It has been another pleasurable day at the SES Conference and Expo here in Toronto!  The theme of today’s sessions was Social Media  – the topics varied from Social Media 101, Social Media Solutions on a Budget to Killer Facebook Targeting Tactics.  Below I have listed some of my favorite points from the sessions I have attended.

Social Media 101

This was a solo presentation by Krista Neher, CEO of Boot Camp Digital; throughout Krista’s session the audience was exposed to the main issue most business owners have – creating value for your audience.

• A successful approach to social media is to create value for the communities that include you, not to promote your product, service or yourself.  The more value you create for the community the more value they will create for you.
• When companies decide to join the social media network – they always start from the bottom.
  - First you should listen, holistically understand the person you are trying to reach.
  - Second think about your marketing strategies and what you are trying to achieve with social media.
  - Third you have to know who your target audience is, figure out how your product or service can solve a problem for them.
  - Fourth step is to figure out your content (good strategy & creative execution)
  - Final step is to track and measure, and then make adjustments accordingly.
• If you want people to like you, keep them around you more often – to do that you have to bring them into your marketing funnel which includes four points:
  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Desire
  • Action
  • When you create content make sure you think about the easy ways other people can share your content.  Also look for social networks that apply to your network, it will make it easier to find people that are interested in your products/services.
  • Twitter is the most powerful social media because you are able to connect with anyone whether you know them or not.  13% of Americans use Twitter (which is up 5% from 2009)
  • Ratings are very important when it comes to your product or service – people are willing to pay 50-99% more for a 5-star product over a 4-star product.  You can use LinkedIn to get reviews from people you have made connections with.
  • The 8 categories of Social Media include: Publishing, Sharing, Social Networks, Microblogs, Co-Creation, Public Relations, Discussions & Review and Mobile.

Social Media Solutions on a Budget

This session contained wonderful tips from Lisa Buyer, CEO of The Buyer Group and Jason Yormark, VP of Marketing and Social Media, Strategies 360.  I will provide the abundance of programs they have listed for the audience below for various Social Media Networks.

• Keep updates short, sweet and optimized
• Since Social Media takes up so much time, and time is money Lisa has given an efficient scheduling timeline for one hour a day:
  8:00 am – 15 minutes
  12:00 pm – 15 minutes
  4:00 pm – 15 minutes
  15 minutes – unpredicted
• Results:
  • Referring traffic to website or blog
  • More engagement/interactions
  • Increased followers
  • Increased subscribers
  • Blogging Resources for Themes since the design of the website is very important check out these links:
    • ElegantThemes.com
    • WooThemes.com
    • StudioPress.com
    • ThemeForecast.net
    • 99designs.com

Twitter

Building Reach:

• • Listorious.com
  • WeFollow.com
  • Twellow.com
  • Branding:
    • Twitrbackgrounds.com
    • Fuelyourcreativity.com/free-new-twitter-psd-background-template
    • CRM:
      • Hootsuite
      • Tweetdeck
      • Seimic

YouTube

• GoAnimate
• One Time Media
• Xtranormal Movie Maker
• Stuperflix Video Maker

LinkedIn Groups

• Great resource for new leads, customers, web traffic
• Identify relevant groups to join
• Contribute regularly outside of sharing your own content

Social Analytics

• Social Mention
• Hootsuite
• Postrank
• Google Analytics
• Klout/Peer Index
• Google Alerts
• Export.ly

Golden Tool of The Day!

Triberr.com – is a reach multiplier which is an invite only website (you could request to join), it allows you to interact with people that are related to your business.  The reason the website is invite only is to keep spammers out however, it allowed Jason to grow his initial reach over a million in one month!

Killer Facebook Targeting Tactics

Actual Bio:

Marty Weintraub, CEO of aimClear, an online marketing agency that has managed Facebook ad campaigns generating over 10 billion impressions internationally.  Client credits include MarthaStewart.com, Siemens, Second Life, Budget Direct, and other global brands.

• PPC is to SEO as Facebook Ads are to Social Media
• Targeting Creativity:
  • What personal traits?
  • Who’s professional characteristics?
  • Which radically private predilections?
  • Concept transcends Facebook
  • Inspired by bottomless personalities
  • Facebook ads are targeted by location, sex, age, relationship statuses, profession, and education etc – what people are interested in.
  • If you are trying to sell noise cancelling headphones it is best to advertise to people on Facebook that like travel agencies such as Expedia.com etc.
  • Make sure to differentiate where the potential lead works instead of the company they like – it can be as different as a page they like or a company they actually work at so you have to be careful where you are marketing.
  • There are over 35 million people in the world who speak English in countries other than US, Canada, Australia and UK
  • When advertising on Facebook
    • Do not take hard core sales positions
    • Offer value
    • Serious Marketing Power
      • Your target is never truly off duty, whether they are home or at work they could log into their Facebook
      • Catch them at home off guard

It has been an amazing experience at SES Conference and Expo – being around the SEO experts themselves has allowed me to learn so much!  I look forward to attending the SES next year!

Search Engine Strategies Toronto Day 1 yesterday was jam packed with cutting edge tactics and great networking opportunities. Day 2 of the conference series was no different, opening with an interactive keynote from Maile Ohye of Google, followed by information sessions on Twitter automation, paid search, site clinic and more.

Day 2 Keynote with Google

Maile Ohye, Sr. Developer Programs Engineer of Google, talked about the recent Mayday update and its effect might be here to stay. For the future, Google also plans to have social search take properties from your social circle to make search results more personalized. However, the social graph is still in its early stages of development and its reach will not go beyond a user’s primary contacts just yet. Maile also says that soon, presence on social networks might play a vital role for your content distribution as real time search for media will take the popularity of your content into consideration.

Linkbuilding is always a popular subject with the public for Google, and the senior developer would like to see linking being thought of as a real business expansion. Google takes link quality very seriously and block-level link analysis will show that not all links on the same page is treated equally. There are hundreds of other components when it comes to search engine rankings and webmasters need to focus on effectively providing users what they want.

Google Webmaster Central is becoming increasingly versatile and will continue to develop into one of the most important tools for webmasters to communicate with Google. Maile confirms that speed is an important factor as slow websites hinder users’ search for the most relevant information. Last but not least, make your suggestions to Google Help Forums because Google listens!

Twitter Nation

Tracy Falke, Social Media Specialist of Freestyle Interactive and Paul Madden of Crea8 New Media gave a very interesting presentation on Twitter, everyone’s favorite micro-blogging platform.  The theme of the presentation was centralized around automation.  Bots can tweet and retweet valuable information but they could never engage in a meaningful conversation with a human being.  The wrong kind of automation could lead to a reputation crisis and perhaps even jeopardize brand equity like John Deere’s @DeereRobot.

Don’t be the loud drunk guy at the bar. Invest in content and not the platform.

Paul believes that to get a decent return on your investment in Twitter, you must engage as much as possible.  The follow-and-unfollow game still works but to do it correctly, you will need semi-intelligent tools.  Use Twitalyzer to analyze your Twitter presence and match your audience’s activity for the best return in investment.  While it is possible to code a bot, it is impossible to code a person.  Paul uses automated tweets but steps in for real human interaction when engagement happens.  One of his rules of thumb is to never post more than one link for every ten general tweets.  He had one of his bots follow someone from the room and it was amazingly hard to distinguish its behavior from a normal user.

It is social media.  Retweeting spam, using auto direct messages and asking for follow are bad behavior.  Don’t be anti-social.

Introduction to Paid Search

Matt Van Wagner, President of Find Me Faster holds a very informative session on paid placement as a form of search advertising. Pay-per-click and search engine optimization campaigns are complementary; while SEO will yield a good return on your investments in the long run, PPC will act as a insurance policy and gateway for secondary traffic. Matt briefly discusses important concepts such as keywords, ads, bids and landing pages and goes on to give great tips on time, geographic and demographic segmentation. It is important to target your audience not only to drive conversion but also to save on campaign costs. Also, expenditure on content network sites needs to be monitored for effectiveness; conversion might be low when users encounter ads in a passive browsing mode.

Since the competitive landscape of keyword research has changed, a lot of what used to be key information are now publicly available.  This makes it hard for anyone to hold a significant informational advantage over the rest of the playing field.  Matt addresses this by alluding to the story of two men’s encounter with a bear; you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to stay slightly ahead of your competition.

I asked Matt for some good books on paid search and he recommends Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day by David Szetela, Joseph Kerschbaum and Michael Flores, Winning Results with Google AdWords by Andrew Goodman, and Advanced Google AdWords by Brad Geddes.

Canada-Specific SEO & PPC Issues

The proximity and relationship of Canada with United States have created a unique problem for Canadian businesses on the internet.  Heather Dougherty of Hitwise, Ian McAnerin of McAnerin Networks Inc. and Guillaume Bouchard of NVI each gave their takes on what are some of the Canada-specific SEO / PPC issues and solutions.

Some statistics could provide companies with relevant insights.  For example, Yahoo and Bing have a stronger presence in French Canada in comparison with English Canada.  Queries with added Canada and Canadian geographical modifiers had higher click-through rates, likely due to the prevalence of U.S. results in searches.  Canadians also responded better to fact-based advertisements over emotionally charged commercials that work well in the U.S.

Also, be mindful of the difference in sentiments that exists in seemingly similar markets and try to avoid using alienating terms like ‘foreign’.

Tough Love: Get Your Site Tuned Up

Jonathan Allen of SearchEngineWatch and Dawn Wentzell of Outspoken Media provided some critiques, a few tricks and tips for those who were brave enough to offer up their sites for the site clinic.  Some of the suggestions include:

• get Google Rich Snippets
• use Cascading Style Sheets over Table tags to divide up content
• be descriptive with product page title tags
• create relevant tools for linking opportunities
• use iFrame to embed outside pages
• employ robot.txt to secured login pages and other sensitive areas
• stick with either with or without the www prefix to prevent diluting PageRank

The day ended with an Open Mic session on Black Hat vs. White Hat, where everyone just enjoyed themselves over conversations, drinks and cowboy hats.

The amount of knowledge and interactions makes it easy to see why this conference series garners so much attention from the industry leaders.  My experience with Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2010 has been an amazing one.

What are your most pressing SEO concerns? I would love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Network Solutions, LLC and the University of Maryland recently came out with a “State of Small Business Report” to take the pulse of what small business owners thinking. They surveyed 1,000 entrepreneurs and over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing some of the results that came back.

Last time the discussion was on Creativity as a strategy for success. This week I want to focus on the boom in social media.

Week 2: The Boom In Social Media

One technology application that is experiencing substantial growth is a social media presence, such as having a blog, FaceBook page or LinkedIn profile. The incidence of small businesses having a social media presence has doubled from 12 percent to 24 percent in the past 12 months.

“Almost one out of five small business owners actively uses social media for a part of their business.”

Almost one out of five small business owners actively uses social media for a part of their business. The main types of social media uses include:

• A company page on a social networking site (75 percent)
• Posting status updates or articles of interest on social media sites (69 percent)
• Building a network through a site like LinkedIn (57 percent)
• Monitoring feedback about the business (54 percent)
• Maintaining a blog (39 percent)
• Tweeting about areas of expertise (26 percent)
• Using Twitter as a service channel (16 percent)

Does social media pay?

The majority of small business owners who use social media – 58 percent – feel the medium has so far “met expectations.” Another 12 percent feel it has “exceeded expectations” but twice as many, 26 percent, feel it has “fallen short of expectations.” The major accomplishments of social media so far are related to marketing and service, and
include:

• Identifying and attracting new customers (61 percent of users)
• Developing higher awareness of the business in its target market (52 percent)
• Staying engaged with current customers (46 percent)

“Half (50 percent) of users feel it has used up more time than expected.”

Social media also helps some small businesses to collaborate effectively with their network of suppliers, partners and colleagues (35 percent) and among employees (21 percent). This collaboration has the potential to spur productivity and creativity among small businesses as their connectivity rises exponentially.

Social media is not without problems. For example, half (50 percent) of users feel it has used up more time than expected. Only 17 percent feel social media has resulted in allowing people to criticize their business, though experts would note this provides a chance to engage critics (only 6 percent feel social media has hurt the business image through negative comments more than helped it). How has social media affected the bottom line of small business?

• Looking at the past 12 months, only 22 percent believe social media use has been profitable; 19 percent believe it lost money, and 53 percent believe it just paid for itself.
• The future is brighter as small business owners learn to master the medium. Almost half (45 percent) expect social media to be profitable in the next twelve months.

Are you using social media to build your business? How are you using it effectively so you’re not just wasting time?

I’ve love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

I’m pleased to announce our latest famous entrepreneur profile of Jack Dorsey Biz Stone and Evan Williams, the founders of Twitter.

You can read the complete story here: http://www.evancarmichael.com/Famous-Entrepreneurs/5527/summary.php
“We wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world,” recalls Dorsey of the name-choosing process. “We came across the word ‘Twitter’ and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds.’ And that’s exactly what the product was.” So just how did this inconsequential information come to make such a consequential difference on the world – both online and off?

“We came across the word ‘Twitter’ and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds.’ And that’s exactly what the product was.”

Constraint: “Design is a career where you learn creative decision making,” Stone once said. “It’s a renewable resource. You never run out of it. It’s never like, ‘That’s it, there is no more.’” As much as the co-founders could have added new features and designed Twitter to death, their success came from exercising constraint and keeping the service as simple as possible.

Fun: They did not have a business plan, or even a revenue model. They even admitted that there is no market. But they did think that their idea was pretty cool. And, with that, they set off to turn their dream into a reality. It might not have been the most useful tool in the world, but then again, neither is ice cream, and people seem to enjoy a lot of that.

Collaboration: Twitter launched in one of the world’s most highly competitive industries, which might make one think it would be highly competitive in return, and guarded of its activities. But the three co-founders took a different approach. They wanted to work with and learn from their competitors to make the industry a healthier place for all, and thus promoted the open exchange of information.

Culture: Twitter employees get free catered breakfasts and lunches when they get to work. Does it get any better than that? At Twitter, in fact, it does. From Thursday concerts to Friday tea-times, employees have a myriad of opportunities to enjoy themselves and communicate with each other at work. That is the kind of open culture the co-founders wanted to instill in their company.

Commitment: If Twitter was a comedian, it would have been laughed off the stage before it even got started. But the three co-founders remained determined to finish their act. They turned their cheek to the criticism, and refused to be bought out. Until they prove what they want to prove, they are not backing down.

The future for Twitter is uncertain, and Williams has called the option to go public “a possibility.”

“Our goal is to change the world, and we’re going to build the best company we can to realize that goal, reach Twitter’s potential.”

“Our goal is to change the world, and we’re going to build the best company we can to realize that goal, reach Twitter’s potential,” he says. “At some point going public may make the most sense. We’re nowhere near thinking of that. At one time I might have said ‘that’s ridiculous’, but I don’t say that any more. We can be more creative than IPO or being acquired.”

Again, the bottom line for the three Twitter co-founders comes down to creativity. Until their creative juices run out, there is little chance of any of them slowing down.

Again, you can read the complete story here: http://www.evancarmichael.com/Famous-Entrepreneurs/5527/summary.php

What do you think of the Twitter story? Are there any other famous entrepreneurs you would like to see profiled?

I’ve love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

I’m often asked by entrepreneurs “How can I use Twitter for my business? It seems like such a waste of time!”

It’s easy to talk in generalities but I thought the best way to show you would be to give you three actual examples from how I’ve used Twitter in my business from the past week.

1) Generate Sales

I’ve set up alerts through Google News Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) so that whenever someone talks about my business, I get an update. It’s easy to set up and it allows you to see what people are saying about it. Even if there are no results yet, as soon as someone does post something, you’ll know and you can respond.

Blogger Marc de Groot recently posted about my Entrepreneur Heroes Trading Cards (http://www.evancarmichael.com/Heroes/) so I thanked him for his post via Twitter.

He was shocked to receive a personal reply, let his Twitter list know about it, and then ordered from my website. A little recognition can go a long way!

2) Make A Customer Feel Better

We make a point of following the customers who give us their Twitter information and are always on the hunt for ways to help them. Sometimes it’s business related and sometimes it’s not. Ringo, my Marketing Manager, has set up a Twitter account @EvansAuthors just to follow our customers.

Here’s an example of how we do it. A customer recently mentioned on her Twitter account that she was sick so we decided to send her some brownies and a get well soon card.

She then sent out a message on her Twitter account to thank us.

3) Go Above And Beyond For A Customer

Like the last case, another one of our customers mentioned that her sister was going in for a cancer surgery and asked her Twitter followers to pray for her. This one was particularly tough because of how serious the situation was and our customer was also based in New Zealand which made it difficult to send her treats from our usual suppliers.

And what do you send? Brownies just didn’t seem right so we found a New Zealand based gift basket company and they had a get well soon care pack that we bought and sent to her to give to her sister.

The result? Another happy Tweet to her followers and she posted a picture as well!

The underlying theme here is connecting with your customers and potential customers on a personal level. We’ve had the best results from Twitter not by spamming promotional content to them but by listening to what they are saying and finding a way to get involved.

It can be business related which can lead to direct orders or it can be more personal and you can use Twitter as a way to connect in a meaningful way with your customers.

How have you used Twitter recently to grow your business?

I’ve love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Photo Credit: HASH

It’s been a while since my last AdSense post so to continue with the series on From $0.30 to $300 / Day on Google AdSense here is Part 6. If you haven’t been following along or need a quick recap our Money Making Formula is $ = V x CTR x CPC. In previous posts I focused on:

V (Volume of Traffic)

1. The formula for AdSense success: $ = V x CTR x CPC
2. Have other people write the content for you

CTR (Click Through Rate)

1. Location, Location, Location
2. Don’t Make Ads Look Like Ads!
3. Focus on Ad Relevancy

Today’s lesson is…

Get the Right Traffic

We’re still going to focus on improving your CTR for this lesson and where your visitors come from can have a dramatic effect on how much money you can make.

There are a number of ways you can drive traffic to your website including getting repeat visitors and finding new visitors through search engines, social media, and partner websites.

“It’s called banner blindness – the more people visit the same website, the more they know where the ads are, and the less likely they are to click on them.”

Repeat vs. First Time Visitors

Let’s first focus in on getting repeat versus first time visitors. Repeat visitors are more loyal, will buy more from you, will tell more people about your site, will link to you… but they won’t click on ads! It’s called banner blindness – the more people visit the same website, the more they know where the ads are, and the less likely they are to click on them.

Think about your own experience with your favorite blogs and websites. When was the last time you clicked on an ad from that site?

This is a main reason why bloggers can have a hard time making money through AdSense – it’s not that blogs themselves are not profitable, it’s that many of the visitors are returning blog subscribers and they won’t click on your ads. If you have a lot of loyal, repeat visitors then you’ll likely have a better time selling your own product or recommending other products and taking a commission because these people trust you and will listen to your recommendations whereas a first time visitor doesn’t know who you are and won’t care about your suggestions – but they will click on your ads.

If you want to make more money through AdSense, the message is simple: You need to focus on getting those first time visitors.

Not All First Time Visitors Are Created Equal

Now that we’ve established that you need to focus on first time visitors, the question becomes “What kind of traffic source should I focus on? Search engines? Social media? Partner websites?” I’ll break these down for you individually.

Social Media: There is no question that social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg can drive thousands and thousands of visitors to your website. I’ve had an article hit the homepage of Digg and it actually caused our servers to melt because we had too much traffic coming all at once.

“If you serve up too many AdSense ads that don’t get clicked, Google will stop showing high paying ads on your site so not only can social media traffic cause your website to crash, it won’t lead to a lot of clicks, and can actually reduce the quality of future ads that get shown on your site.”

Great news right? Unfortunately no… almost none of the social media traffic clicked on my AdSense ads. People who come from social media websites  a) are generally very web savvy and quickly spot your ads and ignore them and b) are browsers looking for a way to kill time – they aren’t really interested in solving a problem and are unlikely to click on an ad that offers a solution to a problem.

Even worse, if you serve up too many AdSense ads that don’t get clicked, Google will stop showing high paying ads on your site so not only can social media traffic cause your website to crash, it won’t lead to a lot of clicks, and can actually reduce the quality of future ads that get shown on your site. Social media definitely has a place in your overall marketing efforts but don’t count on it to help your AdSense revenue.

Partner Websites: Partner websites can be a good source of targeting traffic, assuming that the referring site is related to your own. If your website is about cars and you get linked from a beauty supply website, I wouldn’t expect too many click conversions.

Traffic from partner websites will generally have a higher conversion than social media traffic but you will still get a lot of people who are just browsing and aren’t really interested in your content or ads . It can also be really hard to get a lot of traffic from partner websites that is targeted. Remember the V in $ = V x CTR x CPC Money Making Formula is Volume of Traffic. If you can’t get many many people coming to your site then you won’t make much money with AdSense.

“Search engine traffic is the holy grail of AdSense revenue and should be your primary target.”

Search Engines: Search engine traffic is the holy grail of AdSense revenue and should be your primary target. People who come to your website through search engines are typically looking for a solution to a problem which will make them more likely to click through on ads. They are also not as web savvy as social media visitors so if you do a good job in not making your ads look like ads, they will spend more time reading your AdSense offers and clicking through on them which means money in your pocket.

To get some tips on how to improve your search engine rankings and traffic there are a number of great bloggers who cover the topic and I also write a regular series on search engine optimization as well.

The bottom line here is if you want to have a high click through rate then you need to focus on getting as many people finding your website through the search engines as possible. Google has suggested that an average click through rate should be 1-5%. If you’re not in there (or above… why do you just want to be average?) then it’s time to focus on getting more search engine visitors and the other methods I’ve already discussed to improve your click through rate.

What have your experiences been with search engine vs. social media vs. repeat visitors and their impact on your AdSense revenue? Do you have any examples to share?

I’ve love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Photo credit: labnol

(Photo Credit: Bakerella)

If you’re still on the fence as to if you should be using Twitter or are wondering if you’re getting the most you can from the service here are 5 practical ways that I’ve used Twitter to grow my business in the past week.

As I’ve mentioned before, Twitter is the #1 source of traffic to my site after the search engines and here are a few methods that I’m using:

1) Promote New Content On My Website

2) Connect With People I’m Doing Business With

3) Congratulate A Client Who Is Having A Birthday

4) Make New Connections With Potential Partners

5) Thank People Who Mention And Promote My Business

As you can see, it doesn’t take much to connect with people through Twitter and let them know that you’re paying attention and that you care. Twitter can be a great way to quickly build new connections and maintain the ones you currently have.

What are some of the ways that you’re using Twitter? Please give specific examples by commenting below – I would love to hear from you!

(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!

(Photo Credit: ~Ilse) In my last Twitter University post I talked about how you can monitor your brand on Twitter (How To Monitor Your Brand On Twitter – Twitter University). Today I wanted to share with you the one tool that saves countless hours of time, helps me connect with my customers, and lets me do it all within Outlook – my default email program. The best part is, it’s free!

There are countless Twitter applications that are popping that all promise to make us more efficient and help us leverage Twitter to a greater extent. One of my favorite tools is an application called TwInbox. TwInbox is a free Outlook plugin that allows you to manage your Twitter account through Outlook as well as gives you many customization options to do a lot of really cool, time saving modifications.

Outlook: The Ultimate Twitter Client

When I first got onto Twitter I went to people’s accounts to see what they were up to. After quickly realizing that it was taking up too much of my time I downloaded several Twitter clients and stuck with TweetDeck for a while but it sucked up a lot of my computer’s memory and I hated having yet another application that I had to load every day and keep open on my desktop.

I use Microsoft Outlook as my default mail and calendar program. It’s always open on my computer and I don’t know what I would do without it. When I first learned about TwInbox I was ecstatic – finally a way to have all my online communications together in the same program! No more flipping between applications and tying up computer memory!

Here is a little bit about how TwInbox works. Once you install it you’ll see a new toolbar at the top of your Outlook that looks like this:

From here you can create a new Tweet, ReTweet a post that you liked, and send direct and @ messages all from within Outlook. You can also choose to receive your Twitter @replies and direct messages to an Outlook folder. It comes in just as your regular email does and you can use the same Outlook reply features to respond to your followers. For example, if you click on a tweet and then hit ‘Reply’ it will send the author a direct message. If you click ‘Reply To All’ it will send them an @ message.

Having the Twitter integration into Outlook allows me to keep all my communications within one program and makes it easy to follow and keep in touch with my customers and people I find interesting. This integration alone has a ton of value and is definitely worth doing but here is what makes TwInbox really cool…

Advanced Twitter Integration

Once I started auto-following people who follow me I was bombarded with promotional tweets that were of no interest to me. I thought to myself: “If only there were a way to see the posts from these users that didn’t have links!”… well TwInbox gives you a feature to do just that – it’s called Searches and Groups.

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like and how I use it:

Since you can’t see the full line that I’ve highlighted, here is a part of what it reads: -http -@jaykubassek -@stagingdiva -@JohnOda -@Diannecrampton from:jaykubassek OR stagingdiva OR JohnOda OR Diannecrampton

These are the Twitter accounts of four of my authors / customers. I’ve specified in this rule that I want to follow the author accounts but I don’t want any links (-http) and I don’t want to read any @ messages from other people to them. This way I only get the Twitter posts that they write which are non-promotional and talks about what they are really up to. My only complaint with TwInbox right now is that you can only put a certain number of characters on each rule you create so you have to create multiple rules for a similar purpose (hint hint @TechHit).

Am I Missing Some Valuable Posts?

The question that always comes up when I show people this method is “Am I missing valuable posts that have links in them from my customers?” The answer is invariably, yes. However, it depends on what your goal is with Twitter. For me, I want to stay connected to my customers, congratulate them when they have a big win, wish them luck when they are off on a conference, send them best wishes if they are off on vacation, etc. These are all events that people Tweet about without typically including a link – you basically get the “good” Tweets without all the promotional links. Sure you will miss some valuable posts, but it’s worth it considering all the junk that you’re cutting out.

Save Your Time, Maximize Your ROI

One of the biggest complaints that people have with Twitter is that it takes up too much time and they don’t see the return on investment. Thanks to TwInbox I am able to check my @ messages, see what my key customers are up to, and respond to them to keep my name in their mind – I can do this all within 15 minutes per day. Considering that Twitter is consistently in the top five traffic sources to my website every month, I would think that’s a pretty good return on investment.

* Please note that I am in no way affiliated with TwInbox and don’t make any money from them. I just happen to love their tool and wanted to share it with you so that you too may benefit from it. Learn more at: http://www.techhit.com/TwInbox/twitter_plugin_outlook.html

Have you ever used TwInbox? What do you do to improve your efficiency and maximize your Twitter ROI? Please comment below – I would love to hear from you!

When I first heard all the hype about Twitter I thought it was a huge waste of time. Most of the posts that I saw were either blatant promotional pitches or updates on the personal lives of people I’ve never met. On a whim I used the Twitter Search tool to search for my name and my website name.

I was shocked at what I discovered. People were talking about my company on Twitter and I didn’t even realize it!

“Remember that when someone tweets about your business they are letting their entire list of followers know about their experience. If you’re not at least monitoring the conversation you run the risk of not supporting your champions and also letting your critics make negative claims about your business that go unchallenged. ”

One particular example was a woman who had tweeted that she was considering joining EvanCarmichael.com as an author and wanted to know if it was worth the time investment. I quickly signed up a Twitter account, replied to her and before I knew it she signed up an account! Had I not been on Twitter I would have missed the opportunity to connect with this customer.

Ever since that first interaction I’ve been monitoring what people say about my company. Usually it’s people saying how they enjoy it and it’s a great resource for entrepreneurs. I typically then write back thanking the person for their comment and acknowledging them.

Here is a recent example that came in today:

I have no idea who MonsterMillion is but he/she took time out of the day to promote my site to the thousands of people who are MonsterMillion followers and I wanted to let him/her know that I appreciate it. These type of comments come in every day and I usually reply to each one with a short tweet to let them know that I value their kind words. So far nothing negative has come in yet but if / when it does I’ll know about it and will be able to respond.

How to Monitor Your Brand on Twitter

Here is how you can quickly and easily keep track of what people are saying about your and your business.

1) Go to Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/) and put in your name. You can repeat the process later for your company name and, if you’re a real keener, put in your key customer names and congratulate them when they get positive Twitter mentions.

You’ll then see the results in a format like this:

2) Subscribe to the Feed. At the top right of the page you may notice the link that says “Feed for this query” – if you click on it you’ll be able to see the RSS feed for all the Twitter posts that contain your name. If you currently have a RSS reader then it’s a great way to be instantly notified whenever you get mentioned in a Twitter post.

3) Check Your Feed Regularly. I check my RSS feed on a daily basis (I use Google Reader) so it’s easy for me to quickly find out which new conversations have started up around my name and my company. You want to check in on a regular basis to quickly acknowledge people who are helping to promote you for free and to help out any users who are having questions or problems with your business.

Remember that when someone tweets about your business they are letting their entire list of followers know about their experience. It’s all in the public domain and if you’re not at least monitoring the conversation you run the risk of not supporting your champions and also letting your critics make negative claims about your business that go unchallenged. Twitter results are also starting to pop up in the search engines which gives you all the more reason to get involved and protect your online brand.

I hope I have at least convinced you to monitor your brand on Twitter. You’ll soon find yourself getting more and more involved as you connect directly with your customers.

Do you monitor your brand on Twitter? What experiences have you had?