is, is I’ll have a website and I’ll be talking about specific products or writing articles and content in an attempt to get you the visitor to come to the site and make a purchase.

Hopefully if I’m ranking for the right keywords you are already coming to the site because you want specific data or information, whether they be reviews or content on the site, videos, things like that. You feel good enough about the content that the website is providing and you actually make a purchase. That purchase by clicking through on either a banner or going into the shopping cart is actually linked into the major product.

So, take for example, iPhones. If I created a website that talked about the iPhone5 and that was the whole website. It gave reviews about the iPhone 5 or it talked about the specific apps, if you liked the article about the app and you click through for more information it would put a cookie on your browser for that app and if you decided 30, 60, 90 days after that you wanted to make that purchase, you don’t have to make the purchase from the website immediately, of course, that helps but. You are all probably doing this and don’t even realize it when you are going to read a review off of Amazon away from Amazon on a separate site. Or you’ve done a search and you’ve gotten information and then linked over to Amazon or another website that specifically has the information. Then you come back and you make that purchase, the affiliate marketer is going to make a percentage of that sale.

I do apologize.  Let me just stop for a second, I know that this is a powerful mic and if you hear behind me snoring that would be my dog, Max. I have two fantastic dogs and one of them, Max, likes to sit in the area right behind me and he is very quiet all day long until I either get on the phone or I am doing some type of voiceover like this. I love Max dearly but it is an interesting part of his personality and he is snoring right now. So if that’s rather loud I will adjust in the post afterwards.

So getting back to what affiliate marketing really is, you are enticing a visitor to click through to the merchant and in doing so you are gaining a percentage of that sale and depending upon the type of relationship that affiliate marketer has with that merchant it could be a continuous sale for multiple products if you then come in at a later time. It could be just the one off. It could be promotionals that he is running and only those promotionals that actually result in sales. There’s a myriad of various different ways that affiliate marketing works. Again, I’m not an affiliate marketer.  I’m starting to get interested in it but it is kind of a side hobby to the actual internet marketing company that I run.

So, Google being Google, how gigantic they actually are, came into the industry and built out an affiliate network site that included hundreds of thousands of merchant and affiliate relationships. This week they came out with an email and essentially said it all ends in June. They are going to stop taking on new partners and by the end of October they will have paid out the last of the affiliate marketers.  This is really, you know, one of those things that kind of makes you cringe about Google. You know, they put millions of dollars into a service, and they’ve done this with other software and other things like Google Reader. A perfect example, right?

For years and years Google Reader was something that people used, not too many people used and obviously not enough people used because there they were again making an announcement that they were going to stop Google Reader. This left SEOmoz to say “You know what, if Google is getting rid of Google Reader we will build our own Google Reader, our SEOmoz reader, and we’ll go ahead and anybody who was using Google Reader can now use our service.” It’s really a smart thing to do and it was fairly easy for them to do it. It doesn’t take that much resources and time from really big genius people.

So, they did this again with Google Affiliate Network. They built up a brand and they created an aspect of the industry that really had tremendous momentum. There are some people that are saying that on a yearly basis Google made 500 million dollars. There are other people that are saying that it was so huge that it was 150 million dollars but in a billion dollar industry that is Google, 150 million dollars doesn’t I guess qualify or quantify to have them keep it open.

Now you ask any other affiliate network if they would like 150 million dollars the answer is undoubtedly yes. It’s just when you’re dealing with a large corporation that’s working in the billions, 150 million dollars doesn’t really do anything for them. So, there is this kind of debate going on in the industry, what’s this going to mean.

You have a hundred thousand merchants out there; they have to find a place to go. They will go to Commission Junction or they’ll go to Impact Radius or to something like that.

What I’d like to add to the conversation is the why. Why might Google, aside for 150 million dollars not being large enough, why might they go ahead and stop this whole affiliate network? I’m going to go down the path of conspiracy theory. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I think things happen; JFK happened, the moon happened, all these different things happened, but sometimes when a corporation, that is a very frenetic kind of, psychopathic entity into itself, right? It’s got all these different people with different ideas. They are all talking up to the head of the fish. They are all saying turn left, turn right, turn left, turn right and the fish doesn’t know where to go. That’s a great representation of what a corporation really is.  But sometimes, things are done where we are left, certainly Google is never going to make an announcement and say, “This is the reason why we are pulling out of the affiliate network business.” So, there are very smart people that are then saying “Oh it must be because it was only 150 million dollars and Google is a business model of a billion dollars.” But there is also another very interesting possibility.

Adwords, which is where the majority of Google’s revenue comes from. It’s the way that they make their revenue, right?  So, is it possible that somebody was about to release a report that showed that the departments running Google Adwords were giving preferential treatment to the affiliate marketers? Now of course, complete speculation here. But that in and of itself, right? Google has been caught in the past where they have given preferential treatment within Adwords. Of course, they will deny that running Google Analytics and running Google AdSense and all these different things but, you know, I don’t know enough about this subject but I just think that it’s very interesting that the potential to do harm and in this case doing harm is actually Google providing a bigger influence for their affiliate marketers than the average Joe who is trying to run their Adwords?

Think about it this way, if I gave my affiliate network a little bit of an uptick in the fact that they do business with Google and I’m Google and then they get that little bit of preferential treatment within Adwords and then they are able to generate revenue from that by running Adwords for affiliate campaigns. Who gets the money at the end of that? Well, the affiliates themselves get a percentage of the sale but Google is able to say, “Hey you know what, that leads them to more and more clients that are coming on with Google Affiliate network. So, if you wanted to skew the numbers, the way to skew the numbers for the merchants that are potentially going to come in and use your services is to show the transactions from the affiliates.”

Completely hypothetical, completely conspiracy, but not so far fetched, right? When you think about what is the motivation of Google?  It is to sell more AdWords. And in the case of Google Affiliate Network, what were affiliates doing? They were purchasing AdWords. You give them a little bit of the preferential treatment or a little skewed tick up for a cheaper cost to get to the number one ranking; well you are going to produce more sales. Those sales are then going to lead to both more AdWords and more revenue from the affiliate network. So, that is my conspiracy theory of the week. I assure you next week there definitely will not be more conspiracy.

There is a lot of other things that I want to talk about.  There’s a lot of news always going on in this industry and I certainly don’t want to bash Google. I think Google, for the most part, does a really good job. I think that they would do well with a really, really great competitor and unfortunately all they have in the market that’s even remotely close to them is Bing and Bing just can’t get its act together. You know I was at Search Marketing Expo. I spoke there in I believe October and the last session was a panel that included somebody high up in Bing and he asked where is search now compared to radio to television is it radio, black and white television, color is it HDTV?  I was the only one in the entire room that felt that search was equivalent to radio.

I think that it’s interesting that I got bashed for that. Oh, there’s that guy that thinks search is equivalent to radio. Well it’s certainly not HD. It’s certainly not color. I think that Google is making strides and getting it to the point where it’s going towards black and white television but it’s just not. It’s still at the radio stage. I think that 10 years from now search will be so incredibly comprehensive with schema, and we will have an episode on here talking about schema and metadata and all of that. But what I look at it where I started from the internet, building out a website using standard HTML, break and bold and all these simplified code, you have to kind of say, well that was 15 years ago and now we are generating dynamic HTML, we are pulling from the database, we have WordPress, there’s so much in there. Look at the leap. Look at the timeline leap and you take Google and how old Google is and you build that out 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. Yeah we are still at radio. It’s nowhere near where color TV would be.

Judging from that conversation with the Bing guy on that panel, I realized that Microsoft is just never going to win this search war and I really hope that somebody does come around where they are able to at least put an edge, you know, twist the arm of Google to make them even better than what they are today. To give them a little bit of a challenge. Of course you can always have the Microsoft issue, which is “Let’s not innovate. Let’s just buy up companies that are smarter than us.” And that’s, not going to help Google at all.

Okay, anyway, let’s go ahead and wrap this up. This was the first episode. I think that it will get smoother as we go along and I would really appreciate you helping me to build my audience and letting people know. I am sure that there will be a lot less ‘ums’ and ‘ands’ and I’m sure that my personality will come out a lot more in the next iteration of this. I know I told you a little bit about who I am but let me just tell you where I am going to be. I speak at a lot of conferences every year.

So first of all, I just recently wrote a book called The World of Internet Marketing, which is obviously what this podcast is focused on. You can find it on Amazon. And I am going to be speaking at SFIMA in Florida; Davey, Florida. The dates for that are May 14 in Nova Southeastern Campus in Davey, Florida.

I’ll be talking about schema so we are definitely going to talk about schema a little bit more on this podcast. I’m also going to be speaking at Affiliate Summit East which is taking place in Philadelphia and let’s see when is that happening. That is in August 18th – 20th at Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA. It’s a three day conference that really focuses in on affiliate marketing. Which is really going to be interesting to me. I’m going to speak about schema and I am going to talk about the future of search but for me to kind of meet all these affiliate marketers and to think about all this and to get an idea of what they are really doing on a day to day basis is really going to be exciting.

Then I’m affiliated with the School of Internet Marketing. You can look that up online. I’m currently in the process of creating…it’s an online school and I’m doing the course on Google Analytics and then I’ll be doing the course on Google Adwords and I think Google Webmaster Tools. I think that’s the third one that I’m doing. So that’s it. I really appreciate you. If you made it through this podcast I really appreciate that. You can take a look at my company. It’s HalyardConsulting.com and feel free to tweet me at Halyard Consult or Facebook me at Facebook.com/Halyardconsulting. Thanks so much. This has been great and I’ll see you next week on Friday. We are going to try to do this every Friday. Okay, take care.

THE GOOGLE AFFILIATE NETWORK CONSPIRACY is a post from: Halyard Consulting

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

2-Day Free Book Giveaway: The World of Internet Marketing

JERSEY CITY, New Jersey (February 10th, 2013)

On March 1st and 2nd author Jonathan Goodman will be giving away copies of his book on Amazon Kindle. The book “The World of Internet Marketing: The Basics” is written for the small business owner needing to market to an online audience.

The Kindle version of the book will be available for free only on March 1st and 2nd at Amazon.com.
Short URL: http://amzn.to/WLYNtL
Direct URL: http://www.amazon.com/World-Internet-Marketing-Basics-ebook/dp/B00BAUZY8W/

This book takes the reader on a journey from building an online presence to enhancing their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn strategies. Along the way the reader will learn secrets of social media marketing and how to make their sites accessible for all devices. For the novice, this book is a step into the adventure of online marketing. For the expert, this book serves as a refresher of critical online areas needed to succeed.

About Jonathan Goodman

Jonathan is President of Halyard Consulting, which was founded in 2007 when he recognized the difficulties small businesses had gaining top positions in the search engines. Since then his focus has been to improve the search rankings of businesses with geographically specific customers. He believes that small businesses with limited resources deserve the same opportunities for search engine success as larger companies with powerful budgets. Jonathan brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the marketing challenges of today. Through his determination and devotion to excellence, he has helped numerous businesses achieve results others could only dream.

Jonathan Goodman started his career over 20 years ago at the dawn of the Internet age producing websites for Fortune 500 companies. Jonathan holds an MBA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, an MS from the College of New Rochelle, and a BFA from the Ringling College of Art and Design.

About Halyard Consulting

Halyard Consulting is a New Jersey based Internet marketing company focused on improving online results for small to medium sized businesses. Halyard is focused on increasing online visibility using cutting edge Internet marketing techniques and providing actionable strategies against competitors.

Contact: Halyard Consulting
info@halyardconsulting.com
http://halyardconsulting.com
(800) 641-9157
###

2-Day Free Book Giveaway: The World of Internet Marketing is a post from: Halyard Consulting

Where to Find All of the Quality Content You Will Ever Need

Affiliate Buzz with Jonathan Goodman – Where to Find All of the Quality Content You Will Ever Need

James:             Hi.  It’s James Martell here and welcome to another edition of The Affiliate Buzz.  It’s great to have you with us.  Arlene is away today but I do have a very special guest on the line—Jonathan Goodman from Halyard Consulting—and we’re going to be talking about where to find all the quality content you will ever need.  Now Jonathan started his career over 20 years ago at the dawn of the internet age, producing websites for Fortune 500 companies.  Jonathan holds an MBA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, an MS from the College of New Rochelle and a BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design.  Jonathan is also a friend of The Affiliate Buzz and has been with us a couple of times, most recently to discuss the Google Authorship Markup and Schema.  Jonathan—I guess welcome back to The Buzz and welcome home.

Jonathan:         Thanks so much for having me James.

James:             Before we dig into this conversation we’re going to have about literally finding all the quality content you could ever need—I know you and I had a chance to discuss this prior to getting on the show here—tell us a little bit about your most recent conference.

Jonathan:         So I went to Vermont.  That was a one day conference.  It was Web Marketing Summit.  It was a very nice event.  Vermont is beautiful this time of year, of course.  And I was speaking about SEO efforts that really, truly matter.  It was a smattering of the stuff that I had spoken about at SMX about Schema and other things—changes to Panda and Penguin and all of that.

James:             There are so many conferences these days.  I know you can do a Google search for just about any topic—whether it be blogging or social media, SEO, affiliate marketing—and it kind of makes me smile a little bit because I remember ten years ago, the very first conference that I actually attended was in 2002, which would have been right around now—right around this time—with Commission Junction University down in good old, beautiful Santa Barbara California.  And how time has flown over the decade and now you look around… How many conferences do you either attend or speak at in a year?

Lanyrd.com Logo Image via CrunchBase

Jonathan:         Oh, I actually use Lanyrd.com.  Are you familiar with that?

James:             No.

Jonathan:         It’s a great website.  It’s social media relevant, ties into your Facebook and actually, just this week they tied into LinkedIn and it allows you to see if I’m watching where Rand Fishkin is going or if I am watching where Danny Dover or Danny Sullivan are going, I can watch their calendar on any of these conferences.  So it really allows me to kind of go down the list.  I generally look four or five months out to see whether or not there are conferences that are looking for guest speakers.  There is one happening in Little Rock Arkansas in March that I submitted to speak over there and they got back to me and they said, “Yes, you’re definitely going to be on schedule.”  I said, “Well, you know I’m traveling all that way.  I submitted four proposals. Could I do two?” and so they’re going to get back to me to see.

Obviously, there is an expense on my part.  I have to fly out there and I have to do hotels.  I am trying to ramp up.  For a while I was going as an attendee to SMX East, SMX Advanced, SES, WordCamps—all of these different things—and you have to kind of weigh that against the time that you actually need to be in the office.  Now, in a later part of my career, I am speaking at a lot of these events.  So I am trying to speak at about six a year—six, seven, eight a year—one every other month, depending upon where the location is.  I generally try to stay East Coast just for the expense because I need to fly back and forth fairly quickly.  Like Vermont, I landed at 12:30 in the morning and then I presented at 10:30 in the morning there and then I got on a plane at 8:30 at night and I got back home by 11:30.

James:             These conferences, I think are probably a perfect segue into talking about where to find all kinds of quality content.  I do know as affiliates, we are always on the hunt for resources where we can shortcut—I guess would be a good word—the finding and the development of content, finding places where we can get great content very inexpensively.  I use—as listeners know—Elance a lot.  I know there are a lot of listeners that also use Elance to get articles written.  But we always have to come up with ideas as to what to write about and I know I can spend hours and hours and hours sometimes brainstorming out a series of articles and getting the outlines together.

But there are also some other things that I do and I know you and I discussed it as well—you are doing something similar—when it comes to using, I guess, conferences and other methods to find all that quality content that you’d ever need.  Why don’t we dig into that topic?  We were discussing it before the top of the show here about using conferences as a source for rich detail and rich information to develop content.

Jonathan:         Yeah.  So take the SMX conference, for example, that I just spoke at.  Not only do I have my presentation but I also have the voice data.  You just go up with your iPhone.  All of them have voice recorders.  You just hit that voice recorder.  You do your presentation.  That’s your content.  I give it to my transcriber and she writes it out and that becomes an article on my website.  In addition to that, as an attendee of the conference, I’m actually live blogging during all of these sessions.  So I am listening to what everybody else is talking about and I am gathering up information and I am putting it out onto my website immediately.

James:             As affiliates, we cover obviously all topics.  And in my particular case, I’m usually speaking at something to do with the internet or affiliate marketing.  You were talking with the SEO audiences.  But those people who are listening, who have topics that may be completely unrelated—there are typically still conferences out there that produce information en masse.    We don’t actually even have to attend these conferences.  I do know when it comes to say Affiliate Summit, Shawn Collins releases the prior years’ or the last couple of years’ sessions for free and he publishes the videos of all of these sessions that are featured down at Affiliate Summit.

And the nice thing about using this type of content—and I guess where we’re going with this—is you can gather up this type of information and you can use this as a rich resource to pull down information that can be turned into articles, that can be really used in so many different ways.  I know if somebody was to do a one-hour presentation down at Affiliate Summit… And the same with you Jonathan, how much time would you say you—not to take into all of the years of experience that pours into it automatically—but how long does it take you to put together one of your talks?

Jonathan:         Oh, depending upon the level that I believe the audience is at… SMX, I was speaking to what I believed was a fairly educated audience in the advanced segment so I really needed to be quite detailed there.  I am definitely doing my share of several hours prior to getting up there and actually speaking.  That includes reading up on all the material to make sure that I’m at the bleeding edge for the technology.  I don’t want somebody in the audience saying, “Oh, this article just came out last week that completely debunks what you’re talking about.”  So that’s critical.  Putting it into the Power Point presentation, leveling out all the note points, the bullet points for what I’m going to talk about because a lot of my presentations I try not to put the actual verbiage—I’m not reading right off of the slide—so I’m using images to kind of remind myself as to what we want to talk about.  It’s definitely several hours of research that goes into any of those presentations.

James:             I am the same.  When I put a presentation together—I’m speaking at Affiliate Summit again in January—and again, same with me; it takes… I think about it for weeks, actually, off and on and I take little notes and doodles and then when it finally comes down to putting the outline together and then putting the presentation together that can take me quite a few hours.  And I know most speakers do the same so they bring a wealth of information and knowledge to the table to begin and then they sit down and begin to organize their thoughts into logical flow and then they put together a presentation around it.

I can see we’re up against a break but what I’d like to do when we get back is to talk about how listeners can use any conference or any podcast and the information that’s being shared in this rich detail because in both cases—conferences and podcasting—typically, a lot of thought goes into what’s being presented and how a listener can seek out conference materials, seek out podcasts and then use that material in such a way where they are not plagiarizing, they’re not scraping and they can use it to produce really high quality content for their site and for their online business.  Jonathan, I’d like to talk about that when we get back.

Arlene is away today but I do have Jonathan Goodman from Halyard Consulting on the line and we’re talking about where to find all the quality content you could literally ever need.  We talked a little bit about conferences and I’d like to dig into that in just a moment Jonathan.  Let’s also talk about podcasts. I do know that I use podcasts a lot to create content and I’m not talking about specifically, actually recording a podcast—I’m talking more about using a podcast, whether it’s one that I’ve done myself or somebody else’s podcast, as also another absolutely rich resource of information.

And again, when you’re out there looking around the net, there are so many conferences out there but there are also now so many different podcasts and all kinds of topics, whether you maybe head over to PetLifeRadio.com and find some of the funniest pet podcasts you could ever hear or just do a search for podcast directories to find literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of podcasts out there.  And these too are an absolutely great resource of information.  Now Jonathan, I know that some people are probably thinking, “We can’t plagiarize.  You don’t mean, James, you can just go take these people’s information and then reuse it?”  That’s not what we’re talking about, is it?

Jonathan:         No, not at all.  You and I both frequently use Elance and there are some fantastic editors on Elance.  What I like to do is once I’ve worked with an editor for a while, I am able to feel confident to say to them, “Go and listen to this podcast, extrapolate out all of the really interesting, unique features of what they’re talking about, get a couple of quotes from that person that’s speaking, find out who that person is, who is running the show, what’s their website and then pull in all that information.”

Here’s how I feel about it.  Maybe it’s a different view than what they’re talking about or maybe I have additional information that I can add and bring to the conversation.  It really kind of helps the uninitiated or somebody who is just not as creative to be able to look at other people’s work and say, “That’s really what I want to be talking about but I have a difficult time formulating it.  Here is my editor.  She is going to go and do it for me” and it really works out great.

James:             I have used something very, very similar.  In fact, I pulled out just a couple of little paragraphs right out of the writer spec that I use anytime we’re using a podcast.  And I do find that it really shortcuts things for me too because if I have to sit down and kind of brainstorm out the idea for a topic and then really dig through and go do all the research on—which I do a lot but sometimes you just want to have a different way to go about it—I can go out and find a podcast on just about any topic known to man these days and then I give them a little instructions that says, ‘I’d like you to have a listen to the podcast below”—and this is to the writer and I give them a link to the podcast—“I’d like you to pull out all the tips, the techniques, the strategies being discussed in the podcast.  I’d also like you to reference the podcast as the source of information.  I would like you to use the stories, the real names, the names of the people and the names of the websites that were shared in the podcast.  I want these articles to be very real.”

And then I will give them maybe some additional instructions on making sure that we’re providing our commentary.  So if I’ve listened to that podcast, which I typically have, I’ll have some thoughts on it as well, which I’ll give to the writer to include—maybe a quote or two or something that I agree with or don’t agree with—and it just shortcuts things so well and because in the same idea that it takes time to put a one hour talk together at a conference, which you can do the exact same thing with—because somebody else has already taken all that time and care and detail and poured their experience into it, we really can get some really rich resources, can’t we?

Jonathan:         Yeah, and you’re not plagiarizing because what you really want to do within that article is talk about the person that’s speaking about this and actually even backlink to their website.  Give them full credit for the information that they have provided and that not only helps you to show that you’re working within a larger community but it really is the reason why they did the podcast in the first place.  They are looking for the recognition.  They are looking for the audience.  And you are just helping them expand their audience.

James:             And that goes exactly the same for the conference material.  I know with Affiliate Summit producing and publishing each one of the talks—and there are probably a dozen to 18 good, solid talks at every conference—every one of those is typically an hour long.  Some of them are panels so you can pull those apart too and you could develop content around those.  But I guess what I would recommend to listeners is to take whatever topic you are in and go have a look around, doing some Google searches here for conference materials what conferences are in your industry—if you’re in the pet business or you’re in health and fitness—goodness knows there are all kinds of health and fitness conferences out there, there are all kinds of health and fitness podcasts.

I don’t typically spend any more money either with the writers and stuff to have them listen to a podcast.  The podcasts are usually 15, 20, 30 minutes long.  It doesn’t take them a lot of time to go through them.  They sit down, they—as Jonathan said—they listen to the podcast, they extrapolate all the high points out of it, they get the tips, the techniques, the strategies.  I do want them to share the stories, the real names, the names of the people and the websites and as Jonathan said, giving them a link back to the site—to their site, of course—they’re going to get a backlink and the recognition and the additional exposure.  And Jonathan, in your particular case—and I can see we’re coming right up against a break—if somebody was to take one of your talks and to do exactly what we just said, would you have any problem with that?

Jonathan:         No, not whatsoever because as long as they are mentioning my name, hopefully referencing the company that I own and giving me a link showing who this person is—whether that’s to my LinkedIn profile, Google+ profile or the website HalyardConsulting.com itself—it’s all valuable to me because I’m reaching an audience that I wouldn’t be able to reach anyway.

James:             Jonathan, I can see we are up against a break.  We’ll be right back.

Arlene is skipping out on us today but I do have Jonathan Goodman from Halyard Consulting on the line and we are talking about where to find all the quality content you will ever need.  Jonathan, I’d like to maybe get you to—if you wouldn’t mind—encouraging listeners to actually, really act upon this, to go out and do a Google search and start looking for this type of information.  It can make a really big difference, can’t it?

Jonathan:         Absolutely.  I mean everybody understands that content is king and that we need to be out there.  From my side, I need to be working with clients who understand this—who understand that a portion of their workweek has to be focused on reaching out to the community online, building content—whether that’s voice, video or articles.  All of the voice and video obviously can be transcribed into articles, which help get indexed better in Google but all of that is so critical.

James:             We also talked about e-books before we got on the call today.  E-books is something, of course, I am very familiar with.  I wrote one back in 2002, revisited it a couple of times and I’ve written a couple others since and it’s a great way to go.  But it too can be a real challenge to pull that information together into an e-book.  Anybody that’s sat down and tried, it’s easy to say, “I’m going to write an e-book.”  It’s a whole other thing to actually accomplish it and get it out the door.  But some of the stuff we’re talking about—this can really help in that regard as well, can’t it?

Jonathan:         Absolutely.  Our original conversation—one of the first shows that I did on your show—was talking about the e-book that I was writing about Analytics and how I was crowdfunding that and everything.  Well, only until you actually sit down to try to write an e-book do you understand how unbelievably difficult it is to scope out this whole thing.  And I am not a writer.  It’s not my background.  I’m a business and IT guy.  So to take the information that I have already written into articles on the website—some of which are transcribed from seminars that I have given, some are opinions or some of them are even live blogs—and take all of that with a really great editor and then again, repurpose that content in a different format and build it out as an e-book is just another great way to gain a larger audience.

James:             I do know when we put together the Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook, we actually came up with the idea—because I had an editor at the time who I still work with to this day, just pinged me on Skype actually—we sat down and we were going to put together this little book.  We didn’t have a name for it yet.  We figured it’d take a couple of months at best and we’d be out the door with it.  And I’ll tell you what—six months later it was finally done and it was so much work to sit down and come up with.

We threw many copies in the garbage—the original ideas for the cover—everything went out the door.  In fact, two months into it we really hadn’t gotten anywhere other than realizing all the things that we didn’t want to do whereas today, I do know just using this strategy that you’ve mentioned—audio—and taking that information and then putting it out there, finding the detailed info out there and then… And I do know you as well, you record things a lot as well, just to help you through it because you talk a lot better than you write, you said.

Jonathan:         Yeah.  Yeah, in fact that’s how I’m going to do the Analytics book now is I am working with… I’m going to set up a podcast and it’s going to be a private podcast and it’s going to be me just talking about Analytics—the important data—and I’ll move through the chapters that I want to talk about and the specific information but there is such a huge difference between my ability to talk and my ability to write that this is just the way that it’s got to get done because I’m motivated to do it but to sit down, it would take four times the amount of time that it would if I was just… What I’m doing now is I’m going to go onto the podcast, I’m going to talk about the information and the data and move you through it and then that’s going to get transcribed, that’s going to be an article and then as the chapters build out, once everything is put together the editor gets it again and she really builds out a full e-book.  So it’s going to take a while still but not as much… At least it’s getting done.

James:             I do something very similar where I will gather up all of my notes and all of my thoughts for a particular—might be an article or it could be a chapter of a book or I might have just listened to a podcast that was really interesting or I’ve gathered up some articles that I thought were really presenting something in a unique sort of way—and I’ll get all this in front of me and then I’ll just put my headset on and I’ll have a conversation with the writer about what I’m looking at and I’ll just go 10, 15, 20 minutes having a discussion in a logical order that I think the chapters should flow out of.  And then I can pause and talk and say, “You may want to go research this a little bit and talk a little bit about that” but it’s all about coming up with the rich detail and information and conferences is just a great place to do that and podcasts as well, Jonathan.  One final thing and maybe just as we wrap her up, I do know you have launched a brand new directory that listeners probably would be interested in.

Jonathan:         Yeah, you know directories are incredibly important.  In SEO, we’re always trying to add to good, viable directories and what I’ve actually done is expanded HalyardConsulting.com to have in itself a directory within the website and it’s a professional directory so lawyers and doctors and other SEO professionals—everybody can come in and put in their content for their business and the yearly fee right now—we’re running it—it’s $0.99 for the year.  So I just want a lot of companies out there to take the opportunity and go in and build up the directory.

James:             And that’s at HalyardConsulting.com?  Could you spell that for us?

Jonathan:         H-A-L-Y-A-R-D-C-O-N-S-U-L-T-I-N-G.com

James:             Jonathan, for anybody that would like to get a hold of you to discuss your SEO services, how would they get a hold of you?

Jonathan:         I can be reached at JGoodman@HalyardConsulting.com, I am on Twitter: @HalyardConsult, I am on LinkedIn and Facebook—we have a Facebook page—and you can always email me or you can call me at 800-641-9157.

James:             Jonathan, I can see we are out of time.  You can follow me @JamesMartell on Twitter.  New episodes of The Affiliate Buzz can be heard every Thursday at 5:00 pm Eastern and 2:00 pm Pacific.  You can access the archives for our previous shows on WebmasterRadio.fm, JamesMartell.com and on iTunes.  Jonathan, thanks so much and to our listeners, thanks for listening to another edition of The Affiliate Buzz.

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Find All of the Quality Content You Will Ever Need – Affiliate Buzz is a post from: Halyard Consulting

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Halyard Consulting Kicks Off New Business Directory with $0.99 Sale

JERSEY CITY, New Jersey (November 19th, 2012)

Halyard Consulting has launched a new business directory and to kick off the celebration they’ve reduced the annual membership to $0.99 for a limited time. The directory focuses on service professionals including top level categories such as: Architecture and Construction, Business Management, Communication, Finance, Health Science, Law and Security, and Information Technology. Categories further breakout into sub-categories for more specific services.

The $0.99 sale lists businesses for 365 days and includes both a long and short descriptions; the name of the owner, business and address; the phone and fax numbers as well as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn company profile and keywords. Plus you can upload 4 images focused on the business like corporate logo, owner’s portrait, and office.

Unlike other competing directories the Halyard Consulting Business Directory is reviewed, edited, and approved by humans. “My hope is that small businesses will take advantage of the amazing starter price during this limited time and increase traffic and branding for their companies.” said Jonathan Goodman the President of Halyard Consulting.

About Halyard Consulting

Halyard Consulting is a New Jersey based Internet marketing company focused on improving online results for small to medium sized businesses. Halyard Consulting was founded in 2007 when owner Jonathan Goodman recognized the difficulties small businesses had gaining top positions in the search engines. Since then Halyard’s focus has been to increase their client’s online visibility using cutting edge Internet marketing techniques and providing them with actionable strategies against their online competition.

About Jonathan Goodman

Jonathan Goodman started his career over 20 years ago at the dawn of the Internet age producing websites for Fortune 500 companies. Jonathan holds an MBA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, an MS from the College of New Rochelle, and a BFA from the Ringling College of Art and Design.

Contact: Jonathan Goodman, President
jgoodman@halyardconsulting.com
http://halyardconsulting.com
(800) 641-9157
###

Halyard Consulting Kicks Off New Business Directory with $0.99 Sale is a post from: Halyard Consulting

Email jgoodman@halyardconsulting.com if you would like the audio file.

Jonathan:         Okay, very good.  So this is my blah-blah page.  This is Halyard Consulting.  Started in 2007.  We do small-medium sized businesses.  We’re WordPress exclusive simply because it is the best SEO out there and that’s my personal opinion.  And we do a full range of internet marketing.  This is what I really want to talk to you about—my moustache.  This is Movember so… I think you in the back—you can’t actually see me.  Hopefully you can just see the moustache move up and down.  One in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime.  In 2012, 242,000 new cases in disease will be diagnosed and more than 28,000 men will die—and you can follow my moustache.  This is 14 days worth of growth.  I am very hairy.  And you can see how it grows and then we’re having a celebration December 1^st because my family can’t stand this.  So…Let’s get into this.

SEOs—and there is a lot of information out there and some of it’s good and some of it’s bad.  What I want to do is I first want to talk to you about “What is Google trying to do?”  There are three things that Google is trying to do—crawling, indexing and serving.  And when we look at crawling, it’s the Googlebot—it’s a spider, right?  Let’s get an understanding as to what the level of comprehension is here.  If I say to you “conversion rate,” do we all kind of understand what that is?  If I say to you “Panda,” is it an animal we’re talking about?

Man:     Third base for the San Francisco Giants.

Jonathan:         Well, there you go.  That’s somebody who watches football.  Googlebot… So Googlebot is a spider, right?  It’s an application or it’s a piece of software that Google sends out to look at the websites—tries to index all websites.  But first it has the… Because there are so many websites out there, it wants to say, “Why am I crawling your site?  Give me a reason that I should come to your site.  Give me a reason I should come back to your site.  That’s going to be critically important.  How often should it be coming there and how many pages should it crawl?”  Googlebot doesn’t… If you have 100 pages and you launch your site at 100 pages, Googlebot doesn’t come in and crawl all 100 pages.  It’s determined on the value of the content that you provide.  So it might do five pages the first time and if it’s seeing that there is more and more content, that might be increased as the months go by and hopefully then it will finish up and index all of your… And hopefully you are continually adding more.

How do you communicate with Google?  Sitemaps and Webmaster Tools—X-amount of sitemaps and Webmaster Tools, right?  We’ll get into all of that so don’t worry if you look puzzled.  And I’m watching your faces to see whether… at what point you do get puzzled.  Indexing—so Googlebot absorbs this information and it’s looking for three things—the content on the page, the tags in the metadata and what are the attributes—where are the title tags?  When you have images on there, understand that Googlebot can’t understand that image.  So you need an Alt tag to tell them what it is.  Hopefully you are corresponding the keyword for that page to an image and then putting the keyword back into that Alt Tag with a correct sentence.

Googlebot has a couple of different problems.  Rich media files—like video and audio and flash—it can’t understand any of these things.  So what we have to do; we have to provide additional information in text format.  What am I doing right now?  I’m speaking to you.  What’s my iPhone doing?  It’s recording that.  What do I do with that?  I send it to my transcription person.  She then is going to provide that back to me and this is all going to go up on my website as an article.  That’s—if this was being videoed, if this is audio—now I’ve actually got something that Google can understand.

So what is Googlebot trying to do?  And what is Google trying to do?  They’re trying to serve the right results.  You know, when we talk about “I want to be number one in Google,” you have to say, “What am I doing better than somebody else?”  It’s not just “I’m paying my SEO four times than the other guy’s getting it” because that doesn’t make a difference.  It’s got to be fresh content.  So the search query relevancy, Google looks at 200 different algorithmic points, including page rank and speed of site.

Speed of site is something that they just recently added.  It probably didn’t just recently add it, but they just recently announced it.  So speed of site means Google wants you to be under—and I get a lot of “hmms” and “ahs” after I say this—four to six seconds, right?  Now if you are large e-commerce—I had a whole argument with somebody who was a huge e-commerce person—yes, they want you to load in .001 second but if you are the average website and you are loading at 12 seconds, you’re loading at 20 seconds—there is no way that they are going to like you.  This is going to be a negative effect on what you’re doing.

Page rank is this rank and we’ll get into backlinks and everything like that, right?  And Google constantly wants to see that you are providing information—you are providing interesting, unique content.  You have a five page website?

Question:         I’m sorry.  Can I ask a quick question?

Jonathan:         Sure.

Question:         On site speed?

Jonathan:         Yes.

Question:         Just before we move on from that, I am of the understanding that site speed is slowed down by large images posted to the site.

Jonathan:         There is a ton of stuff that slows down site speed.  It can be on your server.  All my clients are on the AWS—the Amazon Web Services—because we want to low balance it as needed.  If one of my clients writes an article that then gets republished in the Huffington Post and we went from having 100 people a day to now 1,000 a minute, I’ve got to low balance that.  So that’s a site speed issue.  Yes, you’re right.  When you have a huge image up there and it’s not broken down into CSS and everything, it is going to slow down.  There are other things that you could do.  You could write the HTML correctly.  You can compress things.  There are different ways to do that.  So it’s not just a specific image.  Okay.

So content every day versus content once a quarter, right?  If somebody is a dentist in this room and you built a five page website and there is a new method coming out for laser whitening and you write one article and the guy that you’re competing with writes an article every single week or hires somebody to write an article every single week.  Google is going to… Googlebot is going to see there is new data.  “I’d better come back here.  Oh, there’s new data this week?  Well, now I’ll come back every two weeks.  Oh, wait a second.  I missed a week and there was more data?  I’d better come back every week.”  And that’s what you’re trying to do.  You’re trying to entice Googlebot to come back to your site more often.

Okay, Penguin and Panda.  So without getting extremely complicated, Penguin is links and Panda is content.  These are two major changes that Google is trying to produce to get the black hat SEOs out of the picture, to get the Ehows and the Livestrong—or whatever website that was prior to that—the content that they were paying somebody $5.00 to publish a “…point of how to take a photograph—ridiculous content, doesn’t help anybody.  And so with Penguin, we’re talking about links for that.  Keyword stuffing—anybody has an idea as to what keyword stuffing is?  There is a whole variety of different keyword stuffings.  I could 999 somebody else’s site so that nobody can see it and stuff a couple keywords on that side.  If my background is white, I could put content that is white and that would be keyword stuffing.  Cloaking is when I am coming to the website as a human and seeing it as a human but I’m telling Googlebot to see something completely different and it’s all stuffed with information and keywords.  Link schemes is when you’re getting link farms and you’re in directories that have zero page rank or have negative page rank or they take it out of—those are kind of the link schemes that we’re talking about.

So I believe the future of Penguin is going to be based on a couple of conferences that I went to is that they’re going to start bad PR balancing.  They are going to be looking at… Let’s say that you have a website out there and its 1,000 backlinks.  And we all understand what backlink is?  Sometimes it’s complicated, right?  I have a website—JonathanGoodman.com—and I write an article.  I guest post on my friend Kimanzi’s website and in that I have… Jonathan is great in anchor text and it links back to JonathanGoodman.com.  That’s what a backlink is.  But when we’re talking about the load balancing, we’re saying what I believe is 900 are coming from really low quality—PR0, PR1s—some of the stuff’s been taken out of the index.  And you move down through this and you wind up with no PR7s… PR10s… Now a PR10 would be CNN, Huffington Post but PR7 might be your local community website or your local school, right?  That could be a strong enough site.  So when Google looks at all this and they say, “Well really, actually you have 0 and 1 page ranks.  We’re not going to promote you to the number one ranking.”

And then Panda is the content side.  So if you have a site that has a 600-word article and in that page you have ten advertisements—links and graphics and stuff like that—those heavy on the advertising.  First of all, you’re not generating that much in AdSense, unless you’ve got just tons of people coming in.  You’re not going to get tons of people coming in because you’ve got low content, high advertising.  So thin content sites are Ehow—just jargon—stuff like that.  I’m going to watch my verbiage.  I’m not from Vermont.  We curse a lot in New Jersey, especially after Hurricane Sandy but I won’t do it here.  Ask yourself a question—“Are you providing solid valuable content?”

Spinning articles.  What that means is I have taken 600-word article and I’ve put through an application and I wind up with ten other articles—same exact sentences moved into different formats and paths and stuff like that—but it looks like jargon.  It looks like just a mess, right?  You’re not going to read it and nobody’s going to read it.  That first original article is quality.  Those other spun articles are all to be put on ridiculous websites that hopefully get your page rank.  They’re not going to work anymore.  They haven’t worked for a while.

Article farms… I don’t like to call anybody out but I’ve been doing it for so many years I might as well Ezinearticles.com -  If you’re spending the time writing articles or you’re hiring somebody to write articles and you’re putting them up on Ezine, you’re wasting your time.  And this is all the stuff that Google is looking at to see where your links are coming from so that they are going to rank you accordingly or take you off the index completely.

And scraping canonicalization from other websites—so what we’re talking about there is there are bots that can scrape content from your competitor’s site and put it up on your website.  There are ways to protect yourself against this and we’re going to get into that a little bit later.  And canonicalizing is duplicated data, so if anybody out there has articles and they are sending the same article to ten different websites, it’s all canonicalized.  It’s all duplicated and Google has to eventually make a decision as to which one is the more relevant.  What’s going to happen is, if the guy—Site B—has been around since 1998 and has a higher page rank than you, they’re going to actually outrank you for the content that you provided them if it’s all canonicalized.

And are you differentiating your content from everybody else in your industry?  And this goes without saying, right?  If you are not providing informative, interesting articles—they don’t have to be… You don’t have to get a Harvard student to write this stuff.  But you need something unique.

So Google came up with 23 points that they have visual site monitors to review.  And I’m only going to just go through six.  We’ve got a lot of… We don’t have that much time and we’ve got a lot of stuff to get through.  Ask yourself this question.  If you are starting to fall in the rankings, look at your content and ask yourself, “Is this article written by an expert, an enthusiast who knows the topic well or is it more shallow in nature?  Does this article have spelling, stylistic or factual errors?  Was the article edited well or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?”  These are exact questions that Google’s handing to monitors reviewing sites and asking these questions.  I’m not going to go through all of those.  They’re all on the web.

So Webmaster Tools—this is one of… This is the most critical SEO tool that you could use today.  So Google is looking… If you have Google Webmaster Tools out there, you’ll be able to pull up all of this information and you should see is there DNS and server connectivity issues?  Is there some problem with the website that is preventing people from getting to it?  Does the site timeout, right?  This morning I was—I love to admit my own mistakes—so this morning I’m Live blogging?  I don’t know if any of you have seen my Tweets but that’s actually Live blogging so that’s taking the information that I’m Tweeting and it’s compacting it into an article on my website and I double Live blogged and I crashed my site.  So that’s site connectivity, right?  That’s your server running?  I had to reboot the whole thing and get the server back up.  And are there errors in the robot’s .txt file?  I know that I’m getting technical for some people but understand you should be going back to your IT people or you should be going back to your SEO people and you should be saying, “Can I see the Webmaster Tools?  Is there any problem with the connectivity?  Is there any problem with the robot’s .txt?”

XML site guide—there are a variety of different kinds of XML site maps.  And just page site map is easy, right?  You have a site… You have pages.  You’re writing it or you get something to actually go through your site and produce the XML.  But you also have to understand that there is video XML, there is mobile XML, there used to be geositemap.xml, which used to be really great but now it’s any side of the actual page XML.  And if you have been approved for Google News—if anybody here is from the journal—whatever your local journal is or USA Today is, they should be approved through Google News and if that’s the case, then you want a separate XML site for your articles to be able to connect.  And what you’re really doing from a very basic level is you are waving your hand up to the Googlebot and you’re saying, “I’ve got new content.  Please come and look at me.”  And if your site is so large—if you are an e-commerce site, if you are a new site—and you’ve got thousands and thousands of pages—and I know that this is going to be frustrating—but you’ve got to break it out because think about it this way.  Googlebot is coming to your website for five seconds every month and they want to absorb the most amount of information as possible.  They have the ability to split and review information but if you give them a site map that has 4,000 pages connected to it, you’re never going to get all those indexed.  So what you do is you go from the top level—the category—you provide that and then that should link to other XML site maps that then absorb, that then have the listings of all the critical pages.  So if you’re dealing with canoeing or kayaking and you’ve got your categorization—I don’t know Kayaking I’d better switch that.  If you’ve got Pathfinder.com—big animal lover—so dogs, cats, birds, fish.  You mark a separate XML site map for your dogs category and you want a separate one for fish, okay?

And then the robot’s .txt file—you want to control where Googlebot goes.  Search engines are supposed to—I say “supposed to”—supposed to obey robots.txt files.  There are rogue search engines out there from other countries as well as this country that ignore the robot’s .txt file but it’s your one way of saying, “Stop.  I don’t want you to look at this information.”  And what might you want to block, right? Well, we’re talking about canonicalization and canonicalization again, if I didn’t explain it the first time, is duplication of data.  So you don’t want your archive folder to be indexed again because all those pages were already marked in the XML site map.  You don’t want to say, “Oh, go back into the archive” because all of that… If you wrote about baseball on Sunday and you have it on an archive page, it’s going to be canonicalized.  So you want to limit that.  Your search results—whatever anybody’s searching for, it’s not the business of Google.  You want to block all that.

Other ways to block content—noindex, nofollow is listed there.  And the most important thing that I could say about this slide is be careful.  I’ve even made mistakes.  I’ve shut down websites by nofollow and noindex and until you realize that you’ve sank in the rankings and your visitations are zero, you go back and you say, “What did I do wrong?” and it’s mostly the noindex and nofollow was misinterpreted and misunderstood.

Rich snippets—I love talking about rich snippets.  Does anybody know what a rich snippet is?  We are getting to the terminator age.  We are getting to computer understanding.  But unfortunately, because we are humans and we don’t think like computers, we think like humans and so what we are doing is something called schema.org where we are categorizing information for the computers.  Instead of saying, “Hey computers, how do you want to understand this?” we’re saying, “Okay, here’s what we have.  Bat.”  Now right now half of you are thinking, “mammal” and another half of you are thinking “baseball”—and that’s what the problem is.  When you say “bat,” computers don’t understand.  So we need to provide them the differentiation for when you’re searching for “I want to buy a bat”—are you wanting to buy a bat (baseball motion) or are you wanting to buy a bat (flying motion)?  And the way that they do this is through rich snippets.

Skyfall—I haven’t seen the movie.  Don’t tell me how it ends.  I don’t know.  But human comprehension—I walk up to somebody and say, “What’s Skyfall about?”  And you go, “Oh, it’s the new James Bond movie.  This is the 50-year anniversary.  Stars Daniel Craig and Javier Bardem and its directed by Sam Mendes.”  Okay, what’s the computer understand?  The computer understands that the type of thing that Skyfall is a movie.  Okay, well now it’s not a product.  It’s not clothing.  It’s a movie.  The name of it is Skyfall.  The description—I’m not going to read that, for anybody who doesn’t know what it already is.  Director is Sam Mendes.  Actor—Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem.  Sam Mendes isn’t an actor.  He is the director—categorization.  Genre—it fits under action, adventure, crime, thriller.  It’s produced in the English language and the duration is 143 minutes with a rating value—current rating value—of 8.1.

That’s what a computer understands if it’s written using rich snippets.  Sam Mendes is a type of person.  He is a person.  He’s a human being.  He is a producer.  He is a director.  He was… His parents were Peter Mendes who was a retired university teacher and his mother was a children’s book writer.  He was born on 8/01/1965 and these are the things that he performed in.  Now here we have a critical error within the schema.  Well, Sam Mendes is a director.  Directors don’t perform.  So at some point, in order to tell the computer that he is a director and directors direct, they’re going to have to change that part of the schema.

So why is that at all important?  Because the more people that are sitting in this room that understand you’ve got to add rich content—rich snippets—to your content, are going to have it be significantly improved ranking for categorized data.  When Google moves now to rich snippet content, they’re going to look at what is the context of the conversation?  And if your website isn’t providing that back to the computer—to Googlebot—you’re going to be lower in the rankings.

Google Analytics.  So Google Analytics, the second most important SEO product, shows us things like time onsite, if you were all in the other… the bounce rate.  How long are people staying on your site?  How many pages are they going to?  Are they—now here’s a critical question—are they on a desktop or are they on a mobile?  And if you’re not building your website for mobile using responsive design, which we do in WordPress or if you are not doing an m.domain name—and Google wants you to get away from m.domain names anyway—you are going to start serving pages in a mobile environment that are more conducive to a desktop environment—two different things.  And you’re going… You’re lined up with a higher bounce rate and people are going to get frustrated.

What are your conversion goals?  What, at the end of the day, are you trying to do?  Now some clients are trying to make more sales.  Some clients are trying to rank for specific keywords that they could then talk about during golf—believe it or not.  Traffic sources—keywords come in organic and paid.  I know we’re kind of… We went this way and that way.  But the SEO impact of what your organic… Your organic is always going to be more valuable than your PPC.  PPC, you’re always going to have to continue to funnel.  It’s like a drug.  You’re going to have to keep funneling money into that.  Once you’re in the top ranking for a couple of keywords and you’re getting traffic from that and it’s built correctly—it’s not built using black hat—but it’s built with solid, fundamental content that is going to last a good amount of time, then that’s free.  Landing pages, where are people coming in from?  Where are they—Geography—and are they currently finding you through social media?

So when we look at visitor flow—and this is also something that Google Analytics is able to provide you—you are able to see what’s your drop-off rate and specific to the page.  Where are they?  Where did they move through?  Here we have 256 visits, 210 drop-offs—so that in itself says nearly all the people came to the home page and then left—and 46 went to About Halyard Consulting and 12… Then it breaks down this way and it looked at Who I am, My Google Predictions and then some of that even continued onto a third page and we see how that is.  That’s incredible because if you have a page…

Somebody in the last session was talking about… Well, there were two interesting questions the last time.  But they were talking about they wanted to go… They wanted everybody to go to one page to have something that converted.  Well, if you’re looking at your visitor flow and they’re never getting to that page, this is why, right?  They didn’t find anything of interest… Look, from About Halyard Consulting they went to Articles, Business Directory and then a couple of five more pages.  From Contact, they went directly to About Halyard Consulting—and that flow is going to determine if you need to change things in the design, if you need to change things in the content or in the conversion.  There’s a lot of stuff in this so we’re going to just try to get through it.  How am I doing on time?  28 minutes.

Okay, Google Authorship.  This is who you are, how powerful of a brand name you are and are you going to…?  Is that going to then benefit you when you’re trying to get stuff to rank?  So when I contribute to guest posts on other people’s websites I say… Well, first of all, of course I set up my Google+ page to then… This is my Google+ page there and when I give anybody articles that I have written for their website, I put this in it and I say, “?rel=author” so that I am then saying to Google, “This was written by me.”  But more importantly, I am going back into my Google+ page to the contributor section and I am… How many of you are using Google+?  Barely anybody.  I know.  Ah, poor Google.  Must’ve spent so much time on that.  But really, it’s for SEOs.  They didn’t mean it to be for SEOs but that’s what it is.  The great news is that if you use it as an SEO, it is the most powerful tool outside of… Well, it’s for different reasons than Webmaster Tools because Webmaster Tools is pretty powerful.  You want to verify that information.  So you go onto Google+, you create a Google+ profile and you say, “I contributed to kimanzi.com and here is the article link and in that article there is this link.”  It’s confirmation that I wrote that article.  And the example that they use is Barack Obama, right?  I can say that “This article is written by Barack Obama.”  I can take his Google+ page and I can change, say, “Google+ for Barack Obama ?rel=author. But because I don’t have access to Barack Obama’s Google+ page, I can’t go into the contributor and verify that relationship.  So his picture is never going to show up for this.  Was there a question?

Question:         Are you saying there is a specific place to do that—not just posting it on your page?

Jonathan:         Yes.  Within “edit profile” there is “contributed to.”  That’s the area.

Webmaster guidelines.  Everyone should read this.  Everybody should read it every other year when they change it.  So it’s design content, technical and quality.  These are the three areas that Google is looking at to see whether or not you’re doing SEO correctly.

Do you have good information architecture?  Does your site layout well or does it somehow spin people back into the same regurgitated content and they’re not even finding anything and they leave your website?  Do you have a site map?  HTML—eh… XML—absolutely, right?  HTML is a little difficult because when you’re adding an article a day, to then go back into the HTML and rewrite that… So my opinion differs with Google.  XML is critical, right?  You want to limit… On that page where there is an article—100 links.  Now that kind of gets complicated when you have dropdown menus for navigation, footer information—all that stuff—you count up those links on your pages.  When you get to 125, Google is going to have a problem with that.  Rich content—not image heavy.  You want to use the old attribute to describe pictures.  I mentioned that before.  You want to check for broken links in the Webmaster Tools.  You can go in and see all that.  We’ve looked at the crawl errors.

From the technical side—go home tonight and turn off Java Script and see what your website looks like.  Turn off all of the…everything except for the text and just see what it reads.  If you wind up having HTML in there, there is a problem.  If you wind up having a completely blank screen, that’s a problem.  Robots.txt—check up in Webmaster Tools, right?  That is you have the ability in Webmaster Tools to go in and say, “Here is the URL for my robots.txt.  Webmaster Tools, can you review that please?”  And they will come back with any information that is incorrect.  .htaccess files—I don’t want to get that technical but it is critically important.  URLs need to be postname—not perimeters.  Again, Googlebot has… They’re going to get stuck.  When you have a happy website “I love Vermont” in HTML—unhappy website is “?page=1&sortbind=love&sortorder=”Vermont”—it’s really hard for Googlebot to understand that.  And I know some of you sitting in this room are e-commerce people and you’re saying… Or you’re even worse—.net or asp people—and you’re saying, “Oh, we’ve just spent a huge load of money and these parameters are all over the place.”

Understand from this point—from SEO keyword also—if it’s good content on the “I love Vermont” page, Google understands that.  You want to put your keyword in there.  Our keyword here is “Vermont.”  How do you get “Vermont” here?  Vermont is all the way at the end.  You have to go back in to Webmaster Tools and say, “Yes, I have parameters.  I’m sorry.  Here is a question mark.  This is going to lead to a page.  This is going to be an end.  This is going to be…”  You know, by the time that you’re done explaining that to Googlebot, whether you do it correctly or not, it’s complicated for them.  And of course, watch your page speed.

Quality—make pages for users, not search engines.  You want… You don’t want to automatically generate content.  Never spin articles—we talked about that.  Link schemes, cloaking, hidden text, white text on white background—all that stuff, right?  A little bit of a repetitive thing but this is specifically from the Webmaster guidelines.  If you go and you read this, this is what they’re talking about.  And if you allow comments, please monitor because even on the best of days, if I can find a website that allows comments and links, I’m going to spam the hell out of them.  There is nothing I can do.

Here is a little bit of my personal advice.  A little bit of knowledge can be dangerous and I say this to my clients all the time because they all come back to me and say, “Oh, I had this other SEO tell me…”  Okay, but did you understand what he was telling you to do?  “Well… no.”  Okay, so you did it half right and now your site is not ranking.  And I understand you’re all… Some of you are small business owners and you are the cook and chef and waiter and maître de but gosh, this is technical and… That’s the next line.  The next line is gosh—if someone says it’s easy, don’t let them sit down for a meeting.  This stuff is complicated, right?  If you get spam email saying, “Hey, we looked at your site,” runaway.  I’m not spamming anybody here.  You don’t have to bother with that.  Guarantee number one rankings —everybody wants to guarantee…I’d love to guarantee number one ratings.  Here’s the problem.  What I want as the keyword to rank might not be what Google wants the keyword to rank—so completely different things.

Won’t discuss the technical side – I mean even the novice in this room—if you have a question… First of all, I love emails and I hate phone calls.  So you have an email and you have tons of questions and it gives me a day to get through it and write that whole report on why we shouldn’t put white on white?

Yeah, but if somebody says, “No no, don’t worry about it.”  You know, you love when you go to a car shop and you’re buying a car and they’re like, “Oh, no don’t worry.  This is great.  Rated number one.  Everybody loves this car, runaway.”  And if they don’t differentiate between organic and PPC.  This is a critical thing because when they are talking to you and they’re saying, “We’re going to rank you for number one” and you don’t understand that the first three links are paid.  Yeah, they could be charging you money and they could be… If they’ve got you on the phone and you start screaming, “It’s not ranking for olive oil!” and they go, “Oh, check it now.”  So you want to make sure at the end of the day, if you have a PPC campaign and you’re throwing money into specific keywords, you also need to back that up with an organic campaign, right?  Because otherwise, you’re just going to be throwing money after money after money and at some point… And there is data that shows this.  If you have both a PPC campaign and you’re on the first page of organic, people are more likely to click you and they’re more likely to click you in the organic.

And that is it.  Thank you very much.  Listen—feel free… I am always available via email.  Any questions—and I’m sure we are going to get some questions now—but if you go back to the office and say, “I heard this, this and this,” email me back.  So let me check Twitter.  Let’s see if anybody had any questions and then I’ll take questions from the audience.  I don’t see any questions.  Did anyone have any questions?  Yes, I’ll take that.

Question:         How much does PPC affect organic, so Google AdWords affect your ranking or feel like give them something to get something?

Jonathan:         No, no, no.  No, no, no.  I mean if that was the case, then everybody would be pouring money into PPC.  People are pouring money into PPC now, right?  Oh, I’ve sat in meetings where I’ve seen what they’re putting into PPC and it’s just remarkable.  Yeah, if you’re a small business and you’re going to get a phone call from Google, wouldn’t everybody like to get a phone call from Google?  Isn’t that awesome?  And you’re like, “Oh, you’re going to help me with PPC.  Yes.  Oh, I should be ranking for these keywords.  Yes.”  Of course you should—plus these keywords—plus these other keywords.  Well, after you spent $3,000-5,000 a month and you’ve had zero conversions… Again, it’s what you want to do.  What do you want to accomplish?  And at the end of the day, anybody talking to you from Google—and yes, this is going to be on my website so I’ll admit to it—they are a business.  They want to make money.  And if they’ve got you on the phone, they want to make sure that you’re spending even more money than you had been.  So there is no legitimate causation or correlation to having a PPC campaign and getting higher rankings in organic.  It is two totally, completely different things.  Yes.

Question:         Hi.  I have… Our company’s website right now—we’re in the process of revising it, doing one… But right now, organically our search business that I work for, like one, two, three top—like weight conditioning.

Jonathan:         Great.

Question:         Should I be worried when we do the redesign?  How does that work?

Jonathan:         Hopefully you are doing the 301 redirects to any of your…

Question:         I’d like to hear the question.

Jonathan:         Yes.  The question was they are doing a redesign and they are worried that they are going to lose their ranking.  So if you are moving stuff around folder-wise, you’re going to want a 301 redirect that.  So if article on bananas used to be under category “fruits” and is now under category “Africa,” you’ve got to make sure that Google understands that this was the old page and now they need to redirect to the 301 and you want to do that in your .htaccess file.  Yes.

Question:         I have Google Alerts set up for my company and every now and then I’ll get an alert that’s just a page on my site.  So is that a Googlebot has just all of a sudden recognized that page?

Jonathan:         Yeah, there should be a correlation between when you launch something… And you want to go into Webmaster Tools and any time you want to do Fetch for Google—I forgot to put that in the slides—that’s really critical.  Fetch for Googlebot, for any new pages, you want to immediately go in there and put that page on Fetch for Googlebot within the Webmaster Tools and hit “submit” and make sure that it gets indexed.  It’s going to get indexed pretty darned quickly if you are a valuable site and you haven’t been blacklisted.  Did that answer your question?

Question:         Yeah, that’s great.  And even like a new blog post?

Jonathan:         Oh yeah—every site—anything.  Don’t duplicate, right?  So if you make a change to the About Us page, you don’t resubmit that.  Yeah.  I apologize for the people in the back.  All the people in the front are getting priority.  Next question will come from the back.

Question:         Can you talk about how social media links relate to SEO and do links on Twitter and Facebook—are those considered backlinks?

Jonathan:         They are not.

Question:         Can you repeat the question?

Jonathan:         Yes.  Sorry.  The question was are Twitter and Facebook links backlinks?  And the answer is they are not.  But that wasn’t… Was that your full question?

Question:         Just how does social media relate and influence a SEO or does it?

Jonathan:         It adds traffic, right?  And there are some that believe—and I kind of am on the fence with this—that Google is watching Twitter and will automatically index any new pages that show up in Twitter.  I believe that Google Fetch… Fetch for Googlebot is a much better way because you are protecting them and you’re saying instead of it going out into the Twitterverse, you’re saying… That’s why you need to do it immediately after you launch the page because you don’t want anybody scraping it or claiming it for themselves, in addition to obviously all the Google authority… Google+ authority.  But you’re going to their… as opposed… Then you want to send it out for Twitter and Facebook and all that and get social media, get more people following you and get more traffic.  That’s my personal view but I’m not a social… I’m not a social media person.  Can I take one more question?

Question:         Yes.

Jonathan:         One more question from the back.  No, that would be you.

Question:         I work with a lot of clients for service providers so when I’m trying to help them with their SEO it really comes down to the local SEO is their like account in Sacramento and I find it really confusing to know how to advise some of these local SEOs so I didn’t know if you could just sort of give an overview?

Jonathan:         Right.  So hopefully you’re doing geo-local coding, right?  So you want to do longitude and latitude.  So go find your longitude and latitude for that place—that wherever they are—and just in the footer… Well, read up on that because there is some debate as to whether you should put it on every single page.  But you need to have something that says “local.”  And when you’re writing articles, make sure that you mention where the article is from.  Look at it like a press release.  Okay, thanks everybody.  Absolutely take my email and if you have any other questions, please let me know.  Thanks.

SEO Efforts That Truly Matter – 3rd Annual Vermont Web Marketing Summit is a post from: Halyard Consulting

3rd Annual Vermont Web Marketing Summit is a post from: Halyard Consulting