evilgreenmonkey

As I write to you from my hotel room in Australia, I can’t help but reflect on how crazy the last few months have been. The week before MJ, Mike, Jane and I flew out for SMX Sydney, our long time friend Tony Spencer came to visit the Ayima office. After a number of chats with the corporate Mikes, Tony agreed to join the Ayima family and launch our new US office. I’ve known Tony since SES San Jose 2006, chatting in-between the dozens of Tequila shots that Ekky plied me with in an effort to recruit me into PartyGaming. It’s a fantastically exciting move for our company and I’m really looking forward to working with him again after our time at PG.

I’m so proud of what Ayima has achieved in such a short time, having some of the UK’s largest companies on our client list after just 2 years in business. It just goes to show what happens when you have a solid strategy and proven results in the toughest of markets. I’m positive that our US operation will be as successful, probably more so, as our UK business.

It was also great to visit Australia for the first time, I’ve met some wonderful people and caught up with old industry friends. Congratulations to Barry, Lisa and Dave for making SMX Sydney a must-attend event in the conference calendar, which rivalled and in many ways outpaced a lot of the major US conferences.

For almost a year, Keyword Spy have been email spamming both my personal email address and Sphinn (on a weekly basis), regurgitating announcements about its launch and features. The name of “Kelly” appears to be a pseudonym, as any emails to her personal email address go unanswered.

If you’re a KeywordSpy customer or are considering using KeywordSpy.com for competitor analysis, please boycott them for attacking the industry which they’re meant to support. You can find a much better product at Spyfu (http://www.spyfu.com/) anyhow, so there’s no excuse for using these muppets.

A loss of client base is the only way they’ll learn – don’t s**t in your own backyard!

Running dozens/hundreds of websites can be an expensive business, hosting alone can cost upwards of $250 a year for each site. SEOs will often look to host each website on a different IP range or in a totally different country. You may want to host country-specific sites in their target country, but not want to have to replicate your CMS or custom platform on every hosting server. A slightly darker reason for spreading your sites across different hosts would be to manage micro-sites that appear independent and use them to point link juice into your website.
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