Best Purchase: M-Audio Firewire Solo Runner up: Two tennis rackets and 20 tennis balls at the thrift store for $12
Best Moment: Hearing Jane laugh for the first time
Biggest Achievement: Getting hired at Crocs
Scariest Moment: Getting caught in a thunder storm while jogging, thought I was going to get struck by lightning.
Most Painful Moment: Getting jalapeño juice in my eye, thought I was going to go blind
Suckiest Moment: Getting my first driving ticket. Runner Up: Sinus infection
Biggest Drag: Going to Mt Rushmore for the 4th of July but not being able to see the fireworks because it was too foggy.
Biggest Letdown: Hot stone massage, wasn’t that great
Thing I Thought I Would Never Do: Run a half marathon (2 hrs. 19 mins.)
Funnest Moment: Being in Teenage Bottlerocktet’s music video.
Best Movies I saw: Adventureland, Star Trek, Taken, 500 Days of Summer, Office UK Christmas special, Drag Me To Hell, Man On Wire
Best Music I Got: Dillinger Four – Civil War, Teenage Bottlerocket – They Came From The Shadows, Off With Their Heads – From the Bottom, Rancid – Let the Dominoes Fall, Cobra Skulls – American Rubicon, Everything by The Lillingtons
Best Books I Read: Moneyball, Predictably Irrational, What Would Google Do, Punished By Rewards
Worst Movies I Saw: Bride Wars, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Knowing, Synecdoche New York, Paul Blart, Ghost Of Girlfriends Past

A lot of businesses don’t take advantage of their Contact Us page. Most Search Engine Optimization comes down to keywords in the meta title and content on the page and the typical business’s Contact Us page meta title says “Contact,” and the only content on the page is an email form, phone number and physical address. Yet there is much more you can include to get the most of of your Contact Us page.

One of the most frequently searched add-on keywords is “find a,” “how to” and “where is” – as in “how to find a good dentist,” and “where is the nearest dentist.”  These kinds of keywords are highly used in search engines by people looking for businesses but not always easy to place on the website. The Contact Us page comes in as one of the few places on the website you can use these keywords.

In the meta title and content say things like, “Looking to find a local dentist?” or “How to find a dentist can be hard…”

Also in the meta title include your business name and location.

Other things to consider including in the page content: Realize that your Contact Us page might be the first interaction someone has with your website. People don’t just enter into your site from the homepage. You’ll want to include important keywords like your location and what services/products you provide.

• If yours is a local business say something like, “At [business name] we are here to help you with all of your [business services keywords] needs. Please contact us at our local [your city] office.
• Give a brief synopsis of what you do. Treat it like a mini About Us page.
• List your services. Use the keywords people use to find a business like yours.

And don’t forget to include a map, directions, picture of your business and all that good stuff.

Does anyone else ever feel like me when reading content online that too many writers take too long to get to the point? I’m annoyed by long introductions in blog posts. People feel like they need to give me a synopsis of the history of what they are about to write and tell me why what they are about to write is important. Get to the point.

Or maybe my attention span is shrinking. According to the trends tab in my Google Reader: “From your 98 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 3,466 items, starred 0 items, shared 67 items, and emailed 5 items.” I do most of my reading on Tuesdays with an average of 1068  items that day and my favorite time of day to read articles is at 7 p.m, with an average of 818 items. I guess it’s easy to see how the average American could consume 34 gigs a day.

Most of these barely count as reading (Photobomb, Punknews.org, FreeAppAlert, etc.). But in the case of actual articles, I see a title and decide quickly weather or not it’s worth reading further, in the case I do end up reading further, I skim and pick out ideas and move on. Engaging headlines help, so do pictures, charts and lists. Long winded introductions don’t.

Some examples:

Mashable: As the news industry looks to reconstruct its suffering business model, the journalists of today must reconstruct their skill sets for the growing world of online media. Because of cutbacks at many news organizations, the jobs available are highly competitive, blah blah blah.

PPCHero: Testing your ad copy and your landing pages can significantly improve your paid search efforts. Of course, building a solid keyword base, creating an optimized account structure, and executing a well-planned bid management strategy are also crucial. However, testing blah blah blah

Hubspot: Calls to action are the gateways that your visitors must click through to become leads. If your calls to action aren’t optimized and attractive to your visitors, they are less likely to complete the actions you want them to on your website. Creating a great call to action isn’t simple of course, blah blah blah

I read this article thats ruffled some feathers lately about how SEO is not a legitimate form of marketing and I think what the article says is mostly right. Yet there are a few things about SEO in my opinion that make it worthwhile. In the article it says,

Look under the hood of any SEO plan and you’ll find advice like this: make sure to use keywords in the headline, use proper formatting, provide summaries of the content, include links to relevant information. All of this is a good idea, and none of it is a secret. It’s so obvious, anyone who pays for it is a fool.

This statement is absolutely true. Ranking better in search engines is no secret. All SEO comes down to three things: keywords on your site, other sites linking to yours and having your site code formatted correctly. People in SEO make a lot of hubub on all kinds of other stuff  other than those three things but in reality that’s all you need to do. A writer  for Search Engine Land who replied to the above writer makes a point that I think is very valid,

Still, sometimes people have problems. And the stuff that you think isn’t rocket science — that anyone knows — is indeed a mystery to others.

The fact that this information is well known doesn’t limit it’s value and won’t keep people from wanting someone to use that knowledge on their behalf. There is plenty of information out there on how to change the oil on your car by yourself but that doesn’t make Jiffy Lube a con man. Stock brokers also come to mind as people who are paid a lot to use other people’s money in an industry over which they have no control.
Nothing is stopping businesses from learning the best practices on how to get the most out of their website but they choose to pay experts to do it for them, so what’s wrong with that?

I think there is a lot to be said about having a marketing strategy to create content/earn attention as opposed to buying media/buying attention. I’ve gotten used to most advertisements being  avoidable if I don’t want to pay attention to them, so when there are ads that I can’t avoid, like video pre-rolls or in shows on Hulu, I find that I have half the amount of patience with them and dislike the companies more as a result. Don’t try to force me to watch something I don’t want, which to me, does more harm than good. This is a good video below explaining the idea. From the video: “how can I help you accomplish the task you are looking  to accomplish versus interrupting you and distracting you from that task?”

Saw this on TechCrunch this week:

Twitter [and Facebook] “will surpass Google [as a source of traffic] for many websites in the next year.” And just as nearly every site on the Web has become addicted to Google juice, they will increasingly try to find ways to get more links from Twitter. Because Twitter equals traffic…these Twitter links “convert better” than search links because they are often pre-filtered and come in the form of a recommendation from someone you are following.

This is a good point. Now that there are no more gate keepers to filter what gets published, everything gets published and we rely on filters (bloggers, friends online) afterwords to help us find the best stuff. Twitter is a great tool for networking with like-minded people to help you find the stuff you’re interested in. I rely heavily on the opinions of bloggers that I trust to point me to where the good stuff is at. This is the best reason, so far, for getting a business involved in Twitter.

P.S. Google has added a Creative Commons filtering capability to its Image Search results to allow you to find images without having to pay a stock photo company or steal an unlicensed picture from Image Search. The option isn’t currently available on the user interface, but you can enable the filter by adding a certain parameter to your search URL (in this case, just replace “mountains” with whatever you are actually searching for)

• For public domain images — http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_publicdomain
• For images licensed with Creative Commons Attribution (that is, images you can use as long as you attribute the image back to the creator) — http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_attribute
• For images licensed using Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike — http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_sharealike

I got the image above from Wikimedia Commons. Nice!

I made a bundle of some of my favorite feeds using Google Reader’s new bundle feature. Subscribe to it here. Pretty sweet way of sharing feeds with other people.

Mobile marketing will be getting more and more important as Internet connectivity become ubiquitous. Imagine being in a city and not knowing where to go get a bite to eat with friends. You pull out your hand held computer and ask it to pull all the restaurants within a 5 mile radius of where you are. Then you can check your social network to see if anyone is currently at any of those places, read their past reviews, look at real time streaming video inside of all the different bars to see which one has the best vibe and see if any of the restaurants currently have offers or coupons they are sending out. It will be something like this eventually. Mashable had an article about Coupious:

delivering on-demand, location-based coupons to smartphone users for savings at the point of sale. Coupious works by using your phone’s GPS to provide location-based coupons relevant to your immediate whereabouts. Essentially, all you need to do is launch the application to find deals within walking distance or up to 50 miles away.

There are so many cool implications with mobile internet. I had an idea once to make a site that shows where all the best skate spots were so if you were in the city you could look at your handset and see the closest spots to where you were. And then I found out that subpublic.com beat me to my great idea. Although the problem with the idea is creating incentives enough to get kids to upload skate spots. Do a search on Denver and there are no spots uploaded.

I think it’s kind of funny how newspaper people see Google as a business model that is dependent on content taken from others including newspapers. Google doesn’t take content, its sends an audience to them. It allows people to find your article, it doesn’t take it away. Another Jeff Jarvis quote:

Content is becoming a cost burden, what you have to have to get the links, but in and of itself, content can’t draw value without an audience, without links…links are presents that can be given or earned but not bought. But the AP is still operating in the content economy, which values control instead. That age has passed.

I like Jarvis’s explaining of the link economy:

This changes the dynamic of editorial decisions. Instead of saying, “we should have that” (and replicating what is already out there) you say, “what do we do best?” That is, “what is our unique value?” It means that when you sit down to see a story that others have worked on, you should ask, “can we do it better?” If not, then link. And devote your time to what you can do better.

As people adhere to the new rules of the link economy the best stuff is credited and the reader’s ability to get the information they want is improved:

This leads to a new Golden Rule of Links in journalism — link unto others’ good stuff as you would have them link unto your good stuff. This emerges from blogging etiquette but is exactly contrary to the old, competitive ways of news organizations: wasting now-precious resources matching competitors’ stories so you could say you’d done it yourself. That must change.

I’m kind of tierd of being bombarded by Twitter news. Everywhere I look another article on some new Twitter tool or How To article. From Mashable: