I wrote awhile back about getting banned after a spammer injected a scummy footer into my Wordpress blog.    Despite upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress, it seems to have happened again.  I’ve filed all the necessary reinclusion requests with Google; I’m obviously hoping for the same outcome.
The offending links aren’t showing up in [...]

Evil Schoolmarm by zenamoonbeam
Last week, Business Week announced its Top 25 Young Entrepreneurs for 2008. The “youngsters” (they’re all younger than I by at least a year) featured by Business Week have started some pretty neat companies, from a Muslim fashion company to a flavored plastic manufacturer.
Somewhat surprisingly, despite growing up in the online [...]

This is a first here at Mihmorandum — a guest post! It’s written by Ed Reese, a budding Local marketer from Spokane, WA. Ed described his situation to me at the recent SEOmoz Seminar, and I thought his story held some important insights for the Local Search community. It’s a two-part series–the first being the case as described by Ed, and the second being my reaction to his data (coming on Monday, September 22). So without further ado, here is Ed’s story…

I wish people would stop thinking that I somehow ‘have it in’ for the Yellow Pages. Certain Sphinn commenters and a few responses to previous posts I’ve written on this blog seem to imply that I am starting from a “gut reaction” when I criticize their value. This is just not the case. I’m going on hard data from my own clients, and analysis of their business models in comparison to their online competitors’. This article dispels some recent arguments from a YP Association rep, and offers my opinion on the true value of Yellow Pages for small businesses.

Hidden in the middle of Will Scott’s excellent piece on Yelp last month was the following insight, which certainly rings true in my experience with small business owners:

“For me it all leads back to a central frustration I feel from small businesses: they understood the Yellow Pages. You pay more, you get a bigger ad, you get more calls. How hard is that?”

As skeptical as I am of the print Yellow Pages, Will is absolutely spot-on with that comment. It is an incredibly easy-to-understand business, and has been around long enough where pretty much everyone understands how it works.

Search engine optimization, even for the rare small business owner who has heard of it, is much more complicated and is inherently somewhat opaque.

Local Search aficionados will of course immediately recognize the eerie similarity between the title of this post and the title of a famous series by Local Search guru Mike Blumenthal. They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery so, Mike, I hope you approve.

At any rate, I’ve read a couple of exceptional posts in the last few weeks (in addition to my small business reputation management roundup) that I haven’t had a chance to highlight just yet. And I also wanted to make a few announcements of my own.

Having just returned from the SEOmoz Expert Seminar, it’s safe to say the conference offered an incredible value. I learned from Brian Carter’s Recap that SEOmoz would like to keep the bulk of the sessions confidential since they’ll be selling the content on an upcoming DVD, but I got the go-ahead from Rand to post just a few teasers.

25% of the questions Todd Mintz asked me in his excellent interview last month had to do with reputation management for small businesses. So, with this post, I thought I would try to make things a little easier for small businesses by compiling a list of truly exceptional posts related to this topic written in the last couple of months, and summarizing their findings.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a quick post about Best of the Web’s launch of BOTW Local, and my initial impressions of the site. The date of that post, and of the submission of my business to BOTW Local, was June 24th. On August 1st, less than six weeks after submitting my business to BOTW Local, my BOTW Local listing was already showing up as a citation in my Google Local profile.

In case you missed the announcement last week, ActiveRain, a popular blogging community for Realtors, is launching (or re-launching, I can’t quite figure it out) a subsidiary social news/networking site called Localism.com. Almost on cue from Matt McGee, ActiveRain’s goal is to make this the HyperLocal hub for a vast number of communities around the country. Should Realtors leverage this new opportunity or find other ways of making a name for themselves online?