Online Marketing Ideas For Recession 2008 PodCast

Written by Pablo Palatnik on January 23, 2008

Is the media scaring you about the recession the country may face or is facing now? Have a strategy in place if your business (affiliate programs, etc) seem to be declining or could decline because of financial insecurities? Is there a need or want for the product you are marketing?

These are all factors we have to look at and the one major factor we have to look at as online marketers is how peoples behavior will change in the coming months to position ourselves to build and create successful campaigns.

Listen To the Palatnik Factor Podcast —> Online Marketing Ideas For Recession 2008

THE PALATNIK FACTOR PODCAST IS ALSO NOW AVAILABLE AT —> GEEKCAST.FM

Is Google Already an Ad Agency?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on January 22, 2008

There are so many concerns in the industry about Google becoming an ad agency, I personally already consider Google to be one.

Forget its purchase of Double Click, Google itself is the most powerful site on the internet driving millions and millions of users each day and displaying millions of ads daily and being the biggest brand online.

Google is a self-serve ad agency allowing advertisers to choose paid search (search engine ads), content display ads, bid for audio ads, and print ads venturing into the newspaper arena. The acquisition of YouTube was a great vision for Google to advertise on user-generated video content which has 22.7 billion views in 2007 and growing an incredible rate.

So, back to Double Click, Google did acquire a search marketing/ad network/ company which is significant in what they are trying to achieve.

Google has also ventured into the mobile space which according to Nielson Ratings, mobile search was used by 46 million users in 3Q of 2007.

MarketingVox reports, “Last week Andy Berndt, who left Ogilvy to help launch Google’s Creative Lab, told audience members at the Argyle Executive CMO Leadership Forum that “Google is not starting an ad agency.”

What constitutes an ad agency? A team of people putting a plan for you? OK, there is a difference between the traditional ad agency and Google but…I wouldn’t argue the fact that Google is or is becoming an ad agency. By 2009-2011, Google Adwords platform, and probably others, will allow to bid for magazine spots and other media sources. Online search and use is only growing, Google has yet to see better days for its advertising revenue.

Are You An SEO Expert?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on January 18, 2008

About two days ago, Shoemoney posted a blog post titled, “Why I Do Not Like 95% of SEO Experts.” I’m not going to get into the blog post itself as that’s not really what I’m writing about, but more of a question that I raised because of it

What constitutes to be an SEO expert? What is the criteria? IS IT EXPERIENCE OR RESULTS? Since the mid 90’s, a very big industry grew from search engine optimization and I think its safe to say it is still growing with more and more demand for SEO. Today, you have a guy that knows how to tag sites right and implement a link here or there and BAM, he KNOWS seo and will sell you his service.

SEOmoz has a great resource page for finding out search engine ranking factors. These factors are all judged by people in the industry most of us have heard of but are they experts?

• Aaron Wall
• Andy Hagans
• Ani Kortikar
• Barry Schwartz
• Barry Welford
• Ben Pfeiffer
• Bill Slawski
• Caveman
• Chris Boggs
• Christine Churchill
• Danny Sullivan
• DazzlinDonna
• Debra Mastaler
• EGOL
• Elisabeth Osmeloski
• Eric Enge
• Eric Ward
• Guillaume
• Jeremy Schoemaker
• Jill Whalen
• Jonah Stein
• Joost de Valk
• Laura Lippay
• Lucas Ng (aka shor)
• Marcus Tandler
• Michael Gray
• Mike McDonald
• Natasha Robinson
• Neil Patel
• Rae Hoffman
• Rand Fishkin
• Roger Montti aka martinibuster
• Russ Jones
• Ruud Hein
• Scottie Claiborne
• Thomas Bindl
• Todd Malicoat
• Wil Reynolds
• Will Critchlow

Sure, we can consider some of this list SEO experts, but here is the thing about “experts.” They all have different experiences and they all think (for the most part on most factors) a bit differently about how important the engines rank certain factors.

Take into consideration, every engine has a different algorithm so many have different rankings in each engine.

I’ve had good experiences trying to rank for sites and certain keywords that were pretty competitive. I’ve also had bad experiences in my SEO strategies and by this I mean some success and some failure. I think that may be every SEOs experience, no one project is the same. Optimizing a site will be a different experience for every keyword, industry, etc.

It’s not the same optimizing a site for the keyword Life Insurance Quote then Little Baby Flipper Doodle. The strategy is completely different. Many SEOs agree on a lot of things, Many SEOs disagree on many things…this is an industry that changes very frequently and will have many different opinions on many things such as paid links, no follow, etc.

What do you think makes someone an SEO “EXPERT”?

U.S. Government to Access your eMail and Web Search

Written by Pablo Palatnik on January 16, 2008

Today, the U.S. announced it plans to draft a law to allow the government to access your email or web search. UMMMM…Privacy anyone? Listen, we know, its to protect America from terrorist and that’s great…but how far can it go before peoples civil rights are violated…especially in the web space where things are so easy to manipulate.

As an online marketer, one thing I have learned and as all of you online marketers know, people are very concerned with privacy rights and the way information is being transferred online.

Raw Story reports on this news and has the following statements and quotes:

“Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search,” author Lawrence Wright pens.

“Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation, he said,” Wright adds. “Giorgio warned me, ‘we have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”
This actually puts Google in an odd place I think, what are they going to do? Deny government access? No.

The real deal is that they can watch as much as they want but the activity online, searches in Google, Yahoo and other engines is of such magnitude that it will almost be impossible to watch everything and take up a lot of intelligence resources.

This is just announced so it should play out MAYBE in late 2008 and maybe 2009, that’s my opinion anyway.