thinkingWith our latest upgrade it seems our long time LinkWorth customers are having a hard time with the change. We understand because you get used to one way, then it changes and you have to learn the process all over again. Oddly enough, the newer customers seem to think it’s easier. Now this is just based on what we’ve actually heard, so it could vary either way.

I’m not here to say this is right or that is wrong, what I would like to do is reach out to those who have problems and see if we could maybe address common situations that our customers might have problems with. Now do understand that we are still set to launch a second version of our control center by year’s end. This means there are many areas that need to be upgraded, and will be, but we may not get to them right away. We DEFINITELY want to hear from our customers with suggestions that would make your experiences better.

One big addition that we’re working on is tutorials on how to do most common functions. We’ll have written instructions that will go up first, then we’ll be adding video tutorials for those who like watching how things are done.

Please add your comments below and we’ll do our best to add your suggestions. If it is something that we might not get to right away, we’ll let you know, but we’ll do our best to make everyone happy. 🙂

PS. Did I mention GO COWBOYS!!!!! GIANTS WHO?

For those in San Jose attending the SES show, please stop by our booth (#803 and shown in the picture) and say “Hi”. This place is going to be busy busy tomorrow and we’re excited to be a part of it this year.

San Jose is beautiful and the weather is perfect! Cool at night, warm during the days. The way we’d all like to have it.

UPDATE**
Look who our neighbors are!

Today we’re hitting the road on our way to SES San Jose. We have a great group (Enrique, Eric, Juan, Matt & Ron[me]) on the way so if you happen to be attending SES this next week, look for our booth and stop by to say hi.

We have quite a few conference parties to attend and chats with clients, so probably the best time to catch us will be at the booth or after the expo hall closes wherever the crowd tends to migrate.

We hope to see some of you there and be sure to grab one of these really cool shirts we’ll have at the booth!

New website, new customer backend . . . and our poor blog was feeling very left out. It is something we have wanted to do for a while, we just had too many other project taking up our time. I personally hated the last theme being used and after a couple suggestions yesterday to change our blog, I made it my personal Saturday project.

There’s something to say about not reinventing the wheel, but there is nothing wrong with tailoring a proven product to do what fits best. I’ve been looking at blog themes, customizing blog themes and just writing our own theme. The one theme I felt was clean and well built was the old Copyblogger theme which is available for download. One great feature is the ability to use the custom.css for easy changing of the look. I took the theme, made the customizations to fit our overall look, and have it up and running.

We’ll probably make a few more tweaks once our graphics guy gets on it. (He’s real picky!) Ok, it’s time for me to get out.

So far so good with the upgrade. A few small things here and there, but overall things went great.

The control center is back online and you can login to see the new look and all spend $10k each. 🙂 Feel free to post your thoughts here. We’re ready to listen.

Also, if you happen to come across any weird bugs, please send any errors or problems to admin ((at)) linkworth ((dot)) com.

UPDATED:

Thank you to everyone who gave things a spin and were able to give us great feedback. There was a tiny bug that was confusing what account types people had, causing navigation to not function properly, but everything was adjusted and working fine within 45 minutes.

We have some colorful comments below where most love the upgrade, a couple long time customers aren’t up for a change, and mixed bag of other interesting comments. It appears we might have accidentally deleted a group of comments by accident as we’ve had a few people tell us their post was gone. We apologize for that, appears to be a user error (us).

computer messAt 2:00 PM Central Standard Time (-6 GMT), Friday August 16th, we will be performing an upgrade to our control center. The expected downtime will be approximately one hour.

During this downtime, the only part that will not be functional is our control center. All ad feeds will be unaffected, along with the website, blog and forum.

If there are any changes, we will make an announcement as soon as possible.

question markWe haven’t announced much about our 2nd version of LinkInTxt. Obviously for a reason.

Our plan is stellar, but the execution of our plan has been a lot tougher than we expected. We do have the original version up and running so the in-text links are available. We’ll have a lot more time to apply toward the new product at the end of August. We apologize for the unexpected delays, but rest assured we are getting very close!

We are excited to say our long overdue control center upgrade is finally here. As time gets closer, we’ll make an official downtime announcement for the upgrade.

We’ll have two parts of our upgrade and I wanted to throw a bone with an “at a glance” peek of what you might see.

First phase we’re calling NCCv1, will be out this week and here is a quick view:

The second phase which has been labeled Dv2CC, does not have an exact completion date, but we’ll say before 2008. It might look a little like this:

We hope everyone enjoys the new look and simplistic layout!

According to Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, Google is about to release a new algo update to determine who gets to be chief of the top spot in AdWords. It’s always been more of ‘who wants to shell out the most’ type of position, but now they’re supposedly allowing better performing, more targeted ads to get the top spot without having to bid the most.

Regardless of what they may say, it will be silly to think it isn’t going to take big bucks to run in that top spot. I see the whole thing as a ploy to keep people spending their money and trying to be competitive. If you’re competing with 10 other sites that have crazy budgets and your business is a fraction of theirs, outbidding will never happen. This can cause the smaller budget advertisers to get complacent and not try to do better. Tell them they have a chance of being top dawg without paying top dollar and they’ll stay on top of it. Just my opinion, of course.

blue skyThere is no doubt that our industry has plenty of conferences to attend. With so many to choose from now, how do you decide which shows are the right one’s to attend. While there are plenty of others, the most popular are:

Search Engine Strategies – the most well known.
Search Marketing Expo – new, but one of our favorites already.
Pubcon – another popular, mostly because it’s in Vegas.
Affiliate Summit – different crowd, but a great event.
Ad-Tech – geared towards the advertising and corporate crowd.

LinkWorth will be exhibiting for our first time at the SES San Jose in a few weeks. We’re pretty excited about it and glad to take the leap. The who’s who of search will be at the San Jose show and the big fun will be the Google Dance. Here is a good video of a previous SES San Jose show.

Matt and I will be in New York City for the SMX Mobile show, part because the SMX Seattle show was so good, part because it’s NYC and part because we’re ending the week with a bunch of friends coming up for a good weekend. The SMX show has taken conferences to the next level and it definitely caters to those who frequently attend search expos.

The most interesting story of all these conferences is WebmasterWorld Pubcon 2007. Our plans are to have a booth this year but the crew over at Pubcon is really dropping the ball. We’ve made several attempts to make our plans, but I’d have to say their lack of customer support is really beginning to make us feel otherwise. Take Vegas out of the equation and I wonder just how popular this show would be. Bottom line though, it is in Vegas and it is a great time.

Update:
Seems we already signed up to Pubcon! Those guys responded today and said we were the first signed up back in May. Woops. I will change the lack of support to my lack of memory!