Thursday, November 23, 2006

PPC Keywords: Long Tail or Tall Neck? Fat Torso!

Ralph Wilson's newsletter today brought a new term to the in the long tail discussion. I thought Tall neck was a cool addition - but now we have the "torso" (which I from now on choose to call the "Fat Torso").

The principles are perfectly sound - it describes where the real value keywords are for PPC campaigns:

It's not the tall neck, where all of the generic, one word, high traffic, sometimes very high priced keywords are. Those keywords are typically reserved for those with more money than brains.

It's also not necessarily the long tail, where you'll find thousands of three and four word highly targeted but infrequently searched words. These are great - don't get me wrong! It's just that on many of the phrases the trickle of traffic may not be worth the trouble.

It's the Fat Torso! The part in the middle with typically two word phrases that have a decent amount of traffic, a reasonable cost, and good targeting. Andrews suggestion is that most people don't spend enough time making the torso as fat as possible. He pushes us to think of all of the variations of your possible words. Have you really got them all???

All good (or at least great) PPC managers will know this, and revisit the list frequently to make sure, but Andrew Goodman just named it. Congratulations on coining a new term, Andrew.

The full article is here:
http://www.wilsonweb.com/paid-search/goodman-torso.htm

And wasn't I pleased to see that Andrew is from my very own city of Toronto, Canada!

Hey Andrew - if you are looking at your link reports or referring sites and come across this post, please drop me a line.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Affiliate Programs Help Drive Your Marketing!

Ken Shafer interviews Josh and Dallas, founders of DreamHost, about their affiliate program. Some good candid insights here for those thinking of starting affiliate programs.

Key concepts are:

  • How affiliate programs help drive customer referrals
  • How it helped them stop relying on paid advertising
  • How they used affiliate codes in special ways
  • How the blog helps drive traffic
  • Even though they give away a huge commission they make money on LTV (Lifetime Customer Value)

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Email Marketing: Debunking Summer Campaign Myths

Emails deployed in July and August actually out-perform those deployed in September - even in the B2B industry! That's perhaps the most surprising item noted in this Email Trends Report Q3 2006 just referenced in ClickWeekly.

What I don't like about this report is that 'clicks' are measured as a percentage of open rate, vs. a percentage of delivery. I think this is a misleading number because it makes your click through rate appear far better than it is.

It is being reported as such because the author of the report uses ConstantContact, a service aimed at small businesses, and they choose to report it that way.

Read the full report here:
http://www.dmn.ca/Click/articles/vol101/vol101_b.htm

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Mobile Web Best Practices

With the new slew of mobile devices out there, and the increasing availability of wireless Internet, mobile web access is growing by leaps and bounds.

As a web designer, it is great to see some standards being introduced by the good ol' W3 org.

Written for designers of Web sites and content management systems, these guidelines describe how to author Web content that works well on mobile devices:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/PR-mobile-bp-20061102/

Friday, November 03, 2006

Toronto News Release Optimization Success Story

Finally, PR companies are seeing the value in optimizing for the online news search engines:
We just optimized a release for a PR company that is working for a skin care company. This company found us through Google, looking for "Toronto news release optimization". (We are number three if you select 'pages from Canada'... hmmm, I'll have to take another look at that because we can definitely do better there.)

Anyways, this is how it worked:

The first thing we did was research on the 20 or 30 appropriate terms to do wit their press release. Most of the terms are searched less than 10 times per day. One is searched more that 3000 times per day. So we chose the top 3 most searched terms and optimized for those. The release went out yesterday and here are the ranking results so far:

Google.ca News:
"skin care" - position #7
"lip liner" - position #1
"anti-aging" - position #1

Yahoo.com news:
"Skincare" - position #1 and #2
"Lip liner" - position #1 and #2
"Lipstick" - position #4
"Anti-aging" - position #1, #2

I cannot seem to find it in Yahoo Canada yet, which is strange. We'll check again later today. The results overall look very good so far! With the strong search traffic on the terms we chose it should be a huge success. Let's see what the traffic numbers look like in a few days.

If you are sending press releases, I highly recommend news release optimization and submission to Google and Yahoo news. The last release we did for ourselves quadrupled our daily traffic for several days, and we got a few very good leads in the first few days.