Year: 2013

Avoiding SEO Mistakes and Finding the Right Agency

Great post that highlights a few of the mistakes that companies make when having to deal with SEO, but this is the highlight:

The SEO Mistakes That Wiped Out 80% of My Organic Traffic: “The best marketing and SEO is done by a committed in-house team that builds real relationships with others in their niche. And if you’re marketing your first site, I strongly recommend doing your own SEO and marketing to learn the ropes and build your experience. If you ever do decide to outsource it in the future – or hire your own in-house team – having the knowledge from doing it yourself will be crucial to properly manage the process.”

We do SEO for many of our clients. They trust us with this very crucial and necessary facet of doing business, or just having a presence, online. However, I’ve had great fun and success working with companies where I ended up teaching an in-house team or person how to manage their own SEO and eventually their affiliate management etc.

In the long run, the web becomes a better place when agency and marketers stop trying to keep an Oz-like curtain up in order to keep the income flowing in. Sure, we have to pay our bills but the clients will come since what we’re offering is good.

It’s much more satisfying to work with a company (large or small) as it learns and grows along with this constantly evolving web. We much prefer those types of clients than the “set it and forget it” types.

Affiliate Marketing After Coupons

Affiliate marketing as a mainstream channel is something we talked about a great deal in 2006 and 2007 when the industry was largely dominated by either email marketing or coupon marketing.

It has been fascinating to watch the combination of social media and content marketing really transform the paradigm of affiliate marketing from faceless high volume publishers to a more transparent stream of traffic and clicks. That’s been a positive development:

Affiliate Marketing Going ‘Mainstream’ Says VigLink CEO Roup: “Roup adds, ‘[Affiliate marketing] has gone from coupons to content. Though coupon sites were dominating up until a few years ago, what you’ve seen since that time is mainstream publishers, who deal in real content are starting to delve into the affiliate world.’  Huffington Post and Wanelo are among the larger media companies using VigLink products today which, he asserts, ‘proves’ that affiliate marketing is less on the fringes than ever.”

More to the point, the idea that the affiliate chain can include compensation beyond the last-click has been a hot button topic for over a decade now. Roup speaks on that as well:

But we suspect that coupon sites intercept a lot of the value that our publishers are creating and that the coupon site gets the credit. At this point, publishers are not compensated for any click other than the last one. We are working to try and understand that more deeply. Ideally, we would like to compute that value and be able to deliver as promised to the publisher. I wouldn’t say we’re there yet. We are doing some fairly detailed experiments with some merchants though.

It’s interesting to see the notion of affiliate marketing becoming both mainstream as well as realizing the pitfalls of having a core publishing center based on coupling. As the economies and scales of affiliates and performance marketing channels continue to evolve in the next few years (with the steady rise of social media and location based advertising), I suspect we’ll see a very real and solvent affiliate space that need not rely on coupons.

However, what does that look like?

“…parked a big blue box on the rug.”

My favorite line from my favorite episode of Dr Who:

Doctor Who “The Impossible Astronaut” (Episode 6.1) | Planet Claire Quotes: “The Doctor: Mr. President. That child just told you every you need to know, but you weren’t listening. Never mind, though, ’cause the answer’s yes. I’ll take the case. Fellas, the guns? Really? I just walked into the highest security office in the United States, parked a big blue box on the rug. You think you can just shoot me?”

At Least Give a Disclosure, LinkShare

You’d think there would be … I don’t know … a disclosure near and/or at the top of a post on a blog such as MarketingLand clarifying the author’s intended purpose (or at least job) here:

Managing The Migration To A New Affiliate Network: “The topic of affiliate network migration is at the top of the agenda for a lot of advertisers these days. Whether a transition is driven by the urgency around the closing of the Google Affiliate Network, or you’ve bandied about the idea of switching networks for some time, moving to a new network requires thoughtful, strategic planning. Otherwise, you may find yourself hopping across different networks while you disrupt your brand, sales and publisher relationships.”

Kinda scummy, Scott.

Breaking Up with Google

Great cautionary tale for these early days of cloud computing and new forms of marketing/advertising…

Dumped! by Google : The Last Word On Nothing: “I returned to the Google fold with eyes wide open to my responsibilities as a user. In relationship terms, I am no longer monogamous. I store my data on other servers maintained by providers like Evernote, Dropbox, and WordPress, and the cloud is my standby, not my steady. I’ve swapped convenience for control: I back up my email and what I care about most on physical hard drives.

I’m also back in touch with my first love—spiral notebooks. Unlike Google, they will never come close to containing the world’s information, so no one but me will ever want to access them. And to encrypt my data, I just rely on my handwriting.”

Again, be like the fox.

Harrelson Corps Summer Internship

We’re looking for a great intern or two (or three) to help us out with day-to-day operations of Harrelson Agency, Harrelson Press, Harrelson Racing, Harrelson Autos and/or Thinking.FM.

It’s a fun role for a young person to fill either in our Columbia, SC offices or even virtually if they’re tech savvy enough. Plus, you’ll gain incredible experience and have some great references and lines on your resume for the future.

Here’s the formal announcement but feel free to email sam@harrelson.co for more details or if you have any questions…

“Harrelson Agency and Harrelson Press are offering a joint summer internship for high school or college students interested in design, publishing, and where those two fields intersect. The internship period will run for six weeks beginning July 8, 2013. The pay will be a stipend of $500.

Interns are expected to maintain a professional attitude and work schedule, which includes working remotely, meeting with clients, and individual weekly progress meetings. The internship will include website coding, copyediting, e-book design, and other related services.

Interested applicants should submit a 500-750 word bio and/or a link to your blog or Twitter profile to merianna@harrelson.co for consideration.

Let’s get started!
Sam Harrelson and Merianna Neely”

Harrelson Corps Summer Internship

We’re looking for a great intern or two (or three) to help us out with day-to-day operations of Harrelson Agency, Harrelson Press, Harrelson Racing, Harrelson Autos and/or Thinking.FM. Specifically, we’d like to find folks interested in learning about indy marketing agencies or programming or copy-editing or podcasting or SEO or any combination of those.

It’s a fun role for a young person to fill either in our Columbia, SC offices or virtually (we use FaceTime, Skype, HipChat, Basecamp, Google Apps as backbones) if they’re tech savvy enough.

Here’s the formal announcement but feel free to email sam@harrelson.co for more details or if you have any questions…

“Harrelson Agency and Harrelson Press are offering a joint summer internship for high school or college students interested in design, publishing, and where those two fields intersect. The internship period will run for six weeks beginning July 8, 2013. The pay will be a stipend of $500.

Interns are expected to maintain a professional attitude and work schedule, which includes working remotely, meeting with clients, and individual weekly progress meetings. The internship will include website coding, copy-editing, e-book design, and other related services.

Interested applicants should submit a 500-750 word bio and/or a link to your blog or Twitter profile to merianna@harrelson.co for consideration.

Let’s get started!
Sam Harrelson and Merianna Neely”

And You Will Have a Window in Your Head…

Google’s announcements at its IO conference this week remind me of my favorite poem…

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

In a world of anticipatory “search”, be like the fox indeed.

Printing from My iPhone and iPad

I love my Epson XP-400. I picked mine up at Best Buy but you can find them on Amazon (linked) for about the same price of $70.

It’s not a fantastic picture printer, but for crisp documents or archives or tickets etc, it’s all I need for my home office and our Harrelson Corps office.

The biggest benefit is that for $70, we can print straight from an iPad or iPhone just by connecting the printer to the wifi network in the office. It’s magical to print a document or contract from your iPhone in five seconds.

Secondly, with the printer’s support for Google Cloud Print (takes about 2 mins to setup), you can print any Google Doc (from a laptop or device) from anywhere in the world as long as you’re logged in to a Google account or domain (harrelson.co in our case). That’s awesome.

We don’t print a ton of things at Harrelson Corps, but having the ability just to tap a button on the iPad and make it happen makes me feel like I’m finally living in the future.

Highly suggest.

How to Heat a Soap Mug When Using a Safety Razor

I’ll post later on why I love my Merkur razor, but this is the greatest tip I’ve ever read on how to get the soap part of using a razor like this just right (found deep in the Amazon reviews of my next brush)…

Amazon.com: Parker Safety Razor 100% Silvertip Badger Bristle Shaving Brush (Chrome Handle) and Free Shaving Brush Stand: Health & Personal Care: “Everyone has his own method, but if you’re new to this game, here’s mine: Fill half the basin of your sink with the hottest water you can get out of the tap, and place a mug full of this water in the basin. (this allows the mug itself to heat up, which will keep the lather warmer longer.) Let the mug and the brush soak in this water for about two minutes. Squeeze most of the water out of the brush, and swirl your brush in some shaving soap, 4-5 rotations, like you’re mixing with a paint brush. No need to overdo it. Then empty most of the hot water out of the mug, saving just enough water to coat the bottom of the mug, and work up a warm, thick lather in the mug, adding water as needed. Then come back and write a review of the best shave of your life.”

Shaving snobbery is one of my little joys in life. The process takes way too much time in the morning and is expensive upfront but the joy it brings to my life and my pocketbook (do you know how much those Gillette blades really cost??) make me happy before work.

On-Demand Marketing

Not totally on-board with everything here (by 2020 we won’t be tapping things to enable NFC connections nor will companies be texting us when we already have their app installed on our device or wearable), but this is an thought-provoking overview of just how much the web and coming improvements in consumer technology and IT infrastructure (more agile databases in the cloud etc) will change marketing itself in the next decade:

The coming era of ‘on-demand’ marketing | McKinsey & Company: “What’s next? Deploying tools that rapidly assemble databases of every customer contact with a brand, companies will need to push every customer-facing function to work together and form an integrated view of consumer decision journeys. With longitudinal pictures of customers’ touches and their outcomes, companies can model total costs per action, find the most effective decision-journey patterns, and spot points of leakage. As more contacts become digitized—and they will—the data will gradually get easier to create.”

Mobile is the linchpin of the user experience in 2015-2025, but we can’t forget wearables, such as Google Glass, and how much those will impact marketing as well.

via @similarweb on Twitter.

Uncle Herbert’s Autobiography

My Aunt Lib died this past Fall and while we were preparing for her funeral at her home, I happened upon my Uncle Herbert’s old wallet in a closet. I had to take a peek inside and found this piece of blue paper folded up…

2013 05 06 18 53 32

It was his autobiography.

I wish I had known more of this story when he was alive…

Here is the transcription with a few links that I’ve thrown in for my own benefit:

====

Uncle Herbert’s Autobiography

Born in Florence 1920 one block from American Bakery. Worked on farm. Worked Tyler Veener Mill, Roofing Co. Atlantic Coast Line Railroad at Station and in round house. Fueled first diesel train that came into Florence.

Joined Navy March 1942. Went to Newport Rhode Island Boot Camp then to Chicago Navy Pier Aviation Mechanical School about 10 months.

Then to Phila for Catapult School, then west coast waiting for ship corridor.

On ship went to Honolulu. Changed ships then to Marshall and Gilbert Islands in combat their. Liscomb Bay sunk. Then over Equator and then to invade Guam and Saipan. Typhoon on way 3 days.

5 battle stars.

To states for discharge after war. Started working at Koppers Wood Preserving after layed off at R.R. then back in Navy 1950 for 18 months Korea War on USS Saipan.

Then back to Koppers Co.

Heart attack in 1978. Retired 1980. 5 operation and 3 heart attacks one of them bypass.

Built 2 houses.

No Teachers

We’re pretty amazing creatures…

Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves | MIT Technology Review: “Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. ‘I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,’ Negroponte said. ‘Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.’”

Origami iPad

I love the Incase Origami case/stand…

Review: The Origami Workstation for iPad — Shawn Blanc: “Well, why not just use the iPad’s smart cover, and carry around the keyboard by itself? I’m glad you asked. For one the Workstation allows me to use the iPad with keyboard on my lap (for times I’m sitting in a conference room or an airport terminal). Secondly, the Workstation offers a sturdier support for the iPad than the Smart Cover. Thus allowing me to press the Home button and navigate the touch screen without using two hands to keep the iPad from tipping over. And if you prefer to type with the iPad in portrait mode, you can do that no problem.”

I’ve been using an Origami case for my Apple keyboard exactly the same way as Shawn (here’s my setup that I take to the office and school, complete with the same Jawbone Jambox) since last May. It’s rugged, stylish and does what it says it does.

Not bad for $30.

Google Now and All

One of the best posts that Jason has made in a long while…

Google’s Fiber Takeover Plan Expands: Will Kill Cable & Carriers   – LAUNCH –: “Google is going to kill AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and the cable companies. Kids don’t talk on the phone and they don’t have a ton of money. If they can be reasonably sure they’ll have a wifi network, then they are simply not going to sign up for AT&T or Verizon.

It’s game over… in five short years.”

So true and yet another reason I’m trying to offshore more of my digital life away from Google:

“Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.”

Be like the fox indeed.

Google Kills Its Affiliate Network

In yet another round of Google Spring Cleaning surprises, GAN hits the chopping block (to the surprise of many in the affiliate marketing world including myself):

An update on Google Affiliate Network | Google Affiliate Network: “Our goal with Google Affiliate Network has been to help advertisers and publishers improve their performance across the affiliate ecosystem. Cost-per-action (CPA) marketing has rapidly evolved in the last few years, and we’ve invested significantly in CPA tools like Product Listing Ads, remarketing and Conversion Optimizer. We’re constantly evaluating our products to ensure that we’re focused on the services that will have the biggest impact for our advertisers and publishers.

To that end, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Google Affiliate Network and focus on other products that are driving great results for clients.”

Certainly, this isn’t along the lines of a Google Reader surprise (let down) but it does provide an interesting high water mark for what was once the promise of open-web marketing.

It’s no secret that the rise of the “social web” with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ etc has led to traffic flow and even content production being offloaded from once-independent web publishers and sites (affiliates) to respective walled silos. In turn, these silos have realized that co-opting the affiliate model within their own walls to drive advertising revenue.

Therefore, my biggest concern in this is the further consolidation of web content production (especially advertising based) and what it means for small to medium publishers and website owners. Whereas publishers had a chance to compete and thrive and be seen as a valuable channel to advertisers in 2005 or so, that business model is rapidly realizing its own end-of-life.

It’s a strange new world for affiliate marketers and this is only another phase of what started in 2006.

CourseSmart and Dumbing Down Teaching

I had to wince to make it through this article and visibly groaned when I read this:

Teacher Knows if You’ve Done the E-Reading – NYTimes: “CourseSmart is owned by Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other major publishers, which see an opportunity to cement their dominance in digital textbooks by offering administrators and faculty a constant stream of data about how students are doing.

In the old days, teachers knew if students understood the course from the expressions on their faces. Now some classes, including one of Mr. Guardia’s, are entirely virtual. Engagement information could give the colleges early warning about which students might flunk out, while more broadly letting teachers know if the whole class is falling behind.

Eventually, the data will flow back to the publishers, to help prepare new editions.”

As a teacher, I definitely understand the well meaning intention behind something like CourseSmart. I use Khan Academy a great deal with my 7th grade students for similar intentions.

However, the reason I use Khan for reinforcing math skills we’re discussing or for enrichment is to increase a student’s “number sense” and basic quantitative reasoning skills. We have conversations about their work on Khan, we do track progress a little (though it’s not used as the basis for a grade) and I am able to see where a particular student might be struggling, bored, competent or proficient on certain math skills that we’re covering. It’s a handy tool just like worksheets or pencil and paper. In the end, my job as a teacher is to converse with each student and see where they are in their math work on an individual basis. Khan along with many other tools helps me do that more authentically. I don’t “helicopter” students but want them to realize that they can take charge of their own learning for learning’s wonderful sake.

Khan, Code Academy, iTunes U, Coursera etc have made me a much better teacher over the last three years because I fundamentally believe that conversation (meaning more than verbal but conversation in the truest sense of the word possible) with an individual student is still the best test.

Nonetheless, what CourseSmart is doing from a teaching point of view is taking something like reading and making it into a quantitative model of “engagement.” Rather than a student being able to engage with material that suits them best, they’re being pigeon holed into an algorithmic expectation of highlighting and note taking in a way that up-ends the teaching process. Services like CourseMart are yet another example that boxed one-size fits all education at any level does not work.

Plus, the connection to corporate edu is so disturbing. Pearson and McGraw-Hill have become the Facebook and Google of education with their takeover of the education cloud.

Trying to Fix What Is Not Broken

Sad and true across the landscape of education (public and private)…

“Teacher’s resignation letter: ‘My profession … no longer exists’” – Washington Post: “My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic “assessments”) or grade their own students’ examinations. The development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom.

Links and the Persistance of Memories

Doc Searls riffing off of Dave Winer’s post about the history of podcasts here…

Doc Searls Weblog · Why durable links matter: “We can find these historic details because links have at least a provisional permanence to them. They are, literally, paths to locations. Thanks to those, we can document the history we make, and learn from it as well.”

As usual, Searls says some incredibly important things (and gives some great links such as Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost) in a small space.

However, as a middle school teacher I constantly try to reinforce the idea of not just “portfolio spaces” (each of our middle schoolers has a blog that they get to design, set up, create etc) and why links on blogs and personal spaces are so important to the health of the web. It’s a difficult concept for anyone to understand. Why worry about links to things when we have Google for information, Facebook for social, Instagram for pictures and Spotify/YouTube for music?

Doc points out the best reason possible… permanence. The “HT” part of HTML and HTTP are important signals as to how and why the web exists. To be able to look back and learn or reflect on information that we create as we encounter this new digital landscape is so important.

For example, I didn’t know Allen Stern personally but he was a rather important figure when I started to get involved in blogging and what has become the social web. His blog CenterNetworks was a constant source of both information and traffic for my own marketing blog (CostPerNews) at the time. I was saddened to learn of his death late last night and went on a trip down memory lane to see what I could find from my own linking to Allen. Sadly, most of it has eroded by my own actions over time. I’ve started blogs and either sold them or abandoned them. I had to rely on the wonderful Archive.org WayBackMachine. However, I wish I still had that content that I produced by linking to his work or thinking on what he thought up first.

Instead, I’ve posted in walled gardens that cease to exist or are inaccessible to the outside web. I’m more guilty than anyone for relying on services like Twitter or Facebook to deliver content when I should be posting info, ideas, pictures etc on this space and then letting those services aggregate as needed.

So, learn from my mistakes.

Create your own blog. Live on that blog and let other services slurp your content in as you intend.

Create a real and lasting digital footprint.

Leave a legacy so that your kids’ kids can read your portfolio or your blog just as they can read the paper versions (if you please).

Create a healthier web.

R.I.P. Allen.