November 20, 2010 By Mary Killelea

 SearchFest 2011

Portland’s Premier Search Marketing Conference
When: Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Where: The Governor Hotel (866) 979-7660

No matter what level of SEO skills you have this is a great event to attened.  There are great speakers scheduled, you can network with other SEO folks and potentially meet folks in need of SEO work .

Topics include Advanced Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Universal Search, Analytics, Paid Search Marketing and many more.

View the Agenda 

If you would like you can Register Here

I’ll see ya there…  I look forward to meeting new faces in the Portland search  community.

November 18,  21010 by Mary Killelea

This week I read a great article by Brad Fallin who interviewed Rand Fiskin SEOmoz CEO and Co-Founder. SEOmoz blog is now one of the most populare search engine forums in the world with readers numbering in the tens of thousands every day. BusinessWeek listed Fiskin as one of the 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30 (Yep Under 30). Fiskin has written about SEO for the New York Times, Newsweek and in his book, The Art of SEO.

Like many in the late 90’s he had a struggling web design and development business but instead of scratching his head and letting his business dissolve he found that SEO could be the tool that could differenitate him from his competition. He was able to sell the value to his clients early on before people even knew what SEO was, which if you remember was a huge struggle for the industry at the beginning. After starting to offer SEO in 2020, then launching the SEOmoz blog in 2004 as a way of sharing his experiences, the site eventually grew into it’s own brand offering consulting until 2007. Now his model has grown into SEO software that very large to very small companies can take advantage of.

When asked what the most noticeable change in the SEO world is that he’s seen, his reponse didn’t surprise me. “SEO has become a much more accepted and standard for of web marketing. It’s  great to see organizations embrace SEO today like they never have before. ” Just in the past year he says he’s been able to speek  about SEO to the CTO of the United Nations, present ot hte group at the YCombinator event and even heard that the White House is doing some SEO! ”

His closing words of wisdom from the interview was “Don’t be discouraged - SEO is a slow, building process much of the time, but it’s the challenge and the obstacles that make it a competitive advantage for those who embrace it and do it well!”

I am happy to share I just saw that Rand Fiskin is gonna be one of the speakers at Search Fest 2011 discussing Advanced link building.

November 17, 2010 By Mary Killelea

Learn how to utilize and leverage LinkedIn Effectively to help grow your business!

1. Utilize the status updates - tell the world what innovative business ideas, skills and tips you have. (this is a platform to “Strut your stuff - so to speak… don’t be shy)
2. Create a company profile — make it good it’s your first impression in many occasions to potential clients, collegues and your competition. Put your best foot forward.
3. Spend time in your network, take the time to interact and engage with those with similiar interests and those looking for info or help in your industry.
4. Take the time to contribute info
5. Ask questions (don’t think you know it all — those that stop learning will fail)
6. Reach out to those you know or those you know thru friends of friends… it’s Networking 101 — But better you don’t have anything to loose by being active and involved.
7. Join groups try and focus on groups that have more than a 1000 members – Unless it’s in your own niche.
8. Login in and be active at least 3 times a week
9. Don’t get side tracked and waste a lot of valuable time, stay focused on your daily tasks and move on.
10.  Promote your LinkedIn Profile on your website, on facebook etc.. let people know you want to connect with them.  Grow your linked in presence.

November 16, 2010 by Mary Killelea

6 great tips to making money with emails that you send out.

1. Respect your potential customers
2. Send out emailson Wed. or Thursday Avoid Mondays!
3. Be consistent
4. Write a descriptive, compelling subject (reveal who you are)
5. In the subject line Avoid using $, FREE, ALL CAPS, any punctuation that isn’t a period or ?
6. Set your margins narrow between 30-50 characters wide is best — tests show higher click thru responses just by utlizing these margins - granted your content has to be good.
7. Paint a picture with words.
8. Be truthful and trustworthy… don’t scam anyone every
9. Always allow users the ability to easily unsubscribe
10. Offer only product or services of value — you wouldn’t knock on someones door with selling them a product that wasn’t of value would you? (Hopefully you answsered no to this!)