Starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers (“a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets”), Bing users will be able to search names in association with Twitter to see their latest Tweets come up in real time.

Example of Kara Swisher’s twitterstream in search results:

While it will be interesting to see how this initial phase of development is received by users, Bing is acknowledging the public’s demand for real-time search results.

Marketers should take note that this is just the latest example of the value in visibility amongst popular social networks and third party sites. In addition to the continued integration of social sharing on other popular sites (such as Digg and Flickr), social networks themselves are doing more to enhance their visibility for search engines.

Content that people might find valuable should not only be optimized on the company website.

As social sites like Twitter, Facebook and others continue to gain user attention, search engines will need to make adjustments to the type of content indexed in search results; and so will the online marketer.

Not everyone following you on Twitter is truly there to be your “friend”.

Beyond Twitter basics, here are five ways that I use for identifying potentially questionable accounts and Twitter spam.

Check Important Ratios
The first indications are in the numbers. Pay attention to the following red alerts, especially when the numbers reach the thousand mark:

• A profile significantly following more people than having followers
• Large numbers of followers/following without a significant number of comparable updates
• Large numbers of followers/following in a short period of time

Services like Twitterholic and Twitter Grader provide an easy way to look at when the account was created and provide a general “score” in comparison to others. Twitterholic provides a snapshot of the recent increases/decreases in followers and following counts as well.

Be aware that when first starting a profile, Twitter allows someone to follow a maximum of 2,000 others, until greater than 2,000 follow back. Keep that mind when reviewing reviewing profiles, especially those who list something like, “following: 1,999 and followers: 500“.

Check the Style of their Updates
Read through the profile’s history of recent updates to gauge if their style is in line with your taste and interests. Trends in a profile’s Twitterstream to consider:

• The percentage of updates which contain links
• The tone of their updates, particularly when links are included.
• How often they reply to other Twitter users

Part of the value in Twitter is certainly in sharing of information but take note if it appears the profile is just broadcasting links or just offering simple replies without much context.

Tone and profile objectives are important to note as well but keep in mind that there are popular Twitter profiles which rely solely on the distribution of links and provide very little conversation outside of their regular updates. For example, thousands of people follow woot.com because they trust the brand and acknowledge the type of updates they will be receiving by following.

This recommendation is more inline with “personal” profiles as opposed to company news feeds or information services.

Search for Reciprocity
Just because a profile is replying to others does not mean their really having a conversation. Use Twitter Search to identify how often others are replying to them or mentioning the profile in conversation.

If it turns out that very few people are replying back, retweeting their updates or acknowledging what they say, that should be considered a red flag.

Search for their Name in Other Locations
If you are really not certain about a particular account, search for their brand, real name and username in other networks and through Google. Legitimate online marketers should have presence in networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook or be involved in online communities related to their profession.

Verify that the information listed in the Twitter profile matches what else is documented in other social networks and third party websites.

Be careful clicking links in a questionable profile’s bio, especially if they are using a URL shortener such as tinyurl.com or Bit.ly which masks the domain name. Remember that even seemingly real domains can redirect to undesirable locations as well.

Focus on Your Objectives
Above all else, consider your original objectives with using Twitter. It might seem great to have hundreds or thousands of followers but will following everyone back have a positive impact on your end goals.

Services such as TweetDeck and the Seesmic Desktop provide better ways to organize the people you follow but it’s still difficult to effectively follow a large number of users if you’re on a mobile device (though TweetDeck is now available for the iPhone).

If an objective of your Twitter presence is to develop a large following be careful with tools that automate this process. It’s fairly easy to inadvertently follow a profile that might not be aligned with your interests. Regularly check the profiles followed to review their activity, information and ultimately if it still makes sense to stay connected.

Twitter Spam is Not Going Away
More than likely Twitter spam will get more advanced. In addition, as your profile develops and grows, so will the number of followers that might not provide value for your network.

If faced with spam or fraudulent activity, Twitter offers options for dealing with this, including their support forum and @spam profile for reporting spam activity.

At the least, Twitter users always have the option of completely blocking a questionable account from following them, which means your updates will no longer show up in their timeline and they will not be able to follow you.

Are there specific red flags that you check for when monitoring Twitter followers? We’d love to hear you thoughts and ideas on this issue via comments below.

Better Access to Your Content Network Sites

The new interface has streamlined the site exclusion process for us!  Not only that, but we can view the performance of all of the site we hand pick (via placements) as well as all of the automatic placements that are paired to us through the content network.  This easily gives us the ability to view the success of different sites and different placement strategies, and we can get a better feel for what each campaign or ad group is doing on the content network without having to run multiple reports.

We can also easily edit placements, manage bids, exclude them, or export them.  The previous interface did not allow such a streamlined and simplified way to interact with all of your content sites.  We also have the ability to see how sites perform, so we can make quicker decisions to pause, modify, or add different advertisement types to certain sites.  For instance in the group above the checked off campaigns are not performing nearly as well as the other campaigns.  With one click and one page view we can easily weed out poorly performing sites from our content campaign.  This is a huge benefit of the new interface.

A  More Powerful Search Query Report

We can now see what search phrases are triggering our ads!

This may show us that we need to refine negative keywords, add new keywords or themes, or abandon certain ideas altogether.   If we wanted access to this information in the old interface we would have to run several reports, and sift through many many lines of data.  The new interface has streamlined this process and broke up the data by ad group.  This means we can dig in to each campaign and see how we can best manage our impression share.  Secondly, like in the above example, we may not want to drive searchers looking for a phrase like “search engine marketing” to this ad and landing page, so we can quickly and easily add it as a negative keyword.

Graphs - Everywhere!

I am using the ads tab as an example of one of the more useful graphs that has been added into the interface.  (The Ads tab has been changed too - its much easier to test different TYPES of ads and modify your ads - but I’m getting off topic here.) Here we can see how clickthrough rate has changed throughout the designated period of time.

This may not seem like a huge change, but prior to this we’d have to use many many mouse clicks to see how CTR was affected over multiple periods of time, and ultimately we’d have to run reports so we could refer to and update the data accordingly.  And more than that, here is just one of the many places Google’s new interface has added a graphical representation of the data.

In Summary

I’ve showcased three changes that really streamline the process of managing your pay per click account with AdWords.  The unspoken commitment of the new interface is something along the lines of - more graphics, more data, less clicks - and as an account manager I absolutely appreciate this sentiment, and I think the streamlined nature of the new interface, as well as the visual representation of data are two steps in a very good direction.

However it is not perfect, and some nuances of the old interface that were really important got reduced or removed, so stay tuned for my next post where I talk about some of the changes that I do not like.

Related Blog Posts:

• Get Real With Regional Targeting

When you select “See search terms” you are presented with search queries that triggered your ads and brought visitors to your site via the ads.  This data has long been available through the Reports in Google AdWords, but the new interface brings the data right to your fingertips - all in one place for a particular Ad Group, a set of Ad groups within a Campaign, or for the entire set of Campaigns.

One data slice that has been particularly interesting to me is looking at  how people search by geographical location.

Our company is located in Massachusetts.  While we work with companies across the country, many companies search for agencies that are close to home.  So, if someone was looking for “B2B seo in georgia” (see the graphic below), we probably would not want our ad to be displayed (unless the searcher was open to working with an agency in other places).

In the example above, our ads are available for all searchers in the United States.

In the example below, we are working with a client who only serves people in Massachusetts.  We are running two different kinds of Campaigns - one targeting a national audience where people are searching for terms that include “massachusetts” or “boston”, and one Campaign that serves ads only to people searching within Massachusetts.

What we found when looking at the actual search terms people used to find our client is that, even in the ads targeted only to people residing in Massachusetts, they were often looking for eating disorder treatment facilities in specific states and cities:

While you can solve this issue by only bidding on keywords that contain the name of your city/state/region, it is probably a better idea to leave yourself open to searchers who may be agnostic to where you are located.

What to do?

Consider adding in the names of states (and their abbreviations), cities, locations, etc. into your negative keyword sets so that your ads are not triggered by searches for locations that are not a fit.

By adding these words into your negative keyword sets you will not only avoid wasting money on clicks from visitors that are likely a poor fit for you, you will also lift your Click Through Rate (CTR) because your ads will be shown less often & only to the more-qualified searchers.  A higher CTR will benefit your Quality Scores, and allow you to potentially lower your keyword bids and maintain a high position on the search engine results page (aka “SERP”).

To help you quickly manage the negative keywords you might want to use for states and their abbreviations, I have pasted a text version of the 50 states/abbreviations that you can copy, paste, and edit (deleting states that you do actually target and want to be found for):

U.S. States

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

State Abbreviations
AL
AK
AZ
AR
CA
CO
CT
DE
FL
GA
HI
ID
IL
IN
IA
KS
KY
LA
ME
MD
MA
MI
MN
MS
MO
MT
NE
NV
NH
NJ
NM
NY
NC
ND
OH
OK
OR
PA
RI
SC
SD
TN
TX
UT
VT
VA
WA
WV
WI
WY

Related Posts:

• 3 Things I Love About the New AdWords Interface
• 20 PPC Tips for 2009
• Keyword List Generator
• 7 Search Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers & Distributors
• 200+ Negative Keywords to Consider for B2B PPC

Although it is important to adopt a range of social media platforms, Facebook’s command on the online user’s attention is certainly eye opening. Even growing networks such as Twitter and Tagged only have a fraction of the comparable attention. In other words, while it is imperative to reach your market in the communities they gravitate to, pretty much every market has gravitated to Facebook.

That said, overall social networking was up 83 percent year over year and consumer adoption increased across seven of the top ten websites. Even with a 31% decline, MySpace still commands almost 5 billion minutes of the U.S. visitors’ online attention.

Facebook Versus Google
Don’t think that Google has not taken notice. Google is rapidly adopting more social initiatives, including Friend Connect, Profiles, support for RDFa, and a rapidly expanding Gadget library, which can be incorporated into a range of other user-generated Google services.

Even though 5.5 billion search queries in Google were conducted in April 2009, growth year over year was only 7.8% in comparison. ClickZ reports that 57 million users visited Facebook in February 2009 and 105 million Americans are using social media sites altogether.

What Does This Mean for Search Engine Marketing?
Failing to have a strategy within social networking sites means leaving millions of potential searches off the table. The online user has alternative ways to find information they’re looking for.

In some case, search has become more scrutinized. As the news of poisoned search results becomes more prevalent, people turn to those they trust most; their social network.

• Millions of keyword searches can be mined in Twitter conversations every day.
• Sites such as Yahoo Answers provide for direct visibility for almost any business industry and niche.
• Groups for almost every interest are forming in social communities like Facebook, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon

While search engines certainly won’t go away, there clearly are alternative options for people to find the information they are looking for online. It’s realistic to expect Google and the other engines to make adjustments to accommodate these trends and even if search engine traffic remains the priority (for your business), social networking is bound to impact the visibility of web pages in search results more so in the future.

Why Does Social Media Marketing Take So Much Planning?

Social media marketing done wrong is worse than not doing it at all. Make the wrong move and you could create negative buzz out there.

Social Media Marketing done right is more powerful than any single direct mail campaign, trade show, or print advertising campaign you might do. More powerful than even a few mail drops, show booths, or print buys.

All of the above traditional marketing media typically require expenditures in the $$$-tens-of-thousands range - and there is no residual, synergistic, or accretive effect with these media.

Social Media Marketing does create a foundation for long-lasting benefits and activities that complement your other business initiatives.

So, spend your money on social media instead, right?

Not so fast.

Take the time to plan and develop a program that will work for your company first.

Here are the basic questions:

• What do we want to accomplish?
• Where do we participate?
• Do we need a set of rules?
• Who should be involved in this initiative?
• What online assets do we need?
• How will we keep score?

What Do We Want to Accomplish?

Just because it’s hot, it doesn’t mean you should engage in Social Media Marketing.

There are a number of objectives you may have, and you should clearly state these at the outset:

• Participate because our competitors are (this is real, there is a cost to having a competitor take over the conversation)
• Be there because, if we are not, our brand image may suffer as people meet frustration that they can’t find us
• Enhance brand presence online (and overall)
• Generate traffic to our website
• Create links to our website to improve SEO visibility
• Generate sales & leads directly from participation
• Provide customer service
• Gather market feedback from customers & potential customers (and use it to improve our products, services, processes, etc.)
• Analyze and understand competitors’ moves (not just social media activities – there has never been a richer time for Competitive Intelligence gathering than now!)

Where Do We Participate?

This may be one of the more difficult tasks. You will have limited resources and this will force you to choose between social communities/networks.

A first pass, using your instincts, may help you prioritize the discovery process. For example, you may know already that MySpace is not even a candidate for you because it just doesn’t fit.

But, after your first pass, you will still face some decisions that will impact your strategy.

Looking back at your Objectives, you can then think about whether or not you are looking for conversations, traffic, links, eyeballs, targeted demographics, etc.

Three basic questions to ask:

1. Which of the “major players” do we focus on? – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Stumbleupon, etc?
2. Are industry/niche forums a better use of our time?
3. Shouldn’t reaching out to bloggers be a part of this effort?

Do We Need a Set of Rules?

If you are employed by a large company, you will almost certainly have some rules to abide by. Even if there are not rules that have been created specifically for social media, you would be doing yourself a service by thinking ahead and anticipating what your Legal & (traditional) PR teams might require. If you are a publicly-held company, this is even more critical!

You may have reached a decision that you will have multiple people in your organization work on the social media effort. Perhaps even multiple departments.

It would be a good idea to create a written list of “do’s” and “don’ts” for people in the company to reference (even if your company is a nimble, entrepreneurial company that does not typically ask for lots of documentation – you can keep it simple).

Who Should Be Involved In This Initiative?

Human resource allocation is one of the major stumbling blocks in launching and maintaining a social media program!

Here are some questions that may help decide what kind of skill sets you need (and then how many people you need) – will our implementers need?

• Deep industry & product knowledge
• Technical knowledge of products
• Customer service experience
• Understanding of the entire strategic picture for the company
• Access to company systems & databases (products, customer lists, technical info, etc.)
• Online marketing experience

Another key question that has to be answered – do we need a senior executive to participate?

You may want one of the faces (or The Face) of the company to participate in some way – contributing to a blog, building a network in Twitter, writing thought leadership pieces to point people to, etc.

What Online Assets Do We Need?

You will ultimately need Content to facilitate social media interactions. Whether the content is housed on your website or used on other sites, you will need information to help people understand more about your company and tell others in their networks about.

And it has to be interesting.

Spend some time looking at what is resonating in social bookmarking and news sharing sites like Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious, and YouTube.

Can you create content that will also appeal to people? Do you already have the content somewhere and just aren’t using it? If you need to create it, who will do it?

Remember, content can also take the form of promotions, contests, and other attention-grabbing events.

How Will We Keep Score?

As someone recently asked me – “how will we know when to either pop open the champagne and celebrate, or pull the plug?”

You should develop an internal Social Media Scorecard!

One of the “unfortunate” aspects of Social Media Marketing is that many of the benefits are hard to capture with hard metrics. However, you should do your best to create a series of measurable outcomes that can be tracked. I recommend updating your Scorecard at least monthly.

Some outcomes you may want to capture (an Excel spreadsheet should do the trick):

• Traffic (visits) sent to the site from specific social media websites
• Leads/sales that you can track back to referrals from the specific social media sites (using Web analytics and conversion tracking)
• Downloads of white papers by social community referral source (again, with conversion tracking in place)
• Number of followers & fans in each community
• Links generated during the time period (use Yahoo! Site Explorer, look at the “Inlinks” tab, select the option for “Except from this domain” and the option for links pointing to “Entire site”
• Use a search engine like Google and type in your brand name in quotes (e.g. “komarketing associates”), and write down the number of Results shown (e.g. 7,950 for us at this time). Updates to this number monthly will give you a general sense of how your brand has expanded online (obviously there are other PR and advertising activities that will contribute to this number, but you can at least take credit!)
• Reviews in YouTube
• Blog subscriptions (to your blog)
• Subscriptions to a newsletter you offer during the time period

In terms of tracking activities, you can keep track of number of:

• Contacts made to bloggers (you could separate these into comments left on blogs and personalized e-mails sent to the bloggers)
• Posts made in forums
• Updates on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
• Sites/reviews submitted in Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg, etc. (not just your own site/content!)
• New content created for use in social media

Qualitatively, you can add a Notes field to your spreadsheet and make notations about outcomes that were especially significant (hit Digg homepage, great review by Blogger X, link was Retweeted X times, etc.)

I think you can see from everything described in this article that an effective Social Media Marketing program takes a lot of planning!

Search Engine Land has two posts collecting all of the details:

• SMX Advanced Day 1: Live Blogging & Coverage
• SMX Advanced Day 2: Live Blogging & Coverage

Some of the particular session posts I found of interest:

• Social Media & Search Marketing — Not the Same Old Stuff
  It was nice to read the information on StumbleUpon, provided by Dave Snyder and Brent Csutoras, since my activity in that community has waned over the past few months. It was valuable to get a refresh on what others were doing and recommending. Specific write ups can be found on Search Marketing Sage and Outspoken Media.
  
  
• Keyword Research Artistry
  SEO Gadget’s recap provides some interesting keyword tools to check out, provided courtesy of Christine Churchill and Gab Goldenberg.
  
  
• Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag
  I’ve personally been pushing this integration (the canonical tag) with a few of our clients and was glad to see results from others, particularly Jordan Glogau case studies with 1-800 Flowers and Eyeglasses.com. Specific coverage was provided by SEO Gadget and Outspoken Media.
  
  
• SEO Ranking Factors for 2009
  Outspoken Media’s review of this session offers insight in what other professionals in the industry see and project for SEO. I echo Lisa’s hope that Rand Fishkin will put the SMX Advanced presentation online (even if only for premium members) since it sounds like there is a solid combination of expert opinion and data analysis.

  Also, the recap of the Q&A with Matt Cutts (also provided by SEO Gadget) is certainly worth the time to read and consider.
  

• SMX Keynote With Microsoft’s Qi Lu
  Greg Sterling covered the Danny Sullivan’s interview with Qi Lu, head of search for Microsoft. The big news of course being Microsoft’s launch of Bing, the companies new search engine.

“Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting
Finally, information was released from Matt Cutts during one of the sessions that “rel=’nofollow’” attribute, does not help to preserve or better direct “pagerank” of a web page if used to block search engines from following links to pages/sites of little value.

The full details are provided in this post from Search Engine Land, which also details worries with JavaScript’d and paid links. Fortunately, none of our clients are involved in the paid link initiatives which could be impacted, so the latter portion of the article should be more informational in nature than anything else.

There are plenty of very well-written Twitter tutorials out there, and you will find links to some of those at the bottom of this post.

As the title of this post indicates, this is intended to be “the most basic” Twitter tutorial I can imagine.

First, some “don’ts” when you are starting out:

• Don’t start following people until you have your Profile filled out.
• Don’t start following people until you have a link to your website in your Profile.
• Don’t simply fill your “Updates” with promotional information.
• Don’t start following people until you have some “Updates” to show that you are active, and that show how you think. How many updates should you have? See below.

Here are some suggestions for starting out in Twitter (think of these in rough chronological order):

Know Why You Are Doing This

1. Ideally you will have developed a social media strategy before truly embarking on something like this.

2. If you are setting up a corporate profile – you certainly should do this first!

3. If you are setting up a personal/professional profile, or a profile for a small business, you may skip past a comprehensive planning stage.

4. But, at least think about why you are doing this:

a) Who do I want to connect with?
b) How will I gather market feedback from using Twitter?
c) How will I use market intelligence, competitive insights, industry news, etc.?

d) What do I ultimately want to accomplish?

Profile Yourself

5. Fill out your “Profile” and provide information that will help people decide if they should follow you or not.

6. Your Profile will be one of the ways that people find you when Searching for new people to follow. Use some basic words that will bring the right people to you (e.g. I use “B2B SEO” and other terms that will bring B2B marketers and professional SEO’s to me.”

7. Include a link to your website in your Profile.

8. Use an image in your Profile. If you are using Twitter to build your personal brand and network, use a picture of yourself.  If you have a corporate Twitter profile, use your company’s icon.

Connect With People You Know

9. If you know people on Twitter already, and they are not going to judge you too early, start following them. They’ll understand that you are getting started and won’t look at your Profile and Twitter stream (updates) critically.

Find, But Don’t Follow

When you start following someone, they will typically be notified/will notice that you started following them. They will check you out, and make a decision about whether or not they should follow you back.

10. Search for people that are related to your business – competitors, partners, customers, prospects, analysts, etc.

11. See what they are saying to get a feel for things you might say and how you might interact with people.

3 quick places to conduct searches for people:

• “Find People” on Twitter (you will need to logged in to your account to follow the link)
• Twitter Search
• Twellow (list yourself while you are there)

Update Before You Follow

Start updating before you start following. When you do start following people, and they notice, you want them to arrive at your Profile page and see that you are already active and are taking this seriously.

I can’t begin to provide an actual content strategy for you here! But, some things to think about writing as a starting point:

12. It’s OK to put out 1 to 3 posts related to “just getting started here” – don’t overdo it.

13. Post about, and link to, industry news stories, research, stats, etc.

14. Talk about a few things you are doing at work now (things you are actually working on)

15. Correspond with the friends/colleagues you started following at the beginning (i.e. @so_and_so blah blah blah) – show your personality here!

Follow and Be Followed

16. Using the same process in the “Find, But Don’t Follow” section above, starting locating people to follow:

• Analysts
• Competitors
• Customers
• Industry Bloggers
• Partners
• Prospects (maybe wait a bit on this one until you are more comfortable using Twitter)
• Vendors (yours)
• Friends, friends, friends (friends that are using Twitter for business, not ones who will embarrass you!!!
  • This will sound shallow to social media purists, but when you correspond with friends on Twitter, it actually looks like you are popular and interesting, making it more appealing for others to want to follow you (for the record, I actually enjoy corresponding with friends and friendly people!!!)

Analyze & Refine Your Strategy

17. Look at as many metrics as you can reasonably manage and start keeping score – referrals to your site from twitter.com, number of Followers, number of @ replies you are accumulating, links you have accrued pointing to your site while you have been Twittering away (over time), leads & sales trends, etc.

18. Keep looking at what other successful people are doing

19. Read about Twitter and social media

20. Get advice

21. Refine, rinse, repeat.

Resources:

Here are some much more comprehensive Twitter guides:

• How to Use Twitter - Tips for Bloggers, ProBlogger (Darren Rowse), @ProBlogger
• Newbie’s guide to Twitter, Rafe Needleman, cnet, @Rafe
• Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR, Lee Odden, @leeodden
• 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners, DoshDosh, @doshdosh
• 50 Of The Best Twitter Guide and Tips Made On The Internet, Etienne Teo, @etienneteo
• Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools!, Palin Ningthoujam, Mashable, @Mashable

Related KoMarketing Blog Posts:

• The Social Media Marketing Pitch - Stone Soup
• Success in Social Media is Not Always a Planned Event
• Twitter Tip: How to Use Google to Search Specific Twitterstreams
• Six Key Elements of an Effective Social Media Strategy

More importantly, this doesn’t just happen with unsuccessful strategies. Productive online marketing initiatives need the occasional refresh to keep things moving in the right direction.

Here are some of the things I try to do when it seems like I’ve ended up “hitting the proverbial wall”.

Get Reorganized
There are so many new opportunities (applications, communities, articles) in the online marketing space that it is easy to get overwhelmed or simply off track. Regularly try to take a step back and reorganize “free time” spent with research and execution.

For social media exploration, dedicating fifteen minutes to a particular channel or strategy (on a daily basis) may be what is needed to get back on track and feeling productive. For blogging, consider setting up an editorial calendar.

Reorganizing efforts also provides a way to self assess where opportunities may be being missed and if something is not working well or needs to be improved.

Set Mini-Goals
While lofty goals certainly provide strategic motivation, setting smaller benchmarks can provide the necessary fuel to sustain the day-to day tasks that deliver long-term results. This can be as simple as putting together goals for a set number of interactions or tasks per day.

For example, if building an improved blog presence is a core strategy, perhaps setting a specific goal for the number of comments made (on others’ blogs) per week will help motivate the effort.

Optimizing a PPC campaign might mean putting together a review of five sets of ad copy and/or re-evaluating one or two landing pages per week based on historic performance and analysis.

Participate Only
Sometimes I can get re-energized by just participating in the conversations and helping with the contribution of others that work or have related initiatives. When it pertains to social media, that could mean focusing more on dialogue and conversation. Make sure to listen first.

For revitalizing an SEO strategy, spend time and offer assistance in online communities and take time to read and comment on others’ blog posts and articles to gain some needed inspiration.

Finally, remember that a strategy refresh doesn’t need to happen solely online either. For me, attending a networking event or offsite seminar might be enough to get the creative energy flowing.

Expand Your Comfort Zone
A key takeaway from last month’s presentation at SEO Meetup was Amit Mehta’s opinion that to really succeed, one must be 99% competent in the business they are in. He felt that most people give up when they know 90% and only break even when their 95% competent.

The point is that to truly be successful, it’s important to expand out of a comfort zone. This requires taking the knowledge and experience gathered and figuring out a way to apply it in a new or different manner.

For this reason, many online marketers recommend gravitating out one’s comfort zone to network and learn from others in complementary fields. This may provide new perspective and ideas to help build upon and extend already successful strategies, hopefully taking them over the top.

Turn the Computer Off for a While
Finally, when all else fails, maybe it’s just time to get away from the computer screen. Spend some time with friends and family offline and make sure the computer is nowhere in sight.

Get out of the house or office and take a breather, even if it’s only for thirty minutes because of deadlines. A quick reprieve may be enough to clear one’s head and provide the necessary time to refocus and make adjustments.

Getting Past the Proverbial Wall
These are suggestions that have worked for me from time to time. While everyone is different we all know that there is no room for complacency in the online marketing space. You have to keep moving forward. Strategies and techniques that work should be constantly refined and can almost always be improved. Sometimes it just takes a change of pace and quick refresh to get back on track.

Ads on the Google Content Network can be an effective way to gain additional conversion beyond those you get via search.

• When used in combination with Search, the median advertiser has a content CPA that’s within approximately 2% of their Search CPA.
• The Content Network drives nearly 20% of total conversions for the median advertiser.

Conversion rates are higher for advertisers who used either of two AdWords campaign management controls: the Conversion Optimizer and site exclusion.

So essentially, Google is telling us two things:

1) The Content network is just as valuable as the traffic that we generate through Search.

2) Using Conversion Optimizer and through excluding poor Content sites we can expect to have conversion rates improve.

While I am not against using the Content Network (and we often do) I need some of the following questions answered before I can agree that it is just as valuable as the Search Network.

Question 1 - Intent

Over the last year or so, the Content network has been responsible for about 20% of total conversions that come from total Google. However, for any given high volume keyword or theme, the Content network can be responsible for up to 100 times more impressions on average. This comes down to basic marketing 101. Someone that is searching for a specific term (pull) is much deeper in the purchasing cycle than someone who happens to come across an add on a relevant site (push). Often times this variance in searcher intent leads to lower quality visits, more bounces, less time on site, and overall weaker value conversions.

Question 2 - Control

In search I can utilize matching types, different landing pages for keywords, negatives, and a myriad of other tools to control my search campaign. But most of all, I have the ability to choose which keywords I am advertising for. This is simple and impossible to overstate. On the Content network I am building my ad groups by theme and no matter how tight or concise that theme is, I do not have the same level of control as if I was choosing individual keywords.

Question 3 - Tools

This white paper suggests that by using Conversion Optimizer and site exclusion results in the Content Network will improve. Conversion Optimizer is a mysterious little tool that supposedly improves conversion rate in the Content Network by choosing best position for you, ad scheduling, and site placement. I’ve used it a few times and have seen no measurable positive impact. In one instance it actually took a fully functional and ROI positive campaign and reduced its total conversions by over 75% and nearly doubled the average conversion cost. Until we have further understanding and transparency of what Conversion Optimizer is actually doing I can’t reccommend it to any serious advertiser.

Site exclusion is an entirely separate animal and is required for a successful Content campaign. Many sites will be misaligned or poor performers for your campaigns and must be excluded.

Conclusion

The Content Network is in fact a valuable tool for Search Marketers, and it may in fact cost approximately the same to generate a conversion in Content as it does in Search, but I think we need more controls and transparency before we can even estimate the true value of these conversions.

Related Article:

PPC Hero: Highlights from Google’s Content Network CPA White Paper