Handy Google Spreadsheet Keyword Generator

I keep track of all our keyword bids, ideas, brainstorms and lists in Google Drive via Spreadsheets.

I had no idea this was possible but will be using the heck out of this feature now…

A Glimpse Into Google’s Brain, Hidden In A Spreadsheet App: “Yesterday TechCrunch reported that if you make a spreadsheet in Google Drive (Google Docs, formerly), enter and highlight the names of two beers, and pull down on the corner of the spreadsheet cell while holding Option or Control, the app will automatically fill the following cells with the names of other beers. The information is pulled, seemingly, from nowhere.”

And a few examples here.

And no, it’s not just for beer. I made a few quick tries with keyword lists for specific specialty clients and was impressed with the nature of the returns.

It’s not a replacement for keyword-specific tools, but a nice way to brainstorm from time to time.

Google Sets have been around for a while and I was always impressed with what was possible (and bewildered they “shut down” the service a few years back). Nice to see Sets having a long life ahead as a part of Google Drive.

What Marketers Should Know About Facebook’s New News Feed

Excellent post and resources to ponder if you use Facebook for your performance marketing efforts…

Facebook Update Gives Users More Control Over News Feed: What Marketers Should Know: “Facebook’s design changes make it much easier for Facebook users to tune out content from businesses and brands. Because this is the case, you need to give your fans even more incentive to check out their Following Feed to view your content so they can engage with it via Likes, comments, and shares, enabling you to show up in their friends’ All Friends Feed. This makes it even more critical that you post content that is compelling and sharable.”

via Steve Hall on Twitter

Plunk for Mobile Site Testing

Plunk is a nifty and easy-to-use utility that allows you to upload a mobile screen image of a site you might be testing or designing, share it with others and get a report 48 hours later of where people touched their screen.

It’s totally for mobile sites and I think it’s an ingenious idea given the analytics you get:

Plunk – An easy way to test clicks on a mobile phone

“Here are 5 ways Plunk will help:
1. User intuition. See where touch screen testers want to click on your page.
2. Improve functionality. Visually review where users are expecting to find that new button.
3. Retain interaction and engagement. Test where mobile users are getting lost due to either navigation or design and keep their attention locked.
4. Mobile conversion. Feedback for creating a great design will encourage more mobile activity.
5. Bob for those apples. Stuck deciding between new mobile designs? Send them out and dive into your results to find the best one!time and money. Plunk lets you test your mobile users’ clicks to figure out what works and what doesn’t.”

You can share the image to get results to your own social networking followers or to an email beta list etc.

Very cool and handy, especially for performance marketers using mobile (as you should be).

Importance of Marketing Plans

Whether you’re doing search marketing, affiliate marketing, SEO, social media, PPC or some combination of those it’s always important to at least have a framework plan set out.

Here’s a quick and easy post that helps spur some thoughts about marketing plans and what you could be doing to improve your campaigns…

Writing Marketing Plans – SEO Book: “Writing forces an analytic approach. The act of writing something down often brings about new ideas because it gets us out of the routine of ‘just doing’. Secondly, writing plans helps us write better proposals. A marketing plan is about both an analysis and a form of communication. It’s a means to get across your ideas to clients and other partners and convince them of the merits of what we’re doing.”

Instagram and Affiliate Marketing

Instagram continues to be a hotbed of brand engagement with users despite concerns about its new privacy policy and its souring relationship with Twitter:

Despite a Rocky Road, 59% of Top Brands Are Now Active on Instagram [STUDY] – SimplyMeasured: “With 90 million monthly active users, 40 million photos per day, and 8,500 likes per second, Instagram has now managed to attract 59% of the world’s top brands. The past three months have seen a number of new feature and policy changes on the network, creating both incentives for brands to adopt, but also a backlash among users.”

However, how well does Instagram work with performance marketers? Brand marketers seem to be having a field day with the service, but is there any translation to the affiliate or action-oriented segment of marketers?

Aside from approaches that use bots and questionable tactics, it is quite possible to do well with affiliate marketing using Instagram.

For starters, Instagram’s visual nature makes it a no-brainer for connecting with product driven affiliate offers. If you’re marketing something that is service related, show results of your service or how it helps people get something done or done better.

Instagram’s ability to help people make connections by performing as a visual aid is a natural fit for affiliate marketers as well. As with all marketing, you want to “show not just tell” and Instagram is great for showing stories or snippets relevant to your campaign.

Instagram’s connections with Facebook shouldn’t be taken for granted either, since the service can quickly send visual images into the Great Walled Garden.

As with the early days of Twitter and its growth of a community ethos, it’s important to keep in mind that people value the visual function and fun of Instagram but won’t react in a positive way to pure spam. So keep community rules in your mind if you’re going to use Instagram in your affiliate campaign.

Most importantly, use your head and keep your stats.

CostPerNews 2.0

I wrote this on CostPerNews almost five years ago back in June 2008:

CPN went live on Nov 1, 2006 and I had no idea where it was going (and still don’t). 19 months later (at an average of 52 posts a month), we’ve hit the magic 1k mark.

I knew in October of ’06 that I wanted to have a place where I could write as frequently or infrequently as I wanted and cover the emerging web2.0 space and the connections I was (and still am) seeing with traditional affiliate marketing. I came up with the name while mowing the lawn that Fall and ran inside to register the domain before I forgot. Luckily, I didn’t forget.

I can honestly say that this little blog has been the most important vehicle for my own personal brand and business, helping me to get into doors that wouldn’t have been opened otherwise and helping me to get to know some pretty incredible people along the way. If you’re wondering if you should start a blog, take it from me… yes.

So, thank you for being there and listening to my crazy ramblings about Twitter and Tumblr and RSS and open source over the past couple of years. I’ve sold this blog, quit this blog (twice), re-acquired this blog and redesigned it (at least 10 times). And here we are again.

CostPerNews was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reach an audience that I really did appreciate and enjoy interacting with on an almost daily basis. Few days went by from late 2006 until 2010 that I didn’t blog 4, 5 or 6 times on CPN.

Posts had high engagement with comments and emails. Often times, comment threads got heated as we fought to carve out the brave new social web while preserving a corner niche for affiliate marketing.

Eventually, CostPerNews was brought into an awesome partnership with ReveNews (now a part of the Affiliate Summit family).

I enjoyed my time as Publisher of ReveNews, but soon missed the community and quirky nature of web2.0-meets-affiliate marketing at CostPerNews, so I bought it back and resumed blogging there.

I’d sell the site for a second and final time as my family grew and I felt as if I’d run out of time for blogging and the commitment that CPN took to be successful.

Needless to say, I miss writing about the intersection of web tech and marketing. I miss the passionate community of CPN. I most especially miss the daily (almost monastic) practice of writing and writing and writing some more.

I miss the notion of shoshin, or “beginner’s mind” and the joy I had blogging on CPN in 2006 and 2007 when I had no idea what I was talking about but all the passion in the world for how Twitter and Tumblr and blogging were going to change affiliate marketing forever.

I want to get back to that. There are so many exciting developments in the intersection of web tech and marketing. So many of these intersections are products and fruit of what we were hammering out in 2006.

Now that Shawn and Missy have acquired ReveNews, we need more performance marketing blogs anyway 🙂

It’s time to reboot CPN.

MarketingTrends.co is my attempt to find that voice and that writing and that community that I once got to have. You can’t go back home again, but you can create something pretty amazing more than once.

That’s my plan here. I hope you’ll follow along and enjoy.

Free Icon Font Sets For Affiliate Sites

10 free icon font sets that are highly customizable and scalable. I used Sosa on an affiliate site redesign over the weekend and the results were fantastic, so wanted to share here as well…

10 Super Useful Free Icon Font Sets | Freebies: “Icon fonts are great because, as you may have guessed, they are delivered as a font. This gives them a number of advantages over traditional image icons. For instance, if you want to change the color, it can easily be done with CSS. Whereas with an image, you would need to have a separate version of the icon. Scaling and adding effects, such as shadows, is just as simple.”

Your Affiliate Sites Should Use Responsive Web Design

So many folks I know who create “thin” affiliate sites (less than a dozen pages) still use fixed web site widths instead of making their site appealing regardless of whether it’s being viewed on a 27″ display, a 4″ glass mobile screen or a 7″ tablet.

It’s true, using responsive design (RWD in the post below) can cause more overhead, time and expense at the beginning of a site build, but the long term outcomes remind me of the conversations we had about using tables or CSS back in 2003 and 2004 when site creators couldn’t be bothered to “learn something new.”

All that to say, it’s time to fit your site into a responsive design model. It’s incredibly easy to do in 2013 whether you’re redesigning or starting with a new site.

Here’s a good read…

Responsive web design: the war has not yet been won » Blog » Elliot Jay Stocks: “Well, no. As widely adopted as the RWD process is, there are still numerous designers, developers, freelancers, and agencies who continue to opt for the safety of fixed widths, or adopt the process in a semi-complete sort of way — like making several fixed designs that adapt to specific device sizes, or change only when the screen is at a mobile-like resolution.”

Go and do likewise.

WordPress A/B Testing with Simple Page Tester

Shawn Collins points out a nifty WordPress plugin for split A/B testing on affiliate sites or any landing page that requires optimization…

A/B Testing: “For the uninitiated, split or A/B testing is a process where you serve up different versions of your page to different visitors to determine which is more effective.

I’ve tried various ways in WordPress and found they were largely a hassle, until I came across the Simple Page Tester plugin.”

I’ve tested Simple Page Tester with a paid search campaign as well as a Facebook Ads campaign linking out to a micro-site lead generation page and it definitely does the trick.

Affiliate Site Twitter Profile Pages

If you’re using Twitter in conjunction with your other social media marketing plans for your affiliate site, don’t forget the important aspect of the design of your Twitter Profile page.

TheNextWeb has a nice practical guide for points to consider when doing so (it’s aimed at brand marketing folks, but still applicable for performance marketers)…

Tips for Twitter Brand Pages: “The header image can be used to direct the user’s attention to a specific item on the page, as was the case in HP’s example, or it can be used to promote an engaging marketing plan, as Staples did, with a competition. Using the header image as nothing more than a banner advert, as both McDonald’s and Coca-Cola did, wound up getting the least attention from viewers.”

Word of caution here… unlike Facebook Fan Pages or even Google+ pages, Twitter Profile pages area mixed bag. Yes, they are somewhat customizable and the new embedded media feature helps the look/feel. However, up to 1/2 (depending on whose numbers you trust) of Twitter users access the service via mobile or apps. I’d venture to posit (strongly) that most “power” users that are desirable for many niches are these types of app users (I rarey go to the main Twitter page and most of my network is similar).

So, design and test but don’t fret if you don’t see the type of interaction you do with a Facebook Fan page etc. Twitter, unlike Facebook, has lots of meaning in the message.