I recently took my own endorsement advice and bought access to Spyfu for a PPC campaign I’m managing, which is having CTR trouble on some keywords.

Besides my use for my own campaign, the Spyfu membership – especially Domain Ad History tool – was useful in critically appraising this post from Epiphany, which discusses how Lego are apparently not buying keywords they’re targeting for SEO, an apparently obvious mistake. (more…)

Because beating Yahoo and Bing into a necessary merger was just too easy, and because they’re sitting on [Dr Evil moment] MILLIONS (ok….. BILLIONS) of dollars, Google’s AdWords team decided to rest on their laurels and take a few years vacation. (more…)

Guides

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/designing-for-mobile-web
http://mashable.com/2009/11/26/mobile-web-design/
http://abduzeedo.com/mobile-web-design
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20946338/Great-Mobile-Landing-Pages – A useful presentation for beginners. The authors created Movitas, which has the most affordable WYSIWYG mobile page creator I found. (Besides the free, uber-basic Movylo.)

Mobile Web Design Galleries
http://www.mobileawesomeness.com/mobile-web-resources/ – A blog and design gallery with useful resources linked
http://www.mobisitegalore.com/index.html – Another gallery

WYSIWYGs

https://movitas.com/Movitas/pricingComparison.aspx
http://www.tekora.com/en/ – Another mobile WYSIWYG
Very basic: http://www.movylo.com/
Really pricey: http://mobify.me/features/

Slice Shops Turn PSD and AI Graphics Into XHTML, WML etc

http://www.mobilizetoday.com/xhtml-conversion – Seemed to have pretty affordable pricing for slicing up graphics into mobile landers, but it wasn’t clear if they’d do WML either…
https://w3-markup.com/ – A site that will slice your graphics into a working lander, but they don’t do WML. Use them if your target is newer devices that can support 320px wide graphics etc.
http://www.zestadz.com/help/help_landing_page_tool – Unclear if you need to use Zestadz to get their tool, however.

If you liked this post on mobile tools and resources, add my rss feed to your reader!

It’s a fairly well know tip amongst AdSense users that (more…)

A: When you rank for coupon terms plus your brand. A guest post by yours truly at my friend Dean Chew’s site, Chewie.co.uk .

Some other recent guest posts of mine: (more…)

I’ve been reading up on the Content Network before launching a first campaign there in years. The following’s a list of posts I’ve found useful and the key takeaways. They may repeat and overlap in some ways. That repetition is summarized below. The links are accompanied by notes on what’s unique in that guide. (more…)

(We’re continuing our SphinnCon deadblogging, this time with coverage of the web analytics panel. Previously we’d been discussing analytics with a internal search case study from Adi Reguev, and PPC with material from Naomi Sela on the content network, ad writing and split testing with Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach, and mixed link building / ppc notes from my panel/ Dan Sumeruck.)

Michal Neufeld – Google Analytics – Tying Adwords Into Analytics

Some pros of tying the two together:
- Understand the whole funnel, from search to site exit
- Instant and granular view of ROI on AdWords (more…)

Continuing my SphinnCon PPC coverage…

Naomi Sela – Compucall

She blitzed through the early part of her preso on the differences between CPC and CPM bids. One point I caught was that CPC was for ROI driven campaigns and CPM was for brand driven campaigns. [I find it sad that we still talk about advertising as an expense where we don't care if it makes sales - even brand campaigns should be generating an ROI, even if it's only an early stage lead.]

Optimization tips:

- Build and use predefined lists of sites per vertical. If you run an automotive campaign, keep the list of sites that were profitable for the next automotive campaign. Verticals are broadly defined here. EG Economics for adults and sports for kids or social. (more…)

This is the continuation of yesterday’s post featuring my deadblogging coverage of SphinnCon, the recent SMX-affiliated 1 day conference here in Jerusalem, Israel (where I’m currently living).

Ophir Cohen – Compucall Web Marketing (more…)

I didn’t live blog the sessions at SphinnCon, but I did take a good amount of notes. Here’s what I’ve got from my own link building session and from the first PPC session. (more…)

Get the scoop at Janet’s Search Marketing Sage: “Two Must Have Plugins for Landing Page Testing.” The second one you probably never heard of, but Janet makes a great case for !

I just spent a few hours creating and editing an affiliate PPC campaign with Facebook Ad Manager, a Firefox extension that lets you mass-create, upload and split test ads (including split-testing images) on Facebook.

Now, while Facebook Ad Manager saved me a bunch of time, I screwed up with my Prosper 202 tracking setup and so the whole campaign needs to be rebuilt from the start.

Here’s what happened, and how to avoid it happening to you. (more…)

Is PPC necessary? Why is PPC necessary or not? If so, when do I need to do it? (more…)

In no particular order, here are the folks I’m looking forward to seeing at Affiliate Summit East, where I’m on the agenda to speak. (more…)

Here’s what I’ve experienced and learned in the past year. Feel free to skim, but as with my scratchpad first discussing submarine crawling, what you read here today may be industry-changing search news in 6 months… (more…)

Link buying advice often sounds something like, “Get links from relevant sites and pages for the greatest boost to your rankings.” Link buying advice is often wrong.

According to everyone’s favourite content network guru, keyword selection on the content network needs to be based on demographics. That’s why I saw the following weight loss ads on a page that had nothing to do with weight loss, and nor did the site hosting the page. (more…)

The Pirate Bay – the world’s largest peer-to-peer site, which focuses on torrent technology – lets you view what people are searching for (Not Safe For Work (NSFW)) as well as its tag cloud (NSFW), which I presume is what people are sharing, in the most literal sense.

At the risk of stating what may be obvious to most SEOs, when pirates share their booty, keyword research is a lot easier. (more…)

The classic formula for copywriters, AIDA – attention, interest, desire, action – can be applied easily with banner ads. I’m thinking of 125×125 ads and larger here, so microbanner advertisers may find this more challenging – but then, why are you using microbanners to begin with?

Attention: Frame 1: Ask a question that relates to the prospect’s need. “Want more sales, more easily?” (more…)

Nothing new here for the marketing pros in the audience, but you intermediate guys and newbies will like today’s post on why you need to rank for purchasing oriented terms rather than selling ones, imho… I want to expand on Seth Godin’s bit on making a new market vs taking a share of an existing market. (more…)

… while the Bloc Quebecois are seen on AdSense blocks on Cyberpresse, (more…)

If you do, let me know in the comments or by email and you’ll be given access to test things out as well as a free copy of both plugins when they’re publicly released. One of them helps make minisites in wordpress for PPC landers, and the other lets you figure out when jerks steal your content and which of your members said jerks are, so you can kick em out.

On a related note, I’m preparing several feature-quality posts, as well as guest posting and contributing to other posts, and they take time. So please be patient – I assure you it’ll be worth it. And if you haven’t seen them yet, check out my best posts and ideas.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of the posts I’m working on to get you salivating:

Internal Link Building – PageView & Time On Site Booster
Sitepoint SEO Forum: A Study on Moderator Behaviour And Its Effects On Membership
PPC Panel Uber-Coverage (Multiple Conference, multiple panel notes)
Growing Online Business Trend: Commoditization of Data
Sue The Bastards! How Porn Sites Could Be The Next Frontier In Class Action Lawsuits

So… get my rss feed. You’re going to come back anyways when they all make the frontpage of Sphinn (maybe not the ppc panel, depends how comprehensive it is and thus worthy of being promoted or not).

(I promise to be back with premium material next week. For now, here’s for your own entertainment…) My friend Nick recently got an apology from Facebook Ads for disapproving his campaign(s) erroneously. A commenter wrote: “Get the same comment from the Adwords team and surely the end of the world is neigh [sic].’ Well, it appears the end is nigh, as I got this in my email: (more…)

In the world of business, lots of figures are thrown around. There’s a whole school of thought in the world of investing that only looks at a company’s financial statements and decides whether or not to buy their stock based on those numbers. The most important factor of all, (more…)

You heard it here first folks: Google has recently updated its keyword tool to share precise volume numbers. Whereas the tool only returned relative numbers before, it now shows the precise amount of monthly search that occurred last month, as well as an average amount of monthly searches. (more…)

The answer came to me while reading up on advertising. Studies show it takes a certain frequency – most people place it around 7 times – for an ad and its message to be remembered. It would obviously be silly to just credit the last impression for finally getting the target consumer to get the advertiser’s point when the other 6 clearly were part of the process. Yet that’s a question many pro marketers have! (more…)

At SMX West, one of the most interesting things I learned was that an advertiser who spent $30,000 on banners saw a 20% lift in branded search. When you consider how well branded search converts, that’s good news, especially if that demand lasts (for the caveats on measuring true branded search ROI see “What Every SEO Needs to Know About Branded Search“). This post is going to explain how you can use the link graph to get similar lifts in your branded search, (more…)

Update: Check out this “How to forecast SEO ROI” article if calculating the ROI on SEO is the info you want.

What follows is an editorial / research article showing that SEO is valuable – but not explaining how to calculate it.

I was asked what the ROI on SEO is a few times at a recent business event, and decided that it was about time someone spoke up for us organic search marketing experts. The sad truth is that we SEO Experts are grossly underpaid! Let’s look at some stats (or damned lies, if you prefer). (more…)

One of my favourite things to do when browsing the web is take screenshots of interesting things I notice, particularly in the SERPs, but also on other sites. It’s an easier way of taking notes and learning from others. Featured below are some sites you know, like DoshDosh, Treatment Search, Sphinn and others.

There’s also the genuinely stupid Stupid.com, some much more intelligent Sphinn spammers who’ve carefully observed what tips us off to spam, and more. In the interest of load times, I’ve linked to some pictures rather than post them here. Enjoy! (more…)

Want to find out competitors’ keywords? Here’s how to find what keywords competitors use on their sites – and protect your own!

(more…)

You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. (more…)

Scratchpad, for those of you who don’t know, is my informal column. Take the ideas for what they’re worth and ignore the style.

Questions

Q1: What is the best measure of attention equity? Links? Daily visitors? Repeat visitors? Subscribers? Trends in the prior statistics? Something else?

Q2: Is scannable content contributing to (more…)

Here is the final campaign data of my two Facebook flyer campaigns, both of which were terminated December 3rd. All things told, spending under $2 for about 30,000 impressions seems like a sweet deal to me! Plus, I got some clicks and awareness, and it helped me make a good industry connection that has since translated into a few links. So while Aaron paid $500 for links through AdWords, (more…)

I know that aggressive ad positioning, especially when your site is new, are a flag for spam with Google’s algorithms. I created a blog on fishing once that had ads in the topleft and in much of the sidebar, which led to me having to make it through a Captcha for each post. What’s interesting to me now is the question, does aggressive ad publishing decrease PageRank? (more…)

From the NYT (yes, that link is a nofollow and no, it’s not by accident) comes news that Montreal company (I love our city!) Weblo is helping users sell advertising on their Facebook profile pages. That’s not all though. Weblo is also empowering users to sell ads on their Youtube, Blogger, Myspace, Orkut and other web profiles. (more…)

Since Facebook announced their new ad platform, they were allowing advertisers with existing Flyers campaigns to continue running the campaigns until said campaigns were paused or deleted. Now, those campaigns will be automatically shut off by Facebook on December 3rd. (Edit: This is gaining traction at Sphinn. Please Sphinn it to help it go hot!) (more…)