I know a lot of businesses, including my own, that purchase keyword-driven ads on Google’s pay per click networks.  But not too many that also use Yahoo and/or Bing.  If this fits you, you might want to consider adding that extra outlet.

In a flurry of recent back and forths over the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, there’s been a lot of talk about the importance of scale.  The MSN and Yahoo folks think it’s ‘good’; Google tries to downplay it because of decreasing returns to scale (Google should know, shouldn’t it?).

But here’s one little piece of info that cuts through the clutter.  Advertising Age reports that Ben Edelman, who teaches at Harvard Business School, found that click prices at Yahoo were 30% cheaper than Google, and at Bing (Microsoft) 27% cheaper.

Prescription:  mercilessly cut the poorer performers at your Google account and use the money to purchase keywords that convert on Yahoo and Bing.

In 3 fun workshops, you can learn how to plan, execute, and manage your online marketing campaign.  Polly Mertens and Glenn Silloway team up to offer these valuable workshops on  Marketing Your Business Online under the auspices of the Mission Community Services Corp (MCSC).  Learn how to get the most out of your Internet strategy — and stop throwing money down the drain!

Register by September 30 and all 3 workshops are just $129 (full retail price is $159, or 50% off retail for Cal Poly students with ID).  Read on:

These unique workshops will be held on 3 successive Wednesdays in October, the 7th, 14th, and 21st from 6 to 9 p.m.  Each is $79, but you can purchase the package for only $159 — and if you register by September 30, the Early Bird Discount price is only $129.  Call or email David Ryal, Executive Director of MCSC to reserve your seat:  805-595-1357 or dryal[at]mcscorp.org.

These highly interactive classes are information packed and intuitive.  You will take away information you can  use the next day.

Workshop 1:
Using the Internet to Build Your Business
Wed, October 7, 6 p.m. — $79
with Polly Mertens

• Understand online options to increase traffic
• Know when to advertise online and how to do it
• Be able to create an online marketing plan

Workshop 2:
Advertising Online to Grow Your Bottom Line
Wed, October 14, 6 p.m. — $79
with Glenn Silloway

• Learn about keyword-driven Search Engine Marketing
• Identify profitable keywords for your business
• Set up an effective Google AdWords campaign
• Write effective ads
• Determine what your AdWords budget should be

Workshop 3:
Maximize Your Website Dollars–Spend Less, Make More
Wed, October 21, 6 p.m. — $79
with Polly Mertens and Glenn Silloway

• Know how to measure your traffic and use the information
• Analyze the source and value of your visitors
• Set up and use the free Google Analytics program

All of these workshops will be held at MCSC in the Creekside Center, 4111 S Broad Street, San Luis Obispo.

About the presenters:

Polly Mertens: Founder of two real estate portals that ranked number one in Google search in as little as 90 days with zero advertising:  Online marketing expert, trainer and counselor.

Glenn Silloway: Founder of The Net Sells; helped a client achieve $300k monthly sales on $10k Pay Per Click spend; successful search marketing pro since before Google

Now playing on thousands of screens:  TV is NOT dead!  In fact, we’re watching more of it (or at least the thing is on a lot).

The Center for Media Research has just published some  new numbers on media usage from Nielson.  Near as I can tell, almost no one is ever more than 30 seconds away from watching one screen or another.  And the trends are up, up and up.  If Ray Kurzweil is right, you will soon be organically connected to a screen, or really, become a part of it.

Anyhow, here’s some numbers marketers may love:

TV watchers (people tuned in) in US:

2nd quarter 2008:  281,746,000
2nd quarter 2009:  284,396,000 for .9% increase.

Internet users US:

2nd quarter 2008: 159,986,000
2nd quarter 2009: 191,035,000 for a 19.4% increase.

Watching video on a mobile phone:

2nd quarter 2008: 9,004,000
2nd quarter 2009: 15,267,000 for a 70% increase (from low base, but so what?)

We are consuming more and more and more media.  Jacked into the net anyone?

I know a lot of business owners who are interested in participating in social media like Facebook, Twitter or a blog.  But who’s got the time to keep all that content current?

So lots of people turn to an outside writer for help.  Is that a good idea?

Well, this turns out to have a lot of controversy in the Internet marketing community.  Some people think it’s unethical to publish content that others have written for you unless it’s clearly stated that way.  Others think it’s just like business as usual — when’s the last time the CEO actually wrote a press release?

Small Business Trends just published an article with some ‘ghostwriter’ guidelines for working with outside consultants for making content for your online promotion.  Here’s the issue in a nutshell:  the idea of blogs and other social media is that they are authentic expressions of opinion and experience by knowledgeable people.  But if someone outside your company ghosts the stuff for you, is it really authentic?  Remember that blogs, et al, are very personal expressions. The problem is really about that personal authority behind the statement which is posed in a different way online than it is in traditional corporate communications.

Personally, I think the ghostwriting is not only necessary but is fine to do as long as the information is valid/true and it is not published under an alias or someone else’s name.  You can easily publish blog posts as ‘Company X Staff’ and be truthful about it.

Here’s another attempt to deal with the ethics of the matter (link pulled from the article cited above).

My name is Glenn Silloway, owner of The Net Sells Internet Marketing firm, and these are my actual words.  I promise.

Whoa! This just amazed me.  It’s “old” news now, but a week ago Shane ONeill reported in CIO that Bing search results were fixed.  Yes:  natural search results were manipulated to return pro-Microsoft and/or anti-Apple or anti-Google results.  You need to read this article–I’m not going to repeat the details — and it seems the problem has been ‘fixed’ — though searching Bing for ‘why is windows so expensive’ just now (evening 11 Aug) returned a #1 result whose point is ‘why are Macs expensive?’.

The important thing is, search results have to be trustworthy. Once you blow it on the trust issue, you cannot get it back.  I cannot help seeing Microsoft’s testosterone-driven culture overwhelming its thinking head here.  So stupid, so self-defeating, and most of all, so confirming of what a lot of people already think about Microsoft.

Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed is all the buzz the past couple days, but I’m really more interested in FB’s roll out of a new search capability. This is something that will grow over time — as people learn about it, more content will be added to the network that can be used in search.  But it is clearly another alternative to traditional search, and it is based on peoples’ own preferences and experiences.  That’s the social media advantage!

Now that search bar in the upper right corner of your FB page takes you to a new search page where a great array of results wait for your browsing pleasure.  This is keyword-driven (like all search) so it’s not too useful if you have a really complex query (use Aardvark for those!), but if you’re looking for something more common, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘music’, you’ll get lots of ideas.

The image below is from my own search for ‘music’, filtered by ‘events’.  I found a lot of concerts advertised on Facebook!

Facebook's New Search Interface

On the downside, when I tried to find ‘music san luis obispo’ there were no results. Come on SLO musicians!  Get with it and get on Facebook.

This is another example of Facebook’s huge advantage of having all that profile information from hundreds of millions of users and businesses.  You couldn’t usefully add a search capability to a small network (not enough results possible), but when you have this kind of scale, it becomes valuable.  The network effect means that FB will continue to grow because it has these capabilities.  The big get bigger.

I wonder if there will come a point where the personal connection people feel with their networks gets so diluted that the information in the network overall begins to degrade, in quality and/or in quantity.  In a way, that’s what happened to MySpace.  Thinking of the goose that laid the golden eggs here.

Yeah, Facebook vs. Twitter.  The second time this week I’m looking at a struggle for survival at the highest levels.  And into this mix, I’m throwing Aardvark — see why below.

Techcrunch has the blogosphere roiling with its publication of internal Twitter docs that somehow just showed up in the inbox one day.  This amazing post is LONG with detailed meeting notes about everything from employee retention (yawn) to deals with Google or Microsoft (hmmm) to the threat from Facebook (this one caught my eye).

As the Twitter folks see it, Facebook can begin to mimic the Tweet by making its status updates public (through user option), displayed via the same kinds of tools as Tweetdeck and the like.  Or maybe literally in Tweetdeck types of tools modified to also show Facebook status.  And so forth — Techcrunch comments that Facebook is already moving toward this in recent changes.

Now I want to add Aardvark into the scramble.  Recently out of beta, Aardvark is a real-time search tool based on matching your complex query (the more complex the better, not like a search engine) with another person who can answer it.  This is done through an algorithm that analyzes your query, matches it to the stated expertise or interests of people in the network, and sends the query to the best probable matches through email or IM.

The information Aardvark analyzes to make the matches between question and answer comes from Facebook.  There should be a pause before that ‘Facebook’ with a drumroll.  Aardvark’s service is not warmed over Twitter — it is different.  But it matches the real-time search features of Twitter very well, only better because it finds people who could not possibly be in your personal network, or the networks of your friends, or of their friends… OK, I’m getting carried away but you get the point.  It is one component of the Twitter functionality, and it depends on Facebook.

Twitter search is different — it would help you find a laptop cable at a trade show, whereas Aardvark would not — and with Twitter you learn things you didn’t even know you wanted to know (what the Twitter folks call ‘discovery’) and that’s important.

But Facebook is evolving, and sharing its users’ personal data with Aardvark (by permission only) is one way to move into Twitter space.  This personal data, btw, is a crucial advantage of Facebook.  It’s going to be interesting to watch these models converge, clash and compete.  Again, this is going to be good for us users.

Not long ago we talked about Microsoft the monopoly using its vast power to squash would-be competitors. Now it seems almost like poor Gulliver being tied down and lashed by the tiny knives of its Lilliputian enemies.  It just can’t get no respect.

Until Bing?  The NY Times has written that Bing delivers credibility to Microsoft’s search efforts, finally, pointing to its gains in query volume since its launch in May.  Yet most of those gains seem to be coming from weaker challengers like AOL and Ask (another perennial search pretender), and the industry’s talking heads don’t think people will switch to Bing for good.  Why bother, when Google delivers the goods?

To rub salt in the wounds, Google recently announced its own frontal assault on Microsoft with its plan to develop the Chrome OS for netbooks.  Google’s language in the announcement almost seems like it’s taunting Microsoft: So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be…Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system…

Google describes this as the operating system for people who spend most of their time online and invites developers to begin making applications for it.  I am betting that they will.

Sometimes I wonder at Google’s need to take it to Microsoft, but I think I get why they do.  From the user’s point of view, you want to have a framework of programs and applications that work together – interoperability is essential.  Once you begin to use a set of products that are integrated like this, you tend to keep using all of them.  There is a price to pay to use applications outside the network because it can’t have access to all your information and preferences.  Once you are inside one of these families of software, you will see the ads running there, and not somewhere else.  So both Google and Microsoft are extending their offerings and necessarily moving into the other’s space.

There’s almost no one alive who hasn’t got the message that cloud computing is the future, which seems to give a natural advantage to Google in the long run.  But no one knows for sure.  And sure enough, Microsoft continues to try to reinvent itself by moving into the web services with its Azure platform.

Then, just yesterday, Microsoft announced it would be offering light versions of its flagship applications Word and Excel as Internet-based programs to compete with Google’s successful Apps.  Here’s the leader from Marketwatch on Microsoft’s announcement:

Microsoft Corp. on Monday made the latest edition of its Office software suite available for testing and plans to make key applications such as Word and Excel available over the Web – acknowledging burgeoning competition from Internet giant Google Inc. and others.

I’m glad to see this. Letting Google define our total existence online is not a good idea, even if it were true the G didn’t “do evil.”  We need this competition — they will make each other better.

At least according to Statcounter, Bing search engine edged past Yahoo into the number 2 spot in search. This was as of June 4th, and was true both worldwide and in the US. Whether Bing will hold this position over time remains to be seen.  Of course, you need to put this in perspective:  Google is still a huge leader in search, with about 87% of search worldwide (according to Statcounter).  Here’s what the trends look like:

Statcounter suggests the Bing gains are at the expense of Google — the lines in the graph suggest that. Could be true. We’ll see how it holds.

I’m giving some brief presentations to members of the San Luis Obispo County Visitor and Conference Bureau this week, and uploaded the presentation to Slideshare.  So I figured I’d take a shortcut to my next post and embed it here.  Hope it’s got some useful hints for you — it’s designed for beginners.  The aim is to get you started using Analytics, a great program that’s free and can help you improve your website.