does your list measure up?

As an email marketer growing your list is one of the most important things you can spend time doing. Each new email represents yet another chance for you to make the sale when sending out your mailing.

Yet building your list can be an incredibly difficult process, and frequently only a small "sign up for our news letter" button is used. So today we're going to go over some of the techniques you can use to build your list out.

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What? What happened to last weeks roundup? Well, Monday is a holiday and I was so absurdly busy with other projects that I decided "we'll let it slide". And what happens? Awesome stories come in, Just my luck.

Anyhow I've included a few here, such as Googles new search picker, and a video of the google server farms. Also we have surviving a twitterstorm, host level spam detection, problems with the "bounce" metric in the top content report, and more.

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The week before last (sorry folks, long weekend) I started talking about online communities, and a recent report I read on their impact on business. One of my favorite observations within the report was that online communities are like a performance, with owners interacting with small groups to produce content for the rest of the readers. They called this small group Most Frequent Contributors (MFC's).

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Not this canon, but close

We've recently talked about the Canonical link element in our blog and I just wanted to bring it up again with a couple of examples of where you might consider using it.

As most of you already know this is the latest tool in our arsenal of weapons to help combat the problem many of us are facing with duplicate content. We are able to let search engines know which page should be getting credit when there are multiple versions of similar or identical content.

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make it easy to unsubscribe, lest people treat you as something you're not

A while back we had a post on email marketing and the importance of permission. As part of that we talked about how important it is to provide unsubscribe options for your receivers. However I have noticed that while many provide an unsubscribe option, frequently you must jump through hoops to actually unsubscribe.

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Back in January, I wrote a post about the dangers of rushing to judgment based on small numbers. I recommended that even if GWO has declared a winner, it's best to let experiments continue to run at least two weeks and gather at least 100 conversions per version. Today I'm going to play devil's advocate and argue that in some cases, you might just want to pull the plug earlier!

We're currently running an A/B test for a lead-generation website. We believed that the original version of the page had lots of room for improvement, so we were pretty confident we could boost conversions.

GWO very quickly confirmed our suspicions: four days into the test, GWO declared a winner. Our version B was outperforming the original by 139%.

We urged the client to keep the test running, for the reasons discussed in my earlier post. They agreed and the test is still running. In the past few days, the observed improvement has fluctuated, but it's clear the new page is better. It's just a question of how much better.

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Caution, this post definitely contains mature subject matter; reader discretion is advised.

Frustration with the tiny little fields in GA, particularly in Goals and Filters and in the inline filter box reached a climax this weekend.

So I wrote this little Greasemonkey script (below) and called it gaDeAnalyse to remove these anal restrictions.

It increases the size of the in-line filter fields and others by 100% or more - guaranteed.

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despite this image most trends are looking up

Today SEMPO released its 2008 Market Survey. This data was gathered by Radar Research, who surveyed 890 search engine marketing agencies. Its key findings were:

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Yahoo still misses on many points

Yahoo Panama (the pay-per-click platform) has recently released some updates to their system. Some of the changes include day time parting, demographic bidding and a "new" and updated content network. If you've been using AdWords then you know these features are not exactly revolutionary.

On the surface this may seem great. Yahoo Panama has been in need of updates, but this update hasn't done much for Yahoo advertisers and the major problems that plague their paid search marketing platform still exist.

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a new month, a new roundup

This month I am instituting a new feature to the monday roundup: reader submissions! Tweet interesting articles you read to me @ordinarychap. They can be something you read, your own blog, you name it. I'll then include the top two from each category in the roundup.

This week we've got changes to Google, follow-ups to bid to determine your cost-per-click, growing your Google authority, crating shapes in CSS, and Michael Gray on how to cheat with the Digg bar.

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