Archive for October, 2006

If you received SPAM postal mail from listingcorp.com, please don’t send a check unless you contacted them first. They are contacting clients with invoices for “Website Listing Service” invoices of $65.00. Yeah Right. Please hire a reputable SEO/SEM firm for your business by checking in one of the SEO/SEM directories on-line. Naturally I’d like you to hire me, but here are some other great places to check.

• http://www.seoconsultants.com/ Find people by region
• Yahoo Web Directory for SEO Over 300 listings for USA.

Consider the members of the Google Adwords Professionals program and Yahoo Ambassador program for Pay Per Click. Make sure to check on their status.

While few agreed-on certification programs exist yet for SEO, some are emerging. The difficulty is that the industry changes so fast that most education programs are out-of-date within months of inception.

Wal-Mart has began to phase out its smiley face on walmart.com in order to become more Trendy. Perhaps they’re grumpy because many say they got caught red-handed sponsoring bloggers who (true or not) weren’t believed to be real people (I call them bluppets.) The word “flog” is now becoming a household phrase for the practice. That could make anyone frown.

Related: Last Year Kentucky dumped the smiley face license plate (praise the Lord). I donated Pay-Per-Click and organic marketing consultation to sharetheroadky.com (site did its duty, now off-line) to help get their awesome new plate on our two cars (but the ones who really did the work was Allison Smith listen to interview here from last Summer - to get double the number of applications needed and now there are over 3500 plates on the road. Those of us with it never have to see that stupid smiley face on our cars again, and hopefully more bike and running trails will open.

Hard not to smile over that one.

Adwords and other Pay per click ads make a promise that the landing page needs to keep. We all see the ads for spammy sites on a regular basis. We know how to skip them. Google’s system just raises their minimum bids until they go away. Others have found many more examples.

But the type you see here is worse than the usual “free ipod” listing. On those, the landing page usually gives you enough information that your spam-radar moves your left finger towards the back-button of your browser for a quick get-away. Bam you’re out… you may grumble a bit, but you take a sort of perverse satisfaction in knowing you just cost them PPC money on a no-sale.

Furthermore… the ‘rapid-back-button’ action will queue Google to raise minimum bids for this advertiser as a part of their quality index system, making it harder and harder for them to do business in adwords with such a lousy offer/landing page.

No this Amazon example is worse because:

• You don’t realize they are going to dupe you until much later in the process (check out)
• You’re unlikely to “back out” - so they don’t get the quality-index penalty.
• You shop the entire site (e.g. spent valuable time) with the promise in your head… I’m going to get free shipping and no tax… as you make mental comparisons with products you’ve seen on other sites… and the let-down when tax shows up is all-the-more damaging to the brand.

So, intentional or not, it ticked me off, and I will scrutinize future Amazon adwords ads with a new level of distrust from here on.

I have to admit, even as a Gen-X’r I love 50’s diners. I grew up in a small town where I caught the “tail end” of the diner era, just before fast food killed them. We used to have one on Richmond Road called Rockabilly Cafe and were regulars. It’s a simpler food, and, the retro theme breaks us out of the hotspot-entrenched digital world that we work in each day. But Rockabilly closed and the much more hip and modern Panera Bread Co. took over. Ah progress.

I always thought Rockabilly was busy, but their managers had accounting backgrounds and must have seen something different in the monthly receipts - after all, it’s very hard to run an independent restaurant. I would have paid more for my meal to keep the place going but I know most wouldn’t. I also like their other gig, the Common Grounds coffee shop, but that’s another post.

Lexington has the Parkette Drive-in, which maintains some of that flavor - but we also try to break out of the car culture a little when dining as a family, and frankly eating in the car ain’t quite the thrill when you’re in a mini-van. To sit around a chrome-edged table with a juke box playing, sipping milk shakes straight from the blender cup is much more fun.

Johnny Rockets seems to be a well-honed system that is typical of a mature franchise. The closest are in the Cincinnatti area and now there’s one at Newport on the Levee near the Aquarium. I am hoping that one will soon be in Lexington - perhaps downtown or near campus. There’s nothing like it now. All I know is that we’ll be there.

Thought I’d show off the Riders in the Sky email poster I put together for their email campaign. They are incredibly entertaining and deserve something special to advertise the show. Photo is from Riders in the Sky.

I have been looking at the Omakase links that Amazon Associates (Affiliate) program is putting on the left side of my blog entries (upd: have removed) and trying to figure out how they’ve decided what books to put on. Some of them are no-brainers. Others are a bit more clever…
Here’s a snapshot of a link set they had up on my site with my best guess of how it got there.

For me, these links didn’t work well, but I’d like to hear how they worked out for others. Let me know!