Global Search Pros

Every year, I obsess over finding a unique fathers day gift for my father. I start out looking for a super gift, but somehow end up getting him a tie, some power tool, or just taking him out to dinner. The problem is that while I know Dad will appreciate anything I get him, I also know that he doesn’t really need or want much: he’s the type of guy that will buy whatever he wants and he’s past the point where he has many “needs”.

This year, as with Mother’s Day, I decided to make shopping a project and focused on the most efficient way to find a gift. After doing some surfing, I came back to the Collectibles Today. They have a Father’s Day store that is really easy to use. After looking through their tech gifts and Star Wars gifts for fathers, I decided on the Star Wars graphic novel collection from Dark Horse. I’m a big comics fan, my little brothers are just getting into them and we all love Star Wars so this gift seems like a win-win-win.

I’m really happy with my choice. I’ll still be taking Dad out for a beer, but I finally got him something worth while too (it helps that I can borrow them). Maybe this wouldn’t be the best gift for everyone, but if your dad is into sci-fi and still likes Star Wars despite the recent films, then this is a great place to start.

After setting up my Twine registration, they suggested I check out this video.

I am terrible at gift giving. Not because I’m cheap (I’ll spend what I need to) or lazy (alright, maybe a little), but because I’m never sure what to get the most important people in my life. For example, I’ve been dreading Mother’s Day since the beginning of April. I’ve searched Amazon, flower shops, art galleries, and my psyche in pursuit of the perfect mothers day gifts for my mother and step-mother .

No luck.

So now the clock is really ticking and I still have no idea what I am going to get them, but I’ve made some decisions about how I’m going to shop:

1. Look for a one-stop-shop (efficiency is key)

2. Make a decision quickly (you don’t want time to second-guess yourself)

3. Get express shipping (Mother’s Day is really close)

With these 3 precepts, I plan to conquer Mother’s Day. If anyone is on a similar quest, leave me a comment.

I don’t usually pay much attention to screensavers. Mine has been custom for years: after 15 minutes, my desktop starts saying “Get Back to Work”. Still, when a jewel drops into your lap, you have to be grateful.

System47 is THE Star Trek screensaver. If you ever dreamed of being Geordi, Worf, or Capt. Picard then you’ll want to download this. It has the different displays from ship (targeting, engineering, long-range scan, etc) and the sounds too.

I finally have a good reason to let my desktop go idle (as if I needed a reason).

Email Marketing is the Granddaddy of online marketing. Before blogs, SEO, or social anything, we had industrious business owners sending out emails to their contact lists and tracking bounces on a spreadsheet.

As the years have passed, email has become a respected industry with a lot of players: list sellers, tracking partners, designers, copywriters…and you the website owner. If you are starting out with email then you should know you have a lot of options: html or text, buy or build a list (usually you end up with a combination), how to segment the list, when to send it, how often to send emails, and, of course, what the content should be.

I have dinner plans, so I won’t be answering all these questions tonight. Instead, I’m going to point you to a great article from Digital Web Magazine, “10 Tips for your first email campaign“.

Note: No, I am not being lazy. I really liked the article and wanted people to get a look. I will put together a nice post on email marketing later this week. I promise. 

To show how helpful I can be, here are a few tips to wet your appetite:

1. We use CampaignMonitor to make the process as simple as possible
2. Subscription forms are important to build traffic, make them visible and short
3. Unsubscribe options should be plentiful…losing a subscriber is better than pissing one off
4. Study the clicks you get: if you know that certain recipients always click on a particular area, then you have the start of list segmenting.

This article has been updated to reflect the change of DRIs domain name from www.dristaffing.com to www.dricareers.com.

Diversified Recruitment, Inc. (www.dricareers.com) is a diversity recruiting, consulting and management company based in the Chicago area. Its goal is the development and placement of minority MBAs, IT and Engineering professionals.

In addition to a job board featuring positions with Fortune 1000 companies and other firms, DRI provides a large library of articles.

The main purpose for most visitors is finding a new job, but the number of free resources available on the site should not be ignored. Article topics range from typical career development pieces, such as negotiating your compensation package to more ’soft skills’ oriented features such as how to communicate with your boss & managing work/life balance. There is also material for entrepreneurs and overall the site offers content for professionals at every stage of their career.

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Anytime I talk about what I do someone asks me for advice on improving their rankings. At Global Search Pros, we’ve moved away from using rankings as a key metric (though we still track them) and instead emphasize conversions and sales data. That said, traffic is still important and if you have invested time in keyword research, on-site optimization, and link building then you will want to see it payoff.

Below are 3 easy, but often overlooked task that can help your SEO efforts. They are also good practice for any webmaster. Experienced SEOs and webmasters will not see anything amazing here. This post is really about helping small companies and newbies get the most bang for their buck.

1.) Schedule Monthly URL Submissions to the Top Search Engines to Improve your Indexing and Visibility

While Google & Company will eventually get to you if you have any inbound links, waiting for them to make the discovery can be time consuming. Depending on your directory structure and what technology you run, it may take months for them to index your entire site and some key pages may only get spidered at the tail end. Of course, your internal linking structure can help with this but with ten minutes of cut’n'paste work, once a month, you can improve the speed and thoroughness of each crawl.

Start by going to the submission pages for the 3 majors:

• Google Url Submission
• Yahoo Url Submission
• Live Search URL Submission

Submit your top-level domain (e.g. http://www.example.com), and your top 2-3 content pages. After you’ve submitted, make a note of the date and schedule another round of submissions for next month. Thats it.

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best practices robots.txt seo small business seo website submission

Hulu.com, the online video site, co-created by NBC and Fox became publicly accessible today. While I was not a beta tester, I have spent a large amount of time today getting acquainted with their catalog and experience.

The main value of Hulu is that its sanctioned by the big content companies (Fox, NBC Universal, Sony, Warner Bros., MGM, the NBA, Lionsgate, FX, E! Entertainment, Bravo, National Geographic, and USA Networks all have content on the site). Yes, we have been able to download tv and movies for a while, but having an approved source for entire TV episodes and movies means we don’t have to spend hours waiting for a download to finish or worry (as much) about the MPAA raiding our houses.

The movie catalog is still tiny compared to your favorite torrent site, but it will grow.

Likewise, the TV catalog is not exhaustive, but you can catch SNL, Simpsons, Family Guy, 30 Rock, and some episodes from most of the major networks (unfortunately, ABC is not included). Again, we can expect the selection to grow.

After clicking on TV or Movies at the top of the screen, you can navigate to the most popular full lengths or clips, search by genres, or search by studio. Everything is easy on the eye, though the headers for tv shows are unnecessarily huge. You should have no problems finding what you want…if they have it.

Today, I watched the Bones Christmas episode that I had only seen parts of. Yes, guys do watch Bones.

As a video site, Hulu is nothing amazing — yet — but its backing by the big media companies and its ad supported format means its got a shot. We will just have to wait and see how fun it ends up being.

• We edit to convert.
• We are the new math.
• The top is bottomless.