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  1. Google Chief Economist Video Explains PPC Advertising

    Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains in this 10-minute video the basics of search advertising with Google’s Adwords program. Some of the key concepts covered include bidding against competitors, click-through-rate, or CTR, the ever-elusive quality score of an ad and how that all affects an ad’s "Ad Rank."

    What many people don’t know is that you can outrank someone who bids more on a key phrase than you if you have a better quality score. Quality score is determined by how closely your key phrase, ad copy and website’s landing page relate to one another. Google wants people to get relevant results when clicking on advertisements, so this is how they achieve that.

    The video is very basic, but it is a wonderful illustration of how a very complex system works.

  2. Good Website Design Really Does Matter

    According to a recent poll done by Webcopyplus, the aethetics of a website design has a significant effect on how long users stay on your website. Almost 25% of web users indicated “poor visual presentation” as the number one element that drives them away from websites, up from 6.6% in 2007.

    When users were asked what’s most likely to drive them away from a website they said:

    • 50.9% indicated “slow load times”
    • 24.8% noted “weak web copy”
    • 24.2% specified “poor visual presentation”

    This trend seems to indicate that as the web continues to mature, simply having a web site is not enough. To compete you must have a website that stands out from the rest and focuses on what you need your visitors to do, IE: sign up for your newsletter, buy a product, fill out a contact form, etc.

  3. Another Good Site to Syndicate Articles

    3 Things to Look for When Syndicating Content

    One of the best ways to market your website and get more traffic and links pointing to it is by writing great articles about your field and then syndicating them. We’re always on the lookout for good places to syndicate content. But there’s so many sites to choose from…how do you know where your time is being well spent? Read on to find out!

    We recently ran across a site, Go Articles,  that has a good page rank, allows links back to your website (and they don’t use nofollow tags) and is free to post to – the three main things you should look for in an online syndication site.

    Page Rank

    Google assigns a page rank from 0-10 on all pages on the internet. That score gives you an idea of how well linked that page is. Building your own page rank depends on you getting links from other sites that have a decent page rank, which you can find out by using the Google Toolbar for your browser.

    Links

    Although it is suspected that you do get some minimal boost to your site for be simply mentioned on another website, but actually getting a link from another site to yours is where the real value is. But, in addition to having a link from a site with a decent page rank, you want to make sure that the link to you does not use the rel="nofollow" tag. That tag basically tells Google not to follow it, therefore removing any "link juice" that you may get from that incoming link. To check a site to see if they use nofollow tags on their links view your page source in a web browser and wade through the jibbersh until you see something like:

    <a  href="http://www.yoursite.com">This is a link</a>

    What you don’t want to see is this:

    <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.yoursite.com">This is a link</a>

    If you do, don’t bother getting a link from there. It’s mostly a waste of your time and you could be spending it at sites with more link "bang for the buck." Read this post for more on link building.

    Free

    There are plenty of places to pay to syndicate articles or post press releases, but in our experience the paid ones are only marginally better than the free ones, so if you can find free ones that meet this three-rule criteria,they are a good place to start.

    Also, don’t forget to check out an earlier post of ours about syndication that lists WAY more places to syndicate your content at! Note, every site in that list has not been checked for our above three-rule criteria, so use at your own risk!

  4. Google Apps Outlook Sync

    Google has just released a new product called "Google Apps Sync for Outlook" that allows people on Google Apps to continue to use Outlook, but not need a Microsoft Exchange server. See the details here. That is a great new addition as this could save businesses a lot of money by not requiring an Exchange server anymore to sync up company contacts, email and calendars.

    The only bummer is you have to have the Premiere Edition of Google Apps and not the free, "Basic" edition. 

  5. Tasks: My Favorite Google Apps Addon Now With Calendar Integration

    Google recently added an addon feature for Google Apps called tasks which shows a list of to-do items in your mail view. You can turn it on by going to Settings –> Labs and look for "Tasks." I love this addon because it puts a list of to-do reminders where I spend a good portion of my time – in email. Tasks can even be viewed on your phone.

    Even more recently, Google added task integration with Google Calendar, so you can schedule tasks and easily refer to them when in Calendar view as well – here’s more information from Google about it.

    Did I mention Google Apps is free for 50 accounts or less? Once you see what it’s capable of, it will revolutionize your workflow.

  6. 5 Ways to Market Your Site Using Social Bookmarking

    Social bookmarking is a relatively new concept that allows people who visit a website to share information that they find with their friends or associates that they are connected to in a variety of social websites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious and more.

    This post will cover 5 ways that you can get more traffic to your website using social bookmarking as well as bleed over into link building in general as the two are closely related.

    1) Make it easy to share. Make sure every page on your site that you want to get links to has an easy way for people to share it with others – news articles, pages, ecommerce products, etc. There are a number of tools out there, such as Sharethis.com that will give you a snippet of code that you can easily drop in to any page on your site. Also, many content management systems have this feature built in.

    2) Share your own articles. Once you write a killer article or press release, share it with your group of contacts in the social media sites that you participate in. Don’t be afraid to endorse your new article on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

    3) Bookmark other sites. Use a service such as Delicious to develop your own directory of useful links. Other people who trust your opinion will see what other sites you’ve found to be interesting. This also works with link promotion sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati (if it’s a blog post) and many, many other sites.

    4) Comment on other people’s bookmarks. If other people are alredy drawing traffic from a great link, post a comment if you can to get your branding associated with that person’s success as well. This is great for blogs in particular. Comment on other people’s posts (but keep it pleasant!)and offer additional thoughts or just some encouragement.

    5) Ask people for links. If you know that your article or post would be particularly of interest to another website community, trade organization, etc., ask them if they would mind linking to your article. In fact, use our free link-building tool to make sure you get the best formatting for that link. If it is truly a good article or post, there’s a good chance you’ll get good links to it.

    These are just a few tips to demonstrate how you can leverage social bookmarks to better promote your site. Stay tuned for more tips!

  7. Blogging on Blogging

    Well, I’m sitting in a workshop on blogging this morning. Although I’ve been blogging for years, I figured it’s always a good idea to keep learning and it never fails to surprise me how much there is to know, even on a topic that you consider yourself an expert in. I figured I’d take the opportunity to blog about it 🙂 The speaker for this event was Denise Tawwab and you can check out her website here: http://ncconnected.org

    The bad news – In the pre "Web 2.0" world, when customers or
    clients were disgruntled, they would typically call your support number
    and let you know…and perhaps, at worst, tell a few of their friends.
    But with the current online social media phenomena, if you make a
    client unhappy, they are only a few clicks away from telling the whole
    world about it. And posts on the internet never go away.

    The good news
    – Because of the accessibility, you can wield the power to promote your
    company in a very large arena with a very small budget. All it takes is
    your time.

    Types of Blogs:

    1. CEO Blog – this is when the owner of a company blogs, usually for promoting the business or industries related to the business
    2. Executive Blog – Just like #1, but involves a group of people
    3. Group Blog – When any group of people share a blog
    4. Company – supported Blog – When employees are encouraged to blog internally to the company
    5. Topical Blog – Blogging on a particular topic (duh!)
    6. Promotional Blog – Blogging for the purpose of promoting something
    7. Advocacy Blog – Blogging for the purpose of raising awareness about something

    Links:
    http://www.technorati.com
    http://blogsearch.google.com
    http://blogpulse.com
    http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com

    For 50 Power Tips for Blogging, view Denise’s blog here: http://denisetawwab.wordpress.com

  8. Taking Full Advantage of RSS

    I’ve been blogging for some time now, and one of the best aspects of blogs – being easily syndicated via RSS feeds, has one big downfall: about 80% of the people in the world have no idea what RSS Feeds are. Enter Feedburner, a great service, recently acquired by Google, that takes RSS feeds and makes them able to be subscribed to via email – a technology anyone can appreciate. We have used Feedburner for a long time now, and recently we found a service that seems to leave it in the dust…along with many of the other email services out there like Constant Contact and iContact which cater to more sophisticated email newsletters.

    MailChip is an online email marketing service not unlike Contant Contact or iContant, but offers the ability to send out newsletters pulled from RSS feeds, just like Feedburner. And the best part is the price. It’s about half of the price of Constant Contact and iContact and has just about all the great features, like very nicely-designed email templates and the ability to manually sign up subscribers to your list, which Feedburner (also free) lacks.

    MailChip has the ability to also track user actions via Google Analytics, which is…wonderful. Not to mention it’s very easy to use and is FREE for those out there with 100 subscribers or less. And if you have more than that, $10 a month is enough to get you rolling, which is less than most other enewsletter options out there. 

    So, we’re going to give MailChip a try and I have a feeling it’s going to become the RSS email syndication service of preference that we’ll be recommending to our clients from now on.

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