Diorex

Hey guys, wondering if any of you have ever worked with a really good SEO consultant. We have few sites that are doing ok on Google for really competitive terms we would like to rank higher for, but we have no real time or SEO expertise.

Looking for SEO’s on the web is dicey at best. Too many experts who are little more than an adwords campaign and a junk website. It is difficult to separate the good from the bad. Talked with a few “name brands” who were difficult at best and wanted to charge the star guys price but not have the star guy work on the account…

A few criteria:
1. Must use only White Hat tactics - does not mean you cannot do Blackhat elsewhere but we are not risking our core business
2. Must have some sort of track record with references of current or past clients
3. Must know what their time is worth - I dont want to ask the question how much is this going to cost and get “well what is it worth to you”
4. Would prefer to work with someone confident enough to work on a contingency basis, but will consider hybrid or straight fee for right person/company
5. Will want sign off approval on all changes to website. We have a small but growing brand and we are not relinquishing control of that entirely.

So anyone know (or is) a good SEO consultant? Drop me a line.

Thanks.

I don’t post for 4-5 days (over a weekend and a holiday no less…) and get a number of different people asking if I have stopped blogging again.

My recent policy has been to use this blog to vent frustration or to address issues or just to ramble about something that interests me - over the last few days I just have not had anything interesting to share.

Here is your chance to make requests for topics you would like for me to write about. No promise I will have any insight into your request, but if I have anything to say I will try and put it into a future post.

A few caveats - I am not the person to listen to for SEO or scripting or anything terribly technical. I am fairly knowledgeable about PPC, landing pages, ad copy, white labels, Google, Yahoo, MSN, display ads, testing of everything, why affiliate networks are a bad thing for affiliates or just about anything dealing with paid ads on the internet.

So what would you like me to talk about?

In a recent IBM Study, they show that management skills can be learned from playing online games like World of Warcraft.

I could not agree more. I had a dead phase after I closed my hedgefund, but before I found online marketing, where I played way too many MMORPG’s. I no longer play any of them (although I am itching to try the Lord of the Rings game), but that is much a reflection of having better things to do with my time than anything else.

Some skills that could be learned in such a game:
Leadership/management - If you can keep 60-80 online characters happy (and full of loot) then you can probably manage people who are being paid to do a job. In an online guild, people have lots of choices, none of them are there to earn a living. They are probably sacrificing something to be there. If you can motivate someone who has lots of other alternatives to do something for the greater good then motivating someone who will get fired if they dont listen to you seems relatively easy.

Use of Scarce resources - Part of how a guild works is that everyone improves equipment over time so that they can then take on more powerful creatures which then drops better equipment which allows the group to then take down even more powerful creatures wash, rinse, repeat. Being able to allocate these scarce resources in a way that everyone benefits without playing favorites is tricky. Often times your main tank will need better equipment than offtanks, your main healer might need a special wand or some such to keep that tank alive etc. Learning to allocate that piece of equipment that everyone wants, but only one can have in a thoughtful and fair manner is paramount. Trust me the number one reasons guilds collapse is over loot allocation.

The sum is greater than individual parts - sure maybe that personal assistant or IT guy cannot nuke or heal or bring in any extra revenues, but without the person who can do crowd control, the CEO would always been in the wrong meeting or miss out on important calls. The IT guy is the warlock who can allow your salesforce to go out and mine the red mountains for new customers, but still never miss the important product meetings…. Bad examples maybe, but you soon realize that 2 big dogs and a money guy is not everything you need to run a successful enterprise.

Market Cycles - In every game there is some scarce commodity item that is required to be consumed by high level players. Be it potions or armor plating or special magics. Those who specialize in a market will learn that Tuesday night is raid night and the components of these items can sell for 10-20x right before the raid starts and trade at normal value the next day. Buy low - sell high and make a tidy profit. The real world can be very similar to those who specialize enough to look for those differences.

Testing & Research - Until you figure out how to kill the Google dragon, you dont know how to do it. Cannot even begin to think of how many times it took to kill certain monsters that once you understood how to do it, it was a walk in the park. Unlike in MMORPGS - an ebook or forum is not the place to go to get the answers. Answers are only found by spending time and effort researching the problem.

I could probably draw 10 other stupid conclusions, but some of the best managers I know spent many hours honing those management skills playing “that stupid game” as my wife likes to call them. In the real world there is no substitute for experience. In the virtual world you can actually get that experience at a pace far accelerated.

We are growing really fast (1500% increase in revenue last year) and are always looking for great people.

We are currently looking for:
Senior .Net Developer
Test, Build & Release Engineer
Paid Search Analyst (multiple positions)
Business Operations Analyst

Must be willing to work out of our offices in Dallas, Texas. Send me a resume at diorex at gmail dot com and I will put you in touch with our HR person.

In case you have not heard, the mortgage industry is in a free fall, basically causing the stock market to have a black eye today.

Here is some of the potential fall out for affiliates.

1. If you are promoting US mortgage leads, every broker I know (just a few) is saying that credit quality is becoming more and more of an issue. You cannot sell any “Liar Loans” , No documentation, Stated income loans. Those loans are as much as 40% of the volume in the business. It is frankly amazing that those loans were ever available. If brokers cannot sell the loans, then they are unlikely to continue to buy leads.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE]

This video is amusing and intended to make fun of Americans, but as marketers we can also take a lesson from this. Just about everyone of these people is on the internet, they search Google and they buy products you are selling.

Are your ads and landing pages written to the lowest common denominator?

I just StumbledUpon - Squidoo today.

I had heard about it at some conference 6 months ago and never even looked at it. I was amazed at how many really good high value keywords were available for it. I just started messing around on some products I knew a little bit about and the next thing I knew I had 10-15 really high value keywords and will probably go back and grab more, I was so busy grabbing keywords, I did not even build any content.

Now I am not sure how Google treats these keywords, but I can already envision doing strong anchor text keyword links to some of my websites, plus affiliate links, plus maybe even a little adsense income from Squidoo. From the little research I have done, Squidoo appears to have a fairly decent authoritative rank.

If anyone knows of any tools to automate the grabbing of the sites, I can see some awesome possibilities for marketing. If you can build a tool like this, I will cut you in on the action. This seems very much like something that can generate a little bit of money and if you can automate the process you can make a little bit of money a lot of times.

Might be totally wrong, but this seems exploitable.

I Stumbledupon this while bored. Really surprised I was the Hulk. I have a big temper and am something of a scientist but I am not green, not too nerdy and I have never in my life worn purple pants… If asked to choose I would have picked Captain America as my superhero.

Your results:
You are
Hulk

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

As seen in SEW Amazon and Wikipedia are forming a search engine.

I absolutely love the idea of there being new blood chasing after my advertising dollars. The way I see it, I am going to be better at Search Engine Marketing than my competition because it is all I do. The more complex they make the game by having different engines and interfaces, pricing structures etc, the better I will be able to position myself in various verticals, the more volume I will be able to drive, the higher payouts I will be able to negotiate, the more I will be able to pay to drive traffic. Like a never ending cycle of prosperity.

As strange as it sounds, I want my competition to get so fed up with the time and resources it takes to manage this that they either hire someone in house to do nothing but this, or even better they go out and hire a SEM firm to do it for them.

The in-house guy is going to be green at best, the guys doing this for themselves should be making far more than any company is willing to pay, so this rookie is going to come in and make all kinds of rookie mistakes. He is actually going to listen to his Google rep say “Try raising your bids”. They will re-write ad copy, they will make mistakes that I made 5 years ago. While all of this is happening, I will just crush them and take their customers.

The professional firms are even better. They charge an arm and a leg based upon total spend, and by the very nature of the compensation package, many of the suggestions they make will be questioned by the firms that hired them. Most of these firms have 2-3 SEM rock stars that make a ton of money and are very good at what they do, but those guys focus on the accounts spending millions. That leaves the $36,000 a year, just graduated finance or marketing majors to run the accounts I am competing against. They are green, they are cautious, they have to win confidence and trust, plus they are probably working on 4 or 5 accounts at a time.

The focus for search firms becomes driving traffic. The goal of SEM is to drive conversions, which requires landing page testing, very tight analytics and tracking, and the willingness to intentionally lose money. That is a tough sell to a client who might already be skeptical.

I am a firm believer, that the more complicated this business gets, the more money those who do it for themselves full time will make.

In my mind the worst thing that could happen is for MSN to buy Yahoo, the best thing would be for Amazon/Wiki to roll out a killer product, I want Ebay and IBM and others to get in this game. Lets make it as complex and difficult as possible.

I want to read a hundred more articles just like this one in Forbes.

Like any other entrepreneur, I have had a ton of ideas that I looked at and looked at then just never pursued….

I am not sure if it was a curse or a blessing that the first company I started I ended up being a success, but I have been a diehard entrepreneur since I was 19.

1. Airport Rental Phones - This was back in the days when roaming fees were like $.50 a minute, only business people had phones and there was no internet to speak of. The idea was to have rental kiosks in airports where I would rent a cell phone to travellers for $10 a day plus, $.10 a minute or something like that. I think I found a girlfriend who put out or something instead of pursuing this…. Although someone did do it, I was in an East Coast airport in the early 2000’s and saw a kiosk offering rental phones…By that time, I had a no roaming, 2000 minutes a month phone for $100 a month. Hope they made bank before they went bust.

2. Intelligent parking meters - Went so far as to pay a designer $50,000 to create a prototype. It was the late 90’s and noone had yet heard of wifi and each unit was going to cost $2000 or so, but I wanted to install a smart parking meter that would detect the prescence or abscence of a vehicle. Alert meter maids of violations, reset the meter when a vehicle vacated a spot, as well as offer smart pricing for events etc. Never got off the ground, got distracted with other items, but I still think that this has commercial potential.

3. Real Estate Arbitrage - I am a huge arbitrage player, having been a floor trader, a hedge fund manager, foreign currency arb, a sports betting arbitrageur, a casino bonus claimer, a horse racing arb, plus that new fangled click arbitrage. I went so far as to get SEC approval to offer my convertible bonds with which to purchase triple net real estate. Pay out 5% fixed and buy properties at 8% fixed and just make the middle. Damn lawyers took a year to get this done, bank interest rates went from 2 to 4.5% and the idea was dead on arrival.

4. HOV Lane - Got the brilliant idea that an infrared camera could determine the number of passengers in a car. I wanted to station police officers on overpasses and then capture images with a time stamp and mail out violations on a revenue share basis with municipalities. Only problem was that the heat signature of the engine combined with the 60 MPH+ of the vehicles made the image totally worthless. Military grade camera that I needed to make it work cost $500,000+ which killed my margins.

5.Solar Nation - I wanted to put a solar roof on ever house below the mason dixon line (sorry Yankees, but you dont get enough sunlight) I wanted to finance this with government subsidies and low interest 2nd/3rd mortgages. Then make payments on those mortgages on behalf of the homeowner from trading the electricity. Solar power is produced during the high demand high cost days, I could sell the electricity whoesale and then have houses buy it back at night for lower rates. Other than not having a billion dollars….

6. Door to Door auto refinance - I have a friend who has made millions running door to door crews. The nature of the auto business is such that I can save just about anyone $25-$50 a month on their car payment. Unfortunately, this very low tech business required a really large amount of start-up capital and was unappealing to the 3 auto loan companies I got my foot in the door of. Potential for billion dollar company in a very low tech industry, if anyone has $10 million laying around, I can get you some awesome returns!

I’ve had lots of others that never got much past the 3rd beer of the evening. Everyone of these made it to business plan, pitching investors, spending money on feasibility etc. I still really like the parking meter, solar and door to door ideas, just dont have the right team around me to make that happen. It is kind of hard to get your crack SEO to drop that so he can train people to sell door to door.

Go ahead and have a good laugh, would love to here your comments or your crazy ideas that never got off the ground. If noone else ever reads this blog, I have at least preserved it for posterity, or the next few months, whichever comes first.