Almaty resort

Google seemed to have a party for some of their employees in the Google Dublin office. It is called the Google Summer and the theme was the Flamingle Resort. Here is a photo showing off a pink classic car and the signage to the entrance of the party. It was posted on Instagram. There are more photos of this event on Instagram as well. This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers. … [Read more...] about Google Summer Flamingle Resort Party

It may seem like more email addresses will result in more leads, but purchasing lists has the opposite effect. Purchasing an email list actually damages brand reputation and decreases the chance of engaging with the right customers. So how can you grow your list the right way? Not purchasing existing lists is the first step. But there are many other ways to grow your email subscriber base organically. Here are three to get you started: 1. Give customers multiple opportunities to sign up Share your  email sign-up form in multiple places, and always communicate what value a new subscriber will get for signing up. One of my favorite places to promote an email list is on a thank-you page. If a customer has engaged with your brand and you are sending a thank-you, use that opportunity to continue the relationship by sharing an email newsletter they easily can sign up for, and communicate the value they'll receive by signing up. At each opportunity, make sure you are optimizing your … [Read more...] about How to grow your email marketing list without resorting to shortcuts

Demand Media has filed for an IPO. The company, known as a content farm to some, produces much of its content on sites like eHow and others in direct response to what it determines people are searching for on the web. Its filing shed new light on how much it depends on SEO and Google, in particular. That’s interesting, because I’ve never known a company — a publisher — so dependent on SEO (outside of actual SEO companies) to go public before. Below, highlights on these aspects. The SEO and Google aspects really get going around page 14 of the filing: Page 14: Google Funds Big Chunk Of Demand Media We have an extensive relationship with Google and a significant portion of our revenue is derived from cost-per-click performance-based advertising provided by Google. For the year ended December 31, 2009 and the six months ended June 30, 2010, we derived approximately 18% and 26%, respectively, of our total revenue from our various advertising arrangements with … [Read more...] about The Google & SEO Aspects

Online advertising, and especially its bulky older brother, “programmatic,” are darlings of the digital marketing world. Even folks who typically focus on the content and SEO side are dipping into the implications of bot-driven ads. The ability to deliver highly targeted display ads and sponsored content to key consumer segments, with (literally) super-human speed and precision sounds like the data-driven answer businesses have been waiting for since the dawn of “personas.” But what if there’s something wrong? Not with programmatic, but with the system itself: the vehicle on which ads arrive on consumers’ desktops and phone screens? For many niche and local publications, plans for profitability already feel tenuous; if a startup with $132 million in the bank and a network of incredible talent can’t foresee sustainability in digital ads, what do the next few years look like for the little guys? The Medium move Earlier this month, Ev Williams, … [Read more...] about What does Medium.com’s profit model pivot say about the future of online advertising?

I’ve heard about DuckDuckGo a few times over the years, mostly as a name uttered in hushed whispers behind closed doors – “You don’t have to use Google. There is another way.” As far as I knew, it was a small, scrappy start-up that had nevertheless managed to make its mark in the world of search, dominated as it is by the vast and all-knowing Google. Frustration with Google might be at a high at the moment with tax-dodging, increasing dominance of search (and now the mobile web) and removing ads on the right hand side at the expense of organic search results. Therefore I was intrigued by the comments from DuckDuckGo fans on Jason Tabeling’s article on whether you should be paying more attention to DuckDuckGo, urging people to switch to DuckDuckGo and discover the ‘real internet’. How would searches from such a small engine stack up against Google’s, in everyday situations? Would using DuckDuckGo be an exercise in frustration, or a … [Read more...] about Going over to the duck side: a week using DuckDuckGo