Ask a New Yorker: I’m with Alan Rabinowitz. Did you know that there was another Alan Rabinowitz that’s a famous zoologist?
Alan: Yes I did. It’s not me. I’m the famous Internet marketer at SEO Image: http://www.seoimage.com/
Ask a New Yorker: Where do you live?
Alan: New York City.
Ask a New Yorker: Famous internet marketer? Explain please.
Alan: I’ve been marketing websites since 2003. I’ve worked with some big, very well-known brands-Sotheby’s International Reality, Related Management Companies. I’ve also done Paris Hiltons record release party in Las Vegas, and a well known hospitality restaurant company in Manhattan.
Ask a New Yorker: I see you have a book out, can you tell us about that?
Alan: It’s called “Front Page Addiction” its about getting traffic to your website beyond the usual search engines. And how individuals and businesses have built companies by leveraging traffic strategies. It has some instructional information on sites like Twitter and Facebook as well as case studies. It’s in hard-cover only and is like a textbook. It’s a great read!
Ask a New Yorker: What is SEO? And how does it boost and help people find internet sites?
Alan: Search engine optimization. You get exposure on search engines, mainly Google, which dominates search results. We optimize websites to perform well on those search engines. That is what optimization does. It gets exposure and traffic to brands and products and services.
Ask a New Yorker: Terrific. What did you do prior to being an SEO expert?
Alan: I was a professional illustrator. I use to paint for Marvel Comics, Hasbro, Dungeon and Dragons. I studied traditional academic painting. So I used to copy old master paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can actually find me in the New York Times when I was younger drawing Ugolino and his Sons http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/67.250
Ask a New Yorker: Where did you go to Art School?
Alan: Rochester Institute of Technology, The Art Students League and School of Visual Arts, in the summers where I met my mentor, John Frederick Murray.
Ask a New Yorker: Do you have a favorite artist?
Allan: Yes, William Bouguereau, who was one of the most accomplished painters of his time.
Ask a New Yorker: So you painted a lot of hot naked woman?
Alan: Absolutely.
Ask a New Yorker: Let’s go back to your current profession. What’s going to be hot on the internet in the near future?
Alan: Well there’s a lot of social chatter. Everybody is into some kind of social site like Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. Everybody has been doing these for a while. We just saw Digg, one of the big old news portals, sold for $500,000 which is far less then its value years ago. The stars of Digg were the people who posted called Diggers. So the people who helped market companies through their Diggs now cannot even use the portal for marketing so the whole landscape has changed and continues to do so daily. Everybody is going to Facebook now. There are so many people on Facebook that it has as much buzz as Google. Everybody says, ‘Facebook this, Facebook this person” My opinion is that the Facebook kind of sites and maybe even Facebook itself has so much more value now than it did in the past that it could even over power Google if they know how to play it right. Facebook is the only company that can give Google competition for search if it integrated it properly.
Ask a New Yorker: Perhaps they’ll partner?
Alan: Not in the near future, Facebook just made a deal with Bing. There is some synergy but the integration is poor. So Google still reins king for search. I’ll still leave Facebook to do a web search. Facebook seems focused too much on other profile searches, which honestly, I used that so rarely.
Ask a New Yorker: PC or MAC?
Alan: MAC, Of course!
Ask a New Yorker: Yankees or the Mets?
Alan: It’s going to be the Yankees and the Giants, typical New Yorker. I knew the Met’s back in the 70’s and 80’s when they were exceptional (which may happen again soon). I was brought up as a Dodger fan. My father was from Brooklyn.
Ask a New Yorker: Great search engines always have odd names.
Alan: You’re right. Think about it you have to be named something like Bing, Yahoo, or Google. Even lesser know engines like blekko, hotbot, dogpile, and so many more.
Ask a New Yorker: Last question: What do you think of the brand Ask a New Yorker?
Alan: Get out when you still can! No, with all seriousness, I think it’s got a good repore with New Yorkers to go to the site and have something they can go to and refer to. I think that it reaches out to them. It’s a very interactive type of brand.. It’s actually talking to people. I think it has a lot of leverage that could be utilized in a lot of different ways. It’s really how you market it and push it. Branding, what’s going to make them remember a name? How are they going to remember it? If they want to know something about New York where else are they going to go?
Ask a New Yorker: My thoughts precisely. Thank you Alan. It was a pleasure meeting you.
Front Page Addiction By Alan Rabinowitz
Packed with numerous case studies, Front Page Addiction focuses on the top traffic driving sites that can turn small companies into success stories overnight. These sites are ever changing and new features are added constantly as many of these sites conform to the needs and desires of their users. Anyone looking to do extra marketing for their business needs to get acquainted with these 33 ways of driving traffic to their website as described in this book.
