One of the more popular social bookmarking tools is Reddit. Similar to Digg and Delicious it offers search capabilities and allows for news/post/article submissions with appropriate keyword tagging.

The first time I submitted to Reddit was this past Sunday when I was preparing to give a blog promotion seminar at work. I submitted my post: “Firefox Beating IE” because it was a little edgy. Within hours I noticed my visitors and page views absolutely sky rocket. I have never had a bigger Sunday in terms of traffic volume. This past Sunday was actually my biggest traffic day the entire past week. Do take note that submitting to Reddit won’t always get you huge amounts of traffic because it does depend on topic and content (we tried a fellow employees post on PPC and it didn’t do very well).

Here’s a graph of my stats for the last week:

Starting today I am introducing a small new section on my right hand navigation: Featured Website. This is basically a text link to a website that I have been reading lately or that other people have suggested. I am always looking for cool industry websites so please go ahead and email me suggestions. I will also write up a small post detailing the featured website’s details.

This week’s website is Sponsored B2B. Please see yesterday’s post for further information.

Rick Tobin, a Senior Sponsored Search Analyst at Enquiro Search Solutions recently wrote an insightful post on his blog: Sponsored B2B regarding how to find the Real Cost of a sponsored campaign.

Rick focuses his post on B2B organizations and starts by defining the issues:

“If a click is somewhere in the distance past, how can you reconcile that unique visit with all the subsequent visits (whether organic, direct, or sponsored) within the research to purchase stage? What about linking this activity to a unique lead or any conversion? What about actually being able to cost all that activity to get a “real” metric.”

The post then continues to address that there are multiple needs within a B2B Organization to be met as well as issues such as: a long sales cycle, multiple visits, multiple sponsored campaigns, multiple entry points, multiple exit points, probably multiple products and analytics data which doesn’t match the numbers from your sponsored campaign’s reporting.

The conclusion consists of a clever way of finding a solution by simplifying everything, it’s definitely worth a read: http://sponsoredb2b.blogspot.com/2006/10/real-cost-of-sponosred-campaign.html

More on Rick Tobin: Rick has over 7 years experience as a technical writer and promotional copywriter for a variety of industries. His broad ranged capacity is currently focused on producing ever increasing returns for each of Enquiro’s client’s sponsored campaigns. Related article The Doors to Conversion

At the Emetrics summit Avinash Kaushik of Intuit went around to the various web analytics vendors and asked them all the same 2 questions:

Question # 1: Unique: What is the most unique thing about your company / solution compared to all other competitor solutions out there?

Question # 2: Unique Feature: Is there a feature in your product that differentiates you from your competitors? Perhaps a report, a metric or a feature?

The Result is a very interesting post talking about the unique value proposition of 14 different Web Analytics vendors (including Google Analytics, Omniture, and WebSideStory)

Avinash concludes by telling us the benefit of his post both from a vendor and consumer perspective.

Source: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/10/hello-my-name-is-avinash-what-is-unique-about-you.html

ClickDensity was launched in June of this year. It is a usability tool which helps you better understand how visitors interact with your website. It does this by tracking exactly where visitors click on a given webpage. Reports such as Heat Maps and Click Maps are provided to analyze the data.

Recently they updated their software to included exporting and more importantly A/B Testing. “This new feature allows you to easily tryout and analyse small changes to your site, using a subset of your site visitors. Maybe you’d like to know if a different advert image could produce more click-throughs? Maybe a change in the wording of a heading would pique your visitors’ interest? Or perhaps you could re-phrase an inline link to make it more appealing? Use clickdensity A/B tests to trial and analyse changes like these with ease.”

A Free 30 day trial is available and I think it’s worth checking out.

Benefits of ClickDensity Include:

- Seeing exactly where your users are clicking.
- Seeing where people are clicking that they shouldn’t be.
- Seeing where people aren’t clicking.
- Identifing usability and information architecture issues on your site.

I recently read a very good post from the Aviva Directory that listed 21 tips to launch a blog successfully and I have to agree that many of those methods have worked very well for me. I also added subscription via email today because of that list (I’ll keep you posted on how that effects my feed subscribers). Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz also developed an excellent list of his own a couple months ago so I thought I would summarize all 42 points for everyone (there were a few duplications).

If you want 25 more tips, I totally forgot to mention Lee Oden’s list which includes some great tidbits such as:

- “Research keywords and develop a glossary – Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, SitePoint, SEOBook Keyword Research.”
- “Post regularly. If it’s a news oriented blog, 3-5 times per day. If it’s an authoritative blog, 3-5 times per week, but each post must be unique and high value.”