The search engines are focusing more on high quality and relevant links that have contextual placements (links that occur within the content of the page vs on a side bar or footer). All of these developments lead me to believe that IF you are going to pay for links, I would look hard at using one of the blog link services. The important things to ask for and receive with these paid link campaigns are:
1) Make sure the blogs have some value - request blogs with Google page rank no lower than 2
(more…)

Major enterprise systems are starting to look at - and move - critical information systems to non-Microsoft platforms like Google. Gmail’s growth as a consumer email system has been impressive, but now it takes another step by servicing a major municipality. Are large enterprise customers next? Of course they are. This is a major threat to Microsoft’s core business and one of the first shots of enterprise level cloud computing. InformationWeek has a great article on reasons why LA selected Google over Microsoft here

(more…)

I get asked a lot about the wisdom of running a PPC campaign when you are ranking well in organic searches (SEO).The combination of PPC and SEO is always worth testing in my opinion for a couple of reasons (ok, 5 that I can think of).

(more…)

I just read a great post on Mashable that breaks down the characteristics of Twitterers (see the pretty graphs here). The analysis is based on several sets of data and makes intuitive sense.

(more…)

The WTIA event on Social Media last night (June 24th) was a fun event, with some general information that was semi-helpful. My five take-a-ways include:
1) Social Media is hot, hot, hot. Not a shocker, but there were ~300 people there. Every conference that I have been to in the last year that has a social media track or session has been PACKED.
(more…)

Day parting is an important targeting technique that allows you to change your bid profile by time of day and day of week (which is technically called week parting). From a direct marketing/conversion perspective - this is important for several reasons:
1) Business to Consumer products/services have a different conversion profile than Business to Business products/services. This means that people tend to actually BUY at different times of the day depending on whether they are shopping for themselves or shopping for their work.
(more…)

The Marketing to the Max SDMA Conference got off to a great start with a presentation by Debra Aho Williamson, Senior Analyst, eMarketer.

(more…)