I am NOT Maverick Marketing Sydney

If you’re using Twitter, you’ll probably agree that it is tough to find good quality people to follow and even more difficult to get interested and engaged people to follow you.

The guys that developed Socialoomph, a tool designed to assist the management of Twitter accounts and communications, have developed an answer.

They call it FollowerHub.

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Here is something useful if you’d like to search Bing and Google at the same time.

Or even compare the results between the two.

It costs nothing and the results can be interesting.

Try it out over at Black Dog.

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When it comes to site load times, you really want to be the hare not the tortoise.

Page loads essentially speed at which your website will load in a visitors browser. Having pages that load quickly is important from a usability point of view.

From a marketing perspective. you want the experience of coming to your website to be quick and easy for your visitors. If you are a store, you want them to buy.

People on the internet really expect immediacy – they are really impatient.

They get frustrated when pages are slow to load – so much so that they just hit their back arrows and just exit right out. And they head off somewhere else – and that might be to your competitors if you’re selling something online.

While a lot of people are on broadband, and that does improve things, there is still a portion of the Internet population still using dialup to connect through.

If you want to be accessible to people using dial up you really have to pay attention to your page load and make sure your page is quick to load. And by quick I mean a few seconds – the fewer the better.

The kind of things that affect page load are pictures, graphics and video. Also some scripts and the number of objects each page contains.
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Apart from their amazing caching performance (my blog is cached by Google within an hour of me uploading a new post), the great thing about blogs is that you can write about a variety of topics related to your field. This enables you to cover many different keyword phrases – so it’s also great for being found in organic search.

Giving you a helping hand is SEO Blogger which is a tool that has been provided by Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a keyword research tool (you can do a free trial). It is very popular in the United States – and its keyword research is heavily skewed that way which means that it may be less useful to Australians than, say, Google Trends or Google’s External Keyword Tool. But back to SEO Blogger…

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Now you can bid for Google Adwords like a pro with the new Bid Simulator feature.

This video below demonstrates how bid simulator, a feature of the new AdWords interface, provides increased transparency into the AdWords auction.

According to Google, it gives you the insight to make more informed bidding decisions to meet your advertising objectives.

Using data from the past seven days, the bid simulator re-calculates the number of impressions for which your ad would have shown had you chosen a different maximum CPC bid.

It guesses at how many clicks your ad would have gotten for those impressions and how much those clicks would have cost.

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What do Wikipedia’s readers care about? Is Britney Spears more popular than Brittany? Is Asia Carrera more popular than Asia? How many people looked at the article on Santa Claus in December? How many looked at the article on Ron Paul? How popular is your company?

Find out with this great free tool.

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Check out everything tagged to research or see everything in statistics.

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Need to find out the demographic profile of visitors to your website? Here is a free tool that enables you to predict demographics. So for my example above I entered an “after shave” query. Not surprisingly, more male than females are interested in after shave.

Why is this helpful? It gives me insights into how my website should look to appeal to the appropriate demographic and potentially too how my copy should be constructed. (If you’ve ever read the Mars/Venus books, you’ll have heard that men and women talk different languages.)
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Wondering whether your website is set up to sell? Here is a handy tool that can help you to measure its sales orientation. You can access it at MSN’s adLabs.

Websites tend to fall into three categories. Social, informational and transactional. The intention of this tool is detect the customer intention to either acquire information or purchase online. It is based upon their search queries or recently visited URLs.

MSN built its algorithm by reviewing the accuracy of the tool using human evaluators. The results demonstrate a 90% accuracy rate in determining both commercial and non-commercial intent for a given list of query terms.
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