This morning I woke up, checked my blackberry and saw an email from our President and CEO entitled Important Company Announcement I figured we bought a new company or something. Not so much…

This morning it was announced that the board of directors are pursuing a plan to separate the company into two publicly traded entities.

I am part of the newspaper division so we will now be grouped with Broadcast and classified as The E.W. Scripps Company while the networks and shopzilla, uswitch will be under a new company named Scripps Networks Interactive.

With any new change you always have initial concerns etc.. but I don’t really see this being a bad thing; and even if I did do you think I’d post it here?

The KnoxNews (one of our newspapers) has more on the Scripps company split

Last week it was reported that a woman from Minnesota was ordered to pay $222,000 to record companies for sharing music online illegally.

This is so stupid. There are so many issues out there and crimes being committed that are very serious but their going after a 30 year old mom and suing her for over $200,000 because of music sharing? What a joke.

Anywho I was waiting for some sites to begin popping up about this and here’s one. Its called Free Jammie and it makes it possible for the public to donate money to helping Jammie pay off the music industry.

How much cooler would it be for this to happen though…….
A musician or group of musicians pay this fine for her. I’m no legal professional so I’m assuming that this is possible but just imagine the buzz that they would get for doing this. Whats $222,000 for recording artists? It’s chump change. And can you imagine the amount of publicity they would get if they did this, and new fans? I think this would be an awesome grass roots marketing ploy by a band. Does anyone else think this is cool or just me?

Also on a related note I love what Radiohead is doing with their new album. In case you haven’t heard their allowing fans to pay whatever they want to download the new album. This is pure genius and I for one even though I don’t listen to Radiohead would be willing to shell out some bucks just because I think this idea is so brilliant. It should be interesting to see what backlash this causes.

A week ago I wrote a story entitled - How to Convert & Import a Google Pay Per Click Campaign into Yahoo. Before I go to far I have only had this site active for a couple weeks which means 0 page rank from Google etc. Now the whole reason I wrote this how to was because of experiences I had in trying to import from Google to Yahoo and the frustrations not only I had but others have expressed in forums. So I wrote this how-to and I made sure I gave it a title like someone would be searching with in one of the search engines. I then submitted this story to sphinn and digg. Here’s the results 1 week later.

The how-to article received nearly 100 views in just 3 days. I received 2 links from trusted sites: seroundtable.com and searchengineland.com.

How is traffic coming naturally? Well if you search for the phrases:

Convert Google to Yahoo
Convert Google PPC to Yahoo

(and these are just a few) my site is coming up on the first page of results sometimes within the top 3. You might be saying - But thats a really long tailed search. Well for the first phrase alone there are 3,630,000 results. I guess there’s a lot of people having similar problems :).

So here’s a few takeaways.

Even though this site is very new there are two things that I did in order to drive referral and natural search traffic.

1. I wrote for the web. Every person who does a search on the web is asking a question. If I write my article, posts, whatever you want to call them in a format that is based around a question and then actually answer that question, then you will be rewarded by search engines.

2. This is a huge one. GET LINKS! I really only had 2 sites link to me but these sites were trusted, and Google along with the other search engines put a lot of weight on links from trusted sites with related content.

This is just s simple example of using your head when looking to get traffic to your site.