Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

I can't tell you how many times I see ads like below: Sorry, but resultes isn't a word. If you don't spell check your ads, how do you think you'll ever attract an intelligent customer? Or, is that the point... a fool and their money?

I got interviewed alongside Allan Dick at SES in Chicago last week by WebProNews.com, and they posted the video on their site. Go ahead and give it a watch. I'm sure I said something stupid somewhere, but I think it shows my long-term strategy a bit.

I've been following the v7ndotcom stupidity - I mean SEO contest - just a bit. Every now and then I see a link to the search results . I just came across one of the best ads yet based upon those keywords. Sergey Says Eat my V7ndotcom Elursrebmem ! www.isthisyourcat.com Obviously poking fun with the name of one of Google's founders, but it sure made me laugh. Very simple and to the point, which took someone with a warped sense of humor to start in the first place. Kudos.

We have an affiliate that just started creating some content, which we encourage. However, they started bidding against us on Overture and getting quite a few sales from that. While it isn't a problem them getting sales, when it's sales that we would have gotten already (same keywords on Overture) it raises a question with me about the real value of this affiliate. The other question I have is this: would they be seeing enough traffic for it to pay off? Granted, these keywords are mostly under 20 cents per click, but even a 20% conversion rate means they need to make almost $1.00 per sale (if people are following their links in the first place). They don't rank in any of the 3 major search engines, so we aren't competing in that market yet, but they originally copied most of our homepage as their homepage and now they're paying for traffic that we normally buy. Sure, we can afford to get the #1 position back from them, but the real question is why should I have to b...