In honor of the launch of our new website, we have launched a new forum so that the public and our users can conversate about a variety of different topics. It’s very difficult to start and maintain an active community of experienced and unexperienced internet users, and because of this we would like to launch some giveaways that will be given monthly and at certain milestones to random users. Every person that visits this website is allowed and encouraged to participate, it is not just open to Evolution Studios clients.

Every month, a user of this forum will be entered into a drawing to win a free prize. The number of entries into this contest is based soley on the amount of posts you make. If you join but never post you are not eligible. If you join and post 100 posts, you are entered into the contest 100 times. All winners are selected randomly by a computer and no staff member or contractor of Evolution Studios is eligible. We also encourage you to read the Rules post regarding what is or isn’t a suitable post in the forum.

Secondly, upon each membership milestone set by Evolution Studios, a free prize will be given away. This prize is not based on the number of posts, but merely your membership status. All active members of the Evolution Studios forum will be eligible to win this prize. Current milestones are:
500 Members
1000 Members
2500 Members
More to be determined at a later date

Prizes will be determined by month and requests for different prizes can be made to any forum admin or by e-mailing Info@evolutionstudios.org. For the drawing in October and for the first 500 members milestone, the prize will be a 16GB IPod Touch.

We hope that this community strengthens the bonds between the experienced and less experienced web site owner and hope to see everyone at http://www.evolutionstudios.org/forum!

Evolution Studios

We have a number of great features you can use to grow your list. Get started by logging into your account, then click on the “More Features” tab. Here you will find the following tools that will help you build and manage your list.

• A visitor sign-up box to use on your website
• A “Send Page to Friend” link for your website
• A special feature that allows your subscribers to forward your email and add a personal note to their friends

If you need help with any of these features, please contact us. We would be happy to assist you in setting them up for your account. Best Practice: Collect Emails Every Chance You Get

Make a habit of collecting emails to add to your list. Just remember that you are building a permission-based list, which means a person must give their permission before being added. Here are some tips for growing your list. Have a sign-up sheet available at your place of business

• Train employees to collect addresses and permission at every point of contact
• Collect addresses at tradeshows and events
• Collect business cards of people who request information

Take a FREE 60-Day Trial

Email Marketing lets you connect and get relevant messages out to people who want to hear from you. Online Survey helps them tell you what they really think about your products, services, and communications—giving you new ideas and feedback to better understand and meet their needs.

The insights you’ll get with Online Survey help you focus on how to meet customer needs—and deliver what they want. And with Email Marketing, you can deliver relevant, professional-looking email campaigns that get opened, measured and acted on.

· Create professional email campaigns and online surveys quickly and easily; choose from more than 200 easy-to-use newsletter templates and 40 survey templates.

· Get survey feedback and measure email campaign results in real time with instant tracking and reporting—and uncover revealing trends and patterns.

· Use online polls to keep your website fresh and your visitors coming back.

· Manage your email and survey lists, and reporting—all in one place with your integrated Constant Contact account.

· Create targeted email lists based on survey response, and follow up with relevant email communications.

· Get help every step of the way with our online educational resources and award-winning, free, and unlimited customer support.

Open the lines of communications with your customers or members. Build strong, lasting relationships with them. Do it all with Email Marketing and Online Survey by Constant Contact today!

Sign up for a FREE 60-Day Trial today. - Explore Email Marketing and Online Survey with no risk. No obligation.

Need help with content development? Evolution Studios offers complete content editorial services to help you maximize the effectiveness of your site and take your sales pitch to the next level. Our skilled writers will work with you to identify problem areas on your site and rewrite your content to meet your goals.

All writing services are quoted before the project begins, guaranteeing you a fixed price and no surprise charges. Our writers will work with you until you are fully satisfied. From crafting a single page to a complete site overhaul, Evolution Studios offers flexible and affordable editorial services to meet your needs.

We encourage you to check out these two new services and all of our offered services by visiting: http://www.evolutionstudios.org/services

We met Joseph through our awesome friends at Ping.fm, as we knew he had done some work with them on their site, and we were asking around if anyone knew a designer / html/css guy that we could work with to expand our design team (incidentally, one of the other killer outcomes of that whole exchange is that Evolution Studios is now the official media host of ping.fm …so pats on everyone’s back for that as well).

As any creative firm / design agency can tell you, it’s really tough — some say nigh on impossible — to design your own marketing materials, brand and market youself effectively, etc.  We’ve only had our doors officially open as Evolution Studios for about 5 or 6 months, and we’ve gone through about as many incarnations of our ’site design, not completely satisified w/ any of them.

Enter Joseph.

With his new design of our site, he’s captured everything we’ve had in our heads that we wanted to communicate about our brand — our love of  and being inspired by nature, our passion and desire to make technology easy for business owners to understand and use, and the creation of simple, easy-to-use interfaces.  We’re head-over-heels in love w/ this new design and we anticipate keeping it for quite some time.

It’s been great to collaborate with Joe Holst, and we hope that this is the first of many designs that we’ll work on together.

Grand Central Communications

The logo for Grand Central was designed by Cecil Cummings.  We took that and applied some, “variations on a theme” to develop the website template, and kept the clean, professional, black & white look and feel.  This allows the photographs and portfolio pieces of the site, the work, to speak for itself.  On this design, we approached it from the standpoint that “less is more”, and created something very simple, but also very elegant.

In addition to providing web servers, we also are able to do dedicated server management tasks. These tasks include: Initial Server Configuration, Server Optimization, Server Hardening, and 24/7/365 Monthly Server Management. For more information on these services please visit: http://www.evolutionstudios.org/dedicated/server-management/.

Finally, it is important to note that we were not able to complete all of the maintenance on our shared hosting server. We will be completing the majority of the work this upcoming weekend. Please ensure that your name registrars are pointed to the correct server by checking www.whois.sc.

As everyone here knows, the web is great with all the information that is at our fingertips. The greater challenge is often in making sense of all the moving parts.

Even some of the most basic and easily accessible bits, like indexation, can leave one scratching their head, trying to figure out what is the “right” number. Of course, the reality is that there are no right numbers . . . just right now numbers. On the web though, right now is often measured by the click of a mouse or hitting “Enter.”

At best, we often hope to find something that is closer to reality than anything else. It is less about the number, but the relationship of numbers from month to month, and how those numbers compare to the number of URLs we believe “exist” for a site.

Along with the advanced search operators detailed in the guide, there are also parameters that can be appended. In playing around with this several months ago, I couldn’t help but chuckle and think that I “broke” Google for a second. Rest assured, Google seems to have recovered nicely, but you too can experience this for your own amusement.

After doing any kind of search, you can append the “num=100″ parameter to the query string to get 100 results instead of the default 10. Another useful parameter is the “start=990″ that takes you to the last page of the results, without having to click through to the end.

To recreate, just append the following to the URL query string in the address bar of your browser after running a query in Google:

&num=100&start=990

Combining these two not only lead to a result I wasn’t expecting - no results - but also a situation that I think Google just wasn’t ready to handle. Poor Google . . . I made it drop an “o” . . . uh oh.

I am talking about what you read on a daily basis when you do your rounds on the Internet and when you hear dubiously meaningless things said at conferences. For example, what the hell does create good content mean?

???

We gladly accept statements that say nothing in the same way we sit and listen to some politicians say nothing when they speak. At its best, saying a lot without saying anything is a remarkable talent. Blogs attract thousands of readers, public figures gain thousands of fans and people really can make a lot of money and build a lot of credibility by saying nothing. The only way this will stop (and, in general, it probably won’t), is by communities no longer humouring it.

University sociology departments are quite good at spending a lot of money to find out what most of us already knew, but SEO and social media writers aren’t bad at it either. Both parties are also good at identifying and defining elements of their topics that everyone already knows and understands. The reason they’re praised for writing obvious, meaningless articles and blog posts is because most people agree with what they’ve written. It’s easy to praise someone with whom you agree, so stating the obvious and not adding anything of meaning is an easy way to gain praise.

Here is an idea: When you see bogus content like this slithering its way up the rankings of Sphinn, desphinn it. When you stumble upon such a piece, thumb it down. When a speaker at a conference advises you to “get to know your audience,” and adds nothing more, ask the person during Q&A “how?” and don’t be satisfied with boilerplate, lazy answers. Don’t add comments like, “I completely agree!” because that  is why the piece or the speech is useless. All you can do is agree with it because it states the SEO equivalent of looking at this picture, taken out of my office window, and saying, “it’s sunny in Seattle today.”

There are three reasons why people spurt forth this sort of useless information:

1. Laziness: It’s easy to put together the Top 10 Ways to Write Good Content, even if they’re actually a lot better informed and a lot smarter. They could analyse a merger or deconstruct a search results page, but it looks a bit too much like hard work.
2. Lack of knowledge: They don’t know very much, so defining the defined and pondering the pondered is the limit of what they can write.
3. Fear of giving away good tactics: This is more understandable, but should probably be remedied by writing less, not writing rubbish. At a conference, this is unacceptable: if people have paid the sort of money is usually costs to go to conferences in our industry, they should be treated to at least some of a speaker’s more valuable knowledge.

There is a big difference between creating content for beginners and underestimating people’s intelligence. Our Beginner’s Guide does not belittle those who read it, and Rand’s soon-to-be-released rewrite is even better. I’m also not proposing that every post or every presentation should be ground-breaking. Far from it. It’s simply not possible, and we’ve all been guilty of phoning one in. However, we must stop paying attention and handing out praise to those people who have seemingly tricked us into believing that their brand of hot air is worth consuming over and over again. It does none of us any good, and it boils down to blatant trickery.

Reason #1: SEO & Guarantees Have an Abominable History

From 1996 through to today, SEO scams have used “guaranteed rankings and traffic” as a slimy catchphrase to lure in gullible buyers with too-good-to-be-true promises. That association has stained the entire industry and repulsed even businesses that might consider using the “guarantee” label. Just look at some of the questionable messaging used by so-called SEO companies that employ this moniker:

(source) Our search engine optimization software comes with the latest link popularity and web site optimization tools for helping you achieve guaranteed ranking. Here is what the Internet’s best search engine optimization software has to offer:

• Link Popularity & Link Exchange Tools
• Website Submission Software

Automated software for link exchanges and website submissions? If you’ve done ten minutes of due diligence into how SEO is practiced, you’re well aware that these claims venture deep into the sort of tactics that haven’t been effective in the last half-decade.

(source) $399 annual - Guaranteed fast listing on DMOZ, Netscape, Google, MSN, AltaVista, LYCOS, FAST, ASK/Temoa and 100+ other engines and portals! Trace your traffic and guarantee a higher position!

Not only is the listing and traffic guaranteed, it’s guaranteed fast. I’m reminded of Homer Simpson’s infamous utterance after a crayon is re-inserted into his brain, “Extended warranty? How can I lose?”

(source)

• We guarantee to keep you on 1st-page results each month, or you don’t pay for that month.
• We guarantee to optimize your website for up to 100 different keyword phrases.
• We guarantee to provide monthly reports that document all of your 1st-page positions.

Many of the SEO companies that do still guarantee rankings have taken the clever tack of guaranteeing a certain number of keywords that they themselves choose. In this fashion, they can select primarily non-competitive terms and have a fairly high rate of success. Whether those keyword rankings provide any serious traffic is another matter altogether.

The point doesn’t need belaboring. Just as time shares have their “free” weekend getaways and used cars have high pressure salespeople, SEO has its own insiduous, stereotyped marketing claims that legitimate providers avoid like the plague.

Reason #2: The Search Engines Expressly Warn Against It

I don’t often reference Google’s guidelines on search marketing, but since the page ranks so well for a variety of queries related to SEO and guarantees, its virtually unavoidable if a client is performing research about your offerings. This line in particular, stand alone:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Even though the context is meant to put it in a slightly different context (”Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or…”), the messaging comes through very clearly. If your potential clients have read on Google’s website that guarantees are bogus, they’re likely to carry that bias with them as they peruse what the market has to offer.

Reason #3: Rankings are Inherently Unstable

If I perform a search for SEO Company here in Seattle, then drive 3 hours south to Portland (or 3 hours north to Vancouver) and execute the same query, I’m likely to end up with very different ordering of results. Likewise, if I log into my Google account and get personalized results or hit a different datacenter during the course of my querying. Many searchers have even had the odd experience of hitting refresh on a query and finding the results change or re-order.

Given the incongruous nature of ranking fluctuations and the fact that ranking in a particular position on a given machine at a single point in time says very little about the future or even the present, it’s no wonder that savvy SEO firms stay away from the guarantee.

Reason #4: Rankings are a Poor Metric for Overall Performance

Rankings do not equal traffic. A great SEO campaign should be measured by the increase in search engine traffic and (if the contract also includes site optimization for conversions) the rate at which that traffic performs the desired actions on your site. Achieving rankings is (almost) always a means to an end and not the end itself (the one exception being reputation management campaigns).

If your patrons are seeking rankings for posterity or to boost their egos, they might not be the best choice of clients. Those clients who have a solid business model and great content or services to back it up want the kinds of qualified, interested visitors that come from search engines because they’ve expressed a desire that the website can fulfill. Yes - position #1 will generally get you more traffic than any other real estate in the search results, but plenty of campaigns we’ve seen and even some we’ve worked on have been sabotaged by an obsession with pure rankings.

The metric shold always be traffic - increasing search traffic means the SEO is doing their job. Making the rankings of a few top phrases the priority, above and beyond the overall search traffic means that goals are out of whack. Don’t forget that 70% of search volume is in the tail of the demand curve - and there’s usually a lot more low hanging fruit to be found therein.

Reason #5: Making Guarantees About Something You Cannot Control Carries Inherent Ethical Problems

Politicians constantly fall into the trap of making promises they cannot possibly deliver on. Luckily, since they’ve let people down since the dawn of government, we’ve set the bar relatively low. This isn’t true, however, in the business world. If FedEx promises to deliver a package by tomorrow, that’s a guarantee they can make because they control the means of delivery. On the flipside, if a camera-maker promises that all your pictures will come out beautiful, that’s irresponsible - what if you decide to point your lens at Gary Busey?

This same principle applies to SEO.

What search engine optimization companies can & should guarantee is that they’ll provide the best advice possible to help your site earn more traffic. They may even guarantee, after reviewing your site, that they can grow your search traffic by at least 10, 20, 30% or more (we’ve done this in the past, at least verbally, when we’ve seen sites that had incredible potential and extremely poor SEO practices). But, SEOs cannot control the search results the way FedEx can control shipping packages or Coca Cola can guarantee the taste of their beverage. The search engines alone are responsible for and privvy to the rankings methodologies.

In my personal opinion, there are times when I would be willing to gamble a large amount of money on the fact that we could achieve a certain ranking for a given keyword. However, that’s not the same as a guarantee. A guarantee is a promise - a basic contract that necessarily creates an assumption of certainty by the deliverer to the recipient. Anytime you cheat on that logic and make a promise outside your sphere of direct control, you’re walking on shaky ethical and business ground.

Furthermore, with the maintenance and upgrades we will be undergoing, some downtime is expected, we will be doing these upgrades on off hours during the weekend to keep downtime to limited exposure. We appreciate your patience while we make this move.

Lastly, we now have a live chat on our website, www.evolutionstudios.org, that can be used most times in case of questions. Please remember that support requests should be sent to Support@evolutionstudios.org.