eWhisper.net

• WebGuild: Beginner’s Guide To Using Twitter

  Nice overview and guide to Twitter.

  (tags: twitter)

• Test Ad
  • Text ad Headline
  • Description line 1
  • Description line 2
  • Display URL
  • Destination URL
• Local business ad
  • Headline (try business name in the headline, this is one of the few times that’s very effective)
  • Description line 1
  • Description line 2
  • Display URL
  • Destination URL
  • Favicon
  • Business logo
• Image ad
  • Static
  • Flash ad
• Video ad
• Mobile
  • Phone only
  • Carriers
  • Mobile site only
  • Mobile + phone
• Keyword Match type
  • exact
  • phrase
  • broad
• Ad Groups (or campaigns)
  • negative
  • negative embedded
• Ad Position
  • Top
  • Right
• Max CPC
• Times
  • Time of day
  • Day of the week
  • Month of the year
• Bidding
  • Manual bidding
  • Auto bidding
  • Preferred bidding
• Landing Page
  • Homepage
  • Dedicated page
  • Microsite
  • Category page
  • Product specific page
• Websites
• Content network
  • CPC
  • CPM
  • Demographic
• Search network
• Google.com

• International Taxi Fare Calculator - World Taximeter

  (tags: travel)

• Microsoft Robotics

  I’m always amazed at products MS produces that no one knows about. Want to program a robot? Use MS robotics studio.

  (tags: robots)

• Find Your Ad - Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions

  Nice checklist for not only finding ads, but some good articles about adCenter and ad copy.

  (tags: adCenter)

• KPIs: An Actionable Few - adCenter Analytics

  KPIs are often misunderstood. This is a good read toward moving in the proper analytics direction.

  ” For a metric to be useful, it must be actionable. If you can’t influence it, for good or ill, it’s makes no difference.”

  (tags: analytics, kpi)

• Google Website Optimizer - 101 FREE Tips

  (tags: websiteoptimizer)

• Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog » Throw the Bad Clicks Out

  How to run an invalid clicks report on YSM.

  (tags: ysm)

Hosts and registrar’s have different responsibilities. They both have supreme control your visibility online, and one should not use the same company for both - ever.

A host’s duties are to make sure your website is up, running, responsive, and give you support when something goes wrong.

A registrar’s duties are to keep your domain name safe, alert you when there are problems, and keep you in the loop on anything strange going on with your domain names. We’ve all heard stories about hosts who suddenly turn off a site and put the domain name on hold. If you host with the same company as is your registrar, you can lose both in a single moment.

If you keep your host and registrar separate, then if the website goes away, you can easily setup your site somewhere else (assuming you make regular backups) and change the DNS at your registrar. If you have many websites, use multiple hosts and keeping your website backed up at another host (behind a login so it can’t be spidered). If the site goes down at one host, change your DNS at your registrar and your site should be back up in a matter of hours (these days it takes a max of 24 hours for a DNS to re-propagate, and sometimes you can see it in a matter of a couple hours).

If your registrar freezes your domain, you’re in big trouble. Always keep another TLD or two of your site (and it’s good practice to own the .net, .com, etc of your websites) so that you can use another version why you work out the problems.

Use more than one registrar for those alternate TLDs. If you keep the .com name with your favorite registrar, the .net with a second registrar, and the .org with yet a third - you can usually recover while the resolution process is ongoing.

Own the alternate versions of your domain (at a different registrar) name pointing to your website. Make sure that those domain names 301 to your site and do not get indexed (you don’t want example.com and example.net both indexed with the same content as that will cause many SEO issues).

If your main domain is going to be down for a while (such as weeks or months during a lawsuit or a shady registrar); remove the 301 and let your site be re-indexed at the new domain. Unfortunately, you will lose most of your traffic as this will be considered a new domain and you can’t setup a 301 from a domain you don’t control (i.e. you can’t 301 your old domain to your new one as you no longer control that domain). When (or if) you regain control of your domain name, put the 301s back in place and return to your original DNS configuration.

If you have PPC or other media campaigns, change them to the new domain immediately. Don’t pay for traffic going to nowhere.

For information about 301 vs 302 see Matt’s post, you should be familiar with the difference depending on the circumstances of your site or domain being unavailable.

I’d also recommend trying to own the .com of your domain (which isn’t always possible).

My favorite registrar is Moniker.com. Register.com has one of the best APIs for bulk managing domain names and DNS entries. Both Google and Yahoo use MarkMonitor.com these days, which is good for large domains where you want to monitor a variety of domain uses (if this is your goal, also check out CSC Corporate Domains, INC which manages live.com). Google has a close relationship with enom.com, which has been a fairly reliable system. (Note: I have relationships with some of the above companies, but as with all my posts, this info is solely my opinions and I don’t receive funds from the above companies).

Worthwhile read (warning PDF file), http://www.cscprotectsbrands.com/pdf/029-031-TW-March_08-Searche.pdf, about domain tasting and searching for domain names.

Hosts can be cheap, and some cheap hosts are just fine depending on your goals and traffic. As with most things, you get a level of support based upon how much you’re paying. Pay for a cheap registrar, and you usually get zero support. When comparing hosts vs registrars, some people can get away with a cheap host. If you site goes down, it’s not that bid of a deal to move websites. Losing or having a domain name suspended can be devastating. Pay for a good registrar. Know your registrar’s policies. It’s easy to recover from a bad host, a bad registrar can ruin a business.

• Is Your Consumer Using Social Media? - Advertising Age - Digital

  (tags: socialmedia)

• Universal Mccann International Social Media Research Wave 3 » SlideShare

  Nice presentation on global social trends.

  (tags: socialmedia)

• Keyword Trends in Google Analytics With Greasemonkey: Juice Analytics

  If you use google analytics, give this script a try.

  (tags: google+analytics)

The war between SEO and PPC traffic continues to wage every day. Why would you pay for traffic when you can get it for free? Why would you invest in SEO when there are no guarantees? My blog got Dugg but I didn’t get any conversions, social traffic is a waste of time. Bloggers aren’t journalists, I don’t want links from a blogger, give me the New York Times instead. Local traffic is too time consuming.

I’ve created a very basic chart of how I think of traffic. It’s a basic outline, not a detailed look at every advertising medium.

However, before I list out the chart, I must once again share two thoughts.

SEO is not free traffic. I got my start in SEO (almost 10 years ago) and I’m still a fan of SEO. However, if you are a DIYer (do it yourselfer) the monthly cost of SEO is:

• ((what your time is worth (or how much you would make if you were doing something else)) x (number of hours)+
• (cost of paid links) +
• (programmer time in redoing your CMS) +
• (copywriters) +
• (other misc items which can range from server configs to paying for diggers)

All this for non-guaranteed results that can go away in a single update. Anyone who lived through the Florida update understands how fast traffic can go away. This doesn’t mean SEO isn’t worth it (I’m a fan of SEO); it just means that it’s a source of traffic that should be integrated with other marketing ideas.

In the below chart, conversions is how good the conversion rate is. Traffic is a measure of how much is possible (on average, some niches and methods will be much more successful than others and there are always exceptions), and Awareness is essentially Branding.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of advertising types. There are also exceptions to every single rule; so this is only a guideline and anyone can easily argue that any one of these can be better than another depending on the circumstances.

This is a quick list I wrote on a Sunday morning. It’s not perfect, one can debate every statement. It’s a starting point to illustrate some differences.

It’s also worth nothing there’s a difference between advertising and marketing.

…advertising is the paid promotion of goods and services. Advertising is an outlet for your creative message. Advertising is about reaching consumers. While reaching consumers is important, the message that’s delivered to those consumers is what makes them wish to do business with you instead of your competition.

Advertising is reaching consumers. Marketing is communicating with consumers. We shouldn’t be having conversations about just how to reach searchers and serve ads to them. Instead, we should be having conversations about how to connect with searchers once they have seen the advertisements.

Source: Turn Your PPC Advertising Campaign Into An Effective Search Marketing Machine

If you’d like to see some stats of social vs SEO vs PPC vs Press releases, I think this is a good article: http://www.ewhisper.net/blog/traffic-does-not-convert-the-same-seo-vs-ppc-vs-press-releases-vs-social-bookmarking/.

As you can see, when you balance the Pros, Cons, Conversions, Traffic, and Awareness for each of these advertising mediums - there is no one perfect type. It’s through an integration of different advertising mediums that one can sustain and grow a business model regardless of marketing rule changes.

In the next debate when someone asks you to compare PPC vs SEO vs Social; the conversation shouldn’t be should you do this and not do that. The conversation is how to use them together to create greater results.

Though synergistic advertising methodologies the benefits of each adverting type are enhanced to create marketing campaigns that are far better than any one medium could every produce.

• Crude PPC Trademark Rules Screw Hotel Franchise Owners, Best Western, Altus Oklahoma Hotels » aimClear Search Marketing Blog

  Good read about how PPC trademark resoltion can get in the way for companies.

  (tags: trademarks)

My newest article at Search Engine Land came out last Monday. It’s about what the new Yahoo minimum bid means your PPC campaigns.

I spent more time writing this article that almost any I’ve done in the past year. I had access to Yahoo decks, Yahoo PDFs, and Yahoo employees when I wrote this, and really tried to check the accuracy of everything as this is such a new change.

What I found fascinating was that while this column only produced 3 Sphinns; I received 34 contacts via my blog about the story. I think that falls somewhere in the top 20 ever received by this blog from a single post within a week (and it wasn’t even linked to from my blog - the only way to find this blog from the article is in the author section at the bottom of the article).

Sometimes social media looks like one thing (3 Sphinns is very little), while the results can be far different (I consider 34 contacts exceptionally high). Normally when my stories end up on social media sites, I receive very little comments, so I found this quite fascinating as it’s far from the norm that I see.

Enjoy the article, it’s worth reading as this is a change to the philosophy of minimum bids.

• ‘Unbelievable’ sportsmanship in softball game

  Do you preach fair play or actually live it?

• Technology & Marketing Law Blog: Injunction Requires Negative Keywords in Future Adwords Campaigns

  Finally someone understands what to ask the courts for when suing over trademark and broadmatch usage.

  (tags: legal)

• How to Optimize Local Business Profiles for Free Local Directories

  Good read for local SEO.

  (tags: local+marketing)

• keyword lists | geo targeted lists

  Create local keyword lists.

  (tags: local+keywords, keyword+research)

• How Much is a Top Google Ranking Worth to Your Business? : SEO Book.com

  Fantastic read. Correlates some SEO and PPC data.

  (tags: SEO)