When I was seventeen years old, I made the decision to join the U.S. Army Reserves. It wasn’t really a hard choice to make, considering the number of family members that have been in the military at one time or another. When I enlisted, I had to choose what job (my M.O.S. or Military Occupation Specialty) I would go to training for. I had a few good options, but one naturally stood out to me: Food Service Specialist, the glorified Military name for Cook. It was a natural choice for me because I grew up in a Spanish home where Mom did the cooking and taught me all the family recipes.

Now most people have a fairly negative perspective of what a cook does in the Military. One might picture me peeling potatoes all day and cooking some mush that passed as an excuse for food. However, when I went to cook school in Ft. Lee, Virginia, we were taught the ins and outs of the kitchen, proper cutting techniques (you know, so you don’t lose a finger), and of course, we learned some delicious recipes.

Cooking has taught me a lot about professionalism and attention to detail. So, how do I apply those techniques as a web developer? Let me share. When you cook a nice meal (and I’m not talking about out-of-the-box Mac & Cheese, I mean a full course meal with all the trimmings) you have to prepare and have all your materials in place. Sometimes this requires that you go shopping in the morning for all your ingredients. Whether it’s a new design or marking up a new website layout, you have to do a little research in order to know the full outcome of the product. I like to gather my ingredients by meeting with the client — or in my case at Pop Labs, meeting with the Project Coordinator — about what functionality a website needs to have in place. It’s important to know any variables ahead of time so you’re not wasting time making it up as you go.

So, you have your ingredients or research done…now what? Wash your hands! No one wants germs in their food. Now, put on your apron and start with a clean work area, or a framework, and start slicing and dicing. Most follow recipes to the letter, and this is good practice for novice chefs; however, once you’ve become more accustomed to your work area, it’s a good idea to improvise and experiment. We have a particular client that has officially become my “sandbox” of new techniques. I get to play in my sandbox and build castles and then smash them if they don’t work (it’s quite fun). Same thing with cooking. You can stick to your favorite recipe, but then it might become dull and you’ll want to spice it up. The end result may turn out awesome, or it might taste like dog food. In that case, just go back to what works and come back to that experiment and tweak it to taste. Half the fun in cooking is improvising, which can be true for marketing, design, whatever your forte.

Once you’ve fine tuned your skills, you can start creating your own recipes or applications for your dinner guests/clients. It’s good to have a foundation to build upon, but without those foundations, you’re really just throwing everything in a pot and calling it gourmet meal. Sometimes out-of-the-box Mac & Cheese is what you have to provide, depending on budgets and other factors out of your control, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be an interesting new recipe. Do what I do – add some cut up hot dogs! Yum.

Interactive Strategies returns for its third annual conference and for the second year in a row, Pop Labs is sponsoring the Interactive Strategies Conference website. This year’s design was a collaboration between our very own talented designer Melissa Garcia and Roby Fitzhenry of College Station based Always Creative and was developed by yours truly. The three of us are also on the planning committee this year along with fellow Pop Labs staff Jill Fortin and Lori Logue.

The IS conference is Houston’s largest interactive marketing conference presented by our good friends at the Houston Interactive Marketing Association (HiMA). Expand Beyond, this years theme, is a full-day conference on September 9, 2009 at the Angelika Theater in Downtown Houston.

Early Bird Registration is now open! If you would like to attend this year and save 15% off registration enter one of the following promotional codes: melissagarcia, salb, jillfortin or lorilogue. We hope to see you there! Follow @ISconference on twitter for more promotional codes and updates leading to the conference!

Also follow Pop Labs on Twitter (@gopoplabs) for the latest news and updates!

Last week, I had the chance to participate in the latest installment of the Houston Technology Center’s educational seminar series – Blogging for Business. The seminar’s focus was the use of social media in a business environment. The panel consisted of myself, Steve Latham and  Katie Laird and Kelsey Ruger. Sounds like overall we got good feedback. I included a link to my presentation hosted on Slideshare.net. (This is the updated version that I presented at the PKF University this week).

In true social media fashion if you have any feedback, you can comment here,  Join me on facebook or LinkedIn and of course follow me(Kelsey), Steve and Katie on Twitter.

Teaching children to be entrepreneurial is a task that should be taken more seriously. I have 3 children and I’ve always pushed them to try and educate themselves on other things that they may be interested in. I try to make them believers of saving money and being economical. It wasn’t until I met one of the producers from the Biz Kid$ show that I realized I should also be encouraging them to think of new ways or improve older ways of making money.

Biz Kid$ is a show dedicated to the entrepreneurial kid. They feature successful kids and teenagers who are business owners or done something worthwhile that was lucrative. They also teach proper methods of starting and running a business. Some of things they have done are remarkable. This is more than your front yard lemonade stand. Working on their next season of episodes, they decided to include the internet as a medium of making money and starting a business. How can you present proper website building, search engine marketing and social media consulting in an entertaining way? Duh…you find the SEO Rapper!

The producer contacted me and shared her vision about what they wanted to accomplish. How could I resist? I love kids, rapping and the internet. They are based in Seattle Washington and she offered to fly me there for a few days if I was willing to compose a Biz Kid$ focused instructional rap about using the internet to start a business. Interesting task. I was glad to do it. I contacted Dre Dubb Entertainment, one of my favorite music production teams (also produced Design Coding) for a track to the rap I was writing. I received the track, completed the rap and went to the studio to record it. A few weeks later I was on a flight to Seattle. I finally met some others from Biz Kid$ who showed me a great time. The video shoot was awesome. It went a little longer than expected but I had a blast doing it. Touring Seattle was great. I had a chance to walk around and take lots of pictures and next time I’ll remember that if you walk down a hill and you parked at the top of the hill, you have to walk back up the hill. The Biz Kid$ episode is supposed to air on PBS sometime in January. Stay tuned…

Hello, my name is Jillian.

I am a shop-at-home-a-holic.

My first at-home purchase was made when I was in high school: Debbie Siebers’ “Slim in 6″ training program. I saw the infomercial, picked up the phone and after six to eight weeks of sheer anticipation, there it was – the solution to all my problems. The key to ultimate fitness. The program that would jumpstart my new life as a size two in “no time at all!” Debbie Siebers’ DVD sealed my fate. From that point forward, I was addicted to shopping at home.

Two Joy Mangano products and a tub of Oxi-Clean later, my eyes fell upon Ron Popeil’s Showtime Rotisserie. This thing was a beaut. I likened it to the fireplace at Christmastime- you leave it alone and the next thing you know, you’ve got a present waiting for you. I knew I was destined to have this appliance. It had to have been engineered with me in mind. There was absolutely no question about it.

I had meat on those spits the second I freed my Rotisserie from its plastic wrap straitjacket. I poked my chicken a bit with the handy dandy solid flavor injector, made sure the non-stick drip pan was firmly in place, and carefully slid everything back into the appliance. Then, in a moment of fanfare and coronation, I set my Showtime Rotisserie and smiled with satisfaction as I saw the happy, heated, rotating magic take place before my eyes.

Then… I forgot it, like I thought I was supposed to.

I had expected the roast I placed in my Showtime Rotisserie to emerge juicy, succulent and tender. Instead, the Rotisserie spat out a dry, charred mass of nothing, topped with a whole lot of gross and a side of yuck. I had done everything I was supposed to—I set it up just as I was told, taking extra care in the actual marinating and seasoning process. If it had been fashioned to succeed, why oh why did I end up eating Lean Cuisine that night?!

Like all horrible memories, I quickly pushed that experience to the dusty part of my brain and forgot all about my Showtime Rotisserie (pun totally intended). It wasn’t until I switched careers from amateur, shortcut cook to project coordinator at an online marketing firm that Ron Popeil entered my life once more.

A lot of my clients come to me after running their own pay-per-click campaigns for x amount of years. They had fastidiously built out the keyphrases in their ad groups, down to types of matches and relevant geographic terms. They had conscientiously set their daily ad budgets, remembering to set day parting and turn off their campaigns on the weekend. And, after all was said and done (and might I add — very, very typical of this behavior), they sought the assistance of an online marketing firm, because, as so many argue, “they don’t know why they weren’t getting results!”

The answer is simple. Many search engine marketing specialists can give it, and so can Ron Popeil.

“It’s because you SET IT and FORGET IT.”

As business owners, it’s easy to set up a pay-per-click campaign and subsequently forget it. Many traditional forms of marketing follow this model. You set up a direct mail campaign… then you forget it. You film a television commercial… then you forget it. You’re supposed to forget it, just like you’re supposed to forget about a pot roast in the Showtime Rotisserie. But that’s what sets online marketing apart from traditional forms of marketing… and that’s also why it works better.

Anyone will tell you that the more attention you give any item you cook is proportional to how savory your dish is. It doesn’t matter what new, fangle-dangled appliance you use; it’s still a good rule of thumb to follow. Search engine marketing is the same way. Pay-per-click campaigns are a new notion compared to radio ads, television spots or the Yellow Pages, but just because you’ve heard one or two testimonials about how effective they are doesn’t mean you can “set it and forget it.”

It is absolutely essential to keep an eye on what you’ve got churnin’ and burnin’ if you want to get your desired end result. Watch your pay-per-click campaigns. If you’re losing a lot of juice, make sure you’re basting. If it’s losing flavor, make sure you’re seasoning. If it’s charring the sides, turn down the heat. Do what it takes to make sure you get what you want. At the end of the day, we all want an appetizing pay-off. We can have one if we want one—only when we realize that it takes more than setting it and forgetting it.