I’m a Verbalist, Not a Blogger

by George Popstefanov on 09/10/2009 at 3:33 pm in Commentary, Observations, Within Range

After reading all of the blogs that have been recently posted, I am “tired” of writing about the always changing and interesting interactive advertising space. I am realizing that instead it’s much easier to write a blog about how hard is to write a blog when English is your second language. I haven’t been much of a writer, even when I was trying to write in my native language, Macedonian.

With everything that is going in the industry and having the opportunity to go to several different conferences, you would think that I have plenty to say. The truth is that I am more of a verbalist (ver•bal•ist – One who favors words over ideas or substance) than a writer. My problem is that I can’t make my blogs fun and use football references, or talk about my experiences with a phone provider or make a correlation between shoes and online marketing. No, I can talk all day about using search queries reports for your keyword research, looking into webmaster tools to figure out keywords that you might want to add for PPC or utilizing Google Analytics to manage your PPC campaigns, but writing about it and making it fun – Forget about it!

It is much easier for me to write about why I can’t write my blog entry this week than actually write one and risk it not being entertaining. After all, blogs are meant to be: funny 80% of the content, quick and easy read 10% and educational 10%. Looking at my blog entries so far, they don’t seem to fair too well in these categories. My Blog Muse has officially left the building!

With all of this being said, here I am 270 words and still with a blog entry that does not meet the 80/10/10 criteria. On top of everything, I am still 130 words short so I thought I try and share some random thoughts with you today about the industry and maybe take care of my 10% (educational) and 130 remaining words.

Here are my random thoughts for this month that I might turn into blogs one day, when my Muse returns:

• Behavioral targeting is something that you should look into. With the evolution of this technology and the Census data being available through an API, you can now use this data to run a lot more targeted media campaigns.
• Leveraging conversion optimization for your site can greatly help your achieve your online revenue and ROI goals, especially in a year where budgets are cut and conversion online are tougher to get than ever before. I suggest testing first with Google or a similar tool so you can see the impact of by utilizing dynamic data and automated technology.
• Omniture seems to be a topic of discussion a lot more within our organization. Their strategic acquiring of some companies like Visual Science and Test & Target has made them one of the leaders in the Online Marketing analytics and Technology Space. They do throw an awesome summit every year as well.
• Google continues to dominate the world in most online categories. I am starting to get amazed that everything they launch becomes number 1 within 12 months. It will be nice to see them fail at something, just to know that Sergey and Larry are actually humans :)
• Search queries on mobile smart phone continue to increase. As of last month, the big 3 search engines are offering the ability to show up for keyword on mobile search queries. Give it a shot before everyone jumps on the train.
• Using Facebook self served PPC ads is a good opportunity to test your social media acceptance and figuring what demographics within social you have the most success with.
• X-Factor for me this month is attribution reporting. With all the great technology minds that we have in this space, someone is yet to figure out the whole attribution modeling. I am ready for it, aren’t you???