• http://dis.tl/dk6N59 How to justify the value of SEO: An Excel spreadsheet Will Critchlow at Distilled put together
• Referrals have no long tail. They tend to all come from a small group of people, so working hard to get referrals doesn’t make a lot of sense
• Create unique research for presentations
• Give away information and tools not already posted anywhere else
• Don’t hold back. The more you educate, the more people want to learn from you.
• R&D is Marketing.
• If you come into a pitch, and you don’t already have an unfair advantage, you’ve already lost. You want to have built a relationship and wowed the potential

•  Massive growth in search volume year over year, more searchers, more searches per searcher Comscore.
• Google: Every day there are more than a billion searches on Google
• Search has a specific intent to find
• Social media has a different intent
• Leverage social proof
• Forrester does a great report every year: Search “File: PDF” to get Forrester reports
• Growth of SEO spending
• SEO is the fastest-growing investment. We’re falling behind the average
• Show how your competitors are ranking
• Show what keywords your competitors are ranking on
• Ideally do the above side-by-side (great slide)
•  #1 show the listing/monthly traffic/$ that amount represents etc.
• #2 etc.
• #3 etc.
• Objection: “We will naturally rank in search based on content”
• Use a case study like Amazon to showcase the vastly better results when you actively try to optimize for search vs. just putting information online and trying to rank
• Objection: “We’re Too Busy & Other Programs are Easier”
• Little things can help out, such as one new blog post getting the company ranked for a few new keywords
• Objection “We’re too boring to get links”
• Mint.com killed it with a blog
• Some sites are focused around visual economics

Foundations of Relationship

Notes below on the sermon spoken by Pastor Jeff Sorvik were taken February 5, 2012, by Patrick Garmoe, and all interpretations are from Patrick. The content below is not necessarily endorsed by Pastor Sorvik or Anchor Point Church.

There are casual relationships we have with many people, and then there are the relationships that transform our lives, like meeting our future spouses. It is the latter, that God really wants to have with us.

“Philippians 1: 9-11
9 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.”

Keys To A Transformational Relationship

• Loving: Philippians 1:9 — The love discussed here is Agape love — the complete, perfect love that God exhibits.

“Mark 12: 30-31: (This also happens to be a core verse for Anchor Point Church): 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Loving others starts with a decision to engage with them.

• Love takes time.
• Absence hurts a relationship if it goes on too long.
• You can’t really force “quality time” as though less time together can be fixed by simply making sure the time is well spent.

“Psalms 1:1-2: 1 Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers,
2 but whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and who meditates on his law day and night.”

Love takes a connection

Psalm 63: 1-8: (Jeff mentioned it may be his favorite Psalm): “1 You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.
2 I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
3 Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
4 I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
5 I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.
6 On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.
7 Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
8 I cling to you;
your right hand upholds me.”

You need to have a desire for a strong relationship with Christ.

“Galatians 2:20-21— 20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21 I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”

“Ephesians 5:1-2 — 1 Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children 2 and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

• Am I doing what it takes to deeply connect with God?

Loving

Learning

• Philippians 1:9
• 2 Timothy 2:15: — “15 Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.”

Living

• Is the way I’m living my life reflecting my love for Jesus?

• 1 John 3: 16-20 — “ 16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. 17 If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? 18 Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.
  19 This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: 20 If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. 21 Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God 22 and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him. 23 And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. 24 The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.”

Also including The New Living translation, as I think it provides a little clarity on how to interpret verses 19 and 20: “Dear children, let’s not merely say that we love each other; let us show the truth by our actions. 19 Our actions will show that we belong to the truth, so we will be confident when we stand before God. 20 Even if we feel guilty, God is greater than our feelings, and he knows everything.”

• Philippians 1: 10-11 — Test right from wrong.

Take it home

1. Which of these three elements of loving (time, connection, surrender) do I struggle to give to God? Why?
2. What am I doing to intentionally develop my knowledge about God? How do I know if I am developing a right understanding?
3. Does my life reflect an authentic expression of what I know about God?
4. In what ways do I want to grow/change in my relationship building with God?

Jesus wants to wreck me, so I’ll have a great life!

Sermon on January 8, 2012 by Pastor Jeff Sorvik. Notes here were recorded by Patrick Garmoe.

Empty Religion:

• Personally cripples relationship with God!

• Culturally obscures God!

• Eternally provokes disbelief!

  Luke 11:39-52: New International Version

³⁹ Then the Lord said to him, “Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness.⁴⁰ You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also?⁴¹ But now as for what is inside you — be generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for you.

⁴² “Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone.

⁴³ “Woe to you Pharisees, because you love the most important seats in the synagogues and respectful greetings in the marketplaces.

⁴⁴ “Woe to you, because you are like unmarked graves, which people walk over without knowing it.”

⁴⁵ One of the experts in the law answered him, “Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also.”

⁴⁶ Jesus replied, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.

⁴⁷ “Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.⁴⁸ So you testify that you approve of what your ancestors did; they killed the prophets, and you build their tombs.⁴⁹ Because of this, God in his wisdom said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and others they will persecute.’⁵⁰ Therefore this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world,⁵¹ from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for it all.

⁵² “Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.”

 

• Hypocrisy – Luke 11:39-41 – It’s what people think of when they think of Christians.
• Empty Religious Activity – Luke 11:42-43: It’s not about whether or not you adhere strictly to the letter of the law, but instead it’s all about the heart of the law.
• Arrogance – Luke 18:9-14 - Everyone is as in need of Christ equally. God sees people as justified or not justified based on whether they have accepted Christ. That is all that matters.

The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector

⁹ To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: ¹⁰ “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹ The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. ¹² I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

¹³ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

¹⁴ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

• Corruption vs. The Innocents: Luke 11:44: Empty religion corrupts those around us.
• Legalism: Luke 11:45-46: The problem is when we think following the rules is the key to acceptance by God.
• Silencing of God: Luke 11:47-51: You can kill the messengers, but eventually the message still gets through.
• Deception: Luke 11:52: The way you’re treating others causes people to stumble and walk away from God or not hear God.

Real religion is transforms. Empty religion kills.

E-mail expert at b2bemailmarketing.com

Some of the notes are simply things I (Patrick Garmoe) decided to add, or update based on what’s changed since this presentation was first provided

• Use Flowtown or Rapleaf or Gist (or the tools associated within the e-mail program) to track who in your e-mail list are heavy social media users
  • Then target am e-mail campaign especially for them
• Ask people to share your e-mails on social media
• Strive to get e-mail addresses from five to 10 percent of website visitors
• You cannot ever e-mail people who did not opt in, so get an opt-in as early as possible in the shopping process – ideally in the first two or three steps — so you can send them an e-mail about an abandoned shopping cart
  • You can also send an e-mail advertising the kinds of items that were in the abandoned shopping cart, such as dresses, if the person abandoned a shopping cart with a dress in it
• Always make sure you are publishing your e-mails on Facebook and Twitter and ideally have your e-mails archived on your ideally your domain, so you get that SEO value
• Use your e-mail to take surveys of your customers
• An e-mail subscriber generally has more lifetime value than a customer who is not on your e-mail list
• Put the “unsubscribe at the top of the e-mail” if you’re worried about being viewed as spam, or you are trying to warm up a list
• Reputation impacts how many of your e-mails arrive
  • Unless you send 50,000 e-mails a week, you aren’t sending enough to build a reputation, so use a third-party e-mail service provider such as MailChimp or iContact or Blue Factory
• In addition to providing good content:
  • Always have a call to action in every e-mail
  • Remind people of what else they are missing out on, or what else they could buy

She is a former Yahoo employee and an SEO specialist, focused on using social media to research competitors.

Competitive Insights – See slide

1. Market Research Reports:
   http://ow.ly/8Cpa7 contains a popularity analysis
2. Define your competitors: wo.ly/7bqM7 — link to her SEOmoz post
3. Dig in to the data

Look at product names — not just brand names

She uses NetBase, which she says is sort of like the more well known Radian 6 product, but she’s grown up with Netbase and generally prefers it

Use Alexa to provide:

• Reach
• Pageviews
• Bounce rate
• Time on website
• % of search (although not all of this is actionable data)

What are your competitors doing well online?

• Look at the content of your competitors
• Look at the layout of your competitors

You can use social listening platforms to provide nice “sound bites” to show upper level management at meetings

Tool: Amplicate
Social Mention (my personal favorite on the free side)
Use Google because it’s still the best free crawl on the Internet

Examples of how to search on Google to glean more comments about a brand or product:

* "tmz site" -tv -show * hate "tmz site" -tv -show * "tmz website" 

You are searching for the “Why” not the “I hate it,” comments, because that is not actionable.

Look for themes, not single quotes.

Often there are love/hate groups for brands and companies on Facebook

Tool: GetSatisfaction.com

Actionable ideas of this presentation:

• He urged people to think more of keyword phrases that are partly in the head and partly in the long tail. So they get considerable traffic, but not so much that they are hard to rank for.
• He describes a way to create a tool that will harvest a ton of keyword data that you can use to hone in on the ideal keywords. I question on most of the websites I work on however, if it is worth the effort, compared with more traditional methods of keyword research. I do love building a hefty keyword phrase list, and he does a nice job providing SEOs with a very detailed system for creating a keyword list.
• Tools he mentioned:
  • mergewords.com
  • Ubersuggest will search word combinations to generate ideas from root keywords:
    • Audi a… Audi b… etc.
  • Mozenda is an excellent scrapping tool to grab search volume data for keywords
  • Google Analytics keywords
  • Google keyword tool
  • Google Ad Planner
  • Hitwise
  • PPC
  • SEOmoz tool
  • =xml
• When doing keyword research think about:
  • Product Names
  • Category Names
  • Tag Names
  • Locations
  • Advertisers
  • Keywords customers have already compiled
• Mine competitor keywords as well
  • Crawl the website of your competitor
  • Extract keywords from title tags
  • Play around with left, right, find
• At the 14-minute mark of the video he describes the program he had built — if he does not provide something like that on his website today, perhaps I can have Gilbeys make this.
• In a few hours it pulls down 10,000 keywords.
• He uses an array formula — which means he is telling Excel to look at a column, instead of a single cell
• Example: Brand/Location/Color of car produces a nice, unique keyword phrase
• At the time he was taking beta testers at seogadget.co.uk/beta, so I’m not sure if the tool ever came to fruition, or if it is one of the free ones. I did not see anything for sale.

Research the Linkspace API

Construct categories based on your largest keyword terms.

Fox 21 and Channels 3/6 (known here in Duluth as the Northland’s News Center) interviewed me on some legislation in Congress. Not particularly exciting, but it’s here if you want to watch the stories.

http://www.northlandsnewscenter.com/news/local/Northland-Small-Businesses-Worried-About–137625618.html

http://www.fox21online.com/news/websites-black-out-protest-possible-internet-censorship

Religion isn’t our problem, but empty religion is.

Hypocrisy, empty religious activity, arrogance, etc. are all outgrowths of aherence to religion.

What motivates our actions?
Self interest or love?

True love is the most self-less action we can take.

Relationship will always trump truth!
People will choose a relationship over something they believe.

True love trumps all!

A. Adhereence vs. Affection
We follow rules to maintain control of our lives.

“I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul,” said William Ernest H….”/blockquote>
While in one sense it’s great quote, Christ followers need to turn over that mastery to God, because we can’t really be in control. Only God is.

Mark 12: 30 to 31 – All commands are summed up in the idea of loving your neighbor has yourself.

Philippians 3:7-11
10 “I want to know Christ” is the central idea of Paul’s passage here.

What is your reason behind your boundaries?

Events vs. Experience
Which are you more concerned with?

Showing up at events doesn’t mean you have a good relationship.

John 4:19-24: The story of the woman at the well

24: “Worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”

Are you seeking to experience the truth of God in your inner life?

Achieving vs. Receiving
Achieving is a dead end on the road to God

2 Corinthians 12: 7-10
Three times Paul pleaded with God to take away the thorn in his life.

2 Corinthians 3:5 “Not that we are cmpetant in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but are …”

C. Where Is Your Confidence & Competence Centered?

What is your reason behind your boundaries?

Are you seeking to experience the truth of God in your innner life?

Where is your confidence and competence centered?

]]> http://www.patrickgarmoe.com/anchor-point-church-religion-or-relationship-jan-15-2012/feed/ 0 http://www.patrickgarmoe.com/hello-world/ http://www.patrickgarmoe.com/hello-world/#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 20:53:36 +0000 Patrick Garmoe http://www.patrickgarmoe.com/?p=1 Run To Win?

Sermon notes form Pastor Jeff Sorvik, as written by Patrick Garmoe

Hebrews 11 – (Often considered a Hall of Faith passage)

What race are you running?
Are you running that race to win?

Hebrews 12:1-2 talks about “Thowing off everything that hinders…”

1. Get Rid of It! – A Priority-Based Life
“He is a wise man who wastes no energy ffofn pursuits for which he is not fitted; and he is wiser still who from among the things he can do well, chooses and resolutely follows the best,” said William Gladstone.

2 Timothy 2:4 – No solider gets involved in civilian affairs — he wants to please his commanding officer.

How do my actions demonstrate my passions? What do I need to throw off that is hindering me?

Hebrews 12:1-2 – “…sin that so easily entangles…”

2. Break Free From Sin! – A Clean Conscious Life

Sin makes you want to hide – like Adam and Eve did.
Consider reading : “The Strategy of Satan” by Warren Wiersbe

Unconfessed sin in our lives is a foothold for Satan. Satan uses unconfessed sin as a basis for accusations that prompt people to take themselves out of following Christ.

A. Confess it!
B. Flee temptation
C. Invite accountability

Almost the only time accountability works is invited accountability

, said Sorvik. You have to reach out and ask someone to require you to be accountable.

3. Stay With It! – A Determined Life
Romans 5: 3-5

There are seasons where we grow fatigued adn ask ourselves do we want to go on.

Hebrews 12:1-2 –

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus…

4. Keep your eyes upon it! – A Christ-Focused Life
Hebrews 4:15-16: says Christ was tempted exactly like we are.
He used his perfection to show us what could be on earth and what would be in heaven.

Hebrews: 12:2 -
A. Keep your eyes on the prize – A priority-based life!
B. Endoursed the cross – A Determined Life!
C. ??

John 15

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