Questions for your potential SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Firm
Picking the right search engine marketing (SEM) firm is hard. The quality of service and performance varies wildly, but the marketing materials often make it difficult to separate the experts from the pretenders.
And if you are a SEM you might want to read this post and try to answer these questions for yourself. Do a little research and prepare the answers and take them to your potential client. This work is what will separate you from the herd. It will also insure that once you have the new client you don’t get fired on your day off. (Sorry Art)
Updates to some older Posts
Nothing too crazy going on here today, so I figured I’d give a few updates to some older posts. Probably the thing I most want to write about was my Microsoft Live Cashback Search experience. In the post I talked about how great it was, and how I found what I was looking for through Live, bought it now on ebay, paid using pay-pal, all that. Turns out I did qualify for the cashback I just have to wait til Feb. 1st to get it. And for those of you keeping track I made the purchase around Dec. 5th so we’re talking about almost 60 days I’ve been waiting. Quick lesson yes I got an awesome camera at an awesome deal with awesome cashback, I just had to wait 60 days. So basically it was no different than a rebate form, and wait, other than the fact that it was advertised as being instant cashback. Will I use the service again, maybe if all the stars line up, but I will definitely not go out of my way to use the system.
PPC Flow Chart
This flowchart offers tips on how to set up a pay per click search engine marketing campaign.
* Many of the boxes are clickable, and link off to useful tools or content that add further explaination.
* This advice assumes you start with an account on Google.com, and then take the best parts and syndicate them to Yahoo! and Microsoft. In some cases you might have more profit margin on the other search engines than on Google.
* You do not need to do every option on each line, they are just tips and ideas that should work in many cases.
* Based on your feedback we are up for making further improvements to this flow chart. 
A Link Building Exercise
I figured I’d start the new Year off with a little link building. So today I will create outbound links to anybody who wants one. Just sign-up for my rss feed anf then tell me the url, the text of the link, and whether it is safe for work or not. That’s it. I will post the links here to start, once the post is up and running and generating a little bit of traffic I will post a twitter message with a link to the url for all my twitter followers.
Search Results Page: Where you want to be
Consider an airline, a topic I’m familiar with because I spend a good part of my life on the flying metal of one airline or another. In today’s hypercompetitive world, all airlines are struggling to differentiate themselves, but price is always an overriding concern. So although they might not advertise themselves going head to head with a low cost operation like Southwest, they have to be competitive on the same routes that Southwest flies. Price is the given. From there, airlines distance themselves from Southwest based on frequent flier perks, cabin amenities, friendliness of staff or some other factor.
