Posts Tagged ‘Reno’

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Every year Reno puts on a rodeo event. I know this, not because I live here, but because every year approximately one person asks me, “are you going to the rodeo?”

Now granted I’m not a rodeo fan, but how is it that I don’t ever know about this event, save for the lone person asking me if I’m going? Is anybody even advertising this thing?

Ok, so I may not be the average consumer. I don’t watch commercials (thank you, TiVO!); I listen to commercial-free satellite radio or my ipod exclusively (thank you, XM and apple); I get all my news from the internet (thank you, Al Gore), rarely hitting local news sites; and I don’t get out much (thank you, blu-ray.) So it got me thinking….

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Friday I posted a snapshot of a billboard advertising an auto mall here in Reno (Fallon, actually). I wanted to solicit some comments to see if anybody else saw the same problem with this billboard as I did.

Pretty much every comment noted that the guy with the cigarette was a problem, but only Chris of Westward Strategy explained why.

…they associated the sleazy car dealer with Fallon Auto Mall and not Kietzke or “Big City Motors” as their TV ads say. If I wasn’t a local and hadn’t seen their TV spots I would think that all the guys at Fallon Auto Mall look like him.

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Every time I drive by this billboard down off Kietzske and Moana, here in Reno, I cringe. I just gotta wonder what ad Genius put this ad together.

Here, have a look, and tell me if you can tell me what’s wrong with it:

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Have you ever noticed that people are often more willing to travel to a conference than attend one in their own area? I think it’s a planning thing. With local stuff it’s easy to beg off in favor of “more important” things. When you travel you have to make a commitment that you don’t want to cancel at the last minute.

So maybe it’s a good thing that Reno doesn’t have any good search engine optimization conferences.
At least for me. Traveling is half the fun. Not the airline flights, mind you. I don’t much care for those. But I do enjoy going to places and just “getting out” of Reno.

So whenever there is an opportunity to get out to a great conference, I try to take it.

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Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be headed over to the Grand Sierra Resort here in Reno, NV to participate in the Business Professionals of America National Leadership Conference. I’ll be a judge for the Web Site Design Team. Yeah, I know, I’m not a designer, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to provide a good perspective from my knowledge of website usability.

The event will be held between 11:30 AM and 4:30 PM. Lucky for me lunch is provided!

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Over the next few weeks we’ll be in the process of rolling out some pretty significant changes. First, I’ve been named Pimp McFly Associate Editor at Search Engine Guide. What this means exactly, I still haven’t been told. But I think it has something to do with blogging.

So seeing that I’ll be doing 90% of my blogging over there, we are going to change our focus over here at EMP. A new design has been in the works for the past couple of weeks and we hope to have that rolled out shortly. With the new design we’ll be moving the blog back to the Pole Position Marketing domain and turn it into a local company blog.

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In just four weeks I’ll be in Houston attending the most conceptually unique search engine marketing conferences of the year, Small Business Marketing Unleashed. But before I get to that I thought I’d provide a brief recap of Search Engine Strategies: New York.

Day Zero

I’ve been to New York once when I was in my late teens, visiting my sister on a military base in Buffalo. That was the closest I ever got to the Big Apple, until last week.

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Although I only post to this blog once a week on writing-related topics, I was baffled on what I was going to write about today.

I figured that I couldn’t be the only person who has had problems coming up with a topic to write about, so this post is dedicated to helping others find inspiration.

Four Ways to Get Inspired to Write

1. Read about what you want to write about. One of the easiest ways to get inspired to write is to read what others have written on the topic. If you’re writing about writing, read blogs/articles/books about writing. Do a Google Blog Search to see what’s been written, and sort your details for relevance or when it was posted.
2. Find pictures then write to match the image. I stumbled upon a cool site, a Flickr Related Tag Browser, that searches Flickr’s database and offers suggestions for related images based on tags. I found the image above by searching for “books.” Although my post isn’t about books or reading, it is what I used to get inspired to write.
3. Don’t write. If you don’t quite know where to start your writing, get inspired by not writing at all. Watch television, take a walk outside, play a video game, or just clear your mind by meditating. Some of the greatest ideas for writing come when you’re not writing.
4. Ask friends for input. On my Twitter account, I asked my followers to tell me what they do to get inspired. A big thank you to Patricia Mayo, Jttaylor, David Rosam, Melanie Nathan, and Adam Snider for providing me with their inspirational tips.

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Below are the words of the day that dictionary.com sent to my inbox over the last week. I’ve included their definitions and have also thrown in examples of the words in SEO settings if applicable.

Saturday, December 29
bibulous: of, pertaining to, marked by, or given to the consumption of alcohol.

“After attending the sponsored parties at PubCon, the bibulous were feeling the worse for wear.”

December 30
gelid: extremely cold; icy.

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Stoney has a relatively hands-off policy regarding what the team blogs about on (EMP). Occasionally he’ll give us some general direction or guidance (Titles, people! It’s all about titles!!!) and he tell us to always keep it relevant to business and marketing, but other than that we pretty much have free reign. And while he doesn’t like to write negative posts about other small businesses, he’s never specifically said we can’t, so I’m going to vent a little and, well, if a particular local web hosting company gets in the way, that’ll be their problem, not mine.

Some of you may have noticed that our CodeMonitor tool has not been working properly for several weeks (actually it’s been over a few months now!). A while back we started having some issues with our web host. At the time, it was on the same account (1and1 Hosting) as our client reporting suite, task management system and this blog. Our site’s started going down periodically and the customer support we received was less than stellar.

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