There have been tons of articles about it over the past few years - Multitasking is not as efficient as we would all like to believe. We have reached a time where it is not only common to be doing 4 or 5 tasks at once, but it’s pretty much expected. Job descriptions list it as a required skill! We are encouraged with “open door” policies to stop by our coworkers’ desks. We have opened ourselves up to phone calls, email, IM, text messages, tweets, pokes, & about a billion other ways to be distracted, and that’s even before we start working on a bunch of things at once. Read the rest of this entry »

For almost the last year, I’ve been working for a company that is based in Seattle, although I still live in Utah. Telecommuting brings some interesting challenges and opportunities, and one of them is the ability (and necessity) to work wherever I am. Whether I’m in my home office, a restaurant, an airport, or the main office in Seattle, I have to have everything I need with me wherever I am. Such is the life of a Digital Nomad.

As I prepare to head to Seattle tomorrow to spend the week in the office and swing by SMX Advanced, I thought it would be fun to show how I pack for a trip such as this. So in the spirit of the recent “What’s in our Bags” series from Lifehacker.com, here is how I am preparing for the week… Read the rest of this entry »

Let me tell you what this post is not. This is not a post about building your follower count, or using Twitter to drive clicks to your website, or fancy ways to monetize your profile. There’s plenty of that garbage out there already. This is also not a list of best practices from professional bloggers and twitterers. For that I recommend heading over to Twitip.

What this post is, is an illustration of how I have been using Twitter since I started in about July ‘08. I am not trying to tell you how you should use it. That would be like me telling you how to use the telephone properly. Twitter is a communication tool, and everyone will use communication tools (email, blogs, phones, txt, their mouths…) differently for different situations.

How I have used the platform to date has really worked well for me, and since people ask me about this all the time, I thought it prudent to get it down on paper. Well… you know what I mean. Oh - if you would like to follow, here’s me: @rickgalan. Read the rest of this entry »

With all the coverage on basically every marketing or SEO blog, you are likely aware of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and even Ask’s announcement a few weeks ago of support of the Canonical URL Tag. It was big news (well.. big news if you are an online marketer.. if you are a normal person it’s actually pretty unexciting). Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz even referred to it as the “biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps“.

Now that all the freaking out about change has died down (Holy crap! Google changed the color of their wallpaper! Quick, let’s all write 300,000 blog posts about it!), I wanted to share my thoughts on this development (go 300,001). Read the rest of this entry »

At significant risk of sounding like a really nerdy James Bond movie, the title of this post is actually something that came to mind a few weeks ago when brainstorming a new project. I’ve let the idea simmer a bit, but after being present for a great Affiliate Summit session called “Managing Your Brand” I find that I can no longer contain myself. :) In that session, Andy Beal, Lee Odden,  Rob Key & Fionn Downhill gave great advice on online reputation management as well as managing your brand (not just monitoring it but actually managing it). If you did not attend that session but have access to  the videos from Affiliate Summit West 2009, I highly recommend giving it a peek.

It’s very likely that you already know this,  but the web is becoming an increasingly fragmented space. Gone are the days of “browsing” the web - it’s “searching” the web at this point. When is the last time you used a web directory like DMOZ for anything other than building links? There is simply too much out there.

Read the rest of this entry »

So in a fun little twist of fate, I ended up winning a free Gold Pass to Affiliate Summit West from CopyBlogger. I will be in Vegas Monday and Tuesday and would love to meet up! Ping me via Twitter, LinkedIn, email (rickgalan at gmail dot com), or leave a comment and we’ll set something up. Or if you can’t make it, I would love a suggestion for who you know that will be there that I should meet.  Should be a good time!

Incidentally, I have been on a roll lately with winning contests online. I won a sweet little Netbook from Andy Beal and Trackur, and now a ticket to Affiliate Summit. If you know of any other contest to enter, let me know. I’m a sure thing!

Hope to see you out at the Summit!

When I initially started playing with Google Insights, I had a few thoughts about the service:

The Name is Weird

The name is really odd - “Google Insights for Search” seems to indicate to me that there will be “Google Insights for …” Video? Blogging? Pictures? News? Shopping?
I’m not sure. It just seems like Google is positioning the service to be one of many. Even the URL (http://www.google.com/insights/search/) seems to indicate there will be more coming. Should be interesting to see what happens.

So.. Google Trends?

What exactly is the difference between Google Insights and Google Trends? As far as I can tell, the interface was improved in insights, and that’s about it. I thought maybe that Insights was replacing Trends, but the Google Labs page still doesn’t even list Insights, so I guess that’s not true.

Meh.

The last thought I had was simply meh. Neat tool, useful for targeted SEO keyword research (does chiropractor or chiropractic get more search volume?) but there are significantly better tools out there for that. It’s interesting to see the news results and how that ties into search results, but it’s just interesting, not all that exciting or useful.

Man was I wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

I would like to pose a question. When exactly did the world start accepting mediocrity as more than just the norm - when did mediocrity become the positive exception to the rule?

I was thinking about this as I was asked how a recent flight was. I told them the flight was great - but what I really meant was that my flight was entirely uneventful. I got to the airport with plenty of time, did not have to wait very long to check my luggage, and was able to make it through security without having to be strip-searched or anything. I went right to my gate, got on my plane, and everything happened exactly the way it’s supposed to. Plane goes up, peanuts, diet coke, plane goes down.

So the question I started asking myself is what part of that experience was great? Read the rest of this entry »

I was poking around on Shopping.com the other day, doing some research for another blog post, and I came across something that made me think:

It’s Shopping.com’s header, with an exciting little vertical word above it that says “Advertisement”. Awesome right?

It’s understandable (I guess) that Shopping.com won’t be able to sell all the available adspace on their giant website. I mean, they have hundreds of thousands of pages to populate with targeted and meaningful advertisements right? It’s not out of the question that they would have some fall through the cracks, right? Read the rest of this entry »

Like many young adults/online marketers/nerds, I process ghastly amounts of digital information every day. By process, i mean read, watch, listen, write, organize and communicate. Because I spend so much time and energy with this information, it’s pretty rare that something really surprises me any more. Oh there is the occasional blog post here and there that gets me thinking, or the new service or product that intrigues me, but there is simply too much information regurgitation (data puke, if you will) among the contributers in my industry.

Michael Wesch, however, astounds me. Read the rest of this entry »