Bored? Staring at yet another day of SEO from your desk or laptop, and less than thrilled with the idea? To much grunt work awaiting, so no time to explore and refresh the curiosity brain cells, yet feeling less than stellar in the productivity department due to that blah-zay boredom? Yeah, me too.

Truth is, obligation stifles creativity. But creativity drives productivity for many SEOs like me. The thrill of a “brilliant idea” can spawn highly-productive spurts of activity that outperform competitors, even when they spend weeks buying links. In SEO, the smart strategy outperforms and outlasts all but the most aggressive brute-force methods. So how to you break free of the doldrums while remaining productive? The little things count.

For me today it is my new coffee glass. A simple addition to my desk… it’s a Bodum Pavina thermal goblet. Winner of European design awards, it is elegant and simple. It’s a double-walled, clear thermal glass made of the same high-termperature silica quartz I used for materials testing back in my first engineering job out of college. Light as a feather, it feels like a wine goblet in my hand. It’s cool to the touch, yet filled with steaming hot coffee.

Did that sound like promotional copy? Suspect a “sponsored post” ? Nah. I paid full retail ($20) at a local store I shall not name. I have no connections at all to Bodum. How could something so simple be so motivating? That doesn’t really matter, does it? It feels good, and it’s just for me, and that’s apparently what I needed at the moment.

Related info: I only drink french press coffee at home. I have a Bodum french press, and have had several of them over the years. Starbucks sells Bodum french presses, but not the Pavina glasses. I found them at a local high-end home store… look for a place that sells things like Reidel stemless stemware (another great feel-good addition to the home, by the way).

I write a blog post about PHP, and in the sidebar should be a link roll of PHP jobs.

I write about SEO and in the sidebar should be a link roll of internet marketing jobs.

If I were hiring a web designer, I would target a beautifully rich long tail of attractors for my job listing. I imagine I would appreciate a system that combined these automagically, according to some smart ruleset. I bet, given the vast experience of the contextual advertising engines and the relative uniformity of job offerings, that it would be cake. I bet it would be amenable to optimization, too.

Job click thrus convert as resumes, or at least a conversion lead better than most. And job link click thrus don’t have to go direct to specific jobs… they can go through a lead refinement filter, which, of course, would be like an MFA page, helping to land the job prospect onto the optimal match of a job. “So you like the PHP job, did you see these PHP + MySQL jobs, and these PHP + Perl jobs? Which do you like best (chose one or more…” Taguchi doesn’t apply, cause each lead is unique, and so why rely on initial page context, trying to match perfectly when job seekers expect to seek anyway? That’s why PPC doesn’t pay for individual jobs. Instead, use contextual ads to draw them in… but not into a monster job site. Draw them in to iterate the contextual job text link (MFA) system recursively… it doesn’t break any rules (if the initial job exists), and lets the seeker navigate the way nature intended.

Job placement recruiters get what, 6-10% of the first year’s salary at least?

So in 2007, where are the contextual ads for jobs?

I’ve decided to offer a new service called JohnAnswers.com. It’s like Yahoo Research and Google Answers and wikipedia, because it basically answers your questions using Internet information. You ask a question, and the service checks the internet, compiles and answer, and spits it back to you authoritatively. No “if’s”, no “might be” and no “some say”… just  definitive statements based on stuff found on the web, as if it were all true.
Of course none of it is guaranteed to be accurate, unbiased, factual, or anything more than statically evident (just like with Google, Yahoo, and wikipedia). What you’re getting for your $5 is the convenient external validation that you want, pure and simple.
See a need, fill a need.