In my high school, there was literally an arms race.  We boys thought we needed to be ever stronger, bigger and faster to get girls to notice us.  We competed with weight reps, protein shakes and monthly tips from fitness magazines, all in lockstep trying to break out and get noticed.

And then a new kid moved into the neighborhood.  Within a week he was holding hands with the prettiest, nicest girl in the junior class.

He wasn’t ripped and cut.  I never saw him run a race.  But in a herd of bores, he was hilarious.  Adults laughed along with him.  We all walked around retelling his stories and jokes.  He stood out by being different and emphasizing his own best quality.  In a school of 3,000 self-obsessed Californians, his strong signal cut through the noise.

In 2011 most web marketing is about how to compete in the Google arms race.  How to do more keywords.  More posting.  Better syndication.  Be easier for Google to understand.

Friends, pleasing Google isn’t amplifying your marketing signal.  It’s an arms race of noise creation.  In an industry with near-infinite competition, you can’t ever win over Google’s first page for very long.  Posting a weak message once is bad.  Publishing it 50 times just multiplies a bad message.  Just because it’s free, more isn’t better.

But if you come to the Apartment Internet Marketing Conference this year, we think we can share with you some inspiration about how to be the funny kid in school who gets all the attention.  We don’t care about consensus or getting you to agree on the next fad.  We want to help you figure out how to amplify your signal so your message gets heard above the noise.

Increasing your signal-to-noise ration is what marketing is supposed to do.

Please join us May 2-4 at the Hyatt Regency in Huntington Beach for 2.5 days and 16 sessions of interesting, relevant experts who want to teach you how to think for yourself about your business marketing challenges.

The AIM 2010 Conference theme – Many Marketing Channels: One Goal – reflects the needs of owner/managers and their service providers to master many channels to drive and validate their impact on net operating income. AIM 2010 will feature cutting-edge business education designed to help simplify using multiple marketing channels to achieve a targeted ROI occupancy. With more than 200 companies that own and operate apartments in attendance, it’s an event you can’t afford to miss!

We’ll be meeting at the beautiful Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa in Huntington Beach, California. The location is fantastic and has to be seen to be believed. It’s right on the beach with lots to see and do in the immediate area. Best yet, it’s a family-friendly resort so bring the family and stay the weekend! There’s more information about the Hyatt and how to reserve your guest room at the special AIM Conference rate at www.aimconf.com. Be sure to make your reservations soon before our room block sells out.

There’s an exceptional line-up of presenters this year. Keynote conference speakers include Google’s Sam Sebastian, Director of Local and B2B Markets; Greg Sterling, Founding Principal of Sterling Market Intelligence; Danny Sullivan, Editor in Chief of Search Engine Land; Gary Angel, President of Semphonic; and Vivek Sodera, Co-Founder of RapLeaf. AIM 2010 also features intermediate and advanced sessions specifically developed with topics and speakers that address the challenges of using multiple marketing channels.

And we’re grateful to our sponsors who make it all happen. They include Apartment All-Stars, Apartment Finder, Apartment Guide, Benson Media, Capture the Market, First Advantage SafeRent, G5 Search Marketing, Grace Hill, Level One, Move, Multi-Housing New, Numeric Analytics, On-Site.com, Property Solutions International, RealPage, Realty DataTrust (Founding Sponsor), rentbits, Spherexx.com, The Rainmaker Group, and Yardi.

True to its reputation, the AIM Conference is going to be packed with educational value, growth opportunities and plenty of networking. We’ll see you there!

Register here for AIM 2010.

Click here to view AIM 2010 press release.

Two years ago at AIM, experts from Sitewire, a full-service digital advertising agency, did a usability analysis of a renter’s search experience from start to finish. They recently caught our eye again.  Sitewire just published a fascinating post on juicing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results that leverages eBay ad listings.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a popular and effective way to market your company or services. However, those clicks can add up and result in a costly campaign, often times leaving the marketer wondering how to increase SEO without spending thousands.

Danny Stansfield at Sitewire takes a closer look at how to use eBay to get local Google search listings. He theorizes that by listing your item using keywords that a Google searcher would use as well as an eBay buyer, you can take advantage of eBay’s deep pockets to substantially increase your SEO on Google.

Stansfield is in the process of testing his theory one step further by testing how this strategy could affect local listings in Google.  While perhaps not directly applicable to apartment marketers, the theory of placing keywords in a larger site’s ad listings is worth thinking about carefully.  All of the apartment ILS sites can provide this same function.

Read more about Getting Local Google Search Listings with eBay here.