I was the guest speaker on a teleseminar

I really enjoyed it. I always like to know who else is out there, what they think and what they are doing. I was one of 3 speakers on a teleseminar for bowling center owners. The guy who hosted it really seems to know what he’s doing. It’s interesting, there is a certain energy that is consistent with all these people. I wonder if I am too laid back. I have always considered myself an “enthusiast” , but if you ask me to get psyched up on command, you may be dissapointed. I really have to believe in what I am getting excited about.

Marketing your website. Social Networking and a couple analogies.

I was thinking yesterday about what I’m going to say in the tele-seminar today. The tele-seminar is essentially going to be for owners of bowling centers, how to market their business maintain a strong presence online. my part in this whole company is essentially search strategy and that includes social networking, and all of the new social network fads. I find it easier to explain with analogies that people can understand. Everybody has heard of MySpace.com, Facebook.com and of course now the big one, twitter. The DVD of the metamorphosis that is taking place in online marketing is that the Internet is really just becoming a series of networks. They used to sort of explain to new, website owners that the Internet was sort of like a neighborhood. I never really liked that explanation, because it really wasn’t a neighborhood now. It seems to be moving closer to that original explanation.

The Internet really is now just a bunch of communities and portals and if you want to look at something like Google. I would almost say it’s like a map. Or rather, a guidebook. For the most part, the days of manipulating Google, and I use Google in place of search engine. They pretty much managed to become the name of all search engines. The best example they used to use for that in marketing class or xerox. At any rate, it is becoming harder and harder to manipulate Google, they have put so much of their resources into trying to get their search engine to act like a human being, to listen and pay attention to what’s going on outside. In these other communities. So, in order for you to have a successful presence online. You need to participate in as many communities as possible. You need to have a constant steady flow coming in and out of your space, you need to have people talking about, you, hopefully in a favorable way, and you need to make an effort to get out there at least once in a while. Show your face and interact with people. I hate saying that the days of iif you build it they will come are over, that analogy has been beaten to death. However there are still so many people and businesses that believe that if you just throw up a website that you are. Or rather, they are owed their place in line, and because they run a quality business that is somehow going to guarantee them a favorable spot in the search engines. And that’s just not the case.

We have developed a plan, right now we’re calling it the $2 million plan, which I’m not going to go into. Actually, I will never go into a publicly. However, it is a plan that literally covers all the bases. I read an interesting article from someone at Google. I don’t remember who it was but I’m pretty sure it was not Matt Cutts. Actually it was not an article at all it was a phone call that I had with my Google representative. I was asking him if he could possibly give me any insight into the Google algorithm, and how to rank well, of course, everyone they talk to, tries to get them to admit something. And of course they don’t. But what he did tell me was that Google likes to see a steady flow of information. It does not like to see a stopping point. So there should be many paths into your website and there should be some paths out of your website and the pads out of your website should lead to other websites that have passed out of their websites, etc. etc. They said that the algorithm or the spider automatically get suspicious when it finds a website that is sitting by itself. Essentially, if there are some links going into the website, but the website is not saying anything about anyone else. Google does not like that. Now I don’t really see how this applies to websites like target.com. I don’t really see any links from their website to anyone else but a perfect example is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is always going to have the top spot for just about any search term that matters. Its just the way it is is the perfect website.

I don’t really know what going with all of this and I really should be spending my time doing other things, the clock is ticking, and I’m obviously procrastinating. So I’m going to cut it off here, but I am very interested to find out what the people on this tele-seminar tonight. No, and more importantly, what they want to know. Explaining search engine optimization has become easier and easier of the people that own a website are familiar with the terminology but trying to explain the importance of social networking, at least I have found, is incredibly difficult to get people to grasp. I know MySpace.com is for 16-year-old kid rock bands, and I know that Facebook is primarily for generation acts to look up friends from high school and see how fat they’ve gotten. But as far as the value of having some sort of a presence there, it’s absolutely necessary. Social networking, article writing, social bookmarking, twitter, you name it. The only way for your website to succeed today is that you have to take an interest in it or you have to pay someone to take an active interest in it. In either case, it’s expensive, it’s definitely more expensive than it used to be, because you are either making a constant investment in someone like me to create a constant buzz about your website or your spending hours out of your day learning about the different promotion methods, and the new technology in the new science. Its never-ending.

If you had asked me even a year ago I would have probably said that I thought that the Internet, or at least marketing on the Internet have for the most part, found its bottom or rather, where it was going to stay at least for the time being. I certainly didn’t anticipate something like twitter coming along then again. I constantly underestimate the narcissism that is so common in today’s society.

LLC’s, Domain Parking and the IRS

I need a direct line to Obama. If I had one, I would ask him to introduce legislation or an earmark that would effectively get rid of these domainer and parked pages for good. I am so sick and tired of trying to find a website or a domain only to find a parked page full of links for which aren’t even related to what searching for. I have been struggling to come up with a clever name for my company, that would also have an open domain name for the website. I can’t. It isn’t that I haven’t tried, I just can’t find one.

I would love to have some sort of company name that had meaning in another language may be in Greek or Latin something clever. Something that meant upward or progress or innovation or social. Something to do with the industry that I’m in. I finally found a decent name for the company. And of course there is a parked page. After looking up, the owner of the page. I see that the e-mail address that is associated with the ownership also owns an additional 6239 other websites. So, I sent him an e-mail asking if a small startup design company that has been using the name that he has for that domain as Jack handles and logins for the past 10 years, if you might like to sell it. I doubt that I will hear back from him. So instead I’m going to register the name as an LLC, and then threaten to sue him for it.

Domain parking is lame. A very good friend of mine for many years, who makes his money buying up domains and placing parking pages on them. Basically just told me to suck it up and deal with it. Oddly enough, he is a friend from the old days in the adult industry the original polluters of the Internet.

Well now I have to do some research on bowling centers, because I am a guest on a tele-seminar tonight for managers of bowling centers. I am going to talk about how to market bowling centers, and how to market online in general. There is a bit of irony in all of this considering I had never picked up a bowling ball in my life. While that might not be true I may very well pick up a bowling ball, but I’ve never actually gone bowling. I can’t stand the shoes. I am willing to guess there have been some pretty major advancements in bowling shoes in the past 20 years. But I don’t think that I’ll choose this forum to find out.

Please excuse the grammar and bad punctuation on this post I am using Dragon NaturallySpeaking on my blog entries now. I think that I am developing carpal syndrome or at the very least my head really hurts. So I’m trying to type as little as possible. Unfortunately, voice recognition software really is not 100% reliable.