Hey Mitch! Thanks for taking some time out from writing our Newsletter articles to handle a quick interview. 

Not a problem. Nice to be on the other side of the content stream every once in a while in front of my close and personal amigos, the always awesome Lunarpages clients.

You’re another one of those people who work for Lunarpages and does just about everything in every department. So what’s your official job title and what do you do for LP?

I don’t know if I have ever been given one? I guess officially I would be considered a Level One Customer Service Representative, Senior Forum Moderator, Content Writer, Sales Guy, Blogger and Official Odd Jobs Associate. Think I almost got everything covered there.

You can check out the rest of the interview on the web site.  Had been a while since I had done any sort of interview, hope I wasn’t rusty.  I guess what they say about, “time flying by when your having fun” is true.   End of next month will mark my two year anniversary of being with the company, and hopefully I’ll have many more years to come.

Marketing in general has really always excited me, so I thought it might be a good idea to talk with somebody who does this as their day to day business. Daryl Kennedy is the VP of Operations over at TechWyse Internet Marketing. When approached about the interview – my first thoughts were “Whoo hoo! Now I can pick the brain of somebody who really understands this Internet marking stuff” and I have to say I was not disappointed.

How did you find yourself in the Internet marketing world? Most people on the web want to get to the top themselves in popularity. You guys specialize in helping other people make a name for themselves.

Daryl: Getting into the Internet marketing world for myself was quite by accident. I have always been a resourceful person. I have always enjoyed efficiency and understanding new technology. After being in the business of developing web sites, I decided it would be far more resourceful to learn and understand the newer search engine phenomena then hit the streets cold calling which was far more traditional.

After studying search engines for about 6 months, I quickly found that by following search engine principles I could get our own company on the first page of Google, Yahoo! and MSN rather easily. Ironically, many other companies across North America and especially Toronto, Canada began noticing themselves! Since this was clearly a way for companies to begin to generate revenue they began asking me to help them in the same way.

The rest is history. We have branched out now to become a full service Internet marketing company with more than 50 people in 2 different locations. I have never been an egocentric person, I simply enjoy the Internet marketing industry, and even further than that, understanding how to build and analyze different companies marketing efforts as effectively as possible.

Internet marking is a very large tent. At TechWyse, what are some of the services you really specialize in?

Daryl: It has sure developed into a ‘very large tent!’. Put as simply as possible; our goal is to cultivate, promote and measure the marketing efforts of companies. Our focus is on developing a full marketing strategies which include the following process:

• Planning & Measurement – gaining an understanding of the company goals and building a blueprint to develop a successful online marketing campaign.
• Creative Development – developing an online persona that matches and promotes the ultimate goal. Having an effective online brand and conversion friendly design ensures that all the traffic we get your site converts at a higher rate.
• Promotion – the successful launch of previously developed Internet marketing campaign, which may include anything from organic optimization, pay per click, email marketing, Facebook advertising and other social media utilities.
• Analysis – by launching an effective analytics program we can now analyze every facet of a company’s marketing plan.

It is not as focused as it once was, but the truth is that it’s essential to help companies grow!

What is the one marketing tip you see overlooked the most? Such as you see web site after web site and say, “Oh my gosh – why are they not doing this?”

Daryl: This one is easy Mitch; Companies invariably, almost always come to us wanting to promote and build traffic to the corporate web site without first looking in their own yard to make sure it’s as inviting as possible. This is why myself and the entire TechWyse team always discuss the importance of web site conversion or put more simply – what is the ultimate goal of your web site. Figure that out, and develop accordingly. By doing so we can maximize the efficiency of your marketing dollars.

Does it make you mad to see the “easy” offers to rise your search engine rankings? You know the ones that have 101 tips and promise to get you to the top of Google for any keyword as long as you pay $69.99 for their ten page ebook?

Daryl: Hah! You hit the nail on the head with that one. I find it rather comical that even we receive the bulk emails from companies that can get us on the top of Google within 24 hours! My rule of thumb is that if it sounds too good to be true — it probably is. Most of these tactics are those that prey on those that do not know otherwise. Over the last few years, however, I have watched the public grow wiser to this.

Having said all of this, it is definitely possible to get ranked at the top of search engines if you follow a proper plan. Internet marketing done right still means not only the cheapest cost per acquisition than any other marketing strategy but also the most measurable.

My biggest piece of advice for those that do not who to choose; Do some research on the company. Type in the company name into the search engine and see what else comes up. Ask for testimonials and ask those people what exactly the company has done for them. Pay attention to the details; even simple things like collateral, site design mean a lot in this business!

How do you deal with the clients that say, “I want to be at the top of Google for the keyword ‘muffin’ tomorrow!”?

Daryl: There are several different questions to ask to answer properly. It is firstly important to discover if the word “muffin” will get the company the most targeted type of visitor as possible. In this case, if you are selling a recipe book, for example, wouldn’t “muffin recipe’s” be more targeted? Or what if you make muffins in Toronto and want people to come to your muffin store? Why not focus on “Muffins Toronto?”

In the end, there are some instances where not using a long tail strategy is best. In that case it is possible to rank the highest for the word “muffins.” If this is the case, it is very important to build a campaign that effectively engages the major search engines to the point that you are the most relevant search when someone types it in. It usually comes down to having a wealth of content, and also something that is unique that people will reference online to improve your own link popularity.

Give me a solid argument as to why somebody reading this interview should invest in TechWyse and its Internet marketing and analytics services?

Daryl: I am the type of person to outwardly promote why you should use TechWyse services. What I do take great pride in however, is that our company does focus on capturing the entire purpose to your online marketing campaign. While getting results is important, it is just important effectively measure campaigns for results. There certainly are a handful of companies in the world today that do this, but the truth is this is still such a new industry, that you still see a lot of pretenders that take advantage of many lack of knowledge.

Our company is an avid supporter of Google products because this is still the mecca of search. We also put a great deal of emphasis on delivering effective, measurable campaigns that you and your account manager at TechWyse can work together on implementing successfully.

The final thing that I feel speaks volumes about TechWyse is the bandwidth that we have. When companies come to us, they have a group of more than 50 individuals dedicated to their own special area in Internet marketing. Very important!

Thanks Mitch, for the opportunity to speak on your blog. It has been a pleasure answering your pointed questions. I enjoy reading your blog. Keep up the good work!

Final thoughts: Many thanks back at Daryl, and be sure to tech out TechWyse for all of your Internet marketing needs.  They are an awesome company that seems to be more than happy to do anything in the world for you when it comes to online marketing.

So when the chance came up to talk one on one with Adam Ostrow, the editor over there at the social web juggernaut I couldn’t let the chance to pick through a Mashabler’s brain.

Mashable got its start being more based around the social networks out there, and since then has spun off into covering anything that is tech-worthy or Web 2.0ish related. Why the change what I guess you could consider a bigger tent?

Adam: I can’t really speak to our editorial policy pre-early 2007 or so when I joined up with Mashable, but I have to imagine the shift was due to the fact that there is just simply so much more going on in the space than social networking now.

First you had the tools that plugged into social networks – widgets and things of that nature – from companies like Slide, RockYou, etc. This was one of the initial trends that Mashable picked up on. Then, there were applications that integrated on a deeper level with social networks – starting with Facebook and its application platform, and now, most of the other big social sites too. Finally, now we see social features being integrated into virtually every type of Web service – from search, to maps, to mobile. So, I do think there is still a little bit of “social” laced into most of our stories, though, perhaps not as singularly focused on social networking sites.

Additionally, I think because our site has grown so much in terms of traffic and revenue, we simply have the resources to employ more writers and cover a broader arrange of topics relating to the Web – which is ultimately how we grow our business.

You have to get a lot of “Hey, will you talk about me!” e-mail requests. How many companies a day do you get e-mails from and think, “Oh no, not another one of these guys again…”?

Adam: I don’t actually think “oh, no …” too often, but the “I’m building a social network for [insert topic here]” pitch is getting tiresome. Nonetheless, occasionally you will see a really cool social network aimed at a specific niche, so it would be reckless as an editor to just automatically dismiss anything that at least a subset of our readers might find interesting. We get hundreds of emails per day though, so to standout, you really need to be doing something relatively unique, or offering a cool new spin on an idea that is already out there.

Which has been more at the source of Mashable’s growth, being linked to (or talked about) by the right people or having quality content?

Adam: It’s a combination of both. The links help not only because of the direct traffic they send, but because in the long-term, they improve your search engine rankings, which means you get more traffic from Google (and Yahoo, Ask, etc.). Quality content is what drives these links, so it’s a fairly obvious and rewarding circle in the long-term. That said, it takes years to build that up – Mashable was just Pete Cashmore for about two years before it started grow exponentially in 2007.

For those people out there who say, “I want to be the Mashable of ‘insert area of expertise here’” what advice do you have for them?

Adam: I think the most important part is timing. I think when Mashable started, Pete was in part making a bet that social networking was really going to take off, which, was still not a foregone conclusion in 2005. It’s no different than a new startup – not only are you making a commitment to working hard and doing something cool – you are also depending on the market becoming interested in the area you’re focusing on.

So, if you’re looking to start a blog right now that’s going to become big, I think you need to make a bet on a future trend – something you think is in its infancy and going to get really hot over the next few years. You could be wrong – but it’s a lot easier than starting yet another blog focusing on social networks, Web 2.0, gadgets, etc. There is always room for new commentators about topics that are already well-covered, but I think the battle to become one of the leading brands in a saturated space is a very uphill one unless you’re coming in with tons of contacts and money (for example, Silicon Alley Insider).

Do you feel that the “social” aspect of the Web is just getting started, reached its peak or is about time for a wheel chair and a retirement home?

Adam: I’m heavily biased since I depend on the continued growth of the space for both my day job (Mashable) and my various business interests (MindSay, ReadBurner), but I think we’re just getting started. Traditional media has only really caught onto “social” in the past 18 months or so (via acquisitions of Web 2.0 companies and their own homegrown efforts). For example, look at iReport, CNN’s citizen journalism effort. The biggest name in cable news is clearly committed to “social,” and that says something.

That said, I think there will be a shake-out of many of the “me too” companies, and we’re already starting to see that with startups joining forces to combine technologies and employees. But it’s hardly like the late 90s bubble where companies are going public and retail investors are losing their shirts betting on dotcoms.

I want to thank yet again Adam Ostrow for his time, and you don’t need me to go tell you to go and visit Mashable.com for more because like myself, your probably already a subscriber. From head to toe, Pete has a great team working for him.

How did you get your start on the Web?

Emory: My path into the web began in the mid 1990′s. I was a fairly uninspired surfer and email user until I discovered online multiplayer gaming. Meeting others and competing with them in a virtual world fascinated me. I spent a lot of time gaming back then when I should have been reserving domains like games.com. Looking back, I guess you could say that playing multiplayer games was my first online social networking experience. But, instead of the polite introductions we have with today’s social networking sites, you broke the ice by joining a game and chasing people around, taunting and blowing each other up.

Soon, I started building my own user maps. The next thing I knew I was learning to create graphics, then my first Web site which was a Duke Nukem fan site that had an address of something like someurl.com/~emory/dukenukem/, then writing PC game reviews for Gamezilla and UGO and just generally enjoying the whole Internet experience.

Who is the bigger star, Emory or Clickfire?

Emory: The best way to answer that question is by comparing the number of people who stop by my place to visit (friends, magazine salesmen, mailmen, etc) with the number of people who stop by Clickfire to visit. Emory might get one visitor per month. Clickfire gets many thousands. Clickfire can serve a lot more people than Emory ever could. It really makes you think about the leveraging power of the Internet. I could be standing on the street outside my home with a sign that said “Free 100 dollar bills” and I’d never get as many visitors, solve as many problems or meet as many cool people as Clickfire allows. Creating and maintaining my own Web site has has been one of the most enriching of life experiences.

Across Clickfire.com you cover lots of different web developer topics and discussions. What is your favorite area of the massive tent of web development and why?

Emory: I am still having a great time playing around with RSS/XML. Every major social site these days has a feed for the mashing. WordPress has individual category, post and comments feeds. I like to pull pieces of them from my own site and present them on a static page. Then, there is the mobile side, which I haven’t even begun to experiment with yet.

I would say you’re one of the longest running webmaster resources, with your roots going all the way back to 1997. What has made you want to stay in the game so long?

Emory: I enjoy it. Why I enjoy it is something I’ve thought about a great deal. I like having my own “place” online where I can do creative stuff like writing reviews and building free tools. Visitors read the reviews and use the tools and comment; that makes me like doing it more. I can earn revenue by adding affiliate marketing into the mix. So I enjoy it even more. I can increase that revenue with SEO. Now my career is in search marketing and I’m having fun and getting in even deeper. So, I meet even more interesting people like yourself who inspire me to be creative–the cycle starts again.

Are you afraid your going to wake up one day and have the sudden urge to quit and sell shoes at the mall?

Emory: I have no talent outside the Web, so I am sure that will never happen. Besides I can’t sell. I’d probably offer the customer an objective review of the shoes and then give him a pair for free. If I had to make money the brick and mortar way, I’d be broke. Being a webmaster is too much fun.

As far as web hosting goes, which two web hosts out there impress you the most and why?

Emory: You saved the toughest question for last . It seems that all the big shared hosts are offering more bandwidth than you can shake a pipe at. As I’m sure you are well aware, webmastering can be a lonely job and often keeps you up late into the night. If your site goes down at 3:00 AM, you can’t scream. Opening a support ticket online doesn’t seem to satisfy the human need to know that someone is listening and just might care. It’s probably no coincidence that the only two web hosts that have ever won 5 out of 5 Clickfire stars both have 24 hour phone support lines, BlueHost and HostGator. I will say that Lunarpages was the highest rated host we reviewed last year and I really like LP’s pro customer attitude. I am also hosting some sites on HostDime, which I like so far. And HostICan seems intriguing, which we are reviewing now. I think that’s more than two so I’ll stop and bid farewell before I get carried away.

Thanks, Mitch, for giving me the opportunity to share with your readers. And thanks for the free therapy because I have learned some new things about myself now. Keep up the great work with the Web Hosting Show and Mitchelaneous.

How important is user feedback and experiences (good and bad) when it comes to the Pageflakes product?

Dan: It’s extremely important and we have ongoing dialogues with our users through the blog and support forum. We monitor this full time and read & respond to every email. Our product plans include user requested information by way of reviews and feedback. We always have a representative from customer services support team involved in our product sessions.

This is to not only know how our site is produced & written, understanding sessions etc but also to represent the user base and their comments/suggestions into our future plans. They aggregate the most popular requests and common denominator feedback so we acknowledge this as paramount in our product plans. Ongoing dialogue internally and with our users are taken extremely seriously into our product design development strategies.

Start pages have a history of being something that people spend five minutes on, get caught up on whatever they want to watch – clocks or kitten saying funny things. Why should somebody invest the time to spend more time with Pageflakes?

Dan: A great number of users spend more time on Pageflakes than email and social networking sites. The old generation of personalize pages i.e. my Yahoo would result in people clicking for a moment and then visiting another site. But the old RSS information was sports, news and stocks related so if the user wanted to read more, they’d click through or venture to other websites.

With Pageflakes, users can check bank balances, email, network, visit social networking flakes so the interactive elements on Pageflakes is richer and includes flakes that users couldn’t do before. We are revolutionizing what people are doing on the Web. Technology has changed and Pageflakes is more of an engaging experience by definition to keep users on the page longer. They are learning and digging deeper into topics individually and interacting with other like minded individuals.

Focusing your attention to several new projects to aim your pages at a lot of niche audiences (like what you plan to do with education) do you hope to move the project along further than that 5 minute or less eyeball viewing time most start pages get?

Dan: Reiterating the above again, people are using Pageflakes longer than 5 minutes. This is their environment and not just a website. Pageflakes has been active within the educational community globally for 15 months so what we are doing is not just attracting a niche audience, but letting the users create an entire community of say, teachers. They use Pageflakes in the classroom, share through private collaborations and have students visit the pagecasts regularly for assignment updates.

It’s a group product service. We support them and thrive on this grown in the new education paradigm. Pageflakes has been involved with thousands of schools in the USA, Ireland, Scotland, Australia and more. Earlier this year, Pageflakes won a Gartner Award in the Enterprise Category.

This is a reflection on companies who also use Pageflakes as their new internal portal for projects, management, tracking industry research etc. Small businesses use Pageflakes to promote themselves i.e. SoulSistah100 who’s music is basically her business. Companies now use their Pageflakes home page on their business card as a primary example of the work they’ve produced.

From your history at both Yahoo and Google, you have obviously seen what works and what does not work. How have your past experiences helped shape the way you’d like to brand and mold Pageflakes going into the future?

Dan: Past experiences have shown what users want and don’t want in personalized start pages. I now have the opportunity to focus exclusively on delivering the best home page and experience to our users. In terms of shaping and branding, we have simply given the users an incredible set of tools to build their homepage and share with others in a simple and easy format. Our user shave really shaped Pageflakes future for education, business and social networking. We gave them the tools to make their own themes, logos, photos and their own branding experiences.

In the past, products working well were part of an overall company strategy with various different priorities alternating and interlinking. With Pageflakes we get to focus on one thing and excel in this as a true mass market innovator and user driven product initiative that our users can enjoy, personally and professionally.

What are some of Dan’s favorite flakes and pagecasts?

Dan: My pagecast is http://www.pageflakes.com/dancohen and obviously this is my favorite pagecast. I’m also interested in our user’s pagecasts such as SoulSistah100 and nancypants. These users take Pagecasting to new heights, for personal use and business.

I like to see what all users are producing and it’s fascinating to live and visit their lives i.e. what it’s like to be a housewife in Calgary with 4 children, an educator in Scotland or a singer in Osaka, Japan. It’s fun to experience their personas and a bonus for other Pageflakes users to explore.

I also like viewing our new series of open Pageflakes Pagecasts that we’ve produced incorporating flakes from our community section, seasonally and ongoing such as Christmas, UK New Years and our exciting new Super Bowl 2008 pagecast. These are an ongoing campaign that are not only fun but extremely useful for information gathering, copying flakes and you don’t need to be a Pageflakes user to visit these.

I regularly check my universal video search (listed on my pagecast) along with updates on music with a weekly podcast. And local events for my family and I to enjoy this one.

I want to thank Dan Cohen, CEO of Pageflakes for giving me a few free minutes of his busy day to ask questions people actually want to know the answers to.

I have been a big supporter of HostingCon since day one. I think it is an excellent event and it has quickly become the biggest event of the year for anybody who has any interest in the web hosting industry. Each year about this time I get just a little more excited because for web hosting enthuists this is almost as good as Christmas. (more…)

Tune in to episode 110 of the Web Hosting Show to hear the full interview.

• An Interview with Amy Armitage of Lunarpages.com
• What is a Woman’s Place in the Hosting Industry?
• Marketing Tips Everybody Can Learn From!
• Do I Love or Hate the New cPanel 11?
• Finding Domain Registrars for Wacky Extensions!

+ Download and Listen to the Web Hosting Show – Episode 106!

I had the honor to do little interview from Jonathan at Plzhost.com recently. He is yet another young guy that comes from the tech arena into the Web hosting world.

Jonathan, how did you come into the wild and wacky world of Web hosting?

I came into the hosting business because I was looking at the web host I was on with the time with a retail site and how much they provided me with support and help. I looked around at other hosting companies and they wouldn’t even touch what this hosting company did for me. So I started learning the ins and outs of the hosting business.

I came across what got me started by accident really I was working for an auction site named Buyselltrades.com and I was looking around for fraudulent and saw a post that said “start your own web hosting company and work from home” that caught my attention as I was looking into starting a web hosting company. I contacted them to see how much there reseller accounts where.

They told me the way they do things is I have preset plans that I get charged a preset price for which was $1 – $5 per month. I stayed with them for a while and totally forgot that I even owned the domain. I got a notice that it was time to renew the domain and then I started looking into it some more and at that time my friend had a reseller account with Forgehosting.com I started to piggy back off of him and started to really promote that site.

I started looking at other hosting companies to see what was working for them with prices and what kind of awards I could apply for. I new Zen Cart very well and was looking around there site and saw they had Zen Cart Certified hosting. I applied for it and received the certification around the same time I applied for a geek certification. And thats when the business started to take off as I called it within 3 months of getting the certified i went from 0 clients to 40 client and I now have 47 clients and probably close to 100 account hosted on the server.

I recently outgrow the reseller plan so I contacted the my reseller hosting provider and let them know the situation. So they set me up on my own server and gave me root access and also helps with support. And become as what I guess you can call a real hosting company.

Do you have any tips for breaking into the Web hosting buisness?

Breaking into the hosting business is hard. I struggled with many of late nights trying to build my name and keep the name good. There where many nights where I did not get any sleep cause I was looking for ways to promote the site, awards to apply for, hosting directories to list my self in.

It has started to pay off but is has just started I know that I have many more late nights ahead of me to keep my name out there and find new ways to get it out there. It was no easy task to get my name out there and get clients and I still have allot more to do. It was also hard to get my page ranked as well as I do and a PR4.

What is your best tip for success in the Web hosting industry. What has worked best for you thus far?

What has worked for me was that Zen Cart and geek certification. Also supporting and transfering Zen Cart customer. No other web host would seem to help them with there Zen Cart or Oscommerce site. I have heard everything from my host makes me leave a message and then calls me back when its convenient to my host hasn’t responded to emails or phone calls in a week.

Thats where we differed in that most emails are responded to within 1 hour and for example when the Geek Certification company did the support test the response time was 10 minutes. Most issues are resolved within 1-2 hours for minimal down time.

What is the best thing about providing Web hosting for people in your opinion?

What I have learned I have learned more helping people with there issues. Every time something happens I learn something new. For example when I first started it took me about 7-8 hours to do a transfer of a Zen Cart know I can transfer and have up in running in about 2 hours. I love making people happy and to hear the joy and excitement and sense of relief that they get knowing they are supported now and there problem becomes our problem they first time they email us or call us.

What is the most important aspect of your buisness that you want people to walk away from this interview and know about you?

What I want people to know walking away. We believe it four things, great uptime, great support, listen to your customers and keep prices reasonable. We have all the above. We work hard to resolve any issue that comes are way in a fast and timely manner, we listen to our customers and work on getting feedback from them on ways to improve our service.

We have 2 employees that all they do is call clients and see what they think of service and how we can improve service. We give back to the community that supports us. We donate to Zen Cart to help Zen Cart better there shopping cart for everyone and we donate to PACA (peoples anti cruelty association) this is a no kill animal shelter, we have installed web cams and we host it for free. We offer free web hosting to non profit charities.

We have the proper understanding that the customer makes or breaks the business, we also understand that we have to earn your trust its not just given, we have no contracts what so ever we do not believe in them. If you register a domain through us it is your property it does not become property of us.