We want to know how you got into Internet Marketing. Was it through a friend? Was it a news article that captured your attention?  How about a random opportunity? Make it as interesting as possible. It can be either long or short.

You can check out Dave Snyder’s story here.

Here’s my story:

In 2004, I opened up a Myspace and Facebook account. I pushed FB to the side when it stopped being a “private reunion club” for college students and I went full swing with MS. I was a Myspace nut — pimpin’ out my profile and trying to get 50,000+ comments. I wanted to beat Tila Tequila. I failed. Well, a few years later, MS became loaded with spammers and I went back to FB.

I played around with FB for a while. I was constantly writing on people’s walls, posting up pictures and giving out “presents.” It started to suck when I found out people were not adding me to their top friends list nor did I see myself in some of their photos. My jealousy took the best of me. It was so childish, I know.

So during my last semester at the University of South Florida, Tampa, I ended ties with FB. I didn’t want it to consume my time anymore nor did I want to feel the abandonment. I was saying goodbye to all social media.

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Gerontology in the Summer of ’07 and ended up landing a finance job in Corporate America with Wells Fargo Financial. How boring!!! I needed something to keep me alive so I tried singing in a MoTown/Classic Rock band. It never took off so I quit. At the same time I took up a fun part-time job with Creative Loafing, Tampa, a local alternative newspaper. I worked in their marketing department on the Street Team. It was a blast! Check out my coverage on Superbowl XLIII.

Since the economy wasn’t doing so well (and it still isn’t!), things didn’t work out with Wells Fargo. With my successful failure at Monster and YahooHotJobs to find a potential employer, I tried my luck with Craigslist. Lo and behold…Search & Social!

I had a meeting with Loren at a nearby Starbucks. I was told that this was just an intern job doing PR. Even though I had debt racking up from not having a full-time job, I wanted to get into PR so I said yes to it. So guess what, I showed my face to FB again. And then I started a marriage with Twitter. I even started a blog for the Tampa girls at Search & Social called SEOtini.

Dave and Loren have taught me a lot about SEO, linkbuilding, social media and online marketing. I was so against it, but social media is a big part of my life now.

That’s my story. Now go make yours! Leave your internet marketing autobiography in the comments section after this post. Comments may not always be posted immediately due to moderation and our spam filters BUT we will approve them once we see them pending. All stories need to be submitted by April 8, 2010.

The winner of this contest will receive an all-access pass for the eight speaker sessions, networking with experts and businesses from across the country, casino night and calypso night, and breakfast, lunch and dinner on both days of the conference.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Your Story Contest – Win a Free Pass to the S&S Spring Summit

The cool thing is that if you share your personal information with them, the next time you change your Yahoo contacts details, you no longer have to inform them one by one. Yahoo Contacts will automatically update the information your shared with them previously.

The same thing happens with your friends’ details on your Address Book but only if they opted to share their Yahoo Contact Details’ auto-updating features with their contacts including you.

Setting this up is pretty simple. Just go to  Yahoo Contacts and click on “Share my Info” link which you can find under the Popular Tools option. This will display your current Yahoo Contact Info.  Then click on the Start Sharing button. Yahoo Contacts will then a notification to your friends and business contacts that you have changed your contact info. And they don’t have to do anything as it will be automatically updated in their Address Book.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Yahoo Rolls Out Auto-Updating Address Book

With this in mind, I wrote a couple of posts outlining the idea of an SEO honeymoon and what it might mean to inherit a site of that’s been on a SEO honeymoon.  I wanted to take these posts a little further and highlight a debate that I’ve been having in my head around whether an outgoing SEO agency should fully support the incoming agency or not, and if so, to what extent?

The challenges to being helpful

Without a doubt, without business interests helping an incoming agency to take over an account that you previously managed would be a whole lot easier.  But with business interests in mind, why does this support not happen?

1. Heritage of competiveness between agencies / consultants
2. Reluctance to share SEO ‘secrets’
3. Sabotage the success of the incoming agency
4. Cost to the incumbent of providing this service
5. The incumbent on a sales drive to recover revenue
6. Client’s misunderstanding of the SEO process

…to name but a few reasons.  That said, I don’t want to overly stress that the incumbent agency as the sole driver of this transition, so how else can it be managed?

Who has responsibility for the transition?

It needn’t be just the responsibility of the incumbent to manage this process.  What about a scenario whereby on taking on a contract with a consultant or agency, there was an exit strategy agreed upon, where each party would be obliged to fulfil certain responsibilities?

What if the SEO consultant highlighted, from the outset how responsible, transparent and confident they were in their work that they laid this out as an option to the client from the outset?  Immediately we can see that the client, incumbent and incoming parties all can take responsibility for this process, but does this necessarily take care of business interests highlighted above?  Not really.

Business Case to be a Good SEO citizen

Much of what is to follow is angled as if the incumbent party was the driving force but in reality each of these items can be rephrased to highlight the business benefits of considering funding and contracting and transition process.  So here are few thoughts on why exactly promoting closer working between the incumbent and incoming agency/consultant to be hugely helpful…

It’s a small world. You lose a client for whatever reason but through your bitter attitude you gain a poor reputation across their offices.  This might mean that someone that previously had respect for you and your work, and that could have appointed or recommend you in the future, might lose that within a few bitter days or weeks of behaviour.

Grass is greener syndrome. Clients may well have had a bad bout of the grass is greener syndrome and felt eager to jump SEO ship, when in reality, the former incumbent agency was indeed the most fitting option.  As such, they may well return back to the former agency, but only if they had been professional and supportive in their approach as the outgoing agency.

Future case studies. All-in-all, you don’t want the clients results to dip do you.  I’m sure you’ve worked long and hard to achieve a great deal of visibility so do you really want these drop off and prevent you case studying these sustained results in the future?

Clients being more than a pay cheque. You may well wish to show respect for the people/clients that you’ve been working with by ensuring a smooth transition as it may well be their heads on the line if results slip as a result of poor management of this process.  A key point to remember is that many smarter business folk than me stress that business is as much about relationships as it is about the top-line.

If anything arose from any of these items they could quite easily create a poor image of you and the company’s respect for clients.  As a worst case scenario, if this bad reputation was to travel, it might do untold damage to your reputation amongst your peers and prospective/current clients too.

I’m sure there are a number of other reasons to add to this list too, but these seem to be pretty big chunks of food for thought alone…what do you think?

So is an SEO prenup the answer?

There are certainly pro’s and con’s of each, and I like the idea – but is it really to idealist?

I suppose there are quite big differences of being bitter and professional, but needless to say the way an outgoing / incoming party behave during this process can really show their true colours.

Factoring in an exit strategy is certainly like a marriage’s prenuptial agreement; but if divorces feature as part of 50% of marriages in the UK, then each and every client changing their SEO provider is an almost certainty.  As such, should we not make sure that this transfer of client SEO work is managed efficiently and effectively, and as part of the contract?  Do you do this?  I’d be really interested to hear if you have considered this and in what way, so please share!

P.S. Oh, and please don’t share with my girlfriend that I’ve been using so many wedding analogies lately – I don’t want her to get the wrong idea!!

Ben writes about managing SEO and the joys of SEO consulting on his blog, Just Me and My, an organiser of UK search, analytics and social conference, SAScon, and all whilst working as an SEO Director at Mediaedge:cia, WPP.  Ben is quite the busy bee!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Should Clients Invest in an SEO Prenup?

Hey everyone!! It’s that time of the year again for the Spring Summit and we have some great contests going on! With the success of our Twitter #team contest (which is currently going on until midnight), we decided to roll out ANOTHER contest today. If you’re interested in winning a free ticket, then try your luck on this one! It’ll be fun.

Contest details and the video to post a response to can be found here: Contest Video.

On this, you’ll have the chance to reply to the video that I’m putting up. I ask a very simple question- what funny/weird/strange/awesome experiences have you had thanks to social media? I’ll start the video off with one of my own (the bear video) as an example, but you need to send a video response to our video entitled “Search & Social Spring Summit Contest #3″ and get your friends to rate you or comment on you. Whoever has the most votes wins a free Search & Social Spring Summit ticket!

• Go to our youtube channel located here: Contest Channel
• Watch my video for information on the contest
• Send in your own “video response” with your funny/weird/awkward/awesome social media story.
• The winner will be decided by how many votes/ratings yours gets and runs until April 1st.

If you click to see more comments and responses, you will be able to see this area that allows you to add your own video response-

Now, I don’t want to get any comments about how ditzy I sound on this video- I swear I don’t sound like that in real life. Something about webcams just doesn’t flow well with me. I recorded many a video and, sadly, this was the best one. I happened to ramble alot on it but I hope you hang on through the whole video so you can post your video response! In addition to what I said in the video, it hit me after I recorded it that something else happened to me on social media that would have been far more fun to mention.

My bosses are trying to pimp me out to fight a bear during the summit. Ahhh yes, you can probably find the multiple posts due to the magic of Twitter hash-tags (#SSSS) showcasing their eagerness to see me duke it out with a live (and heavily clawed) animal. It started out as a ping, which turned into a tweet, which turned into multiple re-tweets…. now, this might be a fly by night rumor, or it might be true… but either way, I guess you’ll have to upload your video response and try to win a free ticket to find out :)

As you can tell from my video there are absolutely no standards for how you record it. Use whatever webcam you have- or even your iPhone if you want.

Be honest, don’t hold back. Did you meet your boyfriend through social media? Say it. Did you get stalked through social media? Do tell. But only if it’s not serious. I don’t like hearing about harm happening to people via the internet…only hilarious stuff! Did you win something or get randomly picked for a prize thanks to your social media account? Are you that girl that Conan O’Brien singled out to follow on Twitter and now you’re famous!? Remember- the way to get the most votes/ratings is to just have something completely unexpected. I want to hear EVERYTHING and ANYTHING! Make them fun. The contest ends April 1, 2010.

This ticket will include access into the eight speaker sessions, networking with experts and businesses from across the country, admission to casino night and calypso night, and breakfast, lunch and dinner on both days of the conference.

Good luck to you all, and I’ll see you at the Summit :) I’ll be congratulating our winner personally. Perhaps I’ll use the location finder on Twitter to find you so you have another story to tell ;)

PS: Check back to the SEOtini Youtube Channel as well as our SEOtini blog. They’ll be some fun updates coming up!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Youtube Contest – Win a Free Pass to Search & Social Spring Summit

By acquiring Citizen’s Sports, Yahoo hopes to strenghten its social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the web while offering social experience especially since Citizen’s Sports has proven itself in the social sports industry with its innovative applications.

In fact millions of people are said to using Citizen’s Sports various social and mobile products including fantasy sports, live scores and up-to-the minutes sports news. These will blend will with Yahoo Sports content to create a seamless experience for all of us sports fans.

Yahoo Sports boasts of more than 39 million monthly unique users in the U.S.  While Citizen’s Sports popular applications that work with Facebook, MySpace, hi5, iPhone and Android span across professional, college and high school sports. These two sports services are definitely a match-made-in heaven.

The acquisition deal is set to commence in the second quarter 0f 2010. Unfortunately no finacial details were disclosed yet.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Yahoo Buys Social Sport Site Citizen’s Sports

The first new feature that has been added to the latest version of Google Maps for Mobile is search n’ swipe. First, the Maps for Mobile search results pages now displays all the information related to your search. This was previously displayed as tabs. There are also new buttons that you can tap on and will show you places on the map, directions in getting to those places and even option to see those places in Street View.

The new mobile search results page also now makes it easier for you to navigate through various information about particular business establishment that you see on the map. You can swipe of the results page to the left or right  to navigate between pages that will yield more reviews, ratings, buzz and all.

Another new feature is the Latitude Widget and Live Wallpapers for Nexus One and Android 2.1 devices. You can add live Maps widget to your phone’s home screen to make it easier for you to access Google Maps for Mobile. And for Nexus one and Android 2.1 phone users, you can now also use those live, real-time updating maps as your phone’s wallpaper.

The last of the new features of Google Maps for Mobile 4.1 is support for multiple Google accounts. You can now switch between Google accounts that you want synced from your computer to your Android device.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Gesture Search, Swipe N’ Search for Google Android Phones

You have heard of Team Jolie and Team Aniston. You have picked sides with Team Edward or Team Jacob. Now it is time to make your own team. Today, gather up everyone you know and get them on Twitter. Get as many people as you can to be on your team. Have them tweet your team name, twitter name, and the hashtag #ssss. We will count the total number of tweets that you get when we stop the contest at midnight (12 a.m. EST) today.

Example 1: Team Thao @thaott #ssss

Example 2: RT Team Thao @thaott #ssss

Example 3: Any tweet that includes the above two examples

The person with the most tweets for their team will get a complimentary ticket to the 2010 Search & Social Spring Summit. This ticket will include access into the eight speaker sessions, networking with experts and businesses from across the country, admission to casino night and calypso night, and breakfast, lunch and dinner on both days of the conference.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Contest #2 Twitter Contest – Win a Free Ticket to Search & Social Spring Summit

Allowing these ad networks would mean more ad networks would be competing now for display ad space on publishers’ sites.  And this would lead to more ads to appear on sites serving AdSense display ads – more earning for site owners.

So the next time you check out your Ad Review Center account, don’t be surprise to see more ad networks queuing up on your display ad space. It’s up to you to select which of these ad networks you would allow to display their ads on your sites.

If you’re afraid that you might get an influx of ad networks which are not related to the subject of your sites, well, you don’t have to worry since some of these ad networks adhere to Google’s interest-based ad program which stipulates that only relevant ads are to be served on sites they visit. If you don’t like this arrangement, you can always opt-out of  this feature anytime.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google-Certified Ad Networks for All AdSense Publishers

Bing’s “Find more sizes” option not only lets you find different sizes of a particular image yield by your search but other available formats of that image as well.

So, the next time you use Bing’s image search, you can click on that “Find more sizes” option to get a page listing where all of the “same” images appear online in various format, resolution or minor editing. You will also see how these images have been used, that is whether the image was used for mockups, editing, cropping, framing and more. This way, you’d know exactly which image is appropriate for your needs and you don’t need to click on the image search results one by one.

The new feature also list all the pages that reference that particular image online and you can simply click on any of the page that you think would help you with your research.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Bing Adds More Sizes Option to Image Search

According to the Facebook blog, this new feature is aimed at helping Facebook users to quickly find and connect with people, pages, groups, events at applications on Facebook based on user’s preferences.

Facebook’s search suggestion features takes into account not only the people, events, groups and Pages that you are connected with but your friends connections as well. This opens up opportunities for discovering new connections while at the same helping you find the information you need on Facebook.

In addition to specific search suggestion, the drop-down menu also shows a “see more results” which if you click will bring you to a full search results page where you can refine your search further or sort the results by categories. Unfortunately I don’t see this link yet on the search suggestion drop-down menu. It would be interesting to see how Facebook’s search results page looks like and how it compares with the SERPs of the major search engines.  According to Facebook this new  feature will be rolled out on the next few days .

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Facebook Rolls Out Search Suggestion Feature