At the same time, there has been several people talking about Negative SEO. This is the practice of creating a a link campaign with what can only be described as a dodgy link profile. That is a series of links that Google would or could count against you. Examples of these types of links are paid links, reciprocal links and links within a link network. Over on Traffic Planet, a user by the name of Jammy talked about a case where he used such tactics in order to get a site knocked down in the Google Rankings. I was initially surprised to see that Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz offered his own blog and SEOMoz.org as an experiment to see if it could get taken down by the negative SEO tactics of Jammy and other negative practitioners. At first it didn’t make sense to me until I realized that many people, such as myself would give links back to his site. Furthermore, I saw Cyrus Shephard of SEOMoz mention that Organic Google search is not their only source of traffic, so they have been very wise in that regard. So it looks as if they have done as much as is possible to “Negative SEO-Proof” their site. So this in itself will be interesting to see if what they preach in terms of White Hat SEO and Inbound Marketing actually helps them in this instance. I think it will, but I am going to keep an eye out to see if anyone can do it.

Anyway, back  to the point about Negative SEO, I think that this tactic is dirty and I can’t see myself ever doing it. However, I did talk to someone I know (name has been redacted) and their response kind of surprised me. They said that they have no issue with using these negative tactics and they think all is fair and love and SEO War. I disagree, but dug deeper to try and understand their response. They feel that if this happens more often and enough people complain then Google has to change the way that they look at rankings. I think this is already going ahead, but I am stumped if I know of a way that can’t be gamed.

Also in the last few days, it was interesting to see that SEER interactive, an SEO firm seemed to have their pages downgraded in the Google rankings for their own branded terms. They managed to get it back up a couple of days later, I would love to know why you guys think it was taken down. Let me know in the comments below.

What do you think?

Read the article from Marketing Pilgrim here.

“What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve”

What can I say other than I love marketing and business in general? I love it so much I have made it my life’s work…..quite literally, that is what I do for my job.

In particular I love digital marketing and all the opportunity it affords. The opportunity to be creative is great, but I also love the ability to measure and track most of the strategies and tactics that we employ.

Now I think it high time for some formal business credibility builders:

I am currently employed by B2B CFO as the Interactive Marketing Manager for the company. B2B CFO is the largest CFO firm in the world and I get to help it grow each day.

My main responsibilities are for SEO and Social Media Marketing, but I like to get my hands involved with anything that is remotely connected to marketing (so pretty much everything)

I am a regular speaker at the B2B CFO annual partner meetings where I teach others how to use the tools that are currently available for online marketing.

Prior to being at B2B CFO, I was employed by Sitewire. An awesome Digital agency based in Tempe Arizona. While there I worked for such business luminaries as Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Cox Communications, Insight and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

I have dabbled and excelled in many of the areas of digital marketing that is currently available and I will be heavily involved in anything new. Let me know if I can help you increase your business.

I was interested by the concept of this book as I have never believed that you needed a degree to become a millionaire. It’s kind of ironic for me though as I have a burning desire to become a successful entrepreneur and become a millionaire, but I am also about to finish my MBA. So I wanted to read this book to see if it would add anything beyond what I already know. The answer was, not really.

Does that mean that this book wasn’t a good read? No. It is more a reflection on me I feel, I know what was said in this book is true, I just need to go out there and do something for myself.

The basic gist that I got from the book is the fact that you need to build a company that can be duplicated and can be run without you there. Also, Simon recommends that you don’t have a business partner so you can have all of the profits for yourself. This last statement, I am not quite sure I agree with, but I am not the millionaire (yet!).

I also really liked the biopics that were given for several millionaires that became successful, especially The Healy Brothers since they are from the same city that I grew up in. I just wish that we were taught about these entrepreneurs while I was in school.

Would I recommend you buy this book? I would recommend you buy it on Kindle as it is way cheaper, it is definitely interesting, but you may be expecting some amazing genius and be disappointed. Just expect to be given sound advice that might seem to easy to make sense.

Image kindly provided by Robert Hruzek

I have looked back at my blog and just realized that I haven’t blogged since November. I have been super busy with school, but that isn’t an excuse. Well it is but not a good one.  I think I need to make it a professional goal to blog more often, as a Digital Media Strategist, I understand the importance of blogging and doing so regularly in order to build my reputation.

But, understanding Digital Media Strategy and implementing it for myself is a completely different issue. I know when I worked at Sitewire, we had the issue of coming up with many great ideas for our clients, we didn’t ever seem to implement those ideas for ourselves. A lot of the time we didn’t even accomplish the basic ideas.

I heard the phrase many times about “Eating your own Dog Food”

So I have a question to ask….. Do you eat your own dog food?

I know that I don’t all the time and I have even heard others suggest that people shouldn’t, well what say you?

Free SEO Tools - InboundWriter

I read an article today from Lee Odden. It was an interview he did with Bryan Eisenberg. The article was talking about free seo tools that Bryan would recommend. Some of them are free and some have paid portions so be careful of that. Within the article, he recommended using a tool called InboundWriter in order to help you with your Search Engine Optimization. Apparently, InboundWriter looks at information, such as your Google Analytics (although I still need to figure out if that is true) and lets you know what type of content you should write about in order to make sure you are doing effective search engine optimization.

I am using the free seo tools version, it seems to be working fine as of now. All I had to do was set up the plugin in through wordpress and then register my account with InboundWriter. When you register, they give you two version, the $19.95 per month option and the free seo tools option.

What I am intending to do is publish this post and see if I can see a noticeable increase in visitors to my blog thanks to the search engine optimization tool. I think it is worth reading Lee Odden’s blog. You might find some excellent seo solutions that you can use for your blog and/or business.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention, do you see the small button at the bottom? That is the price to pay for the ‘free seo tools’

Let me know what you think.

As much as I really wanted to like The Big Enough Company, there was just something about it that didn’t resonate. The writing style, didn’t intrigue me and the examples didn’t give me anything to relate to.

One thing that is obvious from the first few pages, but not the cover is that this book was written specifically for women entrepreneurs. I have absolutely no problem with that concept, apart from the version of the book that I had didn’t mention that anywhere on the front cover.

While it may sound like I hated the book, which is far from the truth, it did give good advice on designing a business that fits with your goals. It talked about how you should create your business with your end goal in mind. This content is valuable; I would have just preferred it to have been presented in a different way. This is a book I would recommend reading first from the library and if you like I then buy it for your own collection.

I would rate this book as a 5 out of 10 stars