From time to time someone will ask, "Which PPC company should I use." The answer is pretty simple, but it is as straightforward as saying, "Well, you should use XYZ." For the most part, I think everyone should consider starting with Google AdWords simply because that's where you'll find the lion's share of searchers. But Google AdWords is not by any means the only gig in town.

BlogWorld Expo is on at the moment and there are several places running commentary on what's happening. WebProNews has a good summary of the events, one of which caught my eye. It reports on Don Crowther, founder of SMARTS, and his views on using social media to bring traffic to your Web sites. He quoted some interesting figures.

If there is one topic area that will always be popular for blog content, it is the news. What ever is making the news today will almost always bring in readers - if it is well written and not just a copy of what is in the news already. Well written commentary on the news is one of the most shared content on the internet today. It can be one of the hardest to write as well. If your blog content contains news commentary,

Cool quote: )Source( According to a study by Advertising.com, inserting the exact keyword into a paid listing improves CTR by 38% on average. Would you like to improve your CTR by 38%? I'm betting you would. AdCenter now has a new tool to help you do just that. It's called Dynamic Text Insertion. This is a tool that allows you to make the elements in your ad - ad title, description, and even display URL - match the exact keyword the searcher types into a search query.

Social media seems to be going through a phase of shakeups and shakeouts at present. StumbleUpon has recently made some changes and this followed Facebooks big change to profile pages. There are still a lot of mumblings and grumblings about those changes. This last week has seen Yahoo! introducing a new look to their MyYahoo! pages, it seems it may include new features and new functionality. The latest to go through some changes is Twitter. Like most of the other changes,

WordPress is one of the most popular blog software packages in use today yet despite all the work that has gone into writing the software, there are still some basic flaws in the package. One of those flaws is the lack navigation breadcrumbs. These breadcrumbs have several benefits to your blog including user navigation, search engine navigation )which helps your SEO( and a general professional look. Breadcrumbs are the navigation text you often see on some blogs.

Many affiliate marketers have earned their way to superstar status by apply common pay per click strategies to their marketing of affiliate programs they participate in. This is a very effective way to market your affiliate products. But there are some things to think about when you use PPC for affiliate marketing: Instead of using your affiliate ID in the ad itself, create a landing page of your own to sell the benefits of the product you want to push.

We wrote a little while ago about the changes to StumbleUpon and the way friends and subscribers would change. It seems they have finally completed the changes according to the SU Blog . Starting tomorrow,

If you are driving traffic to your landing page using PPC, does it make sense to include meta tags? Yes. Very simply put, because you also expect to get organic traffic to your landing page as well. You can't be too shortsighted about your landing page. It should have all the usual elements that you would put into a regular web page with the exception of navigational tools because you don't want visitors leaving the page before making a purchase. Otherwise,

Internal links can be just as important as backlinks when it comes to blog SEO, the big difference being the amount of control you have over your internal links. You can install a plugin that will add links to related post automatically, however, you have little control over these links. If you have the time, and if you have a good handle on where you blog has been in the past, it can be a much better idea to add links to your previous posts yourself. If possible,

We live in a fickle society so what is 'hot' one day will be turn out to be 'so yesterday' the next. Generally speaking, trends come in waves and last more than one day. To be successful with social marketing, to need to be able to capitalize on what is 'hot' at any given period. To make matters a little more confused, what is considered hot on one site should not always be accepted as a general trend.

I highly recommend multiple landing pages. There are a couple of reasons why. For one thing, different pages will do well in different search engines. As PPC Hero points out on his blog, you can have one page do well in Google and one do well in Yahoo! That's because each search engine has its own ranking criteria. I quote: * Google: The "winning" landing page had longer, more detailed body content.

Over on our Search Engine Optimization Journal blog, I discussed crawl rates and the importance of collecting the data. This has lead to many Identifying Crawl Rates As Part Of SEO. If you have WordPress then you can add a plugin that will record every visit from the search engines and which pages they are crawling. The plugin, Crawl Rate Tracker , is easy to install and easy to use. By identifying which pages are not getting re-indexed on a regular basis,

A press release from ShareThis reports on a new study by Forrester Consulting )commissioned by ShareThis(. Some of the statistics reported make for interesting reading and possible further analysis with respect to social marketing activities. A long held belief by many website owners, particularly bloggers, is that social bookmarking is not about sharing information found, it is more about self promotion. Some of these statistics may back this up.

WordPress 2.7 is due out in Novemeber and once again there will be some big changes. The most noticeable will the change in navigation. Your current WordPress setup is to have all the menu items at the top of the screen.  WordPress 2.7 will most likely use a sidebar navigation system instead. To help fine tune this new navigation system, WordPress.org are looking for users to fill in a quick surevey.

You might think that one call to action on your landing page is enough. You'd be wrong. It isn't. What's more important is that your page visitors see your call to action at least three times. Yes, three times. You need one call to action above the fold so it can be seen upon landing on the page. This one thing alone will reduce your bounce rate. When visitors see that call to action they will want to know what it is they are supposed to buy.

If users have had doubts in the past, it seems they have been answered. According to Facebook, they are not a social networking utility, rather they are "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". TechCrunch has a post related to a Facebook account that was deactivated and the email received )they received an email?( related to the accounts deletion. The circumstances admittedly are not your standard events.

Whether you are writing ad content or landing page material, you should fill it with action verbs. Why? Because action verbs do the selling. In every sentence you write, every word has a job to do. It's the verb's job to sell. If the verb is falling down on the job then it puts burden on your nouns, adjectives, and other parts of speech to do the hard work - work they are not trained to do. Let your most qualified salesman - the verb - do the hard work.

Traffic from social bookmarking sites is notoriously unreliable. They tend to drop in and dissapear again within 30 seconds. If you have something special, they may stay around longer. If you are using social bookmarking to gain traffic, forget it. However, if you are using it for link building, go for it. If one of your pages gets bookmarked and receives a few votes, you may see your traffic spike a little, ignore it.

Linkedin announced earlier this month a collaboration with CNBC. As part of the announcement, L inkedin' blog stated: This collaboration includes CNBC integrating LinkedIn's community and networking functionality into CNBC.com, enabling users to share and discuss news with their professional networks. The collaboration has several benefits for the Linkedin community.