CCG: News & Media

Andreas Ramos and Stephanie Cota are often asked to speak on web technologies and web marketing. We welcome public speaking engagements.

To arrange a presentation or for a press package, please contact Stephanie at CCG.

CCG News for 2006

Our new book on SEO and PPC came out in May 2006. Stephanie and I wrote a book about SEO and PPC in 2004. That sold well, so for 2006, we wrote a fully revised and updated version.

Insider SEO & PPC 2006 has dozens of notes and tips, 26 case studies (including banking, consulting, health services, telecommunications, food & beverages, consumer products, real estate, manufacturing, building and construction, and law), and interviews with top people in the industry at Google, Microsoft, Clicktracks, and other agencies. The book is for people who manage ecommerce or sales for websites. Insider SEO & PPC.

January 1st: A few months ago in September, we were approached by Silicon Valley investors. After several months of negotiation, we came to agreement. Starting January 1st, we're co-founders of Position2.com, a new Silicon Valley startup. They put up the funding and management expertise; we bring our experience and processes. The new company will be CCG on a larger scale.

The CEO manages financial relations with the investors; he has a degree in engineering and a Harvard MBA. He has ten years experience in Silicon Valley as an executive at AltaVista and later started three successful companies. The founder team includes another person with seven years at J. Walter Thompson, the global ad agency. Our investors are both in Silicon Valley and India with substantial resources and industry connections.

We also bought a 35-person company in India. They’re engineers, web developers, and so on. They will develop tools for us. All of the contractors and vendors who worked for us with CCG are coming along to the new company: web developers, graphics people, the network guy, translators, writers, the accountant, and so on. We are adding a SalesForce Certified Agency team so we can offer CRM. We hired another fellow in Bombay, so we now have 41 people on staff.

CCG will continue as a friends-and-family company: we will manage a handful of clients who are family or close personal friends. All new business will be handled by Position2.

We build lead generation (lead gen) systems for companies. Our clients get more leads and more sales. We use PPC (such as Google Adwords) to get clicks, SalesForce CRM to process the leads, and web analytics to keep track of it all. The results are trackable, which means it can be optimized in a feedback loop to maximize the profits and ROI.

CCG News for 2005

December 20th: We earned our Google Agency Certification.

December 18th: We earned our ClickTracks Analytics Agency Certification.

December 9th: Stephanie Cota spoke on using PPC with Google Adwords and MSN adCenter at the WITI.com conference in San Jose. WITI.com is the premier international organization for women in technology and business.

November 30th: Microsoft contacted us and offered us a beta account for their new PPC tool. This will be Microsoft's competition to Google in the upcoming SEM War between the two. We're one of the very few companies with this tool. We'll describe it in our upcoming book. Executive Summary: Sweet.

September 27th: Andreas Ramos spoke in Kansas City, Missouri on SEO and PPC. He was invited by the city's public library system.

September 14th: Stephanie Cota interviewed John Marshall of ClickTracks. We're working on the revisions for the 2006 edition of our SEO/PPC book. The interview was videotaped and will be available soon.

Aug 8th: Andreas Ramos spoke at Search Engine Strategies (SES) in San Jose, the main trade show for SEO/PPC. His co-panelists included VPs from Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Verizon. If you use SEO, PPC, or SEM for your company, you must visit SES to learn what's going on and what's new in SEO/PPC.

Aug 4th: Andreas Ramos spoke on Business Talk radio from the University of Cincinnati. The topic was Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click advertising.

July 6th: We've begun updating and revising our SEO/PPC book. The 2006 edition will be expanded to include several dozen case studies and interviews by Stephanie Cota with leading industry experts.

June 18th: Google released CPM advertising tools. We set up CPM ads for a client. Using the client's UVP (Unique Value Proposition) and TA (Target Audience), we selected target sites for CPM ads. We also developed image ads for the client, based on successful Adwords ads.

May 10th: We added PPC in Arabic for a client. This was an interesting project. Arabic is written from right-to-left. We've already done PPC in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, so we know how to work in Unicode. The European languages are much easier: we manage PPC in German, French, and Spanish.

Jan 19th: Stephanie Cota spoke on CRM at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM.org) at Hewlett-Packard in Cupertino. Details at SFBayACM.org

CCG News for 2004

Dec. 26th: Google Adwords Professional Certification: Andreas spent Christmas studying for the Google Adwords Professional Certification, which he passed on Christmas night. This adds yet more credentials: we wrote the book on SEO and PPC, we founded Adwords-User-Group.com, we have a dedicated personal support representative at Google, and Andreas passed the Google Adwords Professional Certification Examination. This means for you that we deliver the very best in Adwords PPC management services.

Dec. 8th: Collaboration Tools: We started using our internal collaboration tool. We work on many projects now with people in Europe, Russia, India, China, Argentina, and around the USA. The collaboration tool allows us to manage projects and teams. This includes task lists, internal discussion lists, email notification, calendars, libraries for project documents, peer review systems, version control, and so on. This was installed and configured on our servers by Stephanie, who worked with an offshored team in Russia.

Dec. 6th: Using Adwords for Your eCommerce: Andreas spoke at an eBig.org event on ecommerce and Adwords. Afterwards, Andreas moderated a panel discussion with top people from PayPal, AskJeeves, TRUSTe, CafePress, and VerticalResponse to discuss ecommerce tools and how to get your store online.

Dec. 2nd: The PPC FAQ: We wrote an FAQ on Pay-per-Click (PPC). What is PPC, Adwords, and Overture? Why use this? What are the benefits? What is Adsense? Here's a six page FAQ on Adwords and PPC. Read the PPC FAQ at Adwords-User-Group.com.

Nov. 18th: Being #1 on Google - How Important Is It?: Andreas argues that the #1 position at Google is a false target for companies, especially start-ups, on which to focus their (limited) time and budget. A company can spend a great deal of effort to get to the top of a search engine. But if the website isn’t designed to take advantage of the traffic, the effort and traffic is wasted. It’s better to focus on attracting pre-qualified customers and converting them into leads or sales. Read the Article at eBig.org

Google AdWords User Group: We started the Google AdWords User Group to collectively represent people who are using Google AdWords: FAQs, jobs, news, and more. Visit Adwords-User-Group.com.

November 10th: CCG's e-commerce research is cited in Debbie Weil's Word Biz site.

Our SEO book is cited in Insurance Networking News (New York). "Therefore, create a number of versions of the same ad to see what works best", says Andreas Ramos, co-author of "Insider's Guide To Search Engine Optimization. http://www.insurancenetworking.com/protected/article.cfm?articleId=2842&pb=ros

September 19th: Andreas Ramos spoke at the Berkeley Cybersalon: Searching for the Perfect Search Engine. "People have been dreaming about the perfect search engine since Vannevar Bush described an imaginary device called the Memex in his piece, As We May Think, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1946. Although, to date, Google has produced a search engine most closely approximating the Memex, there's a world of other interesting, viable, or useful search tools as you'll discover from our panelists." September 19, 2004. Hillside Club in Berkeley, California.

September 1st: Andreas Ramos appeared in Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies, a book by Stanford researchers on the experts of Silicon Valley. Because Andreas was the national chairman for ten years for the NWU's BizTech Division, where he developed strategies and programs for computer contractors, he is one of the key interviews in the book, written by a professor of engineering at Stanford and published by Princeton University.
- "If we are lucky, once a decade or so, a study comes along that captures the essence and the interesting nuances of an emerging, strategic occupation or work group. This book is destined to be our classic for this decade. No one should be allowed to write about these itinerant professionals or propose new policies or labor market institutions to regulate or serve them unless they first read this book!" (Thomas A. Kochan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
- "Gurus significantly expands our understanding of what is sometimes called "the new economy," exemplifying the value of organizational ethnography and, especially in its superb account of life in labor markets, contributing distinctively to economic sociology." (Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University)
- "This important book is the best account so far of the new and growing world of contract labor." (Peter Cappelli, University of Pennsylvania)
- "...a revealing glimpse into the organization of the knowledge economy." (AnnaLee Saxenian, University of California, Berkeley)

August 23rd: Andreas Ramos spoke at the Social Networking Users Group (SNUG) on blogs. SNUG is a SIG for the social networking websites, such as Ryze, LinkedIn, and so on. Crowne Plaza Hotel, Foster City, CA.

June 24th: Andreas Ramos and Stephanie Cota spoke at the Strategic Web Marketing Workshop, Thursday, June 24, 2004, in Milpitas, CA.

June 12th: Andreas Ramos and Stephanie Cota's new book was released. See Insider SEO: How to Get Your Website to the Top of the Search Engines (Jain Publishing, 2004).

June 9th: World Journal, the largest Chinese newspaper in North America, interviewed us on the upcoming release of our book Insider's Guide to SEO.

May 22nd: Stephanie Cota and Andreas Ramos were guest lecturers at the MBA Business School of Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley. We spoke on new developments in web strategy and technologies.

May 11th: Stephanie Cota and Andreas Ramos spoke in Vienna, Austria, on Technical and Business Writing in America. We are also the national co-chairs of the NWU's Business and Technical Writers Division.

March 1st: Andreas Ramos spoke live in two interviews on Customer Catcher Radio from Toronto. This was broadcast live over the web to an audience of two million.