Using WordTracker to boost your online sales

It's great when you get your hands on something that is genuinely useful, so I'm grateful to Ian Burgess at http://www.linked-it.co.uk/ for pointing me towards http://www.WordTracker.com.

He explained keyword research in Google Analytics is based on past performance, whereas WordTracker is predictive and they are an excellent way to find extra profit avenues from your search terms.

A new version of WordTracker is coming down the line that looks very useful if this beta video is anything to go by:

Wordtracker New Tool Tutorial from Wordtracker on Vimeo.

If most of your online business comes from searches involving just 20 keywords, finding another 20 good keywords would give you a decent hike in new business. WordTracker provides initial free tools and tutorials to turbo-charge your keywords research, with enhanced paid-for offerings.

As WordTracker's free tutorial says: "you can't get enough good keywords", and they open up avenues to unexplored profits, and provide useful information. The words I've looked at to date have shown unexpected differences in popularity. I'll be reviewing my content. Can I encourage you to take a look if you're not using WordTracker already?

And there's good marketing and management advice to be had at http://www.linked-it.co.uk.

The Twitterati

Twitter is like Marmite. Clients and colleagues either love or loathe it. Those that hate it inevitably say something like: who cares what you had for breakfast?

And they’re right. Validating your lonely existence is not what Twitter is about. There’s plenty of rubbish on the internet, but we don’t dismiss it out of hand just because of that.

We are seeing more enquiries about how to use Twitter effectively. And no wonder clients are interested. ComScore shows Twitter has gone from under 10 million monthly unique visitors to its site world-wide in February, to 32 million in April, up from 19 million in March 2009. Even more impressively, that score only includes website visitors, not the millions who access it via phones.

But if it’s the early adopters of funky new social media you are after, or if you think Twitter is the cool place to be, think again! It’s months since I read in the ad magazine, Revolution that the super cool had already abandoned Twitter when the corporate suits moved in for a clutch of other social media platforms.

It keeps happening. Remember all the fuss about Friends Reunited and MySpace? A lot of money piled in and they’re not exactly flavour of the month now.

There are loads of new social media platforms all hoping to be the next big thing.
That doesn’t stop companies engaging with the Twitterati, as long as they do engage and don’t just sell: that goes down like a lead balloon in any social media format.
But it’s wise to stay flexible and avoid putting all the eggs in one social media basket.

There are plenty of next big things brewing.

Microsoft's Bing V Google

Here is a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft's new search engine and Google. You'll see there's life in the older dog yet - but I doubt it was coincidence that led to Google announcing their next generation Wave is on the way the other day!

Enjoy!

Blogging tips

I'm indebted to *David Meerman Scott's Twitter page yesterday for a link to this set of tips about professional blogging from a professional blogger and self-confessed geek called Yehuda Berlinger. I reckon he outlines a pretty clear road from start-up to star of the blogosphere and I will be working to apply a lot of his tips, including having a massive cringe at all the blogs I set up in my initial experimental phase ("not professional" says Berlinger and I agree).

As Simon Allen at Shopfitter says, "Google loves blogs" and certainly the posts on blogs appear a lot faster online than many website updates, so you get results faster with blogs if you're trying to drive more web traffic.

You can track that with the excellent free Google Analytics tools. You can even get free Google lessons and qualifications in all of this wizard stuff to enable you to boost your web traffic and increase your confidence at handling it all. Good on Google!

David is the author of the excellent "New Rules of Marketing and PR" book which outlines how to reach buyers online directly. Highly recommended (and no, I don't get anything for that!).