miercuri, 16 noiembrie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Drivelapse USA, Time-Lapse Video of Entire USA Road Trip in 5 Minutes

Posted: 16 Nov 2011 07:29 PM PST



Twenty-five year old Brian DeFrees took a two month roadtrip across America in his Honda Civic. The freelance photographer took footage of the 12,000 plus mile trip, and compressed it all into a five minute timelapse video. Now you can literally go across America from sea to shining sea in five minutes instead of two months. The video is going viral across the net, and is featured on DailyMail.


10 Weirdest and Ridiculous College Mascots

Posted: 16 Nov 2011 06:37 PM PST

A school's mascot is a symbol of pride and unity that students can rally behind. Anybody can have a wolf or a bear as their college mascot, but these schools have taken it upon themselves to have the most unique mascots ever. They are memorable to say the least! Has your school got a weird mascot? Add it in the comments.

1. University of California at Santa Cruz - The Banana Slug




2. Evergreen State - The Geoduck




3. University of Arkansas Monticello - The Boll Weevil




4. Trinity Christian College - Troll




5. North Carolina School of the Arts - The Fighting Pickle




6. Delta State University - The Fighting Okra




7. Presbyterian College - Blue Hose




8. Wichita State University - WuShock the Shocker




9. Western Kentucky University - Big Red




10. Stanford - Tree



Source: buzzfeed


Back to the Future Project by Irina Werning

Posted: 16 Nov 2011 01:01 PM PST

Irina Werning has recreated a series called "Back to the Future 2," shooting photos of people reenacting portraits of themselves from 20+ years earlier.

The Buenos Aires-based Werning writes of the project: "I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else's house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it's imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today... A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future."

Alexandra 1970 & 2011 Paris


Andy 1964 & 2011 Los Angeles


Campbell Twins 1976 & 2011 London


Carli 1990 & 2011 Buenos Aires


Carol 1960 & 2011 NY


Christoph 1990 & 2011 Berlin Wall


Daphne 1986 & 2011 Paris


Devoto brothers 1990 & 2011 Buenos


Diego 1970 & 2011 Buenos Aires


Evan 1957 & 2011 NY


Fer 1981 & 2011 Buenos Aires


Giorgio 1982 & 2011 Paris


Johannes 1994 & 2011 Hambourg


Juan Carlos 1982 & 2011 Buenos Aires


Lea B 1980 & 2011 Paris


Maria Jose 1983 & 2011 Buenos Aires


May 1985 & 2011 Buenos Aires


Patrick 1986 & 2011 Paris


Patrick B 1982 & 2011 Berlin


Puna 2003 & 2011 Buenos Aires


Riff Raff 1976 & 2011 London


Sander 1983 & 2011 Rotterdam


Sarah and Jim 1986 & 2011 Boston


Seba 1986 & 2011 Patagonia


Sole 1988 & 2011 Buenos Aires


Sonia y Laurita 1998 & 2011 Buenos


The Zurbanos 1999 & 2011 Buenos Air


Violeta 1981 & 2011 Buenos Aires


Marcela 1970 & 2011 Buenos Aires


Lea T 1995 & 2011 Paris


Visualization of Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) [infographic]

Posted: 16 Nov 2011 12:43 PM PST



You may be drunker than you think, it doesn't take many drinks to impair your abilities and risk your health. Here we illustrate the various impacts of a 170 lbs. man consuming one drink every twenty minutes. To approximate for a woman, add one drink to her actual consumption (e.g. 5 femal drinks consumed = 6 on the chart below).

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Source: sober


Run Against Ryan Ad, the Olympic Marathoner

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 11:13 PM PST



Next time you're in New York and waiting for the subway, why not take some time to exercise? You can do just that with this Asics-sponsered ad installation, which shows a video of US marathoner Ryan Hall in action. Don't beat yourself up if you lose, though. First, he's really good. Second, the Ryan on-screen is about a foot taller than real-life Ryan.


Volcano Hotel in Chile

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 10:01 PM PST

Magic Mountain Lodge, is a beautifully constructed hotel on the privately owned natural reserve of Huilo Huilo in Chile. Covered in rainforest moss and vines, this manmade volcano-like structure spews water and is only accessible by a monkey bridge. And if this isn't sufficiently magical and surreal, outside are hot tubs, carved from hollowed out tree trunks, with ideal vantage points for wildlife sightings.

A night at this hotel will cost you around $250 to $400 per night, but who can put a price on a once-in-a-lifetime experience like this?














We Can’t Wait: Driving Forward with New Fuel Economy Standards

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday Nov.16, 2011
 

We Can’t Wait: Driving Forward with New Fuel Economy Standards

Today marks a major step forward in the Obama administration’s efforts to save American families money at the pump, reduce our country’s dependence on oil, and boost domestic manufacturing.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) have formally announced their joint proposal to set stronger fuel economy and greenhouse gas pollution standards. This announcement will save Americans $1.7 trillion, reduce oil consumption by 2.2 million barrels per day by 2025, and slash greenhouse gas emissions by 6 billion metric tons, when combined with other Administration actions on transportation efficiency.

Find out how these new standards will save you more money at the pump.

White House Photos: Behind the Scenes

Interested in seeing behind-the-scenes photos from the White House? Check out our Flickr photostream.

Flickr Photostream

First Lady Michelle Obama greets USO honorees and their families in the Vermeil Room of the White House, Oct. 5, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Renewing Ties in the Pacific
When President Obama touches down in Australia, he'll arrive with two major goals: strengthening our relationships and promoting security in the Pacific.

Apply Today for the White House Internship Program
The White House begins accepting applications for the Summer 2012 White House Internship Program.

America Recycles Day 2011
Recycling is an important way to conserve natural resources and protect our environment while helping bolster our economy. 

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Standard Time (EST).

12:30 AM: The President participates in an official arrival ceremony  

12:45 AM: The President joins Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia for a guest book signing

1:00 AM: The President participates in a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Gillard

2:05 AM: The President holds a joint news conference with Prime Minister Gillard

3:30 AM: The President attends a parliamentary dinner

12:30 PM: The Vice President attends a campaign event

2:30 PM: The Vice President meets with His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios of America, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America

6:00 PM: The Vice President attends a campaign event

6:15 PM: President Obama addresses the Australian Parliament WhiteHouse.gov/live

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates that the event will be live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live.

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How To Brand Your SEO Agency

How To Brand Your SEO Agency


How To Brand Your SEO Agency

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 12:29 PM PST

Posted by neilpatel

Last month I talked about 7 lessons I learned from running an SEO agency. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that you can command clients to pay you 6 and even 7 figures a year if your agency has brand recognition.

Brand recognition also gets you more inbound inquires from companies who need SEO, which will help your revenue become more stable.

If you are ready to take your agency to the next level, here’s how you can build a big brand:

Start a blog

Not only can a blog help build your brand, it can also drive thousands of extra visitors to your website each month. Before you start a SEO blog, you need to know 1 important fact… it needs to be on the same domain as your agency website.

Early on I made the mistake of calling my SEO blog “Pronet Advertising”, when my SEO agency was in fact called “ACS”. The blog was hosted at pronetadvertising.com while the agency site was hosted at acsseo.com. Once the blog became popular people didn’t know whether we were called ACS or Pronet Advertising… even though on the blog it clearly stated that it was owned by ACS.

Once you have a blog up and running, there are a few things that you have to do if you want it to become popular. These days there are hundreds of SEO blogs and if you aren’t unique, there is no point in starting one.

  • Write detailed blog posts – if you write how to type of posts you’ll typically gain more traction than if you just blog about SEO news.
  • Use stats – blog posts that contain facts and percentages also tend to do better. If you look at the SEOmoz blog, you’ll notice that posts like this are popular because they contain stats.
  • Dumb things down – SEO is a complicated topic, so if you can dumb down your blog posts you’re better off than if you only use technical jargon. At the end of the day the person who is most likely to hire and pay you won’t understand this jargon, if they did they’d just optimize their own site. By using images and even whiteboards, you’ll be able to dumb down your blog posts, yet still keep them somewhat technical.

If you blog on a weekly basis and push out good content every week, you’ll start to get more traffic and see an increase in brand recognition in the SEO space.

Become a guest author

Blogging on your own site isn’t enough. You need to start blogging on other blogs. By becoming a guest author on popular SEO and marketing blogs you’ll brand yourself as an SEO expert, which will also help your agency.

In addition to blogging on marketing blogs you also want to start blogging in places that your ideal customer may be looking. For example if your typical customer is a business owner, you could guest post on Entrepreneur.com. If they are an up and coming startup, TechCrunch would be great place for you to blog.

Every week you should be guest posting on at least 2 blogs. The first should be a marketing/SEO blog and the second should be a blog that your ideal customer is reading. To achieve this goal you should email at least 10 people every Sunday night that you are interested in guest posting for.

The reason you want to email 10 people is that most bloggers will say “no”. However, if you let them know the specific topic you want to blog on and you do the research to make sure these blogs accept guest posts, you should get at least 20% of them saying “yes”.

When you submit your guest post make sure you include an image of yourself as well as a bio that includes a link to your company. If you forget the bio you won’t be building up your agency’s brand.

Attend conferences

Conferences are a great place to brand your agency and pick up new customers. When I first started out I attended all of the major SEO conferences, and boy did I make a lot of money doing so. People got to know me, I met potential customers and I even gained more knowledge.

Over time SEO conferences became competitive, which caused my brand to be mixed in with hundreds of others SEOs. After a while I rarely was able to pick up new clients from them… even if I was speaking.

I started to look for new conferences to brand my agency. I quickly realized that industry specific conferences and regional based events aren’t crowded with a ton of SEOs. Which makes it easier to pick up new clients.

If you want pick up new clients start attending industry specific events that aren’t SEO related and also focus on attending regional based events.

If you want to start building your brand through conferences you have to attend dozens of them each year as some conferences will work out while others won’t. In most cases the events that cost a lot tend to provide a better ROI because if someone can afford to pay $3000 to attend a conference, they can probably afford to hire your firm.

Create white papers and beginner’s guides

Everyone these days is releasing free information because it really helps with branding. Just look at SEOmoz’s guide to SEO. It’s become the default guide if you want to learn about the subject.

It’s so popular that when people ask other SEOs about learning SEO, they just point them to SEOmoz’s guide.

By no means is this a short-term branding strategy, but if you can produce really good white papers and beginner’s guides you should start seeing them passed around. The trick is to just make them downloadable so that people can pass them around within their organization.

If you are going to create content, make sure you don’t just publish the same information that others have already released. For example it would be a waste of your time to reproduce the Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

Buy banner ads

Banner ads? They are a waste of money, right? Well if you buy them on other SEO sites they aren’t. When I ran my agency we would spend up to $15,000 a month buying banner ads on other SEO sites...these sites weren’t just news related like Sphinn.

We would actually buy ads on our competitors’ site. As weird as that may sound, other SEO bloggers, who are also service providers, sell ads. From the Wolf Howl blog to Search Engine Roundtable, you can buy ads on some of the most popular SEO sites on the web.

When I bought ads I found that most of them didn’t convert when I sent them to my homepage, but when I sent them to a landing page that gave away a free white paper, it was very effective. As your sales team can take those leads and close them.

Participate in the community

The cool part about the SEO industry is that SEOs have a tendency to work together. They play nice with each other and they are willing to share customers. For this reason it’s important to build up your brand amongst other SEOs.

Other than going to SEO networking events, you can do this through 2 simple ways:

  1. Comment on 5 different SEO blogs each day. Don’t leave generic comments; instead leave very detailed comments that are adding to the conversation.
  2. Join popular SEO forums like SEO Chat and respond to 5 different questions each day. Similar to leaving comments on blogs, make sure your responses on forums are detailed.

If you do these two things for a year, you’ll end up building a large Rolodex of SEOs.

Help people out for free

The most effective branding strategy I used with my firm was to help out popular bloggers for free with their SEO. In exchange for helping them, they would add an image link with my company logo that stated “SEO by ACS”. When you do this for 30 of the Technorati 100 blogs like I did, you’ll quickly build up your brand as these blogs get millions of visitors each month.

You don’t have to know these blogs to do their SEO, just shoot them an emailing offering free SEO services in exchange for an image link. Trust me, it works.

And think of it this way, if someone has that popular of a blog, the chances are they know at least 1 company who can afford to pay you at least $10,000 a month for your consulting services. If you help these bloggers increase their traffic you should be able to get a few introductions to companies that can pay you.

Help people out for free

Another effective tactic that I used to build up my agency’s brand was to just help out people for free. You’ll notice that over time a lot of people and companies who can’t afford your services will hit you up. Instead of turning them down, give them some free advice every once in a while. You’ll be shocked on what that will do for your brand.

My first million-dollar customer came from someone who had no money. I helped him out for free for 30 minutes at a conference and he continually told everyone at the event how I was a great SEO. Within hours I had businesses hitting me up and a few of them were interested in engaging with my firm for 1.2 million dollars a year. Out of those few that were interested 1 agreed.

So the next time someone emails you asking for free advice, don’t push them away. Offer some free help, as they’ll constantly tell other people good things about you and your agency.

Create case studies

If you are good at what you do, you should be able to create some awesome case studies. All you have to do is breakdown what you specifically did for that company, how long it took, and the exact results they saw.

When you breakdown the results be sure to include numbers such as traffic stats, revenue increases or anything else the client will let you include. And when wrapping up the case study, make sure you get a good testimonial or video interview from the client.

One agency that does this very well (they aren’t an SEO agency) is Conversion Rate Experts. I found out about them through their SEOmoz case study. The video Rand did with them broke down how they made SEOmoz over a million dollars, and convinced me to hire them.

Showcase these case studies all over your website as they will help get your agency out there in front of bigger companies. Without them it’s going to be tough to gain interest from Fortune 500 companies.

Conclusion

If you do everything I mentioned above, you’ll brand your agency as one of the best shops around. I know it’s a lot work, but in the end the revenue will make up for the hard work.

Give it a shot; try out just a few of the tactics above for the next 6 months and I guarantee that you’ll see results. You have to make sure you keep at it, as you can’t expect miracles in the first few months of doing this.


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Why is (not provided) My Most Popular Keyword in Google Analytics and How Can I Fix it?

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 05:08 AM PST

(not provided)

While the search industry has been all abuzz with the bad news of Google SSL search, most average people might not even understand what happened. They may wonder “why is (not provided) my most popular keyword in Google Analytics?” (Other analytics solutions might not even show up this data at all). Also:  how can you fix it?

First off, I want to explain in simple terms what happened. I tried to explain it to my wife recently and she didn’t understand at once. So this is the version she could fathom easily:  Google hides the keywords people use to find your site from now on, or at least a significant part of them. All these hidden keywords are tagged as ‘(not provided)’ in Google Analytics.

On SEOptimise currently (the first week of November) 14,7% of Google search visitors had no keyword sent with its referrer.

The referrer is the page address where they came from. On my own blog, SEO 2.0, the number was even higher, with 16,27% of Google visitors. Also, (not provided) is the most popular “keyword” on both blogs.

Whose referral data gets hidden? All users logged in to Google services get redirected to SSL search now by default.

So all these people hide the keywords they use from the sites they visit. Google and thus the CIA, MI5 or any other secret service can still access these data for at least 18 months.

SSL search isn’t bad – it might be secure for some purposes. As a privacy advocate I can understand that someone would want to use SSL search. I don’t see why Google would force everyone logged in to one of the multiple Google services to use it though. Also, the only way to “opt out” of this forced security measure is to log out of all Google tools, including:

  • Gmail
  • Google+
  • Google Reader
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Webmaster Tools

When you log in again, Google automatically forces you to use SSL search again on its https//google.com site. Advertisers who use Google ads will see the hidden data as well, by the way. So if you use SSL search to cover your tracks, at least from the website owners of the sites you click in Google, you have to refrain from clicking Google ads. So what can we actually do about this (not provided) issue?

Ask your web hoster whether they offer SSL for your hosting package

or otherwise upgrade to one where SSL is an option. Sites that use SSL will still see complete referrers from other SSL sites. Thus you can use also see Google keywords used by logged in searchers to find you.

On the other hand, many sites may not notice from then on that you have sent them valuable traffic as long as they don’t use SSL for their sites. You may wonder how that affects you. In the SEO industry at least, people monitor their analytics for incoming traffic and thus find out who links to them. Based on that, relationships between webmasters and bloggers sometimes get forged to the mutual benefit of the two parties. This “SEO technique” will not work most of the time in future unless most webmasters embrace SSL.

 Google’s business model is to sell ads on search results and third party pages. More than 95% of their revenue stems from these ads. So they compete against webmasters and SEOs to get the attention of web users.

Advertisers buying Google ads will have access to the referral data. So in a way Google is blackmailing webmasters either to buy ads or lose a truly important and meaningful metric. They have presented the change as a move to protect privacy, but we all know that Google doesn’t care about privacy in many other cases. Just think Google Street View.

I won’t let Google force me to buy ads. I don’t need them as I do SEO myself. It’s like having a car and still using a taxi regularly. We can only hope that lawmakers throughout the world will make Google stop anti-competitive measures like this one. It may take a few years before the authorities can sort out this issue, and until then we have to deal with it ourselves.

Going SSL yourself is the best option as of now. Otherwise soon 1/5 or 1/4 of your Google search visitors may not provide you with the full referral data. You won’t know for sure which keywords have the biggest impact on your site. The number one keyword will be “not provided” as more and more people start using Google services where they actually stayed logged in throughout the day.

Unless of course you’re in an industry where most people are not Internet-savvy and thus do not use Google services much. There are many people, if not the majority, who do not even know what RSS is and thus do not use Google Reader, for example. Only webmasters use Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools and Google+ has still a market share below 1% of social networking. So in many cases the impact might be far smaller than in the technology-driven search marketing space.

Ironically, the people who really care about privacy, such as Linux users for example, are also rather prone to browse the web anonymously than using Google services

and tell Google their real names each time when they search for some questionable sites. So in niches where real power users are the majority, the search referral issues might be a minor one. Everybody else has to consider either buying ads at Google or encrypting their site as well to get proper referrer data again.

 

More resources on SSL search, (not provided) and analytics:

  1. SSL Search – Web Search Help
  2. Google Hides Search Referral Data with New SSL Implementation – Emergency Whiteboard Friday | SEOmoz
  3. Keep Calm & Carry On Despite Google SSL Search Term Encryption – Search Engine Watch (#SEW)
  4. Google SSL search for all signed in users | | Bigmouthmedia’s blogBigmouthmedia’s blog
  5. Google SSL Search: Update on (not provided) keywords
  6. Google SSL encryption for search queries: the experts’ view | Econsultancy
  7. Resources – Not Provided Google Keywords (Not Provided)
  8. Google Analytics Keyword “Not Provided” Higher Than Single Digits
  9. Is (not provided) Driving You Crazy? Get Some of Your Data Back | SEER Interactive
  10. The noticeable (not provided) impact on the Internet marketing industry
  11. Impact of SSL Search – Research, Search Engines – State of Search

 

 

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Why is (not provided) My Most Popular Keyword in Google Analytics and How Can I Fix it?

Related posts:

  1. Poll: What does Google dropping keyword data mean for SEOs?
  2. How to Pass the Google Analytics Exam
  3. Simple Goal & Conversion Tracking with Piwik: the Open Source Google Analytics Alternative

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Worth it?

That's a question you hear a lot. "Was it worth it?"

Not certain what either "it" refers to, but generally we're saying, "was the destination worth the journey? Was the effort worth the reward?"

The thing about effort is that effort is its own reward if you allow it to be.

So the answer can always be "yes" if you let it.

 

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