Cellphones: Beware of the Red Dot

Many of my cell phones have jumped into the water themselves- I swear! Yah right. Verizon doesn’t believe that one. The censor inside of my cellphone that is typically a white dot (when unharmed) is now bright red. Yes, it is tattling on me to Verizon employees that somehow I abused my phone & gave it water damage. I’ve had my RAZR since December and I was hoping to keep it for at least a year or two. Unfortunately my phone started acting up- I have to change the ringer (vibrate, silent, etc.) through the menu because the side button stopped working. When I took the back off to check out my battery, sure enough, there it was! A bright red dot indicating water damage. The strange thing? I don’t remember ever having any accidents with it! It couldn’t have possibly been a bad one because the phone is completely fine except for that issue. I’d love to take it to Verizon, but why would they believe me that I truly have no memory of giving my phone water damage? Until I can figure out a way to change that red dot back to white, I am stuck with a damaged phone.

This article by Terry Maxon of the Dallas Morning News makes me laugh because it explains a similar situation.

http://www.fox11az.com/sharedcontent/ptech/generalstories2/020406ccdrptechbrokephone.77a61274.html

Website Builder: Any takers?

One of the web site’s that I am currently working on for my SEO internship is a web site builder. I have bought click throughs, I have reworked the meta, I have added it to every free directory, and submitted it to every search engine imaginable. So why are people still not buying a subscription to the site builder? What is the trick I am missing? The site offers a free 10 day trial. We have had plenty of trials, but not many sales lately. I’ve built a web site on it (www.20minuteweb.com by the way!) and it is user friendly and has a ton of great ecommerce options for businesses. And it’s inexpensive. What does City Max, a similar site builder whose sales are great, have on us? The most frustrating thing about SEO is the fact that you can spend months optimizing your site and still barely increase your rankings on search engines. Maybe its my inexperience. My question would be then, what haven’t I learned so far? What are the tricks of the trade? And for those of you that are successful, what advice can you give me?

Pay Per Call

Since I am an intern, I am slowly learning SEO to work on a couple sites that my company owns. I’ve done click-throughs, meta updates, submissions, etc. and I’m still struggling to gain a good ranking on major search engines. My boss clued my in on what he heard was the “new hot thing” in SEO- Pay per call. We decided to give it a try and I created an account on www.ingenio.com. I set up our account and set a bid to have the highest pay per call price out of the listed traditional advertising agencies so that we could get direct telephone calls to our business everytime someone clicks on the link. It’s been about a month now and we still haven’t gotten a single click/phone call. Is this new idea just too new to catch on yet? I would think not considering most major companies are quick to jump into new SEO tools as soon as they’re released. So is this company that I chose just not promoting my ad the way they promised? They were featured in Newsweek and are one of the top companies for pay per call. So what’s the deal with Pay Per Call then?