Scott Thurman – 3 Places to Find Me

The Good news is that in less than a week, I’ve cracked the top 10 on Google and Yahoo! The bad news is that they’re only showing my Linkedin profile and this wordpress blog! I want people to find my for profit business web site www.mychinacityguide.com. According to a Google diagnostic report, the site is blocking the Google web crawlers attempts to catalog the site because of a file called “robot.txt”.  I’ll be damned if I can find that file. The designer/programmer that built my site said that he added some code to fix this, but it hasn’t helped.  I guess I’ll have to get my hands dirty and figure it out myself.

On the assumption that somebody is looking for me, here are the 3 places that you can find my profile:

1. MyChinaCityGuide.com - Personal Assistant Services in China

2. Linkedin Profile

3. WordPress MyChinaCityGuide Weblog

Oh, and here is my PSEOI (Personal Search Engine Optimization Index – I just made that up), which is an index of where any information related to me shows up on Google, Yahoo, and MSN:

Google: #8 WordPress Weblog

Yahoo!: #5 Linkedin Directory, #7 WordPress Blog

MSN: I still don’t exist to the folks at MSN…but I’m working on it.

Note: I won’t look any further than 20 spots.

If you find me, will you email me?  …send me an email?   I need more confirmation that I really do exist.

The First of Four Pillars of Internet Marketing

I had lunch this afternoon with my friend Kent Lewis. Kent is, among many other things, the founder/owner of Anvil Media, Inc., a search engine marketing company specializing in keyword research, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) management.  Every time I meet with Kent I am at once, reinvigorated by fresh ideas, yet overwhelmed by the HUGE task ahead of me.

Last month, I launched MyChinaCityGuide.com, which promotes a Personal Assistant service for people travelling in China. My priorities on getting this started appeared obvious; 1) Build a web site, 2) hire some Chinese people.  Done!  This took me about a month, and I was quite pleased with myself. My web site came in way under budget, and I found a great group of young Chinese students who were eager to be part of my new business. But now what?  This isn’t “Field of Dreams” (“If you build it they will come.”). How do you get people besides you, and your immediate family, to go to your web site?

Which brings me back to Kent and this blog.    I hope I’m not giving away any trade secrets, but Kent’s first recommendation?   Blog.  Apparently it is 1 of the 4 pillars of Internet Marketing. So here I am, blogging.  I’ll save the other 3 pillars for another time, but for now, I’m trying to figure out how to end this.