Here is the Riddle - fill in the ( ):
A (first type of business, product or service) and a (second type of business, product or service) want you to link to their websites, unless you are a (the one thing they could have in common) salesman, I'm willing to bet they don't belong on your website.

I am looking for the best examples of two completely unrelated businesses and one thing they could have in common.  You can use play on words, or the same word with two different meanings for what they might have in common.  Keep it fairly clean please.  You don't need to know anything about SEO to participate!

What You Win:

1. Bragging Rights
2. Your business or website profiled in our newsletter and social media
3. $20.00 OFF any service with MC Design & Services, LLC!

See below an example from my article "A Message From Google You Don't Want to Get". 

This morning school delays ticked along the bottom of my TV screen.  And as usual my kid's suburban school district, as well as, the main urban city school district where I live were NOT delayed due to the densest fog I have seen to date.  As far as my kid's safety it makes little difference as their school is literally out our back gate.  But, every other morning I drive my son to the farthest corner of our school district for pre-school.  It has been during this school year that I have noticed a pattern.

I traveled to Colombia this summer and walked through the most poverty stricken neighborhoods, where families fleeing the jungles and rebel organizations like FARC, came to the big cities and constructed make shift homes.  In my own experience after meeting the beautiful people struggling to make their lives better in another country, I now see it everywhere around me. "There is nothing new under the sun", I suspect most things you can travel to see or experience are right in your own back yard.  As such, it came to my attention this winter that "in my own back yard" the two school districts that would be most likely to have children walking to school on busy streets and whose care-givers were more likely not to have other means to get them to school, were the two school districts who never cancel school.

While driving my pre-schooler to school I have seen little children walking through blizzard conditions to school.  Around my kid's school you have to live pretty far to even ride the bus.  These children don't always even have enough on to keep them warm.  This morning I saw kids ready to cross busy intersections, with the fog; a driver could easily not see them while turning the corner.

While safety is for sure a concern on these days; the main issue for me is, what is the message we are sending to these children?  We hear a lot about self-fulfilling prophesies with regards to the under-privileged.  But where do those "prophesies" come from?  Could it be that an insidious thought is being planted by us in their sub-conscious that their safety isn't worth the dollars saved on extra make up days or attendance counts?  And even if it has nothing to do with politics*, why are all the other kids in the county not in school because of the danger but WE are not being protected?  "I am not worthy of protection."

This gets me fired up every time this happens and I am left with more questions each time.  Like, what can be done about this? What other subliminal messages are being sent that we have not yet realized to these precious children, who have a chance if we, and in turn, they believe in themselves and their worth.

*I am not claiming to be an expert on the issue of school attendance, and recognize there could be many factors that go into the decision to keep a school open, meals for the children and having someone to watch over them during the day being a couple of them.  I just wonder if there is room for solutions.  Please feel free to share your ideas for some!

Since I have been asked by a few of my clients recently how to do this, I thought there may be a few more out there that would like to know how to add images that link to websites or social media pages in their email signature too.
So here it is!:

Open Outlook (I am using Outlook 2010)
Click on New Email
Click on 'Signature' and then 'Signatures'
To create a new Signature, click on 'New' button and give it a name.
Then, type in your contact information.
To add the social media buttons and link them to your pages;
click on the picture icon and upload your facebook button image.
Once it is uploaded, click on the hyperlink icon and type in your facebook page link in the Address box, click OK.
Then do the same for each social media button you want on there.
Once done click 'Save' button on top and then 'OK' button on botton of signature window.

I am watching with great interest how Google's new privacy policy instituted last week will affect businesses' AdWords budgets. Will it be harder to reach the outskirts of your target market now that the Google experience will not be the same for everyone?

"Our Privacy Policy will enable us to build a better, more intuitive user experience across Google for signed-in users.
If you’re signed in to Google, you expect our products to work really beautifully together. For example, if you’re working on Google Docs and you want to share it with someone on Gmail, you want their email right there ready to use. Our privacy policies have always allowed us to combine information from different products with your account—effectively using your data to provide you with a better service. However, we’ve been restricted in our ability to combine your YouTube and Search histories with other information in your account. Our new Privacy Policy gets rid of those inconsistencies so we can make more of your information available to you when using Google.

So in the future, if you do frequent searches for Jamie Oliver, we could recommend Jamie Oliver videos when you’re looking for recipes on YouTube—or we might suggest ads for his cookbooks when you’re on other Google properties."

My guess is that AdWords campaigns will need to be honed very specifically to your target audience and location since the Google experience will not be the same for everyone, unless they are not logged in.  Think about the words that your potential customers would use to describe themselves and what it is they are looking for (or in the case of YouTube) or at.  This allows you to use call outs in your ad, as well as, include another key word.

Examples:
NY Mothers find used
toddlers clothing at our sale!
www.toddlerclothingsale.com

Small Business Owners
Can Afford Help With Ads
www.mcdesignservices.com