As Yahoo and eBay stock drops rapidly, I decided to compare the market caps of leading Internet stocks. More specifically, how many Internet companies do you have to combine to equal Google’s current market cap of $171 billion? Here’s the tally: Yahoo (YHOO): $26B ($145B to go . . .);+eBay (EBAY): $36B ($109B to go . . .);+Amazon (AMZN): $31B ($78B to go . . . );+IAC (IACI): $7B ($71B to go . . .);+Time Warner, owner of AOL (TMX): $56B ($15B to go . . .);+Salesforce.com (CRM): … Continue reading →

I’m definitely not an expert on attracting people to my blog, as evidenced by the slow growth of my feed subscription count. But that fact won’t stop me from adding my best practices on blog promotion to the blogosphere. Here goes: 1. More of Less is Better than Less of More. The most popular blogs seem to be the ones that have at least one post a day and often three to five posts a day. For whatever reason, people like a lot of short posts rather than … Continue reading →

The “R” word is starting to permeate the Valley again. More and more conversations seem to gravitate toward discussion of whether the Internet economy will go down with the ship and suffer from the same recession that is about to strike the general economy. My sense is that the answer is “no”, but with a few caveats. I have several reasons to be at least cautiously optimistic. My number one argument against recession is that most Internet businesses grow by taking away market share from existing offline markets. … Continue reading →

Originally posted on Search Marketing Standard. Sphinn it here. At a high level, a successful paid search campaign comes down to seven basic techniques, as I’ll describe below. Mastering one of these areas is very doable, mastering all seven, extremely difficult. Over the next few weeks, I’ll expand on each of these areas with best practices for each in separate columns. 1. The Right Search Engines. Beyond Google – which is basically required for any search campaign – your selection of additional search engines can make or break … Continue reading →

A few years ago I drove down to the Googleplex on a mission: convince the Google Quality Score team that there was a difference between “affiliate marketing” and “lead generation.” I opened up a PowerPoint deck and showed the team a graph plotting the continuum of Google advertisers. At one end were parked domains and “made for AdSense” or MFA sites. A few inches to the right were affiliate marketers. Next on the list were lead generation companies. And at the far right were the big brands and … Continue reading →