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You may have noticed double underlined links on sites that create a pop up advertisement when moused over. These are "in-text" advertisements, and they're increasingly appearing on content sites to generate additional revenue.

Nearly two-thirds of US Internet users surveyed said e-mail was their preferred channel for written communications between friends, with text messaging the second-most-popular choice. The phone was the most popular way to communicate with friends overall, with 41% of respondents naming it as their channel of choice.

Because the AdWords system rewards keywords with high click-through history (relative to competitors) with better ad positions and lower cost-per-click, click through rate is considered an important performance metric. Along with a keyword's relevance to ad text and landing page copy, click through rate influences a keyword's "Quality Score." Every PPC campaign is bound to have a few (or few thousand) keywords with low click through rates. You can identify them easily enough with web analytics and campaign reports, but what do you do with them?

he latest punch thrown in Yahoo!'s fight to stay relevant and avoid a take over by Microsoft is their unveiling of their new ad management software, named AMP!, which will ship this summer. Though pay-per-click text ads remain Google's (and thus the online ad industry's) bread and butter, there has been a lot of movement around online display advertising over the past year, an area which Yahoo! is currently top dog. Since the beginning of 2007, Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, AOL built up its Platform A with acquisitions of Tacoda, and Quigo, WPP spent $649 million to purchase 24/7 Real Media, and Yahoo! itself paid $680 million for Right Media. And now with AMP!, is Yahoo! actually opening up their ad silo?

When you're trying to draw your readers into the text of your article or sales page, your headline is a crucial first element. Writers should ...

I've been asked several times to give presentations on the basics of social media marketing, and have now refined my 15 minute introductory tour to the point where I think it's fairly good (and I'm really damn picky about my presentations). The following presentation (in visual and text form) should be helpful for anyone trying to convince their bosses, team or cohorts that investing in SMM is ...

In ecommerce, one of the most important things is search. And right now, search has been moved to a whole new level with what is called blended search. Blended search is when the search engine takes it beyond text links to include pictures, video, blogs, news and just about anything else. This is changing ecommerce search especially, because now product search is part of this.

I've always been a big proponent of having actionable anchor text for links when I really want someone to click. ...

When evaluating and improving copy I work through these 10 steps one at a time.