Pedro Sttau

Would just like to wish everyone a wonderful 2010, and may you achieve all your dreams, both personally and professional.

Just an unsolicited piece of advice, never ever forget the power of optimism. It can make your dreams come true and turn dust into gold. I will try to remind myself of my own advise every time I start whining and complainung about the current state of things.

If you can dream it, you can do it.

Haven’t posted for awhile but I couldn’t resits sharing you a presentation that was sent to me by a friend of mine. Completely changed the way I look at incentives as a way to boost productivity and performance.

I’ve been a little quite lately because a lot has been happening.
So my company is currently in the process of merging with an important player in our industry, and as you might imagine, things are a tad messy at the moment.

I am experiencing missed feelings about all of this, one day I feel great that we were able to grow enough to get noticed in the market, but sometimes I just cant it help but feel that I am letting myself down and selling out. I guess that anyone who was so emotionally involved in a project and has gone through a merger or acquisition will understand.

I will keep you guys updated.

I know this is a bit geeky, but the sheer size of everything is overwhelming. Take a look at the cooling systems.

The answer is quite straight forward, because he simply tells you NOT too, over and over again. And yes, in case you are wondering it’s the disclosure issue again.

Let me just give provide some of the background so that everyone knows what I am talking about.

First and foremost, I have nothing against Shoemoney, I am using him as an example simply because he is one of the most straight forward people I have ever seen in this industry, making it very easy to user him as an example.

Jeremy believes that there is nothing wrong with “subliminal advertising”; that ethically there is no wrong doing in delivering a shinny review of a product/service with the sole objective of selling the product through a hidden affiliate link. To put it more blatantly, the idea is pretty much “believe in me if you want, but take note that I might just be trying to sell you something”.

I must admit that my first draft for this post was a complete an absolute bash of the way Jeremy conducts his business. I won’t be getting too much into it, mainly because I was rushing myself to conclusions, but the apparent moral aspect of the issue is quite obvious… or is it?

While I wrote the post something in the back of my mind kept bugging me, and its all goes down to the concept of freedom, Freedom of choice to be specific.
It’s just too easy to criticize someone that has clearly always been so opened with his business practices, especially when one of these practices seems at a first glance unethical and wrong.

So if Jeremy is the first person to publicly admit to his user base that many of his posts are sales driven, is he actually deceiving anyone? Is it really “subliminal” when people have been given a prior notice?

I don’t have a solid answer for any of these questions, but they really raised a lot of questions in my mind and in my personal work ethics.

Lets say you have taken a significant time from my life and invested it in a Blog, you work hard to build the a brand around it, and work even harder to keep the content fresh and valuable, but most importantly, you provide all of this free of charge. So the question is, is it really unethical that you profit from any method you chose to deploy, provided you are not actively deceiving anyone?

There is no doubt that Jeremy’s blog is a fantastic resource of information for both beginners and for mature Marketers, and the amount of free information that he puts out there is fantastic, but there is definitely something edgy in delivering content with the purpose of selling something that isn’t being sold in a blatant and flagrant way.

Would you do it?

I got an email today asking me why I don’t write more about Social Networking, to which I replied “that whilst I have some knowledge on the subject, I am very far from being a specialist in the matter.”

I received a prompt and very curious reply: “why don’t you write about it anyway? Writing can be learning process you know…”

Now I am not disputing the fact that during the process of writing one inevitably acquires a lot of information on whatever subject he/she is writing about, even more so when the subject is on a particular field that we are not 100% comfortable.

My slight quarrel with this argument is not so much on what people write about, but how they do it. I have no problem whatsoever in reading an article on a subject written by someone who is not a specialist on that area, provided he does not place himself on a position of expertise.

It just seems to me that with the proliferation of the Social Networks and the massification of Blogging we have an excess of self deliberated experts everywhere.

All you need to do is make a query about any particular subject on Wikipedia, and congrats, you have graduated!

The constant necessity for fresh unique content hasn’t helped at all, making the quality of the content secondary. This is more noticeable to me (for obvious reasons) in the Web Marketing and Search Engine Optimization arena, where I have read unbelievably patronizing articles written by people who haven’t got a clue on what they are talking about.

The information in most of these articles is useless, just a regurgitation of basic principles that bring nothing new and add no value whatsoever to the reader.

Of course that in order to have value an article/post does not need to be innovative nor does it need to add anything in particular to a topic, provided that it does not self proclaim that it will.

It’s all about the intention of the article that can be controlled by the tone and construction of the article.

Most of the content that I post is not innovative at all, yet I do not proclaim that it is.
There are undoubtedly exceptions, where it can be useful to write or explain something that has been talked about before in a different way, perhaps simplifying the main point of the article, but this is rarely done with a “sales pitch” tone to the writing.

Nothing really new here, except for one statement that really surprised me. Apparently when things started to go downhill in the economy Google pretty much moved the money away from American Financial institutions and moved it to safer external institutions.

When American companies don’t trust their own banks,you know things are bad.

Hopefully you didn’t make the mistake of hardcoding a lot of work into the Wordpress code, so Wordpress’s upgrade process is very clean and straight forward.

1. Backup, backup and backup

Before you upload anything to your server, make sure you make a full backup of your files and database. If your server hosts Cpanel, all you need to do is go to the backups section of the software and click on download full website backup.

Make sure the backup download went through correctly. I would even recommend making redundant backups of the database, just in case.

2. Download the latest Wordpress version

Now that your current wordpress version is safe, let’s download the latest version of Wordpress.

3. Check of compatibility issues

It’s also important to make sure tat all your current plugins are compatible with the new version of the software, so it would be advisable to login to your admin area, go to your plugins area and take note all of the installed plugins.

Now go to the provider of the plugins and find out if they are compatible with the latest version of Wordpress. Download the updated version of the plugins if needed and available.

Unfortunately the Plugin Compatibility page is outdated, but if you are installing a version prior to 2.8 it will still be of use to you.

4. Overwrite the correct files

By correct files I mean every single file and folder except the wp-content folder, that’s where you hold all of your current themes and templates. It is not necessary to update this folder.

5. Update your SQL structure

Now login to your Wordpress admin panel, and you will see a message telling you that you need to upgrade your database. This might seem a little but intrusive, but don’t worry, whatever happens you can always roll back to your current database. (you didn’t forget to backup, did you? )

The direct path to the upgrade file is: wp-admin/upgrade.php (in case you have wordpress installed in your rout of course)

The update is automatic, and it shouldn’t interfere in any way with your current system settings.

That’s it! Your done, your Wordpress is up-to-date.

So I finally decided to upgrade, the problem is that there is plenty of hard-coded work to implement in the blog, so I am expecting a lot of surprises. The last time I attempted to upgrade, things went so badly that I had to roll back.

Bracing for impact.

The more I listen to John Chow the more respect him. I don’t quite identify myself with his business model, but he is simply fantastic at what he does.

This Video really digs deep into the business strategy applied to Johnchow.com and how the blog is on its way to making half a million dollars per year.

As many of you might have guessed, it’s not through advertising that the revenue is build, but through a highly automated backend system that trades in a CPA (cost per acquisition) and Pay per lead system.

My Blog Business Model from John Chow on Vimeo.

Extremely interesting presentation by Frederic Colas, Fullsix’s CSO at OMExpo in Lisbon. One of the key notes that grabbed my attention was the way Fullsix approached ClubMeds campaign, by engaging the visitors in a very curious and creative way. Check it out, it will be worth your time.

P.s. big thanks for MarketingDirecto TV for making this content available.

Capitalism is an economic and social system in which trade and industry are privately controlled for profit rather than by the state

Agree or not with the prerogative, at least Capitalism states its premise very clearly, well…that is of course, until things don’t go quite as smoothly as planned.

The concept of a free independent market has been the basis for modern capitalism in the last 50 years. In theory, the markets should regulate themselves, and the binary supply v.s demand should naturally dictate the flow of the market.

But doesn’t freedom bring a new set of responsibilities? And isn’t one of those responsibilities to accept the concept regardless of the circumstance? Or are we solely against something when it’s not convenient for us to be in favor of it?

This sort of double standard makes me question if the freedom we thought we were experiencing in this generation isn’t after all the same kind of tyranny our grand parents went through disguised with catchy buzz worlds like “Free Market”.

As some of you might have noticed, it’s becoming increasingly harder for me to keep this blog updated, primarily because it’s so hard for me to write about Search related issues when I spend all the talking and writing about the subject.

When I first started this Blog I intended to focus solely on Search, but it has proven a much bigger challenge then I perceived, especially since I have to run my own company which pretty much takes away all the time that I used to have.

So I am converting this blog into a more “personal” communication platform, where I will pretty much talk about everything and anything I feel like. And that of course includes topics about Search.

Really appreciate everyone who still follows my blog even consider the lack of fresh content that has been put into it.

This one might sound a little off, but this needs to be said.

I am the only one who doesn’t think that things are all that bad? Sure the economy is down, but for crying out loud, I’ve been people mentioning and throwing around the word “Depression”. Depression..really?

My Grandmother was English, and she lived through World War I, and I remember listening to her describe how she and her sisters would go down to the addict and stay there for days until the German planes would stop bombarding.

Every time a plane would go by and dropped a bomb they could hear the sound of the Bomb falling down and my great grand mother would tell them to close their eyes and count to ten. If they reached 10, it would mean that the bomb didn’t hit the house.

She would describe to me the feeling of going up the stairs and leaving the addict after a bombing, with that feeling of exciting and overwhelming happiness…yes…it was a good day, they had survived.

Survived my friends, this is the word to be noted here. Most of us have never had to survive a day in our lives. Sure we have all gone through some hard times, working too many hours for too little pay, but that’s what life is all about, its supposed to be hard.

So I suggest that all of us make a collective effort to simply ignore the word “crises” for the next year or so, you wouldn’t believe out better all of our lives would be.