Applying Skills to A New Industry

A friend of mine is getting into dog breeding and asked me to set up her website this week. As you know, my background is automotive advertising. Not German Shepherd advertising. But, hey, the same skills apply. Don't they?

Actually, they do. And I'm having fun learning about a new industry. The first obstacle was spelling Shepherd correctly. After checking the Google keyword tool, "german shepard" is searched a lot. And so is "german sheperd." Too bad neither of those is accurate.

As usually, the third time was the charm and I was able to secure Michigan German Shepherd dot com for her.

I just set up the site and am working on adding more pages. I should have an SEM campaign in place shortly.

My friend has promised to blog weekly updates and I'm excited about adding testimonials once her (the dog's) first litter is sold. Then we'll work on a Facebook page.

Of course, I'll continue to work on SEO with directory listings and backlinks. This is going to be a fun project in a new industry.

Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Actually, I'm not old, but I couldn't resist the pun.

Evolution in the Ad World

We certainly live in exciting times. With the downward spiral of newspapers comes opportunity online. Per the Financial Times, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is in discussions with Microsoft to delist their news sites from Google. Microsoft owns rival search engine Bing.

This could change the landscape for the way newspapers monetize their sites. If the search engines pay them to index their content, this could breath new life into a dying media.

Consumers still want news, this is an interesting way to solve the funding problem. What's even more intriguing is the giants on one side lining up against Google.

As Google downplays the importance of generating revenue with news content, it's obvious they still need to be the primary search tool overall to continue to dominate in the pay-per-click arena.

The lesson is the ad world continues to turn... and evolve. How fun!

Online Privacy Bill

A new online privacy bill could change the way advertisers use behavior targeting. (http://tinyurl.com/km39pz)

Basically, advertisers can buy ad space to target you based on other sites you've visited. The "cookies" in your browser provide this information. For example, if you look up information about a car at kbb.com, car ads might start showing up as you browse online. This bill will require you to "opt-in" as you browse.

The obvious benefit to advertisers is better targeted ads reaching the right consumers.

This will then shift the focus of online advertising to paid search. The consumer controls the topic, so no "cookies" are involved.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.