Maybe it’s unimpressive for a marketer to admit that they read books to keep up with internet trends since most of the time by the time the book is published the material is out of date. However, I like to understand the foundation for an idea or trend and always enjoy reading other experts opinions, regardless of the format.

With that said, I was watching my daughter’s softball game this weekend and took my Twitter Power book by Joel Comm to the game. (I admit that the game is more exciting when my daughter is at bat, so I use the downtime to do a little reading when others are up.) I set the book down to watch an important player at bat and someone stole by book! In a town (Boulder, CO) where the hottest items are play toys, I was amazed. Twitter has reached the masses where someone is stealing a book about optimizing their Twitter profile.

Hopefully the thief takes the time to read the book as it is a great read, helpful reference book and very up-to-date. Although I had not yet completed Twitter Power, I was able to learn or be reminded of critical tasks when building and maximizing your presence. Here are a few….

• Build First, Tweet Later: Don’t make the mistake I did regarding setting up your Twitter page without spending the time to build the page and profile properly.
  • Make a conscious decision whether the account is to leverage a personal brand or corporate site and pick a username accordingly. Select the username with as much cautious as how you would chose a website URL. It’s that important. Use your real name for “name” so people who are looking for you can find you! The main people search function in Twitter is not very robust. Again, choose your name carefully.
  • Set up an appealing graphic that reflects your brand - it’s incredibly easy to do, plus any graphic artist would love this task. Or, there are (surprise!) companies that develop creative twitter templates for less than $100. I used a free background image from a recommended source, www.twitterpatterns.com, as it fit my personality than the more traditional corporate backgrounds.
  • If you are truly marketing your page, make certain you uncheck the box that says “protect my updates” to give others who are not followers a chance to see your posts. As the book points out (but not sure exactly how the Joel Comm puts it because someone stole my book!), permitting only your friends to see your posts is like having a store, posting a closed sign and allowing just your friends to shop there.
• Building Your Network: If you are serious about building your brand on Twitter versus conversing with only those that you have met before (then you should ask yourself why are you on Twitter if the latter!), start looking for relevant tweeters.
  • One idea is to search on persons of interest. In my case, I searched on “paid search expert” using search.twitter.com.
  • Almost always follow who follows you - until you can become more selective. Lately it seems that there has been more spamming on Twitter. Make sure you read their posts before automatically accepting.
  • Review the followers of who is following you for interesting new tweeters.
  • Invite your current friends by using the “find on other networks”. This will search your email contact lists from Gmail, Yahoo and AOL.
  • Query a topic in Twitter and then subscribe to the RSS feeds to appear on your iGoogle page. This will remind you to participate in Twitter daily, but also to find other tweeters of interest to follow.
• Integrate with Other Channels: Twitter is one component of the overall new marketing mix of your site, store, Facebook Page, YouTube Channel. Integrate with these other conversation spots by pushing your tweets to your Facebook page to update your status, show your posts on your website by simply adding the necessary HTML code, design a badge to go on your site and add your Twitter address to your emails.
• Participate!: Make a commitment to actively participate.
  • Try tweeting at least once a day and picking someone new to follow. You can set Twitter to nudge you if you have not posted for 24 hours.
  • If this is a company site, select one person to tweet and keep the voice consistent.
  • The types of posts are recommended to be a mix of questions and thoughts to engage others so as to begin conversations. Use humor once in a while and also post what you are doing.
  • Update your online bio with what you are working on or promoting. Use tweets for conversation.

Above all, try to have fun with Twitter by expanding your network and knowledge of what interests you most. As a marketer, BE CREATIVE and don’t view Twitter as something you have to do because everyone else, including your competitors, is tweeting. Seduce with questions, engage your audience. In other words, do what you do best as marketers!

Thanks for the read. Now off the Amazon site to place another order!

www.twitter.com/brightcloud

We are busier than we have ever been. We’ve been growing as we have brought on new clients while adding new search consultants. At the same time, we are spending more and more time testing as we try to find the right bids, keywords, campaigns, ad copy to maximize our clients’ budgets in a very challenging retail year.

We have seen our client’s paid search traffic decline while the cost per order increase by over 10%. While click through rates are down, the main factor for the increase in cost per order is the significant decrease in site and search conversion rates. A more indepth review was completed by the Rimm-Kaufmann Group who found that sales from search have declined by 20% since July 2008. Since the beginning of the year, AOV has declined by 10%. Their main conclusion - fewer people are shopping and obviously are spending less when they do.

The critical question - what should we do in paid search to generate sales in our struggling economy? Here are a few recommendations:

Concentrate efforts on the market segments where you outshine the competition. Why spend hours optimizing campaigns where your depth of product is shallow and your prices are not competitive?

Be very critical of your ad copy. Search on your key terms and compare your ads to your competition. Would you buy if you were a consumer based on what your ad is saying?

Get rid of unwanted traffic. I love finding new negative keywords as much as finding ones that drive good traffic. If you are using mostly broad match terms, type in only a portion of your broad match terms and see what is returned by the search engines. There are so many great sources for finding negative keywords, but I like using my marketing brain the best (and then go to these sources to fill the gaps!).

Continue to test, test, test. Make certain that you are truly testing and not just changing elements of your program. And, let it run long enough to get statistically valid results or when your gut says to turn up or off. The best part of search is the ability to make changes and see almost an immediate impact.

Look at the bounce rates and time spent on high budget campaigns. You may be bidding on the right words with great copy, but landing page does not sell the product! It is easy to see the sites where management believes the internet is an “ordering channel” versus a “selling” one. Decide what you want to sell and SELL it to the consumer. Convince consumers that they need the product.

Always be on the lookout for new keywords. My great places - Google’s Keyword Tool, Google’s Keyword Opportunities in Adwords Editor, Google SK Tools, Compete.com. But my favorite place is to match my paid search terms against the organic terms to the site to find the gaps.

Especially if you have an in-house person managing your search, make sure they are leveraging the very active blogging, article-writing online advertising community. Search nuances change every week. They may be minor changes that could have a great impact on your search program. Ones on my radar include PPC Hero and Search Engine Land as well as following David Szetela and Marty Weintraub on Twitter.

As they say, there is no such thing as managing time. You need to concentrate on the basics and establish priorities that leverage your competitive advantage. What you can do is make sure the time spent is reflective of your company’s priorities.

Questions:

What are you doing on March 11?
Do you live anywhere near Boston, MA?
Are you sure that your paid search, email and your site are all performing as well as they could be?
Would you like another opinion?

Spend March 11-13 in Boston, MA at the NEMOA Spring Conference and experience SmartLabs, interactive sessions to provide feedback on your online marketing programs. Stay the entire time to gain insights from Mike Bowcut from REI, Christopher Kimball from America’s Test Kitchen and Clark Scheffy from IDEO among many other well known industry leaders. Walk away with great ideas and new contacts.