Tag: book

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Book Review

The Link Publicity Book – Review

I've just finished reading another WordTracker book – The Link Publicity Book.

The purpose of the book is teaching you ways that can help you get featured by media – newspapers, magazines, big sites, etc. Getting featured on such places gets you direct traffic – plus traffic from blogger comments of those stories, PR from Google and increased trust from customers.

The core of the book is a number of stories of press coverage of a site. Each story is followed by ideas that you might be able to apply to your own site. It has interesting suggestions, such as setting Google Alerts with your main keywords, so that you can react to those stories by commenting on them with your insight, a blog post or plugging your product. It also adds up to many ideas on how you can get an interesting press release from your business.

Chapter 4 focus on techniques on preparing your press release. Chapter 5 follows up by showing how to build a list of journalists who will want to hear your news, which also includes several simple ways to publicize your press releases.

Overall, an interesting book. If you are interested in getting publicity, you'd do well checking it out.

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Book Review

Google AdWords PPC Advertising

I've just finished another of WordTracker's books – Google AdWords PPC Advertising . I got it at a US$20 discount from one of their e-mails.

I have been using PPC since before Google AdWords (Overture!), and I did read a few books along the way. So I thought I'd read this one, and if it was too weak, I'd just use their return policy and get my money back (which I actually did on another AdWords book).

I was pleasantly surprised. While the book covers all the basics to a level that I think most people starting with AdWords and PPC would find acceptable, if not comfortable, it also had many things I was not aware of:

  • bid stacks: they sugggest using the suggested bids for exact keywords only, and 75% for phrase and 25% for broad match. I have just started trying it, but seems right to me. They do have a rather involved process using a spreadsheet. I can't help but think it'd be better to just write a small program for this. I guess I'll have to see how much time it actually takes.
  • using the Search Term Report to add interesting broad matches as phrase or exact matches, and removing negative keywords.
  • many other small concepts on how to optimize your campaign
  • the differences between the AdWords Search and Content network. From various colleagues, I got the impression that the content network had lousy ROI, so I never bothered much with it. The book recommends completely separating the campaigns and using 10-15 keywords Ad Groups.

Overall, I really liked the book and already started taking small actions on my own AdWords campaigns. Recommended.

Categories
Book Review

Link Building Review

I've just finished another Wordtracker book, this time it was Link Building:How to build links for your site for SEO, Traffic and Response by Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney.

On a funny note, I was quite pleased with the purchase of the book, as I had tried to purchase it for full price before. Wordtracker's system was broken for hours, so I couldn't order and let it go. Then a few days later, they sent me a US$20 discount, at which point I bought it, with a smile on my face 🙂 .

The book cover many ways to get links. Having read several other somewhat related books, many parts seem similar.

For example, I've seen most of Chapter 1 – Content, on Blogging for Business and Web Content Recipe Book (I recommend both).

There are a couple of details I don't remember seeing covered. Clicking when you link to someone, so that you make sure it gets on the referrer log. There were also a few references to www.majesticseo.com, which I've had a quick look at and seems very cool.

Chapter 2 – Getting to know your online community. A very interesting view on how to classify link prospects, also a reminder that the easiest way to get links (and PR) is finding your 404 errors and converting to 301 redirects.

Chapter 3 – Make your site a linking magnet. All about the best content to get links – pretty much what was covered in Blogging for Business. One interesting reminder is that core articles can often be used for more than a target group.

Chapter 5 – Online Public Relations has some interesting insights about how to write a PR release.

Chapter 6- The definitive link building campaign – covers a lot of various ways to get your link campaign running.

Chapter 7 is a checklist of the various actions mentioned in the rest of the book.

Overall, I found the book interesting, but not great. The coverage on Blogging for Business and the Web Content Recipe book were overall much better.

On a interesting note, Wordtracker now has a Link Builder tool for US$59 a month. From what little I've seen, it doesn't look like a good investment.

You can get Link Assistant for US$99.75. I've used it myself, and it's pretty good. Do keep in mind that they do charge for updates (and it's hard to see when you buy!), but the most expensive plan will only cost US$6.95 a month, while the cheapest is US$3.05. They also have discounts for updates if you use more than one of their tools.