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.

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.

Today’s software tip is geared to web design individuals and companies. Have you ever looked at a web page - especially when you are debugging code - and you see a hexadecimal value and you want to know what color it represents?

Well, this nifty little html color generator type of calculator is just the best little Web-based wizard to come my way in a long time. You just type in the 6 digit color value and hit a button and it shows you a whole web page filled with that color.

Drop me a note if you like the tool. I sure do. It would have saved us a lot of time when we were designing some skins for our shopping cart platform.

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.

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.

What follows is 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.

Stay tuned as well develop this case study.

So this 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.

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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The Godfather’ doctrine and Israel in the Middle East
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

By a miracle, he is only badly wounded. Two of his sons, Santino (Sonny) and Michael, and his adopted son and consigliere, Tom Hagen, gather in an atmosphere of shock to try to decide how to save the family.

This, of course, is the hinge of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie, “The Godfather.” It is also a startlingly useful metaphor for the strategic problems and global power structure of our time. The don, emblematic of Cold War American power, is struck by forces he did not expect and does not understand, as was America on 9/11. Intriguingly, his heirs embrace very different visions of family strategy that approximate the three schools of thought — liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism and realism — vying for control of U.S. foreign policy today.

As consigliere, Tom’s view of the Sollozzo threat is rooted in a legal-diplomatic worldview similar to the liberal institutionalism of today’s Democratic Party. The way to handle Sollozzo, Tom judges, is not through force but through negotiation. Tom thinks even a rogue power can be brought to terms, if the family accommodates his needs and accepts him as a normalized player in the Corleones’ rules-based community. In this, he echoes the Democrats’ belief that Washington’s only option for coping with the Iranian nuclear crisis is immediate, unconditional talks with our latest “Sollozzo,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But to succeed, Tom’s diplomacy must be conducted from a position of unparalleled strength, which the family no longer possesses. Gone are the days when Tom was invariably the man at the table with the most leverage. Like the petty tyrants who challenge Washington with increasing confidence, Sollozzo is an opportunist who will take things as they come — as either a revolutionary or a status quo power, but certainly as one out to profit from the transition to multi- polarity. Power on the streets has already begun to shift to the Tattaglias and Barzinis — the Mafia equivalent of today’s BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). The reality confronting the Corleones is one of increasing multipolarity — something lost on Tom, who, like many Democrats, thinks he is still the emissary of the dominant superpower.

By contrast, Sonny’s response is to advocate “toughness” through military action, a one-note policy prescription for waging war against the rest of the Mafia world. By starting a gangland free-for-all against all possible enemies at once, Sonny severs long-standing alliances and unites the other families against the Corleones.

One can imagine that Sonny’s shoot-first, ask-questions-later approach would meet with the firm approval of arch-neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz and Michael Ledeen. Confronted with the current Iranian nuclear crisis, Sonny would urge an immediate airstrike, and it is unlikely he would make a cost-benefit analysis of the military option: What? A U.S. airstrike would imperil American allies in the region, directly benefiting Al Qaeda? I knew you didn’t have the guts to do this, says Sonny, who doesn’t let facts get in the way of his desire for action.

This rash instinct to use military power as a tactic to solve structural problems merely hastens the family’s decline. Blinded by a militant moralism bereft of strategic insight, Sonny proves an easy target for his foes. In place of understanding the world, he accosts it, and the world, in Iraq as on the causeway, is able to strike back.

The strategy that ultimately saves the Corleone family from the Sollozzo threat and equips it to cope with the new world comes from Michael, the youngest and least experienced of the don’s sons. Unlike Tom or Sonny, Michael has no formulaic fixation on a particular policy instrument; his overriding goal is to protect the family’s interests by any and all means necessary. In today’s foreign policy terminology, Michael is a realist.

Relinquishing the mechanistic, one-trick-pony approaches of his brothers, Michael uses soft and hard power in flexible combinations to influence others. Can the Iran policies advocated by candidates in either party be said to proceed from these assumptions?

Thinking long term, Michael also adjusts the institutional playing field to the family’s advantage through a combination of accommodation (granting the other families access to the Corleones’ New York political machinery) and retrenchment (shifting the family business to Las Vegas and giving the other families a stake in the new moneymaker, gambling). A similar effort at preemptive institutional reform is vital if America wants to persuade its competitors to resist the temptation to position themselves as revolutionary powers. Doing so now, before the wet concrete of the new multipolar order has hardened, could ensure that, though no longer hegemonic, America is able to position itself, like the Corleones, as the next best thing: primus inter pares – first among equals.

Can any of the candidates vying to become the next president of the United States match Michael’s cool, dispassionate courage in the face of epochal change? Will they avoid living in the comforting embrace of the past, from which Tom and Sonny could not escape? Or will they emulate Michael’s flexibility — to preserve America’s position in a dangerous world?

John C. Hulsman is the Alfred von Oppenheim scholar in residence at the German Council on Foreign Relations and president of John C. Hulsman Enterprises. A. Wess Mitchell is the director of research at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. A longer version of this article appeared in The National Interest.