aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Recently Loren Baker’s Search Engine Journal accepted nominations, across a number of categories, for top search marketing blogs. We’re proud to be nominated in the “Best Search Conference Coverage” (#16) category. Our idea was to write actual articles as opposed to the traditional “session notes” approach.

Coverage this year (over 50 posts) included SES New York, SES San Jose, SMX Local Mobile Denver, SMX Social Media New York, SMX Travel Phocuswright Orlando, & SES Chicago (for both aimClear and SearchEngineRoundTable. If so inclined you can now vote for aimClearBlog (5 for best!). Read the rest of this entry »

This is a guest post from Joe Lucas, who many of you know as one of the talented ClickTracks Analytics (now owned by Lyris) Pro Services engineers. Joe is a bright technical mind in the conversion tracking analytics business. We’re pleased to have his take on Knol along with Google’s experimental Personalized Page Rank.

Knol & Personalized Page Rank: Incursions or Future Google SEM Essentials? Joe Lucas—In recent weeks Google has made several well publicized product announcements that may cause alarm for some. Others are quietly optimistic. Read the rest of this entry »

We had one of our clients budget substantial spend-cash for Christmas weekend PPC, as holidays are always a serious hotbed of activity for their product. Last year the same December days resulted in leads that generated hundreds of thousand in sales.

Last Friday’s 5:15PM email from their CFO was ominous: “Marty, I had to cancel the cc due to fraudulent charges. A new one will be issued within 5 business days.” This “legacy” client represents the only remaining aimClear account which still uses their credit card and, due to regulatory issues, we can’t use ours. The Grinch was screaming bloody murder at the door and it seemed Christmas was ruined. Read the rest of this entry »

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Friends, Family, & Associates, thank you for making this year so meaningful in the richness of your friendship and collaboration. May this season bring you and your loved ones blessed peace, joy, happiness, heart, passion, and longevity.

“The Prayer Song” is attached along with the lyrics Download link. I was fortunate enough to co-write and record it with my musician mentor & friend Dick Wilson in 1991. This tape (get that…TAPE ) originated @ The PolyGram International Publishing Studio in Burbank.

Dick wrote these lovely lyrics & I played the instruments except for percussion. The singer/percussionist is my dear old friend and tremendously talented Kurt Barkdull, a musical partner for 7 CDs in the 90’s. “Prayer Song” has been resonating since Kurt was kind enough to remind me about it. Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, young, old, whatever- we all have our own way of connecting to the universe through prayer and song. Peace on Earth, Good Toward Men. Shalom. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a time of year when everyone comes out with their “best of this” or “most influential of that” sort of posts. This is our contribution to the end-of-year sharing of personal favorites.

If I were marooned on a Caribbean island and could only read 6 search marketing blogs, Online Marketing Blog would be nourishment.

Lee Odden makes a professional statement with every iota of every communication, coming from a solid, respectable, inventoried, optimized, ethical foundation and front. Read the rest of this entry »

<Rant> Imagine our surprise to learn that, earlier this year, StumbleUpon trolls were publicly calling for my death.

Our blog is known as a search marketing “advice” publication, so here we’ll share a sadly funny SEM factoid. Some of the most successful aimClearBlog posts were written about and drove OODLES of traffic from StumbleUpon, to a great extent from negative SU reviews for posts about SU.

I mean SU sent us an incredible amount of visitors since our start in March. In retrospect and after researching, we were surprised to learn that quite a bit of buzz-traffic came from those in SU who were totally critical of the fact that I had the AUDACITY to WRITE about SU, truly my favorite social media community. Some individuals employed nasty rhetoric & even suggested that I kill myself…really. Read the rest of this entry »

Most small SEMs give their clients’ credit card and billing information to search engines which can actually cause palpable accounting hurdles as an agency scales. This common practice also raises interesting questions as to who “owns” the account when a client leaves someday.

Though seldom discussed, failing to engage clients in preemptive dialog has the potential to cause accounting, intellectual property ownership, and even legal nightmares. If not proactively addressed and contractually codified, the account-ownership issue can come back to bite you. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve received gratifying feedback in public and private to recent articles discussing the associated challenges of scaling search marketing from solo practice to agency. No doubt each day in our wonderful office presents fascinating, if not daunting, crossroads which have the potential to make or break the business. We’re having so much fun.

We’ve made some mistakes and done other things pretty well right. The fact that Rand Fishkin has been willing to unselfishly share what he’s learned about SEM agency structures certainly helped us shape our business model. Andy Beal has offered extremely practical information. In retrospect, Danny Sullivan & Chris Sherman’s SEM business track @ Search Engine Strategies 2006 mattered a lot.

Technology investments, hiring decisions, analytics philosophy, PPC management, accounting, training, marketing, transparency, social media strategies, networking, community relations, and many other issues require attention, vision and a cast-iron stomach. Read the rest of this entry »

Our content creation practice warrants staffing in-house and/or remote free-lance blogger(s) who are adept (chameleon-like) at researching geographic & niche-specific topics. The end-deliverable is copyright clear original content as specified by one of our SEM account managers & seasoned by your applied creativity. Sounds like fun doesn’t it? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s all the mainstream chatter & rage: “The Facebook graph this” or “social graph THAT.” Serving ads to this mystical diagram of human interactions (and the profiling-variables offered by fledgling ad platforms) are the voyeuristic dreams of heat seeking guided missile marketing freaks. “Points” on the Facebook graph, available to marketers for profiling customers, are still limited though exciting.

The FB self-serve tool itself is a multi-layered lens peering into Facebook’s noisy black box village, a happy harbinger of social ad platform things-yet-to-come. I thought we’d take a look at what attributes are actually available today on a node of the first do-it-yourself social graph ad serving platform and share a tasty bit of the interface. Read the rest of this entry »