In his January video marketing piece, Tom Tsinas reminded us of the importance of incorporating images, audio, and video into our content. He wrote: “As search engine marketers, we all know that content is king and that content is more than just text. Images, video and audio each represent a fantastic opportunity to drive traffic to our client’s sites.” In this post, I’d like to share two examples that demonstrate how important that statement is.

It was my intention to blog on something else today until I chanced upon this article from SearchEngineWatch.com: 48 Practical Questions to Qualify Prospective Search Marketing Vendors by Marty Weintraub.

The 48 questions in question are both enlightening and informative.

And frankly, they should be information volunteered, not solicited. Run the questions around your agency/office and everyone from the receptionist to the CEO should be able to answer any one of them.

Ever wonder why some of your competitors frequently seem to get mentions on radio, in newspaper articles, magazine articles, and even occasionally on television (news or local programming)?

Here’s a little strategy I’ve been working on for about 6 months now that has resulted in some great offline mentions, and takes minimal effort.

Here it is in a nutshell:

What You Need:
If you don’t already have an account on Digg, get one. Dedicate some time to it though … build a semi-power account if you can. If not, try it anyway

Have you ever thought to yourself (or had a client say to you), if I triple my budget, I should see at least triple the results … right?

Unfortunately NOT … at least in most cases that have anything to do with search!

Why:
Plain and simple; any reputable search company will target the easiest and least expensive wins first where limited budgets are involved (or as I like to refer to it, the preverbial low hanging fruit). Let me explain using a very simple example.

Imagine you’re a caveman or cavewomen, and you’re obviously always hungry. You find an apple tree brimming with tasty ripe red apples.

Are there ways that you can help your SEO company improve your results? ABSOLUTELY!

In this post, I’ll help you assess which of the 3 types of SEO Clients you are (from an involvement perspective only), and why it matters to you in terms of results and ROI.

The Impetus:
I recently wrote a post titled “I Jeff Quipp Am Not An SEO … I’m An Authority Builder“. The premise of this post was that as SEOs, we should strive to build strong client profiles online, and to make clients recognized authorities in their respective spaces.

5 Books and 55 minute of your time will provide you with Insight, Improvement, Inspiration, Influence, and Intelligence!

Prior to joining SEP, I traveled a great deal and always found time to read while on the road. I enjoy reading books on history, politics and autobiographies however the ones having had the greatest impact on me were short, simple and to the point. Each book had either been given to me by a Senior Executive or recommended by a mentor.

Social media is changing and evolving. In essence, social media sites like the search engines of 8-9 years ago, are growing up. They’re learning from their mistakes, and are constantly improving.

Source: NWCreation.net

Of course, this constant evolution means that users of social media must too change and adapt to the fluid landscape.

For anyone hoping to get their submissions seen by the masses on various social media, this means continuously expanding your network of friends.

3 Reasons to Constantly Build Out Your Base of Friends:
In particular, there are 3 reasons to continuously build out friends in various social media:

Personally and professionally, this past week has been challenging to say the least. I’ve been virtually AWOL from the web and tried to catch up on a weeks worth of reading this Sunday afternoon.

Here are 10 interesting articles that caught my attention and what I learned:

What you don’t know about Facebook: Don Peat of the Toronto Sun reveals some fascinating information about the social media giant including the country with the highest per-capita number of users, average age, number of friends and daily visits of each user and the fact that the Toronto Facebook ( 1+ million and counting) network is made up mostly of women who keep their political views and relationship status private.

Affiliate Marketing today is so much more than what it used to be, when simply having someone place your banner on their website to drive traffic was the norm.  Back in the day, your banner would catch someones eye, they would click on it, and you would pay the person displaying your banner for each click that came through to your site from theirs.  (Not so different from Pay Per Click on the search engines today).

Cartoon Courtesy of: http://www.marketingmentor.net

I came across Michael Martines blog this week. In it, he says that he managed to increase his blog’s subscriber count by nearly 200%, to 900 subscribers in just two short weeks, by offering a free eBook for subscribing to his blog.

eBook readers have always sounded like a great idea to me, but until this past holiday season, they’ve fallen short of expectations. Sony and Amazon have taken advantage of new technology to release eBook readers that they’re hoping will take off.

source: digital-lifestyles.info