Pay Per Click Marketing Centricity

Local Search: Images Bring Your Yellow Pages Search to Life

According to a few recent surveys, over 30% of all commercial searches are categorized as local searches. That is, the searcher is limiting the search based on a geographic parameter such as city, zip code or neighborhood. The local search engine market should continue to grow rapidly in importance as MSN, Yahoo and Google all now provide local search capability.

A9 is taking an interesting step in local search by taking images of brick and mortar storefronts. If you search for "pizza" in Denver, CO, the results come back with a list of pizza restaurants and images of their store and surrounding area.

A9 has taken over 26 million images in 15 major cities. Someone actually drives a truck by each of the businesses with a camera mounted on top. Proprietary software and GPS automatically takes and catalogs the images.

This is pretty interesting stuff. What happens, though, if your business is located in a shopping mall or high-rise? They don't say. Perhaps you'll soon notice people walking around these locations with small cameras affixed to their heads. Maybe this will be a good business opportunity for someone to recruit the "mall walkers" who get their exercise by walking laps in the mall...

Blog and Website Design: Helpful Link for Design Decisions

If you are creating or redesigning a blog or website, I highly recommend you visit the website for the Software Usability Research Laboratory for the Psychology Department at Wichita University. Their lab has conducted interesting research on website usability. According to their site, their research tries to answer questions like:

•   What's the best layout for a web page?
•   How can you optimize reading from PDA's and small screen interfaces?
•   Which online fonts are the best?
•   What makes an e-commerce site difficult to use?
•   Can individual personality or cognitive skills predict Internet behavior?

Enjoy...

How Wide Should You Make the Lines on Your Blog or Website?

If you are in the process of creating or redesigning a website or blog, one consideration you'll face is how many columns to use for your web pages. Part of your decision making process will be based on how wide you want your main content text. In other words, what line length should you use?

What line length do readers like best for online reading? What length helps them comprehend the information easier? What line length can they read fastest? Do they like short lined text like you find in newspapers - about 35 characters per line (cpl)? Or, do readers favor longer lined text of 95 cpl? Or, somewhere in between? And, should you even care?

Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer. Many studies have been conducted to answer this question, but there doesn't seem to be too much agreement based on the results of the studies. A fairly recent study by Wichita State University, entitled, "The Effects of Line Length on Online News," provides some interesting insights for line length and reader pace, comprehension and preference.

Overall, the longer line lengths (95 cpl) can be read faster by readers. Comprehension is about the same across different line lengths. And reader efficiency (pace x comprehension) is better for the 95 cpl - about the line length of the Marketing Centricity blog. Yes, I counted....

Another study, suggests margins have some impact as well.

Pictures for Your Blog

Including pictures in your blog posts is always a good idea. Robin Good saved all of us a lot of time by posting a very comprehensive list of image sources for your blog about a year ago. Quite frankly, I haven't had time to check out more than his first few suggestions, but I haven't had any difficulty finding what I need. Many of these sources provide royalty-free pictures with few restrictions. Most require a simple registration process.

Your Marketing: Is it Tempting?

I love Business 2.0. It's one of the few magazines I read front-to-back. In the new May issue, Andy Raskin writes an interesting article entitled, "How to Lead Your Customer Into Temptation."

In the article, Mr. Raskin discusses research conducted by Baba Shiv, formerly of Univ. of Iowa and now at Stanford. Mr. Shiv's studies how consumers make decisions. Something important to all of us.

I always like to point out how the small things you do or don't do while marketing and selling your products or services, are key to your success. This study is another example.