Archive for the ‘Search Industry’ Category
Smx Sydney Review – Hats off to Barry Smyth
SMX Sydney was a great success well done Barry. I went to all the way to San Jose last year to hear what our international comrades think about search and Barry has saved me a trip this year by bringing the best of the best to us here in Australia.
Some of the A list thought leaders that I got to discuss the future of search with were Danny Sullivan, Rand Fiskin, and Gord Hotchkiss. I couldn’t get within 10 feet of these guys in San Jose.
It was also very good to see a lot of very familiar Australian faces in the crowd. My old mate Mark Armstrong from Google and I had a very constructive conversation about AdWord API Fees – I said they were a touch expensive to add and update ads and he accused me of melting down several adwords servers and causing the San Fran power grid to shut down when the adwords api was free. We came to a mutual agreement that the adwords api fee was a good way to make people like me develop smarter software and hopefully he will push my feedback up to the people that set the api quota system and make it cheaper to publish ads.
Apology
I would like to make a public apology to Stuart Bartram from Double Click for calling him a big tool in the middle of my SEM tool kit presentation. What I meant to say was that there were many big companies in the market that “BUILD” SEM tools - instead I said, “there are many big tools in the market” while pointing to Stuart. – Sorry about that matey, it was a genuine slip.
Thank You
Thanks to Adam Lasnik for being so incredibly generous with his time and sharing so much webmaster tool wisdom. The legendary Rand Fiskin - thanks for sharing SMO/M insights. Of course Danny Sullivan for his views on the future of Bid Management.
Last but by no way least thank you to the very lovely Ani Babaian for sharing the incredible Live Webmaster Center with the Aussies and for draging us to the ice bar.
Bootcamp Brisbane
I was asked to talk about the major issues to consider when running a search engine marketing campaign on a budget. The theme for the Brisbane bootcamp was travel and travel is of course a competitive category. Of course it is possible to compete but there are no shortcuts.
You can download the presentation here
What makes a great search engine marketer?
I have battled with this question from the very first day I decided to scale up my business.
When I started e-channel in 1999 I was armed with an entrepreneurial spirit and an associate diploma in mechanical engineering. In the early days search engine marketing was source code and Meta tags, and as odd as my background sounds it suited search engine optimisation (SEO) nicely. When Overture (now YSM) launched paid search - the landscape began to shift. Suddenly my skills were not enough and I knew it. My technical skills were still suited to SEO but I had to learn to deal with ad budgets, copywriting and data analysis. I enrolled in a Masters of Marketing at the University of South Australia and that was the turning point for me and e-channel. I learnt about the science of marketing and was instantly able to apply it to search. When Google came along with AdWords and took Overtures model to a whole new level I was ready to handle the technical and marketing aspects of search. The only problem was that my unique combinations of skill sets were not easy to find - So when I went about employing people I found the task of finding search engine marketing talent quite a challenge. I soon realised that I needed great software engineers and great marketers in my team to deal with the increasingly complex needs of my customers.
I now have a great team of search engine marketers and engineers around me. Here are some of the things I look for when recruiting a new team member. (more…)