Etsy is an online portal helping sellers world-wide sell their handmade or antique goods on the internet. I love it because it is full of original handicrafts, and is also a really fantastically maintained site with easy usability.

Etsy is a great example of ecommerce and social media. Apart from their own website and blog, they also appear in social media (e.g. Twitter and Facebook), and actually make good use of those mediums by highlighting specials or featured items.

Their blog had a fantastic post the other day, cautioning their users on 'social media etiquette'. Basically, the Etsy blogs often feature sellers stories, the comment sections of which are often becoming full of 'I also sell' links.

These comments are also finding themselves on the wider web, on blogs mentioning Etsy, and it is making the Etsy founders uncomfortable because it doesn't fit in with their vision of their 'community'.

The whole concept is very interesting - trying to prescribe marketing behaviour in a community filled with users who want to market their products.

The post is called How Not To Spam While Being Active Online, and is a great article for any online community. They had a great simile for people who randomly comment on blog posts trying to sell their own goods...

You're at a gallery opening, discussing the paintings with the artists and other attendees. Someone bursts into the room shouting, "I MAKE PAINTINGS TOO!" and tosses a fistful of flyers on the floor and leaves.

It is obvious to any PR, marketing or sales person that that is not the way to sell your paintings. Instead, you might want to mingle, admire the art on display, get the names of interested people, and drop very subtle comments or distribute your card to a few key people. Doing this online, on a blog post or forum for example, requires you to read the actual posts, other peoples comments, and leave something insightful yourself. Becoming a useful member of the community first, and selling much later, will ensure that you are welcomed back to that blog again and again, and avoids alienating potential customers.

This 'netiquette' (i dislike that word) is a problem for the wider web, and I assume as people start to delete or ignore spam, those sites who have 'nicer' communities may become more popular than those who don't.

is addictive.

For a long time I assumed it was one of the online marketing myths, but I have found that actually people DO spend a lot of time on Yahoo Answers, and in fact it is just as valid as any other social media site.

Yahoo Answers is a place where people can post questions on almost any topic and have strangers answer it for them. These questions and answers are stored on Yahoo for a long time, and can be searched to find information. It was established in 2005 and has since

The sections cover everything from health, family and relationships to maths and science. It has been criticised for not being very 'accurate' and more about 'social networking', but that is what makes it such a fun site in which everyone can contribute, and surely what makes it so addictive.

So how can you use it in your own marketing? Lets go back to my favourite fictional store, the online shoe store. Say this was your store and you were an expert on all things shoes. Then you could register on Yahoo Answers and look for questions related to shoes or fashion.

If someone is looking for your product, or asking a question about yours or a related product, then you can answer them, maybe use your store as a resource, and thereby extend your brand name to a potentially interested buyer.

Any links you include in your answers won't be made into clickable URLs until you are a level 2 contributor - which takes a bit of dedication.

Make sure everything you write on Yahoo Answers is truthful and accurate as possible, and don't go the hard sell (remember, this isn't the way to use social media). Yahoo Answers is a community, and you don't want to be banned or ignored for being an annoying contributor.

Apart from introducing you to new, relevant customers, Yahoo Answers is just fun and interesting as of itself. An ability to help people out and feel like a smarty-pants makes for a good website.

According to Compete Site Analytics, Yahoo Answers received 65 million visits in the US in 2009,  but it is actually used all over the world.

One report I love for making improvements to any Adwords campaign is the 'Search Query Performance' report. This is very different to the 'Keyword Performance Report'.

The Search Query Performance report show you exactly what terms people searched for when they came to your site, whereas the Keyword Performance report shows you what keyword in your adwords account  the click was attributed to. In Google Analytics, you will see keyword performance results, not search query performance.

For example, in your Adwords account, you might have the keyword "leather shoes", which is a phrase match keyword.

If someone typed in 'white leather shoes' and then clicked on your ad, the search query performance report would record one visit against ' white leather shoes', whereas the keyword report (and Google Analytics) would record one visit against "leather shoes".

So what can you do with the search query performance report? Here are just a few things you can do after analysing the kind of search queries people are using to arrive on your site;

1. If people are arriving using search queries irrelevant to your site  - for example if you sell shoes and people are arriving on terms like 'shoe polish', then add the negative term 'polish'. The search query report can help you find negative keywords you might never have considered.

2. If lots of people are using similar terms, you might want a dedicated ad group and dedicated copy for those. E.g. if a lot of people are arriving from terms related to 'tennis shoes', (and assuming you sell tennis shoes), then you might want dedicated ad copy and an ad group for tennis shoes.

3. Similarly, make sure that what people are looking for is related to the landing page you are sending them to. If not, make a new ad group for those terms and have a dedicated landing page.

4. If there are a lot of uses of 'synonyms', then you might want to add them as their own keyword in your account, which will make them more relevant and might reduce your cost per click. 

Mike runs a website that sells designer footwear. He wants to start optimising his website for search engines to get more visitors to his site interested in buying designer footwear.

So, Mike makes his title tag 'Designer footwear', and his headings all use the word 'footwear'. He optimises his content and incoming links for this term, and eventually ranks quite high for the terms 'footwear' and 'designer footwear'.

He is surprised that the number of people coming to his site hasn't increased as dramatically as he imagined. He is ranking number 1 for his term whats going on?

Mike has made a common error in his SEO campaign.

As Google posted yesterday on their official blog, synonyms are very important in search. In fact, they estimate that over 70% of all searches worldwide are affected by synonyms.

So of all the people searching for designer footwear online, around 70% of them could be using synonyms, the most obvious being the term 'shoes'.

Before optimising his site, Mike should have considered what other words people might use to search for his product. He might have wanted to optimise for a number of these terms, or at least concentrated on the highest volume.

SEO takes time, you want to get the keywords right because you then put a lot of time into each keyword you optimise for.

When doing your keyword research, first come up with all the synonyms, plurals, regional variations and coloquialisms you can, and then rank them in order of traffic volume. This will help you decide which terms you want to focus on and ensure you're not wasting your time.

P.S. While reading up about this today, I found another tip on Searchengineland, that I never use -

you can use the tilde symbol (~) to force Google to show additional synonyms (and related words) for your query. For example, a search for [~murder statistics] leads Google to bold words like “crime,” “crime statistics,” “suicide statistics,” “criminal,” and more.

I did some quick comparisons doing this, and discovered that for ~murder, 4 of the page one entries are about 'suicide', not murder, but more strangely (and less controversial), the number one result for the term ~shoes is the Apple store!

The conversion optimiser is a tool available in Google Adwords which uses your conversion tracking data to optimise your placement in every ad auction to get you more 'converting' clicks.

What happens is, instead of putting in a cost per click, you put in a cost per acquisition. This means, how much you are willing to pay for a conversion (e.g. sale or sign up) on your site.

For example, you maximum cost per click, might be $1. If 1 out of 10 clicks to your sites actually converts, this means that your 'cost per acquisition'(CPA) is $10, because it took 10 x $1 clicks for you to get a conversion.

So, what the optimiser does, is reverse engineer this. You say what your ideal cost per acquisition is, then they figure out, using your conversion rate data for each ad group, what your cost per click for each ad group should be.

This is just automating something that is pretty straight forward. If you have a small account, this is something you could do yourself, and that would be better because you have total control. For larger accounts, this might be more dfifficult, depending on whether you have your own software to help you.

Problems

1. One of the limitations to using the Google Adwords optimiser is that you have to have had 300 conversions in your campaign in the last 30 days for it to be enabled, because they need a good sample of data to estimate your conversion rate. This makes sense, but is not convenient for smaller campaigns, with less than 300 conversions per  month.

2. I take anything Google offers with a big cup of salt - as soon as you put a CPA in there, they know how much you want to pay. If you say you are willing to pay up to $20 for a conversion, why would they want to help you get your cost down to $15?

3. Users feedback has shown mixed reviews - sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.  People have reported increasing CPA.

So, if your account isn't big enough, or you don't want to show Google your cards just yet  - try optimising your account yourself!

Do It Yourself

1. Estimate the CPA you are willing to pay. E.g. $20

2. Check out the conversion rates of your Ad groups (making sure you have had a decent number of conversions, not necessarily 300!). Lets say, 5%


0.05 x $20 = $1.

In this case, your maximum cost per click for that Adgroup should be $1.

This shoudl be monitored closely, because if your conversion rates change, then your costs will change. If you make any changes to your ad group, like new keywords, landing pages or ad content, your conversions are likely to change, and therefore so will your cost per acquisition. If so, your maximum cost per click will need to be recalculated, because it might no longer be appropriate.