Marketing Mule

Wordstream recently released a suite of seo tools called “WordStream for SEO”. Wordstream for SEO features a set of keyword reasearch and content authoring tools to help writers create search engine optimized, “keyword focused” content. To be more specific WordStream for SEO helps enhance your search engine optimization efforts with better:

• Personalized Keyword Research: By mining your site’s own historical query data, you’re able to discover relevant, proven keyword opportunities that searchers have used to find your site
• Keyword Analytics: Instead of keyword tool “guesstimations,” WordStream…
  Continue reading WordStream Announces New SEO Toolset

Interspire’s Email Marketer software is a full fledged web based email marketing software with all the bells and whistles. As with any email marketing software there are some features that are an absolute must and there are features that are “just nice to have”. Interspire’s solution has all of the features that most small and medium sized businesses would need, and a large list of optional features that most businesses want.

Here are just a few features that I’ve found useful in the past that are included in Interspires offering:

• Segmentation – The ability to segment your emails is…
  Continue reading Interspire Email Marketing Software Review

In my last article I brought you 5 of my top 10 favorite Google applications for improving online productivity. These are free apps that I use on a daily basis and I’ve found my productivity has improved.

So without further delay, here are my top 5 favorite Google apps for productivity:

5 – Google Reader

I think one of my biggest productivity gains came when I switched to Google reader from my other feed reader.

For one, it’s a much more streamlined reader then most. Plus it gives me more ability to group my feeds using tags, and scan them much more quickly. I’ve found that I’ve saved over an hour a day…

If you are a web worker as I am, your time is precious. If you don’t work you don’t get paid. As such you need to be as productive as you can. That being said there is room for other things as well.

Plus, if you are like me, you work from more than one computer which can make it difficult to have all your settings and “stuff” on both computers.

But this is where Google can be quite helpful. If you aren’t as concerned about privacy then Google can be quite helpful at not only helping you get organized, but also helpful for keeping you productive and connected.

These are 5 of my favorite Google applications:

10 – Google History

I know many privacy conscious users…

If you operate an e-commerce enabled website you may have already researched your options for a shopping cart solution.

There are many great commercial and free solutions, from ProStores on the paid side to Zen Cart on the free side. In addition to these two there are literally dozens of other options.

In this review we look at Zen cart to help you determine if it is right for you.

Benefits of Open Source Software

There are many reasons people chose open source over other options. The first and most obvious is cost. As with other open source…

Many times whether you are a blogger or a business owner, your name comes under fire. Or sometimes someone with the same name as you has a less-than-desirable history. In either case it is important to know how to manage your brand online, to ensure that any negativity which could be associated with your name is mitigated.

Today we look at three sites which can not only help you manage your brand but also increase your reach, potentially leading to new customers or even friends.

Social Networking, not just for kids anymore

While it is true that kids and teens seemed to be the first to jump onto the social networking bandwagon (even before it was known as social…

There are many shopping cart systems out there. From paid ones, such as the ProStores system to open source ones such as Zen-cart. And while many people like the fact that open source software is generally free, they don’t like the fact that there isn’t an organized support system available.

On the other hand, while there is organized support for commercial systems one has to decide if paying for such a system is right for them.

In this review we look at one of those paid systems – ProStores.

After you create your ProStores account and log in you are…

There’s a new web analytics player in the market. One that has some interesting features not found in any other analytics program available.

It’s name is reinvigorate and it offers a few features not found with other web based analytics packages.

Reinvigorate is still a beta product so you need an invitation. Getting an invitation is fairly simple, just go to their home page and click on “beta registration.” Provide the necessary information and within a couple days you should receive an invite.

Once you receive your invitation link, log in and provide your website details along with your preferred login. Then tag…

The Moveable Type blogging platform has been one of the most flexible and easy to install platforms for some time.

And soon there will be an open source version which means that even more people can begin to realize the power of Moveable Type. Therefore I thought it would be timely and prudent to write a “how-to” on optimizing a Moveable Type blog so that more of your content can be found easier through the search engines.

The method I describe here is what has worked for me, however the system is flexible enough that you can play with it to find something that works for you should you find these instructions not…

If you believe Web Analytics is overrated and your business could succeed without Web Analytics, then you’re absolutely correct. Below are 21 reasons why you don’t Web Analytics integrated into your online campaign.

• You don’t want to know where your visitors are coming from.


• You don’t care how much time visitors spend on your website.


• Most popular products? Who cares, you already know what your customers want.


• Tracking hits is perfectly sufficient.


• Dead Content? There can’t be any dead content on your site.


• Site overlay is overrated because you can pretty much guess which links…
  Continue reading 21 Reasons Why You Do NOT Need Web Analytics

As with any offsite but online transaction, it can be difficult to measure it’s effectiveness. For example, it can be difficult to measure true ROI on banners where you pay a CPM cost.

The same can hold true for press releases. That is, you pay the editorial cost of submission and wait for the referrals, but it is sometimes difficult to track them. However PRWeb does provide some basic statistics. When you implement conversion tracking along with PRWeb statistics you can begin to understand the effectiveness of your releases.

Once you have submitted the press release and it has been approved by an editor, simply log into the account created earlier and scroll down the page…

As a search engine marketer, one of my jobs is to consult on press releases and press release submission.

Many times my clients will write their press releases and then send them to me to optimize them before they are submitted. And many times I have to perform quite an edit job in order to make them not only ready for the many online submission services, but also more compelling.

You see, optimizing a press release is very similar to optimizing a web page. You want the title to be compelling enough to get someone to click on it and read it, and you want the text to be just right. Not too wordy, but having enough to explain the premise of the release and keep the readers…

PRWeb is one of the largest press release synidcation services on the web. The claim they can reach over 14 million journalists every day.

In addition PRWeb offers many other ways to get your press release “out there” including keyword based RSS as well as traditional media exposure.

PRWeb doesn’t come cheap. It costs at least $80 to submit a release, and for extra features the cost goes up. But a well crafted release can generate significant traffic to your site, increasing pageviews and ultimately conversions.

In this article we provide some tips on writing an effective press release for PRWeb.

Rule #1 – Remember the Editor

PRWeb is editor driven. They have a…

I have done a fair bit of interviews over the last year and have started using audio and podcasts in order to share the content with my readers. My process is quite simple and I’d like to share my procedure for publishing an audio interview. Thanks to my colleague Cory Bates for helping me with my first podcast.

1. If you don’t have a FeedBurner account get one, and make sure you’ve declared yourself as a podcaster. FeedBurner recognizes media files which allows other people to subscribe…
   Continue reading How to setup a Podcast and Embed Audio

For a long time there wasn’t any very effective ways of measuring your “brand” or blog’s reach aside from the more traditional “link:” queries which you’d use on search engines.

With the explosion of bloggers out there more and more services have been built by bloggers for bloggers. Some of these include ways of finding out just how big of a blogger you are by measuring how other bloggers react to you.

As such, even the search engines have gotten into other ways of measuring your blog’s reach. In this article I review a few of those tools and show how they can be used to measure your blog brand.

Before I get into the blog specific tools I thought I’d review some which you may…

Web Analytics provider, StatCounter, has upgraded its free version by increasing the log file size from 100 to 500. A log file size of 500 means that StatCounter will allow web analytics users to gain insight on the last 500 visitors.

My favorite thing about StatCounter has always been its ability to report data very intuitively and in real time. I wonder if the upgrade of the free version is due to the pressure StatCounter is feeling from Google Analytics. I believe StatCounter has a long way to go if they really want to compete against Google’s free…

Everybody over the past year or more with any type of involvement in buying clicks, be it PPC, CPM, or any other type of keyword associated traffic purchase, has been talking about the long tail of user intent. In other words, those 80-90% of words that people search for, but that do not possess the individual volume to be highly competitive.

For example: let’s say you are running a campaign for Detroit’s latest sports car. First and foremost, you try and buy up all the branded queries because it will take time for your website to get some natural traction and you don’t want to be mugged by any squatters or direct competition. Second, you try to buy all those reasonable search…

I recently came across a cool new widget for bloggers called Add This. With it you can quickly and easily help get more of your content noticed in more places.

Before I go on, I should say that it isn’t just for bloggers. Anyone can use this.

With that out of the way let’s take a look at “Add This”.

There are a couple ways you can go with this product. While it is free either way, both have their benefits.

You can get a free widget that gives your site enhanced bookmarking abilities or you can create an account to get that plus stats on bookmarking.

In either case you get your choice of 3 buttons to…

In today’s Web 2.0 world there are more and more contractors who work from home and/or work for other companies down the road, in the next city or even in the next country.

For example, right now I am writing this article from my home where I work full time, and I log into a web based administration panel to post it. Working from home gives me the flexibility to work on many projects whenever I want.

But sometimes such flexibility can cause problems. Especially when you have workers spread out throughout the globe. Project management in such a situation becomes critical especially if you are trying to building a business or just rely on that next complete project to keep yourself…

In today’s world the Internet is playing an increasing role in day-to-day business. Even the most die-hard brick and mortar businesses realize the power of the web.

And for those businesses that truly lead the pack there is now an enterprise level analytics package to help them do business online.

Omniture’s latest release of Site Catalyst is just such an analytics package. Sure it gives you the usual statistics about your site, such as search engine referrals, page views, paid campaign management and so on. But it is one of the few analytics packages that also embraces Web 2.0.

Now, I’ve reviewed other 2.0 analytics packages such as Continue reading Omniture Site Catalyst – Enterprise Level Analytics for the Web 2.0 World