Archive for the 'Internet Marketing Mix' Category

As a brand new member of both We Build Pages and Internet Marketers of New York, I’m really proud to announce that last week’s Charity Party hosted by WBP raised more than $13,000 to benefit the Ronald McDonald House. That’s amazing.

It’s even more amazing when you know the back story.

Ten days before SMX East was scheduled to begin, Jim heard that IMNY would have to pull its big Charity event after too many sponsors had dropped out. Jim, a man known as much for his big heart as his crazy love for links, decided he wasn’t okay with that and commissioned the We Build Pages team to “make it happen”. And with that, the race began.

What followed would be a jam-packed week of crazy. We Build Pages Office Manager Rita Sickles was tasked with making sure that all of the many details that go into putting together an event like this were taken care of.

Would we serve food or just alcohol? Do we need prizes for raffles? What charity should we choose? Who can we get to sponsor? How much should we guilt them for? How much do we charge people to attend? Don’t forget the wristbands! And the flyers!

From there, Pat Sexton took the ball and ran with it, hitting the phones to woo potential sponsors. I don’t know how many of you have seen Pat Sexton on a mission, but…it’s intense. I’m pretty sure he didn’t sleep for three days as he wrangled up sponsors, took care of the prizes, and got everyone talking about what would be a great event. Our friend Jon Kelly was also there to lend his support, making sure that IMNY had a PayPal account set up for early registration. Everyone was on a mission to raise as much money as possible to benefit the amazing work of the Ronald McDonald house.

And when the big day came, it went off without a hitch. The event was a giant success: The turnout, the amount of money donated, and the smiling faces were all amazing. And none of that would have been possible without all the amazing attendees. So, we thank you.

We also want to thank our sponsors for the event. Without their very generous donations, none of the awesome that happened last week would have been possible. Major props, hugs and accolades to 10e20, BOTW , Search Engine Journal, SEOmoz, Sugarrae, SEMJ, Frank Watson, Search Engine People and Sure Hits.

Finishing out the Thank Train, more thanks go to the staff at Social Bar and Grill for putting up with us, Jim Hedger of WebmasterRadio for acting as MC for the evening, and to Jim Boykin for challenging the We Build Pages team to “make it happen” for charity.

We’d love to add to the $13,000+ that was raised last week. If you weren’t able to get your money in, do it now. Make your checks out to “Ronald McDonald House” and mail them to We Build Pages, 255 River Street, Troy, NY 12180 and we’ll forward them on for you. Let’s see just how generous the search community really is!

Below you’ll find a great mess of photos from the IMNY Charity Party. We hope you enjoy them. As Jim would say, we’re feeling lucky!

 Frank Watson and ShandyKing

 Pat Sexton and Rae Hoffman

 Jim Hedger

 The (scary) Oilman Todd Friesen and Jill Sampey

 Roger Monti and friend

 Avi Wilensky

 Rob Kerry, Emilo from Blogvertise and friends

Jonathan Dingman, Scott Polk, Jillian Taylor, Brent Payne

Rob Kerry, Emilio, Jim Boykin

Danny Dover, Pat Sexton, Scott Polk

Greg Niland

 Risa Borsykowsky

Rand Fishkin, Jim Hedger, Mystery Guest Fishkin

Dani Horowitz, Tamar Weinberg

Pat Sexton

 Virginia Nussey, Pat Sexton

Steve Boymel, Danny Sullivan, Aya Zook

Rita Sickles, Pat Sexton, Jim Hedger

 Jim Boykin, Chuck Price

 Carolyn Shelby, Pat Sexton, Chris Winfield

Ninja Shawn Rosko, Brent Csutoras

Roger Monti with Ninja’s Lauren Caldwell and Todd Heim

Chris Winfield, Danielle Winfield, Avi Wilensky, Frank Watson (back) John Kelly, Lauren Vaccarello, Todd Malicoat, Jim Hedger, Ben Rudnick, Tyler Shears

A group so cool Jim Boykin had to join

Jim Boykin, Shana Albert

 Lauren Vaccarello, Frank Watson, Jon Kelly

 (Special thanks to Tamar Weinberg for helping me identify some of the faces not in my mental Rolodex.)

Popularity: unranked [?]

Back on July 6 I announced that we were going to stop taking on clients until 2008. At that time we were already booked with new clients until October, and I wanted to spend more time on our own projects as well.

We’ll, since July we’ve hired some amazingly talented new Link Ninjas, as well as we’ve got some plans already in place for many of our best properties that we own. We’ve come a long ways, and the good news is that my ninjas are telling me to "bring it on" when it comes to new link building services for clients.

Over the past few months we’ve improved and developed some crazy nice private software to find, track, manage, and report our work. Yes, you can automate many aspects of link building….but in the end it takes a human to write a personalized email, and a human to negiotate the deal, and a human to be able to analyze the data provided, and a human to write an ad that "fits in" and is optimized for many things.

If you’re interested in working with our internet marketing services ((which includes some on page reports initially) and then includes mostly link buiding services on an on-going basis), then check out our link buildng services page on We Build Pages. Check out our Honest Monthly Internet Marketing Reports that we provide for you. Then Contact Us Today. The later you contact us, the longer you’re going to have to wait in line.

The methods we take in our link building strategies work. We get results. If you’re a reader of my blog then there’s a great chance that you’re educated in the value of links, and the right kind of links…those that deliver results. We deliver the links that deliver the results. If you are a reader of my blog I’d love to work with you and show you why I think we’re the best in the world at link building. Tell me what you’re seeking.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Grab your popcorn! – Sugarrae found the face of evil, and then Doug get’s Bitchslapped.

Sugarrae has a wonderful post that was also Sphinn’d about a parenting blogger who was seeking to sell a review to Rae. In the email , the blogger wrote "Girl’s got to feed the family.". Rae (although she didn’t buy the blog review) made some interesting observations about that lady including:

…she built her site and she has the right to monetize and market it the way she chooses. But, it did give me a chuckle, because this, Matt, is exactly the type of link seller you cannot and will never be able to catch. This, is the elusive supposed “evil” you are so in search of.

This is a popular, trusted blogger who has a picture of her and her kids plastered all over her blog… this is an innocent face… this is your evil.

It’s a great read.

This post has a bonus with it too, ya gotta check out the comments. Doug Hail makes several appearances in the comments, spouting is stupidness, and getting a beating from SisterSledge, Graywolf, and getting smacked down again and again by Sugarrae (Doug, never mess with a woman who can pull rank, she’ll eat ya alive). Grab your popcorn!

Popularity: 1% [?]

 Twice this past month I’ve got online in the morning to check my email and found hundreds of returned mail sitting in my inbox. What these are is that some clown (for lack of nastier names) has sent out a blast email where they put all types of variations before @webuildpages.com… for example dkdklds@webuildpages.com or bobsmith@webuildpages.com etc etc, and so when they send their spam, the return email is something @ webuildpages.com.

I’m sure this must happed to lots of people besides me (I’m guessing I’m a random hit, not a "I hate Jim" hit).

I’m sure webuildpages is now on several spam lists, I’m sure I’ve pissed a bunch of people off who think I’m the one sending theses (and hurting the image of webuildpages.com).

I know one email spam filter that we’re listed on, and unfortunately many IPS’s and hosts use that filter….and when I’ve looked into how to get my emailed delisted from their spam list I was suprised they the people who make this list totally assume you’re guilty and they make you jump through so many hoops to try to claim your innocence that it appeared that it would take a lot of time and work to try to get off the spam list.

What can be done?

Popularity: 6% [?]

Can you digg it?

Today I got an email from Gemstream Hosting with the subject line of "FrontPage End-of-Life". I’d think this was spam, except it was coming from a big hosting company.

Now I might hate to admit it, but I know a few websites out there that were built in Microsoft Fronpage.

You should read this if you too know of any sites on the web that we built in Microsoft Frontpage.

Dear Gemstream Hosting Customer,

Gemstream has always been proud to offer Microsoft FrontPage extensions on our Linux hosting servers, which allow our customers to use FrontPage to create and manage their websites. However, Microsoft is in the process of discontinuing FrontPage, and we want to keep you up-to-date on the timeframe of this process, as well as options that current FrontPage users have
for the future.

Already, Microsoft has discontinued support and future updates for their Linux/Unix-based FrontPage extensions. This occurred on June 30,2006. You can find more information here:

http://www.rtr.com/fpsupport/

Changing to a Windows-based hosting server is not an option, as Microsoft is also discontinuing support for Windows extensions as well.

We are continuing to support FrontPage extensions for the time being, but we expect to have to discontinue this support sometime after December 1st, 2006. Since FrontPage is a closed-source program and is no longer supported by it’s maker (Microsoft), continuing usage of this product poses a security risk to our servers, as there will be no way to apply security patches to the product as needed. However, there are a number of options for our Gemstream customers who currently use FrontPage.

Microsoft details their own in-house options at this page, called "The Future of FrontPage":

In this document, Microsoft gives two options for replacing FrontPage:
SharePoint Designer and Expression Web. As SharePoint is not available on Linux servers, the only Microsoft option for Gemstream customers is Expression Web. Currently, this product is in beta, and is available for free from Microsoft:

A review of Expression Web can be found here:

Another option for FrontPage users is to switch to Macromedia Dreamweaver by Adobe, which is a powerful web authoring program used by the top designers and developers. It is available here:

Here is a link to a FrontPage Migration Kit available from Adobe that allows you to easily convert from FrontPage to Dreamweaver:

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns in this regard.

Thank you for choosing Gemstream Hosting!

Dang! I guess I’ve got to tell a few people to start learning Dreamweaver. Yea, Microsoft is coming out with new things…but to discontinue a product before a new replacement is out???….I’d think that would loose tons of Frontpage customers.

After this I go this, I sent this this email:

Can I publish your newsletter in whole on my blog at www.jimboykin.com ? This seems like pretty big news?

Am I wrong to think that most hosts will do just you’ve done….does this mean that if people are using things like "shared borders" (frontpage includes) that thier sites will suddenly "break" when a host removes the extentions?

Would you (or someone there) make any additional comments that I can quote in my blog?

Thanks,
Jim Boykin
CEO, We Build Pages

And my response was:

Jim,
What we have found amazing is the amount of confusion out there in this regard among hosts. We have talked to other hosts who have not heard anything about this yet (even though the Linux FP extensions have ALREADY been discontinued), and others who claim they will never remove FP extensions – which in our minds is a serious security risk (what happens when the next
FP security hole occurs?). Believe it or not, we have also talked to hosts who insist that Microsoft is NOT discontinuing FP, even though parts of MS’s website is claiming that they are. It’s a mess, unfortunately. Microsoft isn’t helping matters either, as they are discontinuing one product (FrontPage) before it’s replacement (Expression Web) has been fully released!

We are trying to move is such a way that we can continue to support FrontPage uses as long as possible without introducing unacceptable security risks on our servers. We are also trying to give them as many alternatives going forward as possible.

It is fine with us if you reproduce this in your blog. In fact, we’d love to hear what others are saying – at this point, we haven’t made a final decision as to when we will discontinue the extensions, and we are still trying to gather all relevant information. But we wanted to inform our
customers of what is going on as early as possible.

Sincerely,
Eric
Gemstream Support

Thanks Eric!

But one of my questions didn’t get answered – "does this mean that if people are using things like "shared borders" (frontpage includes) that thier sites will suddenly "break" when a host removes the extentions?"

Anyone know? I wonder how many people are used to only FTPing only with frontpage. How many sites will never get updated… or simple break and die because of this (yes, the web might get prettier….but still)?

Can you digg it?

-

Popularity: 11% [?]

Cancelling an AOL account is harder than you’d think.

Great video of a guy trying to cancel his AOL account.

Hat tip to Cristian Mezei and his SEO Blog.

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On another note, Here’s an experiment in Viral Internet Marketing.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I’ve had my little battles with blog spam in the past. I’ve gone so far as to deactivate comments and pings on post over 30 days old (that actually helped a lot)….then I added  a plug in called Akismet which helped some more….then I saw a few weeks ago that Matt Cutts had added a plug in that asked a simple math question that people had to answer in order to post comments, so I had my blog designer add that plugin, and wow – yea, spammers can’t add (or at least this stops the auto post programs).

This plug in is called "Math Comment Spam Protection" and I love it.

The only thing I miss is viewing all the hot prescription drugs I should be marketing, or latest products that could make me $….and the subdomains that might be working good – if only I had time to be more black hat this knowledge would be a good help.

Popularity: 1% [?]