Now most people have a fairly negative perspective of what a cook does in the Military. One might picture me peeling potatoes all day and cooking some mush that passed as an excuse for food. However, when I went to cook school in Ft. Lee, Virginia, we were taught the ins and outs of the kitchen, proper cutting techniques (you know, so you don’t lose a finger), and of course, we learned some delicious recipes.

Cooking has taught me a lot about professionalism and attention to detail. So, how do I apply those techniques as a web developer? Let me share. When you cook a nice meal (and I’m not talking about out-of-the-box Mac & Cheese, I mean a full course meal with all the trimmings) you have to prepare and have all your materials in place. Sometimes this requires that you go shopping in the morning for all your ingredients. Whether it’s a new design or marking up a new website layout, you have to do a little research in order to know the full outcome of the product. I like to gather my ingredients by meeting with the client — or in my case at Pop Labs, meeting with the Project Coordinator — about what functionality a website needs to have in place. It’s important to know any variables ahead of time so you’re not wasting time making it up as you go.

So, you have your ingredients or research done…now what? Wash your hands! No one wants germs in their food. Now, put on your apron and start with a clean work area, or a framework, and start slicing and dicing. Most follow recipes to the letter, and this is good practice for novice chefs; however, once you’ve become more accustomed to your work area, it’s a good idea to improvise and experiment. We have a particular client that has officially become my “sandbox” of new techniques. I get to play in my sandbox and build castles and then smash them if they don’t work (it’s quite fun). Same thing with cooking. You can stick to your favorite recipe, but then it might become dull and you’ll want to spice it up. The end result may turn out awesome, or it might taste like dog food. In that case, just go back to what works and come back to that experiment and tweak it to taste. Half the fun in cooking is improvising, which can be true for marketing, design, whatever your forte.

Once you’ve fine tuned your skills, you can start creating your own recipes or applications for your dinner guests/clients. It’s good to have a foundation to build upon, but without those foundations, you’re really just throwing everything in a pot and calling it gourmet meal. Sometimes out-of-the-box Mac & Cheese is what you have to provide, depending on budgets and other factors out of your control, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be an interesting new recipe. Do what I do – add some cut up hot dogs! Yum.

The IS conference is Houston’s largest interactive marketing conference presented by our good friends at the Houston Interactive Marketing Association (HiMA). Expand Beyond, this years theme, is a full-day conference on September 9, 2009 at the Angelika Theater in Downtown Houston.

Early Bird Registration is now open! If you would like to attend this year and save 15% off registration enter one of the following promotional codes: melissagarcia, salb, jillfortin or lorilogue. We hope to see you there! Follow @ISconference on twitter for more promotional codes and updates leading to the conference!

Also follow Pop Labs on Twitter (@gopoplabs) for the latest news and updates!

In true social media fashion if you have any feedback, you can comment here,  Join me on facebook or LinkedIn and of course follow me(Kelsey), Steve and Katie on Twitter.

Biz Kid$ is a show dedicated to the entrepreneurial kid. They feature successful kids and teenagers who are business owners or done something worthwhile that was lucrative. They also teach proper methods of starting and running a business. Some of things they have done are remarkable. This is more than your front yard lemonade stand. Working on their next season of episodes, they decided to include the internet as a medium of making money and starting a business. How can you present proper website building, search engine marketing and social media consulting in an entertaining way? Duh…you find the SEO Rapper!

The producer contacted me and shared her vision about what they wanted to accomplish. How could I resist? I love kids, rapping and the internet. They are based in Seattle Washington and she offered to fly me there for a few days if I was willing to compose a Biz Kid$ focused instructional rap about using the internet to start a business. Interesting task. I was glad to do it. I contacted Dre Dubb Entertainment, one of my favorite music production teams (also produced Design Coding) for a track to the rap I was writing. I received the track, completed the rap and went to the studio to record it. A few weeks later I was on a flight to Seattle. I finally met some others from Biz Kid$ who showed me a great time. The video shoot was awesome. It went a little longer than expected but I had a blast doing it. Touring Seattle was great. I had a chance to walk around and take lots of pictures and next time I’ll remember that if you walk down a hill and you parked at the top of the hill, you have to walk back up the hill. The Biz Kid$ episode is supposed to air on PBS sometime in January. Stay tuned…

I am a shop-at-home-a-holic.

My first at-home purchase was made when I was in high school: Debbie Siebers’ “Slim in 6″ training program. I saw the infomercial, picked up the phone and after six to eight weeks of sheer anticipation, there it was – the solution to all my problems. The key to ultimate fitness. The program that would jumpstart my new life as a size two in “no time at all!” Debbie Siebers’ DVD sealed my fate. From that point forward, I was addicted to shopping at home.

Two Joy Mangano products and a tub of Oxi-Clean later, my eyes fell upon Ron Popeil’s Showtime Rotisserie. This thing was a beaut. I likened it to the fireplace at Christmastime- you leave it alone and the next thing you know, you’ve got a present waiting for you. I knew I was destined to have this appliance. It had to have been engineered with me in mind. There was absolutely no question about it.

I had meat on those spits the second I freed my Rotisserie from its plastic wrap straitjacket. I poked my chicken a bit with the handy dandy solid flavor injector, made sure the non-stick drip pan was firmly in place, and carefully slid everything back into the appliance. Then, in a moment of fanfare and coronation, I set my Showtime Rotisserie and smiled with satisfaction as I saw the happy, heated, rotating magic take place before my eyes.

Then… I forgot it, like I thought I was supposed to.

I had expected the roast I placed in my Showtime Rotisserie to emerge juicy, succulent and tender. Instead, the Rotisserie spat out a dry, charred mass of nothing, topped with a whole lot of gross and a side of yuck. I had done everything I was supposed to—I set it up just as I was told, taking extra care in the actual marinating and seasoning process. If it had been fashioned to succeed, why oh why did I end up eating Lean Cuisine that night?!

Like all horrible memories, I quickly pushed that experience to the dusty part of my brain and forgot all about my Showtime Rotisserie (pun totally intended). It wasn’t until I switched careers from amateur, shortcut cook to project coordinator at an online marketing firm that Ron Popeil entered my life once more.

A lot of my clients come to me after running their own pay-per-click campaigns for x amount of years. They had fastidiously built out the keyphrases in their ad groups, down to types of matches and relevant geographic terms. They had conscientiously set their daily ad budgets, remembering to set day parting and turn off their campaigns on the weekend. And, after all was said and done (and might I add — very, very typical of this behavior), they sought the assistance of an online marketing firm, because, as so many argue, “they don’t know why they weren’t getting results!”

The answer is simple. Many search engine marketing specialists can give it, and so can Ron Popeil.

“It’s because you SET IT and FORGET IT.”

As business owners, it’s easy to set up a pay-per-click campaign and subsequently forget it. Many traditional forms of marketing follow this model. You set up a direct mail campaign… then you forget it. You film a television commercial… then you forget it. You’re supposed to forget it, just like you’re supposed to forget about a pot roast in the Showtime Rotisserie. But that’s what sets online marketing apart from traditional forms of marketing… and that’s also why it works better.

Anyone will tell you that the more attention you give any item you cook is proportional to how savory your dish is. It doesn’t matter what new, fangle-dangled appliance you use; it’s still a good rule of thumb to follow. Search engine marketing is the same way. Pay-per-click campaigns are a new notion compared to radio ads, television spots or the Yellow Pages, but just because you’ve heard one or two testimonials about how effective they are doesn’t mean you can “set it and forget it.”

It is absolutely essential to keep an eye on what you’ve got churnin’ and burnin’ if you want to get your desired end result. Watch your pay-per-click campaigns. If you’re losing a lot of juice, make sure you’re basting. If it’s losing flavor, make sure you’re seasoning. If it’s charring the sides, turn down the heat. Do what it takes to make sure you get what you want. At the end of the day, we all want an appetizing pay-off. We can have one if we want one—only when we realize that it takes more than setting it and forgetting it.

IS ‘08: Secrets Exposed will be held on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at the Angelika Film Center of Houston, TX. Attendees of this conference can expect to be enlightened as key players in this industry unveil the secrets to success in digital media.

Big ups to Melissa Garcia on the web design and Sal Baldovinos on the production!

SWSA took place May 16th-18th, and if you ask anyone who participated all three days, you’ll know the fire is still burning. By the first day, everyone had split into three teams: ForceXchange, which is an auction site to allow soldier, patrols, etc. to exchange, buy, and sell their own gear; Rentescapes, a network for owners and renters of vacation property; and finally, idre.am, where I almost exclusively was, a site that lets you share your dreams and opinions with the Internet. By the end of Startup Weekend, idre.am and ForceXchange launched, while Rentescapes pushed back their launch date.

idre.am originally began one morning last month when I forgot a dream I had before waking up to get ready for work. The night before, I had been reading up on dreams that inspired artists such as Yasunori Mitsuda, who attributes the music of the video game Chrono Trigger to his dreams. I wanted to build a site that could post dreams and give a community creative inspiration. By the time the idea made it to Startup Weekend, it had turned into a social site where users could anonymously post dreams and receive feedback on their dreams. Three all-nighters later, at least one dream became reality.

The idre.am team consisted of nine enthusiastic people with noticeably different skill-sets working cooperatively to produce this site. My personal role (other than the idea itself) included front-end development, assisting with backend development, and providing as much sarcasm and quick quips as possible. We started out with simple features: we wanted idre.am to not only allow users to post to our site from our site, we also wanted users to submit their dreams via Twitter (to @idreamed) and Facebook.

If you talk to the idre.am Team, you’ll find out this was all but simple. Building idre.am within one weekend required daily all-nighters, careful planning, good communication, and an effective team who knew how to tackle this project and present it in a way that it looked like an easy site to create. This enthusiasm and effectiveness has already stirred up some great press and an excited user base, which includes Startup Weekend representative Erica O’Grady and SWSA Organizer Jennifer Navarrete. By Monday, we had also set up our corporate structure and began to spread the word about idre.am.

Even though SWSA has ended, the dedication of our team is still prevalent as our main developer, Jess Martin of Raleigh, NC, continues to work diligently to add more features and I, obviously back in Houston, am not only working on idre.am, but also calling all with the enthusiasm and interest in web design and development to make their dreams a reality by participating in the Startup Weekends to come. but also writing entries about it at work and telling all who want to tell their dreams.

I am really looking forward to this event because it’s one of the few times a conference that wasn’t planned by someone in Houston, was held in Houston. I first met Jennifer, the Editor-in-chief for Search Engine guide at Got Social Media in January and I know first hand that she has been working really hard at making this an event that you will want to attend. The sessions all look really interesting.

If you would like to attend the conference there is still seating available so register today. Friends of Pop Labs can get a discount by using the code POPLABS.

Check out the Youtube video for more information on the conference.

Lucky for me, I also took about ten minutes out of my busy weekend to flip through an old dusty book or two (of course, applicable to my client services role at Pop Labs). Don’t we wish our kids were invested so heavily in their future too? Too bad George Lucas didn’t make a movie about those books.

I recall reading about educating your clients on new products and services as well as new uses for existing products. In fact, the book went so far to suggest that anyone in the client services industry that didn’t educate their current happy clients about new products and new benefits for existing products actually does that client a disservice. After all, if the client is happy paying you for Service A and you roll out the brand-new Service B, why wouldn’t you want to offer him service B and contribute just that much more to this client’s happiness and satisfaction?

Lightning strikes and magic happens. It was as if Obi-Wan just handed me my father’s light saber! This whole concept is completely applicable for online marketing as well. The past is the best predictor of the future. If you manage online marketing campaigns or PPC advertising, then you know when your PPC campaign can absorb more clicks. If you have a benchmark for performance and your PPC campaign is a well oiled machine that is consistently turning out ROI, why wouldn’t you offer your client the opportunity to expand their business by asking for a bigger budget?

That’s a rhetorical question young Skywalker…the answer is fear! Is your fear of failure greater than the excitement of success? Fear of sales, fear of the almighty NO, fear of everything this side from death. So below are a few Jedi mind tricks to help get past that fear and moving towards the direction of more profitability, productivity, and success for your clients, Google, and you:

• Love your Clients! – Clients could care less about what you know until they know you care.
• Serve your Clients! – If you’re selling something that the client doesn’t need, then you probably shouldn’t be selling it at all. If they do need it, then you’re not really selling, only consulting through educating and persuading. Remember- people hate being sold, but they love to buy!
• You are Yoda! – Just as every Jedi goes to Yoda, your clients come to you because you have the omniscient, all-knowing Yoda type of knowledge that is responsible for them paying you in the first place.
• Encourage New Ideas! – Keep a questioning nature and always remember that business owners know more about their businesses than you do. So shut up and pay attention…
• Get Hungry! – A closed mouth doesn’t get fed if you want things to happen. You have to initiate the action!

Remember, if you manage online marketing/PPC campaigns for your clients, wouldn’t it be to their benefit if they were willing to give you whatever budget you needed to help grow their online presence? Especially after you have a benchmark for success based on past behavior (e.g. daily budget runs out)? After all, once you establish that you truly care about their business, wouldn’t it be a shame if they decided to spend their advertising budget elsewhere in another form with someone who didn’t care as much as you do? I’d wager to guess that the answers to these questions are “yes,” in which case you have one solution. Get to explaining, educating, and asking for additional budget to support your clients’ business growth.

Everyone has people, customers are people and employees are people. These “human assets” have talents that should be tapped into for social media. You’ve probably done this to some extent by asking your customers for referrals and then posting them on your website or touting your employees’ education/background. While this may have been a good start, we need to go a step further and leverage specific talents for the sake of social media. For instance, Pop Labs employs a search marketing specialist by the name of Charles Lewis (aka The SEO Rapper, M0 Serious, Poetic Prophet, Chuck). Chuck has the ability to rhyme, to flow—if you will, and has turned this ability into a way to get virally marketed content viewed online, resulting in branding himself and Pop Labs as experts in our industry. Chuck has developed very good content on topics such as link building, design coding, and conversion closing, to name a few. The important part to remember is that he’s transferred this content into something that people actually want to pay attention to: rap videos delivered through YouTube. Probably not the best for every target audience, but you have to work with what you’ve got.

While Pop Labs could have deposited this very same content onto our company website as its very own page or maybe even into this blog, we looked to take it a step further by getting creative and leveraging Chuck’s talent as a rap artist to produce something entertaining and fun that was appropriate for our goal: brand Pop Labs and get exposure from other well-known entities. Sometimes you just have to throw it out there, but you have to be prepared for the feedback you’re going to get… the good and the bad. Transparency is crucial for social media… which is why Chuck not only delivers these rhymes, but he writes them as well—not a hired gun.

Not every company has an aspiring rap artist to utilize and that’s okay. What you DO have is experiences and relationships and other talents that set YOU apart from everyone else, from your competitors. Once you have those figured out, the creative way in which to deliver your message should start to become clear. Good luck!