Day 1 of Connected Marketing Week in San Francisco starts with BlogWorkz including a session called: Inspiring an Army of Bloggers. Here users will learn What it takes to inspire an army of corporate bloggers under the banner of one brand. And how businesses are reaching out to customers and enthusiasts as blogging brand ambassadors. I had a chance to catch up with one of the panelists, Lee Sherman Editor-in-Chief, Personal Finance Group (Intuit) to get his insight on the session…

Could it really be possible that some freelance writers would lie to you, saying whatever it takes to snag your business, justify their exorbitant fees, and turn you into a submissive client who does whatever they tell you?

Well… yeah.

It’s sad, but in the years I’ve been in the business, I’ve seen companies burned, stung, robbed, and strung out by unethical copywriters who couldn’t care less about them…

This is the fourth in a series of posts based on the material covered in our latest webinar: Taking Your Site Performance to The Next Level With Optimization Testing.

The ultimate goal of a Web optimization project is to improve revenue and profits driven through your site. Success is measured by tracking changes in KPIs (key performance indicators), most commonly AOV (average order value), conversion rate, days to purchase, bounce rate, cart and checkout abandonment…

We have a lot of changes going on at SEOmoz (feel free to get excited, we sure are!) and with all of these changes to the site comes the need to focus on tracking. Internally we have spent the last few months redirecting our attention to not only the best practices regarding analytics and data mining, but really pushing ourselves to revisit our analytical processes…

aimClear’s demographic research product includes social media influencers from a number of channels ranking from Facebook and YouTube to forums.  We then challenge Community Managers to take these “friend leads” and convert them to organic friends over 3-5 days, at a “cost per friend lead” calculated from how much time the friend-conversion takes.  This post samples techniques to identify and qualify friend-leads, influencers and several holistic tactics proven to convert those leads to friends…

Loved the latest YouMoz post on SEOmoz by Oli Gardner (Co-Founder of Unbounce.com) who combines 2 of our favorite topics together: Infographics and Landing Pages. Oli provides a 12 step infographic detailing how to rehab your landing pages. Landing page tips and infographic below:

1. One Page Per Source
2. A/B Testing
3. Ad Message Match
4. Context of Use
5. Videos Increase Conversion
6. Direction Cues
7. Data vs…

Apple product launches have become the stuff of legend.

The iPad sold 300,000+ WiFi-only units on launch day. Within three days, the iPhone 4 sold 1.7 million units. The iPhone 3G sold over a million units on its launch weekend.

Clearly, Steve Jobs knows how to launch a product for maximum sales. You might even wonder if you can capture a bit of his magic to kickstart your own promotions…

We lovingly craft reports every day. We try to make sense of what they are saying. When we hear nothing we try to bludgeon them, hoping for the best.

My hope in this post is to share some simple tips with you that might make your reports and analysis speak to you a bit more. Suggestions that might increase the probability that you'll bump into things that might be insightful, and communicate data more effectively…

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Google Analytics workshops and seminars are happening everywhere this summer! If you’ve had excuses in the past, there’s now no excuse not to take a day of training to become an expert and get a leg up. Chances are there’s one happening near you when you’re available — just take a look at the Google Analytics seminars offered on the Seminars For Success portal. These are one day seminars, either beginner or advanced, where you’ll ramp up into a high proficiency or fine tune your knowledge with fantastic instructors…

So, just before I hop off on a 2 week holiday to France, I wanted to share something personal with you. In a long standing tradition of SEO’s and Affiliate marketers who show off their new ride, going from John Chow and Shoe on the affiliate side to Marcus and Dave on the SEO side, I’d like to tell you about my new pair, well actually trio, of wheels. I got myself a bakfiets. Or as you’d probably call it in English: a “Freight bicycle”…

The great thing about web analytics packages is that they are very powerful tools.

The downside of web analytics packages is that they are very powerful tools!

The sheer amount of data, and the complexity of reporting tools, such as Google Analytics, confuse many marketers. What can be overwhelming for the beginner can be just as overwhelming for the expert.

The trick lies in knowing which data is important…

Recently I was in the market for web-form automation widgets/software, basically a service that would allow me to create a custom web-form, collect data and have it hosted. After a little bit of research I was quickly able to find 6 solutions which all fit my need. Here is a summary of th 6 Webform automation services:

• Form Experts – Full service website form services which include dozens of features including: Free Templates, Submission to Email/Excel/Database, Email Auto-Responder, Usage Statistics and much more starting at $7/month…

Matt Cutts is a Software Engineer who heads the web spam team at Google. Matt has been using WordPress for years and feels WordPress makes search engine optimization easier and easier with each update. On today’s show he highlights the fundamental principles of success for blogging with WordPress. And addresses questions like:

• How do I get started?
• What tools do I need?
• Why choose WordPress?
• Which WordPress plugins do I need?
• Do meta tags matter?
• How do I know what content readers want?
• How do I generate unique content – the way Google wants it?
• What about duplicate content?
• Have I been banned or penalized? Why haven’t I been indexed?
• Do 301 (permanent) redirects “lose” any page rank?

Want more? Matt promised to return in the future to tackle more of your questions sometime after his trip to Mt…

By Larry Freed

So you may have seen by now that the big ACSI (hashtag #ACSI) report on e-business was released today with a bang.

On any given year, there is big news in one of the measured categories, but this year, we have big news in all three!

• Social Media: This is the first year the ACSI has measured social media sites, and the results are surprisingly terrible…

Paywalls are a hot topic online at the moment. In the UK The Times has recently put their whole site behind a pay wall and in early 2011 the New York Times is set to also go behind a pay wall. Both of these sites are part of the News Corporation empire and join sites such as the Wall Street Journal which has been behind a paywall for some time already. For those who aren’t familiar with how paywalls work this image might clear things up:

(Image credit)

There has been an awful lot written online about paywalls so I’m going to try and cover new ground in this post and focus exclusively on the conversion rate issues which are unique to paywalls and how news sites might seek to overcome them…

A few months ago at the Google I/O conference, we were approached by Zach Steindler, a co-founder at Olark (a way to gain customer insight and sale better through live chat) who was raving about Google Analytics Annotations. He had such a great business case, we decided to let him rave here. Enjoy, and thanks Zach.Making good business decisions is hard, and making the right one is even harder. At Google I/O I realized many people use Google Analytics but they aren’t familiar with the recent annotations feature that has helped us make smarter business decisions…

Justin Timberlake posted a trailer to the new Facebook movie (The Social Network) on his blog in which he plays Napster’s founder Sean Parker. In the “Social Network” Parker gives advice to the young entrepreneur, Mark Zuckerberg – played by Jesse Eisenberg. The release movie is set for October 1, 2010.

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* Sigh * As long as I can remember, spring and summer have been the time for (but not limited to) barbecues, swimming and the effects of semi-surprise search algorithm updates on our clients. Recently, we’ve seen Google tinker under the hood, announcing the Mayday and (long advertised) Caffeine algorithm changes. Yahoo has been making various mods as well.

To the benefit of our readers, we’ve put together a client case study that looks at measurement techniques for evaluating site performance through Google and Yahoo’s algo’ changes…

Good news from the horse’s mouth. We don’t mean to call Matt Cutts a horse, but, well, if you know him, you know what we mean. Matt heads the webspam team here at Google and also speaks on behalf of Google answering questions about ranking and results on Google’s search engine. When people have questions about things Google-search-related, Matt is the one who answers.He posts regular video blogs to the Google Webmaster Help channel answering your questions…

ReadWriteWeb reports that BAO for iPhone pinpoints the user’s location and shows key demographic data about that area. According to the application, within a mile of your house are just over 15,000 people, with an average age of 35 and an average income of over $100,000. The app also tells you what percent have a college education, are homeless, are home owners, and how much is spent on retail shopping in my area…

comScore: Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in June with 62.6 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! (up 0.6 percentage points to 18.9 percent), and Microsoft (up 0.6 percentage points to 12.7 percent). Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have experienced gains due in part to contextual search approaches that tie content and related search results together.comScore Core Search Report*June 2010 vs…

Let me give you some advice first: listen to this podcast with your Google Analyics account open and in front of you. Justin Cutroni, this weeks guest, is an asbolute expert on Google Analytics, and he shows by explaining in a very easy way the most fascinating new functions that Google Analytics has to offer and which reports you as a blogger can use to improve your blogging.

The show discusses loads of features, from Advanced Segments and Custom Variables (and how nicely they’re integrated into yours trulies new version 4 of his Google Analytics WordPress plugin) to the new Intelligence and Alerts tab…

This is a guest post from Tom Critchlow who is an excel ninja, data geek, analytics nerd and head of search for Distilled, a London & Seattle based search agency. Tom provides a cautionary tale on the importance of keeping your site up to date.This blog post title may appear sensational but I assure you that it’s not (much…). I recently spotted an issue with a client’s e-commerce website which was costing them £100,000 / month in revenue (~$150,000)…

While many IT departments spend the second Tuesday of the month patching the operating systems on their servers, Google Apps customers running their business in the cloud have some free time to evaluate and roll-out new applications. Lucky for them, today there are 10 new apps available today in the Google Apps Marketplace.Several of the new applications help you manage communications more effectively, from tracking contact with customers and partners to de-cluttering your inbox:

• Bantam Live: Bantam Live provides easy CRM and team collaboration to track contacts, prospects, deals and organize projects, tasks and events…

“One way to fight this sort of strategy [Google's strategy of playing in every market] is Yahoo!’s sell or outsource everything but the logo strategy.” (-Google As A Publisher)

Amongst other moves listed there are the closing/selling of the Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo’s answer to AdSense, and the outsourcing of Yahoo shopping to PriceGrabber. If you take that along with Yahoo’s failure to ever take the analytics company it acquired out of beta, you see a pattern emerging:

Yahoo doesn’t stick by its products…

With the introduction of Google Analytics’ intelligence engine came the ability to setup alerts for a variety of different metrics. Google extends alerts by allowing you to create them on top of custom segmentations – see video below for an example.

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google Web Report: Average Page Size 320 KB

  Google released a report on general statistics of web pages on the Internet. The report lists basic information they retrieved over the course of “Google’s crawl and indexing pipeline…

Last week, we shared a video on how to get the most out of your automatic alerts. Now that you’re familiar with automatic alerts, you know that Google Analytics has an intelligence engine that monitors your traffic and posts alerts when it sees something unusual. Now we want to tell you about “custom alerts.” With custom alerts, you can add on to this capability and tell Google Analytics to also watch out for specific things that you know you’re interested in…

Last post I outlined 10 reasons not to copy Amazon, with a promise to follow up with reasons why you SHOULD copy Amazon. While I could easily have compiled a list of 50-100 tactical items that could improve your conversion like unusual shaped cart buttons, delivery cut-off dates, customer reviews, mobile apps, triggered email or point-of-action assurances, I chose today to focus on 5 strategic things Amazon does really well, that could make you or save you millions of dollars…