Seghesio Family Vineyards Launches Dinner Series at Historic Vineyard Sites

PRLog (Press Release) - May 15, 2012 -
Seghesio Family Vineyards offers guests the opportunity to dine and savor its wines at their source — among the vines of the historic properties where they’re grown — as part of its new Chef’s Summer Dinner Series. These dinners, hosted by members of the Seghesio family, continue the winery’s long tradition of sharing wine and food among friends. Guests will be shuttled from the winery to these treasured sites to enjoy special wines from the Seghesio library and seasonal menus prepared by Executive Chef Peter Janiak, formerly of San Francisco’s Boulevard and Presidio Social Club.

Chef’s Summer Dinner Series

Passalacqua Ranch/San Lorenzo, Alexander Valley – Saturday, June 9th
Hosted by Winegrower Pete Seghesio and Uncle Fred Passalacqua
The inaugural dinner series will kick off at the oldest site of the Seghesio farms. Guests will enjoy Chef Peter’s menu with Seghesio’s first vintage of Muscat Canelli and a flight of Old Vine Zinfandels while surrounded by beautiful century-old, head-pruned vines.

Westphall Ranch, Rockpile AVA – Saturday, July 14th
Hosted by Winegrower Pete Seghesio
The second dinner will take place in one of California’s newest and most exciting appellations, Rockpile, situated on a narrow ridgetop with breathtaking views of Lake Sonoma. The winery’s limited-production Arneis and a flight of Rockpile Zinfandels will complement Chef Peter’s menu.
Rattlesnake Hill at Home Ranch, Alexander Valley – Saturday, August 11th
Hosted by Winemaker Ted Seghesio
The series finale will be at Home Ranch, the birthplace of Seghesio Family Vineyards and the home of America’s oldest Sangiovese vines. Chef Peter’s menu, served atop Rattlesnake Hill overlooking Alexander Valley, will be paired with Seghesio’s first release of Vermentino, along with the Home Ranch Zinfandel, Aglianico and a flight of
Venom Sangiovese.

The Chef’s Summer Dinner Series will be limited to 50 guests per event. Tickets are $200 per person and $175 for Centennial Club members (two per membership). A limited number of tickets will be available to Visa Signature cardholders at $175 per ticket. For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit www.seghesio.com/NewsandEvents/Events/ChefsDinnerSeries or call (707) 433-3579, ext. 109.

Other culinary offerings:
Seghesio Family Vineyards offers several other wine and food experiences throughout the year, including its popular weekend Family Tables and annual Zinfandel & BBQ Festival:

New season of Family Tables
Now in their seventh year, Seghesio’s Family Tables are considered by many a “must do” in Sonoma wine country. These private tastings allow guests to enjoy wine the way it was intended, around a table with food and friends. Each Family Tables experience begins with a tour of the historic winery before moving to private tasting rooms overlooking the century-old cellar. A seasonal menu of recipes from the Seghesio family and Executive Chef Peter Janiak is paired with a special selection of library wines.

Family Tables are offered Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. from Presidents Weekend in February through Thanksgiving. The cost is $50 per person and $35 for Centennial Club members (two per membership). For more information or reservations, please visit www.seghesio.com/wineandfoodpairing or call (707) 433-3579.

Ninth Annual Zin & BBQ Festival – Saturday, July 28th  
Pete Seghesio and the Blaze Pit Crew will put their famous ribs up against the barbecue of two of the best in the business — reigning Memphis in May champion Chris Lilly and Dr. BBQ. Guests will choose the champion in this annual showdown, showcasing some of America’s best barbecue and a stellar lineup of Seghesio Zinfandels. Seghesio’s barbecue tradition began 10 years ago, when Pete Seghesio met Chris Lilly of Big Bob Gibson’s at Memphis in May, the world’s largest barbecue competition. Inspired by what he saw, Pete headed out to Kansas City to bring back Blaze, a custom-built Jedmaster smoker. Upon his return to the winery, Pete invited Chris and Dr. BBQ to come teach him the tricks of the trade, and thus the Zin & BBQ Festival was born.

Chris Lilly has won 11 World Barbecue Championships and is recognized as one of the top pitmasters in his field. Dr. BBQ has won numerous barbecue awards and published six cookbooks, and he frequently appears as an expert judge at major barbecue events across the nation.

Seghesio’s Zinfandel & BBQ Festival will be held Saturday, July 28th from noon to 4 p.m. at the winery in Healdsburg, CA. Tickets are $75 per person and $60 for Centennial Club members (two per membership). For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit www.seghesio.com/NewsandEvents or call (707) 433-3579, ext. 109.

About Seghesio Family Vineyards
Founded in 1895, when Edoardo Seghesio planted his first Zinfandel vineyard in Sonoma County, Seghesio Family Vineyards produces critically acclaimed wines that honor the history of Sonoma and the Seghesio family. Collected over a century, Seghesio’s 300 acres in preeminent growing regions — the Alexander, Dry Creek and Russian River valleys — represent some of the oldest vineyards and proprietary clones. True to Edoardo’s vision, Seghesio produces Zinfandel and Italian varietals. The winery offers daily tastings and weekend wine pairings with Seghesio family recipes. For more information, visit www.seghesio.com.

For media inquiries, images and interviews please contact Skye Morgan of Charles Communications Associates at 415-701-9463 or press@charlescomm.com.

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Spy on Competing Blogs and Web Sites Using MixRank

There’s an amazing new web site I came across last week and while it’s mainly targeted towards marketers, bloggers can use their services as well. The site is called MixRank.com, and they pretty much allow you to spy on your competitors that are using Google Adwords/Adsense. Before jumping into how the web site works, let’s first talk about why this is important from an internet marketer and blogger stand point.

Provides you with ad copy that worksDisplays the target audience and web site that advertisers are getting traffic fromUsage of banners and ad copy, should you promote this same advertise through an ad networkInspire new ways to promote your blog and/or bring in new readersFind new products and services to blog aboutSee what type of advertisers are buying traffic on other blogs

Either way, if you are an affiliate, internet marketer, blogger or all of the above, you should be able to truly appreciate the value in what MixRank.com has to offer… and best of all, it’s free!

Let’s run through the web site and break down what they have to offer.

For this example, let’s say we are looking for ad campaigns of domains (competitors) that use them word “theme” in their domain name. Using the name “theme” because we are looking for wordpress theme related site. To start, you simply head over to MixRank.com and type in “theme”, or whatever word/url you are searching for. MixRank will then display a list of urls currently in there system and how many copies of ad creative they have for each. You can see this break down in the screen shot below.

Lets assume you then select themeforest.net with 12 ads, the next page will then display the text ad creatives, banners (if any), and traffic sources for all campaigns setup through the Google Adwords system. You can see this displayed in the screen shot below.

As you can see, the text creative for the ThemeForest ad campaigns are shown above, which also include some campaigns for independent theme owners who are looking to promote their themes on ThemeForest as well. You can also select from the menu tabs on the right side of the page for further information, which are ad reach, best performer, keywords and demographics.

For a full review on what MixRank has to offer, read my other review on my affiliate marketing blog, which also displays screen caps of the banner creatives and traffic sources for a popular coupon web site.

As I mentioned, MixRank is an amazing tool for research, and best of all it’s free! The purpose behind MixRank isn’t for you to try and copy ad campaigns and use them as your own, but to instead study the information and sources that system can weed out for you. Whether you are a blogger or internet marketer, MixRank is an excellent resource to add into your arsenal!

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Top 5 Social Bookmarking Sites That Can Drive Crazy Traffic To Your Blog

Social bookmarking sites these days are powerful marketing tools that SEO content creators can use to drive traffic to their blogs and niche sites. Traffic from social bookmarking sites is a great boost in addition to receiving traffic organically from search engines. If you’ve been in the SEO game for a while now, you probably know that every blogger has their favorite list of social bookmarking sites they think are the best, hands down. You probably even have your own list, but it seems as though everyone has different opinions when it comes to the best social bookmarking sites for driving traffic to your content. Knowing what social bookmarking sites have the potential to drive the most traffic your way is important because bookmarking your content takes up a good amount of your valuable time, even if you minimize this task with automated submitters.

The relevant stats of a social bookmarking site that make for the best possible link back to your content include; Google PageRank, number of inbound links, Alexa Rank and as far as eyeballs looking at your content, you’ll want to concern yourself with the stats on monthly visitors too. Given these criteria, here are the top 5 social bookmarking sites that can get the most visitors in front of your SEO content:

1. Digg

Google PR: 8, Alexa Rank: 284, Inbound links: 267,000,000 and monthly visitors according to Quantcast: 23,900,000.

We all know about Digg – the power of this bookmarking site is truly crazy. Get your content on the first page of Digg and you better hope your servers can handle the tens of thousands of visitors that will be headed your over to your site. The much harder part is getting your content to take off on Digg.

What does well on Digg? Apple related stories, useful tech news, negative stories about corporate corruption, news stories about odd and outlandish crimes, political opinion pieces that are not run of the mill and anything that is simply very quirky, funny or out of the ordinary.

2. Technorati

Google PR: 8, Alexa Rank: 457, Inbound links: 43,000,000 and monthly visitors according to Quantcast: 2,400,000.

Technorati is great because you can actually link you blog up to Technorati, which provides a stream of the latest and greatest in the blogosphere. Get you blog connected with Technorati and all your posts have a chance to be featured on a very high ranked social bookmarking site.
What does well on Technorati? A variety of blogs can do well on Technorati, but how much your content is featured depends on your “Technorati Authority” to a degree, which you must build up over time using their system of guidelines.

3. Del.icio.us

Google PR: 8, Alexa Rank: 2,648, Inbound links: 154,000 and monthly visitors according to Quantcast: 325,000

Another, great highly ranked social bookmarking site that has seen a lot of improvements and grown significantly in the last few years.

What does well on Del.icio.us? According to some analytical reviews, about 50 percent of Del.icio.us top ranking stories are about anything tech, 8 percent are about business and making money; 8 percent are tutorials of some sort or how-tos and 7 percent are simply offbeat, lifestyle stories. The rest are broken down into much smaller, various categories.

4. StumbleUpon

Google PR: 8, Alexa Rank: 939, Inbound links: 119,000,000 and monthly visitors according to Quantcast: 978,000

StumbleUpon is another great social bookmarking site – just use it yourself and you’ll soon find how addicting “stumbling” can be. You can “stumble” or bookmark your own content and review it yourself to get more hits from StumbleUpon. However, only “stumble” your best, most original content, as “stumbling” too much content that sounds the same or like it’s trying to sell something, will cause you to get kicked out from bookmarking content on this site.

What does well on StumbleUpon? This site is really the most diverse content wise; all sorts of topics can do well here. However, the top categories of topics are technology and off beat.

5. Reddit

Google PR: 8, Alexa Rank: 4,815, Inbound links: 3,807,418 and monthly visitors according to Quantcast: 1,200,000

Reddit has millions of loyal, tech loving, quirky users. Just post an interesting enough question in the AskReddit forum, and you could find your question and its comments on the first page of Reddit’s “what’s hot” section.

What does well on Reddit? Politics, news, science and programming.

Remember getting huge amounts of traffic from these bookmarking sites or any bookmarking site for that matter, means getting on the front page. This involves writing on certain, popular topics, but mainly creating stellar content that people just have to click on and share.

Jessica Drew is a freelance, SEO content writer who blogs about a variety of money making and finance topics such as private student loans.

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71 percent using video-sharing sites: Pew report

The eyes have it: 71 percent of online Americans are using sites like YouTube and Vimeo, up from 66 percent a year ago, and 33 percent in 2006, according to the Pew Internet Project.

“The rise of broadband and better mobile networks and devices has meant that video has become an increasingly popular part of users’ online experiences,” Kathleen Moore of Pew, said in a statement. “People use these sites for every imaginable reason — to laugh and learn, to watch the best and worst of popular culture and to check out news."

Video-sharing sites are also "very social spaces as people vote on, comment on, and share these videos with others.”

YouTube, Pew said, reports that 48 hours of video are posted on the site "every minute. And since 2005 the number of visits to the site has grown from 8 million views a day to over 3 billion per day" in 2011." YouTube gets more than 200 million views a day via mobile connections.

Parental eyeballs are also increasing on YouTube and related sites: 81 percent of parents in the Pew survey said they visit video-sharing sites, up from 72 percent in May 2010, "while non-parental use dipped slightly from the 63 percent reported in the same survey."

The increase, Pew said, "might also be attributable to the fact that parents with minors at home are younger as a group than the non-parents cohort and use of video-sharing sites is linked to younger users."

If we're not watching YouTube, we may be shooting videos to upload to it or to share with others. Pew says 34 percent of cell phone owners say they've shot video with their phones; 26 percent have watched video on their phones; and 22 percent have posted videos or photos online.

When it comes to combining cell phones and video, "men are more likely to watch videos on their mobile devices than women, but both sexes are equally likely to record and post videos," Pew said.

Related stories:

Check out Technolog, Gadgetbox, Digital Life and In-Game on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.

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