Notes from the field.
Long-form essays on the operator's craft — momentum, judgment, SEO, and the patient compounding work that nobody Tweets about. One Sunday at a time.
Holistic Content Marketing Helps All Marketing Channels
Content is king. We’ve been hearing this for years, and, to this day it is still the truth. But, the type of content and mediums to promote it have been different and…
Setting my intention for 2016 and what led me here
I had so many thoughts to share about 2015, the past couple years, and most importantly, looking forward at the future. I would say that 2015 was very much up and down,…
Quickbooks Connect: Growing Your Business Online Presentation
At Quickbooks Connect I presented on all the available methods to help small business owners grow their business online. I discussed SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, Facebook Ads, and Email Marketing.
The Snowball Effect: Getting Started and Gaining Momentum
I’ve been thinking about the “snowball effect” for a few weeks now and reminded myself how important it is to get started. It led me to wondering what we’re doing at Visible Factors…
Must have online marketing tools when starting your business
Over the years I have used tons of tools for marketing programs and campaigns I’ve created. But, I get a lot of people that ask me “what do you use for email…
Top SEO mistakes or best practices overlooked
A lot of companies tend to over-think or over-engineer their SEO efforts but they forget things like keeping the site up, site speed etc. After working with over 20 companies in the…
SEO as a core startup marketing strategy
If you’ve ever started a brand new site, you’ll know that getting organic traffic is extremely difficult. Sure you can buy traffic through Adwords or various other media buys and/or you can…
In The Last Year, I Built A Company Without Knowing It
A little over a year and a half ago I resigned as the CEO of Eventup, the company I founded and loved with all of my heart. I thought my career was…
Save Time Guest Blogging, List Away
If you are doing SEO of any form, you’ll know one of the biggest and most important challenges is finding links. A quick and easy way that I recommend to companies that…
Tony Adam
Tony Adam is Founder and CEO of Visible Factors (a Prime Rank Media, Inc. company), has been in technology since 2000 and online marketing since 2003. Tony is an entrepreneur, startup advisor,…
Stop Complaining About Search and Content Based Business Models
There is so much buzzing in the search industry from @arrington writing about why he thinks search still sucks and JCPenney being busted for paid linking. And, just weeks ago Google busted…
An InHouse SEO's story of feeling beaten down but always moving forward
Decision Making: How to be Better and Faster
Being a good decision maker is one of the toughest things to be. It isn’t just about being smart, but, also has a huge dependency on being able to make quick decisions…
Social Design & Optimization: The Power of Network Effects
One of the most interesting things I’ve been studying over the last year has been the power social design and network effects. Even though many of us have used Social Media for…
Professionalism: Let's have a toast for the douchebags
One of my favorite quotes I try to remember every day is by Nas. In the song “Favor for a Favor” he recites “Favor, for a favor, that’s how we do business.”…
Presentation: SEO & Social Media for Communications Professionals
Thanks to Erik Deutsch, I had the opportunity to speak to a great class at UCLA tonight about SEO and Social Media for Communications Professionals.
Digg 4.0: Is it coming sooner than expected?
Last week I was working with someone and showing her the ropes of social media marketing and other general topics. I had showed her how to sign up for Digg, StumbleUpon, and…
Creating Relationships vs. Selling and Closing: It’s all about Partnerships
If you know anything at all about me, it’s likely that it’s this- I’m ALL about the relationships that I create. I’ll never blatantly walk up to someone and tell them they…
Job Hopping: A resume doesn't tell the whole story
I’ll start by saying this, I agree with Mark Suster’s points to never hire job hoppers, but, sometimes there is more to a story than a resume holds. And, according to Jason…
Setting goals and executing with social media marketing
While at SXSW, Chris Winfield and I had our presentation on “Social media marketing for your business.” My biggest focus for the presentation was to help people realize the power of creating…
Business Development Opportunities: Find and Close Them
Having spent a lot of my career doing a lot more than just SEO, I’ve had to wear many different hats. One of my favorite hats to wear is actually the Business…
Moving back to Los Angeles for MySpace!
For the last couple weeks, I’ve been tweeting a ton about “big decisions” that are on the horizon. The truth is I came to a major cross roads career wise and geographically.…
Are Google’s real time and latest results REALLY based on relevance?
I’ve had a few colleagues and friends lately ask me about Google’s real time search results since they launched real time search about two months ago. To some of you, this might…
foursquare: The arrival of the location based business "game"
I’ve been on this huge kick of creating visibility for products online lately. All I can think about is how to gain visibility for an online brand. Along with that, I’ve been…
Why being a strategic marketer is so important
I’ve spent the last week at my parents house in a little town in Los Angeles called LaCrescenta. It’s been the first time I haven’t been in an office for over 1…
Social Media Marketing for your Business at SXSWi
About two months ago, I reached out to Chris Winfield, Brent Csutoras, and Todd Malicoat about putting together a Social Media Marketing for your Business Panel at SXSW Interactive. We all thought…
Business Ethics & Mistakes you should avoid!
As an individual that works very hard at maintaining relationships and attempts to help anyone at anytime he possibly can, I see some pretty interesting mistakes that people make, DAILY! Sometimes, I…
Building Traction with Search and Social Media Visibility
Over the last few months I’ve seen an interesting cross section of startups to large brands and marketers to developers that are all running businesses. There has been one thing that ties…
Another #twitterfail? – Twitter turns on Mobile Notifications for Users
So today I was going on about my business when I got like 10 sms messages in a row from Twitter. For no absolutely reason at all either. Then I was like…what…
Twitter taking the Social out of Social Discovery
The most trending topic on twitter right now as I am writing this post is #fixreplies. It is shocking to me that after weeks of proclaiming that twitter is all about social…
Online Reputation Management DOES matter
So, I wake up this morning and see a post written by Darren Slatten completely dismissing the importance of Online Reputation Management. And, I found the post a little comedic at best,…
Twitter integrates search into main site
Well, there has been talk about Twitter integrating its Search functionality into their main site. It turns out the twitter team was testing this out and it has now integrated into the…
Skittles Aggregated Website, is this a Win or Fail?
Lots a brewing on the Skittles madness tonight because of they’re new “Social Media Aggregation” for their domain. The question I have is, was this a move of pure genius? Or, are…
Keys to building quality relationships and things to avoid
I could go on and on for hours about how people abuse relationships because I am sooo passionate about the topic. Within Internet Marketing, I have developed some solid relationships with and…
Checking StumbleUpon Referrals and Reviews to specific URLs
I was listening in on Office Hours on WebmasterRadio.fm today and the question came up of how to find the referrer URL from StumbleUpon to your site. When you look at Google…
Measuring success in SEO and Social Media by determining ROI, Analytics, Metrics up front
When you are working at an organization that doesn’t have the right analytics, its painful. This also goes for working with clients that don’t have the money to buy an analytics package…
Startup Mistakes: Just launched my site, now I need SEO
I have been in SEO and Internet Marketing for some time now and I can’t tell you how many sites I have worked with or seen that have come to me after…
4 Main Reasons you should be linking in Blogs
We create blogs with tons of great content and we base our content on Social Media that attracts a link or two. (Boy, isn’t that the understatement of the year!) We rely…
AJAX and Non-JavaScript Experiences for SEO friendly websites
With the “Web 2.0” world that we live in, companies are inclined to create “snazzy” new AJAX experiences for users. I have been dubbing this the AJAX Dilemma lately because organizations/companies/website owners…
Positioning yourself using SEO and PPC for Customer Acquisition
When I started learning about SEO and the role it can play for any business, whether small or large, there was one quote that put it all into perspective. It was a…
Top 7 Must have Firefox Extensions, Plugins, and Tools
Since I just bought my new Macbook Pro, I had to reinstall all of my Firefox extensions, plugins and tools. So, I figured, hey, why not write a detailed post with examples…
Giving thanks, while also providing perspective on the SEO Community
If you know me at all by now, you will know that I am typically a very humble and modest person that just sits back and enjoys the show. I never usually…
Tips for Building Communities, Online and Offline
I have been inundated with communities over the last couple years and recently it has been almost the only thing I am working on lately. I have learned so much about managing…
An understanding of SEO Keyword Research
Keyword research is the base for any good SEO campaign and a large amount of your success will be truly dependent on how well you did your keyword research. Of course, this…
The Art of SEO Evangelism
Being an SEO Evangelist within an organization requires lot of energy, a lot of knowledge, thick skin, and a lot of relationships. Success is hard to come by and will require a…
Updating Permalinks when moving to WordPress 2.5
Tonight I updated WordPress from WordPress 2.0.2 to WordPress 2.5 and ran into some issues with permanlinks. Turns out that Yahoo! Web Hosting does not allow you to do Permalinks the standard…
Internal Link Architecture for your website
Part of any link building campaign should always include the internal Link Architecture that you have within your domain and off the domain for link building activities. I tend to use the…
Being prepared and doing research pays off
Over the past week I have seen two of the most horrific examples of why research is so important. It is what we base our decision making on in our work lives,…
Sculpting PageRank using rel=nofollow for Link Architecture
Over the years I’ve been practicing a lot of different techniques with my internal link architecture. One of the things that I have been doing more and more of is evaluating when…
Social Media – Part 2: Dominating the Search Engine Results Pages
Last week I talked about how to stay active, answer questions, etc. to keep brand awareness high and reputation management under control. This week, I’m going to give you an overview of…
Social Media – Part 1: Being Active in your Community and Answering Questions
I’ve wanted to start writing more about Social Media and I think the best way to start would be to talk abut what I love doing, and that is building my own…
Web Standards based design and SEO
So, I figured to ring in the New Year of 2008, I would post about how the whole SEO industry should really start to take an understanding of Web Standards in the…
Being an Industry Thought Leader Through Your Corporate Blog
This is a continuation post as a follow up to Blogging for Customers, not Dollars. I felt this was important for corporations and in-house talent to look at when writing a blog.…
Being effective at Conferences and Networking Events
Sometimes it is very hard to meet people at conferences, networking events, etc. I’ve been doing this for quite some time as a consultant, so there are a lot of lessons that…
Evangelizing SEO within an organization…
Evangelism about SEO in an organization and spreading the word in a “grass-roots” sort of way is something that is very hard to do. I always think about it and get excited…
Top 5 Viral Marketing Tips forgotten
Many companies completely forget to include the following viral strategies or they are simply looked over. The sad truth is that these strategies are almost always EXTREMELY simple to implement. 1. Add…
The value of networking and social media
Yesterday night I had a conversation with a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in a long time and it has inspired me to write a post about networking. I have…
Tools for Linkbait and Viral Marketing
Really understanding the value of good links and viral marketing seems to be a common struggle for many companies. This being the case, it is very easy for these companies to lose…
Blogging for Customers, not Dollars
I really want to focus right now on how to focus blogging on not dollars, but your customers. So, to start, I want to tell you what this WILL NOT be about:…
Word of Mouth, Viral and Customer Evangelist Marketing
After receiving a book about Creating Customer Evangelists, I was inspired to re-visit a post I had written a while back on the new generation of Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM), Viral…
Copywriting & Good SEO Copy
SEO has lately been a plethora of information about Linkbait, tricking engines, social marketing and such and I wanted to post something in my mind that really takes me back to what…
SEO vs. PPC: There is no debate
I was going through my recent newsletters and blogs today when I came across an article about the battle between the two. Personally, I do not think there is a debate and…
Click Fraud Funding Terrorism
Minutes after posting my latest entry about throwing out speculation about where Google would be if Click Fraud had action taken upon it, there has been a stunning new development. Apparently at…
Beginner's Guide to Blogging
Recently I have been trying to get into the swing of reading up on articles in my time off, getting back into SEO/SEM and blogging. Soon enough I will try to enter…
SEO "Secret Sauce"
I keep hearing lately about what the “secret ingredient” or “secret sauce” is of SEO. It has kind of bothered me because for about 2 years now i’ve been in the industry…
One essay, every Sunday.
The marketing operator's notebook — what I'm building, what I'm reading, what I keep getting wrong. No course, no funnel, no upsell.