Make Your Spreadsheet Into a Custom Feed Reader

Did you know that your Google Docs Spreadsheets can be made into a custom feed reader?

Think about all the things you look at on a daily or less routine basis. Would it be useful to have all that stuff in one place?

Google Alerts
News
Twitter searches
Link updates
Technorati
Search results
Comments
…etc

Here is a quick run through for how to do it, and believe me it is easier than it looks!

Start a new Google Spreadsheet

Go to the Insert / Formula / More Formulas menu

Look down the “Google” choices

You can import from HTML, external data, XML, or a feed

To import a feed, simply use =ImportFeed()

For example, see what people are saying about you in Twitter …

You will get all the results as they are created

See the links pointing to your site

Add a feed to monitor blog mentions

In the first cell put the Google Blog Search URL for your search

Import the Titles from the feed

Import the URLs from the feed

Combine the Titles and URLs for each row to create links

You will get a full listing. Optionally shrink your B and C columns

For full details on the functions used about, take a look at the Google help documentation here.

I am sure you folks are much better at this than me, how can you use these feed import features in cool ways? Please share in the comments …

3 Seldom Used Ways to Get Quality Links to Your Blog

Every site owner is looking for more links. Links boost search engine rankings, while sending direct, quality traffic.

When discussing link building you normally see only two tactics really discussed; linkbait and pitching/link-begging. There are other, potentially more effective ways though that bloggers seldom use.

Creative Commons

The first example of using fresh and free content to get links is through Creative Commons licensing. By setting a CC license on your content you can tell other people that your content is available to use under certain circumstances and with certain restrictions. So one example might be that you can use my content for free provided you do not change it and that you link back to where you got it from.

As the unethical people will copy your content any way, and Google is getting much better at recognizing the originator of a piece of content, the risks are low, and you do in fact get a steady trickle of links from this.

By using the CC WordPress plugin you can essentially make your CC license “official” and it can also appear in CC content searches.

Read more about Creative Commons for Bloggers here on this very blog.

Article Marketing

Article, or Ezine marketing is an older form of link building where you write articles and then submit them to special sites called Ezine Directories. The most famous is EzineArticles.com

People who need a steady stream of new content for their own newsletters, blogs or web sites then come along and are allowed to copy these articles providing they keep in place your author “resource box”.

This can provide both direct traffic and generate links for you. The direct traffic comes mainly from people finding your content on the directory site through less competitive search phrases due to these directories growing a good amount of search engine visibility. When web masters utilize your content on their sites, or their email newsletters appear in a web archive, that shows up as a fresh link to your site.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is a type of article marketing where you write for free for someone else in return for a link back to your own site. These are more personally negotiated, and take a bit more effort, but have the benefit of you being able to target which blogs you want to write for to get the best results, and can often have a link both from your author attribution and, if on topic and not forced, within the content.

You need to start the relationship first with the blog owner. Comment with intelligent responses, and befriend the blog owner in social media, that way you will be familiar and they will have an idea of the kind of ideas you are capable of. Then get in touch with some potential headline ideas for discussion. Do not send a fully written piece until you have at least briefly discussed what the blog needs and audience.

Summary

Getting links for your blog is not just about emailing site owners with pitches or link bait, so think creatively how you can get more links while helping other people share your content.

How to Use Google Analytics to Get a Better Picture of Your Twitter Traffic

How do you know if your Twitter activity is paying off?

An obvious return on investment is more people reading your tweets and as a consequence checking out your website. This certainly does work, but apart from a gut feel that you are gaining visibility, how do you know exactly what you are doing is working, and in particular, the specific attempts that worked and those that fell flat?

Luckily the free and fabulous Google Analytics can help you out …

Track URLs With Campaigns

The problem is Twitter users rarely use the Twitter.com website to read and tweet. This means there are many many desktop and mobile applications, and these applications do not send referrer information to Google Analytics.

Google has a special URL builder designed to help you construct campaign URLs for advertising tracking, but we can use them for our Twitter linkage just the same.

The neat thing about hooking everything up in analytics is that you can track these visits all the way through to conversion, either as a subscriber or to see if the Twitter visitor buys from you.

Tool: URL Builder - Analytics Help

Of course this tool produces huge URLs, so your next job is to shorten down to preserve more of those precious 140 characters that we are allowed for each tweet.

I use a service called Cli.gs – interestingly Cli.gs also tracks clicks, or I should say attempted clicks as the number who reach the destination never matches what the service claims to have sent …

My Cligs

Now this is not an entirely clear picture because it only tracks clicks on the URLs that you have created. How can we track our total Twitter traffic?

Advanced – Google Analytics Profile and Filter

What about the traffic that we did not initiate, but came from Twitter and other microblog services?

To get around this we need to detect them and aggregate using Analytics Profiles and Filters.

First you need to add a new profile …

Analytics Settings - Google Analytics

… making it for an existing rather than new domain …

Create New Website Profile - Google Analytics

Once created you need to hit Edit

Analytics Settings - Google Analytics

Scroll down and add a new filter

Profile Settings - Google Analytics

Create New Filter - Google Analytics

Add the settings exactly as you see here.

Create an Online Survey for Free With Google Docs

In the past if you wanted to put together a quick survey you have either had to cobble together complicated tools, used an online service that was expensive or incomplete, or paid an external body to get the job done for you.

Now Google is going after yet another slice of the online tool pie with Google Docs. Is there a market they don’t want to own?

I’m not complaining, this is pretty cool.

To create a survey you simply add a new form.

You can add any number of fields, from multiple choice to essay style text boxes. When you are happy with your form you can either enter the data your self or share with others. It’s even possible to share as a web page that you embed in your own site.

As answers come in you can see the whole detail in spreadsheet format. Of course you can save and export this data for use in your own Excel or Database work if you so wish. I expect stats nuts will want to use true statistic applications, but for my purposes the best is …

… yup, it even summarizes the survey for you with pie charts and everything. For the math-challenged like me, this is a dream.

Not a dollar spent, and takes all of 5 minutes to do. Wonderful. I even might have to start taking back all the bad things I have said about Google lately ….. nah

The Alternative Google Chrome Comic

Google Chrome

People seemed to be losing the plot a little, getting a touch over excited, calling Chrome a Windows-killer (a browser does not an operating system make, no matter how optimism-fueled). Any ideas that Google was going to take Explorers market share over night is just wishful thinking.

I just thought I would inject some sanity into the proceedings.

Google Insights

I don’t follow the search and SEO news like I did a few years ago but even I spotted a lot of the guys talking about a new service from Google called Google Insights.

The service provides information on search volume broken down by time and geography. So if you want to know if your favorite search terms are gaining or losing popularity, and where, then this is the tool for you.

Unlike Barry I can’t get very excited about sports so I first tried a search close to my own heart … “Chris Garrett”

Google Insights for Search - Search Volume: "chris garrett" - Worldwide, 2004 - present

As Aaron says “you can consider boosting early success in the most receptive markets”. Using this I can kind-of see where interest would most likely be.

Aaron also points out this is valuable data to PR and branding folks:

This type of tool can also be used to see how related some generic concepts are to more specific related concepts, and how much news coverage and marketplace changes move the relative importance of different keywords in a marketplace. Public relations experts will be able to use graphs like the following to say “hey our brand is catching up with the market leader.”

Seeing how a term is growing or diminishing in popular usage is an important feature. Compare “weblog” to “blog”:

“Weblog”
Google Insights for Search - Search Volume: weblog - Worldwide, 2004 - present

“Blog”
Google Insights for Search - Search Volume: blog - Worldwide, 2004 - present

As you can see, while the terms were interchangeable at one time, “weblog” almost seems old fashioned now.

Where it falls down though is the data is based on what people enter as search terms, not what they are interested in. This is an important distinction as this chart shows:

“Microsoft v Google v Yahoo!”
Google Insights for Search - Search Volume: google vs. microsoft vs. yahoo - Worldwide, 2004 - present

What do I mean? Well, I know there are many people who enter Yahoo as a search term in their Google homepage to take them to Yahoo! website. They are not interested in Yahoo! as a search, they use it for navigation. Without that nugget of info you might draw the wrong conclusion from the lines on that graph. Take the data as interesting but hardly 100% reliable.

That said, it is still useful and fun. In particular, the geographic info is interesting, who knew where the most interest in SEO was?

“SEO”
Google Insights for Search - Search Volume: seo - Worldwide, 2004 - present

What do you think? A toy or genuinely useful?

Google Paranoia and the Tin Foil Hat Club

How many times have you seen on forums

“Don’t use the Google toolbar!”

“I don’t use analytics, I don’t want Google knowing what I am up to”

“Guess I can’t use FeedBurner now”

“There is no way I am getting a Reader account”

… and so on.

What is it with all the Google Paranoia?

These are otherwise sane webmasters not wanting to use services because Google might use their data. What do they think Google is going to do with it?

Now if we are talking about spammers, well they have good reason to not want Google to see their data. One click and their business could be impacted. For the rest of us, surely we want Google to see our stuff?

What is the biggest issue people have with Google? Not giving our sites enough credit. What could help Google see we have quality sites? All that analytics and feed data!

If Google sees that this blog has so many subscribers, so many get the feed via email and so many sites send traffic, that should put us above the spammer with the tricked and mislead traffic, right? We should rank higher than the sites with bought links that never get clicked and the machine-made content that gets no subscribers.

So for me, bring it on! Use everything, I have nothing to hide!

Is there something I am missing?

Nanaimo, the Capital of Google Earth

Where would you guess would be the most data-rich place on Google Earth?

I expect you would take a stab at Mountain View California, where the headquarters of Google is located? Silicon Valley, Redmond or perhaps New York?

No, it’s a small port town in British Columbia called Nanaimo!

How Google Earth Ate Our Town – TIME

Beating San Francisco in the e-stakes is a big deal for an old coal mining city of only around 78,000 people, nestled about an hour north of Victoria. What Nanaimo lacks for in size, it has tried to make up in sheer volume of raw electronic data.

I love Canada, and often like to do my virtual tourism using Flickr. Nanaimo was one of the many places we had been eying up on the real estate sites like MLS.ca. This stuff just takes our research to a whole new level.

They have added mapping, terrain, points of interest and even every single business. If you are hunting for a starbucks, never fear!

Many key places have virtual tours so as well as flying over and virtually driving the roads, you can get a sense of being there too.

It’s not just tourism this is useful for either

The Google fire service allows people to avoid accident sites by tuning electronic devices to automatic updates from the city’s RSS news feed, says fire captain Dean Ford. Eventually, Nanaimo plans to equip its grass-cutting machines with GPS devices, so residents piqued by the apparent shabbiness of a particular park or grass verge can use Google to find out when last it was groomed by the city’s gardening staff. And the city’s cemeteries will soon be mapped to allow internet users to find out who is buried in each plot

You can get the Nanaimo date here, and get an idea of what it will be like when your town is wired into the nets.

Why it is Not Advertising that is Broken, But Advertisers

Mouse If you were reading this article at Techcrunch quickly you might think that advertising is a waste of money. The article reports that a study by comScore reveals some interesting facts about the demographics of ad clickers.

Apparently around half of all the clicks made on ads are generated by only 6% of the total web population. That is an interesting statistic in itself. While we are all familiar with the 80-20% principle, that is extreme.

But really, when you look at your own stats, is it really that surprising that many clicks are “wasted”? A lot of ad clicks are mistakes. Some are curiosity. Many ads are misleading so conversions are poor. People mis target ads or leave ad placement to media buyers who just want to boost their kick back percentage and delegate to low grade staff who don’t know what they are doing, are counting the hours down to clocking off time and certainly don’t care about your campaign.

The news from the survey gets worse:

The average heavy clicker is 25 to 44 years old, earns less than $40,000 a year, spends a lot of time online but not a lot of money online, and likes to frequent auctions, gambling sites and job boards. Sounds like a lot of these heavy clickers are out of work and have nothing to do.

The implication is these people are just idly surfing and have no intention of spending money with you or really taking any notice of what you have to say.

This really isn’t that big a revelation! Really, if you haven’t been measuring ROI then you only have yourself to blame. If you have been measuring ROI you can sit back smug in the knowledge that despite all these conclusions matter not a jot to your bottom line.

If your best campaign strategy is to simply spend money on likely looking sites then you deserve all you get. You do not have to be happy with this default demographic. The targeting tools at your disposal are getting more sophisticated. Microsoft in particular are putting in a lot of effort into demographic targeting. You can do your own research and testing. Of course, that takes more effort than simply lining up a budget and pulling the trigger, which is perhaps where this problem comes from.

The fact is clicks alone are a poor way of tracking campaign success but are an easy metric to fall back on for lazy marketers or unscrupulous agencies. Clicks are not equal to performance but can be argued as if they are.

Clicks are just one metric out of many. When someone clicks they have only taken one desired action in a chain. There is a complete journey from how many see your ad all the way through to those you get to the point of charging their credit card and hopefully being a happy return customer.

Those days of “I know half of my advertising is a waste but I do not know which half” should be long gone. Unfortunately there are still many advertising strategies out there that rely solely on having a fat cheque book.

Is Google Toolbar Hijacking 404 Pages?

I logged in this morning to see a message from Wendy pointing me at this article.

It seems the new version of the Google Toolbar detects a 404 error code and serves up Googles own “helpful” replacement 404 page.

Why is this “helpful” behavior bad? As well as a link to the domain root they provide a prominent search box pre-filled with search terms. The temptation is going to be to hit that search button, effectively taking away your visitor.

How many people are going to be affected by this? Probably a small number. Not sure how many people have the toolbar installed but I don’t think the impact will be huge, the issue is more about Google again putting their own needs before those of the webmaster. Biting the hands that feed them just one more time.

You can see more discussion over at DigitalPoint and other forums. Some webmasters are very upset by this.

From what I understand this is still beta software, perhaps in the final version Google will make this optional or remove the feature if the backlash heat gets too much?

Do you think Google is going too far? Is Google putting their needs above webmasters? Are Google “evil”? Please share your views in the comments …