One of the coolest parts of being an author is receiving unannounced foreign language copies of your book in the mail. Last week we received the Polish version, which they apparently named “E-Business.” So watch out, Czech Republic; Poland just gained a competitive advantage.

Sandra is upset about a minor color shift in the cover design. And that button label is way too long! But otherwise it looks very nice - great job on retaining the page layouts!

For the English version and related freebies, visit http://www.WebDesignForROI.com.

How Efficient and Effective is Your Marketing?

As I write this, the U.S. economy has been declared officially in a recession. And for all of us who aren’t big enough and/or incompetent enough to warrant a government bailout, it’s a challenging season, one full of re-evaluations.

A cultural sign of the times: I heard an NPR radio program delve into the origins of the phrase “tightening one’s belt,” complete with interviews of belt manufacturers. In happier times, I might’ve found this an amusing play on words, but now? I found myself cringing just a bit at the light tone, thinking of friends who’ve lost their jobs.

But back to the current economic challenges, and the opportunities they present.

Yes, I did say opportunities, and I don’t mean it in a Pollyanna, “the sun will come out tomorrow” sort of way. I mean that this is a time when businesses can discover more efficient, effective and high-return ways to market and sell than they’ve used in the past.

Marketing Efforts: Areas to Expand or Improve

If your company has not evaluated the following initiatives recently, it’s time to give them another long, hard look:

(Read the full article…)

I’m one of four authors now writing the Just Behave weekly column on Search Engine Land. In a sure sign that I really suck at this whole social media thing, it only now occurred to me to cross-post that on my own company’s blog. Better late than never, though. So here’s a quick summary of the two columns I’ve written so far, with links over to Search Engine Land for the full articles. As always, all constructive criticism is welcomed.

Wagging the Long-Tailed Dog: Search Behavior & The Economy

As the head of a search agency, I admit that I was somewhat bemused at first by this whole financial crisis we’re having. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t like seeing people suffer, and it hurts to see the impact that a slowing economy is having on many of my friends and neighbors. But as a longtime critic of traditional media and promoter of Search, I couldn’t resist feeling a little smug knowing that traditional ad budgets were about to be cut and the move to online media accelerated as advertisers started focusing more heavily on ROI. Given that Search accounts for almost half of online media spending, that trend would be a good thing for Search and, selfishly, my company – right…? The big picture search trends aren’t going to change dramatically. More people will continue to search more often no matter what, so what could possibly go wrong?

Full Article…

Two Little Things That Make A Big Difference

A lot of the focus in the search marketing world—both paid and organic—is on the technical and quantitative side. And that’s understandable, given the technical background of many of the practitioners and the perception that those elements are relatively easy to control. But many search marketers do themselves and their clients a disservice by not taking a more balanced view, arming themselves with the tools that a solid understanding of the search user experience (SUE) can provide.

With all the talk about how to achieve high rankings, the right growth curve to target for inbound link counts, PageRank shaping (which always makes me think of Suzanne Sommers, like she’ll be pimping the PageRank Shaper as the next Thigh Master), eking out higher Quality Score, and the like, it’s easy to lose sight of the role that actual users play in determining the success of our search campaigns. But user experience considerations often play as large a role as any of the other topics that search marketers regularly discuss. The trick is figuring out where to focus your attention.

To provide a shortcut, here are two quick tips on SUE issues that don’t get a lot of attention yet have a big impact on results. The first tip focuses on how to increase organic traffic by achieving a higher CTR on your organic search listings. The second discusses how to reduce the bounce rate on your site by ensuring a good first impression.

Full Article…

In the past couple of years, Closed Loop Marketing has had more and more companies contact us who were actually already running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns - some managing in-house, some outsourcing to other agencies. So if they were already active in PPC, then why were they contacting CLM? Because by-and-large, these companies were quite disappointed in their PPC campaigns, with results ranging from mediocre to downright dismal, and they were searching for SEM guidance.

CLM was hired to audit and essentially ‘make over’ these accounts, and the results across-the-board have far surpassed even our expectations. At the Web Builder 2.0 conference last week in Las Vegas, I had the pleasure of speaking to this at a session called Extreme Makeover: SEM Edition. In this session, I shared the common pitfalls that we see companies fall into time and time again, the strategies that CLM applies to successfully remedy these common PPC-killers and the final outcomes of our clients’ Extreme SEM Makeovers. In that same spirit, CLM has created ‘SEM for ROI - Top 10 SEM Inspection Checklist’. This checklist represents what we consider some of the most impactful elements to critique first within your PPC campaigns to find areas for improvement.

#1

Download a Search Query Performance Report from Google AdWords (note that such a report is not available in Yahoo or MSN - only Google). Mine this for more keywords to add, as well as more negative keywords to add.

#2

Calculate your ROI from Broad, Phrase and Exact matched iterations of your keywords to determine profitability for each and adjust your match type strategy accordingly. This can parsed from the Search Query Performance report.

#3

Download a Placement Performance Report from Google AdWords (this report is not available in Yahoo or MSN). Use this to identify which Content Network Sites are not converting well, and set up site exclusions accordingly.

(Read the full article…)

OK, a little background: Sandra and I did a webinar for Aquent last month, and had over 2000 people register to attend. We thought that was pretty great. They also mentioned they were going to also put our slides up on SlideShare, but we didn’t think too much about that at the time.

In a follow-up post from the Aquent blog, Matt Grant noted that SlideShare had featured our presentation on the home page at one point, and that over 8000 people had viewed it so far. Wow. As Sandra said, we’d have spent more time on those slides if we knew they were going to get that kind of play. Anyhow, I went over to SlideShare to check it out and halfheartedly thought “I wonder if we’re on the Most Viewed list.” But we weren’t… Wait, that only shows the current day’s most viewed. What if I click This Week? Bingo:

That’s 8595 views for our presentation vs. 7354 views for Ms. Jolie.

As it’s taken me two weeks to complete this post due to a blog platform issue, my fifteen minutes of fame are long gone now. But still… to have our presentation get more views than something titled “Angelina Jolie Pictures” feels like a pretty major accomplishment. Especially with such unalluring title slide.

And now we’re the 6th Most Viewed for the month, still just ahead of Angelina. See it for yourself, before we roll off.

Maybe there’s a market for this whole Web Design for ROI thing after all…