What Is Love?

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken."
~ C. S. Lewis

Today, is Valentine's Day. According to the U.S. Greeting Card Association, there will be a billion cards sent again this season, thus making it the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. Christmas, naturally, is numero uno.

Thirty years ago I am pretty sure I inundated my bride-to-be with more than a few cards (and poems) because we were separated at the time. I was in Puerto Rico and she in Maine. We got hitched in August, but at that time the closest I could come to being with her was to look at the moon and hope she was looking at it at the same time.

That year I was working at a Christian book store in suburban San Juan. Being an avid reader, I loved the context I found myself in, other than the aching heart. I discovered many treasures. One was an audio cassette series of lectures featuring C.S. Lewis, in his own words. The theme of these lectures formed the basis of his book The Four Loves, a deserved classic on this universal theme.

If you've not read it, I wholeheartedly commend it to you. But till then, you may find the following review by David Lahti to be a nice appetizer. This is the intro to his reflections on C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves.

What is love? Lewis embarks on a personal and insightful exploration of affection, friendship, romance, and charity.

Reflection
How can so many millions of us believe that love is the best thing in the world, and yet there be so little emphasis in our popular culture on what love is, as distinct from finding someone to love and to be loved by? John Lennon was quicker to say “All you need is love”, than he was to explain what he means by love. Popular songs sometimes take a stab at it, but are better at phrasing questions than providing answers: “What is this thing called love?”, “Is this love?”, “I want to know what love is”, “How will I know when it’s love?”. The voluminous self-help books are focused on practicality rather than explanation, and the works of psychologists and philosophers (for good reasons) often confine their analyses to those aspects of love that result from a study of behavior and are amenable to quantification.

C. S. Lewis’s book, on the other hand, is devoted entirely to an explanation of love that descends into our animal nature, but ascends also into the realm of religion and spirituality whence (Lewis believes) true love comes, and where it reaches its highest and most meaningful fulfillment.

To read Lahti's review in its entirety, along with a few additional recommended readings on this abiding topic, visit his page here.

Luck

"I'd rather be lucky than good." ~ Lefty Gomez

"The race is not always to the swift or the battle to the strong... but time and chance happen to them all." ~ Ecclesiastes 9:11

Today is Friday the 13th, so I thought a few observations about luck were in order, since for many thirteen is an unlucky number. In fact, in 1911, psychologists came up with a name for this fear of thirteen: Triskaidekaphobia. Friday the 13th has been considered unlucky since the 1800s and many buildings have no thirteenth floor because of this irrational anxiety.

It is interesting that the central theme of Woody Allen's 2005 film Match Point centers on the theme of luck, so much so that for the lead character Chris Wilton it is his life theme. Ironically, when Wilton says in the film, "I'd rather be lucky than good," I assumed it was a line written by Mr. Allen, the screenwriter/director. But while doing a search, I see that this quote's source was the Hall of Fame pitcher Lefty Gomez. Allen made it fit so well into the fabric of this film, however. Does this mean no attribution was necessary in that context? Or was Mr. Allen lucky no one noticed?

Thirteen has a positive place in history as well. There were thirteen original colonies and thus the first U.S. flag had thirteen stars and stripes.

Well, getting back to the "lucky or good" notion... Is it really better to be lucky? When we give too much power to luck, are we not saying that we have no power in ourselves? It is realistic to make the acknowledgement to forces outside one's control, as Napoleon did, but even the greatest generals recognize that their troops must be ready for combat and sufficiently armed, and that a strategic plan is required, as opposed to haphazard chaos.

I have often heard the saying that we need to make our own luck. Or as Abe Lincoln put it, "I will prepare myself and the opportunity will come."

How do you feel about luck? Do you feel lucky? And while you're waiting for your ship to come in, what are you doing in the meantime? Are you preparing yourself so as to be worthy when you see the sails approaching your little piece of shoreline? I hope so.

For what it's worth, don't break a mirror today.

Two Hundred and Twenty

Pretty big day today... Abe Lincoln would be 2oo, and my daughter turned twenty. Though she's not yet on the cover of any magazines, my gut tells me she will be some day. She's just that kind of girl. As my Grandma Newman was fond of saying, "Now I hain't braggin', ya hear, but..." and it was usually something about what people said about her cooking, which was mighty fine. In this case, I sort of am braggin' 'bout something mighty fine. Like many dads do, I s'pose, they see something special in their girl.

This past weekend Christina and I went together to the Father-Daughter Ball here in Duluth, an annual tradition of 13 years for some dads, but approximately eight for us, I suspect. In the beginning her dance step was pretty basic. But she's got rhythm and she's a quick study, so she held her own. This year she showed me all the moves I've never had. She knows how to move dem feet. And with her old man, we danced ourselves out. Gosh, it was fun.

As for Abe, something tells me he wasn't that much of a dancing man. That did not keep him from being a significant president, though he has had his share of detractors, hated by many in the South who considered John Wilkes Booth a hero.

Lincoln was born 200 years ago, on February 12, in a cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky. On a family vacation to my own Kentucky roots my present family (as opposed to the one I grew up in) visited this rough-hewn Lincoln homestead. Though he spent most of his adult life in Illinois, working a series of odd jobs before becoming a lawyer and eventually a politician, he no doubt felt the same as I regarding his modest Kentucky birthplace. It is a remarkable thing that here in America one can still, through hard work and a bit of luck, rise up from literally nowhere to achieve much.

Last week I found an article in the February Smithsonian that does an excellent job of putting Lincoln into perspective. "Lincoln's Contested Legacy" begins by outlining this premise, that Lincoln has been a touchstone for many points of view, even for contradictory viewpoints and political rivals. It reminds me a little of the search for the historical Jesus, except with a lot more material to work with.

Writes Philip Kunhardt III, author of the piece, in its opening, From the time of his death in 1865 to the 200th anniversary of his birth, February 12, 2009, there has never been a decade in which Abraham Lincoln's influence has not been felt. Yet it has not been a smooth, unfolding history, but a jagged narrative filled with contention and revisionism. Lincoln's legacy has shifted again and again as different groups have interpreted him. Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites, East Coast elites and prairie Westerners, liberals and conservatives, the religious and secular, scholars and popularizers—all have recalled a sometimes startlingly different Lincoln. He has been lifted up by both sides of the Temperance Movement; invoked for and against federal intervention in the economy; heralded by anti-communists, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, and by American communists, such as those who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the fight against the fascist Spanish government in the 1930s. Lincoln has been used to justify support for and against incursions on civil liberties, and has been proclaimed both a true and a false friend to African-Americans. Was he at heart a "progressive man" whose death was an "unspeakable calamity" for African-Americans, as Frederick Douglass insisted in 1865? Or was he "the embodiment...of the American Tradition of racism," as African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr. sought to document in a 2000 book?

For an interesting, though brief, interview with Philip Kunhardt III, who also co-authored the book Looking for Lincoln, check this out.

Lara Fabans: More Insights from the Edge

This is part two of the interview we did last weekend. Lara Allen Fabans might look like just another mom in the park with her eight year old daughter, but then you notice the laptop and iPort and as you peek (you're not supposed to peak over peoples' shoulders, but sometimes we do) you see she's working on an Internet marketing campaign or analyzing demographic data or maybe merging online registrations with lead generation data or possibly helping a company register new URLs.

Ennyman: What is “data mining for retention”?

Lara Fabans: Some sites have registration. Your hope is that these people regularly visit your site. I worked with one client where we were able to track the rate of registered users, and how many clicks they did before leaving the site. We were going to get down into categories to find out what were the most popular, and test how to improve retention. Some people used to measure time rather then page clicks, but you know, the phone rings, someone pops into your office, and it artificially increases the time, so I'm glad they've moved past that.

Another metric is how long does someone stay on your email list, or how long do they continue to buy your product. Most items that are quickly consumable such as vitamins or diet products have a retention rate of about three months. So, knowing that, you need to ensure that you are bringing in enough new customers each month to keep your revenue steady.

Enny: I regularly get asked questions about viral marketing. Isn’t a viral type of campaign dependent in part upon the culture of the company? Can you point to any examples of really successful viral campaigns?

Lara Fabans: I think most Viral Marketers are trying to get the hype of viral marketing to go viral :-) The key is to have something noteworthy that people want to recommend.

And the best way to do that is have a Recommend This To a Friend form right on the web page, or even a squeeze page to capture them before they leave.

The most fun viral campaign that I remember was in the very early 90s, you called National Discount Brokers, and the IVR had "If you would like to hear a duck quack, press 7." You pressed 7, and a duck quacked, and then it said "thank you" and hung up. It was so silly that we sent it to everyone we knew. Sadly, in 2006, Ameritrade bought National Discount Brokers and removed the duck quack which goes to show that they have no sense of humor.

Most people point to the "End of the Internet" page which said you've reached the end of the internet and it was really a good squeeze page. You were supposed to put in your name and email address and that of a friend, and then you were supposed to go back to the beginning of the internet. There's a high curiosity factor which is vital in viral campaigns.

A viral campaign has to be interesting, be something real (no one will recommend it if they feel gypped), and make the person really curious about what's going to happen next. And I suspect even a "stodgy" company could do something interesting that has high curiosity as long as it has the proper tone that they're comfortable with, and it's directed to an appropriate group.

Enny: In my world, measurement is a critical component of success. How come people don’t make a greater effort to measure their marketing results?

Lara Fabans: I suspect people are taking shortcuts. They get overwhelmed with the data, and ignore it, or don't know how to properly test. I suspect they're trying to save money by not having someone on staff who could generate these statistics with recommendations. I also suspect people don't have marketing plans. The purpose of the plan isn't necessarily to follow it, but to think things through.

That being said, you don't want to get bogged down in process. That's why the analysis and testing are so important. You put a stake in the ground, analyze how well you did, make a few more tests, and then keep moving forward. You can be nimble and still have analytics being done.

Enny: Being so young you seem to have a lot of interesting experience under your belt. What has been your biggest achievement thus far? Of what are you most proud?

Lara Fabans: I'm on the downhill side of 40 which, I suppose, makes some thing I'm a baby & others think I'm ancient. I learned to love learning from my father, and think it keeps us young. He's retired but working on iPhone applications. Go Dad!

My crowning achievement is my daughter and my marriage. I'm proud of having some really long term friendships in my life, and even though four of them have moved far away, we maintain the bonds.

I've made huge mistakes along the way, but I view them as learning experiences and keep moving forward. I can choose to think about the positive or the negative, some would say. Pish, I think about them both pragmatically and analytically. Experiences are neither positive nor negative. It's our response to them that matters.

Enny: A lot of companies still seem to be clueless when it comes to internet marketing. What, in your opinion, are the first areas to focus when a business undertakes an internet marketing initiative?

Lara Fabans: They need to realize that it's a different type of marketing and requires its own plan. Direct marketing is a "push" whereas internet is a "pull." You need to find the best way to pull eyeballs to your presence. In addition, we've moved from the age of information to the age of recommendations (swiped that from a blog). It helps to put useful information out to build up your reputation, and then have people recommend you, your company, your products, your services, your information, etc.

And what companies really hate is that it takes time. If you start it now, it may take as much as a year to build up a strong reputation. And they don't want to wait. They want to do 500 cold calls which yield 50 leads which yield 3 sales and know that it takes a month. Unfortunately, if they don't start working on the online reputation, their competitors will be light years ahead of them when they wake up.

Those that fail to create an internet marketing strategy will be left behind with the horse and buggy. Like Borland, and Tandem. And all of the newspapers. (ok, maybe not the WSJ).

Enny: Thank you, Lara, for your contributions here and to all whom you have helped in the past and will advise in the future. If I had more time, I think I'd like to pick your brains for a book on eCommerce. I am totally confident you'd be a gold mine of insights that would be of value to any business serious about profiting from opportunities the net has placed at our mutual fingertips.

The very best to you, in all things.

Five Minutes With David Cane, On Happiness

“If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share.” ~ W. Clement Stone

The idea of happiness is something so basic that most of us desire it without knowing why. As Americans it is even written into our national creed as one of our basic entitlements: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The pursuit alone does not always result in happiness. That might be why there are so many books about happiness on the market. Many of them deal with our internal barriers and others offer practical tools for removing external barriers. The how of happiness, the steps to happiness, the psychology of happiness, the secrets of happiness… So when I was given a chance to review yet another book on this happy subject, The Short Book on Happiness, I took advantage of the opportunity to instead interview its author, David Cane.

Born in 1964, Mr. Cane is a graduate of The American University in Washington D.C. where he received his MBA. His life experience includes overcoming drug and alcohol addictions, unemployment, bankruptcies and other misfortunes. Like many, he knew why he was unhappy, but did not know how to find the happiness he saw others experiencing.

Today he has been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for fifteen years and speaks routinely on the topic of addiction and recovery. It is apropos that his blogspot includes this quote from Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.” Everything really does start right there.

Ennyman: What was your motivation in writing this book?
DC: For me, studying and learning about happiness was never enough. I’ve read many books that I thought would help me become happier. I learned a lot, and many of the books I read were extremely well written and valuable as they related to helping me understand why I was experiencing worry, fear, and low self-esteem. What was missing, however, was a simple, short, but substantive approach that I could apply to eradicate worry, acquire more confidence, and become a happier person. My heart was always in the right place, and I knew I could achieve more in my life, and I was certainly ready to do the work, but I just could not figure out the right actions to practice.

It’s my belief that many people unwittingly procrastinate becoming happy due to spending an inordinate amount of time seeking out the reasons for their unhappiness. Too much time is spent figuring things out, and too little time is spent solving the problem. The problem, in essence, is that we have allowed our minds to become our masters, and must reclaim ownership of our minds in order to become happy.

Enny: Many people know most of these truths. Why don't they do them?
DC: That is correct. Things such as positive thought, gratitude, forgiveness, and faith are not new. I believe there are a variety of reasons why people do not practice these things and do not receive the associated benefits in their lives. These include:

~ Difficulty in sorting through the vast amount of information and differing philosophies available on these topics
~ People want a quick fix, and give up if it results don't happen fast enough
~ People know what they need to do, but don’t know how to do it to get results
~ It takes a lot of energy and commitment
~ Thinking in a new way makes you "different"
~ It takes people out of their comfort zone

Enny: In a world with so much suffering, is it right to be happy?
DC: Yes it is. I believe we deserve to be happy, and that is God’s intention for us. In fact, much of the suffering in the world is created by people who are unhappy to begin with. The more happiness there is, the less suffering there will be. People that are truly happy (i.e., have high self-esteem, are not consumed by worry and fear, and have a strong faith) are in a much better position to reduce suffering in the world.

Enny: Discontent can become a prod for motivating us to do something to make a bad situation better. (e.g. in a situation where social injustice is taking place.) Can we be both happy and discontent at the same time?
DC: Yes. In fact, a person who is truly happy understands that happiness does not mean that things around them have to be going well. That is, one can have financial difficulties, health issues, family issues caused by others, etc. and still be happy. Happiness is an “inside job” and is a reflection of how comfortable one is with who they are, not what they have, and for me starts and ends with faith in God.

Enny: Do you have a website or blog? Where can people find your book?
DC: Yes. My website is http://davidcanebooks.com/

My blog is http://thoughtharmony.blogspot.com/
My book is available through my website, as well as on amazon.com and barnes&noble.com.

Enny: The full title of the book is The Short Book on Happiness: Transform Your Life in 10 Days. Thanks, David, for the good and important work you are doing. I believe you are right regarding your observation that much suffering is created by people who are unhappy to begin with.

Be sure to check out David’s website and David's website and blogspot. For additional information on overcoming secret addictions be sure to visit my friend John Prin’s website, appropriately called True You Recovery.

The Unfinished Stories of Richard Allen Garston

SHORT STORY MONDAY

This is the introduction to a much longer story which I will strive to faithfully share here...

The Unfinished Stories of Richard Allen Garston
by Ed Newman

The stories had been stored in boxes. A ledger indicated that there were 3,283 of them, plus more than five thousand fragments, some of which had been codified to identify their relationship with other manuscripts. Since none of the stories were complete, who is to say whether the five thousand fragments were not in themselves stories? That would make more than eight thousand stories.

Richard Allen Garston died in 1975 at age forty-seven, burned to death in a fire. There was no autopsy performed, for there seemed to be no call for one. No one appeared to benefit from his death. The last eighteen years of his life he had been a recluse, his source of income unknown. None of his works were ever published. If he was one of our century's great authors we'll never know, for his manuscripts, annotated and filed in boxes, were burned by his brother.

I discovered, or became aware of, Richard Allen Garston through a writer's group in Bedminster, New Jersey in the spring of 1990. The chief propagator of Richard Allen Garston mythology was a certain Horace Keane who, to everyone's dismay, never missed a meeting. Actually, it's a wonder the group didn't utterly disband and reconvene elsewhere. Keane was a science fiction writer who whose ideas were, I suspect, completely plagiarized, though no one would dare make the accusation to his face. Most writer's groups are a little too nice in that way.

You will note that I have not called it "our group" because I only attended sporadically, and for no more than six or eight months. The only function of these details is to share with you the events that set me on my quest.

Keane was one of the oldtimers of the group and, as already noted, the regular attender. To describe this man, or any of the others, would be a diversion from my main story so I will not take us down that path other than to say that the purpose of the group was to read to each other what we were working on.

When I first began attending the meetings, Horace Keane's stories and references to Richard Allen Garston appeared to be so exaggerated that I suspected Garston to be a fabrication. It was not until my fourth or fifth meeting that I met the modestly eccentric novelist and playwright Willson Willis who confirmed Garston's existence. (The pen name Willis wrote under is a household name which I am confident you would recognize.)

There was a lady at the meeting who was working on a tragic love story and Keane began suggesting that she wasn't going deep enough into the tragedy part of it, that she should really explore and develop more thoroughly the dark recesses of her characters' souls. Willis cut him off. "Oh stop it now. Her style is all lightness and air. Not every story has to be a Richard Allen Garston."

Right then I knew. And I wanted to know more about the man and his work.

After the meeting I asked Mr. Willis if we could go somewhere for a bite to eat. He assumed, naturally, that I was interested in talking about his own work and declined, suggesting that he was tired. His routine was to wake early, to be at his writing desk by four.

"I realize you are busy, but would it be possible to perhaps meet for lunch sometime then? I want to hear more about this Richard Garston that Mr. Keane keeps talking about."

As soon as I said the name Willis got a strange look in his eyes, as if he were making some calculations in his head. "Oh," he said. After a short pause, he added, "It's getting too late to go anywhere else. Why don't you just come to my place? Follow me home and we can talk in my den."

After tarrying a little while longer at the meeting, we escaped to our cars and I followed him home. For my readers who know the area, it is one of the nicer homes on Burnt Mills Road, not far from the polo field.

···

My name, which I should have told you at the outset, is John Urban. My wife, Lynn, is a high-powered executive with a well-known Fortune 50 firm headquartered here in Jersey. A few years ago, when I got downsized out of a copywriting position with a New York ad agency she suggested I take a sabbatical and write the novel I had always claimed was in me, a suggestion I was eager to oblige.

I found the project more challenging than I'd imagined but was gratified to have finished the book, Kill Them With Kindness, in under a year. But writing was easy compared to the task of finding a publisher. Even with an agent. Even with New York contacts.

My second novel hasn't gone so well. It may be that I have been distracted with my efforts to find a home for the first. Or it may be, though I refuse to believe it, that I am tapped out. My first book felt honest and original. The second has felt wooden and now tires me rather than energizes.

After a while one is aware that the easy explanations for one's moods are no longer valid, that there are deeper root causes. As the song goes, sometimes it's hard to face reality, especially when the trouble is as plain as the stitches on your face. (I was in a car accident this past year.) For me, the trouble was Richard Allen Garston. I don't know how this thing got such a strong hold on me.

Unable to make progress in my second novel, I discarded it and began doing research for a short story, something I was confident I could finish quickly, but this, too, fell to the wayside. This was about the time I had begun attending the writer's group. My sterility had become almost oppressive.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK

Lara Fabans Talks About Cybermarketing

I met Lara Fabans via Twitter. According to her blog she’s “Just another Silicon Valley girl who thought she'd escape after college but found deep roots in her hometown.” But when you look her credentials it doesn’t take long to find out Lara Fabans was paying attention when she saw the Internet unfold. With a BS/EL from CalPoly and more than two decades of online experience, Ms. Fabans has seen and done a lot in the realm of cyberbusiness and marketing.

It runs in the family though. Her dad was employed by Apple for 15 years, purportedly the wireless guru who developed the iPort. As in most homes, what dad does gets taken for granted. Says Fabans, “I was never impressed with him until he told me that THE Douglas Adams had called him to ask some things about wireless technology.”

Though her blogspot lists her interests as wine, knitting, heavy metal, motorcycling and Sponge Bob, her life centers mightily around cyberspace as she visits or partakes in up to 300 blogs a day. For this reason I decided to pick her brain a bit about marketing in the social networks now known as Web 2.0….

ennyman: A lot of companies are desirous to take advantage of the explosion in online social networking, but don’t know how to break in. Are there any techniques or tools that you have found especially helpful to marketing professionals?

Lara Fabans: The first step of any marketing campaign is to ask yourself: Why are we doing this? I've seen some groups/companies/people who just want to be on the bleeding edge and sign up just to sign up, but there's no real plan behind it.

Guy Kawasaki has been very successful with Twitter. He is in the business of disseminating information, and he can do that quickly and easily by copying and pasting web links into Twitter. He follows everyone who follows him. News stations are posting links to their web pages with breaking news. Why are they successful? With Guy, you closely follow his tweets because you know it's going to be useful. Therefore, if I were going to do some form of PR, I'd get Guy on my good side and ask him to tweet to my story or blog. He has become a marketing channel. The news stations are trying to get people to go to their websites. Thus, if you see a news story that piques your curiosity, you will click. And once you're at their website, you will see their banner ads. You'll click around at other interesting things. And maybe you'll register for a newsletter.

FoodNetwork tried to use MySpace for the prior season of Next Food Network Star, and I feel the campaign fell flat. They were trying to get people excited and discuss the show and the contestants. It became the MySpace brand rather than the Food Network brand. You'll notice that this last season they had everything on their own site with video blogs, regular blogs, etc. and people commented. Once they were on the Food Network website, there were strategic links to take people to the online store which is very good for business.

Facebook seems a bit untested. I think there's a large potential, though. Buca di Beppo's has a fan page where people can chat about how much they love the food, but it may not be something that someone thinks about visiting every day. At least they put "Visit us on Facebook" at the bottom of their emails. Iron Maiden put together a fan page and made a huge mistake. They sent an email to all of their fans with what could be considered spam. It had nothing to do with Iron Maiden, and I'm sure they lost a lot of fans after that one. They didn't post an apology that I saw either.

When you make a mistake, you need to address it immediately and not hope that it will just go away. The mistake itself will go viral and everyone will know. A company needs to have a solid plan for dealing with gaffes and outright mistakes, and ensure that someone addresses things promptly.

Surprisingly, Pizza Hut seems to be on the forefront of Facebook. They have an application page where you can order pizza to be delivered right from their Facebook page. Talk about making things easy! And what a cool thing to tell your friends. They weren't trying to be cutting edge because everyone else was. Pizza Hut was cutting edge because it worked for their business model. They also have a phone application that works the same way. They're reaching out to people so people can get what they want Pizza Hut in as many ways as possible.

So to break in, start with a blog and get people to comment. Ask your friends to ask questions if you have to. Then figure out who has a similar business model, and see what they're doing. Is it working for them? If not, why not? How can you learn from their mistakes?

ennyman: Among other things you specialize in online marketing and SEO.

Lara Fabans: I got my first email account in 1987. I was able to read most of the USENET newsgroups every day. I am an internet junkie. I'm still heavily into email, but I am getting quite addicted to Facebook. I need to learn to parse Twitter better. I read about 300 blogs a day on a variety of interests.

I love helping build up companies. It's probably the engineer in me that analyzes and systemetizes their business and marketing processes. But I love it all.

One thing that's been interesting is the SEO vs. SEM. I think a lot of companies fall under the spell of SEM, and don't look at the real statistics. Most people don't click on the sponsored links. There are a few simple things that you need to do consistently to have a better SEO including your title keywords, the first few sentences, how often you add more information, etc. And that's where a good online marketing consultant can help out. Your frequently updated content could be new articles that you obtain or have someone write, or it could be a blog. Some people repeat the same keyword instead of realizing people search on keyword phrases of at least 3 or more keywords. Finding synonyms for those words and phrases improves your rankings.

What can be frustrating is that SEO requires patience. Sometimes it takes 4-6 weeks before you see the results, but if you get impatient and stop adding in fresh content, you go back to square one. A really fun article on someone who was trying to bury something about herself is on the Wall Street Journal. It's a cool read.

Definitely google your name and your company some time. (Ok, and Yahoo! it and MSN it. Each search engine has different algorithms, and most people think of Google, but what if the majority of traffic comes from MSN or Yahoo....then you'd better update your strategy and optimize for those instead....which brings us to...)

ennyman: What are the most important things businesses need to understand about creating a “sticky” website?

Lara Fabans: This is where your analytics come in and you find out where the majority of the people are coming from and how many pages they view before they leave.

I love doing the analysis and can sit there fixated for HOURS studying this.

What? You're not tracking this? You probably are but don't realize it. Most websites have logs, and you may have to ask your host where to find them.

Something else to track is repeat visits. If I'm going to your website every day and viewing 8 pages, that's pretty darn great. I'm obviously buying what you're selling on that website since I keep coming back.

If you're just selling products and not being a provider of information, you need to find out the stickiness of your sales funnel. There's statistics out there as to what you can usually expect from a well tuned sales funnel (of course, I don't agree with using generic statistics...I believe in figuring out what yours are, and then seeing where we can improve it). If you're losing 75% of the people in the first step, then you know you've got to set up some tests to find a better way to get people through the sales process.

ennyman: You have an E.E. from California Polytechnic and a Masters in Information Technology from AIU. When marketing yourself, what do you consider the core strengths you bring to the table as a consultant?

Lara Fabans: My ability to systematize the current state, analyze problem areas, and identify multiple solutions. Then we go for the low hanging fruit while we build up the back end. Nothing I do is random or spurious. I spend a lot of time finding out about your business, where you're
trying to go, how you're currently going there, and if it's going to do what you want it to do for you. I want to help you fix your biggest pain, remove your biggest roadblocks, and pave the way to success.

ennyman: This looks like plenty for today, so we'll continue later. In the meantime, your website is....?

Lara Fabans: http://www.lodestone-cs.com/

Thanks, Lara. Till next... The best to you in 2009.