This is our last interview in the SES series and is with Kris Jones, President and CEO of Pepperjam. Kris is a powerhouse of an Internet marketer and Pepperjam has been named (for the 2nd straight year) as one of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the US. With a reputation as a great place to work, the Pepperplex boasts unending supplies of a leading energy drink for its employees. Kris talks about ping-pong on the job, search arbitrage, and other dilemmas with Joe in San Jose.

Thanks again to everyone who took time out of their busy conference schedule to answer some of Joe’s questions.

You may have heard the adage, “you cannot manage what you don’t measure.” When seeking to optimize your web business, it is also worth hearing, “you cannot improve what you don’t know.” That’s what comes to mind when working with e-commerce sites that haven’t effectively implemented a web analytics program yet want to increase their website’s conversion rate.

Here is another interview from our SES series. This one is with Todd Malicoat, aka stuntdubl, one of the leading SEM experts in the industry. Todd is currently working on two very interesting projects, SEO Class and MarketMotive (be sure to check them out, if you haven’t already). Joe caught up with Todd in San Jose to talk about SEM industry, training, its future and its current image. Enjoy!

Based on all of the buzz about “conversion” it seems that it has become the metric of the year for online marketing. A few years ago, although marketers were certainly aware of “conversion” very few companies talked about it. More so, very few companies ever cared to measured it. Now about every website design and search marketing company suddenly offers “conversion” services. Nevertheless, as the buzz surrounding conversion increases it’s important to remain grounded on the performance fundamentals regarding pay-per-click marketing (or any marketing for that matter).

Have you ever been hanging out, randomly searching online and found something negative about yourself in a search engine results page? OK, well, maybe you weren’t randomly searching exactly, but I bet when you saw that negative stuff, you wished you had known about it when it first was indexed, so you could have defended your brand, yourself, or your service. Called reputation management, monitoring your site and service throughout the blogosphere has become an increasingly popular service. For any startup, small, medium or large sized brands/companies, it’s best to have someone dedicated to monitoring your reputation online while involving yourself in conversational marketing.

Joe Whyte got a change to interview Matt Inman (aka oatmeal) at the recent SES conference in San Jose. Matt is a chief technology office at SEOmoz and is the guy behind the SEOmoz tools. He is also well-known for coming up with very creative linkbaiting campaigns (using quizzes) for his own dating site, Mingle2. Here is the full transcript of the interview.

Web analytics play a crucial role in building a high performance web business. Whether it’s basic site statistics like unique visitors, page views or sessions, analytical data like click paths or funnel abandonment or campaign performance metrics like cost per lead/sale, conversion or value per visitor, knowing your numbers help define your next steps for growth and improvement. However, besides the greatest hurdle of web businesses actually taking the time to become aware of their numbers, there is also the concern with the numbers being accurate.

There is little doubt that patents are driving innovation. However, those same patents can hinder the progress if applied incorrectly. There are some huge issues with the patent system in the United States right now, resulting in increase in lawsuits and huge backlogs and delays. Many feel (including yours truly) that with all the new highly technical fields out there, the system needs to be reevaluated. Well, the change might be coming. According to Economist, The United States Patent and Trademark Office is looking into going social.

Joe Whyte got a chance to catch up with social media gurus, Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis, at the recent Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. Neil and Cam share their thoughts on the state of the social media optimization industry, spam and the right pricing for the SMO professionals.

Have you heard of behavioral marketing, but not known exactly what it is? You probably have been exposed to behavioral targeting before at one or more points in your life and not even known it. Behavioral targeting, if done right, can be a very useful tool in your internet marketing tool belt.

My experiences with behavioral targeting have been always in tandem with other marketing campaigns, all supporting each other and working together. Behavioral targeting as a stand-alone marketing technique can potentially be effective, but I have seen more success with multiple campaigns interlaced together to make each one perform better.

If you are looking to learn more about behavioral targeting, then keep reading for more on the basics of this technique to help you launch your first behavioral targeting campaign.