Just last week, I had the pleasure of keynoting the fabulous eMetrics Conference in San Jose. While there I had a chance to sit down with my good friends Jim Sterne and Avinash Kaushik to discuss Jim’s latest book Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment. If you are doing anything in social media, planning on it (and if not why not) then you should get a copy right away. Take 8 minutes and watch the interview below, there are some juicy nuggets in there.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Learn how an innovative retailer used Google Voice to increase their re-orders in this guest post on the Econsultancy blog.

Want to know how to avoid the 8 Second Black Friday trap? Find out my advice on this guest post on the Microsoft Adcenter Community blog.

My good buddy Avinash does a fabulous job on this post explaining Social Media Analytics: Twitter: Quantitative & Qualitative Metrics.

Are you using Google Analytics but would also love the benefit that log file analysis brings in understanding what the search engine bots and spiders are doing? Learn How to Track Search Engine Bots/Spiders with Google Analytics in this nice post.

Garry Przyklenk of PPC Advice does a great job as he interviews me as a sneak peak to Search Engine Strategies Chicago. Will you be at SES Chicago? If so, let’s try and meetup. Feel free to call me at (718) 569-8240.

FreshDirect.com does a fabulous job sending out a lagniappe and reinforcing it in an email before the holidays. What kind of lagniappe are you offering your customers?

For all my American friends I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving. Here is something to enjoy:

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and don’t forget this holiday tradition started by David Letterman:

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For other great links through out the week, please be sure to follow me on Twitter.

It’s now been almost 2 years since I last did my training session “Call to Action: Conversion Optimization Training”  publicly. If you are looking to improve your conversion optimization efforts you’ll want to be there. I’ll be teaching a Search Engine Strategies Training course on November 5th, at the Downtown Conference Center in New York.

The other course I haven’t offered in almost 2 years is Persuasive Online Copywriting. Well you’ll be hearing more about the availability of that course from your desktop. Copywriter and copywriting teacher extraordinaire Jeff Sexton and I will be teaming up to bring you this course virtually. We’ll meet once a week for 3 weeks, you’ll have exercises and you’ll come out a much improved copywriter, even if you never wrote copy before. Let me know if you want advanced details before they come out later this week.

As many of you know, I have been a faculty member of MarketMotive and have been doing training and workshops for members – well we are getting ready to launch a certification course in conversion optimization in January. They currently offer several certifications in web analytics, search engine marketing and social media. If you are interested in a conversion optimization certification shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to hook you up with a juicy discount.

One of my favorite parts of working with MarketMotive is working with my good friend Avinash Kaushik, author of Occam’s Razor, Web Analytics: One Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0. He’ll have some part in this certification course as well. Last time we were together at SES San Jose 2009, the folks from MarketMotive grabbed a video camera and found some people who had questions for the two of us. Check it out! Do you have some questions for us? Let’s also wish Avinash a speedy recovery on his broken arm.

On November 4th, I’ll be at the Ad:tech conference doing some roving reporting and interviews for WebMasterRadio. If you are going to be there, let’s try and catch up. If you’d like to be interviewed by me, send me an email and I will try to get it set up.

Earlier this month, The Brand Show headed to Scottsdale, Ariz., for the BOLO 2009 annual conference presented by agencyside. I was one of the keynote presenters with Guy Kawasaki. After the presentations, the Brand Show sat down with many of the speakers and did interviews with them. These interviews include: Jim Lecinski, Managing Director of Global Sales and Service at Google and Amanda Vega, author of “PR in a Jar,” and Marc Poirier, President and co-founder of Acquisio. You can download the mp3 of my interview if you want to listen to it on your iPod.

My friend Chris Garrett teamed up with fine folks from Wordtracker to offer a great new ebook on blogging for business.

In this new e-book “Business Blogging – 50 Steps to Building Traffic and Sales,” you’ll discover:

• Why your business needs a blog (yesterday!)
• The biggest pitfalls of blogging — and how to avoid them
• How to build a following of faithful blog subscribers
• Proven tips for converting your blog traffic into actual sales

The ebook is nicely done, providing very concrete advice to getting your blog set up and getting out of the gate running instead of crawlng. Even after all the years I have been blogging, I caught a thing or two things I needed to do for this new blog.

Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer made some major announcements regarding upgrades to their products. Google Analytics new features include: New Analytics Intelligence (which includes the ability to add an alerts (email) when a key metrics fluctuates, new mobile tracking support, Multiple Custom Variables for visitor segmentation, Advanced Table filtering, you can now have 20 Goals set up, and you can now add Engagement goals.Google Website Optimizer added a new Website Optimizer Experiment Management API. The API allows for the creation and management of experiments outside of the Website Optimizer interface.

I’ve been reading several new books including the just released follow up book to the amazing Web Analytics: One Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity, I’ve previewed The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Rand Fishkin, Stephan Spencer and Jesse Stricchiola. The book is due out on October 27th, but pre-order now so you can get it as soon as it starts shipping.

Econsultancy released a new conversion research report. They found:

• Organisations whose online conversion performance had improved over the previous 12 months looked at twice the number of segments as those organisations whose online conversion rates have not improved. The main types of segmentation carried out are: demographic (39%) geographic (36%) and behavioural (33%). Thirteen per cent of companies do not segment at all.
• Company respondents who said they were very satisfied with their conversion rates carried out more than four times as many tests per month on their web properties as those who were very dissatisfied with their conversion rates.
• Only 32% of company respondents said that they were doing A/B testing even though 53% said it was “highly valuable” and a further 42% said they believed it was “quite valuable”. A/B testing is the method which is most likely to be on the agenda, with 46% of company respondents saying that they are planning to do this.
• Similarly, other methods including multivariate testing, user testing and cart abandonment analysis are widely regarded as valuable, but under employed by responding organisations.
• The four practices most closely correlated with high levels of satisfaction with conversion rates are:
  1. Removing bottlenecks and blockages to conversion
  2. Identifying key performance indicators
  3. Aligning keywords, calls to action and landing pages
  4. Using compelling and effective calls to action

Also don’t miss Econsultancy’s Search Engine Marketing Trends Briefing November 2009.

Google and Microsoft Bing announce deals to include real time Twitter search in their results. What will this mean? Microsoft Bing also cuts a deal to include Facebook to include status updates. These are huge events in terms of the future of social media, search engine optimization and of course measuring all this activity.

I just got back from speaking at the Bolo Conference and AZIMA event in Arizona. They were both well organized events, with very attentive audiences. At the Bolo conference I premiered my latest presentation, Trim the Fat: How to use Personas, Analytics and Human Psychology to Improve Marketing (more on that soon). The reception to the presentation was extremely positive. But I am not here to talk about myself, but to talk about one of the other keynote presentations at the Bolo Conference.

I had the privilege to interview Guy Kawasaki before his keynote presentation at Search Engine Strategies New York last March. You can listen to the interview on WebMasterRadio.FM. Guy’s presentation is a detailed hands-on illustration of how Guy uses Twitter. You can listen to a previous version of his presentation about how to use Twitter on WebMasterRadio. Guy splits no hairs, as he is aware that some people do not like his approach to marketing on Twitter. However, the audience loved his hands on approach as he walks them through using Twitter with this collection of links on how to demo Twitter he uses as his outline.

Have you heard Guy Kawasaki give this presentation (either live at a conference or the recording above)? Some people feel Guy Kawasaki is a Twitter spammer who uses bots and automation to drop urls all the time. What are your thoughts about how he uses Twitter? Would you use it the same way or just take out a few of his tactics and tools (which ones)?

Click here to view the embedded video.

What happens if your onsite web analytics look good, but you still aren’t drawing conversions?

Mike McDonald, of WebProNews caught up with me after one of my site clinics at Search Engine Strategies for an interview on Creating a Self-Service Sales Cycle.

After looking at the analytics, I saw that not a single page had a bounce rate over 20 percent and no page had an exit rate bigger than 30 percent. However, the conversion rate was under 1 percent. In other words, customers knew how to get around the site but did not know how to buy. This is a case where landing page optimization isn’t enough.