In effective search marketing campaigns, the more experienced business aims to minimize its PPC spend and maximize the results. The first thing towards achieving dual success as described is you need to install some analytics tools. The best place to start for now since it is free is www.google.com/analytics. It takes literally five minutes to set up. and once you have it set up, you can start seeing your daily traffic in terms of where people came from and what they did on your site. The best part about analytics is that today the results are instant. you can run a campaign of adwords for an hour and measure the exact results in the same hour. so not only can you see which ADS (through Google or Yahoo) are producing clicks into your site (plus you can see how many impressions occur of each ad as compared to the number of clicks - this is called CTR, click through ratio, and will be covered in another post) you can then follow the clicks THROUGH YOUR SITE and see which visitors take specific actions on your site. Stay tuned where I share some strategies for running more efficient PPC campaigns. I will start by highlighting things you can do MANUALLY and soon I will be sharing some case studies and recommendations of software that will automate much of the process.

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EvePearl.com has that interesting business combination of a products AND services shopping cart / ecommerce platform like WebCart© that could deliver a customized look and feel for each of her product sets. But at the same time she needed a content platform to offer up information related to her makeover services. Eve - otherwise known as the Makeup Artist to the Stars - was recommended by the visionary Eisenberg brothers at that newly public web conversion and analytics consulting company FutureNow. A good part about the project was that though it complex in scope, she basically knew what she wanted and that made the core of the project relatively simple. First, Eve wanted a new look and feel for her site. Second is she wanted to introduce a whole new level of functionality for her customers to offer them video casts, interviews, an updated high end photo gallery and lots of other web content she could not easily manage with her prior Content Management Solution (CMS) software. Besides adding in all this brand spanking new function set, she also wanted to be able to manage updating the content on her own. So the short story is that my angry web designer delivered a first draft in 9 days I think and at it's core, he made it happen. Just to give you an idea of the process. We reviewed over 500 web sites for keywords like cosmetics, beauty supplies, makeup, beautician and makeovers. We built a spreadsheet of best practices in terms of what links were common between most of the closely competitive sites. We looked for common icons that would give her new site the credibility the customers expected. And finally, we looked at color schemes to see what we could efficiently create without requiring customers to learn a whole new site comprehension. If you review the Case Studies section of my site, you should find a more comprehensive review of the steps we took to redesign her site and then integrate the old content into the new platform. I am very proud of this site because it took a lot of effort from all parties involved and everyone delivered a noteworthy effort. This does not always happen and that is why I am mentioning it now.

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Living in Los Angeles has its perks and one of them is that L.A. has become a hub of technology companies. One of the most noteworthy associations in the technology space on the West Coast is the Digital Coast Roundtable. Their roster of members has some real industry stalwarts like the Panasonic company. So when I had a chance to work on redesigning their web site and integrating their old content into our Web Site Architect CMS Platform you could say I got off my rump and jumped at the chance. In the case study area of my site, you will soon find a step by step analysis of the DCR site upgrade. I want to thank Conchetta Fabares at DCR for her thoroughness and follow-through at getting this project underway and completed. Stay tuned as we develop this case study.

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Clearly, CMKCosmetics.com is not necessarily a new web design project but I am posting about it now because it is in a similar industry to EvePearl.com and since I've gotten my feet pretty wet with cosmetics, it makes sense to put up a little information about this site too. CMKCosmetics.com is an interesting situation because she sells cosmetics to everyone in one sense, because everyone has the potential to use her makeup products to look more beautiful. However, she also has an exciting niche market opportunity to sell cosmetics to a very particular type of customer. That niche is served by her brand of Shabbat Cosmetics. These are lipsticks and eyeshadows for example that are formulated in such a way that Rabbis approve of their use on the holy sabbath. Without getting into the details too much, not only did this site have the opportunity to showcase products for a definable audience, but it also had to take into consideration the social mores of that community. This meant that the photos used on the site had to be meet a certain level of acceptability for modesty. As well, the whole color scheme of the site had to be in a sense "sensible" and not too flashy. That is a tough bill to fill to sell "sex" but not look like it too much. Well maybe she wasn't trying to sell sex, but it's a pretty fine line between getting all dolled up looking good and crossing the threshold to a bedroom. Yet, that may be a male point of view. From the woman's perspective beauty and all the accoutrements used to enhance one's beauty, are not really about sex but about a self perception. In the fashion world, you are what you wear - and not necessarily for an ulterior motive. So the CMK cosmeticsweb project was noteworthy more because of the limitations presented by the niche audience than because it gave me a chance to showcase some enhancements we had made to the WebCart Ecommerce platform. We are always adding new configuration options to WebCart so it is almost like commonplace - though some of the features you will see on CMK are quite nice. look at all the alternate images of the lipsticks to get an idea of what I mean.

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There's a new trend in the firefox plugin world where the original developers get so busy they don't have the time to update their plugins as new releases of firefox are introduced. Leave it up to the technogeeks to fill in the gaps. One of the most noteworthy firefox plugins is something called SEO Open which is used to help with search engine optimization tracking right from your own firefox browser. You can quickly visit any web page and using this plugin, you can see yahoo backlinks, msn backlinks and the grandaddy of them all, google backlinks. plus a host of other SEO statistics. In any event, since Firefox 3.0 was introduced this plugin was sitting there dormant waiting for someone with the time to update it. And Mike from emikey.net has stepped up to the plate with one of his most recent Firefox extensions postings. So if you have downloaded firefox 3.0 and you want a free copy of the updated seo open extension, drop by Emikey.net and pick it up.

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Rss Directory Submission Software This software enables you to automatically register your Blog RSS Feed or your Web Site RSS to over 50 directories. You can try it free to see how it works and then spend a couple of bucks to automate the process for dozens of directories. And you can use it over and over again for multiple web sites. Want to be a hero? Buy it for yourself, and then offer to set up your friend's blogs for free just to get some brownie points.

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Moffsoft FreeCalc is a great replacement for your existing Windows^® calculator. They have taken the standard Windows calculator functionality and added great features:

• Adjustable calculator size - Make it any size you want and Moffsoft FreeCalc will remember the size and position next time you use it.
• Tape - Save, print, or clear the simulated paper history tape.
• Color schemes - Select a color combination or use your Windows color settings.
• New keys - Clear Tape {CT}, double zero {00}, triple zero {000}, and memory subtract {M-} keys have been added.
• Visible memory value - You'll always know what's in memory because it's displayed on the calculator status bar.
• Option settings - Flat buttons, always on top, tray icon, run on startup, and hiding the tape are some of the calculator options.

So next time you are in need a quick fix with some calculator action don't hesitate to use your new MoffSoft windows calculator. You can download it here from Moffsoft.

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It used to be that clicks could be purchased for pennies per click. Even with the insanely high fraud rates of 30-40%, it still was worth it to buy as much traffic as you could afford. In the last few years, the costs have skyrocketed. And as more people become web savvy, the competition for those elusive top sponsored ads, becomes even more acute and thus the prices go up another notch. When I began helping other clients develop their own 4 Pillar Internet Success strategies, I used to focus mostly on search engines. The traffic from them was basically free and therefore it made a lot of sense on how to dominate on free search engines. The funny thing is that as their rankings increased their traffic increased but their conversions did not move in sync. And the reason that made the most sense was the PPC ads on the top and right of Google for example. The heat map studies show that 7x as many people click on the free search engine rankings results as people who click on the ads. That's great if you have good rankings. Problem is that people tend to forget that 1 out of 7 people still click on Sponsored ads. So if you are willing to give away 14% or so of your business opportunities to your competition, then you can ignore PPC. But, if you want to take advantage of every business opportunity from a targeted prospect (remember the user typed in the query into the search engine because ostensibly he or she is looking for your service) then you need to buy sponsored PPC ads. So maybe this is counterintuitive but the point is that as your business grows and your rankings grow, so too will your PPC budget grow because 14% of the traffic will always click on the ADS. What I intend to cover in this PPC section are strategies, case studies and applications designed to get the most out of your PPC budget.

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OK. Here's the story behind this free windows software today. So I'm working on a new laptop with Microsoft's Vista operating system. And 4 weeks into the new laptop I get the ACER black screen of death. It's worse than the blue screen because the computer boots up, flashes the microsoft logo and then goes black. So you don't even see a message to debug your system. So fortunately Acer has a recovery system to restore your system to the factory settings. Unfortunately, it doesn't help you restore any files you saved to the hard drive before the BSOFD (black screen of death). Today i present you with a free utility called Recover Files. It is an award winning program that can undelete / recover deleted files after they have been deleted. Recover Files is a professional file recovery software that allows it's user to recover accidentally deleted files. Even files removed from the Recycle Bin, network drive, compact flash card, portable devices, in a DOS window, or from Windows Explorer with the SHIFT key held down. Recover Files is a small, fast, useful, practical and powerful. It has a clean, simple interface. Recover Files will work with Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista operating systems. It can be used to recover deleted files from all NTFS and FAT partitions. The program supports all Windows file systems for hard and floppy drives including FAT12/16/32, NTFS/NTFS5 and image recovery from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia and Secure Digital cards. Recover Files quickly and effectively restore all those files that you may have deleted by mistake. Wish me luck because I'm going to test it on my laptop. I doubt it will work though because restoring a clean system is not on the list above. Otherwise though this looks like a great program. For more info, check out http://downloads.zdnet.com/abstract.aspx?&compid=64992&docid=308479&tag=nl.e550.

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