So, I know this horse is pretty dead, but I think I am going to kick it one more time. As many already know, a few months ago Netflix angered their user base by breaking up and charging more for their services.

My wife and I were one of the many customers that canceled our account with them when they made these changes. The change on their part really made us ask how valuable was this service really to us. I know we would have kept on paying our $9.99 monthly fee without asking this question if they had maintained their usual course. However, once we did ask the question we realized that there was enough free streaming (hulu) and paid DVD (redbox) services for us to confidently walk away from our Netflix addiction.

Recently, a friend shared their hypothesis on how Google Sets can be used to see what keywords Google thinks a site should rank on. Basically, he advised building a short list showing the keywords with the most density on your site and throw them into Sets. The final outcome would show the keywords Google feels you would best rank on.

I tried this out on MyMarketer, and a list of very broad keywords came about. Obviously, since I pulled the density from MyMarketer’s home page, which dynamically changes with the publishing of a new post, the accuracy of this method seems questionable.

Furthermore, there is a warning label on Google Sets stating that the service will expire September 5th of this year. So, even if my friend is correct about his assumption (which I am doubting) it wouldn’t matter much in exactly one week.

According to Google’s Annual Stock Holder Report, 99% of all its revenues come from their advertising programs (and not the 97% usually reported). For a company which almost did 35 billion dollars in revenue last year, that’s rather impressive.

As Google’s advertising flagship, Adwords is the bulk of that cash flow. The creative people at Wordstream did an infographic on the 20 most expensive keywords in Google AdWords. I was curious to see what it would cost if SEO was treated like Adwords. Meaning, what we would have to pay Google if they charged us per click for every #1 organic position we held in their search engine.

Doing this exercise puts in to perspective the importance of ranking organically over paid. There is no doubt that paid has a place in a search marketing strategy, but for many users the instant fix of paid search heavily over shadows the long run benefits of SEO.

Back in December, I wrote a post about how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a.k.a. the Mormon Church or LDS Church) knows SEO. At the time, many influential SEO bloggers were showcasing the strength of the Church’s SEO efforts.

Yesterday, the LDS Church did a press release on their social media efforts. It seems that the Mormon Church is also quite proficient in social media. According to their press release, “…six of the Church’s official Facebook pages are ranked among the top 100 in the “Church/Religious Organization” category — including two in the top 25.”

These pages, according to AllFacebook.com, are:

I know the economy is struggling, but I was a bit surprised when I stumbled across a NPR story of an Idaho high school selling advertising on their test sheets. It has been over a year since this was reported and I am curious to know how successful this experiment of extreme personalized marketing panned out. Did it help bring in significant amount of funds, and did the advertising businesses feel that they where able to receive an ROI on their advertisements?

This is a unique case study and it makes me wonder how ethical it is to penetrate the academic veil. I know we have advertisements in the schools, like vending machines and other healthy alternatives =), but I wonder what damage we do when we start prostituting the actual learning environment. To me, having interruption advertising on the test teaches the kids that nothing is above the principle of making money.

If you are going to have advertising on the test, you might as well put advertising on the school toilet paper! You definitely would get more views, though you would be competing against the creative artwork and slogans found on the walls of the stalls.

ebay-logo There seems to be a lot of top 10 lists popping up on the web these days. I think our attention span with the Internet is so low that anything longer than 10 bullets is seen on the same level as War and Peace.

The other day I came across a top 10 list which listed the best ways to make money off of the Internet. Number one on the list was eBay.

I honestly don’t believe that eBay holds the luster it once had. It seems that these days eBay is more like junk bay. Occasionally there are good deals; or once in a great while you can sell something and make an extra buck; but the amount of effort one puts into it doesn’t seem worth it.