Many Body Theory

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.

During SMX London there was a great question that was asked to my panel. The question was “How to you deal with clients who’s developers are against always dropping your pixels in when you need to add new analytics?”

This was a really great question. Lately, I have been working at Zoosk so I have not had this problem but did manage to think of an answer (one that I wish I thought of having to deal with the same problem).

My suggestion: use a 1×1 pixel iframe.

I have found that when dealing with clients that it is easiest to have their developers drop in any pixels that you want when they first get signed. If you ask them to drop in an iframe that loads some page from one of your servers, you can drop in any javascript pixels that you wish on that page and not have to go to the developers. What is also great about this, is that you never have to worry about load time - the developers will never have to complain that your pixels are causing the page to load because it is locked away in an iframe and you won’t have to worry about distracting the user experience with the size of it being 1 pixel by 1 pixel.

So next time you take on a client, or if you are an in-house internet marketer — try to get the developers to drop in a 1×1 iframe pixel that loads a page on a server that you control and allow you to drop in any javascript pixels that you want to fire without always having to ask permission from the dev team.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=zooks

Google now thinks that “Zooks” — which is an actual town in Iowa is a typo for the dating website that I am currently working for: Zoosk.

So some of the more sophisticated internet marketers and affiliates that I know use some sort of basic rules based bidding to decide whether a keyword should be bid up, down or paused. Some even apply similar principles to ads/landing pages to decide whether they need to pause something.

Wouldn’t it be great to do something that wasn’t rules based? Something that would work for nearly every industry out of the box and can adapt to changes in your website?

My topic (I think I”m given about 10 - 15 minutes?) is about multivariate landing pages and testing. I’ll go into details and show how you can predict landing page conversion rates (yes, wake up every morning and already know how much money you will make) and determine whether something will back out (I don’t care if I get 1,000 new users for $0.01/each if none of the pay me money) — oh and by the way, you’ll be able to apply all of this to your keywords and the rest of your marketing strategy (yes, I said it!)

Register now for SMX London (http://searchmarketingexpo.com/london)

… no big deal.

Today I recieved an email from Search Marketing Expo about whether I’d like to speak on May 18th about Multivariate Testing.

I haven’t decided on whether I will accept because of all of the madness with everything else in my life but you know if I decide to go then it will be off the hook. I’ve done my research on the other speakers and pretty sure I know exactly what they will be talking about and will be able to wow the audience about advanced tactics that are five years ahead of what they are doing.

I’ll have to sleep on it and will post tomorrow whether or not I will be in London this May. There are a lot of other great speaking events and still waiting to hear back from two other conferences this summer

If you can’t determine whether a keyword will convert within ten (10) clicks then you aren’t a professional internet marketer.

Also, the position has to be position 5 (mid page) and you need to stretch these 10 clicks across a week’s worth of data.

Note: no, this is not how you should do Internet marketing and assume that after 10 clicks you can turn anything off. This post is a mockery of someone who interviewed with a friend and utterly failed during the question of “how can you tell whether a keyword is performing”

Zoosk.com is a free online dating website that until recently has focused all of their attention on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. To date they have over 10 million profiles — making them the largest dating application for social networks.

Earlier this week they brought me on board to help build out their online presence in the search engine world through pay per click marketing. I am very exciting about working with the team at Zoosk and looking forward to increasing their already impressive member count.

Check them out – Zoosk.com

So I will be going to SMX West 2009 on Tuesday, Februrary 10th to see Dennis Yu talk about Local Search Marketing Tactics.

Dennis is an old mentor, colleague and most importantly friend who I am honored to have in my network. It was back in 2006 when he brought me on-board his first company to work with him on providing SEM and SEO for large non-profits. Flash forward to 2009 and he is still providing great quality work for non-profits as well as large companies such as Quiznos and Analog DIgital.

To sign up and see Dennis Yu speak about Local Search Marketing Tactics, you can goto: http://searchmarketingexpo.com/west

For those looking for free credits to spend using the Yahoo Search Marketing platform I have included a link to get $25 of free spending money.

If you are just starting out and every dollar counts then this $25 can mean a lot if you are not going to be spending much a day.

Coupon Link: Yahoo Search Marketing $25 Coupon