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Now, a new breed of companies is trying to tackle all of those options and determine what ad works for a specific audience. They are creating hundreds of versions of clients' online ads, changing elements like color, type font, message, and image to see what combination draws clicks on a particular site or from a specific audience.

Testing your ad copy and your landing pages can significantly improve your paid search efforts. Of course, building a solid keyword base, creating an optimized account structure, and executing a well-planned bid management strategy are also crucial. However, testing allows you to understand how to optimize and improve your communication with your target audience. Conducting thorough tests on your landing pages can deepen your audience interaction and increase your conversion rate.

Barry makes two great points in this post you should look at if you are looking to develop a web strategy for your business.. He makes two great points that are very important for businesses to realize when crafting a social media or community building strategy. If you can engage an audience around your brand by providing them content where and how they want it - you will succeed online and see real conversions - whether it is leads or sales.

With more and more people flocking to social media sites, it is important that your audience can engage with your brand through as many channels as possible.

At the 2010 Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston, Bernie Borges was a panelist on the topic of "Driving More Qualified Leads into your Funnel." One of the questions from the audience was from a marketer who shifted his 2010 online marketing budget from paid to organic inbound marketing. He said that his lead performance had declined and asked for input on how to address it. He didn't give any other details, so Bernie gave his input from both a B2B and B2C perspective. Read more...

Great post on content strategy

I encourage clients, associates and even friends to create content-rich sites for whatever they specialize in with the purpose of building an audience and forging relationships. The type of content aside, the way to create a popular web property is to slowly grow larger over time in an organized, attractive layout with uniquely useful material focused on your niche.

Great rundown on what keyword research means and 7 tips on how to increase traffic using effective keyword techniques. Great ideas for the SEM aspect of your web strategy

Keywords are phrases for which you would want your blog to be found in search engine results. Keywords help your blog get recognized by search engines, and as a result, help your potential customers find your blog. Your keywords are what you would expect your target audience to search for to find your blog content. Keyword research means researching the phrases that are going to be used by your potential customer to find your blog in a search engine. Keyword research should result in a set of keyword phrases that you should target in your blog content.

It's fantastic that interest in social media is so high, but I'm alarmed at the number of brands and agencies that are ready to jump into social media to take "advantage" of audience concentration in Facebook, Twitter, and other fast-growth outposts. What's lacking in most social media programs is an actual strategy. If you don't know precisely why you're in social media, with whom you want to engage, and how you're going to measure success, you're not ready to start.

To survive, publishers have to let this one go. Digital (online and mobile) is the future; younger people have already adopted digital media as a lifestyle, and they're not going to miraculously start reading print newspapers in any significant numbers as they grow older. Print will continue to decline as its core audience ages. So put the future at the center of the company, not the past. Now, and not before it's too late.

14 killer tools to help you evaluate the user experience of your website.Excellent tools to help you figure out who your audience is, what they are doing, and most importantly - why they are leaving your website.

Here's a big problem with web design: If you want to make your website better at turning visitors into customers (or subscribers), you need to understand why most of your visitors are leaving! But those people come and go without trace! How do you know what they wanted? How do you know what would have persuaded them to take action? If you owned a real-life bricks-and-mortar store, this would be easy: You'd hear their objections. You'd be able to ask questions. You'd hear what they muttered as they headed for the door. Capturing the voice-of-the-customer is more difficult with the web, but it can be done. Here are 14 free tools to get you started!

As the evidence shows, a white paper can be a powerful and persuasive marketing vehicle. Provided, of course, that the reader actually reads it.