How to Build a Great Contest

How to Build a Great Contest

vía SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

So many websites are currently doing contests and you notice the size of this industry when looking at specialized websites which index all the contests online. So I analyzed about 20 existing contest webpages in my niche and took all the best ideas plus added some of my own magic to condense them into one ultimate contest page.

If you want to start a Facebook & Twitter contest, you're in the right place.

Building my contest page, I had a few goals in mind. What was my target? Anybody that speaks French (it's a French website), that has a Facebook or Twitter account and that's interested in laptop computers (the niche of my website). I needed to find what on-page elements had to be present in order to create the maximum amount of buzz and convert visitors into participants.

List of on page elements to include on your contest page. They are in order of how my page was built.

1. One great image at the top of your contest page. This will be the graphic identity of your contest so make it nice, include your logo if you have one. I also included a picture of the products they could win.
2. Describe your contest (in your text, include links to various pages on your site. Your contest page will receive backlinks and should have a high PR. By deep-linking to your articles, you'll send some link juice):
   1. Why you are doing this contest? Your site's 3rd anniversary? A new product just came out?
   2. What prizes are offered? Include more than one!
   3. How to participate? If there's more than one way of participating, make sure you insist that they should participate using both methods.
   4. Include buttons for visitors to participate. Make it easy for them! They should need to click and voila, done.
   5. Now you can add more information about your contest. What are the details?
      1. When does it end?
      2. How many winners?
      3. How will you contact the winners and when will the prizes be sent?
   6. Add more details on the various prizes. If it's a laptop, give the specs.
   7. Include a photo of the first, second and/or third prize. They should want it!
   8. Conclude by thanking your audience for their participation and asking them to send the contest to a friend by email. I had included a button in javascript (sharethis) they just had to hover over to get the email form.
   9. Add the comment form. If you are using Wordpress be careful! By default, the comment form goes under all the existing comments. If someone has to scroll down 100's of comments to leave a comment, he won't. I had to modify my php wordpress template.
   10. Note: To keep the page loading quickly (speed is important for SEO), I configured Wordpress to only show the last 20 comments in order of earliest to oldest. It would have been ridiculously slow if I was showing all 907 comments! WP or the plugin All in One SEO adds canonical urls pointing to the original contest page URL, so multiple pages of comments won't get separately indexed thus creating duplicate content.

To get a strong buzz around your contest you need to use the power of social media. Luckily for you, it's also how they should participate. Here's where the magic happens.

To participate via Facebook:

A visitor must click the LIKE button (social plugin) which you have added yourself into the page. This is linked to your Facebook page (you need one!) which receives an additional LIKE (It also posts a link on their wall).

Second, they have to click the Facebook Share button. This posts your contest link onto their Facebook wall. Make sure your page TITLE and the first paragraph of text are well written and attractive because all their friends will now see your link in their activity page. Some say using LIKES and SHARES are the same, they both post something on their wall. It's up to you to use just LIKE or both.

Finally, I asked visitors to post a comment on the page. This will be useful to get their email address to contact them. They will give you a valid email!

Everybody that participates via Facebook will advertize your contest on their wall for all their friends to see. You'll get a lot of additional participants, people who would never have found your page otherwise!

To participate via Twitte:

A visitor must Tweet your specific message. You need to include a few important things within the 140 characters. ex:

Win a #laptop! Retweet this message & follow @YOURNAME to participate! #YOURHASHTAG http://www.bit.ly/YOURCONTESTURL

Include the prize(s). Explain how they can participate via Twitter. Include your own unique Hash Tag (awesome for statistics). Shortened URL to your contest (Great for stats also!)

It's pretty easy to create the Twitter link. Start with http://twitter.com/?status= then add your tweet. You mustn't have any spaces or special characters. Spaces should be replaced by %20. Search for an online tool to convert your tweet if needed.

Secondly, I asked them to follow me via Twitter. Follow @yourtwittername linked to my Twitter account.

Lastly, they needed to leave a comment on the page with the URL to their tweet. You also get their real email addresses this way. 

Everybody that participates via Twitter will have a tweet on their feed for all their followers to see. If you get a few big fish, you'll get loads of RT and new followers that way.

Tip if using Wordpress. You'll have a lot of various codes inside your post (javascript...). Wordpress might modify your code when you switch to VISUAL mode so it's important to stay in HTML mode. I built my entire post inside notepad and I'd paste the HTML code from there. This saved me a number of times because Wordpress had modified my code in some way.

How could I have improved my contest?

If my site was a little bigger, I would have prepared a nice video with a pretty lady explaining the rules and asking people to participate. Video marketing is huge and if done properly it would have been a great source of visitors.

Facebook is a lot more powerful than Twitter mostly because there are just so many more people using it. Twitter users often have a Facebook accounts but the opposite is not always true. With both platforms, I was truly impressed at how easy it was to create a buzz. If they have something to gain from sharing your message, they'll happily complete the actions you request of them as long as you don't make it too complicated.

Now its time to try your own one...

¿Cómo definir un proyecto para un sitio web?

Si es el propietario de un hotel y quiere tener presencia en Internet mediante un sitio web para su empresa, puede contemplar las siguientes posibilidades: desarrollar usted mismo, confiar su elaboración a uno o varios de sus empleados, contratar los servicios de terceros, dejar su elaboración en manos de un amigo o conocido, etc.

También es posible que usted desarrolle sitios web para ganar dinero creando páginas web a terceros o haciendo páginas web propias con las de ganar dinero mediante publicidad, sistemas de afiliados, venta de enlaces, etc. Asimismo, puede trabajar en una empresa desarrolladora de soluciones web creando también sitios web para terceros.

Por otro lado, hay que tener presente que para desarrollar proyectos web de cierta envergadura será necesario un equipo de personas que se repartan las tareas a llevar a cabo. De modo que, cada uno de los integrantes del equipo podría estar especializado en un área diferente: diseño web, marketing online, seguridad, etc.

Hoy en día se puede decir que si no estás en Internet no existes. Imaginemos, por ejemplo, que alguien quiere ir de viaje a Buenos Aires y desea encontrar un hotel céntrico, económico y lo más cercano posible a una boca de subte, qué puede hacer?, ¿Cómo lo puede encontrar? Una manera muy fácil es buscar en Internet y, en apenas unos segundos, podrá obtener un listado de hoteles con estas características para elegir. Ahora bien, ¿qué hoteles aparecerán en esta lista? Aquellos que se hayan preocupado por estar presentes en Internet. Este es un ejemplo sencillo para comprender por qué en todos los hoteles, restaurantes, zapaterías, discotecas, tiendas de ropa, masajistas, pintores y un largo etcétera les interesa tener un sitio web.

Aparecer en las primeras posiciones de los buscadores

Supongamos que el dueño de un hotel céntrico y económico de Buenos Aires  ya tiene un sitio web creado. Sin embargo, siguiendo con el ejemplo del apartado anterior, si al hacer la búsqueda, su hotel aparece en la posición 250 de la lista obtenida, probablemente casi nadie visite su web. Entonces, debemos preguntarnos qué puede hacer para que su hotel escale posiciones y aparezca entre los primeros de esta lista? Para intentar que esto suceda podemos realizar una serie de acciones relacionadas con el Marketing Online, especialmente acciones SEO (Search Engine Optimization) y SEM (Search engine Marketing).

¿Qué se dice en Internet de mi negocio?

Los usuarios de Internet, cuando buscamos productos o servicios, como puede ser una habitación de hotel, también tenemos en cuenta la opinión de otros usuarios respecto a este producto o servicio. Por ejemplo, no reaccionaremos igual ante comentarios como “La situación era perfecta, pero, el ruido de la calle no nos dejó pegar ojo. Además, la limpieza dejaba un poco que desear.” que “Los dueños eran muy amables y la comida estupenda, por lo que, volveríamos con los ojos cerrados.”.

En consecuencia, debemos tratar de averiguar qué se dice de nuestro negocio en Internet y realizar acciones para la reputación del mismo sea el mejor posible, ya que, si nuestro hotel apareciera en las primeras posiciones de investigación, pero, con una opinión de los usuarios nefasta, esto nos podría perjudicar mucho más que si no apareciera en la investigación. Para gestionar esta reputación podemos realizar acciones ORM (Online Reputation Management).

Beneficiarse de las redes sociales de Internet

Desde la perspectiva de una empresa o negocio, además de un sitio web, Internet ofrece muchas más posibilidades para estar presente y dar a conocer nuestros productos y / o servicios a nuestros posibles clientes. Las redes sociales de Internet son, sin duda, los que nos permitirán acercarnos más a los internautas, permitiendo interactuar con ellos, crear comunidad, informar a nuestros seguidores, saber su opinión sobre nosotros, etcétera. Para ello, podemos realizar acciones SMO (Social Media Optimization).

Cuando el sitio web que hayamos creado ya esté en línea en Internet, algo fundamental que tendremos que saber es qué resultados está dando, es decir, tendremos que poder responder a preguntas como:

¿Cuántas visitas estamos obteniendo al día, a la semana, al mes? Desde donde nos visitan? Qué ciudades o países? Están comprando nuestros artículos o servicios desde el sitio web? ¿Qué porcentaje de visitantes hace alguna compra? Cuántos vuelven a visitarnos? Etcétera.

Para poder responder a estas y otras preguntas relacionadas, es posible utilizar diferentes herramientas de software que nos proporcionen estadísticas de visitas al sitio web, resúmenes de ventas realizadas, datos relacionados con el perfil de nuestros visitantes o usuarios, etcétera. Esto nos servirá para tener en cuenta a la hora de tomar decisiones respecto a modificaciones, ampliaciones o mejoras de nuestro sitio web.

Cuando se desarrolla un proyecto web es conveniente generar una documentación donde queden plasmadas todas las acciones realizadas a lo largo del mismo, lo que iremos haciendo desde el principio.

La documentación de un proyecto web podrá ser consultada en cualquier momento y, también, nos ayudará a corregir posibles errores, realizar modificaciones o ampliaciones.

4 Ways Paid Search Can Support Inbound Marketing

Google

 recently launched a big campaign to reactivate its dormant Adwords users with a $100 offer. Why the aggressive push? I think it’s important to note that if you were to ask any businesses 4 or 5 years ago if they were marketing online, running PPC (pay per click) ads on Google Adwords would be the first, if not only, thing out of their mouth.

Since the hey-day of paid search, the adoption of inbound marketing (blogging, social media, video, and SEO) has exploded. Inbound marketing resonates with more businesses because it doesn't cost anything but your time. This is partially why outbound tactics, like paid search and display have fallen out of focus. After all, why wouldn’t you spend all of your time blogging, networking, and optimizing your website if it costs you nothing, established your credibility & brand, and provided amazing results? Plus, if you have a small business with limited budget it makes sense to put all of your eggs in the proverbial “inbound basket.” Right?

There’s certainly some truth here. No matter what your industry or company size, if you’re ready to market your products and services, I suggest mastering inbound marketing first and think about the outbound later. However, paid search is a channel that can certainly compliment your inbound marketing strategy if set-up and run correctly. In fact, the skills you develop from the execution of inbound marketing tactics can have an incredible impact on the performance of outbound channels like paid search.

Here are 4 ways paid search can support your inbound marketing strategy:
 

1.  Complement Successful Inbound Marketing Tactics

Paid search can be a useful tool for expanding the reach of landing pages and offers that have shown success via inbound marketing. Start a paid search campaign with keywords center around your offer or blog post title. If done correctly, you can drive incremental leads and sales to these campaigns.

2.  Fill In SEO Gaps

Search can be a highly competitive and saturated marketplace. Inbound marketing teaches us to focus on the long tail where traffic may be lower but the opportunity to convert customers is huge. However, there may be some terms that don’t necessarily fit the inbound mold - say keywords you competitors are bidding on and where you think it’s valuable to play.

Starting a paid search campaign centered around competitor keywords and offers can give your business visibility and let your competitors audience know there are alternatives. 

Proceed with caution here though – although it’s perfectly acceptable to bid on terms you see your competitor bidding on, stay away from bidding on their trademarked terms. Not only is it of poor taste, but it can get you in trouble too.

3.  Test New Landing Pages, Keywords and Variations

Have you created new landing pages or thought of new keywords you’d like to rank for organically? Create a paid search campaign targeting the keywords you would like to rank for via SEO and direct them to landing pages and offers you’re testing. In just a few weeks you will have tons of data about how popular the keywords are (impressions), how relevant your offer or service is to those keywords (click-through-rate), and how well your copy and offer is aligned with people searching for that keyword (conversion rate). Plus, if you start your campaign with broad match keywords you’ll be able to gather a list of performing keywords to add to your SEO wish list.

4.  Think Outbound When It Comes to Campaign Structure

 Campaign structure is critical to running a successful paid search program. Instead of building your campaigns around the keywords and people you are targeting, try building them around you’re your products, services, and offerings. Then, build adgroups of keywords within those campaigns that are geared towards relevant keywords and matching headline and ad copy. You’ll find it much easier to handle the addition of new products, offers, and tests.

At the end of the day inbound marketing thinking has the potential to help more than just your inbound marketing tactics. Obviously, paid search isn’t the only outbound marketing channel that can compliment your inbound marketing strategy. What’s your take?

Read Original Artilce at Hubspot

11 Proven tactics to help you never run out of content

#1: RSS Reader: Scan It Daily

A great way to get fresh ideas and inspiration is to sign up for a free RSS reader such as Google Reader. Then use the Google Blogs search option and search blog directory sites such as Technorati and Blogcatalog for blogs that are relevant to your product or service. When you find what you’re looking for, simply subscribe by clicking on the RSS feed and adding it to your reader.

Organize your feeds into folders and sort by category for easy scanning; you can combine topics you find in your industry’s blogs with your own commentary to create posts that stand on their own.

You can read it later, manage your subscriptions and create new folders.

#2: Make Every Employee a Marketer

Encourage employees to contribute to your blog by writing posts on a topic of interest in your industry. Ask your customer service and sales teams about their most frequently asked questions, then have them write blog posts about the solutions. Creating a simple blog template for employees to use can be a great tool to eliminate any objections to writing a post. Click here for some sample templates.

This template will help you get started.

#3: LinkedIn Groups

There’s no shortage of opinions on LinkedIn. You can join up to 50 groups per individual profile. Find the most active groups related to your industry by searching the Groups tab. An easy way to tell which groups are most active is by the number of members and discussions. LinkedIn Answers is also a fantastic place to tap the knowledge of your professional network.

You can search by group name, keyword, company or school.

#4: Forums

If social media has a grandfather, its name is Grandpa Forum. These open and free discussions are a fantastic way to find out what’s going on in your niche. A simple search on Google for “<your topic> + forum” will yield thousands of results.

You can find thousands of articles, blogs and much more.

#5: Make a Tag Cloud

Use entire conversations based around your relevant keywords to build a tag cloud. For example, find 15 tweets that mention your brand, product or industry and drop them into a tag cloud application such as Wordle. You’ll often find new keywords you may not have thought of as well as a few surprise topics of association. This is a great way to really stretch your content dollar and find emerging trends to blog about.

You can create "word clouds" from text you provide.

#6: Eavesdrop

Be nosy. Listen in on conversations offline as well as online. Tune in to conversations while waiting in line at Starbucks or by ear hustling the table next to you at lunch. Find out what people are talking about, what they care about. Carry a small notebook or use Evernote to jot down and keep track of interesting points you overhear and the ideas they spark.

Make it easy to remember things big and small using your computer, phone and the web.

#7: Crowdsource

Post a social networking status or blog asking your audience for content topics and suggestions. Online survey and polling tools can be invaluable resources for collecting and prioritizing these ideas in an organized way. Embedding a survey or poll directly into your website or blog engages your audience in real time, and lets their voices be heard. You can also launch a survey or poll directly in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn asking for feedback.

#8: Audio Books

A wise man once said “Why read when you can have someone do it for you,” and the audio book was born. Because everyone is severely pressed for time these days, audio books are a fantastic way to listen to books on the go. Just listening to 15 minutes in the car or 20 minutes at the gym can spark several ideas for content and enable you to “read” a book or two a month. Check out Audible or eMusic for a nice selection of titles.

A new way to receive information and knowledge.

#9: Google News

Want to keep your content relevant to current events and hot topics in the media? Sure you do. Google News aggregates headlines from news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader’s personalized interests.

Simply search for keywords related to your industry and click on the news. Scanning the results will immediately provide you with headlines to tie your topic to what’s happening in the world.

Google News offers links to several articles on every story.

#10: Attend Industry Events

Meetups, Webinars, Tweetchats, Conferences. There’s a wealth of events hosted on- and offline on a weekly basis with many offering a free exchange of ideas and knowledge. Look for events with topics related to your industry and jump right in. Chances are you’ll leave inspired with new ideas and a new-found vigor to turn them into remarkable content.

These events can help you connect with your social community.

#11: Frankenblogging

“A Day In The Life” is one of the Beatles’ most influential songs and it came together with two seemingly unrelated bits, one written by John, the other by Paul. This is a perfect example of how bringing together two distinct segments written independently of one another can spawn greatness.

Like most bloggers, you probably have a growing number of half-written posts. The idea here is to find a common theme or link between two of them and combine. For example, I took a half-written post about identifying influencers, combined it with another half-written post about using Twitter lists, and came up with a fabulous post about finding influencers on Twitter and following them efficiently using Twitter lists.

Read Original post at SocialMediaExaminer

10 steps to start implementing Social CRM.

1) Understand your Conversation Map. Listen and understand the social media conversations from advocates to influencers and from detractors to consumers.

2) Understand the Social Graph of your customers. This is very important - it refers to your current customer in your CRM system, marketing database or customer datamart. Are they on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, external communities, etc., etc?

3) Have a Social Graph of your Best Customers. Are your best customers using social media?  Can you start engaging them for your own pilots? Can you engage them? What other types of customers can you engage? Again, these are known customers in your CRM system or Loyalty Program.

4) Establish processes & requirements to meet your goals and objectives based on current needs and the analysis from the above 3 steps.

5) Get ready to put together a social media plan based on the requirements and processes. Do you need to be on Facebook? Do you need call center integration? Do you need to integrate social media marketing with your marketing automation? Do you need a community to provide ideas and collaboration for customer support? Do you have a Social Media Manager ad policies in place?

6) Create specific use cases for your integration points to capture data. This is not just about technology but also about customer experience, culture and processes.

7) Have your traditional CRM ready for social media. Do you have the workflow, processes, rules, data structure, training, call center, people, etc., ready to manage communities and social media channels?

8) If your customer or influencers are already collaborating using social media, is your enterprise ready to collaborate internally? i.e. Social Business, E 2.0.

9) Like in CRM... Do you have the culture, people and change management attitude to really change?

10) Improve your CRM ecosystem - this should be step 1. Fix what is not working today!

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5 Steps to Google Places Optimization

It’s been an active year since Google introduced Google Places as a replacement for its Local Business Center. Not only have the name and the look changed, but Google Places results have come to dominate the search results for many queries with "local intent". 
While the traditional rules of on-page optimization are still paramount, having a well-optimized Google Places profile is now essential for local businesses to get themselves above the fold.

If your local business doesn’t have a Places page or if it isn’t properly optimized, you could be missing out on well qualified traffic and leads. Here’s our quick and easy plan for achieving Google Places optimization Zen. 

1 - Claim or Create a Google Places Page

Chances are that your business already has a Places page, even if you never set one up. Start by doing a simple search for your brand name to see if one already exists. If you see a listing for your business, click to the place page and look for the “business owner?” link, then follow the instructions to claim it. If you find that you don't have a places page, start a new one at google.com/places. 

2 - Verify Your Google Places Page

Once you have claimed or created a Places page, the next vital step is to verify it. Until you verify your listing, it won’t be considered “trusted” because the search engines don’t know that you are actually the business owner. As a result, it may not appear in the search results, or how often it appears may be limited.

The verification process is easy, but it takes time. Follow the instructions when setting up your Places page or by clicking the verify link when you are logged in to your places account. You might be given the option to get a phone call, but will likely have to wait for a postcard in the mail (which takes 2-3 weeks.) 

3 - Optimize Your Places Page

When you finally have your Places page verified, there are a few things you can do to optimize your page and make it easier for potential customers to find you.

• Optimize your business’s title – Your title in Google Places should be your business name, and possibly include some reference of your location. For instance, if you own a franchised business, including a location keyword is important to distinguish yourself against other area franchisees. Use HubSpot’s Keyword Grader or the AdWords keyword tool to better understand how users are searching for businesses like yours using city and state names.

• Include keywords in your Places page description – Write a brief and concise description of your business, and be sure to include a keyword or two from the last step (don't go overboard adding keywords, though.)
• Choose a few appropriate categories – Choosing the right categories is important, and you can include up to five – but only include categories that are actually relevant to your business.
• Make your Places page as complete as possible – It’s generally thought that more complete Places pages have an edge over less complete pages in the eyes of the search engines. Photos, videos, links to your social media profiles, hours and additional information can help to make your Places page more engaging and appealing to users, too. HubSpot’s Google Places page is a great example.

4 – Google Places Rankings – Citations, Not Just Links

Links to your website have an impact on Google Places, but many believe that reviews and simple mentions of your business across the web are of equal or greater importance. Search engines likely use mentions as a means to measure the “buzz” around local businesses (which don’t always have websites, and as a result, can be harder to judge the popularity of.) You can look for opportunities to build up citations on -

• Directories – Claim or create your listing in each of the major directories, and make sure that your information is consistent across all of your listings (here is a good list of places to start.)
• Review sites – Reviews give search engines a signal that your business is a real place that is known and liked (or disliked) by real people. Encourage your customers to leave truthful reviews of your business, and claim your listing on the major review sites to make sure that your listing information is complete and consistent.
• Local Resources & Events Pages – Look for local directories, business listings, and event pages for opportunities to list your site. Start with your competitors – visit their Google Places pages and see where their citations are coming from (you’ll see a list of links titled “more about this place” at the bottom of the page, which is a great place to start.)

5 - Don’t Forget Your Website!

Not only will a well-optimized website attract organic search traffic by itself, it’s also the best citation you are likely to get for your Google Places page. In addition to following basic on-page optimization guidelines, be sure to have a local phone number and local address in plain text somewhere on your homepage.

Read full article at Hubspot.

Google Compete : Travel Hotel Consumers: How Online Research Affects Bookings. Summary

• Half of all hotel researchers indicated researching exclusively online  Friends, families and colleagues were the most-used offline sources to learn about hotels

• Half of hotel shoppers reported using search engines in their research. Online clickstream behavior indicated that a third hotel shoppers are referred by search to a hotel website

•  Price was the leading reason for why consumers booked on a specific hotel website Receiving rewards/points was also a strong driver

•  Higher costs per night and longer stays increased the length of time consumers spent  researching hotels online The share of researchers using online sources also increased for longer hotel stays

• Nearly a third of hotel shoppers indicated viewing an online advertisement during their research process. Booking online was the most dominant channel. 

• Only 1 in 6 bookers indicated booking over the phone or in person Hotel bookers are using fewer travel sites to conduct research than year-ago levels indicating more focused shopping activities

Google CPA: How to make sure it works for you

Google Adwords CPA (cost per acquisition), is where you bid per acquisition and leave Google to adjust your CPC accordingly. However a CPA campaign will only work well if it has enough consistent data to work with. Read how to assist Google to give you the best ROI.

At face value a Google Adwords CPA campaign is attractive to businesses who don’t wish to get involved with their adwords campaigns too much, rather concentrating on converting leads to sales, or visitor optimization. i.e. what happens after the click.

However although this model is open to all there are some conditions which need to be met to allow Google’s algorithm to perform.

Firstly, and most importantly, you need to have been supplying Google with consistent conversion tracking, from consistently running campaigns. The bare minimum sample is 50 conversions, and a similar spending pattern over at least two weeks of conversion data.

This is the minimum, seeing as you are handing Google licence to spend your money for you, it might be worth planning ahead to allow enough time for seasonal, or short time frame variance to play out. You’ll need to plan ahead anyway as the option to run a CPA campaign will not be available until enough data had been collected via conversion tracking.

It is important to be spending consistently, that is not turning the campaign on and off manually all the time. I know this is a temptation for start-ups who are using Adwords for lead generation, and once enough leads are in, switching off to save expenditure, but this will play havoc with the algorithm (I have that on good authority from a Google rep I spoke with today).

If your current advertising budget means that there is not enough to be spent all month long, then why not cut back with Google ad scheduling? This way you can reduce the hours that the ads are shown in an automated and consistent way, but leave the campaign on. In a previous contract I used to severely reduce advertising over the weekends as that particular industry browsed but didn’t bite from Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime.

Once enough data has been collected, the CPA option is clickable, and it is worth noting that CPA campaigns are available for Google Search as well as the display networks.

The two work slightly differently however. On the display network your ad will be shown more to websites which perform to your chosen acquisition bid price, and less (for less CPC) to those sites that don’t perform.

For search CPA its is more of a case of adjusting the bid price to meet the CPA. It’s a kind of automated bid monitor taking advantage of changing market conditions. (Not all advertisers advertise all the time creating moments when competition is less and therefore the bid cheaper). I don’t know this next bit for certain, but I suspect that your ads position on the page moves around as well to meet this cost adjustment.

I’m told that currently 70% of ad spend is on Search, and only 30% on the content network. However I wonder if that will change as marketers become more comfortable with CPA bidding? I will be looking for any avenue to get the overall CPA down regardless of traffic type. How about you?

14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition

1. Statbrain – Using several sources, Statbrain’s algorithm computes the number of visitors to a website based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any hit-counter information. Use this as a rough relative benchmark of your traffic to theirs. First run your website and compare the results given by StatBrain to your actual results to get a sense of its accuracy in your category. Figure out what the multiplier is and then try it on a competitor.

2. AideRSS – Find out which of your competitors’ blog posts and topics are engaging people. This should provide you with a list of topics you should be covering. Engagement doesn’t necessarily mean your competitor’s opinion is right or even agreed with — but it does mean the engaged people are interested in the topic and therefore why not your opinion on the topic.

3. FeedCompare – If you use Feedburner to track your rss subscribers you can compare the size of your feed to others. Just like in #1 above, figure out your own multiplier and then compare it to the competition.

4. Xinu Returns – Xinu Runs a report from multiple sites to tell you how well a site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking sites and other technical details. How well are you stacking up against your 5 biggest competitors?

5. Google Trends For Websites – Enter up to five topics and see how often those topics been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. You can learn more on how to use this from our friend, Avinash Kaushik.

6. Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Again, Avinash explains how to use this well.

7. Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast tool – This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.

8. Microsoft’s Search Funnels – Customers often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences. This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers’ search sequences. Search Engine guru Mike Grehan explains the value of these query chains.

9. WayBackMachine – Go back in web history to see how your competitors’ site has changed through the years. Look for the things that have stayed consistent, because those might have been the most successful. In the same vein, what have you changed on your own site during that time? It’s easy to lose track, particularly of your own work, and to think of your current site as “how it’s always been”.

10. Web Page Speed Analyzer – Compare the download speed of your pages with those of your competitors to see which are loading quicker. Quicker loading pages tend to have an advantage at converting visitors. This analyzer provides a detail analysis of the page elements. For a rough comparison of two pages side by side try WebSlug. And, WebWait is great when you want to get accurate speed results from the visitors perspective because WebWait pulls down the entire website into your browser, so it takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and image loading which other tools ignore.

11. Web Page Readability – By comparing the readability score of web pages you can optimize your writing and make sure that you aren’t creating overly complex sentences and paragraphs for your audience.

12. Attention Meter – Attentionmeter gives you a quick snapshot comparing any websites you want (traffic) using Alexa, Compete, and Quancast.

13. Websitegrader – Website Grader is a free tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. Also worth checking out Twittergrader to check on your competitors’ twitter accounts.

14. Google Alerts – set up searches for your competitors, key employees, and keywords to monitor their activity.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it: Try some (or all) of the above techniques and report back on your intriguing espionage! This tape will self-destruct in 10 clicks.

Top 9 variables to maximize your linking strategy

In order to maximize your linking strategy for your top keyword phrase, it is useful to take a look at what makes up a high-quality link. Here are the top variables to keep in mind when you begin to execute your strategy. 

1.Your keyword phrase must be in the Anchor Text from external links pointing to your landing page, which needs to topically be about your product or service. 

2.The quantity of external links pointing to your landing page is a search relevancy variable. The more links pointing to you, the more important you are. 

3.The quality of external links pointing to your landing page is important. If the link exists as part of a content-rich page, this is even better. 

4.The in-bound links pointing to your landing page need to come from a wide variety of websites. Having a thousand links coming from just two websites is of low value. 

5.The Page Rank of the page where the link originates is very important. The higher the Page Rank the higher quality the link will be. 

6.In-bound links to your landing page that come from topically relevant websites are of higher value. 

7.Links from third-parties that point to your in-bound links is a quality factor. If lots of high-quality sites are linking to the websites that are linking to you, the links will be of higher quality. 

8.Links from pages that are just one or two clicks from the referring home page are more valuable than links that are buried seven levels deep. 

9.In-bound links that are tagged as “no follow” are of no value to you.