Creating the Right Ad Text
from Search Marketing Standard
The author often tells prospective search engine marketers that to be good at SEM you need to be good at three college courses: statistics, psychology, and creative writing. Creating good ad text is probably the one SEM skill that combines all three of these skill sets. Here are the author's top tips for creating and optimizing effective ad text. More

Why Microsites Are Weakening Your SEO Results
from Search Views
A microsite is an individual web page or cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. Organizations usually create a separate URL or subdomain of the main URL to house these microsites. This is bad from an SEO perspective for a number of reasons. There are millions of domains out there on the web. So how do search engines know who they can trust? More

Search Engines and Link Reputation: What’s Yours?
from SiteProNews
Since links are the fabric of the web and they allow us to move from page to page and site to site, they also play a crucial role in deciphering the context of your site when analyzed from outside sources (particularly from search engines). Call it osmosis, link transference or what you like, the fact remains that “what other sites say about you” meaning “how they link to you” (or how you build links) matters. More

Subject Line Testing: What Metric Should You Use To Measure Success?
from Email Insider
Recently the E-mail Experience Council posted the results from a survey asking, "What is the primary metric by which you measure the success of your subject line A/B tests?" - open rate, click rate, click-to-open rate or conversion rate. There is no "right" answer. It varies by business, by situation, and by intent of the test being conducted. Each of these metrics measures something different and it is critically important to understand what is-in fact-being measured when each of these metrics is used to evaluate subject line A/B split tests. More

Catching Subscribers the Intelligent Way
from eAdvisor
When you launch an e-newsletter, one of the primary goals, naturally, is to continually increase subscriptions. But just including a “Subscribe” link may not be enough. More

Will Economic Downturn Sink Digital?
from AdWeek
While the economy sputters toward recession and is by most accounts headed for several rough quarters, there are mixed signs how much this will affect the online ad industry. On the plus side: A Millward Brown survey of 252 marketing executives undertaken by Publicis Groupe public relations shop Manning Selvage & Lee and PRWeek found most respondents looking to cut traditional marketing channels while increasing online spending. Another plus: a forecast by Jupiter Research this month also found online to grow at the expense of offline media during a time of economic uncertainty. More

To Save Gas, Shoppers Stay Home and Click
from The New York Times
To go shopping these days, more Americans are trading in their car keys for a keyboard. Online shopping is gaining at a time when simply filling up a gas tank to head to the mall can seem like a spending spree. A number of retailers are experiencing double-digit sales growth at their shopping Web sites, creating a surprising bright spot during an otherwise gloomy time for sales in brick-and-mortar stores. More

Podcasting Gets Legs
from Mobile Insider
Why is podcasting so difficult to explain? Is there something inscrutable here I am missing? From the time I discovered the podcast library in iTunes, I was a total addict. But when it comes to convincing the people around me of the platform’s ease of use and the joy of time-shifting, I feel like Tom Cruise proselytizing Scientology. More