The next few months I will be speaking at events in Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Hawaii. Beyond these events, you can always find me at the monthly Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association events.

The next DFWSEM event is on November 16th.  We will meet to discuss ‘The State of Search Marketing’ featuring Duane Forrester of Bing.com.  We will also be co-hosting the 2011 Jingle Mingle holiday party on December 1st at the Dallas Contemporary and all proceeds will be donated to the Dream fund.

You can find me at these events in the next few months:

• Dallas Social Media Breakfast - October 27, 2011
  • Blogging for Success
• RICA-RTG Fall Forum in Phoenix - November 2, 2011
  • Increasing Revenue from Your Website
• Pubcon Las Vegas - November 8-10
  • Smart Organic Keyword Selection and Research
  • Interactive Site Reviews: Focus – Social Media
  • Monetizing Twitter & Other Social Media Channels
• Pubcon Hawaii - February 13-15
  • Link Building & Link Baiting for Tourism

If you have an upcoming event that you need a speaker for, please contact me here.

My Upcoming Speaking Engagements

So I may have waited until the last minute on this one, but I feel that if I didn’t nominate Dallas for the MozCation, I would be doing our city a disservice. As the current president of the DFW SEM, I know that our members would love to hang out with the Mozzers.  I’m also pretty sure that the Mozzers will enjoy the warm weather and sunshine that we have in June. So on behalf of the DFW SEM, I present the reasons why it is a must for a MozCation in Dallas.

Dallas Has The DFW SEM

• We have hundreds of members and attendees to our monthly meetings who are very passionate about online marketing.  See the video below for a sneak peek into our organization.  We were founded in 2003 making us one of the oldest SEM groups in the country! Check us out on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• We love SEOmoz and SEOmoz loves us
  • Gillian, aka SEOmom, spoke at our September 15th, 2010 meeting, but we want more Moz action!
• We know how to have great parties and events.
  • Pubcon came to Dallas in 2010 and we hosted the biggest party in town that was enjoyed by all who attended.
  • We have also sponsored many other events and work closely with other local organizations such as the Social Media Club, IMA, AMA, IABC, AIGA, AAF, and many others.  Most recently we all partnered to raise over $10,000 for victims of Japan’s recent crisis.
• We feature the best and the brightest at our meetings.  Recent speakers include:
  • Brian Clark
  • Brett Tabke
  • Brian Massey
  • Chris Silver Smith
  • Brian Combs
  • David Mihm
  • Gillian Muessig
  • Rob Garner
  • Christine Churchill
  • Mark Robertson
  • Representatives from Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube and Many More!

Other Reasons for Dallas

Besides the community of SEOs that we have, Dallas offers much more.

If you haven’t heard, we have a great basketball team led by the world’s greatest basketball player.  Not to mention, we have the biggest and best football stadium in the world.  We also have great hockey, baseball, soccer and horse racing.  If you don’t like the pro sports, we have many minor league teams too!

Roger addressing the crowds at the Dallas MozCation

Everything really is bigger in Texas. Especially the SEOmoz MozCation!

Our Arts District has undergone an amazing transformation and the dining, shopping and entertainment are unlimited.  I’ll let you dig in deeper here.

Texas is very business friendly.  In fact, there are more corporations based in Texas than any other state.  There are 20+ Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Dallas alone (yes, the now infamous JCPenney included).  The Financial Times even did a piece recently about how awesome Dallas is.

While we used to be behind the rest of the US in public transportation, we now have light rail serving the majority of the city and are also connected to Ft. Worth via rail.

Don’t just take my word for it, here are a few reasons that others love Dallas.

Why SEOmoz Should Come to Dallas for a MozCation

SEMpdx, a Portland organization aimed at educating people about search engine marketing techniques, held their 6^th annual Searchfest Conference on Feb 23, 2011 at the Governor Hotel.  After reviewing the speaker lineup, and seeing tickets for under $200, I decided I had to attend.

There was much talk about a snowpocalypse, but luckily that didn’t affect Portland which only got a couple of inches of snow, only the people driving from out of town.

I always try to fly on Southwest and this trip was no different.  I flew from Dallas to Kansas City and onto Portland.  The current issue of Spirit magazinefeatures articles about Dallas, and being from Dallas, I thought I wouldn’t see anthing new, but I did discover a new nature hiking trail that I plan on checking out soon.

I always knew Texas is business friendly but wasn’t aware that ‘more corporations are based in Texas than any other state.  There are 20+ Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Dallas (yes, the now infamous JCPenney included).

After arriving in Portland, I hopped on the train to downtown which was super cheap at $2.35 for the ride.  I was pretty pleased with Portland’s public transit and didn’t have to rent a car which is always nice.

I was unable to get a room at the conference hotel, The Governor Hotel, so I got a room at the nearby Paramount hotel, which was very nice.  I definitely enjoyed the Jacuzzi tub each night of my stay. I had a corner executive suite and had some nice views of downtown Portland.

The next morning I woke up early and headed over to SearchFest.

After the Keynote by Chris Sherman of Search Engine Land, I attended the Competitive Intelligence session presented by Todd Malicoat and John Andrews.

The next sesssion I attended (along with 90%) of the other attendees was the Advanced Linkbuilding session featuring the SEO celebrity himself, Rand Fishkin, and Adam Audette of Audette Media.  Rand was very upbeat and many thought his demeanor was more excited than normal.

What would a search conference be without a quote from Matt Cutts?!

Next up was lunch, which was surprisingly good considering the food I’ve had at other conferences isn’t always up to par.  Great job Jake’s Catering!

The next session I attended was the Conversion Optimization session presented by Susan Delz of Ion Interactive and Lulu Gephart of REI.  If you haven’t checked out LiveBall from Ion Interactive, I highly suggest checking out this great landing page optimization tool that I was introduced to recently. (link to LiveBall)

After this session, for the final breakouts, I was one of 30 others who listened to Todd Friesen and Ian Lurie talk about Building Your Search Agency.  This was a great session that featured lots of humor, obscene language, David Hasselhoff naked and lots of tips for running a search agency.  I have to say that this one was my favorite of the day.

The day concluded with a keynote by Chris Boggs, President of SEMPO and currently running SEO for Rosetta (the #1 agency to watch according to AdAge).

After the keynote, everyone hung around for a few hours for the Happy Hour sponsored by ethology.  There were lots of great people to talk with and I met a lots of great people.  You can see the rest of my Searchfest 2011 pictures at Flickr.

The next day, I headed out to the airport.  There wasn’t any snow on the ground in downtown, but there was on the outskirts of town.

Overall, SearchFest was a great conference and I’m hoping to attend next year.  Thanks to SEMpdx, David Mihm and all of the others who made this a great event.

SearchFest 2011 – My Trip in Pictures

Here is the SEO presentation that I gave in Houston at the Interactive Strategies Conference on September 16, 2010. Please leave a comment below if you have any questions or need clarification. To any attendees, thank you for listening!

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg3brvdt_122c4hvgbfh

IS Conference Keyword Research & Strategies Presentation

I recently have been going through my emails and clicking like crazy on the ‘unsubscribe’ links in a lot of the messages I have been getting recently.  In doing so, I have seen quite a few different unsubscribe messages.  The majority of these unsubscribe messages are pretty short and to the point and have a check box for ‘unsubscribe’ and not much else.

However, I recently came across a great idea by Gordon’s Jewelers that I wanted to share because I think it is something that all retailers should emulate.  Instead of just letting me choose to either (a) receive emails or (b) not receive emails, they give a few other options to change the frequency of the emails instead of just unsubscribing.  So instead of unsubscribing, I simply changed my preference to receive less emails and Gordon’s didn’t lose an email subscriber.

The frequency of the emails is the main reason I have been going through and unsubscribing from so many offers.  It seems like most retailers are sending me an email at least weekly if not more.  If given the option by these companies, I would in many cases simply lessen the frequency that I get their email communications.

Here is Gordon’s Jewlers email unsubscribe page:

In a study in March of 2010, only 37% of the 100 major online retailers surveyed have some type of option to change email preferences, while the others simply use an unsubscribe option.  This seems like a big loss for the other 63% if you ask me!

What options are you giving to YOUR email subscribers?

Reduce Email Opt-Outs With Your Email Unsubscribe Message

OpenCamp kicked off today and I was one of the lucky attendees.  I was not able to attend the Friday festivities with the US Army Golden Knights, but from everything I heard, it was definitely a successful event.  There are photos and coverage of Friday here and here.

Courtesy One Cool Monkey

I arrived at OpenCamp around 8am to sign in and get ready to start the conference.  I didn’t register until the day before, so I didn’t have a fancy printed badge like everyone else, but Mark Ramsey was kind enough to help fill in my details.

After checking in, I went into the main room to sit around and talk with other attendees.  The first session was scheduled to begin at 8:30 but by 9:00, they announced there were technology difficulties, so they wouldn’t be starting until 9:30.  Luckily, I went out to the sponsor tables and Microsoft had a few boxes of Dunkin Donuts to fill my belly while I waited for the conference to begin.

At 9:30, the show was started by John P as promised.  From then on things seemed to move at twice the speed.

Giovanni Gallucci was next and presented his ‘Blackhat SEO’ session that had quite a bit of info that most attendees agreed were worth the price of admission alone. Lee Odden posted details of that session here.  Most of the main sessions were also streamed live at CaliLive.tv, and you can watch the first four sessions here.

After Gio, Cali Lewis talked about Success with Multimedia and shared her experiences and lessons learned managing her show at GeekBeat.tv.  The most tweeted tidbit from her session was that for her, 10am-2pm is the best time to get your message out via social media.

Cali was followed by Trey Ratcliff, who is known for his great HDR Photography explained how to share your photography to get noticed, as well as how to use other people’s photography to make your own site stand out from the crowd.  Trey also had quite a few people in line to get one of his ebooks on photography.  One of the things I really liked was when he reminded people to make sure to translate your popular content so that it can be shared worldwide.  An example is how he had his users help translate his HDR tutorial which led to many more links and viewership.

The morning sessions were then closed out by Scott Kublin who discussed monetization strategies.  His advice is to use your analytics software to find your most popular posts and then re-optimize them.  You can even use tags to help Google Adsense better target your ads to your content.  For more help on this, see my tweet on how to add the code he mentioned.

I then headed to lunch which consisted of a ‘create your own hamburger’ buffet which didn’t taste very good, but at least it looked good

After lunch I headed to the WordPress track and listened to Stephanie Leary discuss the Hidden Gems of WordPress.  Her in depth presentation can be downloaded here.  She had a lot of info that she tried to fit into 30 minutes but could have filled an hour with all of the info.

Jerod Morris was next and talked about how he took his $10 investment in MidwestSportsFans.com and turned it into a highly trafficked site that is a regular on the first page of Digg and other popular sites.  Jerod also mentioned a great WordPress plugin called WP-Malware that will monitor your WordPress installation for malware attacks which have been very common lately (I had to deal with one last month so I’m definitely going to add this plugin).

At 3pm, I decided to head over to the ‘Charging Room’ to fill up my batteries and check email.  I’m glad to see a whole room dedicated to charging your batteries, because I have been to more than one conference where people where in line waiting to use the limited outlets available.

After the break, I headed over to the Multimedia track to hear Eric Swayne talk about how you should be measuring your campaigns and what KPIs you need to focus on.  His presentation was so popular that people were standing outside the door just to get a glimpse into the packed room.

After Eric’s presentation, I headed over to hear more about Woopra and then Buddypress.  Both presentations were great.  I finished out my day by listening to Mike Orren talk about how Pegasus News became the popular site that it is today.  The site was originally going to be an unplanned Dallas music news site with hundreds of band profiles but transformed into a news outlet that gets 450k uniques a month now.

I’m now headed off to the party tonight and will follow up later with more OpenCamp coverage.

I have also uploaded all of my pictures from OpenCamp to Flickr which can be seen in the slideshow below.

More OpenCamp Coverage:

http://dfwreporting.com/2010/08/29/opencamp/ (video)

#ocdfw on Twitter

CaliLive.tv (Video Streams of Common Sessions)

OpenCamp Dallas – Photos and Session Coverage

The PPC Blog just published a great infographic showing how Google works.  I have been talking to a lot of small business owners lately about helping get traffic from Google and many don’t seem to understand the process. This image shows how both the organic and paid listings are ranked, although you must remember that the two do not influence how the other operates.

So if you think it is an easy task to rank well in Google, please take the time to understand this whole image and you will see why it is important to work with a professional who understands Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click advertising when trying to market your site online.

Infographic by PPC Blog

How Does Google Crawl, Index and Rank Websites?

I am in independent online marketing consultant based in Dallas, TX.   I create campaigns that encompass all aspects of internet marketing including PPC marketing, organic marketing, social media marketing and email marketing. I have worked with companies in many industries (mortgage, pharmaceuticals, retail, service, technology, software, and many others).

I also currently serve as President of the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association and speak frequently at events including DFWSEM,  Pubcon and others.  I am available for public speaking engagements, so please contact me if you are looking for a speaker to educate your group about online marketing.

I previously worked as the Director of Internet Marketing at different interactive agencies in the DFW metroplex and have been doing marketing since before Google was around. Most recently I was the Lead for SEO and PPC at Vizion Interactive.  In these roles, I created and implemented organic marketing campaigns, paid search campaigns, email marketing campaigns and consulted on web site design and usability in a very diverse group of industries.

I have a bachelors degree in Entrepreneurship from the University of North Texas.

In my spare time, I manage a few sites of my own that provide affiliate and advertising revenue.

My non-work hobbies include playing soccer, running half marathons, and getting outdoors as much as possible to fish, camp, or just enjoy the view.  I also enjoy being an uncle, brother, son and soon to be husband to a family that I greatly cherish.

Enjoy the site and PLEASE share your comments.

Click Here for My Consulting Services

I’d love to connect with you online and you can find me here:
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Who is Mark Barrera?