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I am featured in the book, Creatively Self-Employed: How Writers and Artists Deal with Career Ups and Downs by Kristen Fischer. In the book, creative types discuss what life is really like when you take the plunge into creative self-employment. From waiting for clients to pay up and battling the “lonelies” to gaining self-assurance and growing your business, readers get a candid look at authentic living-straight from those who are out there making it happen. Read more about the book in the press release.

Take your Daugther or Son to Work Day is tomorrow, 4/26. I haven’t taken anyone to work in a couple of years when I took my teenage cousin, and in 2000 when I took my Mom. I guess I could always borrow a niece or nephew.

Last week, I had attended Search Engine Strategies (SES-NY) in New York City. Along with new products, services, and developments in the Search Engine Marketing, another trend is emerging and it’s getting harder to ignore, that of online social search.

There are quite a few players in online social media. The most popular is that of MySpace. In addition to the keyword “myspace” being in the top ten of keywords being searched for online, the media is also using MySpace as a research tool.

MySpace is also being used by the entertainment industry to promote TV Shows like Grey’s Anatomy, and movie releases like Harry Potter . These sites are done in order to build and reinforce the fanbase.

Another fast growing networking site among the college set is Facebook. It is like the online version of a Yearbook, but with a picture, activities, and more all in one. In terms of features, it’s not as rich as MySpace, however, it can get addictive fast with the need to keep in touch.

Meetup.com is a site where people create profiles and then join meetup groups based on geography and/or interests. There are groups from entrepreneurships, to crafts.

The first on the social scene was Friendster, which as been around since 2002. When the site first started, its functionalities included linking to friends of friends, and friends providing recommendations. Since then, they have added blogs, custom templates and custom urls e.g. http://www.friendster.com/wildwe, in order to keep pace with MySpace.

So, you may be asking yourself, what do all these sites have to do with my business? For the answer, tune in for the “next” newsletter. .

Now, that I had a chance to get over the shock, I can now write about it. DoubleClick is now owned by none other than Google. For the full press release, read it here. Google has announced yesterday that it has bought the internet advertising powerhouse to add to it arsenal of advertsing services. Rumors were abound as to which search engine would acquire it over the past several weeks and now we have the answer. What will this mean for both the search engine and internet advertising industries? Is this the a birth of a trend of search engines buying other online ad companies (e.g. DoubleClick’s known competitor 24/7 Real Media) and others? Time will only tell.

Now that SES-NY is over, I’ve had some time to reflect on some comments given by SES participants and attendees:

“The speaker did a great job and knew what they were talking about.”

“I’ve enjoyed the show.”

“There were so many great sessions I wanted to go to. I wish I would have brought more colleagues.”

“The site clinic session was very eye opening. It helped me changed the way I look at my website.”

I personally wish that there were networking tables in the ballroom on the last day. I should have been more social, as per the movement in social media, but that’s a post for another time.

Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs.com and ClickZ contributor stated that alt text is secondary text and websites should not depend on alt text alone.

Images need to be supplemented not only with captions, but also with title tags, heading tags, and body text.

I took a moment to see what some companies were up to on the Exhibit Hall Floor of SES- NY. Listen in on my conversation with Dennis Hart, Sales Manager at ClickTracks

Download the Podcast (.mp3)

If you are a small business and you don’t have a blog a weblog, you could be missing out on some significant organic /natural search engine visibility and traffic.

To find out how to start blogging and how to publicize it, tune in to SmallBizTechnology.com.

The goal for any business is to get into your target audiences’ head and find out what they are searching for.

Both Heather and Jill Whalen of High Rankings discussed best practices for copywriting for search engine optimization (SEO) in Writing for the Search Engines at Day 2 of Search Engine Strategies in New York.

Here are a couple of tips:

Keywords are KEY

Optimize for real keywords that real people are searching for.

For more SEO copywriting tips, tune into the full article at SmallBizTechnology.com appearing soon.