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Ben Bernanke (Federal Reserve Chairman) currently holds the key to influence the supply of money, but Matt Cutts (Google) is teaching us how to get more of it online.

Ben Bernanke

A few of us middle-aged marketers can still remember Black Monday, the stock market crash that occurred shortly after Ronald Reagan appointed Alan Greenspan Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987. Many more of us can remember the dot.com boom that occurred a decade later, followed by the Y2K burst in March 2000. Despite the ups and downs of this bipolar economic era, the perceived powers of Alan Greenspan led many to believe he held the keys to recovery and recession.

Not much changed with this perception when Ben Bernanke succeeded Greenspan in February 2006 as the Fed's Chairman. Last year he was ranked the fourth most powerful man in the world by Newsweek. However, President Barack Obama may be positioning Lawrence Summers, Director of the National Economic Council to succeed Bernanke when his term ends in January as the Obama Administration's initiative for change is driving a diversification of power and demand for innovation.

It is obvious from recent failures that changing the federal funds rate to influence the money supply is only one of many options to affect the U.S. economy. However, this is an essential key to managing and stabilizing our economy — and Bernanke holds the keys.

Matt Cutts

Who would have thunk it? The day has come when a software engineer from Google has more business followers than the Fed's Chairman — well, at least those with a web marketing focus. Matt Cutts currently heads up the Webspam team at Google, but he is most recognized for helping marketers improve their PageRank and visibility in search results. Unlike the economics of interest rate decisions, search engine optimization (SEO) is something ever business owner actually has some control over. Here's the catch — it's not easy and it takes time. 

Google's PageRank algorithm is complex and its details have not been disclosed. Therefore, many marketers are looking to Matt Cutts for advice on how to improve their PageRank and ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). If your business isn't getting noticed for the right categories online, then you are not prepared for the next generation of marketing. Depending on the level of competition you are dealling with, it could take a very long time to achieve your objectives. SEO experts like David Viney believe that Google will penalize web sites for obtaining too many referring links to quickly, due to the nature of how those inbound links may have been acquired.

With nearly six billion active Google searches in May 2009 alone (according to Nielsen), it is pretty clear that Cutts holds the keys to mastering the free market economy online. If you are a list manager or list owner and have not yet embraced SEO for your business, then you may want to get started now by learning the SEO language from our marketing glossary and putting your mailing list titles on a search engine optimized platform.