In a week from now I will be heading for New York City - the SES NYC starts on April 10
...with the first party already starting the day before - thanks to Todd, Greg, BOTW and TLA

Will you be there ?
Let me know so we can meet and have a chat :-)

Meanwhile let me tell you that this March was probably the most work-intensive month of the last 3 years.

You know, I am studying marketing here in a night study-mode, besides running my business - did you know that?
Actually I've started in 2003 and now it finally comes to an end. I quit my project manager job, incorporated during my studies do only what I do well - links & presell pages -(ok and some other stuff)...

The studies also were the reason I missed the SES in Munich ( some people told he it wasn't that great ) and will
also be the reason why I'm going ot miss the first SMX show early June - Dannie Sullivan's new venture.

So today I had another of those horrible written finals that we have in the curriculum, where they want you to remember theories and models from 4000 pages, 20+ years old and definitely a bit "unrelated" when it comes to internet marketing (I tell you, Google would send that stuff to supplemental hell for not getting enough links - at least my own brain algo has a hard time storing these sometimes :-)

Plus I got feedback for the theory part of my master thesis on
"improving motivation of online community members" that I already wrote about briefly some time ago....

The survey for my thesis will be run on Digitalpoint as well as on Cre8asiteforums, thanks for Shawn and Bill's support, however my draft got rejected so I'm going to rework that survey till end of April probably... gee more work on top ... anyway's - I'm looking forward to going thru the data of all those (hopefully) 1000 participants when the data is in...

To stimulate the survey participation for the forum members (and get entries also from the not-so-enthusiastic writers :-)
I thought about a sweepstake, a give-away of some prizes ... and obviously everything that has some link juice would be a great prize for webmasters, or?

what you think of a "link juice" prize (i.e. a cool presell page) or maybe some blog posts on a couple of sites for some participants? I would appreciate your feedback, your ideas, AND of course, if you want to donate some link space for the participants, that'd be great!

Actually I'd love to make people really go HMMM when they see what kind of prizes they could win by participating...

Other news are my decision to finally setup a real office for Cemper.com here and hire people locally. I've been working with freelancers from all over the world, but had to realize that outsourcing, off shoring and over-the-net working
just doesn't work as good as it seems all the time... I had a lot better experiences with local teams that I managed.

Ok - enough rambling about my studies and office stuff - you see I'm pretty busy with some stuff you might not have realized...

my major goal of this mail was to

• Touch Base again and suggest a meeting at the SES in New York
• Give you an idea or explanation for the bit of silence here with me the last weeks

• Great rambling on why people want Page rank 4 or higher links ... funny stuff is I already forget that backlink crippling in Google was once purely PR based :-)
• Jim's internal link valuation tool adds some manual factors that definitely need to be there... I'd love to have that available
• Have you read my Solo SEO review actually? and figured that PPP sells posts via Page Rank now?
• Clients dropping old links is something I see from time to time... but are these links rotten or what?
• Todd's premium post of breaking up with bad clients is great
• Aaron's Difference between filters and penalties and content remixing is a must read
• Graywolf's local search interview collection... wow... I saw this grow over weeks and kudos to Michael for all this hard work... I guess I'll read them on the plane...
• these 9 cost-effective PPC branding strategies are nice , tough "a bit" older :-)
• and having this nice definition of arbitrage going up to arbitrage 2.0 and shopping engine arbitrage could almost make it into the marketing textbooks of 2020 or so :-)
• and also quite old but good is Matt's rant on un-detectable spam is fun.
• If you want a link on an austrian university, you have to go here and follow the (german) instructions --- there are some true concerns of cross-linking between the austrian .edu and all the participants - which effectively creates link ring that will get devalued within weeks, but as long as you don't mind having a worthless link among some small and quickly put together pages, go for it - it's an educational site... and it is below the radar for not even being an .edu :)
• Oh - and don't confuse it with this german university link offer - it's a nice rip-off AKA link-bait for 170+ trackbacks... they won't provide links
• doing some brainstorming on which new nice to go after? SeoBlackhat has this great list up
• and finally - Jason's put up a nice cartoon about "blogging consultants" - saying he's tired of social media marketing .... :-)

Ok, that's it - the SES NYC starts on April 10 and I see you there!