Google has the brand and they are not going to be loosing searches to FaceBook, and FaceBook is not a search engine. At most Google just needs to angle for the searches coming out of facebook but those won’t be massive.

He also makes KEY points about niche marketing and understanding that all marketing is going ROI/Internet in the future unless you are huge enough to do branding. In the next five to ten years old dominate small to mid size businesses are going to be competing with smart passionate markers who know where to find better ROI. On the internet you can find niches that have millions of people, its a whole new world!

I moved to Denver Colorado and I will be based out of here for the foreseeable future! So far I love the city and the surrounding area, I already had some friends here and I’m looking forward to going to some of the local SEM/SEO meetups. I moved to Denver to eventually open a local office for the web hosting company we bought in October called Site5. A lot of the future SEO articles I write will be focused on Site5 and the work we are doing to rank ourselves for web hosting related phrases. Should be an exciting and challenging year! I know this is a bit far from the United Kingdom but a lot of our articles will also focus on the community I’ve been part of there. Plus a lot of our business is focused on that area of the world so don’t fear that we are now in Denver

I’m a pretty big fan of LinkedIn and use it often. If you haven’t heard of LinkedIn it is a social network for business and I highly recommend you join. You can use it to find answers to business questions, jobs, employees, and make connections that can help you with a lot of search engine marketing projects. And if you want to add me my profile is here. Let me know if you have any questions.

So here is my idea! Build a backend that allows advertisers to interact with video creators as well as buy sponsorships of videos tagged with certain keywords or which have certain keywords in the video. So for a broad sponsorship advertising campaign an advertiser would login, choose the category/tag they wanted such as “Tech/iPhone” or input a trigger keyword such as “iphone”. Then the advertiser could choose how they wanted the ad to show, here are some possible choices:

1 to 3 second display at the beginning of the video of a static ad image.

Ad shown as a peel ad in the right corner.

1 to 3 second display of a static image shown at end of video.

1 to 3 text ads shown at end or beginning of video for 1 to 3 seconds.

Or sick text ads above and below the post recommended videos

So that would allow someone who is offering an iPhone unlocking service to advertise on any video that has “iPhone” in its content or is categorized as such. Pricing should work as paying per click.

Now in addition to this broad keyword triggered setup you also have a place where advertisers can buy video sponsorships from video authors before they go live. So a video author might upload their video they created, choose a category, describe the content and set a time for how long before it goes live. Then an advertiser would login and view pending videos to see what is available. Then for a flat rate set by the author of the video they could buy sponsorship of the video. Plus if you have a history of the person making the videos an advertiser can see how well their past videos have done and how many times something has gone viral. So in addition to all those options you also set a big payout if the video goes viral, so if the video is shown more than X times the video’s creator gets a bonus from the advertiser. Don’t you think that would work? Here is a hypothetical real world example:

Sam is a dude in a basement. He makes a video of his cat playing with his converse shoes in his basement. The cat is cute. Sam uploads the video and decides what the hell, I’ll leave it for a few days in the pending queue and see if someone wants to sponsor it $50 bucks and pay a bonus of $5,000 if its viewed more than 100,000 times on YouTube. Matt at Zappos checks his email and has gotten an alert that a video tagged with “shoes” is pending at YouTube. He logs in and views the video, the cat is cute, he decides for $50 bucks they will sponsor the video and that if it goes viral its worth paying a bonus of $5,000. Sam gets notification and now has $50 bucks to buy stuff for his basement. The video goes live, the cat is cute, it is viewed 400,000 times. Same gets a $5,000 dollar bonus and Zappos gets excellent branding from their sponsorship with no risk.

This should also work for professional video creators as they can get paid more upfront and on the bonuses as well if they have a history of creating content that goes viral.

And for longer content, just copy Hulu and start a huge database of TV and movies that go back to the beginning of time. Google just needs to buy ABC or something and take all their long tail video content and put it online with advertising on it. For content that is twenty minutes to a few hours commercials are not a problem for most of us.

My favourite part of the conference was the site review and discussion section. If you want to make a 100% advanced-advanced SEO conference I think just having that group of guys there for three two hour sessions on broad subjects would be amazing. Just being able to ask questions, argue, and make your case is what sparks creativity IMO. All the presenters were great and my favourites were by Nick Gerner and Danny Sullivan because they were on broad subjects about how search engineers think and where they are headed. Jane, Rand, Will, Rebecca, Sarah, and everyone were just amazing!

I can’t comment on the network part of the training apart from meeting a few great guys during the presentations. I ripped the cartilage in my chest the week before and was in a lot of pain so I just went home after the conference to sleep and recover (got to visit a local Seattle hospital to make sure I was ok). I’m sure, as with most conferences, drinking after the conference is the really valuable part and from comments from others this part was were the value was.

Two days of expert-level content on search marketing & website optimization. This seminar is aimed specifically at experienced people who want to learn cutting-edge, techniques and tactics to push their knowledge and skill set to the next level.

My favourite thing about search engine optimisation and marketing is that it is constantly changing and you have to read and test constantly to stay on the cutting edge. I keep watch over a thousand SEO blogs, forums, and related marketing sites in order to catch any new techniques or ideas. I’ve stayed away from conferences because I’m not sure they are going to have any new information unless you are buying drinks for everyone at the bar afterwards. I’ll be sure to let you know what I think of this training conference SEOmoz is setting up. If you want some more info on it and who is speaking go here.