aimClear Search Marketing Blog

This session was especially geared toward the search novice, with details on programs from major providers and advice on how to succeed. The assembled audience was comprised of Small business owners, agency representatives and in-house advertising representatives.

The panelists provided a well rounded program chock full of sound basic approaches to what can be a very daunting road to travel. Read the rest of this entry »

The bandwidth involved working with my SEM colleagues, twittering, staying in touch with Facebook peeps and processing clients is delightfully staggering. Sometimes an innocuous written exchange blasts across my desk amidst the noise,  strikes a nerve and leaves me in thought.

In this case a state-level branch of a well known national brand, pinged me by email to ask common SEO shopping questions, including classic misunderstandings: personalized search and “site submissions.”  The inquiry was a bit of a “Dear John” letter, so other firms likely received a similar inquiry. We don’t respond to RFPs but make it our practice to answer polity to reasonable questions time-allowing, with the corporate mantra being to support potential clients.

I’m memorializing my answers to that inquiry in this post, for the benefit of future clients and our Account Managers.  I’ve fictionalized names to protect anonymity. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a palpable hush in our aimClear rotunda office yesterday afternoon as, *gasp,* I finally caved personally to incorrect usage of of the initials “SEM” to humor our PPC client. Sadly in this wacky world of nearly indistinguishable acronyms, abbreviations and cryptic terms there’s a colloquial tragedy afoot. Even the New York Times got SEM wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Cash and ROI from ecommerce is easy to calculate. Measuring income from AdSense and other affiliate revenue is simple for publishers to weigh, in order to validate investments in content, SEO or arbitrage. Leads are easy to count, as are associated PPC expenses.

However, evaluating a website’s ongoing profitability is often not quite so cut and dried. In these times of budgetary duress, short-sighted thinking too often fosters short-sheeting the corporate web presence. Here are 6 less obvious cash-in-the-bank criteria, by which to measure a site’s hidden success. Start with the statement, “a website could be considered profitable if it:” Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings from late afternoon @ SMX East. It struck me covering the Ad Agencies & Search Marketing panel for SEORoundTable, that this conference crowd is a bit different. Yeah, the groovy old school search community-of-origin I love is here–pioneers, bloggers, the very roots of our industry. They’re crawling all over the place speaking, hanging out, blogging for trade pubs and meeting clients.

Still, the crowd at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on West 34th Street center is different Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Day 4 at SES San Jose and it looks like they saved the best for last. Moderated by Gregg Stewart SVP, Interactive, TMP Directional Marketing, this session looked at Contextual Advertising from two directions: from a publisher’s perspective on how to generate more revenue dollars and also effective tactics for managing contextual campaigns. David Szetela CEO, Clix Marketing shared world class content targeting  tips from Advertisers perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

Next week search industry thought leaders from around the globe will converge for Canada’s premier annual SEM conference, Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2008. Show organizers Andrew Goodman and SES Global Content Director Kevin Ryan have put together a dandy 2 day, 3 track and specialized half day training sessions program which promises to be state of the art. Read the rest of this entry »