If you look at the footer of MyMarketer you will notice something you might not have seen before—three miniature articles. The articles you will find focus on three areas: blog content, general web marketing, and search marketing. The titles of the articles are: Tips on Creating Great Content, How To Do Web Marketing Better, and Top Search Marketing Mistakes.

These are not your typical blog articles, but rather seriously condensed posts that are roughly 130 to 150 words and use about 20 lines of space. I call these mini articles Footer Seeds, and as far as I am aware this technique isn’t really being used in the blogosphere.

I just realized that I haven’t published my Pubcon South 2011 notes. Due to the ever changing nature of SEO I like attending conferences like this to stay on top of things. However, I found all to often that much of what you can find on the Internet is restated in the conference. My favorite quote from this conference came when talking one-on-one to a conference speakers (who will remain anonymous). He said to me, “How do I teach people just enough without teaching them too much?”

Unfortunately, I do feel that many speakers in most web marketing conference have this same attitude. However, at Pubcon South 2011 I did find some SEO nuggets of knowledge that I will share below. Yet, the best jewel of information I can offer is that you will learn a lot more talking to the speaker face to face, than just sitting listening to their well crafted presentations of “just enough” information =).

PubCon Notes & Thoughts
I am sharing only the best notes from my time at PubCon South. Most of my notes are based around social media, since I was charged with covering this venue, while others in my party covered the SEO aspects of the conference. There are many people who I have left out (including the speaker I quoted above), due to the fact that much of what was shared in their presentation were common knowledge.

domain_for_sale Yesterday, a friend came to me with an interesting question. His company was approached by a small competitor wanting to sell their website. They competitor said they would sell the website for just over a million. My friend was charged with finding out if the website was worth that much.

Due to sensitivity, I can’t share the site but I can share the questions I asked to help my friend gauge whether it was worth buying the website. Do understand that these questions come completely from a web marketing perspective. I know there are other questions you should ask, to find the full value. However, the below questions are a good guide to get you started.

1. What is the domain? When it comes to SEO the actual domain name is important. If the domain is a high traffic keyword than it is worth more. Many people in the SEO world think that exact keyword matching is dead when it comes to domains (and with hyphens it is). For the past year I have tested this notion and found it is not true. If you have an exact match keyword as a domain, you will find that it is 10 to 40 times easier to rank on that particular keyword depending on your niche. The best thing you can do is to use a free keyword tool and check out the traffic the domain has as a keyword. This will determine a lot the value of the domain, particularly, if the domain has nothing hosted on the site.

Recently I was invited to teach web marketing at a local community college. When asking the class what the first step of marketing was I received an overwhelming answer of SEO.

This seems to be the vast perception of internet marketing. However, there are actually two steps one should take before even beginning search engine optimization. With this post I want to focus on the On Site Optimization (or OSO) step (the other step I will discuss in a later post).

OSO is a critical step to initiate before even attempting SEO. The reason for this is that OSO focuses on conversion; whereas SEO focuses on traffic. No matter how much traffic you get if you don’t have conversion it is pointless.

The last several posts have been about my mistake in not branding my blog right. Recently I stumbled across a cool website, brandidentityguru.com, that helps you determine how strong your branding is.

There were several things that I found really interesting. First, was the Branding Test. This little quiz has you go through 12 questions trying to assess the strength of your brand. I first quizzed MyMarketer.net but the questions were much more tailored to business than a blog (though there were several questions that helped). So I decided to assess Oracle’s marketing branding, since I work with the marketing department so much. Below is the outcome, keep in mind that the outcome is skewed to my opinion:

abstract1.jpg It has taken some time but I finally feel that MyMarketer.net has become the blog I’ve wanted. I like the new look much better than before. People just didn’t get the whole reference to the kitchen sink. This is a principle I learned long ago in marketing—don’t try to be too tongue in cheek, people just don’t get it. To bad I didn’t learn the first time.

As you create your own website or blog it is important to always keep in mind the end user. Sometimes you can get away with an unusual name or layout, but this is generally the exception and not the norm. You should try to make it as easy as possible for people to understand what your site is all about.

It seems that web 2.0 violates this rule. With names like flickr, delicious, maple, and even digg are hard on the end user. However, you can get away with an unusual name if in .0002 seconds the user can tell what the site is about when they visit the site.

I have been seriously blogging since February of this year. It has been interesting to see my blog evolve over such a short time.

You may have noticed the new superhero design. I got tired of explaining to people what I meant by kitchen sink marketing. Unfortunately, when you find my blog in google you will still see it referenced as Kitchen Sink Marketing. It will be curious to see how long this will last—hopefully not long.

For those of you who may be new to my blog I have shown the old banners of the site. Really it is the banner that defines this wordpress template. This is nice because it makes it easier to completely redesign the blog when I get bored of the look.

domain-name.gif The other week I was working with my friend Scott who I’ve mentioned on this blog for having a talent for finding great domain names. Anyway, Scott and I started to notice something about the domain names we were searching on. We noticed that the names which we were searching for dot com availability would be snatched up if we didn’t purchase the domain on the spot.

At first, Scott and I took this unique phenomena as a tribute to our ability in finding great names. However, with each name snatching doubt began to rise on the privacy of the whois searches.

It became quite evident the other day while working with a friend on a obscure religious project that something was up. My friend really liked the name 40days.net, and upon our first whois search was told that it was available. I wasn’t surprised, even though my friend felt this was an invaluable name I didn’t feel it was a high profile name. In fact, I was so confident that no one would pick up this name that I told my friend to continue to search out a dot com and that we would buy 40days.net later. Imagine my shock, and my friend’s chagrin, when the very next day someone gobbled up the name for ownership.