Archive for December, 2007

Critiquing A Blog Can Improve Your Writing

Friday, December 21st, 2007

A number of years ago my goal in life was to write the great American novel. As part of my learning the craft of writing I enrolled in a course one summer at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. An exercise from the class still resonates with me as being one of the more useful ways to grow as a writer and I thought I’d share in the hopes you’ll find it useful too.

Before getting to the writing exercise allow me to give the Gotham Writers’ Workshop a recommendation. It’s been about a dozen years since I took a class there and I still consider it time well spent. Even the one course helped take my writing to a level it hadn’t seen before. If you happen to be in the New York City area you might want to sign up and I just noticed on their web site they also offer online courses.

On with the exercise.

An Exercise In Critiquing

During the 10 or so week course every student was asked to submit two pieces of writing for the rest of the class. This was a course in fiction so submissions ranged from poetry to short stories to chapters from a novel. You would make a copy for everyone in the class including the instructor and each would have a week to critique what you’d given them.

If you’ve never shared your writing with a group of strangers before, it’s no easy task. It’s a quick step outside your comfort zone.

The critiques followed a specific format. If you liked something you underlined it. It might be a word or an entire passage. If you liked it you drew a line underneath. Consequently if you didn’t like something you drew a squiggly underneath. Anything you didn’t understand received a question mark. None of the above came with any explanation. Just the underline, squiggly, or question mark.

In addition to the above each critique asked you to do two things

  1. Write 3 things you likes about the submission
  2. Offer 3 suggestions for improvement

During the week after you handed out your work you would sit quietly while everyone else discussed it. The teacher would go around the class asking for something someone liked or asking for a suggestion to improve the work. All the time you were to remain absolutely quietly while a discussion was held about your writing. It was your chance to be the proverbial fly on the wall. Much more difficult to do than it sounds.

We weren’t exactly a group of professional writers so finding 3 things you liked about a story wasn’t always easy. The meat of the exercise for me and the part I really want to share with you is the last part, the 3 suggestions for improvement.

In having to come up with ways to improve someone else’s writing you were forced to really think about the craft. The more I put into the suggestions, the more I found my own writing improve. Unfortunately many in the class didn’t spend the time working on these critiques. Their loss I guess.

Suggestions for improvement could be anything from rewriting a passive sentence to one using an active voice to making major structural changes. The key for me was again how much effort I put into helping someone else.

An example I still remember was for a story where the protagonist in a very key scene at the end was only introduced a sentence or two before the key scene. A new character came across to me as a cheap way to solve the conflict in the story and my suggestion was to introduce the character in the first couple of pages and weave that character into a few choice scenes throughout the story.

Thinking about ways to improve someone else’s writing helped tremendously in improving my own writing. I emerged from the course with a stronger writing voice and a better understanding of the craft that is writing.

How To Use The Exercise To Improve Your Blog

I don’t think you have to take part in a writing workshop to make these critiquing exercises work for you. Once again coming up with ways to improve a piece of writing that isn’t your own can greatly improve your own writing.

One way to apply the exercise is to take an in depth look at another blog. Start with a single post and critique it the way I described above. You can probably skip the underline, squiggly, and question mark part, but these markings were a good way to slowly ease you into the process. You can look back at the things you underlined and look for themes to decide what you truly liked and you can look at the squigglys and question marks as fodder for something to improve.

I’d suggest doing this for a variety of blogs, some that you like and some that you don’t. Look at blogs related to your topic and look at blogs that are completely unrelated. Taking the time to consider different types of writing on different topics will require you to think about the craft of writing in a more diverse way.

Try not to look only at great writers. Spend time with writers of varying skill levels to get the most from the exercise. The comparison between good and bad will help you see what the better writers do to make them better and you’ll be able to use those observations to improve the writing of the other blogs you critique as well as your own.

An Offer To Critique Your Blog

The one thing you won’t get critiquing someone’s blog is feedback on your own. If you know a few bloggers you can offer to trade critiques with them. Four or five people who take the exercise seriously should be enough. You can all critique one blog in the group per week and by the time you’ve gone around the circle two or three times (if not sooner) I think you’ll notice an improvement in your writing.

I thought to get you started on the process I would offer to critique a few posts. If you’re interested in having me critique one of your posts using the method described, either leave a comment with the URL of the post you want me to look at or drop me an email with the same information.

After the holidays I’ll write a post on each of the critiques I can get to.

Whether or not you want feedback about your posts from me or a group of fellow bloggers give critiquing some other blogs a try. Often things that we can’t see in our own writing we can easily see in the writing of others. And remember this is an exercise where the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. If you do take the time and put in the effort you’ll find yourself with a deeper understanding of the craft of writing.

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About the Author

Steven Bradley is a web designer and search engine optimization specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo community by the username vangogh, he is the author of TheVanBlog, which focuses on how to build and optimize websites and market them online.

Social Media Buzzwords

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

In the 2008 Crain’s Book of Lists, Ignite contributed to an ad placed by it’s associated agency, Brogan and Partners. This particular ad included a list of “Social media buzzwords to make you sound really, really smart”, which was quite a fun list for us to compile.

While the ad covered the first ten, we’ve listed the complete list of 25 Social Media Buzzwords below (in no particular order).

Enjoy - and as always feel free to add some of your own -)

  1. “Social Graph”
  2. Twitter
  3. LinkedIn
  4. Semantic Web
  5. Wiki
  6. Widget
  7. KickApps
  8. Tumblr
  9. del.icio.us
  10. Enterprise 2.0
  11. Social Media Optimization
  12. Meme
  13. Mash-Up
  14. Social Media Monitoring
  15. User-Generated Content
  16. Web 2.0
  17. Social Networks
  18. “Blogosphere”
  19. Viral Marketing
  20. Ruby on Rails
  21. Social Media Press Release
  22. Vlogging
  23. Micro-Blogging
  24. Transparency and Authenticity
  25. “White Label”

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About the Author

As a Social Media Strategist for Ignite Social Media, Lisa McNeill outlines social media tactics and develops social media campaigns to help companies reach customers and build brand advocates. Her expertise in project management and marketing additionally guides the execution of these campaigns.

Visit Ignite Social Media

Google Gives Webmasters More Features

Friday, December 14th, 2007

A Google Webmaster Tools article explains how you can make your site more Google-friendly.

You can “Get Google’s view of your website, and diagnose potential problems.

See how Google crawls and indexes your site and learn about specific problems we’re having accessing it.”

You can assess the performance of your site “Learn which queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there.”

googletool.jpg

Further you can share information with Google to help them crawl your site better. It says “Tell us about your pages: which ones are most important to you and how often they change. You can also let us know how you would like the URLs we index to appear.”

The best part is that its free, to use it “Simply log in with your Google Account and add your site URL to get started. It’s an easy and free way to have a more interactive experience with Google.”

The Google Webmaster Central Blog further elaborates on the releases “we have two new features: Content analysis and Sitemap details. We hope these features help you to build a site you could compare to a fine wine — getting better and better over time.”

Content analysis “…contains feedback about issues that may impact the user experience or that may make it difficult for Google to crawl and index pages on your site. By reviewing the areas we’ve highlighted, you can help eliminate potential issues that could affect your site’s ability to be crawled and indexed. This results in better indexing of your site by Google and other search engines.”

The Content analysis summary page has three main categories, they are Title tag issues, Meta description issues, Non-indexable content issues. You simply need to click on these to get details.

content-analysis-usability.jpg

If you’d select the “Duplicate title tags” you’d get a list of “repeated page titles along with a count of how many pages contain that title.” As of now they “present up to thirty duplicated page titles on the details page. If the duplicate title issues shown are corrected, we’ll update the list to reflect any other pages that share duplicate titles the next time your website is crawled.”

“Long title tags” and “Short title tags” in the Title tag issues category are meant to “identify title tags that are way too short (for example “IT” isn’t generally a good title tag) or way too long (title tag was never intended to mean <insert epic novel here>).” Additionally there’s an algorithm to identify potentially problematic meta description tags. These pointers can help your site display better titles and snippets in search results, which is likely to increase visitor traffic, however they won’t help your rankings directly.

For the “Non-indexable content issues” they say “we give you a heads-up of areas that aren’t as friendly to our more text-based crawler. And be sure to check out our posts on Flash and images to learn how to make these items more search-engine friendly.”

content-analysis-crawling.jpg

About the Sitemap details page’s functionality they say “If you’ve submitted a Sitemap, you’ll be happy when you see the additional information in Webmaster Tools revealing how your Sitemap was processed.”

This information can be found on the Sitemap Details page in addition to the information that was previously provided for each of the Sitemaps. The information would show the number of the pages from your Sitemap that have been indexed. A word of caution though “Keep in mind the number of pages indexed from your Sitemap may not be 100% accurate because the indexed number is updated periodically, but it’s more accurate than running a “site:example.com” query on Google.”

On the Sitemap Details page you’d also get a list of “any errors or warnings that were encountered when specific pages from your Sitemap were crawled.” It’ll save time that was earlier spent on crafting custom Google queries to determine how many pages from your Sitemap were indexed.

sitemap-details.jpg

Guess what else do they have to offer? “Webmaster Tools now available in Czech & Hungarian.”

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About the Authors

Nav is the founder and CEO of PageTraffic, a premier search engine company known for its assured SEO service, web design and development, copywriting and full time SEO professionals.

Navneet has wide experience in natural search engine optimization, internet marketing and PPC campaigns. He is a prolific writer and his articles can be found in the “Best Articles” section of many websites and article banks. As a search engine analyst , he has over 9 years of experience and his knowledge is in application here.

Steps to Consistently Improve Your Blog

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Read enough tips and it’s easy to convince yourself that your blog is wholly inadequate or there’s no way you’ll ever be able to find the time to incorporate all of them into your own blog. Fear not. It’s easier than you think. All it takes is the right approach and the desire to form some good habits.

Tips to improve your blog are everywhere You can read a tip on writing a better title for your post and another on how to better design your posts. You can find tips advising how to increase comments on your blog and how to create the right content to achieve your goals. If someone has discovered something that works there’s a tip about how you can do it too.

Taken in total all those tips can be overwhelming so what’s a blogger to do?

5 Steps to a Better Blog

Here’s my own process for incorporating the advice of others in the hopes of improving my blog.

  1. Decide which tip(s) you want to add to your blog - The obvious first step is to decide what exactly you want to incorporate into your blog. You don’t need to change your blog every time you come across new advice. Choose the tips that make sense to you.
  2. Take the time to understand why it works - Parroting a tactic isn’t enough. It might help temporarily under one set of circumstances, but if you truly want to improve your blog you need to understand why something works so you can adapt it and really own it.
  3. Incorporate tips one at a time - Don’t try to do everything at once. If you do you’ll end up with mediocrity. Like it or not, you can only master so many new skills at once. The best approach to making a permanent changes is to work on those changes one or perhaps two at a time.
  4. Slowly work new tips into your blogging routine - Similar to the idea above. Trying to do things too quickly also leads to mediocrity. Changes made slowly over time are more permanent than quick changes made once. Slow and steady wins the race.
  5. Make it a habit - As you work on one new skill and actively incorporate it into your blogging routine that new skill will become a habit. You’ll eventually find less of your time goes to actively trying to write a better post title. You’ll simply find that your post titles are better.

Examples of the Process in Action

Let me share a couple of examples of tips I learned that I’ve tried to incorporate here.

First consider post titles here since I first started the blog. Take a look at the blog’s sitemap and scan some of the post titles. By no means would I say all the titles are the best they can be, but if you compare a few of the more recent titles at the top of the list with a few of the earliest posts at the bottom of the list I think you’ll agree the recent titles are better.

I don’t think there’s a specific point where the titles crossed a line from bad to good. There are examples of good titles early on and examples of poor titles recently. But overall the trend has been an improvement in the average title. And because I’ve slowly worked in the habit of writing better headlines and post titles I expect the trend to continue.

Second consider the use of images within posts. I’ve used images here and there since early on, but images have found their way into posts more and more since I came to the connclusion their use would improve the design of each post. I’m still working on making a habit of finding and adding images so not every post currently has them. But overall the trend is for more images to make their way into posts and in time all or nearly all posts will have at least one image inside.

Summary

As you read and come across more and more tips don’t try to incorporate everything all at once. Decide which tips you think will improve your blog and realize that not every tip will necessarily be appropriate for you. Spend time understanding why a given tip works and begin to make a conscious effort to incorporate it into your blog. Make that new tip part of your blogging routine. Accept that it will take time to fully integrate any new tip into your blog and keep at it until the habit develops. Rinse and repeat.

What tips have you been actively incorporating into your blog?

Comments

About the Author

Steven Bradley is a web designer and search engine optimization specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo community by the username vangogh, he is the author of TheVanBlog, which focuses on how to build and optimize websites and market them online.

More On Corporate Blogging & Oxymorons

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

I had several interesting responses to yesterday’s post on corporate blogging, so I thought I’d come back and hit the topic again today. Most were along the lines of, “Sure, some bloggers within corporations have successful blogs, but that’s not really corporate blogging.” I disagree.

As someone who has worked in a corporate behemoth for many years, I know that a “corporation” is nothing more than a big pile of stock. And a stock certificate can’t write a blog post. Blogs can come only from the people inside the corporation.

So, sure, all examples of successful corporate blogs are from individuals (and sometimes teams) within corporations that have a particular, personal point of view. That’s exactly what corporate blogging is. No more and no less.

All blogs (at least all successful ones) have a personal point of view, whether they come from corporations or not. If we equate “corporate” blogging with some form of anesthetized PR communication resembling not much more than a press release that allows comments, then I think we’re missing the point.

Large corporations, probably more than any other kind of business, have a desperate need to connect with their customers. Letting their employees out of their Legal-PR imposed cages so they can interact with customers is their best hope of overcoming the risk-free, homogenized brand images that we equate with corporate “personalities.” Perhaps companies clinging to the vanilla brand image of years gone by, afraid to show the real people within their walls, are running the biggest risk of all. Customers are beginning to demand more and blogging is a cheap way to give customers what they want.

As a follow-up to Monday’s post on the Blog Council, I spoke with Andy Sernovitz of the Blog Council yesterday and he cleared up the controversy over accepting comments—I’ve updated my post.

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About the Author

Copyright Mike Moran

Mike Moran is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, expert on Internet marketing, and the author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., the best-selling book on search marketing. Mike also writes the popular Biznology newsletter and blog.

The Corporate Blogging Oxymoron

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

A few folks, after reading yesterday’s post on the Blog Council, thought I was being too hard on them for not accepting comments on their own blog. But that wasn’t the prevailing sentiment. More people felt that I was expecting way too much—corporate types don’t know how to blog and never will, and setting up a council with a fancy logo won’t change any of that. While I understand the skepticism behind that opinion, I don’t agree.

Sure, it can be harder for a corporation to tolerate blogging’s free exchange of ideas than it is for a solo blogger. And yes, far too many corporations have had rocky starts in the blogosphere. I know that Wal-Mart, Sony, and others have been caught creating “flogs” that purported to be from customers that instead were written by their ad agency. I’m aware that Dell began its blogging life with a happy-talk item about the tenth anniversary of its Web site, only to be pummeled by bloggers demanding better customer service. You can look elsewhere to be regaled by the tales (or maybe “galed” by them if you haven’t heard them before).

I won’t even argue that these stories are the exception, rather than the rule, when it comes to corporate blogging. I won’t tell you that most corporations have jumped into blogging with both feet, as the PR team and the lawyers lock arms in a jaunty dance down the road of marketing openness.

But I can cite examples of corporate blogging that is working. My company, IBM, has thousands of bloggers, as does Sun, Microsoft, and many other large companies. They help our customers understand technology directions, industry goings-on, and strategic issues. Robert Scoble, while he worked at Microsoft, helped humanize a firm that the mainstream media only demonized. Sun’s and IBM’s blogger have likewise been a huge advantage to their respective marketing programs.

Many other companies use blogs to connect better with their customers through blogs. Blogs that are written by living breathing employees, not the PR department.

I know that’s still news. I understand that successful companies using blogs are still relatively small among all companies. But the fact that they exist at all means we can strive for that level of success for many more companies. Corporations are not all the same, so it’s ridiculous to expect that blogging will work for all of them.

But it’s equally ridiculous to lampoon the Blog Council because all corporations are clueless types who couldn’t blog if their lives depended on it. Corporations can blog. And some corporations’ lives probably do depend on it. If corporations don’t learn to connect better with their customers (regardless of whether they use blogs or other means), they are apt to be left behind by smaller companies that do connect.

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About the Author

Copyright Mike Moran

Mike Moran is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, expert on Internet marketing, and the author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., the best-selling book on search marketing. Mike also writes the popular Biznology newsletter and blog.

Blogs Not the Place for a One-Way Message

Monday, December 10th, 2007

Are there times when it is acceptable to have a one-way message? Sure, but blogs are not the place to do it. If you believe you should block comments on your blog, maybe you shouldn’t be doing one. And when you’re purporting to tell people the best ways to blog, maybe that’s the dumbest move of all.

Jordan McCollum from Marketing Pilgrim had a great post Friday called “a How Not to Corporate Blog Guide,” which justifiably rips into the Blog Council for its strange way of advising companies to blog while not seeming to have a grasp on the basics itself.

Sure their first few posts are dripping of the kind of PR-inspired lameness that lots of groups struggle with when they start blogging, but hey, some of my posts stink on ice, too. Yeah, it would be nice of these self-described blogging experts knew better than to start that way.

But geez Louise, they blocked comments?

I mean, what were they thinking? The quickest route to excoriation in the blogosphere is to show you’re not listening. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with blogging knows that people comment on them. For them to be experts in blogging and not accepting comments is laughable.

What’s more, one of the blog posts contains frequently asked questions. Uh huh. Questions from whom, exactly? I know they’re not accepting questions from the folks who read their blog, unless they fill out a contact firm. How very Web 2.0 of you.

Starting a blog with an FAQ post and not accepting comments for additional questions is the stuff of parody. There are some very solid companies involved here and I hope they are just off to a bad start, because we need corporations to wake up to real best practices in blogging.

I hope that by the time you read this, the embarrassment may cause these experts to open up comments. If they do, I promise to take another look to see if this could become a useful community that exemplifies best practices rather than just talking about them. In the meantime, however, you might want to look for best practices elsewhere.

Now, it’s possible that this is an error. I know I’ve been embarrassed when something on my site wasn’t working. I had a bug a few months ago that was rejecting comments for some Firefox users and I still don’t know what happened or why it went away. And when I looked at the Blog Council site in IE, it did not render properly, so maybe it’s just not ready for prime time yet.

I don’t want to appear uncharitable. Doing it wrong quickly is my idea of the right approach, so I hesitate to be so critical of anyone trying anything, no matter how far off the mark they are. But these folks are setting themselves up as experts. If any of them want help from me, I’d be happy to assist. And if they think I am off the mark on this, well, they can leave a comment here.

About the Author

Copyright Mike Moran

Mike Moran is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, expert on Internet marketing, and the author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., the best-selling book on search marketing. Mike also writes the popular Biznology newsletter and blog.

Blog Council…Yawn

Friday, December 7th, 2007

I woke up this morning to a lot of fawning messages from people in the blogosphere about the new Blog Council, founded by a dozen big companies that generally just don’t have a clue about modern customer relations and marketing: AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.

Let’s read their press release (press release about a blogging group?) to get a sense of what they’re doing:

“The Blog Council exists as a forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.”

My translation: “we’re all clueless, but don’t want anyone to realize just how unplugged our organizations have become from the world of “marketing 2.0″, so we created a club so our ignorance can be shielded from public eyes.”

Alright, that’s probably a bit harsh, I admit, but having helped organize the terrific Blogworld Expo last month in Las Vegas, why weren’t these companies there? We had over a thousand of the smartest trend-setting bloggers and new media people in the world all neatly in one place. That’s how you learn, guys, from talking with the best in the business — and everyone else — not by hiring an expensive consultant to have discussions behind closed doors.

The Council is headed by Andy Sernovitz, formerly of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, an organization that also seems not to have realized that the power is with the people, the grassroots, and that “word of mouth marketing” is so darn ambiguous that it can describe just about anything anyone does, including buying coffee for a colleague or giving the boss a ride from the auto shop (I’ve written about this ambiguity before. See: Bogus word of mouth marketing projections).

Also worthy of note is that the blogcouncil site is ostensibly a blog (it lists “comments” and “trackbacks”) but there is in fact no way to leave a comment that I can find, and the trackbacks count is clearly broken since I know of a number of blogs that are already pointing to their entries. Is this modern corporate “safe” blogging? And listing the author of each entry as “blog council” rather than individual contributors? These are worst practices, not best practices.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I want to believe. I really do want to support the new Blog Council and do want to believe that large corporations like Coca-Cola should be involved in the blogosphere. I just think that the very structure of modern corporations, with their managing to quarterly results, CYA tactics and massive aversion to risk, is the very antithesis of blogging and any word of mouth anything. They’re all conditioned (thanks to business school, and yes, I have an MBA so I know of what I speak) to control the message, which makes it darn hard to have anything interesting to say to the online community.

Indeed, as has been demonstrated time and again, it’s Madison Avenue, specifically the small, nimble, edgy marketing and PR agencies that are really the only hope that large corporations have of getting involved in modern social media and the blogosphere in any meaningful — and interesting — manner. These agencies might stumble occasionally (as I have written about many times) but they’re trying new things and they can afford to take risks in a way that larger corporations, publicly traded entities, simply cannot.

So what do you think? Is the Blog Council going to a milestone in the adoption of blogging and new media by major corporations, or is it a sleeper organization that’s going to come and go, leaving behind a few press releases and a Web site that gradually fades away?

Comments

About the Author

Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is
internationally known as an expert on both business and technology issues.
Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four
startups, he also runs a strategic marketing company and consults with firms
seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave
is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast
programs.

AskDaveTaylor.com
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

Don’t Let Blog Guilt Make You Post Unworthy Content

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Over the last two and a half years of blogging, I’ve published many tips and tricks to help people who are just starting blogging on how to find time to blog, styles of blogging or ways to optimize your blog.  One thing I haven’t written that much about is how I decide whether something is good enough to post.  To say I write about what I’m interested in is probably pretty obvious - but I don’t always like everything I write.  What I realized recently was a lesson that I had learned and been using on my blog, but never shared before. 

One trick I have talked about before is that I have a simple notepad document where I write my blog posts, collect ideas, and essentially keep all my rough thoughts and writing before cutting and pasting them into Typepad.  You can probably imagine that over two and a half years, this file is pretty long.  During my time away from blogging, I went through it to see if there were some posts I had written previously which I could publish.  To my surprise, there were 17.  Not 17 ideas for posts (I have dozens of those), but 17 fully written blog posts that I never published for one reason or another.  Sometimes I didn’t like my perspective in them.  Other times I didn’t feel that I had a strong point of view.  Still other times, the post was good but the timing for posting was wrong.  For one reason or another, I wrote all of these posts and then decided to bench them. 

My first thought was that some of these posts could be a perfect archive of material to quickly publish while I would be away from blogging.  Unfortunately, as I read through them, I could tell they were mostly average and would not make the greatest posts.  Of course, I could improve or rewrite some of them, but the easy thing to do would have been to just post them as good ideas and not worry too much about the writing.  I didn’t, which leads me to my piece of advice for bloggers who are building their blog and struggling with continually putting out good content … don’t let “blog guilt” or a feeling that writing is a necessity drive you to publish content that you’re not happy with.  Sometimes what you don’t write says more about you than what you do. 

Comments

About the Authors

Rohit Bhargava is the Vice President for Interactive Marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.

http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com

Hitwise Launches Paid & Organic Search Tools

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Hitwise today announced the addition of several new features to its Search Intelligence™ product, including Paid and Organic and Fast Moving Search Terms data.

Hitwise Search Intelligence™ provides the industry’s deepest and timeliest search behavior analysis available and is part of the Hitwise Competitive Intelligence service, which is based on how 10 million U.S. Internet users interact with more than one million websites on a daily basis.

The new features enable marketers to pinpoint opportunities to refine keyword portfolios and improve the effectiveness of search marketing campaigns.

Paid and Organic reports allow marketers to analyze which paid terms and organic listings have been most successful in driving traffic to competitive websites.

Fast Moving Search Term reports identify the terms that have increased in popularity each week across all search engines. This data can identify emerging search behavior trends to better understand what is top of mind with consumers.

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About the Author

Manoj has been working in the search engine marketing industry since 2002. He started out as a software developer but now provides in-depth web site analysis using web analytics.

http://www.enquiro.com

Manoj is also the author of Web Analytics World. Web Analytics is an essential component in developing a successful online campaign. Help convert visitors into customers by understanding them.

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