by Jennifer Cario )If you are new to Pinterest and don't already have an account, make sure to read part one in this series .( Now that you've gotten youself up and running with a Pinterest account, it's time to put it to use to start collecting ideas, links and pictures. Remember, Pinterest is a powerful online filing system that gives you visual access to the things you might wish to use down the road.

by Jennifer Cario Pinterest is a virtual pin board that allows you to collect images and links to things you like on the web. If you've ever seen someone pull out a scrapbook filled with recipe clippings or a binder full of wedding or home remodel ideas, you've got the general idea. The difference with Pinterest is the fact that it all takes place online in an environment where you can share your collection with your friends and vice versa. To put it in the simplest of terms,

by Mike Fleming Cutting through all the clutter of data, which metrics are your critical few? You probably have at most three critical few metrics that define your existence ...If you can't take action with anything, then perhaps you are using the wrong metric for your business...the simple process of identifying a metric as your key performance indicator and creating a graph of it rarely helps you find insights...before you diagnose how to improve a metric,

by Stoney deGeyter In the world of business, marketing and advertising is everything. Marketing is at least as important as the products or services you sell. Without marketing, you have no one to demonstrate the superiority of what you offer! There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door.

by Dave Cosper A business owner recently asked me how to go about building positive reviews in a way that would "optimize" their Google Maps listing. This is about as provocative a topic as it gets in the Local Search community, I know, but it's also an unavoidable subject worth addressing. Search marketers ponder the same "How To" question, if for nothing else to try and understand every aspect of local search ranking factors and translate this to practical advice for SMB's.

by Miriam Ellis If you've been walking on the sunny side of a clean street on your Search Marketing journey, hopefully you've skipped right past that dark and narrow alleyway in which lurks the spin monster. The practice of 'spinning' articles for directory submission isn't new, but it has come to my notice that marketing firms are currently utilizing this as a post-Panda effort for avoiding the dread Google duplicate content label,

by Mike Fleming ...life is about taking action, and if your work is not driving action, you need to stop and reboot...hits and pageviews don't mean anything except that someone came to your site and consumed some content...metrics are a dime a dozen, so how do you know which ones to use? They should have the following four attributes... Uncomplex - If you want action, everyone involved in the decision-making must easily comprehend performance.

by Stoney deGeyter Designing a great looking website is good. Putting it on a strong information architecture is better. Rolling out a newly optimized website is good. Checking it first is better. Investing in SEO is good. Investing in ROI is better. Optimizing your e-commerce site is good. Using optimized concantenation schema is better. Quick-fix SEO is good. Long-term SEO is better. Performing SEO correctly is good. Doing what you can quickly is better.

by Mike Fleming ...the bottom line for magnificent success is the people...invest multiple times more in her or him, or more of them, if you truly want to take action on your data. Otherwise, you are simply data rich and information poor ...a great tool in the hands of your reporting squirrel is useless. A free/inexpensive/underpowered tool in the hands of your analysis ninja will yield massive results that impact your bottom line... -Avinash Kaushik ) @avinash (,

by Mike Moran As social media has )somewhat( matured, an interesting culture has grown up around the idea of editing social media content. And for reasons that I don't understand, it isn't one culture-it seems as though every kind of social media has developed its own culture around editing content. It is as if we can't decide whether social media is a realtime force that is stream of consciousness and should never be changed,

by Jennifer Cario As we roll into 2012 companies are looking at ways to either boost their social media campaigns, or in some cases, launch them for the first time. One of the big questions they have is whether or not they're too late to the game. While I'm not going to lie and say it's the easiest it's ever been to get in the game, I can say more companies will find it easier to get involved today than they ever have before. I see six key reasons for this.

by Miriam Ellis Whether 2012 is the year you start marketing a local business from scratch or the year you get serious about learning how to use Local SEO to best advantage for a company that's been drifting in Local limbo for years, here is my must-do checklist for your success in Local! Some of these tips may sound like no-brainers to you,

by Stoney deGeyter There are a lot of phases to the buying cycle. Searchers begin with a thought and then start researching answers via their favorite search engine. As they learn more about their query, they move into shopping and buying modes that hopefully lead them to a satisfied purchase. In each phase of this cycle, the searcher is typing in a unique set or words or phrases. Each search is designed to provide more relevant information than the last.

by Mike Moran I don't know a lot about robotics, but I have read a few articles recently about the biggest problem that robot manufacturer have in entering the home. They need the robots to behave differently so that people know how to interact with robots. For example, if a robot needs to open a door, it moves to the door and then must scan the door to locate the doorknob, identify the kind of doorknob, and then begin moving its robotic arm to open the door.

by Mike Moran Have you ever asked yourself whether you paid search program is all that it can be? Most of us suspect that we fall short in some areas, but who has the time to stay on top of every aspect of a Google AdWords account, on top of everything else we do all day? Or perhaps you want to check out what kind of job your agency is doing with all your paid search money. Well,

by Mike Fleming ...you need to drastically rethink what it means to use data on the web...there is a lot of data, but there are fundamental barriers to making intelligent decisions...because clickstream data is great at the what, but not at the why ...it's important to know what happened, but it is even more critical to know why people do the things they do on your site...and the what else, which is perhaps the most underappreciated data on the web.

by Mike Moran Mastercard and VISA certainly hope not, but Larry Page wants to be in your wallet. Well, not exactly-he wants to replace your wallet. Last month, when I talked about Google's new strategy -we do everything-I mentioned that Google is working hard to unseat PayPal, the online payments leader, but I think that I undersold Google's ambitions. Google wants to be the leading form of payments anywhere, not just online. So, how might they do that?

by Mike Fleming For far too long our online efforts have accurately been classified as faith-based initiatives...that's exactly how we made decisions for our offline efforts, and when we moved online, we duplicated those practices. But online, in the glorious beautiful world of the Web, we do not have to rely on faith ... you have a God-given right to be data-driven ...to understand the impact and economic value of your website by doing rigorous outcomes analysis.

by Mike Moran Perhaps you saw the announcement of Google+ for Business-it made big news for a day, but there isn't that much to say about it. Honestly, if you understand how Google+ for individuals works, it will take about ten minutes to get up to speed on Google+ for Business, which is rather disappointing, because after months of development, Google added just a few fields for a business name and a photo. So, if you have a business or a brand or a product or a local place,

by Stoney deGeyter Getting the most value from your SEO investment isn't always easy. There are a lot of factors that go into every SEO campaign and it's not always easy to cut something out without negatively affecting something else, or worse, the entire campaign. I addressed some of these issues in my last post linked above, and here I wanted to provide some additional insights on ensuring your SEO investment is a valuable one. Comparing In-House vs.