Directories have been around for years, but it seems in the last few years more and more people are utilizing directories as a viable SEO tool. The other day my friend, Eran, who operates GroovyJeans.com shared with me that directories were one the best sources of traffic for his site.

With that mind, my good friend from New Life Habits sent me over a list today of almost 1000 directories. The list also has the Google page rank associated to the directory.

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.

There is so much happening on the web that it’s rare that I feel like I am the first to learn of something. Fortunately though, yesterday I stumbled across WebbAlert.com on the first day they launched. WebbAlert is a video blog hosted by the famous and beautiful Morgan Webb.

I have known of Morgan’s fame, being that I am a recovering video game addict. However, I have not watched her show, X-Play, since I’ve been sober from video games for five and half years (it’s sad but true, I cannot play vgames without handing over my life to the console).

Yet, I will be an active watcher of her video blog. Her blog covers the latest in tech news and the digital culture. It’s about time us tech/blog geeks have beauty to represent us. No offense Scoble but you just don’t do it for me!

You know you are addicted to blogging when you start to have severe shakes after short periods of not blogging. It has been several weeks since I’ve put up a post. There are a few reasons for this:

Unfortunately, I am still waiting on the graphic, but I am excited to see the final product. I’ve decided to take a stronger focus on the MyMarketer name and also remove the Kitchen Sink branding.

I know this will crush many of you, but I am tired of getting spam on whether I will link to other kitchen sink sites. I know we all get spam no matter what, but I’ve decided that if this is inevitable that I would like to get spam on something I am passionate about–superheroes!