Many Body Theory

Chris Sherman asked if I’d like to start contributing to Search Engine Land. This is really exciting news and I’m looking forward to my first article.

More details to come.

The two do not always go together (unless you’re referring to dating offers). I won’t name names of some affiliate marketers who could be making even more money if they weren’t trying to impress their female account managers (hmm, I wonder if the networks do this on purpose?). For them, they like to show off how many sales they can generate for a certain account manager rather than taking their campaigns to the highest paying network and make even more of a killing.

Dating can suck in this space… there are a lot of late nights in front of a computer and unlike most of those guys who are computer programmers who guys still living with their parents – we many times are real people. We understand humor, we don’t play dungeons and dragons, and we make real money.

I won’t deny it – I tried asking one of my Google account reps out once (and was turned down, sadly) but what else will you do when your office is full of men? These are the women who you have to interact with…And it is a real bummer when they are actually quite attractive.

I personally have given up on dating for the most part. I’m always asked by friends and colleagues whether my profile gets special treatment on the dating site that I work for – just for the record: it doesn’t.

As a single, reasonably attractive guy with his life in order – I’ll pursue dating later. Sure, it would be great to not ask myself what I will be doing on a Saturday night, but it is refreshing to minimize the number of distractions in my life as well.

I’ve been asked to give a talk about Adgroup Management which will cover how to build a scalable campaign from the ground up by understanding what keywords to place in what adgroup and how to form your adgroups around campaigns in the proper way.

Additionally, I was informed that they most likely will want me to moderate a session as well during the second day.

I’ll be following up with some more updates about this over the next few days.

Well, being that I am biased and will say that the topic of Landing Pages & Multivariate Testing was the best topic (oh, did I talk about that?) I should probably discuss the second best topic of SMX London 2009.

2nd Best Topic: Writing Killer Search Ads & Landing Pages

I really enjoyed listening to Kate Morris of Marketing Demons.  I think I would have enjoyed Kate’s presentation more had it been first because some of what she discussed was covered first by Kerstin Baker-Ash’s presentation (who was also great).

Another great presenter was Guy Levine who mentioned off-line methods of getting great ad copy. Guy and I had a chat later that day and I mentioned the irony of his presentation: he suggested turning to magazines/newspapers for great headlines and it is our industry (online media) that is killing theirs.

Jon Myers, Head of Search at MediaVest, was the topic’s moderator and did a great job. He really gave the room’s energy a level higher than any other topic. When most moderators go to 10, Jon went to 11.

The networking was fabulous.

Well it wouldn’t be SMX without Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz now would it? I think I may have accidentally told Rand that I’d send him a few articles for his blog — which means anything that would have been worthwhile to read on this blog might now show up somewhere else

It goes without saying to give a big shout-out and thanks to both Chris Sherman and Fanny Jeanmougin for putting on SMX London and letting me speak. I look forward to SMX London 2010 and being able to present again.

As far as other smart people that attended the conference — It was awesome meeting Heath from Sony Europe. Words can not describe what a sharp guy Heath is in sales/marketing — maybe we will get the pleasure of having him speak at the next SMX because it would take Zoosk leaps and bounds to use a few pages from his playbook and apply them to our current strategies.

I am currently in London, England because tomorrow (London-time) will be the first day of SMX London. I landed last night (lost a total of 20 hours) and well rested and ready to go. I spent the day being a tourist and seeing the sights. Right now I am back at my hotel room (it is 6:48 PM local time) and checking over email, stats, etc — even though I am out of the country it does not mean that I can stop thinking about work.

As a single 20-something I must say… London is great if you are reasonably attractive. There are a lot of women with cute accents and most important is that they are much easier to engage in conversion with versus the women back home.

If you are in London — I am expecting you to show up for SMX London 2009 at the New Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden.

Now that my father has passed away, I get to hear some pretty interesting stories from his friends that he would never tell me when I was younger.

As a lawyer he would meet with a lot of various people…. Here is a memorable quote from a trip to Boston to meet with a Venture Capital firm:

“You see what we do is we know a start-up needs 10 million dollars. So we give them 5 million because we know in a year they will be back again and we will give them another 5. This way instead of owning 20% of the company in two years, we own 20% in one and own 50% in two. Pretty soon we own the entire company.”
- Venture Capitalist

“That sounds exactly like what the mob does!”
- My Father

Thoughts? In the start-up world we laugh at this, but really — this is the reality.  If you can’t boot-strap then you give into men who wear suits.

Maybe the employees at Zoosk need to use our site for dating as much as our users?

I have attached a photo of one of the Zooskers who dressed up like a character from Star Trek in honor of the movie coming out to theaters tonight.

Edit: I was asked by the Zoosker not to show his picture.

Edit 2: Picture is back up.

PS: If you want to meet the team at Zoosk we will be at the 8:30 show at the Sony Metreon.

PPS: For the record, I feel this is movie is going to be the best movie that is coming out this year. Also, I have seen every Star Trek episode at least twice (and own all of the movies)

So I wanted to write a quick post and say that the Lunch 2.0 was a success. We had a few kegs of beer and lots of pizza. I will try to post some pictures later about the Lunch 2.0 at Zoosk - the largest dating application on Facebook.

Zoosk is having an awesome meet and greet for startup lovers and web geeks in the San Francisco area. Come by and check out one of the coolest teams that I have had the opportunity to work with. The Lunch 2.0 is being held the day before Valentines Day.

Zoosk - Largest Online Dating Site for Facebook and MySpace.

130 Battery Street, Suite 300

Friday 13th 12:00 to 2:00 PM

Many thanks goes out to PPCBlog.com (the sister site to SEOBook.com) for calling two of our tools as “cool” and mentioning them in today’s blog article.

You can find the article here: http://ppcblog.com/new-pay-per-click-tools/.

We will be releasing a new tool tomorrow. I apologize for not releasing anything today, but there are three tools that are in debugging mode and I hope to launch them all before the end of the week!