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My Google AdWords used to occationally earn the coveted “up north” position (above, not on the right) on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) but recently have been pushed down to an average of #5. But I don’t think I’ve updated my CPC (Cost Per Click) in three years.

So, how do you get to the top listing? This post by a Google representative explains it very clearly:

Search Engine Watch Forums — Top position? Impossible?

Here are two basic facts worth knowing:

• Rank number = Max CPC x CTR. Thus Max CPC and CTR have equal weight
• Ads go to the top when they have met an additional performance standard, which focuses on the relevance of the ads to our users…This is measured by CTR.

There is additional discussion from people in the forum about this information but no one discussed how to boost CTR (Click Thru Rate). And the only way I can think of doing so is to improve your ad. Once again, I haven’t touched my AdWord ad in years. I think the only way to do this is by adding gimmicky copy. Right now, I have a couple promotions starting that I could list in my ad which would boost CTR. And afterall, isn’t click-thrus why we are using AdWords?

Off-topic. Just wanted to share that my old National Guard unit, the 3/126th Infantry is shipping out of Michigan to Fort Dix to get ready for duty in Iraq.

I was a truck driver and later worked with ammo supply. It’s been almost eight years since I dropped out of the NG, and I’m sure the unit has changed a lot since. Should I feel glad that I quit or like I cheated them? Either way, my spirit is with them and so are my prayers.

I was talking with someone today about the shrinking size of trade publications. This time the subject was Laboratory Equipment, which was 24 pages and 26 advertisers (5 full page).

So it was interesting to find an editorial in the new Circuits Assembly (pdf) acknowledging the shrinking magazine. What Mike Buetow lamented is that as ad-pages shrink, so does editorial content, only further diminishing his magazine’s relevance. But this is a guy with a plan…

First, he makes a rather bold step in saying…”wouldn’t (readers) be best served if we packaged each issue as if they paid for it?”

Then he creates an action plan to cram more content into his magazine by providing abbreviated content that continues online. This actually gives him the freedom to publish longer articles and provide more data. This creates room to address more of his nine key technology areas each month. He echos what I’ve said is the continuing job of trade publications: “Our role is to act as a filter, screening the noise from what’s truly crucial.”

Our parent company recently started releasing PDFs of product catalogs, which has been something I’ve asked for repeatedly. The problem is that they were generated from the original print jobs, so every graphic element is rendered individually. The result is a 6M document (for eight pages) that slowly paints each element every time you scroll. On top of that, there are foreign fonts used that aren’t embedded. Ugh!

So, how to fix? I just opened the PDF file, then reprinted it using Acrobat Distiller (not PDFWriter). I have the properties for Distiller set to “eBook”. The resulting file is about 700K!

Now I’m able to create templates in Goldmine to send PDFs of our pretty brochures. Cool!

I thought I had a slow year blogging, but in reviewing my posts I was surprised by the quality of what I found. Check these out (newest posts first):

• Great case-study in B2B marketing gives my take on an article from MarketingSherpa
• Juicy info on B2B web searchers summarizes another MarketingSherpa article
• CRM project moving ahead outlines basic steps taken to get our CRM project started
• Business.com–home of click fraud? Is a expose using my personal experience.
• Three free prizes are examples of WWSD (What Would Seth Do)
• SEO as a branding tool tells a truth for B2B websites that should be heeded.
• We try harder…being #2 is a link to one of my most inspiring reads this year…

A #2 brand should never try to emulate the leader

• Dilbert is right about marketing links to an article in an engineering mag creating white papers from your engineers.
• Website Critique takes a B2B company to task for their ‘new’ website.
• Edgecraft with Alton Brown is an analysis of what makes a Free Prize.
  

But now that I understand more about him (thanks Wired), I am raising him to hero-status. That isn’t a casual statement to make. He saw the edge, and made it happen.

• Scum alert! is my first post regarding the very evil Traffic Power SEO company. Its generated a number of emails from victims to me.
• Is email sabotaging your sales efforts? asks the question–when should you reply by phone to an email from a prospect?
• Old news and red herrings provides some analysis by yours-truly regarding the impact of Google on trade publications. All of my posts should be this good.

Trade pubs need to provide new information (including product info) that readers want to learn about. Engineers are not going to search the net to see if Agilent has a new impedance analyzer, but they’ll be thankful if it is presented to them. Google can’t do this–that’s the red herring.

• Building useful site navigation points to an article that focuses on navigation designed to generate more conversions–such a simple idea, but runs contrary to your sense of organization.
• From the master Guru Jakob Nielsen takes B2B websites to task. Great advice on creating ‘advocate tools’ to help during the purchase process.
• Back to the basics Things not to do on your sites (about half the examples have been fixed)
• Who’s your best salesperson? is a little story about how I bought a new washing machine at Best Buy. If you think this is about them not being on commission, you are wrong. This is an ‘ah-ha’ moment, so worth reading.
• Marketing: It’s a puzzle is a great post not because of my prose, but because of the great article I found. It tells it like it is.
• Another marketing nitwit tells of a email newsletter sponsor whose landing page is a Word document!
• Can CRM survive the handoff has to be one of my longer, more rambling posts. I dare you to read it.
• Getting control of the calendar is a quick introduction to the power of the ical file format. (Nowadays I have Goldmine which speaks ical!)
• From Mailbox to Trashcan is just a link to an article about getting your direct mail read.
• Is anybody out there? (like me?) When yours truly gets his head blown-up (literally) in the local paper in an article about blogging.
• Top ten posts of 2003 in case you liked this list!

We just sold some of our equipment to Apple. So why not send a picture of that product to iPod My Photo and use it for a promo piece? I suppose I should ask Apple if I can refer to their company if I go any father than casual usage. But for twenty bucks, its worth it just to email to all our sales reps to get their attention. This is soo cool.

Thanks for the viral link, Greedy Girl! (She’s got a great blog, check it out)

MarketingProfs.com asks whether companies in B2B, service or complex products can take advantage of the holiday season in their marketing.

The answer is yes, of course, but why? What would you do? Answer their question here:

MarketingProfs – What’s Your Best Advice? – Marketing wonderland during holiday season

If you like, you can copy and paste your answer in my comments section. I will put my response there if you want to cheat or do me one better.

Blogs are a great place to vent, although dangerous if you insult someone. Here are my slightly neutered gripes:

• Emails regarding ‘my account’ that don’t actually tell me what to do. So I use the email address in the message to ask what to do and I get an automated reply on how to check my account. (This is Ariba, a major e-commerce service.)
• People who blame their own personal agendas on other people.
• People who want to make pointy-haired decisions to help without asking what is needed.
• People who don’t trust their team and take control of a decision, only to delay the project.
  
• Teams who act like the “United Front of Judea” from Monty Python Life of Brian. (More time talking about ‘doing’, than actually doing.)
  
• Team decisions that end up with compromises that dilute the final product.
• Door-to-door solicitators (especially when they start calling you afterwards).
• Spell check at Blogger that doesn’t have ‘blog’ in its dictionary.
  

(I’d also like to say that these are not necessarily internal issues here, but may also be with outside groups that affect me. It’s not that bad here!) Thanks for listening.

Well, we’ve done it: we’ve started using Goldmine after just a scant period of pilot testing. I figured that even bare-bones, Goldmine is better than what we were using. So far, that’s been a good call. It does leave me with many things to do yet, like populating fields and implementing features. If I had too many features ready, I think they would have been overwhelmed (which means I would have been overwhelmed with questions).

The biggest learning curve has been with email. Part of what I liked about Goldmine is the ability to see emails sent or received by others to customers, which makes it easy to cover for each other, which we do a lot. To do this, Goldmine needs to become a primary email tool. So we are letting people wean themselves off of Outlook. The feature people seem to miss the most is the ‘auto-fill’ of addresses. The ability to link emails to contacts is great, but it makes it a more complex tool, worthy of its own training class, I think.

How am I weaning off of Outlook?

1. Sending all customer correspondence from Goldmine is an easy way to start.
2. You can view your Outlook email from within Goldmine, and then just drag relevant emails to the Goldmine Inbox for linking to a contact. I can’t do this because my Outlook inbox has over 7000 emails, bogging down Goldmine.
3. I’ve set my Outlook email to leave messages on the server for one day. If I get an email from a contact, I can then check email from within Goldmine (manual check, not auto check) and import the message by dragging to the Goldmine Inbox. Goldmine actually shows you what email is on the server and doesn’t upload it until you’ve dragged it to the Inbox. I’ve been emptying my deleted items folder in Outlook regularly, which also removes those items (spam) from the server (this is an Outlook setting) to keep Goldmine less crowded.

I think I may stay in this configuration for a while, as I still see to many advantages to having Outlook handle general correspondence.

Apparently there aren’t enough directory sites yet.

This one looks a little cheesy, even with an “Get Internet Explorer” logo on the home page. I assume it is mostly useful to the search engines. The one good thing they have done is labeling links to sites if they have pricing on the website, which engineers will love (if they ever find or use this site).

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