Here is how I see this working… you can either comment here on my post with a link to the post you write on your own blog with each of your networks, or you can simply comment here telling me how to add you/network with you on your social networks.

The idea is to create a big list of center-right bloggers who wish to be better networked via social sites. For everyone who participates, I’ll list you here along with a link to your blog.

Network away!

Facebook
OK, so the first stop for me is Facebook. I don’t spend much time on Facebook any more these days, but I still log in once per day to get the updates and make sure my profile hasn’t burned to the ground. If you’re logged in to Facebook, you can visit my profile here. Please feel free to add me to your list, or drop me a link to your profile and I’ll add you.

StumbleUpon
Next is my personal favorite… StumbleUpon. I’ve been using Stumble for some time now. Unfortunately, I’ve had to bounce around through several accounts so I have no established account at this time. I am, however, working to establish my main SU account, and I would like to invite everyone here to join my friends list. You can view my StumbleUpon profile here.

Tagged
This was JUST pointed out to me by Publius Forum, so I’m a noob on Tagged. My Tagged profile is here.

YouTube
I watch videos like crazy, but rarely submit them. Don’t be surprised by that. My YouTube profile is here.

By the People @ Ning
Then there is By The People, a social networking group over at Ning.com. By The People functions similar to MySpace, only it’s cool. If you’re a limited government activists and would like to network with others who share your view, this might be just the place. Check it out!

Technorati
Does anyone really still use Technorati? I mean, the results are fairly easy to manipulate, and spammers have noticeably taken advantage. That being said, I still run a profile and would be happy to exchange favorites. View and favorite all of my blogs by clicking here.

You can favorite my blog by clicking the button below.

MyBlogLog
I need to log in and make some changes to this account, so please forgive me if the information there is a little outdated. You can add me to your network by clicking here.

Digg
I’ll admit, my friends list is a mess and I don’t really use it to find stories and content. However, if enough of you are willing to start networking via Digg, I think I can persuade myself to clean up the list and start using it more aggressively. You can view my Digg profile here.

LinkedIn
This network is one that I consider a little more professional than the rest. I use LinkedIn to discover the background of a lot of people I work with in politics, and I find it’s a great place for resume building and contact management. If you have a LinkedIn profile and would like to connect up, send me an invite using ericjodom@gmail.com. My profile can be found here.

There ya have it! Like I said, if you write a post like this, please leave me the URL so I can go add yours as well. If not, just leave me a comment with your networks or any instructions on what I need to do on my end to connect up with you.

Best Regards,
-Eric Odom

My first website went live in late 2003. It was at Backpackerdeals.com, but for some reason Archive.org has nothing previous to February of 2004 and even then the cache seems to be missing.

Anyway, the site was an affiliate site for student travelers. It was a lot of fun, and the site made a few bucks. More importantly, it helped me learn what NOT to do and opened up a lot of doors for my internet marketing career.

My main mistake with Backpackerdeals.com was that I knew nothing about code when I started it so I used an out of the box solution. Which, at the time, was complete crap. After a few months I began to learn a bit about code and felt backed in to a corner with the site builder.

In the summer of 2004 I launched two more student travel websites. Backpackearth.com and Traveljive.com. I’ve since sold both sites, and it looks like the new owner took the content and parked the domains. But the two sites made me quite a bit of money from 2004 until early 2007.

This is Archive’s cache of TravelJive in the summer of 2004.

As you can see… it’s quite laughable. But in those days it was quite popular. On average, any given day in 2005 would result in about 600 unique visits. Backpackearth.com was doing MUCH better!

In 2004 the main source of revenue was Google Adsense. I was getting decent checks every month and it felt worth the effort. In 2005 Google Adsense started paying so low that it was almost insulting, so I yanked Adsense in favor of the new Yahoo Overture network. Overture paid more per click, but was still somewhat lacking.

This is when I entered the text link market. Yes, I was one of those…

I had an account at Linkworth.com that was paying $300+ per month and I had another five websites that I was spending a lot of time on. I was also running affiliate programs for Lowestfare.com and a few others.

2004 and 2005 were GREAT years to be making money online because the search engines were naive, the markets were easy to tap into, and blogs hadn’t yet started dominating over static content.

In early 2006 I was working in a completely different realm online. I started moving away from money via websites in favor of consulting work through private contracts. I was also heavily involved in politics and in the summer of 2006 I was working in politics as a political and internet consultant.

In 2007 I took a consulting job with a national political organization as “Director of Internet Operations”, which also allowed me to serve as Director for a national politically flavored new media conference.

November of 2007 brought great things as I took a job with Sam Adams Alliance in Chicago as “New Media Coordinator”, where I currently hold employment and work as an internet consultant on the side.

Not bad for a guy in his 20’s who started fiddling with websites while working at Wells Fargo Bank, right? The internet certainly changed my life forever, and it’s been a wonderful ride ever since.

I guess it all depends on how you view it, but from the direction I’m looking, some of these new Facebook apps do nothing for the Facebook experience itself. In fact, all they do is market an outside product or service.

Take the Free Unmetered Host application for example. The “application” is explained like this.

Welcome to FreeUnmeteredHost.com

We offer free UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH hosting with 12 gigabytes of disk space. There are no hosting fees, bandwidth usage fees, overage fees or hidden fees.

Our network is BGP enabled and consists of a variety of backbone providers, each providing connectivity that means you have the fastest most reliable service.

» 12GB Disk Space
» UNLIMITED! Bandwidth
» PHP 5 Support
» mySQL databases
» 100mb per second
» Instant activation
» Domain Name Support
» Easy to use WYSIWYG editor
» File Manager
» 24/7 Technical Support
» Full FTP Access
» name.freemeteredhost.com
» 99.9% Uptime

Here is a screenshot in case you don’t feel like visiting the actual page.

I’ve sent a message to a member who had apparently tried to use it, and got an intriguing response.

Hi Eric,

When I initially tried the application I honestly had no idea how it would work. I just wanted to see if the free hosting part was valid. After I installed the application, a banner ad started appearing on my profile page.

That’s not exactly what I had in mind, so I got rid of the application and that was that.

Sorry I couldn’t help.

-XXXXX

Sounds like this app is nothing more than a marketing scheme set up by Free Unmetered Host.

If this is the case, couldn’t it been seen as abuse of Facebook, the FB community, and everything the site represents? Or am I looking at this from the wrong angle?

That being said… I won’t be posting about SES here on the home page of Fresh Vision Media. Instead, I’ll be posting all related topics over on my new search engine blog, SE Tattler.

Please check SE Tattler for updates.

The Organic Listings forum/panel was moderated by Danny Sullivan. The panelists were Mike Grehan, Mark Rosenberg, and Erica Schmidt.

Apart from the keynote by Seth Godin this morning, the Organic Listings forum is the only full event I’ve been able to get to so far. And have no doubt, SES Chicago has already been well worth the visit. Needless to say… these next few days are going to be highly valuable and I look forward to learning as much as possible.

I’m trying to type this while listening to the current forum (Big Site, Big Search), so I’ll just touch on the basics of the Organic Listings Forum.

The following is a list of the questions asked that I found most important for what I do in SEO and internet marketing.

Question One
This wasn’t so much a question as it was a revelation in one of Google’s struggles to bring timely and relevant information when it comes to search strings related to direct products.

The gentleman who asked about his site painted a picture of major problems with traffic fluctuations. The website he works with is Shoplocal.com. Apparently the site is seeing traffic go from well over 100,000 visits per day one day to 5,000 the next. He was curious to see if it had something to do with “revolving products”.

When I say revolving products, I mean the site will compare product sales on a local level. For example, if you’re looking for an ipod in Chicago, the site might give you the latest deal from both Best Buy and Circuit City. The problem is, once the deal ends the page remains online and the search engines continue indexing it as if the content never changed.

It was established this wasn’t the problem with traffic fluctuations, but the question remained… why would irrelevant results remain in the index? And not just remain, but rank VERY well.

The keywords Danny Sullivan used to bring up a page on Shoplocal are “chicago ipod”. Sure enough, a shoplocal page came up as the #1 result. But, this page is no longer relevant or useful because the product on sale is no longer on sale and has vanished from the page.

This tells me that Google is still showing extremely outdated and irrelevant results, and has yet to figure out a way around it. Good for the user? I think not.

Question Two
Q: Is the new trend in using no-follow to pages such as “contact us”, “site map”, etc, relevant?
Mike Grehan made a great argument about no-follow. His premise is that the no-follow was designed to link to pages that you don’t trust or would prefer not to give “link credit” to. So, in his words, why would you not want bots to follow these internal links?

Question Three
Q: Should we still be concerned about keywords in meta tags?
Danny Sullivan reminded the crowd that Google pretty much ignores keyword meta, but other engines such as Yahoo and a few smaller sites still read them and recognize them.

Question Four
Q: What is the value of the root domain vs. the sub-domain?
This discussion has been tossed around in conversations I’ve been involved in for several years now. In fact, it’s still a big discussion in the blogging realm because a lot of bloggers are using yourname.blogspot.com or yourname.wordpress.com. Many suggest it would be far better to break away from those sub-domains on other sites and move over to a hosted yourdomain.com.

Interestingly enough, an employee for Discovery.com happened to be in the audience and Danny Sullivan decided to pull up the Discovery site and take a look. The current Discovery domain re-directs to a sub-domain, which is the Discovery channel itself.

The reasoning for this re-direct is because Discovery had originally wanted to create a web portal back when the portal idea was hot and happening. But, they later found out that the majority of the users who land on Discovery are looking for the channel, not a general portal.

Unexpectedly, Danny Sullivan and the rest of the panel readily agreed that all of Discovery’s “sub sites” should be on their own domain. For example… www.animalplanet.com.

Of course, this would take an overwhelming amount of programming and hassle to move the content from the main Discovery site and create hundreds of thousands of 301 re-directs, so it was agreed that Discovery was probably doing fine without it.

But it did go to show that having independent domains for “sub families” or “sub-products ranges” might be a better direction to move in.

Plenty more to come throughout the day!

The entire event is loaded with good content and a lot of chances to interact with others in the industry, but there are several events that I look forward to the most.

Seth Godin will be speaking on Tuesday morning (we also get a free copy of his book, Meatball Sundae), so that slot is certainly a “can’t miss it” kind of thing. I also plan on attending the following.

The Human Equation: Giving Back Internet Style
The World Wide Web has changed how we do everything, including give back to our fellow man. What does the nonprofit world look like in the Web 2.0 world? Technology has grown by leaps and bounds since the dawn of the internet as a communication vehicle. It has changed the way we give back, communicate with our constituents and provided a means for creating a platform for the community to support itself. Learn from experts in the space about the latest developments in community and technology for the non-profit sector.
Moderator:
* Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Speakers:
* Darian Rodriguez Heyman, Executive Director, Craigslist Foundation
* Ben Rattray, Founder & CEO, Change.org
* Nan Dawkins, Founder, RedBoots Digital, Serengeti Communications
* Angela Siefer, Executive Director, Grassroots.org

Orion Panel: Universal, Blended and Vertical Search
Search result multiplicity is not a new phenomenon, but recent advancements will guarantee the world of search and marketing will be changing forever. Before you attend this week’s optimization and best practices sessions, hear from industry gurus about how search, marketing and information seeking is changing the industry that follows the search.
Moderators:
* Kevin Ryan, Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch
* Kevin Heisler, Executive Editor, Search Engine Watch
Speakers:
* Mike Grehan, Founder and CEO, Searchvisible Ltd.
* Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media
* Brad Goldberg, GM, Search Business Group, Microsoft Corporation
* James Lamberti, Senior Vice President, Search and Media, comScore, Inc
* Jim Müller, Tech Lead, Universal Search, Google

Organic Listings Forum
Pose questions to our panel of experts about free “organic” listing issues, plus participate in this session that allows the audience to share tips, tools and techniques. There’s no set agenda, so this is an ideal session to discuss any major recent changes with organic listings.
Moderator:
* Danny Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief, SearchEngineLand.com
Speakers:
* Mike Grehan, Founder and CEO, Searchvisible Ltd.
* Mark J. Rosenberg, Esq., Sills, Cummis, Epstein & Gross P.C
* Erica Schmidt, Global Director of Search, iProspect

Big Site, Big Search
How do you cope with doing search engine optimization for a company with tens of divisions, hundreds of products, thousands of web pages and seemingly no way to bring order to the chaos? Where do you begin with the SEO process? This panel looks at problems and solutions unique to those running big sites or from big companies and brands.
Introduction by:
* Kevin Ryan, Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch
Speakers:
* Bill Hunt, CEO, Global Strategies International
* Amanda Evans, Senior Search Consultant, WebMama.com, Inc.
* Olivier Lemaignen, Group Manager, Global Search Marketing, Intuit
* Randy Peterson, Search Marketing Innovation Manager, Procter and Gamble

Sitemaps: Oversold, Misused or On The Money?
When Sitemaps were launched, they were touted and hailed as the tool for submissions. This panel composed of SEOs and search engine representatives will examine the promise and the delivery on it from two perspectives.
Moderator:
* Danny Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief, SearchEngineLand.com
Speakers:
* Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
* Vivek Pathak, Infrastructure Product Manager, Ask.com
* Jeremy Clem, Manager, Natural Search, DoubleClick Performics
* Trevor Foucher, Google

SEO & Development – Get It Together!
In this session you will learn why your Web development and marketing teams need to make nice. The audience will hear first-hand from a firm performing development and SEO under one roof. The discussion will include the client advantages/challenges presented.
Moderator:
* Chris Boggs, Manager, Search Engine Optimization, eMergent Marketing/BRULANT, Inc.
Speakers:
* Geoff Karcher, President/Owner, The Karcher Group
* Sage Lewis, President, SageRock.com
* Colton Perry, SVP of Technology, NetPlus Marketing

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines
As the web moves into its second generation, sites are making more use of CSS, AJAX and other advanced and interactive design techniques. But how are the largely Web 1.0 search engines reacting to these, from an SEO perspective. This session explores issues and solutions.
Moderator:
* Anne Kennedy, Manager, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink
Speakers:
* Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive
* Shyam Jayaraman, Software Engineer, Infrastructure, Google
* Eric Richmond, VP, SEO/Technology, 360i
* Vivek Pathak, Infrastructure Product Manager, Ask.com

Images and Search Engines
Now that paid search has become an integral component of the marketing mix, marketing managers need to plan for the impact it will have on other media such as television, direct mail, websites and email. In the session the audience will hear real world examples of hoe SEM can successfully intersect with traditional media as well as its impact on website design and market intelligence gathering.
Moderator:
* Anne Kennedy, Manager, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink
Speakers:
* Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance
* Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive
* Chris Silver Smith, Lead Search Strategist, Netconcepts, LLC

I’ll stop in to a few other areas as well, and I’ll certainly spend some time in the expo hall. But for now the above is the basic game plan.

Can’t wait!

-Eric Odom

Unfortunately, thanks to Matt Cutts, it has come to my attention that Google appears to be positioning itself to penalize sites/blogs who sell text links.

This doesn’t hurt me too much, and the reason it won’t hurt me is a bit ironic. I already sell text links to Google. Yeah, that’s right, Google sends me a monthly check for displaying the text link ads you see to the left of this post when looking at the single post page. Google also pays me to display the image banner at the top of the main page of my site.

Why then, can I not sell the text link to my good buddy in web design? It is, afterall, just advertising right?

Google and this “all your base are belong to us” attitude is getting out of hand. The company has gone beyond provided information via a search engine, and is now dictating what we as internet users and webmasters do on our own terms.

I understand that a LOT of people sell hundreds and hundreds of links. But who’s fault is that? Care to take a guess? Google.

You see, Google came up with the arbitrary site ranking system that was heavily based on how many back links a page has. The amount of weight that goes into those back links is now in question, but no one can dispute it has in the past played a major role in the search engine’s ALGO.

Not only that, Google also came up with a weapon that served no purpose other than shooting themselves in the foot. That weapon is known as PageRank. PageRank is Google’s way of ranking a page based on the amount of back links that come in.

But now all of a sudden those of us who play fair are at fault for Google’s own short comings. How is that right?

It gets better (or worse depending on how you look at it). Google actually wants you and I to “report” sites that sell links. If that won’t open up a world of internet warfare I don’t know what will.

I guess I should just login to my account over at BlogAds and start finding all of my competitors right? I can go report them and hope that they get put on some kind of black list right?

See how bad this could be?

I know it can be said that Google is doing this for the better of the internet, but if you think about it, Google is the only winner here. Why do I have Google ads on my site? Because I don’t have time to find text link advertisers. But imagine what would happen if EVERYONE was barred from sell advertising. Everyone wanting to make money would have to go to Google Adsense or a similar supplier.

It basically says to me “no one can sell links but us”, which is completely disingenuous.

It sickens me to hear an employee of Google talk this way. I really hope that Matt just stuck his foot in his mouth and will soon pull it out. If Google is serious about this, I may have to start actually using my Overture account.

So much for that check… Matt Cutts killed my plan.