KeywordSpy.com Is One Tool You Can Use to Evaluate a Site's Advertising Potential

If you are involved in any aspect of search engine marketing or search engine optimization, you need every advantage you can to stay ahead of the competition and to stay current on developing trends. One of the many free tools out there that can help you is KeywordSpy.
Through this keyword tool, you can perform advanced keyword research and keyword tracking to study what your competitors have been advertising in their Adwords campaigns and Other pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. It also offers a convenient way to view the same information about your own sites.

Among the advantages this software gives is the ability discover who your competitors are, what kinds of keywords they are using, and a general idea of your competitor's online advertising budget. With this tool, you can tell the exact terms and phrases that are driving the most traffic to your competitors' websites, which should help you in tailoring your site and your online marketing approach to increase your own traffic.

Like with many online SEO and SEM tools, there is a free and a paid version of this service. It is worth it to register and check out the free version.

What Is All the Fuss About Free and Why Anyone Who Is Online Should Pay Attention

If you are doing anything involving the web, most of the really good stuff is free, from basic office and business services like Gmail and Google Docs, to entertainment options like YouTube to iTunes, most of the really good stuff is free, and most of the rest of the stuff that costs money has free options that are very, very capable.

Have all the online business types lost their minds? Is this the beginning of the end of capitalism and the final triumph of socialism? Hardly.

It may be a bit hard to believe, but offering content, services, and knowledge for free has been the path to the growth of businesses associated with the Internet, and to the creation of revolutionary changes in communication, publishing, and a host of other areas.

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail, laid out the basic reality of this free economy in his recent book Free: The Future of a Radical Price makes the following general argument:

- The economics of the Internet allows a near zero marginal cost for distribution, so all content is getting cheaper over time.

- The concept of "There's no such thing as a free lunch" is giving way to the idea that a free lunch is not a gimmick to get you to buy something.

- If the good and useful stuff is free, you can't win on price, you have to focus on quality and relevance.

- The challenge for anyone or any business that is online is to create an audience or potential customer base with free services, content, or information, and then work to get something of value from them. While the exchange can be for money, it can also be for intangible things like reputation.

For a more detailed background on the concept of free, check out this Wired article from February 2008, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.

How to Download Your Google Docs Even If You Have a Lot of Them

If you are serious about working online, that means keeping all of your key working documents, or at least copies of those documents, online. One convenient way to do that is to use Google Docs for your text, spreadsheet, presentation, and PDF files.

If you like Google Docs, and the files start piling up. It makes sense to download them and back them up. While you can do it one file at a time, if you have 20 or even 200 files, it can be a big hassle. However, it looks like those hassles are all in the past.

According to the unofficial Google blog Google Operating System, now you can export all your documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs from Google Docs in a zip file.

If you have a bunch of Google Doc files, you should download them somewhere offline to back them up. If you haven't used Google Docs yet, check it out. Log into Gmail and click on the 'Documents' link in the upper left corner. If you don't even have Gmail, then get an account and start messing around with it. All this stuff I mentioned is free, so you don't have much of an excuse not to try it.

Text to Speech Functions as a Podcasting Tool

Text to speech software has been evolving for decades, though there has been substantial progress in recent years. For those of you who have purchased a Mac computer in recent years, the compute comes with a text to speech system that can be used to read text.

I've run a podcast for several years at my airline safety site AirSafe.com, and last week I decided to run a test to see how well the audience would accept a computer voice instead of a human narrator. I combined that with the online form I talked about in the last post to do two things: try out the text to speech software as a narrator and evaluate the audience's reaction to it.

Early results show that the podcast, which was just under five minutes long and was about two airline safety incidents from late October 2009, was generally well received. Most of those who responded listened to the entire podcast, and also felt that they could stand to hear the voice for short episodes. Surprisingly, most said they would listen to shows of any length.

One of the options for this text to speech system is to supplement regular interviews. There are dozens of comments and emails that come in during the typical month, and some would be appropriate for some podcasts. Also, those who wanted to submit guest commentaries but who did not have recording capability could write their response, and the software could read it.

For the AirSafe.com aviation safety podcasts, the ultimate goal of using text to speech software isn't to avoid recording regular voice conversations, but to provide a way for the portions of the audience without podcasting equipment to contribute to the ongoing conversation.

Listen to the Podcast Episode
Northwest Airlines A320 Overflight Event and the Delta 767 Landing Incident

How Quickly Should You Try Out a New Tool or Resource? - Do It Immediately

There are many good resources out there for getting ideas about how to improve your ongoing online marketing efforts. One of my favorites is the podcast Marketing Over Coffee, whose hosts discuss several new or ongoing topics, usually related to search engine marketing, web analytics, or social media. A few weeks ago, their discussion about Gigadail led me to write an article about the virtual online podcast directory I made.

In this week's show they did it again. They casually mentioned that Google Docs allows you to create an online form that you can use on a site or a blog. While I was listening to the podcast, I went to check it out, and created a form by the time the show was over. I then put it in the AirSafeNews.com blog, and let Twitter and my mailing list contact my audience.

I've been using Google Docs for a while, and this capability was always right there under my nose, but I didn't notice it until I heard it in the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. This is another example of just how rich the online environment is when it comes to having free and useful resources all around us. The least you can do is try them out whenever you come across one that looks interesting. You can start by taking the survey.

Trying combinations of new services
Sometimes using a single new tool may not be enough. One example was given in the How-to-Bet.com where it described how Gmail, Google Reader, Google Alerts, and Delicious to keep up with news and events on a particular topic, while at the same time saving bookmarks, files, and other information on services that could be accessed from anywhere online.

Blackouts, Twitter, and Social Media

If you are involved with search engine optimization, or you actively use social media for online marketing, then you are constantly getting exposed to new and different online resources, or trying to figure out different ways to use them to make money or to keep your business moving forward. Sometimes it takes a dramatic event to show us just how useful these tools can be in a totally different situation.

A few weeks ago, the dramatic event for me was a blackout. I was at home late on a weekend night, and the lights suddenly went out. I looked out the window and saw a nearby neighborhood was lit up, so I figured it was a localized blackout. I also figured it wasn't going to be a big local news story, so listening to the radio probably wouldn't give me much information.

The TV and computer were out, but my phone, which had Internet access, was up and running. I suddenly had a wild thought about how to get information on my neighborhood blackout. I'd used Twitter, specifically the search function in Twitter at search.twitter.com, and did a search on my neighborhood's name.

What I found surprised me. There were quite a few people who were using their Blackberrys and iPhones to send Twitter messages to their friends. It was surprising because the area affected by the blackout had about 10,000 residents, but most would not have even had access to the Internet, and only some of them would have had both Twitter accounts and a desire to send out messages.

The number of people using Twitter in my neighborhood was surprising, but the content of the messages were not so surprising. Most of the messages were not very useful, with things like jokes, rumor mongering, and wild speculation about the blackout. In spite of the useless noise, I did find several useful pieces of information, things like links to the power company's web site and Twitter account. Links to the Twitter accounts of local television news organizations, and updates on what blocks were getting back their lights.

So what should you take away from this little story? First, if someone in your family is using Twitter, don't get in their way. If you are thinking about using Twitter, go ahead and check it out. You may actually like it. The service may come in handy one day in ways you can't imagine. Whether you use it or not, check out search.twitter.com. Search it like you would a search engine and look for things that interest you. I've found it very useful for breaking news items. For details, check out a post of mine from another blog that describes how I use Twitter to support my web site AirSafe.com.

Because of this experience, I found out several things I didn't know, such as the fact that local news organizations use Twitter, as does the local electric utility. Next time there's a problem with my electricity, I'll know where to go.

For even more insights into the kinds of social media resources are out there for you to use, check out my list of 10 free social media tools you should try.

You Can Now Record Your Comments and Questions to AirSafe.com Online with Google Voice

AirSafe.com provides a number of ways for the audience to keep in touch with AirSafe.com and to suggest topics for the AirSafe.com News. Now, with the help of Google Voice, you can record your comments and questions online or by phone.

To check it out, you can click on the icon below, or you can visit the AirSafe.com feedback page at feedback.airsafe.org.




Your thoughts may inspire new material for AirSafe.com, or it may end up in a future episode of the Conversation at AirSafe.com. If the icon doesn't work for you, or if you are calling from outside the US, please call AirSafe.com directly at 408.905.6259.