(Photo Credit: Pierre Beteille) Mark Drager is a Toronto based entrepreneur who created a new business in 2006 called Phanta Media. He was a startup entrepreneur who was trying to stand out in a very competitive market.

Fast forward to today and Mark is doing business with clients like Royal Bank (the 55th largest company in the world!) and Audi.

I asked Mark how he was able to build up a company out of nothing and he said “It’s all about building trust” – in a sales cycle where you may not have much personal contact you need to build trust with your prospects to get them to believe what you’re saying and sign on to do business with you.

Mark decided to write a white paper on how you can quickly build trust with your prospects that I thought was worth sharing. You can view the white paper at Mark’s website.

Here is the executive summary:

“The truth about trust is nobody – but nobody just gives it away. Sure, trusting is an easy thing when you’re talking friends and family. You might even trust the electrician or mechanic that a neighbour recommends, but in the absence of face-to-face contact – out there in the ether – how easy is trust to come by? Let’s take a closer look at that moment when a customer or client enters into your sales cycle.”

Here are some of the key points:

• Attempts to break through the marketing-noise has taken a “tricky, even risky direction”
• Trustworthiness is built on operating principles that need to be demonstrated
• Focus on others (clients, consumers, co-workers, partners) for the other’s sake, not for economic benefits
• There’s something very appealing about working with a company that lays all its cards on the table and operates with full transparency
• Resist the urge to over-promise and stay true to your original, authentic values

The entire white paper is only four pages long but it’s worth a read – again, you can view the white paper at Mark’s website.

And as always, let me know what you think by commenting below!

(Photo Credit: Jeff McNeill) This is a special edition of SEO University where I have a guest post by Elisa Gabbert. Elisa was introduced to me by Byron Gordon, a great guy who I’ve worked with for a couple of years at the Search Engine Strategies conferences here in Toronto. When Byron asks me to check something out, it’s usually good!

Byron said I should check out WordStream’s new keyword tool located at http://www.wordstream.com/keywords. For years I’ve been a fan of using Google’s free tools, namely the Google Keyword Tool and the Google Traffic Estimator Tool. They are both free, provide great data, and it comes directly from Google – what more could you ask for?

I posed the question to Byron and he put me on to Elisa who wrote this guest post. I look forward to your thoughts on WordStream vs. Google after you read the post.

“At WordStream, we recently launched a new free keyword tool. One of the questions we get asked frequently is how the tool compares to the Google keyword tool (in fact it gets asked so frequently we put it in the FAQ).

Let me try to run down the pros and cons of using each tool.

Where Google’s Tool Is Better

Google’s keyword tool is similar to many of their products in that it has two core strengths: it uses Google data, and they give it away for free. If you’re in a market (and there are many) where Google is the dominant player, having access to Google’s data can definitely be useful. And Google has a lot of data.

The tool also provides several columns of numerical stats including both local and global monthly search volume and search volume trends, as well as information like advertiser competition and estimated average CPC which can be useful for the PPC advertiser. Aside from keywords and related terms, WordStream’s tool currently only shows you an estimated relative volume.

Where WordStream’s Tool Is Better

Google’s keyword tool taps into the company’s huge data sources, but they’re not giving you full access to that data. For example, a search for “britney spears” returns 72 results. Performing the same search on our tool yields over 37,000 keywords. We only show you the top 100 within the tool itself, but you can enter your email (or sign up for a free account) and we’ll send you the full list, all 37,563 keyword phrases, free of cost. So we are giving you a lot more to work with, including many long-tail terms, and this is really valuable for large PPC accounts or affiliate marketers especially.

Another advantage to our keyword tool is a greater diversity of keyword sources. We aggregate search query data from Internet Service Providers, browser toolbars and search engines—amounting to more than a billion unique keywords and over a trillion search queries—and we carefully weight the data to avoid bias toward any particular source. So our data is more comprehensive.

The “related keywords” feature allows you to select related terms and synonyms and include them in the results with your original query. Again, this is important for keyword expansion and can tell you what other phrases your audience may be using to search for related topics.

There’s also a filter feature so you can weed out terms that aren’t relevant to your search.

Finally, WordStream’s keyword tool is faster than Google’s. You get results pretty much instantaneously.

In the end, the point of using any of these tools is to get keyword suggestions, and it’s important to remember that they are in fact just suggestions—many of them may be irrelevant to your website or business. The more data you start out with, the more usable, actionable keywords you’re going to end up with after you drill down and figure out which terms are going to be most relevant and valuable for you. Then you can get to work optimizing your web copy and PPC campaigns based on those keywords, which in turn gives you more data to analyze (like which keywords drive the most traffic and conversions, and which aren’t delivering any value). This creates a cycle of data-driven decision making.

Our view is that keywords in and of themselves aren’t worth anything. It’s what you do with your keyword list that matters. That’s why we developed the tool. We hope that dedicated search marketers will stick around to learn the benefits of keyword management—tools and strategies that help you group, organize and act on all that raw keyword data to get real results in return.”

Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, a software manufacturer specializing in keyword discovery & management software for SEO and PPC. To get in touch with Elisa, you can send a note to egabbert at wordstream dot com, follow her on twitter, or check out the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog, where she’s a regular contributor.

What do you think about the WordStream Keyword Tool? Are you going to give it a try? I would love to hear your thoughts on the tool if you comment below!