Happy Birthday Kevin Wilke – It’s coming up fast – Sat, Aug 7th, so this should hopefully reach the SERPS by then…:)  Happy Birthday Kevin Wilke, thank you for everything – awesome events, products, socials, etc.  Much Appreciated!!!

Happy Birthday Kevin Wilke !!!

If you are involved in affiliate programs and generate marketing and/or advertising revenue online from your blog, or other type of website, you may soon be in for a very rude, unpleasant surprize.  Especially with the current economic situation, state governments could be looking to increase revenue any way possible, and I”m sure that there will be increased instances of state legislatures trying to pry more and more of your hard earned money from your wallet and from your families.

What exactly is the Advertising Tax?  Well, a very short, basic explanation of it is that some people, governments, state legislatures, etc are trying to use the existance of an affiliate program as basis for the establishment of “Nexus” of a company in that state.  Once Nexus is established and has been determined, states can then use that to force those companies to collect sales tax for that state, at a minimum.  It opens up quite a can of worms, and sales tax could just be the beginning, as they could impose other legislation and control on those companies, and make business prohibitively expensive and an accounting nightmare at minimum.   Instead of dealing with this, retailers will just drop affiliates who reside in the offending states, further eliminating jobs and income when it’s difficult enough as it is.

One thing you can do is to visit this page at the Performance Marketing Alliance and let them know about yourself and how it would affect you.  They can then pass this information on to legislators in your state, and let them know that you don’t approve of it,  and the harm it would cause your business and your families.   http://performancemarketingassociation.com/advocateform.html

Better to take a proactive stance to this instead of just waiting for that e-mail that lets you know you’ve been dropped from the affiliate programs that are putting food on your table.  I’ve been through this once before, in 2006 with the online casino industry, with all of my eggs in one basket with that, and within a months time being dropped from every revenue source I had.  Not a fun spot to be in… 

Contact your legislators, representatives, congressmen, whoever, and let them know your stance on this…

Local Search Revolution – If you are a brick and mortar business, or a traditionally local, offline business, think again…  It’s not going to be long before, in many niches, that the success of local brick and mortar businesses will be driven by who ranks in the Google Maps section, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, etc. – AND – even who appears when you hit up OnStar to find a local restaurant, tire change, dentist, grocery store, lowest gas price in the area, etc.  Actually, that day is already here, and the further we move forward, the more pronounced the gap between the victors – those who are in the top of the maps section, and who appear in the GPS and OnStar Directories, and the loosers – those who don’t appear at all.  And the spoils for the victors, or the privledge to stay in business.  If you are concerned about the success of your business and are interested in being one of the LUCKY ones TO STAY in business in this new economy, and want to find out what must be done – click here right now and register for my  FREE Local Search Webinar this coming Tuesday.

There are very limited spots available, and first come, first served – and first to succeed…

Twitter is over capacity.  Please wait a minute and try again.  Must be a nice problem, I guess…  If I had a site selling something, or making money on advertising, which this site does in some ways, with affiliate links, and through the sales of my services, helping quite a few of my clients rank in the top of the search results for a number of their keyword terms, if I had such demand for the content and services on my site that it was over capacity, I’d have more business than I could handle.  I’d also loose a few customers, probably make a few mad, and loose advertising revenue.  I’m wondering how a social media site like Twitter, who KNOWS they are big and growing exponentially, makes a TON from advertising revenue, etc. can’t manage to scale their hosting and capacity.  Both a good and bad problem… Tweet…

Professional SEO’s Guide to Local Search – This is an incredible opportunity for you.  For a VERY LIMITED time, when you sign up for my mailing list on the right side of this page, you will receive a FREE copy of the Professional SEO’s Guide to Local Search.  This book is being sold online right now beginning at $49 which you can see the order page for the Professional SEO’s Guide to Local Search right here.  This book covers Google Local Business Listings, local seo, google maps, local search engine optimization, and how to get your business ranked for local search, and take advantage of this new wave in local search marketing, and will help you explode your business via the internet.

So, for simply signing up for my mailing list, you will receive a copy of this comprehensive guide for free, through a very special deal and arraingement with them.  This is an extremely limited time offer, and I will either comment or ammend this post when I’m forced to remove this very special offer, but for now, and as long as I can convince them to allow me to keep giving it away, it’s simply yours for the taking by signing up and confirming your e-mail on my Search Marketing education, news, and information e-mail list.

Hurry and put your name and e-mail in the box to the right on this page today to take advantage of this incredible offer, and get your  $49 Professional SEO’s Guide to Local Search for free….

I also provide comprehensive services related to local search, and am available for consulting, coaching, as well as provide complete, done for you services.  Contact us today to find out how we can help you explode your client base by tapping into one of the biggest marketing shifts in the past 100 years….  Local search and experience Search Marketing by Mike Richey.  Hurry and get your Professional SEO’s Guide for Local Search today while the offer is still available..

Search Engine Marketing – SEO vs. PPC.  Which is better?  Which gets better results?  I’ve heard that PPC is very expensive and there’s a lot of click fraud, and that it’s very difficult…

These are just a few of the things I’ve heard from friends and clients regarding search engine optimization, pay per click and marketing online.  With internet marketing, search engine optimization, and pay per click, there really is no “one size fits all” solution…  Each case has to be looked at individually, and then monitored for results, and tuned and it’s ongoing efforts re-evaluated, etc.

These are also just a few of the topics I’m going to be covering this evening at the US-75 Business Professionals Learning and Networking Group.  If you can make it, we’d love to have you, and I’ll be covering these and a wide variety of other topics, and would be happy to answer your specific questions and address any issues you might be having and help you get a grasp on what your options are, how they will benefit you, and what you can expect with diffferent kinds of marketing campaigns, etc.

I normally don’t post things like this, but Denai is a really good friend of mine, and I’d like to do what I can to help her live her dream.  If you could, please just take a few seconds to click on the link below, vote for her, and then either forward this link to everyone in your address book, your Facebook, Twitter, etc?  You don’t have to actually read anything….  Just click on the link below, click to vote for Denai, and it takes all of 30 seconds…

I’d very much appreciate your help with this, and I’m sure Denai would also…

Mike

The below is copied and pasted from an e-mail from her:

!!!PLEASE FORWARD!!!
====================
You read correctly, I am pursing a dream of being on TV… as a Talk Show host!
With Oprah’s contest for Your OWN Show, this will become a reality in 2010!!!
WOO HOO!!!
 
I need YOUR VOTES to climb the charts.
 
I am COMMITTED to working my way from page 70 to page ONE by July 3rd!
The Top FIVE with the most online votes will be on a REALITY TV SHOW.
Those persons will compete and my intention is to WIN my OWN show!!!
 
I NEED YOUR HELP TO GET THERE!!!
There are already people with over 1 million votes, but I BELIEVE in my friend, my colleagues, their networks, my family, and in my dream!!!
That is why my audition will RESONATE with the producers, Oprah, and all involved and you will see me on TV!!!
 
You can VOTE as often as you want whenever you want from now until midnight on July 3rd!
 
You can SHARE on Facebook, Twitter, and in your email asking your contacts to VOTE.
 
Please FORWARD this message to EVERYONE you know.
 
Here is the link: http://TheDenaiShow.com
 
THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!!!
Denai
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
VOTE TODAY & EVERYDAY FOR THE DENAI SHOW on OWN!!!
 

http://TheDenaiShow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yesterday, Google announced it’s new search index, Caffeine. What is Google  Caffeine?  How will Google Caffeine affect my SEO?   The premise behind Google Caffeine is that they can offer you MUCH fresher results, and that pages can be indexed at a MUCH faster rate that they’d previously been able to.  Google surmizes that people want to receive much more relevant content faster, and with the advent and exponentially increasing popularity of video, articles, blogs, and other various rich media content and information publication platforms, Google says that Caffeine can and will deliver.  How will it affect our SEO?  Remains to be seen.  From what it says, it will be possible for pages to get indexed and actually show up in the search results MUCH faster than before, but it could also create a demand for pages that refresh much more frequently, or content that is updated much more quickly, thus more labor intensive and increased effort and or costs associated with SEO.  Of course, as always, automation kicks in and enables these things to be taken into consideration and rolled out without manual intervention after being setup, but we’ll see.  According to Google “Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.”  That surely WOULD require a healthy dose of caffeine to manage that, and for many, to even begin to understand it.  As for search results and how it will affect SEO if at all, it’s only a day or so old, and the jury is out for sure still on Google Caffeine.  Read more about it here on Google’s official blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html