Dr Chynn - FIRST responder - on WTC settlement

Posted on June 24th, 2010 by Dov Weinstock

I would like to congratulate Worby & Groner for their persistence in working out a fair settlement with Judge Hellerstein for the 9/11 volunteers.

I was, to the best of my knowledge, not only the first eye surgeon, but the first MD to arrive on the scene at Ground Zero the morning of 9/11. The reason I got there first was because I had actually been on call as an intern at St. Vincent’s hospital the 1st time WTC was bombed nearly a decade before, and waited with 100 MDs for hours before the first ambulance showed up. So the 2nd time on 9/11, I decided to head down there on my own, rather than waiting around for hours.

We set up the first medical triage center in the Burger King across the street, and also helped set up the first morgue. I closed my laser vision correction center ( www.parkavenuelaser.com) for a week to volunteer at Ground Zero.

Today, I have asthma that my pulmonologist has attributed to inhaling particulate debris at Ground Zero, which is ironic at on 9/12 I was interviewed on national TV asking companies to donate respirators. I used to be very active in sports, and ran the NY Marathon when I was at Columbia Medical School. Now, I have a chronic cough, and could never run another marathon.

However, I’m not bitter. Being part of the incredible volunteer effort at 9/11 was one of the most important experiences of my life. If I now have some asthma and a chronic cough, so be it.

Like most 9/11 victims and volunteers, I have no desire to litigate. Really, I just want what is fair in terms of recognition and compensation for my real deficits.

Again, I appreciate the sincere efforts by both Worby & Groner and Judge Hellerstein to broker an honest settlement, so we volunteers are treated fairly, and can move on with our lives.

Sincerely,

–
Emil William Chynn, MD, MBA
Dartmouth + Columbia + Harvard + Emory + NYU-trained
1st LASIK surgeon in NYC to have LASIK himself (in ‘99)
Only pure refractive surgeon in NYC who exclusively performs No-Cut/Flap LASEK!
15,000+ cases - 100% Legal To Drive!
Member AAO, ASCRS, MENSA

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Click Fraud - a diabolical new scheme

Posted on January 20th, 2010 by Dov Weinstock

A recent WebProNews article detailed a diabolical new fraud scheme. Essentially,

spyware on a user’s PC monitors the user’s browsing to determine the user’s likely purchase intent. Then the spyware fakes a click on a Google PPC ad promoting the exact merchant the user was already visiting. If the user proceeds to make a purchase — reasonably likely for a user already intentionally requesting the merchant’s site — the merchant will naturally credit Google for the sale. Furthermore, a standard ad optimization strategy will lead the merchant to increase its Google PPC bid for this keyword on the reasonable (albeit mistaken) view that Google is successfully finding new customers. But in fact Google and its partners are merely taking credit for customers the merchant had already reached by other methods.

Of course, click fraud is nothing new. But PPC customers should be aware that ever more sophisticated schemes are being hatched all the time. Google is not directly implicated here, of course - in fact they are at pains to point out that they perform their own monitoring for click fraud and pay out refunds to their customers - but many people are advertising via 3rd parties who implement their AdWords campaigns, and it is in their interest to show good results. These are the folks to watch out for.

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SEO vs. PPC revisited

Posted on December 10th, 2009 by Dov Weinstock

We are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating whether a client’s budget is better spent on Organic SEO (left side of the search results page) or Pay-per-Click advertising (right side of the page).

WebProNews just published a summary of an SES Chicago session on the topic.

Bottom line, in my view: PPC is OK, if you are getting a good ROI (easy to measure), and can show immediate results - but has no residual value. When you stop advertising, you get no further business. SEO, on the other hand, can take a while to show ROI, but once you are on top, it’s a lot easier to stay there than it was to get there. So - in most cases, prioritize SEO, but plan to spend on PPC until SEO starts to show results.

Read the full article here. Also check out the comments for further information.

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Social Network Marketing - Natural Places to Reach Your Target Markets.

Posted on November 19th, 2009 by Dov Weinstock

Perhaps the fastest growing areas of Internet content are the Social Networks. While Search Engines like Google and Bing are still the primary paths for people to find goods and services online, the traffic generated from social networks is steadily increasing. The popularity of Facebook, YouTube, and the many other Web 2.0 and Social Media sites makes them a potentially important component of your online growth strategy.

Advantage Internet Marketing can help you develop a strategy to take advantage of these tools and increase your website traffic and online lead generation and/or sales and revenue.

Two factors are at play in the importance of Social Networks – the volume of active users, and the affinity provided by the social model. Active users of social networks have a high comfort level with their interactions, because the model is predicated on social interaction. In other words, the user feels more at home in the online neighborhoods and social circles he or she belongs to. It therefore may be easier to win that initial trust (or at least, curiosity). Up against that, however, is the sheer volume of branches and pathways available to the user, which tends to reduce focus and dilute the impact of a marketing message.

Many of the same principles of marketing and communications that apply to the Internet in general are also at play in the social network environment. A clear message must be communicated, consistent with the brand, and some kind of unique attraction should be offered to the user (information, entertainment, or other social utility such as that offered by Facebook Causes or Fan Clubs).

In addition, especially because of the huge amount of information being disseminated through these networks, a consistent effort must be made over a protracted period of time, in order to reinforce the message and the brand. This is nothing new, of course – the same has long been known to apply to print advertising and other traditional media.

Advertising on Social Networks has also begun to take off. However, it is still unclear if these sites are reliable revenue generators and if their ROI matches traditional Pay-per-Click advertising (like Google’s AdWords system). Our assessment is that at present, traffic generated from Facebook advertising tends to be more casual, as it is often generated from ads on marginally related pages. In other words, people may visit but they won’t necessarily buy. AdWords, on the other hand, drives traffic that by and large is generated by people who are actively searching for something, and Google does its level best to ensure that they are presented with ads for goods and services related to their search.v

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Dov Weinstock Featured on UBA TV

Posted on October 22nd, 2009 by Dov Weinstock

My ‘elevator pitch’ was featured yesterday on ‘Fearless Business’ on UBA TV!

http://bit.ly/1qdpEJ

(I’m at 29:00)

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Filed under: SEO

Taking the “Ski-Lift” Approach to Landing Pages

Posted on October 13th, 2009 by Matt Giebeig

A popular saying in the internet marketing world these days is “content is king”. The expression refers to the importance of creating content for your website, and emphasizes that providing interesting and engaging material for the end user can give a website the edge over its competition. But lets face it, not every company is equipped to produce interesting content on their website.  For some companies the problem might be a lack of man power and for others it might be having nothing interesting to write about.

This makes a lot of people cringe when an SEO company tells them they need to produce more keyword-rich content pages in order to rank higher in the search engines. They might worry that too much content is going to clutter the website, confuse the user, or that the low production value of their landing pages might dilute the site’s quality a whole.

The best way to address these problems is taking the Ski-Lift approach to landing pages. The basic idea is that the landing pages will function like ski-lifts; They take users on one-way trips to points on your website,  after which the users will navigate down through your content mountain, never seeing the other ski-lifts that are off to the side.

Your Website is a Mountain, Your Landing Pages Are the Ski-Lifts.

Most websites implement this by adding links to landing pages on a discreet footer at the very bottom of their page so that people will not notice them, but the search engines will. The landing pages are designed to seamlessly move traffic forward into the site, functioning as a type of entrance page for each keyword they are optimized for. The major advantage is that this leaves the rest of the site’s structure and flow virtually unaltered, while you add as much content as you want.

There are 3 things to keep in mind when using this technique:

  • Landing Pages Must Be Action Oriented - Landing pages built as portals must encourage the user to move forward into the site rather than stay on the landing page reading the content (which in all likelyhood is keyword dense and possibly very boring.)
  • Do Not Attempt to Make Links to Landing Pages 100% Invisible - Most search engines are smart enough to figure out if your background is green, and your links are green, that you are trying to hide something from your visitors. Google regularly penalizes sites that use these kind of deceptive practices, and by this point they know just about every trick in the book that SEO firms use to try and accomplish this. Usually just putting links in a footer is enough to prevent 99.9% of people from noticing them anyway.
  • Create New Pages from Scratch - Copy & Pasted content will get flagged for duplication. Even if you replace an entire page with synonyms and reorder the paragraphs you would not fool Google into thinking that it was a new page. The extra time it takes to create a whole new page is worth it, because once you’re flagged by a search engine it’s nearly impossible to recover.

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Twitter: I’m Just Not That Impressed

Posted on July 31st, 2009 by Matt Giebeig

So its 2009 and there is no denying the popularity of Twitter anymore. Being an online marketer, I of course have joined up, researched companies that have successfully applied it to their business, and looked into a variety of desktop applications to manage tweets.

But every time I log on and browse through my list of subscribed tweets, I cannot help but feel like social media has taken a huge step backwards. Why are people “moving” from facebook to this? What twitter has essentially done is taken the “facebook status”, implemented a ridiculous character limit, removed the ability to post full-text links, removed the ability to directly comment on a post, removed 95% of the information on a poster’s personal profile, removed picture albums, removed the distinction between companies and actual people, and removed 3rd party applications.

I know some people point towards the fact that its much easier to tweet with your mobile phone than a update a facebook status. Ok, they have a point there, except for the fact that nobody wants to hear about useless, mundane observations about every-day activities. This aspect reminds me of the Live Journal craze, and we all know where Live Journal’s market share is right now.

I could go on about Twitter in-depth all day, but in order to avoid writing a novel here I’m going to make a concise list of the top 3 reasons it bothers me.

  • Anonymity - Some people see this as an advantage, and rightfully so. Celebrities, Corporations, Iranian dissidents… they probably benefit from not revealing very much personal information, but do you know who benefits the most? Spammers. The limited profiles of Twitter users make it easy to set up an account, and since there is no individual/corporate distinction on Twitter, spammers don’t get banned! Combine that with the fact that links are posted as bit.ly text you have no idea what you are clicking on! Good stuff.
  • Non-Originality - The majority of avid Tweeters spend 90% of their time re-tweeting other posts and/or posting links to their blog posts. If we want interesting content we’ll use a real internet aggregator like Digg or Delicious, and if we wanted to read your blog, we probably would have RSS’ed it already.
  • Lack of… well… Lack of Everything - I covered this in the few paragraphs above: there is nothing on the site other than 120 character posts. I don’t know why people are under the illusion that Twitter has staying power when they have the most 1-dimensional, easy-to-imitate product in the entire world. Just wait till Twitter starts hosting paid advertisements, and watch how fast people stop using it.

I know what I’m going to do… I’m going to take YouTube, impose a 15 second limit to videos and then remove the ability to post comments on the video’s page or the user’s channel, then remove all useful information from users’ profile pages. I’ll call it Clipper, and market it with the ability to upload straight from your camera phone. If everything goes to plan, I’ll be selling the rights to Google in no time.

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Eggs and Your Business

Posted on July 10th, 2009 by Dov Weinstock

Seth Godin has another gem - a great point married to a good chuckle.

Bottom line - make your product or service stand out from the crowd! It costs a bit more but it makes a world of difference.

eggs

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Filed under: SEO, Social Media

Five Ways the Moonwalk is like SEO

Posted on July 2nd, 2009 by Dov Weinstock

From Bruce Clay:


1. It changed the game.

There’s a universal understanding that Michael Jackson’s career welcomed the dawn of a new musical age. Jackson’s unique dance style, epitomized through the moonwalk, inspired countless dancers and choreographers that followed. By the time the moonwalk reached the far corners of the earth, everyone recognized that dance and entertainment would never be the same. In many ways, search engine optimization has changed the online business game. SEO introduced a measure of order and control to business owners interested in growing their online business but uncertain of how to do it. The dance world and the online business world were both shaken up by the advent of these moves.

2. The beauty is in the simplicity.

Despite the outrageous and overblown dance moves being invented today, nothing will ever quite compare to the simple beauty of a man floating backwards across the floor. Jackson wasn’t hiding anything up his sleeves when he performed. He gave everything he had to the stage — every spin, every step, every screech. If anyone was to ever attempt to capture the essence of a Michael Jackson performance, there’d be no backstage secrets to comb through. In the moonwalk, what you see is what you get: an effortless mastery of movement. In SEO, secrets are constantly chased with hopes of gaining an edge. But the truth is, the core tenets of SEO have all been shared before. There are no secrets to successfully executing SEO or the moonwalk; the answer’s in front of us.

3. Everyone thinks they can do it.

When Jackson first broke out the moonwalk in front of a concert audience in 1983, you have to believe that millions watching on their TV screens at home started gliding backwards to the beat. And how many of them successfully executed the move? How many can even replicate it today without watching countless videos and practicing for hours? Likewise, the search engine optimization industry is fast expanding as people hop on the Internet marketing bandwagon. As SEO enters the mainstream, more and more people will look for their share of the pie. However, success in SEO requires time, patience and long-term dedication. Sure, experts make it look easy, but successful execution requires skill.

4. It’s part of a larger whole.

Audiences watching Jackson perform would wait with bated breath for the moonwalk. Any performance would be lacking without it, but the moonwalk alone was not the reason they watched. A high-pitched “ooh!” and gloved fist punching skyward would be equally missed. If Jackson performed an exhilarating show filled with smooth, pop-and-lock moves and fresh, energetic vocals, the moonwalk was the icing on the cake. Internet marketers recognize that search engine optimization is also part of a larger whole — the greater marketing mix. Cross-channel integration multiplies the marketing effect, so a healthy marketing budget will have a diversified selection of mediums. Whether it’s choreography or the marketing mix, the moonwalk and SEO alone do not a performance/online strategy make.

5. To the uninitiated, it seems like magic.

After a few unsuccessful tries, a Jackson imitator might realize that the moonwalk is deceptive in its simplicity. In fact, it could almost be deemed impossible if it weren’t displayed in all its glory in the video above. If it’s not impossible, one might posit after watching a Jackson performance, then it may as well be magic. Similarly, it might seem impossible that a search marketer can get a site into the top rankings of a competitive Google SERP. But as we all know, search engine optimization practices are applied, tested and measured with scientific precision. Without background and experience, SEO might just look like magic. Then again, in Jackson’s case, maybe it really was.

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Destroy Your Industry!

Posted on June 24th, 2009 by Dov Weinstock

Here’s a startling quote from Seth Godin:
“The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does.”

His point - change in the business and consumer environment is inevitable, and the cycles are getting faster/shorter all the time. If you are not reinventing your industry, someone else will do it for you, maybe sooner rather than later.

Scary when you think about it…

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