Looks like other marketing writers are appreciating my words. Joseph Jaffe used several of my quotes in his article.

More speaking Gigs. Next Tuesday, March 18th, for the U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray Search Symposium: 2003 and Beyond.



Normally I'm sharing SEM and SEO tips with marketers, this time the audience is analysts, investors and other interested parties.

COOL!

Today I have the opportunity to speak at the Direct Marketing Club of NY's lunch event on search engine marketing. I love the speaker circuit ;-)

Jerk DeJour.

One of my insurance industry clients coined this great phrase for the dumb advertisers that sign up for Overture and then stick all their listings in top position till they figure out there is no way they can convert business at a rate to justify that price.

In some industries there are more Jerk DeJour's than others. Imagine some mid-sized organization's marketing manager discovers paid search, signs up for Overture and $15,000 dollars later realizes they made $2567 in revenue from the media spend. It's sad.

However the larger businesses are not immune. Some of them start to act like the Jerk DeJour when they have a position-focused campaign. They have deeper pockets and so may burn cash a lot longer.

So, if you are wondering how to track your Google Adwords content inventory and distinguish it from your pure search traffic, there is a way. Let's hope you are running a log analysis program. Look for googlesyndication.com in your referrer portion of your log file and that will be your content originated traffic. Then you can measure it to see how it converts and behaves.

I covered this in my marketing zine.

How could I forget. While at the SES show, the first organizational meeting of a newly forming organization SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization. No web site is up yet, but I volunteered to host it and get the site done. The driving force behind SEMPO is Barbara Coll. If you have attended an SES conference over the last few years, chances are you have heard Barbara share her secrets to effective organic SEO.

As the organization and its mission take shape, there will be a site up to communicate the goals of the organization to interested parties.

Oh yeah, if you are curious what the contextual ads look like within Google AdWords, chances are there is one at the top of this page. It took the AdWords system only 10 minutes to figure out to put SEM ads on this blog. The DB at the contextual portion of Google's AdWords must be quite nimble.

The Search Engine Strategies Conference was packed. Over 1000 attendees. That has to be a new record. I was able to speak three times at the event. At my first panel, I distributed my ClickZ article on the closed loop paid search campaign optimization method.



On a later panel, I joined Fredrick Marckini CEO of iProspect for a panel entitled Future of Search Engine Marketing. I love doing these kinds of panels. I was able to talk about the introduction of Contextual Advertising Inventory into Google and Overture's networks. I also talked about the fact that logo and image enhanced search results are coming in the future and are likely to improve the user experience for many players.



XML paid inclusion is also here to stay. No matter how good the spiders get at spidering, there will always be some content that is best fed in by trusted partners via XML.

There is far more to be said about "Best Practices" in search engine marketing than can be said in my ClickZ Column. Luckily, ClickZ has offered me the opportunity to publish weekly instead of bi-weekly. So, now I can share my ideas with the marketing community even more often. Given the recent aquisition of Blogger by Google, it seems I can no longer procrastinate setting up my own Blog. So here it goes.

Tomorrow I'm off with my team to Search Engine Strategies Boston.


So enough of this Blogging, back to my preparation for the conference. I have to share my wisdom with attendees while they also learn that my firm has the best PPC search engine campaign management software out there.