I’m going to be running this program:
Cleveland Intensive Social Media Workshop

This will be one of the most advance social media workshops you can find anywhere.

If you want to advance your social media programs at your company in systematic ways, this program is for you.

The Online Marketing Institute and Wharton Interactive Media Initiative’s new Intermediate Social Media Workshop Series is coming to Cleveland on September 21st offering world-class academic rigor and case study research from the leading universities and research firms combined with practical training from OMI instructors.

Here is an overview video I did on the event:

If you want to learn more, click here:
Cleveland Intensive Social Media Workshop

Post from: SageRock Digital Marketing

Sage Speaking at: Cleveland Intensive Social Media Workshop

Over at the SageRock Institute I just put up a new class I’m running. It’s a really in-depth key phrase research class.

I actually intended it to be a self-lead course. But then I got the idea that it would be fun to have a “studio audience.”

When the course is completed I’m going to sell it for $99. But if you want to take part in the class (and get the finished product) for $75 check it out.

Click here to learn more about this training session: Key Phrase Research Training

Oh! And I’ve included the first video of the class there as well. Its the introduction video: Why key phrase research matters. That’s totally free and you have to do nothing to get the video other than sit there and enjoy

Post from: SageRock Digital Marketing

Key Phrase Research Training 12 Part Online Class – $75

This Position is Open!

Are you looking for the an amazing career opportunity? Good news, SageRock might just be looking for you!

We are seeking  an individual who is passionate about search engine technology and is interested in working in an entrepreneurial environment. An ideal candidate will be a strategic thinker who can hit the ground running. They will be responsible for planning, optimizing, implementing and analyzing search engine marketing campaigns.

Please send resume and salary requirements to greg@sagerock.com

Company: SageRock
Job Title: Web Marketing Specialist
Description: SageRock is hiring a web marketing associate to work with our SEO and PPC specialists in campaigns for our clients.

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialist will be given the opportunity to lead not only SEO projects for clients but will also be involved in building out internal processes for cutting edge optimization work. While working within the current team and directly with Operations, this position’s primary focus will be the accomplishment of our client’s goals, which range from improving organic ranking to generating sales, as well as everything in-between.

Additional responsibilities include possible Paid Search account setup and maintenance, market and industry research, strategy planning, HTML and CSS code modification, ROI management, analysis, and more.

Job Responsibilities:

Assist SEO specialists and Paid Search administrators with:

• Competition, phrase, market research
• Management of day-to-day client relationships
• Creation and Management of strategic online campaigns for current and new clients
• Operating management tools to maintain ROI goals
• Content Creation
• Link development
• Modifying websites for SEO
• Monitoring, measuring, and reporting metrics to clients
• Developing and managing Social Media promotions

Skills and Experience:

• Self-motivating, quick-learner
• Bachelor’s degree in marketing, communications, e-marketing, or applicable field
• Certification with Google AdWords, Yahoo! Ambassador program, etc.
• Strong organizational and analytical skills, plus ability to manage simultaneous projects and demanding deadlines
• Proficiency with Excel, HTML, and CSS

Excellent benefits package  includes vacation; medical, dental and disability insurance; simple IRA matching.

About SageRock:

SageRock Digital Marketing Agency is a place where performance is rewarded, where you will find opportunities for growth and clear paths for advancement. It is a place where you can be a stakeholder in a privately held business. At Sagerock, leadership is accessible and committed to successful growth. We have offered competitive compensation and an attractive benefits package since 1999.

Come work in a collaborative, enriching environment in an exciting, fast-paced industry.

Please send resume and salary requirements to greg@sagerock.com

photo credit: Zack Klein

Post from: SageRock Digital Marketing

SageRock is Hiring: SEO Specialist

I get a feeling business is starting to get rolling again after a sleepy July. I suspect in a couple weeks the Internet marketing world will be in full swing for Fall.

I realize this has been talked up quite a bit, but I finally got around to watching the Old Spice Commercials and Videos. These have caused a huge following. But best of all for them (and proponents of social media) sales of Old Spice Body Wash have jumped 55% in the past three months and 107% this past month.

But there’s a lot of pretty interesting news items that have come over recently. Check ‘em out below.

The Top 10 Infographics Every Internet Marketer Should Bookmark

Providing Support Through Your Facebook Page

Parature for Facebook is designed to make a company’s Facebook Page double as a full-featured customer support center.

Twitter Blog: Introducing Fast Follow, and other SMS tips

Fast Follow. Anyone in the US can receive Tweets on their phone even if they haven’t signed up for Twitter.

Ouch! Today’s Hard Lesson on Yelp – Phoenix Restaurants and Dining – Chow Bella

What can we all learn from this? Perhaps that it’s beyond a bad idea to accuse an unhappy customer of working for the competition, and then call him/her “ugly,” a “loser,” and a “moron.” Was Amy B. smoking crack for breakfast today?

Google Places Now Allows Replies – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Starting today, if you’re a verified Google Places business owner, you can publicly respond to reviews written by Google Maps users on the Place Page for your business.

Old Spice Reaps Rewards of Viral Campaign

According to a Nielsen report which was noted in Brandweek, sales of Old Spice Body Wash have jumped 55% in the past three months and 107% this past month.

Post from: SageRock Digital Marketing

Old Spice Fun

The picture you see here is the kind of picture I’ve been taking for years.

I love my family immensely and consequently, I love taking pictures of them.

The picture above is of my wife Rocky, our friend Holly and our awesome kid, Indiana.

We were on Lake Erie in upstate New York at Evangola State Park.

Next week I’m flying to New Orleans to meet up with this guy:

This is Zoriah. Zoriah is a photojournalist and war photographer.

If there has been a major event in the world, chances are very good that Zoriah has been there to cover it.

The list of places Zoriah’s photos have been published is massive. But the top few include:
Newsweek • BBC News • The Wall Street Journal • CNN • Fortune Magazine • NPR

I have the very unique opportunity to participate in one of his photojournalism workshops. This is a one-on-one workshop where Zoriah and I will be going through the Louisiana area shooting the life of people effected by the recent oil spill.

This was a birthday present from Rocky. It’s, without a doubt, the most awe-inspiring gifts I’ve ever received. I’m incredibly excited. But I’m also extremely humbled by participating in this workshop with Zoriah and also shooting this incredible catastrophe. Straight up, I’m a little nervous about the whole event. I really can’t imagine what it’s going to be like.

But I wanted to tell you what I am up to.

If you are interested in keeping track of my week-long journey, I encourage you to be sure you are following me on Twitter and/or Facebook.

My Twitter account is:
http://twitter.com/sagerock

This is my Facebook account:
http://www.facebook.com/sagerock

I’ll be posting photos there and possibly some video.

My life pursuit is to deeply experience as much as I possibly can while I’m on this earth. This opportunity fits perfectly in my life values.

See you on the other side.

Post from: SageRock Digital Marketing

Sage To Photograph The Gulf Coast Oil Spill

I feel like the stories this week are all about on the same level of interest… so so.

The ones in particular that jumped out at me had to do with paid search. It’s expected to grow 10.8% and account for $29.8 billion.

Honestly, I don’t know why it has taken this long to get to this point. But I see no end in sight.

Display media should really be the last thing that you do. If you aren’t doing paid search but are doing display… I feel you have things backwards.

Here are all the stories that jumped out at me:

US Online Ad Spending to Grow 10.8% in 2010

One contributor to the altered 2010 estimate comes from the quicker-than-expected uptick in the US economy. This shift has a twofold effect: more shopping by consumers, most readily seen in search ad expenditures, and a greater willingness among companies of all sizes to spend a bit more for marketing in general.

YouTube Brings Easy Video Editing to the Masses

YouTube has just announced its brand-spanking new online video editor–allowing anyone to make simple edits and improvements to their uploaded videos

Bing to May Power Yahoo Results Starting in August

According to a joint presentation, Yahoo has already started testing Bing’s search algorithm and the switch over will take place as early as August:

Paid Search Accounts for Almost Half of Online Advertising

Paid Search has quickly become the most important component of online advertising, and in 2010 this segment will account for $29.8 billion, up by 16.5% over 2009 totals on a constant currency basis.

Bad Links: Words From Google

Generally, bad links pointing to your web site won’t hurt you. A topic we discussed and debated here over and over again.

Image from here: SurchSquad Blog – PPC Management and SEO Services for Small Business

Post from: SageRock Digital Marketing

Paid Search is $29.8 billion

Not everything Google does succeeds. In fact, some of the things Google does are downright ridiculous.

Also, I would say Google is not good at marketing. That actually could become a problem someday… if anyone ever comes up with a competitive tool that is anywhere near in the league with Google’s main applications.

But I will say this… Google is obsessed with moving forward.

Case in point is “Google Now Fully Caffeinated“.

Google has basically revamped their entire indexing engine to be faster and include more of the real-time web.

The thing about this move is… with 60+% market share, this really was totally unnecessary. They already had the more effective indexing engine.

Google is always looking out the front window.

This fact is highlighted against the news that “Bing’s Cashback Program Shuttered.”

Who knows why Bing is canceling this cashback program. But it looks like they can’t even buy search traffic.

It makes Bing look like they are staring out the back window and regretting where they came from.

Here are the rest of the news stories that jumped out at me:

Google Local Tags for Ads Now Available Nationally

For a flat monthly fee of $25, businesses can enhance their listings that appear on Google.com and Google Maps with a yellow tag that emphasizes specific information such as a coupon, video, website, menu, reservations, photos, or a custom message. Tags do not affect the ranking of the listings, and we clearly indicate which parts of the search result are sponsored.

What’s the ROI of Twitter? Acquisition Might Finally Answer That Question

Trendly is now closed to new customers, but according to its site, the service offered some pretty cool analysis. Stuff you can actual use!

Google Now Fully Caffeinated

The Official Google blog says

Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Bing’s Cashback Program Shuttered

As part of this “test-and-learn” mentality, we will be retiring the Bing cashback feature, which means that the last day you can earn cashback will be July 30, 2010.

Will Twitter’s New URL Shortener Hurt SEOs?

Twitter announced they will be wrapping all links through their own URL shortener. So if you post a URL, it will automatically be shortened and passed through http://t.co/ as a URL.

Post from: SageRock Digital Marketing

Google Is Obsessed

I usually get really psyched about the headlines that come over in the search marketing world.

But this week… not too thrilling.

I will say, please read Matt Cutts article “Make a web page for each store location“. So many sites bury their store locator behind forms that search engine spiders just can’t get past. It only causes you tons of missed potential.

Here are the rest of the articles:

comScore Releases April 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings – comScore, Inc

U.S. Internet users watched 30.3 billion videos in April, with Google Sites ranking as the top video property with 13.1 billion videos, representing 43.2 percent of all videos viewed online.

SEO Advice: Make a web page for each store location

If you want your store pages to be found, it’s best to have a unique, easily crawlable url for each store. Ideally, you would also create an HTML sitemap that points to the web pages for your stores (and each web page should have a unique url).

DoubleClick Invests In Real-Time Online Ads Bidding With Invite Media Buy @SEWatch

“Real time bidding technology… enables advertisers and agencies to tailor their bids on an impression-by-impression basis, based on their own data, when bidding on websites that choose to make their ad space available through an advertising exchange,”

U.S. April Mobile Searches Get 90% Boost Via Apps, 50% Via Browsers; Social Networking Still Biggest @SEWatch
SEO Tool Review: Wordtracker Back Majestic To Create Link Building Magic @SEWatch

I would say that the WordTracker/Majestic SEO powered link analyzer was a better user experience than Yahoo Search Explorer.



Post from: SageRock Digital Marketing

Not Very Exciting SEM News

We all should keep an eye on Flash, and how we use it in our Web sites. Apple does not support Flash. Consequently, because iPad’s are becoming so widely used, this is going to cause some tough decisions to be made.

This is a strange turn of events for me. I typically am the person who fights against the use of Flash in Web sites. But now I find myself on the other side of the discussion.

Flash has become a solid tool for presenting multimedia content. And right now, I don’t believe there is a better technology that can take its place.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Will you take the Flash movie off of your site?

Here are all the news stories from the past week that I found interesting:

Marketers Respond to the Apple v. Flash Battle

Programmers and Web designers say clients increasingly are asking that their websites or applications be compatible with Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Those sites can’t be built with Adobe’s Flash technology, which is used widely for online video and animation but which Apple has banned from its devices.

Yahoo Buys Associated Content and $5 Per Article ‘Journalists’ Celebrate

The deal, which will be announced later today, is part of an effort to shore up Yahoo’s content offerings and underscores the increased use of low-cost, crowd-sourced content, a strategy that AOL is pursuing through its SEED content factory, as well as by Demand Media, which reportedly hired Goldman Sachs to explore an IPO this summer.

Foursquare Check Ins Growing Rapidly

Responding to criticism for Foursquare’s recent downtime, the company said it’s now handling an average 600,000 “check-ins” per day.

That’s basically double the less than 400,000 check-ins per day in late March — just two months ago — and up about 5X from when it hit 1 million check-ins a WEEK in February.

Google Handles Privacy Blunder Well

Google added that, Google has made a decision to completely stop using the WiFi data collection technology with Street View cars in the future. Those wifi collecting cars will be taken out of the rotation and not be used due to the privacy concerns expressed globally. In addition to these steps, Google promised to ask a third party to audit the software at issue and conduct internal reviewing procedures to ensure that the controls are in place to prevent these issues in the future.

Is Social Conversation The Future Of Polls And Surveys ? [Study] – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

In a study called From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series, researchers found that online social conversation analysis could also “capture important large-scale trends.”

U.S. Q1 Online Ad Revenues Hit Record $5.9bn As Market Looks Up – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Online advertising revenues hit a record $5.9 billion in the U.S. in the first quarter, reflecting an uptick in the country’s economy as well as the increasing role of online advertising in marketers’ campaigns, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said in a report.

How to Cloak Your Affiliate Links the Easy Way

Nowadays, I use a much simpler technique that puts all my affiliate links on one php page, i.e. link.php, which resides in the root directory.

Photo from: Philips Box Flash on Flickr

Post from: SageRock Digital Marketing

I’m Supporting Flash. What’s happening to the world?

I put a lot on the line with this event.

I’ve been a huge fan and participant of The Web Association for years.

Recently, we were talking and they mentioned that they would like to try an event in Akron.

The first idea that came to mind was a social media event featuring the Akron-Canton Airport. They are doing some world-class, cutting edge social media tactics. I really wanted this to be the first event.

Everyone at the Web Association thought it was an awesome idea.

I then talked to Kristie VanAuken, the airport’s  Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing & Communications Officer about the idea. Because of her extreme awesomeness (you’ll see what I mean) she was all about it.

But here’s where it got tricky. The Web Association was concerned about having the event too far south. They were afraid they might not get enough people at the event.

But it seemed like the place to have the event was right at the airport.

I really pushed for them to try it here. They said it was a huge risk because if we didn’t get a good turnout we might not be able to do another Akron / Canton event.

But I knew my Akron and Canton peeps would totally come through.

And sure enough, the event is filling up fast.

But I don’t want the attendance to just be “good.” I want The Web Association to be blown away!

So, let’s show those Clevelander’s what we’ve got. Let’s fill this puppy up!

If you are available:

May 27, 2010
11:30 AM – 1:30 PM

Please come to this most awesome event.

You are going to learn a lot about how social media is done right. You are going to be able to check out the very sweet CAK airport.

And you will be able to show your Akron / Canton amazingness.

PLEASE COME TO THIS EVENT!

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE AND REGISTER.

Post from: SageRock Digital Marketing

Big Time Social Media In Akron / Canton Ohio