Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

Next month, you can hear / see me at SES. I am once again speaking on the Shopping Search Tactics session and will be lurking in the corners at all the events surrounding SES. Hope to see you there.

I'm heading out to New York next week. I'll be speaking on two panels now, both on Thursday. Shopping Search Tactics and the Retailer Forum. Should be a fun time, and I'm looking forward to catching up with some friends. I'm also anticipating having some business deals worked out while I'm there, making for some interesting weeks when I return. :) I guess I'll see how it goes, but boy do I enjoy SES.

Have you ever wondered what a search engine bot looks like? Well, I've met them first hand at Search Engine Strategies , and they're a scary beast. Yahoo's Slurp, Google's Googlebot and others are strong bots, running around and grabbing pages from all over the web. Once trapped, you'll have a hard time getting them to let it go. They'll hold on to it for a very long time, until at some point it either gets banned or it vanishes into the supplemental index. They're truly mean bots. On the other hand, MSNbot (some may say it's a-LiveBot) has the same core concept, but it seems to have missed one important piece. While it still runs around and finds pages, it's got a much tougher time holding on to them. This has led to numerous indexing problems. Hopefully they can get their bot's issues repaired soon, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. They're just too corporate for pincers ( defined as "Noun : roach clip, roach holder - met...

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 having lots of people email me asking for a copy of my slides from the Shopping Search Tactics session at SES last week. Instead of emailing everyone with that, I'm just going to post the presentation here . Any questions on it, let me know.

I had a nice conversation with Darron of WebmasterRadio.FM at SES . He showed me a sneak peek of WebmasterRadio 2.0 and gave me a tour of the analytics he can pull from Akamai , which he had switched to just 8 days prior. It was really cool, and I'm hoping to take a deeper look at using soon (which is why he showed me anything in the first place). Oh, and I won't say anything about those stats, the servers, or the admin panels since Darren said he'd hunt me down and kill me if I did. I don't think that's really the case, but I did see some sensitive stuff that he doesn't want out in public. But all of this leads me to wonder what's going on tonight. As I'm trying to get a podcast of "The Alternative" - specifically the episode from 12/07/2006 (52 MB), it's been working for 2 hours and still shows 12 minutes left. I'd consider that it might be my connection, but I downloaded 800 megs of other podcasts while this was going, and that didn...

My ego got a boost at SES this time (not that it really needed that - ego's don't sell products) when I was called a "True SEO RockStar" by an SEO RockStar . It's rather nice getting noticed by some of the people in the industry, and really validates what I do on a daily basis. Some other take-aways from SES so far. There is a lot of money in domain brokering. I heard about a .net domain that a guy bought for $149k. He also has a domain that is related to our space that he scored that has had multiple offers that he's rejected thrown at him. Podcasting isn't just for playing with any more. It's a real medium that even some nuts-and-bolt sellers are using to increase sales. Very few online businesses can do $1M/month in sales. According to a source, even the Nike.com's of the world fall short of that mark, making what I'm doing at ToolBarn even more impressive. I guess what people have been saying for years is true - the Internet creates a level...

One thing you've got to say about Chicago... this place blows! Literally. And it's always a cold wind on top of that. But I made it here, all the giveaways I have for evens made it in one piece (well, 37 pieces for the socket sets), and I'm all ready and waiting for something to start. While checking in, Bruce Clay welcomed me to the wonderful weather of Chicago. Little did he realize it wasn't much different than home. Prices for Internet access went up from last year. It was $9.99 12 months ago, now it's $12.95/day. I opted for the $59.95 for a week route, since 5 days at $12.95 was a bit more than the weekly rate. In any even, I'm off to meet Allan Dick of Vintage Tub and we'll see what we can accomplish tonight. First order of business: food.

I'm packing my bags tonight to head out to Chicago tomorrow. I'll be speaking on one panel on Thursday. I'm looking forward to seeing some friends, talking shop with someone who understands what I do, and meeting some new people. I tend to get more from the networking than from the sessions now (9 conferences in 3 years can do that), so I'll be watching out for cool people once again. Someday I'll have to show up with my resume polished up, but for now I'm not actively looking. Yet, every time I go there, someone offers me a job. I guess success breeds interest and options. I've also got some really cool giveaways this time, ranging from several 37 piece socket sets for my session to a huge contractor's bag full of hand tools and a Lithium-ion cordless driver for a private party on Monday night. This should be fun. Last time sure was as I gave Chris Sherman of SearchEngineWatch a tool belt . Not only was it fun that he won it, but he actually wanted it...

Once again, I'll be speaking on the Shopping Search Tactics panel at SES . This will be the 6th time on that panel, so I want to change up what I'm saying quite a bit. Nothing is worse than a stale presentation, right? So what I'm doing is starting out with a horror story, then showing how it wasn't a reality because of our involvement with shopping engines. From there, I'll get more into the strategy of optimizing feeds and how testing can make or break a shopping engine campaign. This will be quite different than what I've done in the past, but it seems like from the feedback we've received this is more what people want. Of course, the rest of the session being re-done should help as well. It'll be interesting in any event.

I was reading an article in a magazine about another Nebraska resident that goes by Shoemoney (who I met in San Jose last month - nice guy) and he was talking about diversifying within your niche. This had me scratching my head a bit, then Allan Dick from Vitage Tub and Bath sent me an email. Clawfoot tubs are a niche, so when he gave me an email about diversifying, Jeremy's interview popped into my head and things started clicking for me. Kitchen Sinks What Allan and his guys are doing is expanding within their niche. They have supplies for all sorts of bathroom related products already. They have relationships with Kohler, Whitehaus, American Standard and the like already. These manufacturers also make kitchen products. So what they're doing is expanding into a new area without setting up new vendor relationships. They're selling Kitchen Sinks and faucets at a new website - appropriately named buykitchensinks.com . So now expanding within a niche starts to make sense t...

Last week, I was at SES in San Jose. Each year, Google hosts a little event that they call the Google Dance at their Mountain View headquarters. While I was waiting to get on the bus, I was given a white hat with the letters SEO on the front. It was a nifty gift from some friends at appliedseo.com , so I donned it. Later in the evening, I saw Matt Cutts getting ready to grab some grub in the cafeteria. He walked over to talk to us, and it didn't take him long to notice the hat, and even less time to realize it was hidden text (white on white). He posed for a picture in the hat, but now I'm left wondering. Since I've been caught with my SPAM (hidden text) at the GooglePlex, do I need to file a reinclusion request so I can return next year? If so, should I do it in video format like Matt's latest blog entries? Someone please give me some advice here. :-D

Coming up in San Jose, I'll be speaking at 2 sessions at the annual Search Engine Strategies event. Yes, only 2 this time. It's sort of like a vacation compared to the past few times. Both of the sessions I'll be doing will be on Wednesday, August 9th. Shopping Search Tactics This was the original panel I started on in Feb of 2005. We're going to be making some big changes to the content, and we're even dropping one speaker entirely. (Ok, so she refused to work with us any more... or maybe it was just getting to be too far out of what she's involved with now... you make the call). We've been working on making the presentations more of one coherent thought among 3 speakers, so it should be a much more fluid panel than it's been the past few times. In any case, it's my 5th time on this panel and it's always fun... not to mention it makes me look at our stats again and see what changes have come out recently. Retailer SEM Tactics - 1:30 pm This on...

I'll be speaking at 3 sessions in the upcoming SES show. I spoke for the first time 1 year ago in NYC at the Shopping Search Tactics session. In San Jose later that year, I repeated at the Shopping Search Tactics and also did the Vertical Creep session. In Chicago, it was the 3rd round of Shopping Search along with a Search Ad Buyer's Forum. Coming up this time in New York? Well, I'll be busier, and I'll miss a few that looked fun. 1) Shopping Search Tactics (4th time) 2) Search Ad Buyer's Forum (2nd time) 3) Retailer SEM Tactics (New session) So, what will I be missing? The Search Ad Buyer's Forum is up against a few good ones. Eric Ward is someone I always enjoy hearing in the Link Building Basics. Since I've seen that one already several times, I'm not going to worry about missing that. Practical Copyright & Trademark Guidance for Webmasters and SEMs Your competitor is bidding on your trademarked name. Some splogger is profiting off of your cop...

So, I went to SES in San Jose again. What a blast. Not only were the sessions great, but Yahoo rented Paramount Great American for a night. After that, it was the Ask Jeeves get together. The next night was at the Googleplex. Wednesday was Webmasterradio.fm, text-link-ads, MonsterCommerce, and Incisive Media. While the parties were great, the highlight for me was presenting at 2 sessions. The first session I presented at was moderated by none other than Danny Sullivan. He had predicted in 2003 that "Invisible tabs" would be used to show users the content they really wanted. Well, now it's 2005 and this is starting to happen, so this session was showing how it's happening and what the impact is for Search Marketing. Greg Jarboe, president of SEOPR, started out by showing some of the ways in which news items (his specialty) were starting to show up above the organic results. Some of the engines even show pictures of the person in the article. He showed example after ex...

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...