Muahhaa...

Happy Halloween.

Speaking of this candy infested day. I have one report and one bone to pick. First of all, I'd completely forgotten about the day and when I went home in the evening, my neighborhood was crawling with kids. The problem was that I had neither the candy nor the time to entertain these little critters. (I know it sounds kind of un-neighborly but I am being honest here.) So, I had to employ the time honored strategy of shutting off all lights in the house to simulate the appearance of nobody's-home. Beyond feeling pathetic, I had to break out my flashlight several time to find stuff in the house.

On the bone picking part, what is the story with Halloween candies? Specifically, what kind of scary ingredients are people concocting these days? I mean it tastes nothing like the Halloween candies of yore. If I am going to fatten myself with sugar and other junk, at least make it taste good!

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Right. Back in the Marketing grind.

Most important grip for the day. My color printer is dying. I use it to print collateral for our sales super heroes. In the old days, the printer used to jam every other day. Then, it started to jam every other job. Now, it jam on every page. This is a serious pain. Why people do not take their file delivery in digital form is beyond me. Anyway, I am searching for a new color printer and if you have any suggestion, please let me know.

Right, so last week I was mumbling about my experience with FindWP. The changes seemed to have yield some result. The key thing being that, I am theorizing, I also upped the bidding amount to get #1-3 position in the listing. The quality of the click-through improved meaningfully. However, it also chew up my budget extremely quickly at about 2x to 3x of the prior rate. Bigger budget is not an issue as such if the ROI is there. But, the quantum leap in budget does require me to sit down and regroup a bit. Unfortunately, I have been too busy to do that - no time to think. Hope to get on it next week.

Also signed up with KnowledgeStorm which is another whitepaper/case study serving service. It differs from FindWP in the delivery method - people click on KS's links instead of my links. Then, KS delivers the users info in a spreadsheet. KS does a good job of making the whole thing as painless as possible by creating the content for the whole campaign. However, having a disinterested third party creating the content has the disadvantage of not having that crispness in good copy writing. So, I spent some time before it went life to enter in all the keywords to boost its performance. I still need to scrub the rest of the detail contents but that will take a bit of time.

Another question on KS. Since I was clicking on some of my listings to see what is is like for users, I do wander if my info will be "captured" and sent to me as a lead. They better not! And, if they do, I will demand that my info not be counted toward the minimum raw leads guaranteed. We will see tomorrow as the daily leads info come in.

Another service InfoSearch which provides targeted content for better natural search ranking. Just finished the keyword selection process. It is an interesting exercise to see how these "experts" come up with the most relevant set of phrases. We started with the Google AdWords campaign keywords as the seed. Some of the initially proposed keywords had the issue of relevance, the lack thereof, when created by disinterested third party. That happens. But, what I find a bit disturbing is that some of the proposed terms I already have very high natural search ranking (#1 or #2). I am not paying to get these terms targeted since I am already there. Between you and me, you would think that the professionals would have the sense to scrub the proposed list by doing searches against Google before presenting to the clients. Anyway, this one is going along fine. I cannot wait to see the initial contents.

On the PR front, I am a bit inundated with case studies, press releases, etc. This is a good problem, I suppose. I am in the middle of getting two case studies formatted for production. I have one case study waiting for final approval. I have a press release approved which I hope to push out soon. Another press release is kind of stuck because the customer who is giving us a quote is dragging his foot - I may decide to switch the customer to get the press release moving. Finally, I need to get a partners release produced. And, this is just what is going on this week!

My PR firm is doing their job. I will have a good chat with them tomorrow. Partly to cover the various activities underway. The other is to see if we can get more press pick-up. I know it is not the easiest thing but they is why we are paying the big bucks!

Oh, not sure if I've mentioned this before. Part of the grand scheme with the press release is to structure it so that it is also optimized for search engine. The upcoming releases all have varying degree of search engine optimization. It will be interesting to see how the experiment pends out.

Producing another newsletter. This one is for the install base. I got feedback from some of the customers that they feel a bit "lonely" since we do not talk with them that regularly. Hey, if people want to hear my rambling, I am game.

Not doing a heck of a lot on the Google front. I am running the budget optimization thing and have been adding a new keyword here and there. I am sort of in my maintenance mode. Most of my Google exciting these days come from the AdWords Help group where people ask the most obvious of questions. I know it is unnatural to look for documentations, but, people!, asking obvious questions do not improve your stature in my mind...

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BTW, just thought that you should know I only learnt of the expression "Muahhaa..." recently from JC, a Californian transplant in Texas, who is many years junior and, in all likelihood, smarter than I am. But, hey, an old dog can too learn to say Muahhaa...

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