semvironment has been going through a shiny new internal transformation lately…here’s the latest:

semvironment is now a one man show. I (James Zolman) realized that during this economic turmoil, it is easier to be flexible and strong as a service provider if the people that help me can maintain their sense of freedom to work for others while we have the strictest agreements of confidentiality and non-disclosure in place between our contractors and our clients. Every one of our contractors worked in-house for us at one time so they are trustworthy, smart and entrepreneurial people. Yes times have been difficult here, but every single one of my prior employees is doing great and not a single bridge has been burned because of these times. I am excited to press forward independently with the use of awesome ppc software, the best contractors and the best clients ever.

semvironment is focusing more on education and coaching. I am going to revive the blog a bit with at least a weekly blog post unless I am on vacation with my beautiful family. The blog will cover more SEM stuff while still emphasizing and maintaining a healthy dose of PPC management posts.

I am looking for small business owners, in-house teams, ppc management agencies, ppc software companies or individuals that want or need an external opportunity report. Basically, I would spend two or three days reviewing the account, the history and your analytics reports and write a report for you with ‘next steps’ for helping your team or you improve your ROI with paid search!

And a little plug about the latest for me (James Zolman) outside of semvironment:

You might have heard of Click Walrus a little bit in the previous blog post…I have been investing heavily in this attribution tool designed for small businesses, affiliates and bloggers. I’ll make an official announcement about it soon but sign up for updates early so you can be in on our alpha tests! w00t!

I am starting a personal blog at www.jameszol.com in the coming weeks. The blog will discuss a lot of different topics…family, business, computers, advertising…just a little bit of everything.

Looking forward to a bright and shiny future for everybody!

• Where Have You Been?
  I can’t believe I haven’t posted anything since June…well, I guess I can believe it. Here is a quick summary of what I have been...

“In February 1998, Jeffrey Brewer of Goto.com, a 25 employee startup company (later Overture, now part of Yahoo!), presented a PPC search engine proof-of-concept to the TED8 conference in California. This and the events that followed created the PPC advertising system. Credit for the concept of the PPC model is generally given to the Idealab and Goto.com founder, Bill Gross.

Google started search engine advertising in December 1999. It was not until October 2000 before the adwords system was introduced. Allowing advertisers to create text ads for placement on the search engine. However PPC was only introduced in 2002, until then, advertisements were charged at CPM. Yahoo Advertisements have always been PPC, since its introduction in 1998.

Goto.com was an Idealab spin off and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service.

In February 1998, GoTo offered advertisers the option of bidding on how much they would be willing to pay to appear at the top of results in response to specific searches. The bid amount was paid by the advertiser to Goto every time a searcher clicked on a link to the advertiser’s website. By July 1998, advertisers were paying anything up to a dollar per click.

GoTo’s business model was based on the idea that its paid listings would make it more relevant than other services, especially for general searches, and web sites that pay more are probably better sites. A similar service had been offered by Open Text in 1996, but this precipitated outcries and bad publicity because searchers at the time did not want the search process more commercialized.

In contrast, GoTo’s pay-for-placement model was very successful. Commentors theorised that the web had matured in the intervening two years, and these type of economic models were more acceptable since the web was no longer just a place for academic research, but also a place for buying products. GoTo founder Bill Gross speculated at the launch that GoTo would succeed because, as a relatively new service, it had no reputation to taint with paid listings, unlike Open Text.

On October 8, 2001, Goto.com, Inc. renamed itself Overture Services, Inc. GoTo’s chief operating officer Jaynie Studenmund said “We also felt it was a sophisticated enough name, in case our products expand.”

Through partnerships, Overture enabled portals such as MSN and Yahoo! to monetize the hundreds of millions of web searches made each day on their sites. Indeed, these partnerships proved highly lucrative, and in a period otherwise marked by dot-com failures, Overture became a substantial profit driver for portals like Yahoo!

This success enabled Overture to acquire web sites such as AltaVista and AlltheWeb.

In 2003, Overture was acquired by its biggest customer, Yahoo!, for $1.7 billion. The old brand name of Overture has now been phased out as Yahoo! re-brands many of its products under the Yahoo! name. The exception to this is in Japan and Korea where the local businesses continue to use the Overture brand.”

Interesting, right? What a young industry with so much potential. It’s too bad that the Quality Score is still a ‘black box’ in a way while we have the ability to manipulate and improve a PPC account on so many levels!

A few of our major accomplishments are yet to come…we look forward to a VERY monumental year.

Let’s see what Google and Yahoo! were doing when they were two:

Google – it was the year 2000. Here are some excerpts from their history page (http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html) :

While computers on the desktops were fully powered, the desks themselves were wooden doors held up by pairs of sawhorses. Lava lamps began sprouting like multi-hued mushrooms.

The informal atmosphere bred both collegiality and an accelerated exchange of ideas.

Google’s features and performance attracted new users at an astounding rate. The broad appeal of Google search became apparent when the site was awarded both a Webby Award and a People’s Voice Award for technical achievement in May 2000. Sergey’s and Larry’s five-word acceptance speech: “We love you, Google users!” The following month, Google officially became the world’s largest search engine with its introduction of a billion-page index – the first time so much of the web’s content had been made available in a searchable format.

To extend the power of our keyword-targeted advertising to smaller businesses, we introduced AdWords, a self-service ad program that could be activated online with a credit card in a matter of minutes.

As 2000 ended, Google was already handling more than 100 million search queries a day — and continued to look for new ways to connect people with the information they needed, whenever and wherever they needed it.

Yahoo! – it was the year 1996. Here are some excerpts from their time line page (http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/timeline.cfm):

Yahoo! becomes a publicly owned company.

Yahoo!’s first TV commercial airs, and the “Do You Yahoo!?” tagline is introduced.

Yahoo! News is birthed by aggregated news page created by Yahoo! co-founder.

Yahoo!’s traffic reaches one billion page views.

Wow, lot’s of major milestones were reached during Google and Yahoo!’s second years – we expect to reach our major milestones in the upcoming year.

In fact, we just met with a stellar team of advisors today. We’ll post our takeaways from THAT meeting tomorrow!