Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

Pamela Lund once said to me something like the day that Loren Feldman and myself are both in a room, the walls were going to cave in because of the noise. I haven’t met Loren yet, but his online stuff is funny, and he is quite loud and not afraid to speak his mind. But wait a second, I’ve been told the same thing!

I’ve been hearing wisps of this Audience conference, but really did not get it until I just read Shoemoney’s blog. It sounds amazing. I love the fact that it is intimate. I love the fact that there is no where to put your computer or write notes easily. I love the fact that is has some of the biggest and the best in the business, in the type of setting that will tilt them just a little bit and allow some of their juice to spill out in a different direction than the usual talks.

With Loren’s creativity I can only imagine what else he has in store.

Just the idea of Shoemoney on a theatrical stage if fantastic in itself. The guy is naturally very theatrical, and the setting is perfect for him. I just wish that Jeremy was going to sing too!

The event is very affordable, only $399. I honestly just clicked back to verify that is was that inexpensive and it is.

The Audience Conference is another wonderful example of what we can do when we don’t give a crap about badges, exibitor tables, or conference centers. I just love the idea of finding another unique way to connect the people to the speakers on the subject we all hold dear, the audience!

I just noticed that in addition to having Tech Crunch founder, Shoemoney and T.V. celebs, they are going to have things like a funky harp group playing as well. I love a good juxtoposition!

Not that most people would get it, but this event is literally historical in what it is doing.

I am actually quite excited, just to find out what happens!

Boy we are going to have fun.

We are sending out invites to sponsor today.

If you want to sponsor either as an individual, or as a company, let me know imediately.

I will be finalizing the t-shirt and card designs so need to sponsor logos now. 🙂

We are going to be having a fight club with Robert Drysdale the 6x world champ in Brazillian jiu Jitsu, and with Shawn Tompkins at his new home at the Tap Out gym. Shawn is running pro training for the big UFC guys, and we will be able to watch.

I am getting lots of e-mails about the poker tournament.

We are only going to have room for 100 players. My buddy Chris who runs the poker room at the Mirage has worked out a great deal for with me for us, and we are going to have cocktail waitresses serving free drinks to the players, and 200 of my guests from 8:00 to 2:00 a.m. on Thursday night of Pubcon. This is going to be off the hook!

The poker room is right next to CPK, BLT burgers, and the Deli, so we will have food and drinks.

I can only get in 100 players and 200 guests. There will be bracelets to identify you.

I am going to make you work for them a little, and do a little pre holiday charity awareness. It will just cost you a tweet if you are buying in as a player, and a blog if you want to get in as a guest with the open bar. Details coming up here, but don’t blink because I am going to post it, send invites to my list, and I predict they will be gone fast!

If you don’t sign up for the poker tournament in time, you won’t play. Sorry?

If you want to be part of the party, and don’t win a spot as a guest with the free bar, then you can still come, you will just have to buy your own drinks 🙂

Just watch this blog, and details will be announced probably within the next few days or early next week.

If you want to sponsor either as an individual or as a company, read this and hit me up.

I also may have a few surprises during my talks at pubcon, so you may want to come see what’s up for those too. 😉

Some of the facebook advertisers were selected to beta test the new facebook ads manager. I am sure there will be more changes before it goes live for  everyone, but here is a sneak peak and my initial impressions.

First a rundown on what’s not in there.

The biggest restriction for running facebook ads is still the speed of loading multiple new ads. This was not handled in the new beta. If you are not familiar with facebook ads, there are many, many variables. Even if you decide to test 3 different titles, with three different images, three different ad copy options, to three different age groups, in three different cites, you will have 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3  possible ads which means you will have 243 different combinations. Because the ad platform is all server based, each time you move to the next screen it takes up to a  minute to load, depending on the speed of your internet connection etc. So to run 243 ads will take you at a minimum 500 minutes, or close to 10 hours.

There are software programs that are sold that do this automatically, but the problem is that they are against facebooks terms of service, and they only allow a few variables, and have not allowed for the variables I personally want to test. There are so many demographic different variables to test in facebook advertising, that the options could easily be in the millions when you start adding them up. I am sure this will be handled in later versions of the ads manager, just not yet.

That being said the new ads manager is a huge step in the right direction. In the current ads manager, pre beta, once you have been running ads for a while, you will have pages and pages of campaigns. To navigate to find a certain ad or adgroup would require clicking through multiple pages looking for your ad, which could take a while if your pages are slow to load. Now there is a table of contents that you can slide up and down to find a specific group. You can also sort the adgroups by different variables to more quickly find the one you want. There is also an onthe fly search box to search for ad names that is similar to the search box you use to find facebook friends.

There are also selection boxes next to each campaign in the campaign view, where you can edit entire campaigns, multiple campaigns, or even every campaign, and with a few clicks can change all the daily limits, whether they are active or inactive.

There is also an easy way to change the name of a campaign from this screen which is nice to get them to alphabetize a  certain way, assign them a number to keep track of them, or even just to correct the errors you made when you created them.

The graph at the bottom still is a little counter-intuitive to me, in terms of how to scale it. Mine usually is off the scale and appears blank, and honestly I still have not figured out to use it.

One of the nice features is the ability to click on the top of the column, such as campaign, status, budget etc. and have all the campaigns sorted that way. One notable point of that is the ability to bring all the active campaigns up to the top where you can see them, and push all the deleted and paused campaigns, down out of the way.

Below is an image from one of my accounts.

Because of the massive number of variables there are to choose from when running facebook ads, and the fact that they keep adding on more and more, means that it is going to be a while before you will be able to easily manage all aspects of large numbers of campaigns. If you combine this with the fact that facebook is obsessed with quality, and a great user experience, it would not surprise me if we don’t see the ability to manage even most of the variables in large groups for a year or more from now.

Once you are inside a campaign you can also change the ad name easily without having to reload screens.

Once you are in the screens to create a new ad, the screens seem identical.

While I am stating my wish list, I would like to see a listing of possible keywords. I got the list of the top facebook profile keywords, but this obviously changes over time. I would also like to see a list of neighborhoods available.

This new facebook ads manager is a huge step forward, appears to work flawlessly, and will cut down the time of managing large numbers of campaigns dramatically. Facebook is doing an amazing job of keeping their software really clean, intuitive, and pretty bug free.

As a final note, take a look at the volume of searches for facebook advertising vs. myspace advertising vs. google advertising. While not a complete story, it does give some insight to the amount of interest in the subject.

If you need help with facebook ads, just give me a holler.

Not an actual dinasour, but an actual turtle-rex taken from George Avery of GetAds creek.

The Best of The Web, BOTW, boys have kicked in big time for our beloved poker tournament. They did this before the exact set up has been determined, and before we have figured out whether it will be a charity tournament or a non charity tournament.

Greg Hartnet loves this tournament, and the tournament loves Greg.

The BOTW crew are true dinasours of the internet world, since they have been around since 1994.

Their company, and the culture around it has served as fertile grounds for many of the leaders in this field to find their roots and grow. When I first started going to the conferences, it was told to me by many people to just hang out at the BOTW booth. You will never find any pretentiousness there, and nobody is ever an outsider. Just throw on one of their famous t-shirts, and you are instantly part of the family.

If I set up any new site of any importance to me, to this day, I always submit my site to their directory, which is the original internet directory. If your site is quality, they will most likely accept you. If you get accepted, then you get a quality link, that is very relevant, and on topic, and good page rank.

For those of you who don’t remember, before search engines this is how you found stuff on the internet. I still have a lot of faith in hand reviewed directories, and expect a resurgence of them in the future. I don’t think a computer can ever determine quality and relevance the way a human can. Their newer blog directory rocks and is a great place to get links and awareness started for your blog.

I am grateful to Greg, Brian Prince and the crew there because from the first moment I announced doing an event, the first poker tournament, they immediately jumped in and offered whatever help, finance or otherwise I needed. They let me come to their parties, even before anyone thought I was cool, and are an incredibly tight, yet welcoming group of people.

Thank you again guys for making the first poker tournament possible, and during such a tight year for so many people, being so quick to step up and throw down to make sure the event we all love so much takes place!

The Mirage hotel has graciously allowed our gang of misfits to decend upon their lovely hotel and casino on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2009 at 8:00 P.M.

The poker tournament has grown so large, and brings with it such a moving party, with last year literally hundreds of people who either showed up to play or just to play 🙂

If you want to rub elbows with the top SEO’s, internet marketers, website owners, and social media experts, this is the place. It is the relationships you develop here that will allow you to get the real internet marketing secrets in the future.

Keep checking this blog as Pubcon 2009 approaches, but it looks like we are going to be setting up our own poker room for the event, as we can not longer fit inside their regular poker room.

Before this can actually be a charity poker tournament, I need to get approval from the Nevada Gaming Commission. As I am sure you would guess, having a poker tournament with real money flying around legally, has an enormous amount of regulations attached to it.

After doing some research I found a charity that if they will give us permission, I would like to get behind this upcoming holiday season. They are called the Blind Center of Nevada. One of the super cool things they do is run an online electronics business, which takes old electronics, computers and monitors, cameras and the like, makes sure they are working, and then sells them on e-bay to support their center. To date they have made around a million bucks this way. This supports the center which trains these guys and gals in skills so they can be out in the regular work force.

Historically blind people for the most part have had assembly jobs, or other repetitive jobs that were less intellectually demanding. Through their program they allow blind people to new technology that allows them to do things online, that previously was impossible.

Anyone who knows me well, gets that I like to support those who are busting their buts to help themselves and others. This group takes that path by teaching visually impaired people job skills, and then in their own institution allowing those individuals to apply those skills to make money to run the institution.

If you give a few thousand dollars to feed people, that money will be spent in a day. A group like this, since it is already making some money themselves, can leverage a donation to help many, many, more people in many ways for years to come.

The poker tournament should be a great time. EVERYONE IS INVITED! I would love you to blog about it, and put up a poker poster on your site, and make sure EVERYONE  who is part of pubcon knows it will be the best of the pubcon parties!

We are now accepting sponsors for the event also. The money is going to a good cause, so open up those pockets!! Contat me at dk (=at=) purposeinc.com if you are interested.

Feel free to grab a poker poster that is the correct size for your blog and use it on your site.

It is 4 a.m., the party is finally over, I am exausted, but as good journalist I need to keep the public updated with what’s important right?

Azoogle, Alex Z. and Michael Sprouse pulled out all the stops for what was THE BEST PARTY I HAVE EVER BEEN TO.

On the bus ride home, I said to my wife, after this what is left? Seriously it was unbelievable. There will be a lot more shots that will show up my blog coming up, but a lot of them will never see the light of day. 😉

It was cool, Michael Sprouse used to be high up in the playboy corporation doing marketing for them. When the girls saw him, they were genuinely happy to see him. It made me proud!

If you can imagine just how wild a party could get, the absolute wildest, and turned back the volume just a quarter of a click, that is what I just experienced.

I stayed out of trouble and played Donky Kong. Free video games, are you kidding me?

All the while the whole event was actually done tastefully, and with a lot of grace and beauty. The food in fact was off the hook, and a huge surprise.

My wife and I got to hang out with Hugh Hefners brother Keith. I noticed something amazing. He constantly complimented all of the girls, and was warm and friendly to everyone he met. Very, very nice guy. Feel free to invite us over for old movies whenever you want!

Come back soon to see more of the pics, once I have time to edit through them.

I went out on one of these stands to get my picture taken standing over the pool, and a few of the Azoogle staff were kind enough to give me a little push into joining their pool party.

I will let these 11 pictures tell the story, and you can fill in what is not being shown with your own imagination.

Ha Ha! I honestly can’t believe I am saying that. I grew up in the 70’s reading playboy as a kid. In fact as soon as I could read, I was reading it! Before Maxim, and all these other mags, and even before sports illustrated’s swim suit edition, there was Playboy. I even read it for the articles, and as a kid just adored the cartoons!

It was marketing genius.

I think of myself as being fairly enlightened, and yet I am still a sucker for a pretty girl. Pretty much still just stops me in my tracks. You want to brand yourself? What if you could create a brand that would forever be associated with georgeous, yet classy girls? That is what Playboy did.

I have begun to have fun with affiliate marketing lately, thanks to my good friends running these cool companies. It is the funnest of all of the internet worlds I have dropped into so far. It is a fun world because they are not afraid to be exactly who they are, a bunch of guys purely interested in making money and having fun. O.K., so some of them exagerate how much money they make in affiliate marketing, but I do know there are some big bucks rolling around in this area, and plenty of guys making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in profit, who never did a day of college.

I’ve learned you can lose a nice bucket of money really quickly in affiliate marketing also. It is not for the weak of stomach, that is for sure.

But the real deal companies are rolling through hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Azoogle is unquestionably a huge mega force in this area.

So tomorrow I get to go feed the bunnies!

This should be absolutely fantastic, hilarious, and a photo opportunity like no other!

The perks that go along with being involved in the internet business world just rock!

Michael Sprouse (Azoogle Marketing Director) rocks for putting this together.

By the way, in addition to the trip to the Mansion, Michael is putting us all up at the W hotel with pool parties, brunches and the whole works.

It is probably worth running some Azzogle ads if you are not already, just for the parties 😉

And I will See You at the Mansion!

I am a twitter user as purposeinc, occasionaly tweet, am proud of my 454 followers vs. the 221 people I am following, but haven’t used it to try to really make money yet. For me, like most internet marketing it is a big game, and fun, sometimes the good money rolls in, but mostly I like making big changes and helping people and companies out.

I was over at David Brim’s internet business blog, catching up on what he is up to, and came across his article on twitter 101 guide for business. It made for a good read.

Once of the concepts he brought up, and I have heard this from some of the huge companies that I have consulted for, is simply the concepts of watching for your industry or company to be mentioned. I looooove, doing reputation management on the internet, otherwise known as squashing a$$h:)les, and after watching some of Shoe’s tricks on reputation management have become a huge fan of it, and quite skillful, inventing many of my own highly effective tricks 😉 (Ping me if you need some high end help on this!)

So, as many of you know I crack a lot of backs each day, and am constantly testing different online marketing for my chiropractic office. I’ve even had patients now, with no training, get hired to become full time twitter users for companies. To top it off, this week I got a call from Jeremy Hermanns, internet marketer to the stars,  needing a little assistance with a project for one of his A-list celeb clients that involved twitter. Now this really got me thinking about twitter!

I know people are getting a ton of followers, but what can the blue whale do for a chiropractic office? So I went to search.twitter.com and searched for chiropractic to find the thousands of tweets per day that would involve chiropractic. Of course the first thing I find is Michaels account @chiropractic so I scrolled down to see what else I could see.

During the past day, in all of twitterland, there were only a few mentions I could find of chiropractic that seemed natural by people discussing it. The majority of them were twitter spam of the kind that I would imediately unfollow the guy.

When we heard Gary V. of wine library spoke at the Elite Retreat we watched him create content like a madman. No kidding, minutes after his talk, he was answering e-mails, twittering, and online with his masses. He told us that quantity of content, and truth in content to him were far, far more important than making sure each post was perfect before letting it loose.

In fact when I read some of the celebs twitters, you can tell they are written by someone else. On the other hand, I love seeing someone twitter where you can tell it is the real person, with all of their quirks, flaws and opinions. Can that make a small business money? Let’s see what we can cook up. Can a local chiropractic office, scan twitter for all the tweets of locals with back pain looking for a chiropractor these days? Not yet. But blink our eyes and the world will change again!

GUEST POST BY DENNIS YU
Dennis runs Blitz Local, a company dedicated to helping local businesses get real customers in through their doors. Yeh, Dennis is competing directly against some of my projects. Why would I let him guest post? He’s a good friend, a helpful guy, and that’s how we roll. 😉

The cynics would add a 4th C for “charlatan”, given how poorly companies selling local Internet advertising are performing. However, that overlooks how hard it is to deliver new business to local service firms and how new this market is– more on that in a bit.

I recently met the CEO as well as the founder of yodle.com, a fellow company in the local space– stand up guys, I must say. They have 6,000 clients– way more than BlitzLocal.com, but not as many as ReachLocal.com or WebVisible. There are 6 million small businesses in the US that are at least a quarter million dollars in revenue, so 6,000 is only 1/10th of a percent of the market. Nobody has even a percent of market share.

Recently, Yodle has been hit with some criticism for aggressive sales techniques. They have 110 full-time sales folks who call lawyers and doctors repeatedly. Though perhaps irritating to some prospects, the model is quite effective in generating sales. And Court Cunningham, their CEO, tells me that they are 2 weeks away from hitting profitability.

They want to be the #1 brand and you can’t hit that growth curve by word of mouth. In 2-5 years, small business owners will go with the recognized brand– and Yodle wants to be that brand.

Some challenges:

• Internet searches are low, but growing— You face a chicken and egg problem. People aren’t going to search online for services unless they know such services exist online. Rural areas or geos with low broadband penetration will often have no businesses online for a given category (“cosmetic surgeons in Enid Oklahoma”, perhaps). The concept of search requires that people know it exist to ask for it. Thus, advertising dollars and consumer sophistication go hand in hand. The market is early.
• Clients want new business generated, not clicks— Don’t tell me how many hits my site got. I want to know how many referrals my site generates. Calls generated is a better measure than clicks, but not as good as confirmed clients. Advertising companies such as ours cannot control whether a prospect will no show for an appointment, but we can try to target what search terms are more indicative of a good lead.
• The market is not educated— “Sales” alone won’t work, since you have to educate the client about how to operate their site, to answer the phone quickly and effectively, to use email marketing to drive retention, and to set realistic expectations on what Internet marketing is capable of. How much do I need to spend and what I can truly expect to generate in new business– not clicks or calls?
• nascent technology platforms— The beauty of search is that based on the search term, you already know what the searcher wants and where they are in the process. If they are looking for “denver liposuction“, then you better show them exactly that– content on Denver Liposuction. If they want to know the side effects of liposuction or the pricing for such procedures, you better show them a different set of information. Most of the local internet advertising companies send users to the same page, no matter what they search on. At up to $10 a click, that’s a lot of waste.

BlitzLocal doesn’t believe in first mover advantage, which is the “winner take all” philosophy. This type of thinking is that whoever reaches critical mass first in a market will win. Yet Yahoo! pre-dated Google in search, Friendster pre-dated Facebook in social networking, and the list goes on…

We don’t see the other players as “competitors”, since nobody has a dominant position or has even developed a bulletproof platform. Rather, we are together trailblazing in this developing market– working to educate clients about what is realistic about Internet marketing and that it’s not turnkey. Clients have to put forth effort to reflect their unique selling proposition on the web– and that must come from them, not us. And together, our group of companies must develop best practices on generating quality referrals for our clients. Judging by the churn rates in our industry– up to 90% in 6 months, according to the recent Borrell Research report, nobody has it figured out yet.

It’s easy to decry the “end of the yellow pages“, but the reality is this is years away and a slow death. It may be a few years before consumers are getting smarter about seaching online for local services and doing so in sufficient volume. The question for companies such as ours is when to really step on the gas for marketing and to what extent we can rely on aggressive outbound sales versus working towards an awesome product.

Back to clicks, calls, and clients– it’s easy to do the first part, medium difficulty to generate calls, and very hard to generate clients. If local Internet marketing companies are having trouble doing it for themselves, then caveat emptor on whether they can do it for you.

There’s no denying the potential of the opportunity in local.

If you want to get in touch with Dennis, you can reach him at: [email protected].

I do whitehat SEO through and through. I am a huge Matt Cutts fan (cuttlet) and have made a ton of money off of the graciousness of Google for sending me lots of very high quality traffic.

From the beginning Matt has said, develop good content, don’t even worry about the SEO too much, and google will reward you.

Lately I have had my eye on the term facebook advertising in google, and my site has been doing O.K. at it.

I totally cracked up today when I looked and saw that Shoemoney had taken the spot right after facebook themselves for a ton of matches.

If you read my blog I am sure you are aware of shoe and the fact that he really truly writes for the readers and not for the search engines.

I think the next two pics below tell the story.

Hope you laugh as hard as I did 😉

the greatest seo of all

By the way, Google says there were 282 million matches on this one 😉