The holidays are upon us!  For most of us, this means more time with family, delicious food, and some great celebrations.  For anyone with an online presence, it can also mean you get some coal in your stocking in addition to increased revenues from holiday spending.  The coal I speak of is spam.  And in this season, the spam is not only coming to your email, but to your blog and website as well.

You can look forward to some more spam in your email, advertising their normal fare of male enhancement products and long lost relative scams.  If you have a website that is interactive and allows commenting, you will probably find that you are suddenly getting a lot more comments--comments that have nothing to do with your business and everything to do with Louis Vuitton purses, discount Prada sunglasses, or jerseys for your favorite sports team.  You may notice that these comments have various embedded HTML codes for links back to the site they are trying to optimize, such as <a href="http://www.getyoufound.com">Get You Found is Awesome!</a>  This type of comment, if approved by the administrator of the site, will create a link back to the spammers site, optimizing them for a targeted keyword. 

Whether you are marketing for small businesses or large ones, Facebook tabs can be a great way to gain fan interaction as well as get new fans.  Here are three great examples of Facebook tabs that have been used creatively for media promotions.  

There is a reason why people need pay per click management. It is simply too easy to set up a Google Adwords (or other PPC) campaign incorrectly or inefficiently.

I recently took over a campaign for a client who had put around 200 keywords into two different ad groups with a total of two ads between them. It is a lot faster to set up a campaign by entering all of your keywords into one ad group like this, but it can really hurt your campaign.

Everyone knows that word of mouth endorsements are generally the most effective and most desired form of advertising. They are free, generally self propagating and are also the most effective long term form of advertising in any medium. This is due to the generally accepted idea that people listen to, and trust, their friends.
Here are two excellent books that you can get on the subject:
Word of Mouth Advertising Online & Off by Lynn Thorne

Many people think that during a recession or a down economy the best thing to do is to cut back advertising spend.  Looking around online will show that some businesses are shifting or increasing marketing spends - (this is actually how many companies got to where they are today as evidenced by . Look a little deeper and you will see that online advertising companies are seeing steady increases in business despite the downturn in the US economy. Why is this the case and what does it mean?

I run into acronyms a lot in the tech industry. Everyone assumes that you must know what all of them stand for since you are also in the tech industry. Other industries sometimes make this mistake as well. This actually relates very well to keyword marketing research and search engine optimization.

The other day a client complained to me about the money they were spending on their pay per click campaign.

At this point in time, her budget was only $1,000 a month for a national campaign that was performing well. Does anyone else know how you can reach a national audience several times a day at targeted times with a trackable return on investment for only $1,000?

You would not believe how often I run into this:

Clients want to optimize their site for the products that they sell in their brick and mortar store. But... they don’t sell them online for whatever reason.

Why not?