Kimber Cook: Hi, I’m Kimber, Internet Marketing Specialists at Masterlink Interactive. I’m going to talk to you today about email marketing. Specifically, we want to answer the question with the rise of social media popularity, does email marketing still matter?

The fact is, yes email marketing does still matter, it’s very important, email is not dead. Even with the rise of social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter. Though Facebook and Twitter have experienced so much growth lately, that we tend to talk a lot about social media. The fact is that everyone still uses email. Facebook, one of the most popular social media sites currently has over 500 million active users and that’s a big number. The number of worldwide email accounts is projected to increase from over 2.9 billion in 2010 to over 3.8 billion in 2014 and that’s a lot more users that you could be reaching. 75% of all email accounts belong to consumers. These are your customers and they need to be reached. Email has a phenomenal reach. Even if I check my Facebook account every day, if your company’s message is not in my new stream at the moment I log on, I’m going to miss it. But I see every unread email in my email box even if I don’t log into my email every day. With the rise in popularity of smartphones, email marketing can become even more popular. Personally, my phone alerts me every time I get an email message. Now that’s pretty powerful.

If you’d like to talk about email marketing or if you have any questions for us know, we’re here to help. Thanks.

You can advertise on search networks, popular blogs, video sharing sites, social networking platforms, television, radio, newspapers, and phone books. Let’s not forget smart phones, billboards, magazine, newsletters and even weekly church bulletins. There are so many places your potential customer could be found, and you only have so much advertising budget to go around.

You’re not sure where to put your next advertising dollars. I get it, as do all marketers. We live in a state of constant media “noise”, and we ourselves are fighting for a seat at the table. We want your dollars. You aren’t even sure you want to spend them, but business has been tight lately. Your sales force has had more time on their hands, and you’ve had to let a few people go.

Well, if you’ve gotten this far you’ve probably already found a good solid source or two for marketing. Perhaps you’ve reached the point with them that you can’t squeeze any more out of those sources. Maybe they have even become less dependable outlets for advertising. So, what’s the next step? How do you make that big investment that saves your company?

As an employee of an agency our goal is gain as much of your advertising dollars as possible. It only makes sense to do that. The smart companies “test the waters” as they say. They often give a smaller, short-run contract to agencies like mine. They usually do this with two to three agencies, sometimes simultaneously to gauge success. If the results are lacking for an agency they have not invested or lost much. If the results are great then the company rewards that agency with a bigger and longer contract.

Be one of the smart companies. Test the waters. Make the agency prove they deserve your dollars. That way you never have to fear the big investment.

I thoroughly enjoy Wikipedia and use it frequently. I love to read information and facts, and Wikipedia makes doing so all too easy. The information is of course provided by users, so there is a lot of info on Wikipedia that is wrong, but overall it is still informative.

Google liked the idea so much that they decided to take the same idea and monetize it. Now, users can create informational articles on ‘Knol’ (www.Knol.Google.com) and create an ad to go along with the article. The articles default to allow Adsense ads to which the writer will share some of the revenue. Google says that there is very little oversight to the veracity of the ads except that users can leave reviews.

This sounds easy to take advantage of for profit. One of the problems with the idea comes down to the fact that Google is the one that gets the rest of the profit. They are also the one that controls the rankings. While, I really do believe that Google will operate with integrity and avoid unfair practices, I still think that Google is opening up a can of worms they may not be prepared for.

The other problem is directly on Google.com search results. Most search results pages are littered with at least one Wikipedia link or more. It stands to reason that Knol will do the same as long as the information within the articles is significantly different. This will create another challenge for the SEO community. Luckily, I’m just a PPC specialist. More Adsense space creates more Content Network real estate for my clients. Heck, creating an article designed for a client’s ad seems to be……..ummm…forget I said that.

Anyways, despite the way it sounds, I really do like the idea of another open source encyclopedia. I love the offerings that Google brings to the web. I think Google would have been well advised to walk away from this one. As questionable as the idea sounds for Google, Knol is going in my fav’s anyways.

In case you haven’t heard the news Yahoo will begin showing Google’s Adwords ads in the next few months pending a Justice Department review. This all happened on the same day that Microsoft and Yahoo officially broke off talks about Microsoft buying Yahoo.

The big questions are:

1. What does this do for Yahoo?
The ads on Google have more competitive bids. Yahoo will receive a percentage of what Google receives from these clicks. This will actually bring more money to Yahoo than their own ads by themselves. This will also probably give Yahoo a jump-start to their bidding competitions. It remains to be seen whether the Google ads compete with the Yahoo ads on a level playing field.

2. What does this do for Google?
This will not actually improve Google’s statistics for search volume. Still, it’s just one more piece of real estate for Google to expand their ad network to. It also provides a way for Google to boost its click revenue.

3. What does this mean for the search industry?
Google is growing in dominance. Yahoo is being given a brief reprieve from their long slow fall from grace. Microsoft is left at the altar wondering what could have been.

Your sales person has brought a potential client into the office, your team has made the stellar pitch, and the energy between everyone was electric. In the end the $20,000 a month deal went to another agency. After going through the usual check-list of reasons in your head try going through this additional list.

1. Techie-Talk – Most search marketers that I know don’t have a marketing background. Most of them have a tech background which drove them to search. If they can’t speak money to a client the deal is probably going to be hard to get past that business’s marketing department.

2. Condescension – Trying to prove to a potential client that you know your stuff by throwing out all the industry jargon can come off like a call to a tech-support guru. The caller walks away feeling insulted.
3. Confusing Data – Clients only care about click-through-rate if that means more money for their company. This is like the number one issue. If they can’t understand the data then it is worthless information.
4. Reputation – It is too easy to mislead a company, and the corporations are catching onto this fact. They are acting more and more like the sales process is an interview. They are searching the web for the name of the agencies they are talking to. Poor placement on the search engines or negative links look like your company doesn’t know what it is doing. Talk the talk. Walk the walk.
5. Employees – This is the same as the last note, except that it applies to the employees. Any person the potential client might meet is game for being searched. Who really cares if one of your people has posts about their drunken exploits on their MySpace page? Your clients do. It smacks of a lack of professionalism.

Just because you’re in the industry doesn’t mean you can fool clients. It is just too competitive out there. Make sure your clients see the best side of you, and you will be rewarded.

Dan Thies, a Dallas area SEO known as the “keyword guru” and author of the SEO Fast Start e-book is holding a seminar, SEO Fast Start Live in Dallas on June 25 & 26 at the Crowne Plaza in Addison. Dan is recognized in the industry as an SEO expert and has been practicing and teaching search engine optimization for over 10 years.

SEO Fast Start is a free e-book offering step by step instructions for a process-driven method of SEO including planning, measuring, & improving your ROI. Dan will be expanding on many of the topics in his book during the live Dallas seminar.

“During this intensive 2-day training, we will discuss how SEO and PPC fit into the larger picture of your business… how to develop better strategies, tactics, and processes to maximize your return on investment from search engine marketing.”

The agenda includes:

• Understanding Your Brand
• Keyword Strategy
• Content Development / Copywriting
• Link Building
• Google AdWords – PPC
• Social Media

It’s not often that a good SEO conference comes through Dallas so if you’re looking to learn about or expand your knowledge of SEO and have an opportunity to network with some of the brightest SEOs in Dallas, don’t miss this event. You have until tomorrow June 4 to sign up for SEO Fast Start Live with the early bird discount for $97.

We’ll be there!

While I was watching prime time tv last week a CBS 11 News teaser caught my attention with the headline “Dallas Web Designers Ready To Compete With Google”.

Now I don’t really watch the local news much and although my boyfriend was a bit dismayed at the fact that we’d be missing part of The Daily Show with John Stewart, I knew I had to stay tuned for this story.

These Dallas men along with several from California and Hawaii created a new search engine, Viewzi. Now Viewzi isn’t exactly just like other search engines. Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN are all text based search engines. These basically show the results for web pages as text with the title, description and URL. Viewzi is much more interactive.

With Viewzi there are several options for viewing your search results. There’s the Simple Text View which shows combined results from Google and Yahoo in a familiar text listing format. There’s special viewing options for video, images, mp3s and Amazon books results. The Weather View is also particularly handy but not so much for it to be a daily destination for me.

There’s a Everyday Shopping view which shows results from Amazon, Ebay, Target and Walmart. This could be handy depending on what you’re looking for as it shows images of the actual products.

The two views I found most useful, yet not so much that I’d actually use them regularly are Web Screenshot View and 4 Sources View. In the Web Screenshot View you get Yahoo search results with a nice screenshot of the website. However, there’s only one result on screen at a time and you have to scroll through one by one. In addition, the screenshots seem to take some time to load (note they are still in beta, so this may be temporary slowness). As a Search Engine Optimization specialist, this is not great news unless you already have a 1st place ranking in Yahoo. If not you have to hope the Viewzi users like to scroll a few pages.

Next up is the 4 Sources View. This one is my favorite for playing around with so far. This view provides the 8 top results for Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN all on the same page. It also shows a screenshot all of the results, unfortunately the screenshots load somewhat slowly here as well.

The 4 Sources View results can be customized to show whichever engines you are interested in. You can choose to view Google results only, or Google and Yahoo only. This feature is helpful in comparing results in the top search engines all in one place, which is handy. I like searching in this view, it’s fun. But I’m not sure that it’d be that useful if I were a regular searcher and not a curious SEO. First of all it’s not very intuitive, I can just picture my mom and dad trying to figure out how to use this. Secondly the ordering of the results from the 4 engines seems so random. Why is Yahoo sometimes on top, MSN other times and some spaces have results stacked up from 3 engines and others with only one? What’s it all mean?

All in all the Viewzi team did an incredible job designing the site. I love the look and feel with all of the graphics, image navigation and web site screenshots. I just don’t see this as anything that Google will worry about. People use search engines to get to the information they are searching for fast. They don’t want to scroll through large screenshots or mess around with reordering the 4 big search engines while searching in another. I think of Viewzi as more of a fun “alternative” search engine and not a “Google Killer”. I just seriously doubt that Average Joe Surfer will be migrating to Viewzi and adding “Viewzi this” and “Viewzi that” to the internet vocabulary anytime soon.

Viewzi’s public launch is scheduled for June 9th. If you’d like to try out Viewzi now check out the CBS 11 news story “Dallas Web Designers Ready To Compete With Google” for a referral code.

Analytics is a dirty word to many web users. The word depicts tons of boring stats that only a select few individuals can make heads or tails of. Goal conversions, funnels, filters, and traffic sources make a user’s head spin. Don’t stop reading just yet. There are actually some easier stats to understand that will directly affect how your web site design.

Here’s the good news – Most of the information is easy to find and easy to read

Here’s the bad news – It requires actually exploring a few minutes to find these things. *gasp*

I know. I said this was going to be easy. It is easy once you know what to look for. I’m not going to walk you through the steps to find this information. That’s your job, and I’d have to list the steps for each analytics. So, here are the 4 easy stats to watch for in Analytics and why they’re important.

1 – Flash support – If your website uses any amount of flash at all, it is important to know if your users have flash and that they have the version you are using. If 10 percent of them do not then you have a problem. See? That was easy, right?

2 – Broadband – If you have a high percentage of dial-up users, and your site loads slow on dial-up, you’ll want to address this fact. A previous client of mine had the opposite effect. Their dial-up users converted better than their broadband users. The assumption was that once a page loaded, any page at all, the users were committed.

3. Version of OS – No matter how much you love Linux or Mac, the majority of users are using Windows. All of your website’s details should be PC friendly above all else.

4. Browser type – Every last detail of your site must work when using Internet Explorer. Over 90% of internet users are using it, so your page must be designed with IE in mind.

Yahoo jumped at the opportunity to purchase Index Tools; an analytics provider that charges a relatively small fee to each client to track the hits and conversions going their sites. Yahoo has announced that they will start providing Index Tools free of charge to some users.

Google bought an analytics company, Urchin, several years ago in order to provide this sort of tracking. By offering it free they were able to attract more advertisers. Google Adwords Conversion Tracking, while distinct from Google Analytics, has seen recent improvements as well.

Index Tools and Google Analytics are worlds apart in appearance and user-interface, but as far as functionality, there is very little difference between the two. Google presents more aesthetic looking graphs, while Index Tools makes it easier to cross more data variables on user charts, but the virtually all the same information is accessible through either one.

Acquiring a comparable analytics provider will make them much more attractive for the future, but Google’s upgrades will make it tough still. Google Adwords Conversion Tracking is now able to track more than one type of conversion for the same client. This is phenomenal step forward. Many advertisers want to track when users fill out a standard form or a form for information, but the ability to track both was limited. Each user could only be counted once, but each form was counted as a transaction. Using that format an advertiser could determine how many users had completed both forms, they could not determine which form had been filled out if they were individual form conversions. Google Analytics could be used for this purpose, but the process to do so was time consuming and cumbersome.

Google Analytics has recently started beta testing the ability to track information by different time periods as well; hourly/daily/weekly. While the daily and weekly will save time when creating a report, the hourly reports are the best advancement out of the lot. Previously, one could track all kinds of data for the different times of the day such as clicks, but the conversions weren’t displayed hourly. That means that it was difficult to tell the conversion rates at different times of the day. For a PPC Specialist, the conversion rates are crucial. Let’s hope this offering comes out of beta-testing ASAP.

It’s hard to tell how big of a deal it would be if Microsoft buys Yahoo. You see, Yahoo’s old search platform, Overture, used to power MSN Search. Anyone remember a couple of years ago when Yahoo’s search totals took a huge dive? I mean the really big dive, not the other big ones. You see, much of that was due to the loss of the MSN contract. It wasn’t that people stopped using Yahoo so much as it was that Yahoo could no longer count MSN’s numbers towards their own totals.

If Microsoft buys up Yahoo, this is likely to reverse trend. Anyone that has used Live Search, the engine that powers MSN Search, then you already know how much of an improvement this could be. I am like many people in that I do not care for Microsoft adCenter. The interface is not user friendly, and the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Yahoo, now powered by Panama, could simply resume powering MSN Search. That would make one less stop to make when managing pay-per-click campaigns and it would be easier.

Of course, if Microsoft is unsuccessful at buying Yahoo then the remaining players would most likely be Apple, Google, or no one at all. Yahoo and Apple together would be awesome. My Yahoo combined with iTunes? There’s some marketing power. What if Google bought Yahoo? It’s hard to imagine the government allowing such a merger for monopoly reasons. But hey, Google is becoming the future Skynet (and probably will be once they complete their search for Sarah Connor!). Heck, AOL could even jump in and show Yahoo how mismanagement is really done.

I think Yahoo would be making a bad choice if they stayed put, but I thought the same thing when Nintendo turned down Microsoft’s buyout offer for their game console biz. Nintendo knew they had a core market that was profitable. They only needed to change the way they operated. Then again, how likely is it that Yahoo could replicate the success of the Wii?