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I just got around to reading the LatLong blog where they brought my attention to the fact that Lexington is now covered by Google Street View. I wish I’d have seen the camcars.

Sure Enough, you can now tour Lexington with your trusty mouse. At here’s Main and Broadway, and below that the Main St. Library. In addition, many other areas were added as well.

MA: Springfield
NY: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse
NJ: Newark
VA: Virginia Beach
NC: Charlotte, Winston-Salem
SC: Columbia, Greenville
GA: Atlanta
FL: Boca Raton, Cape Coral, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Sarasota, West Palm Beach
AL: Huntsville
MS: Jackson

TN: Knoxville

KY: Lexington, Louisville
OH: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo
MI: Ann Arbor
MO: St. Louis
KS: Topeka
NE: Lincoln
OK: Oklahoma City, Tulsa
NV: Reno

They also added more parks, which is cool if you’re planning to visit

Everglades National Park (Florida)
Florida Keys
Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming)
Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming/Montana)
Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)
Joshua Tree National Park (California)
Death Valley National Park (California)
Lassen Volcanic National Park (California)
Sequoia National Park (California)
Lake Tahoe (California/Nevada)

I saw this today on Google. It is for a Google Adwords keyword in a hypercompetitive marketplace… with a $12.56 average CPC (cost per click). The advertiser was hoping to use dynamic keyword insertion. Instead they did dynamic money wastin’ ad this can definitely affect their Quality Score.

The business cash advance industry has some of the highest keyword prices on the web, and dynamic keyword insertion could definitely help you get ahead… But if your success or failure depends on high performance I recommend you set up and test your google adwords setups extremely carefully, or have a 3rd party review your campaigns occasionally.

Plug:

Scott Clark can review your Google Adwords campaigns for errors, waste and missing opportunity. Just click over here to contact me about helping.

I’ve not written a post for a while that just draws attention to another discussion. But I thought Mark Jackson’s two articles from the past week or so were absolutely brilliant. Mark - look me up sometime, I’d love to buy you a beer.

It also rekindled my thinking that I need to finally change the name of my firm. You all know what a joy doing that is, especially when you have strong search rank for your old domain name.

I hear this all the time

“I’m a designer and I don’t really do I.T.”
“I’m more of an I.T. person, I don’t really do design.”
“I looked at competitor sites and built something similar.”
“We don’t really look at our site’s statistics much.”
…and on….

I’m old. I’m blessed (cursed?) with a background EXTENSIVE in both I.T., Design, and Search Marketing. What I realized even with the different viewpoints is that SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is far more important than any pixel tweaking or snazzy coding ever was or would be to the growth of a web business. I imagine I see the world like those flies that have 100s of lenses each giving a slightly different angle on things.

In 1998 when I started, I was all about web design and meta tags, but over the next 3-4 years, through 2002, I did more and more real search marketing. By 2004, it was almost full-time, a split between organic SEO, PPC, and landing page optimization. Design was done as a necessary vehicle to achieve search rank - sort of a super-landing-page project (in my mind at least.) Site Creations, Inc. doesn’t fit anymore. I’m going to have to rebrand soon to be faithful to this change.

I feel that no design should be started without a true SEM expert present at the meeting, and throughout design. This introduces confusion into my sales activity, of course. Most people come to me wanting web design, often for abysmal product offerings. I want to help, but unless they have a great offer, and truly understand how conversion-driven design works, I have a hard time staying enthused unless we can address some of the underlying issues first. I thought David Rodnitzky did a nice job of summing up one way this can work:

….frequently pitch clients on a combination of ongoing SEM consulting and a one-time usability tune-up. Again, this is a win-win situation – I get more of the client’s business by charging for the usability assessment, the client gets a much better converting Web site out of the deal, and we both end up satisfied with the increased success of the search engine marketing campaign….

….it’s important as a consultant to try to bring these folks at least a little closer to earth and establish realistic and clearly understood goals at the beginning of the relationship….

I realize that I.T. and design skills are both vital to the success of many sites - features, functions, branding, and identity are naturally very important. But when “expertise-egos” get in the way, you lose. When that feature is taken too far for no good reason, or when that customer-driven design compromise makes you feel defensive, it’s time to hand over the keys.

Does your non-profit send less than 10,000 messages per month?  Even with the growth of social media use , such as facebook groups, myspace, blogging and twitter by non-profits, most still use email heavily to keep people in the loop - and emails have been shown to convert to action better.

So if you’re looking for a good way to get your non-profit newsletter out the door with a minimum of hassle? Well this deal is going to be sweet.

Here’s the deal:

Any verified non-profit account or sub-account participating in our new program will receive 10,000 email credits in their account. Any unused free credits expire at the end of the month, but never fear, the account will be refreshed with 10,000 new credits at the beginning of each new month. Any non-profit mailings over 10,000 credits will still receive the 15% discount.

To sign up:

• If you’re NOT a Vertical Response Customer you’ll need to sign up.
• Fill out a the VR Non Profit Application form and fax it back to (415) 808-2480.
• Allow at least 3 days for approval.
• Vertical Response will Contact You.

If you ARE an existing Vertical Response nonprofit customer you only need send an email to nonprofits@verticalresponse.com and they will start the program for your next purchase.

If you have questions regarding the status of your application, call VR at (866) 683-7842 6am-6pm PST. Don’t call/email me about it, because I won’t know.

Note: The free offer is only for the excellent Vertical Response email marketing product, not for any consulting services.

Image by DryIcons used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

This was a lot of fun this week, and I was thrilled to be chatting (yelling - the bar was a bit noisy) with folks about blogging, social media and search at Social Media Club Louisville. This group was especially (and refreshingly) straightforward about what works - no bull. It gets tiresome hearing blog-cheerleaders go on all day without any real direction. Also some great advice about writing evergreen content versus news, about post frequency, and link building. Here are the best videos from the event, which you can hear just fine :-) On the video.  Also check out the photos from the gathering.

• Chris Pearson - Personified.com (Best Damn Blog On The Planet)
• Rob May - Coconut Headsets.com (formerly of BusinessPundit.com)
• Michelle Jones - ConsumingLouisville.com
• David Finch - DavidSFinch.com, BusinessPundit.com
• Moderated by - Jason Falls, SocialMediaExplorer.com

I just put together a new business card for this years’ conference season. I stuck with the steam-theme this time, but made it feel more like an antique club card. They’re nice and glossy.

I hope they’re here by SMX Social Media. If not my old card will do, and Sphinncon or SMX Advanced will be the first time I use them. Signature blurred.

If you’d like one of these, and you’re not in search marketing, let me know and I’ll share the photoshop template. You’ll need the oldtype typewriter truetype font.

ps: on real version my signature is filled in.

What do you think?