Posted by Paul Velten on Fri, Feb 26, 2010
It seems that there are more Social Media Tools on the market today than there are Starbucks, so it's more important now than ever to save time (and money) to find the tools that excite even most experienced Social Mediaphiles.
That's why ymarketing would like to share some of our favorite (and free!) Social Media Tools for 2010, in no particular order. Some of these tools have been out for some time, while others are brand spanking new. The purpose of this blog is to promote Social Media tools that will make your life easier and more fun, thus the categories will be somewhat random, but their effectiveness will not. Enjoy!
Great all-in-one comprehensive browser for real-time and social web. Tweetdeck allows users to open their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace accounts all in one directory.
Productivity enhancement service for Social Media users. Hootsuite Helps organize, schedule, and deliver content through Facebook and Twitter.
bit.ly is one of the first, and still our favorite, URL shortener for tracking and analytics.
Voice interface technology that let's you instantly acces your Facebook and Twitter accounts simply by speaking into your phone. Vlingo is a great hands free option for mobile tweeting on the go.
Allows multiple people to communicate through corporate Twitter accounts and stay in sync while doing so. No dropped balls with CoTweet, no stepping on each other's toes.
flickr creative commons search is a great place to find free photos (under a creative commons license) that you can use in blog posts, presentations, etc.
Great competitive intelligence for twitter is what Topsy gives you. Keep your social media ear to the ground with this excellent tracking tool.
Want to see how popular you are on twitter? Wefollow allows you to view categorical rankings of who's hot on Twitter.
For those of you who are interested in everything social media tools, and want a few suggestions of some great paid tools, here you go:
Flowtown is a super cool tool allows you to take a random person's email address and quickly determine what social networks that person is on, as well as name, age, gender, and occupation. (I believe it costs $15 a month)
Dashboard program for your Social Media account, Swix promote it as Google Analytics for Social Media. We love the scorecard aspect of it. ($10 a month)
For more information visit
ymarketing.com, follow
@ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707
Posted by Paul Velten on Fri, Jan 08, 2010
The ymarketing Paid Search Team recently read an update to the beta for Google Lead Generation Forms in paid search ads at SEOroundtable.com. Have you ever wished you could easily increase leads for just the cost of a click? Google is testing it out with Google AdWords Contact Form Extensions to normal AdWords ads. The current leads are phone number based with three custom fields. Delivery of these ads is via email as a moment and clients are committed to contact the lead within 24 hours.
We have noticed the Mortgage and Entertainment Industries testing In the new Contact Form Extension. We have also seen other bloggers and paid search companies mention these ad format updates such as this blog post from DailyRadar.com
Things to know about the AdWords Contact Form
- It will only associate with ads in the #1 position.
- The Leads will be priced with the Max CPC Bid during beta test.
- About the form: Requires Phone Number Collection, up to three custom questions, questions shown will be determined by Google quality algorithm.
Get whitelisted into the Program through your AdWords Account Manager at Google and start getting your phone leads from Google AdWords!
Here are some sites that like the new Google Contact Form Adwords Feature: searchengineland.com, insideaffiliates.com, seroundtable.com
Here's a site that dislikes the new Google Contact Form AdWords Feature: blog.hubspot.com
SEO specialist ymarketing thinks:
This is worth testing. We want to see the results of the beta ASAP!
Do you have "real experience or results to share about your experience with this beta?"
What do you think?
Contact Us or Leave a Comment!
For more information visit
ymarketing.com, follow
@ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707
Posted by Paul Velten on Thu, Jan 07, 2010
AdWords Contact Form Extension: Apply by Contacting Google AdWords Account Managers
ymarketing recently found news of a new AdWords Lead Form at SEOroundtable.com. If you have a Google AdWords Account Manager you can apply today to be whitelisted into the new AdWords Contact Form Extension beta.
What is the goal of this AdWords Beta?
1. Increase ROI from your Paid Search Ads on Google.
2. Pay for Leads. During the beta your price per lead will be priced at your regular CPC Bid.
3. Integrates into your current ads " Ad enhancement".
Paid Search Managers everywhere are seeking for all three of these things. We were definitely interested in news about the Contact Form Extension. 
Here's what the ymarketing paid search team has to say:
"Google is definitely shortening the click-2-lead behavior funnel by offering to use the search engine ad as a call to action."
We will be watching to see:
• How much will CTR improve in various industries?
• What will be the cost of leads after the beta?
• During the test the leads are limited to phone leads, will Google provide integration into CRM applications at some point?
Connect With Us:
As new paid ad betas and extensions are released we hope to hear from those who try these new ad formats to see the results. Please feel free to post your results in the comment section of this blog.
For more information visit
ymarketing.com, follow
@ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707
Posted by David Carpenter on Tue, Nov 17, 2009
In poll and after poll of marketers and business decision makers alike, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes out on top or near the top in terms of ROI. But how do we really know? How does an organization measure the ROI of an SEO initiative? And with mounting evidence of the impact Social Media has on Search Marketing, how do we measure the ROI of Social Media initiatives?
ymarketing conducted extensive research on the web from July to October of 2009 looking for the definitive answer for Return On Investment from SEO and Social Media (looking for ROI calculators, case studies and other research) and, aside from a bevy of polls citing the high ROI value of SEO, were surprised to find that there seem to be no great standards or agreed upon methodologies.
TopRank poll on the top digital marketing tactics in 2009
Your Input Sought
In the first of a series on the topic, we'll share some of the evidence we uncovered and invite readers to contribute their own innovative ideas, experience and evidence that they've found. If you'd like to participate, leave a comment below and add it to the discussion.
What's Coming Up
In part 2 of the series we'll cover the traditional methods that SEO practitioners use - ranked keyword lists and other forms of measurements that, by today's real-time web standards, look pretty crude and unscientific. We'll also de-mystify the confusion around ROI and ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) and evaluate if there is a meaningful distinction between the two.
SEMPO Study on top three marketing tactics for 2009
In part 3 of the series we'll delve into solutions: new methodologies, tools and solutions companies are using to track, measure and quantify the value of their SEO initiatives, including exploring a topic we like to call organic keyword monetization.
Because of the tight partnership between Social Media and Organic Search, a part of this discussion will be focused on exploring a topic raised by David Spark in an article "Social media success doesn't start with ROI" which highlights the troubles in using old media metrics in a new media world.
There is consensus about the value of SEO... but how do we measure it in our own businesses?
For more information visit
ymarketing.com, follow
@ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707
Posted by David Carpenter on Sat, Sep 19, 2009
LinkedIn has quietly posted some very impressive numbers once again.
Sure, Twitter gets all the media attention, but it's warranted given its explosive 802% year-over-year growth. But LinkedIn's 89% YOY numbers look remarkable when compared to anything but Twitter or Facebook. But look deeper at the numbers and you'll find that LinkedIn actually grew 6Xs faster than Twitter in August, and 4.5Xs faster in July, according to compete.com
Consider LinkedIn's vitals (as of August 2009):
- 27 million total users
- 14.2 million users in August 2009
- Representing all 500 of the Fortune 500 (how many companies can say that?)
- Average stay: Over 7.3 minutes per visit
- Visits per person, per month: Over 3.7
- Pages per visit: Over 13
- Rank: #67 among all websites (ahead of USA Today, Southwest Airlines, HP, Wells Fargo, TicketMaster, Priceline and MLB.com mid-summer)
But this isn't meant to be one more blog raving about LinkedIn's interconnected networking prowess. What we're looking at is LinkedIn's power to elevate your business for free; specifically to lend search equity from LinkedIn's mighty vault into your company website's SEO account.
Here are six (6) ideas you can implement to improve your website's search equity leveraging LinkedIn:
1. Company Page
Within LinkedIn your company page serves as a "cliff notes" version of your website and as a valuable "peek inside your company" as it will contain links to the individual LinkedIn profiles of each of your team members who has associated their individual profile with the company's. This serves you well as long as the page is kept up-to-date and as long as individual members keep their profiles in good shape. We recommend businesses ask all key employees to setup profiles, keep them up to date, and associate them with company page.
2. Anchor Text
Nearly every LinkedIn user knows they can include their company website (example shown), but the common setting does not give your company's site as much value as it can. By selecting "Other" instead of "My Company" you can use descriptive text, keywords that describe your business. After all, you don't want your website to be found for the term "My Company", do you?
The way to really leverage this idea is to get everyone in your company using the same keywords, the same descriptive text. This works because of the inherent Search Equity that LinkedIn has earned (and passes each time it links to your site) and because of the extra value search engines place on keywords placed within anchor text (the descriptive text that contains a hyper link).
3. Join a group, Create a Group
As our good friend from Hubspot Pete Caputa says so well, "LinkedIn Groups are an amazing opportunity to build an opt-in email list quickly. (Almost like the early days - late 90s - of email list building.) If you're into internet marketing... you should join the HubSpot Pro Marketers list." (nice plug, Pete!)
"You should also start your own group about a topic related to your business, which would interest your target prospects," Caputa notes. "LinkedIn Groups spread quite virally throughout LinkedIn because group badges automatically display on members' profiles. Once your list is built, you can gently promote your educational content, blog, etc. For example, if you sell software to accountants, create an 'All Star Accountants' group or something along those lines."
4. LinkedIn Answers
Answer a question and your connections will see it in their Network Updates feed. LinkedIn rewards quality; you will gain expertise points when the person asking the question votes your answer as the "best answer".
5. Network Updates
These are the LinkedIn equivalent of your Facebook Status update, or your latest update on Twitter, and they tell your entire network what you're up to. This is a great place to let people know of your latest blog post.
6. Direct Advertising
While the minimum advertising level used to be $50,000 a month, LinkedIn has followed Facebook's lead and rolled out an innovative new advertising platform they call "Direct Ads" that, at a $50 minimum and a pay-per-action / pay-per-click model, is affordable to a much broader array of businesses.
Ads are simple to create, targeting is powerful and relatively simple, and the scale and access to high profile decision makers is unparalleled on any network.
We've been running these paid campaigns on LinkedIn and Facebook for our clients and have developed a testing strategy that works. With the right strategy and attention, you should be able to recognize results from your paid social network efforts as well.
Feedback
What do you think? How are you utilizing LinkedIn in your business? Do you have some great ideas we missed? We'd love to hear from you and add to this list...
For more information visit
ymarketing.com, follow
@ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707
Posted by David Carpenter on Wed, Jul 15, 2009
As I talk about the virtues of social media marketing and blogging in particular, with business owners from 20-person companies to marketing executives representing Fortune 1000 enterprises, I frequently encounter the same objections when it comes to Business Blogging:
• "I just don't get it. How would blogging possibly help us reach our business goals?"
• "Blogging is fine for other people, but we're serious about driving our business forward and need to spend our time marketing."
• "Who has time to blog unless they're unemployed?"
And just recently I heard my favorite objection yet:
• "Don't some people blog when just a simple tweet would do?" (a hip reference to Twitter and its 140-character limit and a shot directed at the long-windedness of some bloggers, all rolled into one!)
All of these are legitimate questions and objections (and they all have equally legitimate answers, hopefully answered in this post).
Businesses that don't invest in blogging are losing out on a huge opportunity.
Here are the top six (6) reasons Why Businesses Must Blog, in order to thrive in 2009 and beyond, in order of importance:
1. Increase Search Equity. Search Engines crawlers (affectionately known as "spiders") scour the internet for food daily; their favorite meals consist of text, headlines (H1 tags), meta data, page titles and links with descriptive anchor text. Well-crafted blogs are a virtual feast. The search engines behind these spiders don't really care if a newly discovered page is a blog or a regular web page; what they're particularly interested in is new, unique, well-crafted content. Blog posts between 200-400 words with good use of headlines, descriptive anchor text and relevant keywords are a virtual Olive Garden to the search engine spiders in a sea of soup kitchens. So the domains these Blogs reside on are rewarded with deposits in their search equity account. If your blog is on your company site (i.e. blog.yourcompanyname.com) then your site benefits and accrues the search equity; if you use a "free" blog site (i.e. yourcompanyname.blogspot.com) then Google or some other webhost gets the benefit. If you need more convincing that using a "free" service is a bad idea for your business, read Top Reasons Why Business Blogs Shouldn't Be On BlogSpot.com.
2. Increase Website Traffic. The clients who we have worked with to setup and properly promote integrated blogs (blog.yourcompanyname.com) have seen their traffic increase between 300% and 2,000%. The effect of these traffic gains - although by itself quite dramatic - is that the number of inbound links multiplies and additional search equity is applied. Since starting our blog (blog.ymarketing.com) we've seen our amount of content pages indexed on Google and Bing triple, and the blog has played a direct role in tripling the number of quality inbound links to ymarketing.com.
3. Increase Search Engine Spider Crawl Frequency. The question of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it fall" has an application in the world of search: if a website gets updated and no search engine spider comes by to re-index the site, then the change didn't really do your business any good. We've seen clients increase their crawl frequency from monthly to several times a week; I have to attribute this primarily to the addition of an integrated blog, and the results are that changes to the site (i.e. meta data testing, new content pages, news updates, etc.) get indexed nearly immediately, so we can get a read on what changes had a positive impact right away. The whole process of test, read and refine is greatly accelerated.
4. Increase Sharing and Word of Mouth. Have you noticed that people typically don't share product information on Facebook? Not too many people "Digg" company information sheets, right? And most of the Internet population resists the temptation to "bookmark" the "About Us" page on your site. People like to share things that are of interest to them on a personal level, and things they think their peers and friends would be interested in. This is true for B-to-B as well. Blogs make it easy for people to share with others. They give site visitors a reason to connect on an emotional level. In our research we have collected data that proves that referred visitors are between 1.5X and 4X more likely to convert into a qualified lead or new customer than general website traffic, so the financial, rational argument for sharing can be made. When we setup client blogs we include the most popular business sharing tools as buttons to make tweeting, digging and sharing on Facebook and LinkedIn as easy as emailing a friend.
5. Qualify Leads before they ever make contact. I recently experienced this myself. A prospect for our business read a comment that I wrote on someone else's blog, liked the line of thinking of my comment as much if not more than the original author, followed the link I provided back to our blog, read several posts, agreed with our approach and philosophy, then contacted us as a well-read, highly-informed qualified prospect. That is happening more and more, and would not have been possible let alone probable before we started blogging.
6. Build Community. The reason most people think of first ("You blog so that you build a community of like-minded individuals, promote discussion, etc.") is actually my #6 reason Businesses Must Blog. Let's be real: If you're not the size of Microsoft, Cisco or Netflix, the community construction aspect of blogging is going to take a while to fully develop. But it will, as long as you make the decision to start blogging, continue to publish quality content, and invite others to participate in the conversation.
A Word on Blogging Best Practices
The Best Practices of Blogging recommend that you spend equal portions of your time reading the blogs of others, commenting on those other blogs, and crafting your own. So if you can only invest, say, two hours a week to this valuable new pursuit of blogging, be sure you start with 1 half hour into finding and reading other people's blogs of interest to you and your business goals, a half hour or more leaving comments and asking questions on those blogs, and an equal amount of time writing your own posts.
Leaving Blog Bread Crumbs
Taking a cue from would-be social media pioneers Hansel & Gretel... One of the best ways to build a community in the early days of blogging is to include a bread crumb - a link to your blog - every time you read and comment on someone else's relevant post or blog. An example:
"A very interesting and provocative idea about the greening of marketing, Michael. I thought you were absolutely right on your assessment of the topic of how direct mail impacts our environment, but consider this one idea you may have missed: Search is the new direct mail. I've written about this topic at http://blog.ymarketing.com/?Tag=inbound%20marketing and invite you to have a look..."
That way when interested readers see your comment and agree with your point of view or unique insight, they'll follow your link and discover your blog.
What do you think... What did we miss? What are the compelling reasons for business to blog that we neglected to include?
For more information visit
ymarketing.com, follow
@ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707
Posted by Ryan Lash on Tue, May 05, 2009
Admittedly I borrowed this idea from JB's Searchblog, as I used to work off of a setup like his several years ago. I also have to give credit to the original Lifehackers.
As a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) by trade, my obsessive compulsiveness (OCD) has poured over into my every day personal and work life. I now end up 'twacking' everything, work stations included!
Also, as a serial entrepreneur I am always extremely busy and do everything possible to increase productivity; in addition to working for my Search Engine Marketing Firm I also own/operate a Sports Nutrition Company and am producing a TV Show (will have more info on this shortly).
The SystemWhat we have here (besides failure to communicate) is a system comprising of 5 machines (from left to right):
-PowerBook G4
-HP Pavilion (backup box)
-Apple iPhone (8 gigger)
-HP Dual Core Pavilion (primary box)
-HP Pavilion Tablet PC
All computers share 1 primary terminal (keyboard + mouse) and 3 19" Samsung Monitors via the use of software (synergy) and hardware (IOGEAR KVM Switch) .
The End Result?
1) 300% increased productivity
2) ZERO Downtime
3) A lot of toys to play with (='s fun)
-The MADD Man
PS: Please feel free to tap me on the shoulder during lunchtime at the next industry event and I will gladly show you how to optimize a sandwich :).
For more information visit
ymarketing.com, follow
@ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707
