I’ve known Paul Peic a long time. I took that picture of him above by snapping a shot of my own TV screen using an older model digital camera set to record night shots. Paul was on CBC Dragon’s Den at the time, a groundbreaking venture doc series in which he appeared in 2009 alongside three other entrepreneurs in a clever cell phone contract crowd-sourced program engineered to lower rates called MyCellMyTerms, which was years ahead of its time, but ultimately failed to make any money.

Today Paul runs Paddleboard Addict, a stand-up paddleboarding school in Toronto from his floating house in the Brimley Marina on the east lake shore.

Paul is a serial entrepreneur with a hard body and a big heart. He made quite a name for himself in the early 2000 as home renovations and house flipping TV star for a couple of different DIY television shows.  He discovered Stand Up Paddleboarding a few years ago and soon became hooked on the sport’s potential for exercise and fitness training.

SUP is Standup Paddleboarding

Stand Up Paddleboarding (SUP) is the fastest growing water sport in the world.  Paul designed his school’s program to teach anyone, even total amateurs and people without any athletic ability how to safely paddle in one of the most beautiful and serene areas in the Greater Toronto Area.

Paddleboard Addict offers beginner, group and private lessons. They will even come travel to your home or cottage to teach you and your friends. All equipment is provided in their lessons including SUP board, paddle, life jacket and leash.

Don’t miss out on the special Night SUP – with lights on the bottom of boards.

Paddleboard addict is especially effective school in flat water – the calmer the water the easier it is to learn the delicate art of paddle boarding . Other schools on Lake Ontario teach in choppy water (waves).  Toronto has some of the best beaches in the world, which is verified by the Blue Flag Program. This internationally recognized program awards blue flags to communities committed to maintaining high standards for water quality.

SUP Yoga

is art on water. Claire Matthews teaches Yoga for kids just outside Toronto in southern Ontario.

When I last visited my parent’s farm, they insisted I remove a stack of glass jars that I’d been warehousing in their garage. Four years earlier, I had purchased 40 cases of 8oz glass jars for packing honey, only to discover they are the wrong size.  The eight ounce jar is perfect for olives, pickles, sun dried tomatoes and hot peppers, but not pure Canadian honey. Little did I know when I bought them, this odd size is actually illegal for food producers to use (in Canada) because its not on the list of approved sizes. There are six different sizes for producers to use. This is because consumers get confused and cannot shop for honey in all different size jars with different volumes and prices. So anyone selling honey in Canada has to do so in one of six different sizes, and this 8oz size isn’t one of them.

So each summer harvest, for the last four years, I have filled about six dozen jars for my own use and to give away as memorable gifts to friends.

But last weekend I agreed to get the remaining stack out of the garage. I reluctantly packed up the last twenty eight boxes into my car and along with a big bag of gold coloured metal lids, i brought them back to the city. Here I immediately placed a Craigslist ad for $50 in the GENERAL category for sale by owner.

There were no takers.

So green living blog suggested that I place the same ad in Freecycle.org and give away the specimens to a worthy cause. It was good advice.

I put the ad in the Cabbagetown group, at approx 8am on Saturday April 20 2013, and by noon I had six responses.

Five of them offered to come to my abode within the hour to get the jars.

But I chose instead to give them to Vicky who lives nearby, and is administrator of the Bleecker Wellesley Activity Network in Toronto. I delivered the jars later that day, all because of this email she wrote in response to my ‘what are you going to do with them?’ question:

Vicky wrote,

...If you look on Bleecker Wellesley Activity Network website there is a link for a couple of our videos.We focus a lot on breaking isolation and food and food safety.  We will be starting to teach about preparing foods for ourselves and pickling/canning, that sort of thing.  The jars would have been great for this kind of thing and for safe food storage as well.  (since all our members live in social housing they tend to have pest control issues regardless of how hard they try not to and glass is always a great way to keep things safe, clean and dry.)  We have a monthly free fresh produce program that gives each member that wants/needs it, a free week’s worth of fresh produce at the end of the month.  Well.. near the end of the month, it will be next Thursday    This helps them get over the hump of the end of their old age or o.d.s.p. or welfare cheques.  We service anyone in our low income TCHC buildings that are 55 or older, senior or disabled.  
We are also in the middle of doing a recipe project.  Recipes for 1 or 2 and diabetic recipes.  This booklet should be finished by mid-month next month for everyone who is participating in this project.  I have the recipes all ready, just need to get it printed.  It’s already funded as well

Vicky is quite a talker and the website she mentioned does indeed have some videos, but also a rather sad story in ABOUT US section detailing how the City of Toronto, in the aftermath of a fire, hired contractors who colluded with a private security company to rob them blind.  But I’m talking out of school now. Go to the Bleecker Wellesley Activity Network website and read the story for yourself in the About Us section.

Here is the donation in its entirety. No wonder my folks wanted it moved – it does occupy quite a bit of space!

Do you think I just left her there?

I feel sorry for Tish Harkus, Manager at Canadian Club Whisky for it’s obvious she has a real passion for this beverage, and a powerful gift for communicating the essence of the Canadian Club experience, but sadly, even her professionalism and compelling stage presence couldn’t cut through the lunacy of the Apr 18 tasting event.

On April 18th 2013 Praxis PR invited me to join the Canadian Club Chairman and share his Whisky Whisdoms at the inaugural #CanadianClub national meeting in the Great Hall at Hart House.

It was a boondoggle.

Honestly, I would like to report nice things, and ‘give back’ to the PR community, but it was like this gathering was organized by people who had never thrown a party before.  There were so many rookie mistakes.

The huge Twitter wall was impressive, and I liked the Prezi style presentation. Congrats @TheDanLevy who won a nice prize for composing a clever tweet.

The tasting tables were given no additional lighting, so i couldn’t read any of the literature provided, or even see the ‘tear drops’ after swirling the whisky in my glass, as Tish instructed.

It was really hot in the Great Hall that evening – because the heaters were on behind us! They were going full blast and everyone was sweating buckets.

Here is myself Rob Campbell and my pal Cory at the tasting. Cory collects whisky and really enjoyed the spirit of the show.

Tish had to hold her mic directly in front of her mouth and speak loudly to be heard, and everyone at the tasting had to really listen to pick out her words against the DJ’s music, which was far too loud and acoustically perverse in that huge auditorium.  I heard Tish tell an organizer that if she had to talk over the music all night she would be gargling with CC before the end… Her throat is sore today I’m sure, because the music volume didn’t change.

The Chairman was terrific. He was the high point of the night.

Look how the photographer in the burgundy shirt stands directly in front of the projector and completely eclipses the slideshow during the Chairman’s speech. Its comedy.

There were four bartenders at this event – each specialty drink order takes about two minutes to complete. There were over two hundred guests. Do the math.  Both bars were positioned directly across from each other which resulted in a room-dividing log jam, and mass line-up confusion that was never remedied.

Behind this crowd, outside in the hallway, there was a food vendor serving hot meat sandwiches and doing cooking demos while fifty people lined up to wait for his wares. The smokey scent of congealed beef was not ventilated, and so it lingered above the crowd for everyone to inhale. And it was a thoroughly revolting smell.

Above is Sean from Korries clothiers in Toronto on Danforth Ave.

Here’s a bacon ceasar, beside a maple flavoured Manhattan.

The gift bag was probably the most generous collection of items I have ever seen or received free at an event. It included a high quality shaving kit, two fashion magazines, metal CC cufflinks, two ounces of whisky in tiny plastic bottles, real glassware and a flash drive emblazoned with the Canadian Club name and logo. There was however no literature about the CC brand, or any printed takeaways from April 18th tasting event in the bag, which was odd because there was lots of printed material at the event. None of the printed material from the occasion made it into the gift bags to help people like me compose tweets or blogs afterwards.

When I tried to access the flash drive that was provided, this is what I saw, and subsequently couldn’t open or make any use of on my PC.  Is that what’s supposed to happen?  Perfect.

A further UPDATE

To their great credit Praxis PR sent me a note alongside the Canadian Club support literature that should have appeared on my thumb drive, and a complimentary gift after reading this post, and I am humbled by their great generosity.

This is VERY convincing. And even more convincing is this slide show of crowdsourced images. I am very curious to see if the mainstream media will have anything to say about this in the days to come? Which station will dare to suggest that maybe perhaps this was orchestrated by factions within the US government?

Last week I accepted a role in the marketing dept of a tech company called Transparent Inc. They’re located in the King Dufferin corridor, and like so many other companies down there its hard to tell exactly what they do for a living.  I’ve been here a week and still don’t know. This firm is part of another enterprise called LAUNCH!, an experiential advertising agency.

I have new responsibilities, input into the design of some really interesting things being built, and a clean window overlooking the shifting digital landscape in Canada;  the company chair gives me a fresh perspective and a lofty perch from which to study the art and science of web marketing in the early 21st century.

I’m the Content Manager at Transparent

I came up with the title ‘Content Manager’ myself.  They wanted to label me the Social Media Manager but I rejected that nomenclature on the grounds that its a rookie handle, horribly cliche, and not accurate in describing my storytelling tactics.  I’m more of a content marketer.  A meme weaver  I use Facebook and Twitter to amplify the social signals in my drama for better SEO linkbuilding.

On Twitter, I will grow @Transparent_Inc and on Facebook and manage other services, dress backgrounds and pimp sidebars with widgets and cross-promote profiles to make a social media horn-of-plenty, but its not really what I do.

In this case it’s important to remember that Transparent has velvet gloves and handles its scions with no obvious traces – its transparent -  and leaves no marks on the fledgling enterprises it spawns and grows.  A dispassionate tone of voice is sometimes necessary to be perceived as sophisticated, intelligent and useful.

I will try to offer readers rare glimpses of life inside the firm.

Here’s a sneak peek inside a conference call meeting with developers where the Alpha Team has gathered to discuss their latest project. The guy in the far corner is John Kent who specializes in making wire frames and system architecture.

CEO Mike Smith blazes a trail in erasable red marker on the wall for developers, coders and myself, a content creator to follow along behind and fill in the blanks.

Andrew Dick ponders the development schedule and keeps track of all the moving pieces as deadlines approach.

Andrew shows Steve critical pieces of infrastructure that need to be tested in advance before being implemented into the code.

My first task?  I thought I would start by making the company’s dog app more findable. This is cute little piece of business.
Doggy Datez is a location-based mobile platform that makes it easy to find new dog walker friends and have more fun while exercising your canine. By using the app and “marking your territory”, you’re taking ownership of an area which is about a 200 meter square space in the real world, wherein you can see who else visits your spot. The app has all sorts of data to select good companions for ‘datez’.

Just a few years ago I used to call people on the phone and ask if we could walk our dogs together, and now that seems ineffective and socially awkward or even gauche.

This handy application is cool and is getting rave reviews from real people in the real world with dogs that need walking.  Gadget tech authors and podcasters have been kind too, including Mashable who listed Doggy Datez #2 on their top ten list of ‘must have ‘ dog apps!

Impressive. Now its my job to tell that story.

Read what I wrote about this dog app on Son of a Beekeeper.

On Saturday Feb 23rd 2013 I was at Podcamp Toronto. The first familiar face that greeted me as I walked in the door at 9:30am was Karim Kanji co-founder of Third Ocean. “Rob Campbell” Karim announced as he shook my hand. “You showed up early, and you wore a suit!” he said, suddenly suspicious of me.  Karim was helping organize Podcamp Toronto 2013 because, like a moth to a flame, he must love the excitement of being an inside man at these things. Taking it all in over two days you can sort the facts out later – identifying new and old trends and most exciting, using new information to conceive new possibilities.  Yes I felt a little overdressed right at that moment, but you know, as the day went on I came to believe again that you can’t dress up too much for public events, esp when you’re presenting, and speaking to a crowd of strangers, making first impression.
I snapped this shot of the 2013 volunteers wearing the blue shirts. They’re hard to get.  Blue is this year’s colour and these shirts might be valuable as collectibles in years to come due to their relative scarcity in the year they were issued.

Orientation was uneventful as it was essentially a pep rally, with no real information passed. Rogers was giving away some phones in a random draw which meant you had to give them all your information and sign a contract – no there was no contract.  But the opening spheel was little more than an opportunity for the organizers to introduce themselves and the idea that Podcamp Toronto 2013 is an unconference. That means the ‘law of two feet’ applies which means if you have two feet, you can use them to escape from any session without raising any eyebrows or upsetting anyone – in theory.

Prior to the opening orientation, I sat down beside a guy who turned out to be David Campbell proprietor of Disco Social which is a Facebook and Twitter media management company that listens and speaks, creates content and studies analytical data on their clients’ behalf.  David is the kind of guy you take to liking immediately, as soon as you meet him; he’s smart and a good listener who’s good at getting other people talking.

Here we are sitting together in Mark Farmer’s session, Measure or Get The F#&@ Out! which was by all accounts the most informative workshop on the subject of measuring social media using Radian6 and Sysomos, Hootsuite and Social Mention. The session audience was full of veterans including Sheldon Levine, @40Deuce the community manager for Sysomos who was standing along the back wall, keeping Mark honest in his accounting of company products and attributions, but more on that later * another blog post

The highlights of my day were five sessions where I was listening and learning other people’s thoughts and ideas; this is such a generous knowledge sharing occasion inside what I believe to be a Golden Age of sharing.

Laurie Dillon Schalk’s Podcamp 2013 Session on Storytelling

I had the good fortune to find and get a good seat in Laure Dillon Schalk’s session on Storytelling with Randy Matheson, Andrew Jenkins, Hessie Jones and Mark Evans at 11am in a mercifully large classroom where there was plenty of seats – but soon everyone was full and there were people watching from along the walls because these heavy hitters have lots of experience and Laurie is a skilled moderator who is more than capable of getting it out them.

I want to include this video as it shows the full house and gives a little taste of what was being discussed and you can see how genuinely attentive the audience is and how focused they are on the panel – this is a moment in time inside the symposium of Podcamp Toronto 2013.

Hessie Jones really impressed me with her account of the same session written on the Ze Art of Storytelling on ArCompany blog,

Randy Matheson also gave a list of Links mentioned at Podcamp 2013 Art of Storytelling which is really helpful for anyone shopping for new storytelling tools. I have discovered a new obsession there: cowbird.  What a wonderful little gem, and I’m experimenting with some other discoveries to see about the quality of incoming links for SEO purposes. I may publish my findings here later.

Star Trek Was A Cool Show

One of the highlights of the day for me was John Leschinski and Keith McNally’s panel entitled Star Trek was a Cool Show. This was a great escape from the cliche techno babble and a voyage into th extreme Star Trek fan-dome. It is refreshing to find a group of people that like something without apologies.

It was also amusing to see the people who didn’t know anything about these guys get up and leave the session in the first ten minutes , right around the time Keith asked John is he sleeps in his Start Trek uniforms, and John replied that he doesnt wear any pajamas. Thats when anyone who wasn’t down with program headed for the door. But this gathering did produce some more enlightened conversation than that, and behold there is an audio recording here,

http://www.keithcourage.com/vinylcountdown/2013/03/star-trek-was-a-cool-show/

The five funny guys are podcasting veterans, and they know how to keep the conversation entertaining and the laughs rolling in.. when I chime in halfway through the recording you can hear them mocking me, in my suit and taking notes. Craig pretends he’s me writing a critique and says aloud, ‘Hmmm not the best Star Trek panel I have ever seen.’

Later in the day, I attended and gave a comprehensive account of the marketing secrets passed along by Julia Hidy relating The Art of the Press Release at 4pm on Saturday.

Rob Campbell discussed the Secrets to SEO Marketing

At 3pm in room RSS 162 I took the floor and treated everyone in the room to a rambling account of my own daily deeds making content media for both buzz marking and SEO.

Secrets of Content Marketing for SEO at Podcamp Toronto 2013

Questions Answered:
How can I write mathematically stronger media?
The new article marketing – what works. What doesnt work anymore?
Where to go to publish your work?
What to do AFTER you publish your piece?

Yes I discussed how to engineer stories that attract and satisfy both humans and robots, and how it’s so important to promote your media in a particular way by fragmenting the stories over many platforms. I showed the hard proof of ROI – page one rankings – and demonstrated how you I try and lure readers from one place to next and how I watch with satisfaction as they have powerful branding experiences, putting the story together in their own heads, one link at a time.

Posted in: Actually sharing secrets, article marketing, business storytelling, Friends of Smojoe, Personal Blog, Search Engine Marketing, Smojoe Events, Web Resource

Here’s Winnipeg’s 2012 Winner, Robyn Thompson with a cheque symbolizing her full ride scholarship awarded last year.  The Aveda Institute blogger did a good job just recently summarizing her last year in Catching Up With Winnipeg’s #BornToStyle 2012 Winner, Robyn Thompson.

Are you Born to Style? Prove it.

2013 Born to Style Hair School Scholarship Contest  is now accepting submissions from Canada’s next top hair stylists. If you, or someone you know wants to jump start an exciting career as a professional hair and beauty stylist, then this is your best opportunity!

There are four full scholarships available – one for each of the AVEDA Institutes in Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver.

Devin is a recent graduate of the Aveda Institute and now a professional stylist at Canada’s busiest and most beautiful hair salon, Civello on Queen Street West in Toronto.

STEP 1: MAKE A VIDEO (2 MIN OR LESS)
Create a video to show the world your talent, and how you were born to style; the video should make obvious your passion and determination to develop your skills.

STEP 2: UPLOAD & SHARE
Click on Enter Contest to upload your video. Share your Aveda Institute entry page with your network of family, friends, fans and followers. Get them to vote for your video. The entry with the most votes is automatically reserved a spot in their city or region’s Hair Showdown.

STEP 3: HAIR SHOWDOWN
Three or more real life hair and beauty professionals will select four aspiring hairstylists in each city, as well one spot will be slotted for people’s choice to advance to the final round. These future hairdressers will participate in a live head-to-head competition and runway show putting together two complete looks in front of a panel of style experts and hairstyling heavy hitters. The winner in each city will be awarded a full scholarship to the Aveda Institute hair school!

Start your hairstyling career with Aveda today! Download Contest Info Package.

Want to look at last year’s videos for inspiration?

Last Year’s Hair Showdown in Toronto was Thrilling to Watch

Jen McNeely of She Does The City was one of the three judges, seen above beside Ray Civello in the center. She summarized the evening in her article, Born To Style at Aveda Institute had young aspiring hairdressers compete for a $10,000 scholarship. which I linked to in my own article on 2012 AVEDA Institute Hair School Scholarship Showdown on Delectably Chic.



I borrowed this last picture from Wedding Girl’s post about the 2012 Born To Style Hair Showdown in Toronto which has two pictures of me in my favourite green shirt.

Check out Aveda Institute Toronto  on Facebook, and follow on Twitter @AVEDA416

TheTickleTrunk.com website is well stocked to sell Onyx’s signature air tight food containers, lunch containers, steel popsicle molds and ice cube trays direct to the public. Starting Jan 1st 2013, Rob’s primary goal is to increase traffic and sales at this brand new property. Smojoe will do this through high quality rich media content marketing, advanced SEO ‘business storytelling’ or … Meme Weaving.

Carolyn Cameron, the CEO of Onyx Containers trusts Rob to help grow the retail arm of their expanding business by making the products more findable in web searches and image searches. Since the site launched in July 2012, traffic to The Tickle Trunk has been less than 2000 visits per month, and total sales for the year is less than $11,000. There is no existing Google AdWords program, or any coupon strategy, or any other form of marketing in place at this time.

Campbell operates under the assumption that people with stainless steel appliances in their kitchens, especially fridges and freezers, are the most likely customers for Onyx Containers. These folks would use the web to get specific and buy these items to satisfy their desire to acquire matching stainless steel kitchenware. Air tight glass food containers, popsicle molds and ice cube trays are also popular search terms, see below*

Online shoppers start the process by typing key terms into search engines, then they choose either organic or sponsored results; the four or five images that appear in Google will also be key drivers in each shopper’s exploration of pg1 results, as they seek the merchandise available for purchase.

As a primary relevance builder, Smojoe will flood this marketplace with images of Onyx Containers and mix them into compelling stories told on multiple platforms with pictures and User Generated Media (UGM) challenges. This activity will yield permanent results: a busy spider web of incoming links back to The Tickle Trunk estore. The human-activated network links the brand with important people and places online. Google will calculate these connections and come to attribute more importance to The Tickle Trunk estore, and rank the site higher in search results.

Here’s how it’s done,

Smojoe Content Marketing Process for The Tickle Trunk

Identify SEO Keyword Targets

Do keyword research to find the biggest search terms (using WordTracker or Google AdWords keyword selector tool) until you can easily identify four primary keyword targets. Match these terms with four most important sections of your store. SUMMARY Do keyword research to find the biggest drivers , then assign them specific page targets.

For example here is the data regarding the frequency of searches done for ‘lunch containers’

The boxes that have been checked are good targets for The Tickle Trunk ‘lunch containers’ estore pages. Let us teach Google that this URL http://www.thetickletrunk.com/7-lunch-containers should be associated with the word ‘lunch containers’ by making this destination relevant under those words in all of our soon-to-be-told socially magnificent stories.

Popsicle molds

http://www.thetickletrunk.com/8-ice-pop-molds

Ice Cube Trays

http://www.thetickletrunk.com/15-ice-cube-tray

Airtight as modifier for ‘glass food containers’, and ‘stainless steel food containers’

http://www.thetickletrunk.com/17-airtight-glass-stainless-steel-containers

ON-Page SEO

The Tickle Trunk webmaster should work to make these target pages into the very best destinations for the keywords I have attributed to each page. As it stands today, the pages are SEO friendly and properly titled, however they are styled ‘minimalist’ as per the design template which was modeled on the clean white appearance of Brookfarms General Store. Smojoe advocates for more text on each page. We’d like to see more prominent SHARE buttons and paragraphs of helpful text and supporting images added below the sales windows. A helpful video and contextual transcription explaining how the vessels are made, or how they should be used, would be a big shot in the arm to overall website SEO values, as it would help convince Google cache bots that these eCommerce pages are among the world’s best destinations for their attribute keywords.

OFF – Page SEO or Link Building

General Content Marketing Strategy

Meme Weaving – Smojoe likes to make marketing capital that lasts forever, and the page of stuff should serve humanity as valuable resource for something important. Its very satisfying to sit back and watch discussions live out a life of their own, and hopefully they make brand awareness in knowledge filled posts, or perhaps a list or user submitted recipes, or sketches, or a gallery of useful pictures etc. Its a great thing to retire from a campaign and watch it grow larger and more pervasive and more important as they age into the very fabric of the web – this is how we make ‘marketing capital’ or in a word, relevance.

A good internet meme directly involving links to your client’s estore is a great way to make passive marketing capital that will, over time, make client goods and services more findable because they are more relevant to more searches for more things.

Spending time creating compelling articles, blogs and discussion forum posts is the secret to a successful, long tail media campaign.

for example… How To Make Beer Cubes

Build Resources – HTML ‘Hot Script’ Building Blocks

Before making a spider web of compelling stories, Smojoe, the spider, must brew up a batch of silk for the threads, and these include rich media text bytes, images, logos and links.

Rob Campbell will bookmark client pages in every possible program including but not limited to Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and especially http://Zoomit.ca

Rob will make pictures in paint shop and publish these graphics and logos along with helpful descriptions on Flickr, Fotki, WebShots, Xanga, Zomba, Picable, Picasso and Photobucket.

Rob will use Facebook and Twitter to supercharge the media and keep friends and stakeholders updated on story developments, contest winners, race schedules and remarkable uploads.

Eventually… while making supporting media … its finally time to get creative.

How to tell stories on multiple platforms? Solicit User Generated Media in four consecutive Lenzr photo contests. Each contest should target a different keyword.

1) Four Lenzr Photo Contests in 2013, One For Each Keyword Target

Two photo contests will start the ball rolling.

Child’s Art, Lunch is a photo contest on Lenzr launched January 2013 that seeks handmade pictures of the noonday meal from child artists.

Starting Jan 1st 2013, and running for three months until April 1st, Child’s Art, Lunch is a new Lenzr photo contest that will build awareness and fifty powerful incoming links to the lunch containers page of The Tickle Trunk.

This intriguing contest was created to capture the imagination of parents and children who could come together and help create a repository of children’s art, sketches of kids meals. But unlike traditional media campaigns the success of this social media attraction doesn’t depend on human participation. Success here is measured in links not pictures and its more important how far and wide, and how passionately the marketing team can spread the word of this challenge in articles, blogs and discussion forums. Our telling of the story is more important than the story itself and 3rd party user participation makes the links we create back to The Tickle Trunk even stronger. See here, this post about Child’s Art, Lunch contest on Red Flag Deals, a popular coupon discussion forum. The replies help reinforce the importance of the

Also in January 2013, Smojoe launches Full Onyx Containers which is a second Lenzr photo contest to collect images of airtight glass containers and airtight steel containers full of food.

This match will encourage the public to submit pictures full of fresh fruit and vegetables, nuts berries, salad greens, coffee beans, dried meats and cheese, etc all manner of foodstuffs that one might store in a vacuum sealed jar. Indeed the containers do not need to be filled with food, but they must be Onyx Containers – the pictures will be ported over to a special page on The Tickle Trunk website blog.

All submitted images should be worthy of display on the The Tickle Trunk website – blog – the RSS feed from the Lenzr photo contest page is being imported to this page on the blog and all submitted images are being displayed as thumbs

And Airtight glass containers, airtight stainless steel containers will make a gallery of images and become a helpful visual reference tool for all humanity.

Starting in April there will be another contest entitled Popsicle Recipes, followed by Late Summer Drinks to support keyword claims on and Popsicle molds and Ice Cube Trays respectively.

2.) Sponsor Foodie Badge in 2013 Miss Teen Canada Blog Network

The 2013 Miss Teen Canada Blog Network regional delegates are graded on their ability to maintain their regional blogs and write about their campaign for the crown, and support for charities and fundraising events they may attend as regional titleholders. Starting in May 1st 2013, all seventy delegates will be challenged to write different style posts to get different niche badges and be eligible to win prizes awarded by sponsors at the end of the year.

For example there will be a Fashion Diva badge, and a Beauty Blogger badge, etc and so bloggers will have to write a fashion blog piece, and review a cosmetic product to get these other badges. A kind woman named Christi Woolard is the admin and will award the digital monikers; she also coaches the girls on how-to-blog on WordPress and sends along a blog bible full of tips, pictures and helpful instructions.

Foodie Blog Badge will be awarded to posts about food as served by parents or proprietors of a local restaurant. These content pieces always have lots of pictures of tasty food and sometimes include recipes and menu tips. Food bloggers write restaurant reviews and make suggestions regarding food parings with drinks and desserts. Most foodies focus on a single meal per post. If that meal was consumed in a new restaurant then the story usually starts outside the venue with a wide shot of the facility to establish the setting. Both journalists and TV directors are taught to start wide and then go in for close-ups. They take pictures of the restaurant or the chef in the kitchen (if they dare), and then go close on the dish and describe the meal and how it tasted and afterwards mention beverages and necessary condiments. Foodie blogs find a wide readership because everyone loves / has to eat food.

All seventy girls will write Foodie posts to get a badge sponsored by Onyx glass stainless steel food containers available for purchase at The Tickle Trunk. The program concludes in October 2013 when the sponsor picks the best posts and six large prizes are awarded, and twenty four small items are dispensed to the winning bloggers, all across Canada.

3. Sponsor 2013 Toronto Zombie Race, Donate Prizes For Links

The 2013 Toronto Zombie Race is a thrilling romp through the wilderness around the decrypt Richard L Hearn Generating Station on Unwin Rd in the Toronto port lands. Its a 5km trek through a post apocalyptic obstacle course filled with live zombies!

The course features seven unique obstacles in between three large scavenger hunt areas. There are prizes given to both runners and zombies – Onyx Containers make great prizes. Links to The Tickle Trunk will be present in all storytelling done around this summer attraction in the City of Toronto and we predict that this will yield a bounty of great references and direct visitors to the estore.

Runners start the race with three lives each – three red ribbons are tied about their midsection. Runners hope to survive the course with as many lives as possible, which they will exchange for prize tickets. Zombies however can grab their lives and then they get the prize tickets and when the numbers are called out at 5pm on Race Day, it will probably be the zombies who get most of the sponsor’s merchandise. All threads on these running discussion forums will be updated with pictures of zombies winning Popsicle molds.

Regardless of who wins the prizes, when photographers snap pictures of zombies winning Onyx Containers stainless steel popsicle molds it will result in lots of sharing. The event will impact 12,000 health and fitness buffs at a minimum , horror movie aficionados and Toronto scene makers can also be affected here. Reputable bloggers will be issued free tickets to attend the race.

More information pending

4. Comb the Stories Out Across Friend Networks

Throughout 2013 great stories will emerge from the above listed Tickle Trunk sponsored attractions. These tales are to be further spread around the web as friends are encouraged to develop and publish articles, blogs and discussion forum posts directly related to the sponsored media. Niche bloggers will chime in about the Lenzr photo contests, or the 2013 Miss Teen Canada Blog Network Foodie Badge, or the 2013 Toronto Zombie Race. They have lots of different angles and different stories from which to choose a pretext to offer a link to The Tickle Trunk (which we reward with discount product codes).

Mom bloggers are encouraged to write about the Child’s Art, Lunch image contest on Lenzr, while runners or health and fitness bloggers are encouraged to tell their readers about the upcoming Toronto Zombie Race and the available Onyx Containers prizes including stainless steel popsicle molds and ice cube trays. All bloggers are rewarded with discount product codes they can use to get 1/2 price merchandise at The Tickle Trunk in exchange for their cooperation. Their blog posts are added to all related Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and promoted in bookmark programs.

Summary of Smojoe Strategic Content Marketing Plan for The Tickle Trunk

In total, the combined media maelstrom should directly impact over 250000 Canadians, but more importantly it will vault The Tickle Trunk to the top of Google Search results for four primary keyword targets. The Tickle Trunk should enjoy a gigantic 300% increase in traffic and sales before January 2014.

Post by Robert Campbell on Jan 21, 2013

Look here at my old author profiles!
http://www.ignitepoint.com/library/profile.cfm?writerid=33502  (used to be IdeaMarketers)
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Rob_Campbell
I also used to employ Amazines.com, FreePressReleases.com, HelloArticles, FastPitch… I’m trying to remember more.

But all this is just garbage now. I hope you are not using these sites?! Myself, I wouldn’t waste precious original content by publishing it in these mud puddles… nor any site that has the word ‘article’ as prefix or suffix i.e. ArticleSpinner or GoArticles or HelloArticles etc   As you can see,  I no longer upload content to those sites.  They are bastions of ‘useless’ text that nobody reads except robots.  No actual humans navigate to an article directory or a replication service to gather up information about something they are researching or something they are interested in…  The only real people to drop by are other article marketers who are posting their verbage for robots.

If you are still submitting articles to ezinearticles.com in 2013, you are wasting your time, and ideas.

I have evolved a new recipe for article marketing by empirically testing websites and content and looking for positive results. My process is to constantly seek out new places to publish… I tried Xomba, Bukissa, Squidoo, HubPages, Scribed and well none of these work very well actually, but there are some great places if you keep looking.  Tips  1) watch Google analytics to see which articles return the most direct traffic, and 2) type article title into search engines to see how long it takes before the piece is on page one.  The mark of a good web magazine is how prominently your content shows up in search results regardless of how good your content is, and how many links it has.

Now I put the article at the top of the process, and then surround it with derivative media. I always use original photographs, and if the website to which I’m submitting rejects the piece because of the pictures, then I reject the magazine (ezinearticles). Pictures are the secret of secrets for Smojoe SEO, and separately hosted and individually optimized images do, in my opinion, add to the findability and value of the overall content submission.

Back in 2006, it was considered good practice to try and get as many replications as possible. Those days are over  – the Google duplicate content filter insures that only original ideas are displayed in search results.   Today I only publish original content, and I earn more links by rewriting the content in one niche perspective or another.  I make story funnels by drawing out the idea in the article over a series of blogs and discussion forums.  I use about a half dozen new article networks now; here are some. My process is to ‘spider-web’ links all around and in between the content and client website.

http://arob.knoji.com/
http://www.triond.com/users/Roberrific
http://www.digitaljournal.com/user/510099/news
http://contributor.yahoo.com/user/82532/roberrific.html

And I always keep my eye out for magazines that accept reader submitted content and magazines that could be persuaded to publish out-going links to my clients. I have a variety of these sites in my database, and I do believe the mark of a high quality advertising firm or PR agency is their ability to get brand content published exclusively on niche magazine websites.  The best portals are the web magazines where you have to call or email the editor directly to beg / bribe her to publish the piece.  The best publishers get lots of readers because they are sincerely interested in ‘using’ the content. Here is some of my later work using Lenzr photo contests for SEO storytelling,

Business Storytelling Using Lenzr Photo Contests
http://www.zimbio.com/Photo+Contest/articles/OsmsGgLvyys/Business+Storytelling+Lenzr+Photo+Contests

But how do these services collect the rich data they need to make useful results? The data they purvey, the source of the information and its deliverance is the primary distinction we can use to judge these local search providers; deep down inside these small competitors, they have to believe they can create an information delivery system that surpasses Google’s own local search abilities.  As in most business niches, Google is the market leader in connecting Canadians with their dentists, but that hasn’t stopped half a dozen competitors from trying to do it better… and some do actually   This fascinating topic is something I barely explored as I glossed over the surface details of five competing websites.

I wrote about Dental Referral, Smile Canada, DentistFind.com, the ODA and their website, YourOralHealth.ca and Canpages which I included more or less as a control, and because once I wrote about them negatively here on Smojoe in retaliation for Yellow Pages delivery tactics and so having been showing kindness toward them now to reward their evolving business model.

Find Me a Dentist

The content piece entitled Find me a dentist is an article by Robert Campbell that explores the notion that a local consumer’s quest to find a nearby dentist is the true ‘bleeding edge’ in local search and the metric by which an effective service can be judged.  I got the idea to do this article for Dr Archer earlier in the year when I was doing keyword research for her, and I discovered the unusual search term ‘find me a dentist’ which as you can see below is a weird anomaly in the dental niche search category that gets a lot of monthly traffic.

I believe these big search numbers are generated by three different factors; 1) automated cues – a mobile search website or some 3rd party system cue enters ‘find’ ‘me’ ‘dentist’, and then uses Google’s data feed to populate their service.  2) Naive users who treat search engines like magic genies and enter requests the same way they’d talk to servants. And 3) an amalgamation of similar queries that have results data ‘bundled’ together- note how all three different clauses have same search numbers.

Whatever the case, I reasoned that I could write and publish a great article with that title, on this subject, and then promote the content to a top ten ranking in the search engines for that title simply because the article I handcrafted is so wonderfully informative, and so well linked to so many related, reputable domains.  You see I can discuss the piece all over the web, for one reason or another. Here is an article on how finding a dentist is at the heart of local search on Fuel Ghoul which celebrates all manner of web innovation that reduces hydrocarbons (our environment would be spared by letting people select dental practitioners closer to home).  I can make the piece relevant on food forums, tech forums, red flag deals type of websites, and I can write about the piece here on my own personal blog where you can bookmark it, comment and tweet the URL out to your #SEO friends.

Article by Robert Campbell on Google+