[See Reference article at ShoeMoney's Website - This is the old VOTE HERE Link for Digital Vegetarian at ShoeMoney's website]

At WebmasterWorld in Las Vegas, I came across this competition called ‘Shoeperstar‘. Why should I be the blogger that gets to go? [NOTE: Aaron Kronis will be speaking at Pubcon 2009:]

Reason 1. I’m all about Rockstar SEO. I came to this conference with one goal. To learn how to become the Rockstar SEO that I’m going to be. It had nothing to do with trying to win any contests. It’s who I am. I did manage to win an iPod nano in a draw though, and luckily there’s this contest that Britt from Shoemoney/IZEA told me about.

(performing as ‘KRONiS’ in OHIO)

So, what IS an SEO Rockstar actually?

Well, I think it is someone who is constantly improving their knowledge of SEO, while learning how to monetize and also being able to perform some type of music in a way that is most excellent.

Reason 2. Webmaster World Pubcon – Being my first year, the goal in Las Vegas was to meet as many of the successful SEO people that I have been learning from by reading their blogs and to get lots of great ‘rockstar SEO’ pics. I really must say, I had a blast.

Reason 3. I recorded a CD that puts my music where my mouth is. You can download it from my previously unpublished industry link that also shows an EPK from my previous iteration of my band ‘KRONiS’.

Reason 4. I’ve been to NXNE (North by Northeast) in Toronto and have always wanted to go to SXSW but it was always too expensive and there was no way our band could afford to travel to it ourselves.

some random jamming from last night…testing macbook and crappy amp/backup guitar.

Reason 5. Check out the THERMOclinE Video for ‘Vacant Lot in 2000′.

• Aaron plays guitar in it, note the product placements for Line6, Ernie Ball MusicMan Guitars, Mesa/Boogie and Vibe Clothing. “After this beautiful model (yes we all have our model stories) I dated introduced me to a successful video producer – Rich Cureton, we were able to get a VideoFACT grant. MuchMusic paid for a video for my previous band THERMOclinE with their VideoFACT program that helps emerging artists with major label/indy distribution(Stamina/Sony) get the money to shoot pro quality music to help MuchMusic keep the 35% Canadian content of a higher quality. We were one of the first indie bands to ever shoot in HD in 2000 – George Vale came on as a favor and shot with the HD camera in one scene on rollerblades…a $200,000 camera! George directed videos for Major label Canadian artists like Edwin as well as director for the video AGAIN by Alice in Chains, one of my favorite bands.Reason 6. I have had product and artist endorsements from: Vibe Clothing, KMS Haircare(see spikes below)”

• spikes thanks to KMS haircareMesa/Boogie Amplifiers, Ernie Ball MusicMan guitars and strings, Line6 Technology, Airwalk shoes. You can’t get these companies to easily help you without doing something right. I’m not trying to sound like a dick here, I’m trying to justify my reason for winning the Rockstar SEO contest!

Reason 7. I was hired to write songs for rock operatic diva Patrizia

who hired Steve Thompson to produce the project. I got to jam out with him and record several songs including a cover of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ . Steve is known for mixing Appetite for Destruction(Guns & Roses) and Metallica’s ‘And Justice For All album’. When he put ‘Blackened’ on to show me something, I was pretty stoked. The first song I ever learned all the way through was ‘One’ by Metallica which is on the Justice album.

[future insert video of aaron playing clean part of one with clean solo TO BE DONE TONIGHT CHECK BACK]

Reason 8.This is very rockstar:Decided to move to California on May 15th and started playing 7-string guitar that day for Unraveled based on the research online looking for amazing talent.

This was the best band I could find. Up until that day I only played 6 string guitars…mainly because when I was 16 I tried to buy a 7-string Passion and Warfare guitar that was autographed by Steve Vai – in Toronto at Long & McQuade – and as I was buying it, someone else bought it from a different sales person.

I’m glad that never went through as I may not be here now had that happened!

– on the marqee as Unraveled at the famous Whisky a Go Go.

We’ve already performed at the Whiskey a Go-Go on Sunset in Hollywood and will be at the Vu bar in Newhall on Feb 1st, then the Dragonfly Bar on Santa Monica Boulevard on Feb 5th with our friends in FLATLINE who just got signed to Stand and Deliver Records.

I play in a band called UNRAVELED who has a show this Feb 5th with FLATLINE.

Read more about this at www.aaronkronis.com.

Reason 9. I had a PUBCON TREE at my desk for Xmas:
First, I took it out of my storage unit at Hermosa Self Storage,

Next, I brought it down the long trippy hallway,

Then, I decorated it with trinkets form Pubcon

- An Xmas tree at my cubicle decorated with pubcon swag, etc.

Reason 10. I have a video of me and Tony Hawk skateboarding together on a ramp when I was 14.

It WILL be ‘You-tubed’ and added/linked here.

[return to this post to see my digitized old VHS videos including the home skate vid we made with tony hawk at 14 yrs of age for me.]

Reason 11. I do my best to help out, in december I went to Idlewylde to play at a camp for sick kids thanks to the kind folks at theartofelysium.org

E.ly’.si.um: a place or a condition of ideal happiness

Mission- The Art of Elysium, a non-profit 501(c) (3) organization founded in 1997, encourages working actors, artists and musicians to voluntarily dedicate their time and talent to children who are battling serious medical conditions. We provide artistic workshops in the following disciplines: acting, art, comedy, fashion, music, radio, songwriting and creative writing.
Contact: info@theartofelysium.org
The Art of Elysium!

Reason 12. On Sunday Dec 12th I got to jam ‘Plush’ backstage with the Metal Skool guys at the Dog Rescue benefit that my good friend Jay put on with his wife Rene.

Reason 13. For some reason a photographer took some pictures of me wearing IZEA clothing with several rockers. [plan was to insert photos here...still waiting for them,..the post must go on! ungh]

Reason 14. The Donnas – I had a pic taken with them at the dog rescue show – still waiting to get it from the photog…They’re doing great this year, producer and my CDN buddy, Jay Ruston has recorded a new album with them which we saw them perform songs from live at Safari Sam’s on Sunset not too long after they were on the cover of billboard in June.

Reason 15. Paperback Hero – with whom I performed at Universal CityWalk in June, trading of roles in Papberback Hero with ex-Savage Garden and current Lifehouse guitarist, Ben Carey who had to borrow my rig as he was gearing up for Carson Daly that week with Lifehouse. They also played at the dog show, it was cool because i had to drive around listening to there CD like a crazed fan when I had to learn their songs in a week. So seeing it acoustic was pretty awesome. We messed around a little in soundcheck too.

Reason 16. I had tix to see Alice in Chains with Velvet Revolver the week that I got back from Pubcon..WOW what a show. I got two picks from Jerry Cantrell to add to my pick collection:

Pantera picks from shows Aaron attended – see more at Aaron’s myspace page

Reason 17. I think King of the Hill is just BEAVIS Grown up… or maybe BUTTHEAD

Reason 18. I told Lori from Poplabs SEO firm that I was ‘really good at these things and to pay attention’ right before they drew my name to win an iPod nano/video.

Reason 19.

Hornfists with: Jim Boykin

Reason 20.

Rand Fishkin, Rockin’ out after some heated discussions at Pubcon.

Reason 21. Bruce Clay

Reason 22. Some random beautiful Seo princess who I shared a cab with at Pubcon. Man SEO people are really friendly and helpful! Her name was Tanya. The photo doesn’t capture the shinyness of her outfit. update: Tanya Vaughan is the SEO for HP Worldwide and also is speaking at this year’s 2009 Pubcon in Las Vegas.- > You never know who you’ll meet at these events!

Reason 23. I’m white hat, and the ‘power of the white-hat’. Since the guys from Ecommerceonline.com gave me a nice flexfit white hat, i’ve been given a lot of phone numbers, for example like Amy from the club ‘Seven’ in West Hollywood.

however I’ve also recently received a badass flexfit black hat for xmas from my buddy Scott from Wpromote who also attended the conference in Vegas with us. The black hat also works well, however it started out on a bad note when I went to watch UFC and almost choked to death at a restaurant. Geez. it was kinda funny at the time how I dove towards to bar to spit out my food which I unsuccessfully tried to wash down with beer (usually works with water) which then foamed up and caused me to spit it out all over some people at the bar hahaha oh hell. At least I ended in a busboy’s tray to spit out the food. I could been killed! I was like I’m CHOKING not wasted drunk..hahah…at first everyone in a bar thinks the latter. I bought them a pitcher for their worries. Then the bar kindly reimbursed me – nice. They even didn’t charge me for the food. I HIGHLY recommend the Underground in Hermosa Beach for a laid back time. I also recommend CHEWING your food.

Reason 24. This cool Red Bull employee took pix of me with some hotties at ‘Seven’ and then e-mailed me after listening to my music. Apparantly Red Bull Records is going to be a solid company to submit to – just look at how many places carry their product. They aren’t going anywhere soon from this market and have tons of commercials.

Reason 25. Kick ass drummer Randy Cooke (Kelly Clarkson, Hillary Duff, Raine Maida, tons more) has joined forces playing drums in ‘KRONiS’ with me. I can’t wait to rock the west coast.

Randy is badass-he’s performing with RINGO STARR FROM THE BEATLES at the Ed Sullivan Theater this week on Late Night with David Letterman, also Rachel Ray and Craig Ferguson, then friday night at the Hard Rock on Sunset.

Now as a child I grew up listening mostly to Beatles radio hits. I learned about death when John Lennon was killed. Then my dad took me to see Beatlemania. I still have the button somewhere.

That was very amazing and I was very young.

Reason 26. I played the Whiskey with ‘UNRAVELED’

Reason 27. I played at City Hall in Toronto at the ‘Winter City Festival’ on Feb 4th of 2007 in -20C weather.

Reason 28. I have Kevin Mitnik’s business Card thanks to Crunchman.

Reason 29. I have Woz’s too.

Reason 30. I took the time to meet every panelist of every panel I went to and will be following up like a good boy.

Reason 31. When I rolled through Toronto for Christmas, I’ll rolled nicely in the executive suites provided by Nupad.ca

THANKS PAUL! my boy mr Paul Francis took great care of the accomadtions during my trek home at christmas this year.

Reason 32. I barter for lots of things in return for SEO. – Being Canadian I can only legally work for my kick ass employer – Wpromote.com

Reason 33. I have a set of Rand’s SEOMOZ cards from the card game they made of SEO people.

Reason 34. I made my own card.

Reason 35. Rae Hoffman invited me for ‘coffee’ in toronto. I hope she takes me up on this, I may get some links out of it and learn a hella lot as she had the best answers on most of her panels. (update: never heard back from her:( )

Reason 36. I’ve now (after my VIRGIN trip to vegas) seen things that I will never mention again.

Reason 37. I got a pic of Matt cutts doing the Hornfist.

Aaron Kronis w/ Matt Cutts and Lori L. from Texas(where SXSW is).

Reason 38. After winning an iPod I felt that I deserved a spin with my pretty conference pal.

Reason 39. RSS FEEDS FROM BLOG CATEGORIES INTO FACEBOOK – so simple. so do it!

Reason 40. I’ve never been this happy to have the job I have, live where I live, play in the bands I play in and there’s so much more to learn and do!

Reason 41. I’m friends with this famous hacker now, who recently hooked me up as an Artist liaison for en2go.net who are badass. WOZ is now on officially on the board of directors for en2go who I’m working WITH right now on a new venture. I’ll explain more later, but wire magazine has offered to interview Crunch who has asked me to join him for it..hopefully I’ll be able to blog more about that here in the near future.

Wozniak Backs Captain Crunch in Net Video Startup

By Marty Graham 01.15.08 | 3:00 PM

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak waits to buy an iPhone in June 2007.
Photo: AP/Noah Berger

Tech legend Steve Wozniak has signed on to the board of directors of en2go, a young publicly traded company founded by music innovator Tolga Katas and legendary phone hacker John Draper — better known as Captain Crunch.

Apple co-founder Woz’s assistant, Julie Roebuck, confirmed that the papers were signed Monday, and relayed questions from Wired News to Wozniak as he drove to an industry party. He said he was interested in the company’s technology, and drawn to the opportunity because of his long-standing friendship with Captain Crunch.

(read the article in wired)

Reason 42. The only way I can invoice any consulting has been through the Canadian record label I own called Stamina Records.

Not bad.

Reason 43. I’ve been learning how to reverse engineer software from some people I know from dc949.org who I intend to win an UBER pass at Defcon with for the CTF competition.

Reason 44. I sang a heavy metal version of ‘Lose Yourself’ with a version of ‘KRONiS’ from Ohio/Michigan at ‘The Shelter’ in Detroit, Michigan. consider inserting the mp3….maybe if people are nice.

Reason 45. I accidentally met a beautiful girl from Venezuela due to a typo.

Reason 46. Today I offered my parking spot to a poor girl driving around aimlessly as I knew she would appreciate it and I was leaving anyways.

Reason 47. I have friends and colleagues going to SXSW and this would be extremely beneficial to my career in several ways.

Reason 48. I have acting training and representation – I just can’t get paid for anything as I have no green card yet. Now winning a contest where I need to appear on camera is totally comfortable and would be really fun.

HEADSHOT:

Reason 49. Britt from Izea gave me a badass IZEA shirt which I accidently wore, then took photos with lots of rockers with it on.

Reason 49. Britt from Izea told me to enter. She’s also seen me on no sleep, hungover and buzzed from a combination of that and the free beer from Blogsvertise that took away my hangover.

Reason 50. According to the CEO of my company, ‘I won vegas’.

Reason 51. I can ice skate backwards and am a professional Snowboarding Level 2 Instructor (www.casi-acms.com) certified in Canada, also a Level 1 Freestyle coach.

Reason 52. My blog, digitalvegetarian.com, was named for the following reason, which I explained to several folks at pubcon, including Jim Boykin who gladly posed with the hornfists for my Rockstar SEO persona.

- Some guy was trying to be all ‘open source’ by converting a file from 96kbps as an MP3 to a 256kbps OGG file. It makes the file substantially larger and the quality cannot increase past 96kpbs, so it is a waste. I was like, ‘What are you a digital vegetarian’? I immediately purchased www.digitalvegitarian.com just to find out that I spelled it wrong, I blame some other substance. Luckily as an SEO I can fix things. The proper spelling is www.digitalvegetarian.com – but since they both work, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

Reason 53 http://www.digg.com/users/RockstarSEO

I Digg and people dugg my halloween costume as LEELOO from Fifth Element:

Reason 54. if you look at www.kronis.org in 1997 - I tried to create a site for musicians that clearly states you will never be charged money for this site. Where were you on the web in 1996? I couldn’t get .com them and I did try.

Reason 55. I met Paul Gilbert in Santa Monica while looking for a parking spot. He’s the most badass guitarist I’ve met here aside from Jesse from Unraveled.

Reason 56. I told Paul Gilbert that I saw them in Toronto at G3 (Joe Satriani, Paul Gilbert, John Petrucci) and how I covered Joe Satriani’s “SUMMER SONG” LISTEN TO MY VERSION OF SUMMER SONG with permission on my ‘Yours Forever’ CD, and that I play Petrucci’s guitars from ErnieBall/MusicMan

Reason 57. I came to California at age 14 to try and be a pro skater. I fell in love with this place and vowed to come back. I live here now in Redondo Beach and have finally started surfing.

(maybe insert some skateboarding images.)

Reason 58. My web 1.0 mailer from 1997.

Reason 59. I was DAMN close to inventing Google…. i just didn’t think monetization from ads.

Reason 60. This was my take on Yahoo! – it was a directory but for snowboarding. Not bad for 1996…

Reason 61. in 1997 I didn’t know about publishing content that was copywritten, nor did anyone care. I just new that text file guitar tablature was for the birds. Today’s solution is Guitar Pro or Finale. Back then, my solution was to scan in jpgs of the magazines and put them online. I think I may have been the first to do that for alternative rock in America… AND I USED JavaScript Popups! it doesn’t work in the archive, but here’s the songs, as posted (web 1.0):

• Daisy
• Interstate Love Song
• Vasoline
• Big Bang Baby
• Dead & Bloated:
• No Memory: sooner
• Dancing Days(Led Zep cover)
• Sin: ditto
• Big Empty: not done
• Art School Girl: not done
• Sex Type Thing: not done yet

Reason 62. I created ‘kroner’s killer tablature search engine‘ back in 1997.

Reason 63. In 1997 I created pages for my friends to go to that listed the bands who were playing at the EDGEFEST festival in Toronto as well as the Lollapalooza festivals.

Reason 64. Yours Forever is a possible hit song. Originally written for, get this, Spiderman 2! – the BS connection never panned out so I got help from Greig Nori of Treble Charger and then producer of Sum41. It went to the right people at Columbia who said, ‘Big names only’ and never listened to it. I took the spiderman lick OUT of the solo and the version we have today was completed.

Reason 65. I played a show recently with Unraveled and the guys in Tinhorn. I’m a big fan of Strange Brew, now I know Dave Thomas’ kids as 2 of ‘em are in Tinhorn! Very talented guitarist and solid drummer. When I was 17 went to The University of Western Ontario and the drinking age was 19. My ID read ‘Bob Mackenzie’ and pegged me at 22.

(Insert scan of western card).

Reason 66. After graduation I became one of the executives on the Nortel Student Union. I used to bring 500-1200 people to parties that initially were at the End Of Term (EOTP) but decided to implement and BOTP(beginning of term party) and also an MOTP (middle of term party) which was much better then meeting everyone at the end right before their co-op terms were finished.

Reason 67.

This was going to be 99 reasons… just got a little long so I decided to go with 69… here was my reason for 99 tho:

The reason I chose 99 to begin with is because of my boy, ‘Wayne Gretzky’ who really inspired me growing up. A quote from the great one, “You don’t score on 100% of the shots you don’t take”. I guess that is why I have so many irons on the fire in life…Oh and my sister’s backyard rink that her hubby makes yearly isn’t bad either!

insert pic of roxy’s rink and aaron w/gretzky ( i have them i swear!)

Just want to get this in the contest before its too late!

reason 68. – I got my work visa today finally~ so I’m in business baby.

reason 69 – all my friends at wpromote and my bro there who’s getting me the next step towards a greencard. SO i don’t have to marry anyone now! this kicks ass. thanks for reading. I’ve not been working on this the way I plan to because of my recent relocation to downtown los angeles to a sexy loft where I can do my music and work and just enjoy everything from a central location.

peace – hope to visit SXSW with you. Aaron