From 2005 to 2008 I successfully ran a “one man shop” web development company with only knowing the basics in web design and development. However, what I didn’t know in design and programming I made up by thoroughly knowing outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and project management. If you look at my gallery page you will see just a few of the projects I did during that time.

I am often asked to teach these business methods to others, and over the years I have developed a series of lessons to help facilitate these requests. I have been meaning to publish these lessons as an ebook, but with all that is currently going on in my life I don’t see it happening any time soon. So, instead of waiting for that someday to come I have decided to publish the lesson that is most requested—crowdsourcing.

Today I presented to a group of Utah business teachers from the Alpine School District. My presentation was focused on three possible scenarios teachers could use when utilizing social media in the classroom.

The main problem I focused on was how the school district blocks most social media websites on their networks. There are very real and obvious reasons why schools are aggressively not allowing these sites (which I highlighted a few). Yet, it is apparent that the collective “we” is becoming more and more dependent on digital communication and schools are beginning to have discussions on how to safely inject social media into their curriculum.

I spent significant time researching this presentation, and gained a new found appreciation for our educators. Once things calm down in my life I have plans to break apart my presentation into a series of blog posts that dive more into this topic.

I have been rather quiet here on MyMarketer. It’s not that I have given up on blogging or all the beauty that goes along with it. Rather I have my head somewhere else.

Back in November my wife introduced me to an amazing website—Pinterest. Unless you live under a rock you have heard of Pinterest. If not, you can check out my collection of tutorials that shares anything you want to know about Pinterest.

Anyway, in January my longtime friend and online pr expert, Janet Thaeler, and I decided to dive into Pinterest and understand how businesses can utilize the tidal wave of traffic that it generates.

The other day my friend Leland asked if I knew any great SEO SERP tools that were free (serp is an acronymn for search engine ranking position). Personally, I am hooked on the paid tools SEOmoz offers, but I understand that when you start out in SEO you often don’t have the luxury of paying for the all the new shiny tools out there.

Leland’s biggest frustration was that when he did a search in Google all the tools he tried didn’t work. A lot of these websites can’t sustain their tools since they are free. It actually takes real resources to crawl the engines and return results. If a SERP tool pings the engines too often their IP is banned for a day. Get banned too many times and you can count on being permanently locked out.

So, you can see why finding a decent free SERP tool can be difficult. I love the challenge of finding free resources to help people in their SEO quest and hopefully my research from these efforts can help others. Therefore, below are the different tools I found that actually worked. I haven’t used most of them more than once or twice so my feedback is limited. Yet, the one thing I can guarantee is that they will show you your SERPS and that they are free (at least at the time of writing this).

I came across a website that actually has SEO valentine’s cards. The site is lacking in design, and it looks like they haven’t done anything on it since 2007, but the cards are very humorous!

The service allows you to forge the sender, so I spoofed an email to a SEO buddy. I setup the ecard to be from his wife and he did receive it. However, if you do this make sure you spell your friend’s wife’s name correctly or he will throw it into his spam folder Ü.

It’s too bad they don’t have more cards, it truly is a great idea. I talked to my friend after he received the email and he recommended I make the Matt Cutts eCard my avatar and go leave a comment on his blog. There’s no doubt it would be hilarious, but I told him he could be the creeper that Matt files a restraining order against.

We have seen in the past few years Bing growing leaps and bounds in the search market. However, the growth really isn’t coming from Google’s market share, though it has nibbled some away. Instead Bing is growing because it is cannibalizing its partner Yahoo!

Growth is growth though, and Bing is becoming a significant player in the search industry. As a search marketer this is obviously very important to me. I personally don’t care how my users find my website (Google, Bing, or their mother), just that they do find it.

Yet, there is a significant problem with Bing that continues to hurt them—quality. Hate or love Google, it is hard to deny that their quality isn’t light years ahead of Bing. Due to this fact, Google recently has become extremely sensitive about Bing stealing utilizing Google results.

I don’t ever use this blog to share my political views, but I think this subject is important to every blogger no matter what he or she chooses to write about.  The below youtube video does a great job visualizing the damage that the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—though, the video doesn’t directly mention SOPA—can truly have on our web ecosystem.

PIPA and SOPA are bills which have been introduced in the Senate and the House to give the U.S. government and corporations the ability to censor the net. This is all done in the name of protecting “creativity” and “copyrights.” The law would allow entire sites to be censored by corporate and government entities. All this is achieved by simply convincing a judge that a website is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under these bills, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, would be considered illegal behavior.

With the birth of 2012 comes the renewed determination to push out content that sits in my drafts folder being perpetually worked on. This post has been one of my perpetual projects since I wrote part one waaaaaay back in September on common SEO mistakes.

Originally with this post there were 16 total mistakes, but the last five were the main road blocks in the post being published. However, with just the below 11 tips this article is already almost 2000 words long. So I don’t think the omitted five mistakes (which will be added to part three) will be missed too much.

Count on one—possibly two—more post that will wrap up this subject. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take me to 2013 to do it. ~Paul W.

“It’s all about people.” ~Mike Davidson

Michael Stelzner, the genius behind SocialMediaExaminer.com and other ventures, just announced what he calls the Networking Clubs. The basic idea behind his idea is having an online forum that is honed in on social media.

Before you leave a comment flaming me about how you already belong to 29 social media groups on LinkedIn/Facebook/Google+/DigitalPoint/WarriorForum/WickedFire and so forth, let me share five reasons why I think Social Media Examiner’s Networking Clubs are different and better.

“I don’t want you with me! I don’t need you! I don’t need anybody! With my strength — my power — the world is mine!” ~The Incredible Hulk

As a kid I loved all the super hero comics, and now, thanks to Hollywood, I can relive them through the movies. Yet, it is even more fun when cartoonist Caldwell Tanner from the College Humor fame turns Internet companies into these same heroes and villains.

Below you will see heroes like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and several others showcasing their unique Internet powers. Unfortunately, I feel that Caldwell has left out some important heroes/villains and some iconic Internet sites. If I were an illustrator I would add them, but alas that is not one of my super powers.