I found this list of twitter shortcuts in the twitter help section. These are great to know whether you use twitter in the browser, a computer application or on your mobile phone. These shortcuts will save you time.

• @username + message
  

directs a twitter at another person, and causes your twitter to save in their “replies” tab.
Example: @meangrape I love that song too!

• D username + message

sends a person a private message that goes to their device, and saves in their web archive.
Example: d krissy want to pick a Jamba Juice for me while you’re there?

• WHOIS username

retrieves the profile information for any public user on Twitter.
Example: whois jack

• GET username

retrieves the latest Twitter update posted by the person.
Example: get goldman

• NUDGE username

reminds a friend to update by asking what they’re doing on your behalf.
Example: nudge biz

• FAV username

marks a person’s last twitter as a favorite. (hint: reply to any update
with FAV to mark it as a favorite if you’re receiving it in real time)
Example: fav al3x

• STATS

this command returns your number of followers, how many people you’re following, and your bio information.

• INVITE phone number
  

will send an SMS invite to a friend’s mobile phone.
Example: Invite 415 555 1212

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You may or may not know that you can run banner ads on through AdWords. When most people think of Google AdWords they immediately think of the text ads. The reason this seems to be the case is due to the fact that when you are on Google.com you will only see text ads.

However when you run an advertisement you are able to be on the Google.com site or on one of their publisher sites. A publisher site must opt in have banner ads displayed instead of text ads, or both. Therefore through Google AdWords can run Banner ads on the Google network.

Tip
If you are considering buying banner advertising a particular website, you may first want to check Google. Here is why. Some websites run Google ads, and some of them have opted in to banner ads. If they have opted in to banner ads you may as well check by using the placements within AdWords to determine if that site runs Google ads and if that site.

If they do run banners instead of completing an insertion order with them for a specific amount of spend you may as well first test them through Google ads when you can run banners. This is a great way to test the site’s banner ads and how they work for you without having to agree at a time to a particular spend. with Google you do not have to pay a CPM price you will pay a CPC price for the banners.

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Compete.com only tracks the United States traffic to websites. We have worked for many companies assisting them with determining the discrepancies between multiple tracking services. Most everyone uses the free services such as Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, and of course paid services such as Comscore. Typically these four services are compared to a websites statistics provided by a service such as Google Analytics.

When comparing actual site analytics to these free services you are bound to see discrepancies. By actual we mean tracking of every page as opposed to statistical sampling which then infers the amount of web traffic or pages viewed to a site.

I wanted to point out that Compete only provides web traffic data from users in the United States. Just knowing that will answer most of the initial questions regarding discrepancy in compete data with your own.

You should also know Compete’s methodology for determining web traffic to a particular website. While Google analytics provides code to put on every page of your website in an attempt to obtain actual data, Compete uses a panel of 2 million individuals. The panel is a cross section of Internet users in the United States and they obtain click stream data from ASP’s and ISPs. They also obtain data from widgets, applications, and their toolbar.

You can read more about the Compete panel and projections on their website. It is important to know the differences between the methodologies of each of the tracking companies. Not only do you need to know the methodologies but you also need to know the nomenclature as each one of them has different definitions. To properly compare one to the other it is important to know what each data point means and how it is defined. In other words how do they define a visitor, a visit, do they use cookies etc.

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Help me start my 5 day test. I am comparing this website response rate to my AWeber Newsletter response rate. A request to bookmark a URL is below, regardless of whether you are viewing this on the website or via newsletter please bookmark the URL below via delicious. I will then compare test stats.

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As an attorney having obviously been through law school I am very familiar with what is known as the “Moot Court”. Today I received a comment from Rob Meyer (thanks Rob) that pointed me to the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin “Moot Corp” competition.

From their site, here is an explanation of the competition and how it all began:

In the early 1980’s, two Texas MBA students yearned for a business school activity as challenging and prestigious as “moot court” in law school. They envisioned a competition in which MBAs working in teams would conceive an idea for a new business, develop the idea in a written business plan, and present the plan to a panel of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, accountants and lawyers.

In 1984 this vision was fulfilled when the Graduate School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin held its inaugural Moot Corp Competition. It was the first competition of its kind for MBA students and is still considered the most prestigious in the world. The Moot Corp Competition has been crowned “the Super Bowl of world business plan competition.”

What a great idea, I never knew this existed but apparently has been going on for quite some time. Back in the 90’s when I raised my first round of venture capital I would have loved to have had a process like this to learn from. I personally learned a lot from two mentors, both impressive CEOs for public companies and startups alike, it is from those experiences you can learn the most. A moot court is just that, learning from others that have been there before.

Here are some links to learn more and watch videos. I think I just spent an hour reading and watching myself. Take a look if this is something you may be interested in.

Links

• Moot Corp Competition
• McCombs School of Business Blog

GoDaddy Hosting
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Lifetime Value of a customer is and will continue to be more important. Everyone is familiar with customer acquisition. Customer acquisition is essentially obtaining a new customer. The cost of obtaining a new customer is called the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).

If you spend $100 and you obtain 10 customers your cost per acquisition is $10 per customer. Determining the right cost per acquisition is obviously assuring you have made a profit. If you are an affiliate marketer and you are paid $30 per customer and it costs you $10 to get a new customer then you have profited $20. However it is not always the case that the initial cost per acquisition is less than the initial profit on a sale. It is possible to have an initial cost per acquisition of $20 on a $10 product. Why would you do this?

This is due to the fact that while the initial cost of acquiring that customer was $20 and you only made a $10 profit, the customer’s lifetime value is enough to cover your initial cost per acquisition and make a profit. That customer over time may make you an additional $50 in profit and therefore the higher cost per acquisition in the long run make sense. This is why you need to know the lifetime value of your customers.

Obviously is easier said than done, but it is possible and we do it for client’s everyday. More important than comparing the lifetime value to the initial cost per acquisition is being able to tie the lifetime value to the initial marketing campaign.

Here is why. in the example of customer acquisition if one marketing campaign was costing you $2 per customer and the other marketing campaign was costing you $1 per person you would obviously turn off the $2 dollar campaign and continue the $1 campaign.

However, now add the lifetime value of a customer and your decision-making process may change completely. If the $1 customers had a lifetime value of only $.50 and the $2 customers have a lifetime value of $8, then your decision is the exact opposite. You would turn off the $1 customers, potentially, and continue the campaigns yielding $2 customers, as it is worth the extra $1 per customer due to the huge disparity in lifetime value and overall profit per customer.

The key is tracking the lifetime value and even more importantly associating it to an initial marketing campaign to be able to make the best decision and obtain the best return on investment for your marketing dollars.

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Mobile statistics and analytics are not easy to find. However AdMob’s monthly reports are excellent. Not only do the provide insight into the mobile advertising market but also into the mobile market and users behaviour.

Sample Size
Note that the report is put out by AdMob and based on data from their network. With that caveat in mind, their April reports states they now serve ads for more than 7,000 mobile Web sites and 1,600 applications around the world. That is an impressive sample size.

Free Reports
You cannot beat their free monthly reports. Great insight and information, the April report was 19 pages. You can go to AdMob here , or straight to their metrics page here

Mobile Metrics
They provide information such as:

• Smartphone Market Share - such as iPhone with 43% of Mobile Web and App Usage
• Ad Requests - by Country / Region
• Handset Data - Worldwide and by particular countries
• more…

AdMob is an excellent source of data for the mobile market, it’s worth subscribing to their blog and obtaining their monthly reports.

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If you are like me you have slowly acquired domains over time. First you buy a couple, then you have 10 or 20, next thing you know you have 100. You may even have multiple accounts and never took the time to consolidate. With hundreds of domains, or even tens, you now need to be sure not to lose any. There are two options that GoDaddy has, one you are probably familiar with, one is a lesser known but convenient option.

Automatic Renewal
You may already be familiar with the automatic renewal option for domain names where you simply choose to automatically renew every year. Assuming you choose the 1 year option to keep costs down as opposed to purchasing 2,3,4,5 or more years in advance. Just be careful if you use a credit card that the card can expire. You may want to consider using your paypal account and therefore you only need to keep your paypal up to date.

Consolidating Domains
Consolidating Domains is the most interesting and less familiar option. In the past you would pay annually on the anniversary date of your domain registration. Therefore if you purchased a domain on June 13th, you pay every June 13th. After you purchase tens or hundreds of domains you may have domains that need to be renewed every month. This can become a full time job. The domain consolidation allows you to choose the date you want to renew your domains.

You could have all your scattered renewal dates consolidated into one day every year. So you may pick Jan 1 to be the day, as an example, that you always renew all your domains. Now you only have to renew once a year. However the downside is that you now have one large bill every year if you have a lot of domains.

A second option is to spread your domains over the entire year and choose the first of each month for 1/12 of your domains. This way you spread out your domain renewal expenses proportionally over the year and know that the bill is paid on the same day every month.

How to Consolidate
Simple quick and just $1 per domain per month, a one time fee per domain depending on how far out you extend each domain. Simply log into your GoDaddy account and choose to consolidate as they will walk you through the steps. Also if you are renewing or buying new domains use the code FPT3 at check out for a domain discount on every domain and the godaddy hosting promo code of FPT1 will get you 10% off every hosting package.

Try not to lose your domains, either auto-renew, or consolidate, or do both for ease of domain management.

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A better quality advertisement on Yahoo can allow you to obtain higher rankings in their pay per click search marketing without increasing your cost per click.

Yahoo Quality Index
Much like the Google Quality Score that I wrote about recently Yahoo has their version which they call the Yahoo Quality Index. Essentially they are trying to determine if you have a relevant advertisement. They wish to present quality advertisements to visitors of their site. The better your Quality Index of your advertisement, the more likely you will achieve a high ranking position in relation to other ads and spend less money than others that have a lower Quality Index score.

How is the Quality Index Computed
To compute the Quality Index Yahoo looks at your advertisement, the keywords in the ad, the keywords you are targeting, how many clicks you receive and how you compare to others that are your competition.

What is Good and What is Bad
When reading the Google Quality Score a 1 is bad and a 10 is best. For Yahoo Quality Index they show a bar with 1 to 5 bars, 1 is bad and 5 is best.

How to Increase Your Quality Score
To increase your quality score you need to micro manage your advertisements and campaigns. Create ads that incorporate your keywords, either hard code them by typing the word in the ad or use their “insert keyword” function. [Note: When using the insert keyword be careful to check that inserting a keyword will make sense when the full ad is being read by a user]. Therefore the more relevant your keywords to your ads the more likely your score will be higher.

Also, although Google and Yahoo have not said this (at least I cannot find it) I firmly believe from experience that the correlation between the keywords, the advertisement, and the landing page the advertisement is sending the individual to, makes a difference as well. So make sure your landing page correlates to the keywords you are using and the advertisement.

Conclusion
Manage your Yahoo ads much like you would your Google ads, optimize keywords - ads - and landing pages for the higher score, higher rank, and cheaper overall cost when compared to your competitors.

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Blog, Twitter, Facebook
These are a great way to start your social media setup. Particularly with WordPress as the blog, a Twitter account connected, and a Facebook page. Twitter and Facebook have such a large audience it makes good sense to start with them. Of course the realm of possible social media sites to participate in grows daily.

Getting Started
Getting started with a strong social media foundation typically begins with a blog, hosting, a unique domain, Twitter account and Facebook page all linked together.

It is suggested to obtain a unique domain right at the start so all the links in you work hard to obtain. As a blog WordPress is free, easy to use, and incredibly powerful due to all the plugins created for it. Obtain a hosting account from a provider such as GoDaddy which provides a WordPress hosting account, your domain and your off and running.

Consistent Naming
For branding purposes it is wise to obtain a domain name, Twitter account and Facebook page with the same name, such as longest.com for a domain and twitter.com/longest for a twitter account.

Social Brand Search provides a quick search of domains, Twitter names, and Facebook Pages. Go to Social Brand Search Here (it is free) and start choosing a name, then get your hosting and you are off and running. Social Brand Search searches for you and let’s you know which names are available.

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