Recently the Blizzard office has partnered with Constant Contact as our Email Marketing service of choice.  They have a great platform, easy to use features, and the ability for clients, project managers and experts to collaborate on all blasts to send frequent, solid messages to subscribers.

With these great features comes a few frustrations.  We have run into a few instances of lists being a bit “dirty” and ending up with a few too many spam reports according to Constant Contact’s rules.

Constant Contact has a loose rule of around 1 per 100 email addresses in any particular send, we have seen lists closed down for less than that.  Constant Contact has pretty standard spam rules, and whether you’re working with them, MailChimp, VerticalResponse, or iContact, you’ll probably have the same issues if you’re working with an old list or one you’re not sure about the origin of.

If your list is flagged as spam, these companies require you to show proof of subscription for a percentage of the list. Every person I’ve talked to at Constant Contact has given a different percentage, so if this does happen, you’re going to hope you get someone in a good mood on the phone when you call for your list review.

We have been looking for a solution to clean up these lists BEFORE we load them into Constant Contact, and with trial and error we’ve come up with a pretty successful way to ensure our lists are clean and less likely to raise red flags with your email marketing provider.

Step 1:

• Make sure the subscriber list is as updated as it can be in the CURRENT email marketing program and also in Constant Contact.

Step 2:

• Draft a blast in the CURRENT program thanking them for participating and asking them to reconfirm their desire to receive messaging from the client.  Ask them to “Click Here to Update Subscription” or “Click Here to Unsubscribe” within that email with big easy to read buttons.  Anyone who wants to update their subscription will be taken to Constant Contact to do so, where we’ve already uploaded their information and they just need to update and/or confirm it.
• Anyone who wishes to unsubscribe will do so within the CURRENT email marketing program that doesn’t have as strict rules when it comes to spam reporting.

Step 3:

• Once we have a satisfactory open rate, the list of unsubscribers can be exported from the CURRENT email marketing program and then applied against the list in Constant Contact.  Anyone who wishes to stay will have already updated their information in Constant Contact.

I imagine we’ll get an open rate of around 20 to 30%.  That 20-30% could make or break our list when it comes to our first send with Constant Contact.  When the line between good and bad is blurry, we need all the help we can get to make sure we’re doing things to help our marketing, not hinder it.

Benefits to Having a Clean Email Marketing List

Learn More about Email Marketing!

Register for Blizzard’s Webinars designed to help you build better blasts, and send the right person the right message.

Email Marketing Basics: Designing Blasts that Convert
Tuesday, June 1st, 11 AM MDT
Learn tips and techniques to simplify your email marketing design and increase your click-throughs and conversion rates.
Sponsored by Mouse On House

Email Marketing Basics: Segmentation and Targeting Your Email Lists
Tuesday, June 8th, 11 AM MDT
Learn how to segment and target your email lists for better conversion rates.

Need help getting your email marketing program off the ground?  Blizzard has a new plan that’s designed just for you.  Call or email our team today for more information!

LinkDiagnosis is a free tool that gives you an in-depth analysis of links pointed at your website. It requires a quick Fire Fox plug-in but is worth the minute of extra work.

Type in your URL and it crawls then exports a Link Diagnosis Report including:

• Your incoming links
• The anchor text those links use
• What page the link is coming from
• Total back links
• Estimated strength of the length
• Page rank of the page that the link is coming from

Try it and find out who is linking to you and if the link is valuable.

Check out Blizzard’s other favorite tools in our toolbox.

Do you have questions about what to learn more about the power of links? Get Blizzard’s on-demand webinars including:
All About Google VI – Link Popularity
All About Google VII – Getting Good Links

What is a Site Map?
A site map is one page of a web site that lists all of the pages (URL’s) for that particular web site and to each page of the site.  The structure of a site map is typically in an outline form listing the web pages within related categories or themes.

Most web sites that do have a site map just list every page in the form of a link from the “home page” down to the “contact us” page with no flare or logical order.  Site maps are typically left alone with no existing optimization and are just merely part of the site’s architecture.

The Evolution of the Site Map
Google first introduced the site map in June of 2005 and then it was not until the next year that Yahoo! and MSN joined with Google to recognize the fact that site maps are needed for individual web sites to submit their site’s pages to the search engines.

Google’s size limit for a site map is 50,000 URL’s which, to me, is more than enough.  I, personally, have not worked on any site that has more than a few hundred pages so leave it to mighty Google to give us way more bandwidth than we will ever need.

XML vs. HTML Site Map
An XML site map is a version that Google likes to use almost exclusively.  With Google being the #1 search engine out there and growing by the day, why not adhere to their guidelines and best practices.  An XML site map has a very beneficial feature called the “priority tag” which tells the search engines what pages are most important therefore indexing and crawling those pages first.

Those priority pages would probably be the “home” page, the “vacation rentals” page, etc…  Any page that you would like the search engines to see first and foremost (your “money pages”) would get tagged.  This allows the webmaster to control what pages the search engines can see and index.

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Almost everyone that uses Twitter on a regular basis has their favorite tools to enhance and manage their experience.  There are many tools out there, and new ones are popping up all the time.

Here is a list of some of our favorite tools, and all are free!

Manage and Organize Your Twitter World:
TweetDeck – This is as a free helpful Twitter management tool with various features that are easy to use including: sorting, searching, spell-checking, groups, marking favorites, simplification of retweets and replies and more.

Before you decide to make the TweetDeck switch, you can check out this video on How to use TweetDeck

Be a part of the 2.0 world – Tweet a Pic!
TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter and is simple to use. It also offers an app for mobile phones so you can Tweet pictures when then happen.

Net-Work-It
One of the challenges with marketing and networking through Twitter is finding followers and getting people to follow your Tweets.  Wefollow and Twello offer an easy to use directories to find people to follow as well as adding yourself to their directory.

Keep Your Eye on What is Being Said
Tweet Beeps set up Beeps to keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company or anything that you want to keep your eye on. They will email you reports of any mentions automatically. “It’s like Google Alerts for Twitter!”

Track Your Links
Bitly allows you to shorten, share and most importantly track links that you put into your Tweets. Analyze the effectiveness and success of your Twitter marketing by seeing who clicks from your Tweet to your website or blog. Bitly can be used from inside TweetDeck or as a sidebar on your desktop.

Mass Social Network Updates
From Ping.fm you can post to many more social networks than Twitter including Facebook, Twhirl, and more. Ping supports over 40 networks sites, so it’s a great way to create a presence if you have something valuable to share.  (Insider Tip – remember that your Tweet’s don’t disappear, so think before you update.)

Stay Away from Spamming Twits
Twitchuck allows you to check Twitter accounts to see if they have been reported as spammers before you choose to follow them.

Schedule Future Tweets
Sometimes you need to tweet when you can’t be at your computer.  Easy Tweets and Future Tweets allow you to schedule tweets to post when you can’t.

What the People Are Saying
Browse to find most popular topics under discussion on Twitter in the past 24 hours Tweetag

If you are new to Twitter make sure to check out Mashable’s Top 7 Twitter Tutorials and follow us @BlizzInternet.  Don’t forget about Facebook or LinkedIn!

Video is all the rage… it deepens your presence in search engines and it improves conversion rates on your website.

Many resort operators don’t have professional videography in their budget and are  intimidated by making a slideshow themselves.

One of our customers recently asked if there was an easy way to make nice little videos for their website.  Good question.

My personal favorite free and amateur tool is Windows Movie Maker — an application that most have on their computer and don’t even know exists.  Movie Maker is a reasonably powerful piece of software that will let you:

• Take photos and videos and create movies.
• Allows text overlays, fancy transitions, and panning and zooming.
• Allows you to add audio (don’t add copyrighted music!)
• Saves your creation in many different formats.

However, many people are looking for an even easier solution.  A solution to turn photos into a video, add copyright-free music automatically, and even host the video for you (so you don’t have to figure out how to get it uploaded on the web).

I recommend you try Slideroll.  Here is a quick example of their video. It took me 16 minutes to create this short photo-based video:

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Have you ever risked your life rushing to the airport only to find out when you arrived that your flight was late?  Wouldn’t it be nice if someone called your cell phone and said, “Hey dude, slow down. Your flight is 45 minutes late”?

If you want to know if an arriving flight is on time for a friend or relative you’re picking up, wouldn’t it be nice if they called you and said, “Oh by the way, I’m late by 45 minutes and you don’t need to take off work to get me at the airport”?  Unfortunately, they are still in the air and can’t call you.  While internet flight status reports and real-time flight tracking are not new, you can now set up alerts to call your cell phone and/or e-mail yourself or others regarding changes to your flight.

One of my responsibilities at Blizzard Internet Marketing is to make travel arrangements for the numerous speaking engagements and trade shows Trent Blizzard attends all around the country.  While away on a trip recently,  he called to tell me he was running late and there was NO WAY he was going to make his flight.  He asked if I would I check out options for other departing flights and see if…  Just then, we both heard the sound of a text message being received.  “The flight gods are with me!” Trent exclaimed, as he checked the phone message.  The text message informed him his flight would be 45 minutes late, so he had just enough time to make it.  What a relief!

Trent then wondered if he would make his connecting flight.  So, I went to my favorite real time, on-line flight-tracking source, Flightstats , and entered his connecting flight number and date.  Indeed, it was a lucky day.  His connecting flight had another perfect 45-minute delay!

This flight tracker site has an array of helpful features, including flight availability by route, airport parking, historical flight ratings and airport delays.  My favorite feature on flightstats.com is the simple to use flight alert. This free online application monitors flights and sends informational messages to e-mail enabled devices and cell phones.  You receive flight alert messages in the event of a cancellation, diversion or delay greater than 30 minutes.

After logging in, go to Travel Tools and enter the airline, flight number and date of departure. Alert messages include:

• Status confirmation up to 3 hours prior to departure.
• Notification if the flight is delayed by more than 30 minutes.
• Notification if the flight is cancelled or diverted.
• Arrival notification when the flight lands.

If you select Departure Alert Messages, you receive a status update prior to departure and a flight departure alert. I f you select Arrival Alert Messages, you receive a message when the flight arrives at its destination. What great customer service!

I’m always looking for smarter ways to travel, so if you have any great travel tips, please share them with me and our readers in the comments area. Thanks!

Anyone who’s buying or selling advertising online doesn’t need a detailed explanation of why we want to be able to interpret whether a particular keyword phrase indicates an intention to make a purchase or not. We don’t just want traffic to our websites, we want traffic that converts.

While it’s sometimes fairly obvious – either from the words in the search phrase (where can I rent a beach house in Wildwood?) or from the detail within the search phrase (3 bedroom beach house in Wildwood with WiFi) – this is something that optimizers and pay per click campaigners struggle with continually. 

The Tool 

So, when MSN adCenter Labs unveiled their Commercial Intent Detection Tool about a year ago, it seemed like a great idea. Here’s what they say it does:

Predict a customer’s intention to buy, sell, or complete another kind of transactionbased on her search queries or recently visited URLs.

They backed the release up with an explanation entitled Algorithmic Commercial Intent Detection of Search Queries. The one-pager begins with:

Using algorithmic commercial intent detection, 52% of queries were determined to be associated with commercial intent. The alogorithm was deemed very accurate, with a rate of 90% for detecting both commercial and non-commercial intent.

The Research Behind the Tool  

Then, in the manner of content that appears to be scientific, it dryly goes on to explain why and how the algorithm testing was done. Human evaluators were used to check and verify the accuracy of the results. How? Apparently, they were asked if a phrase had commercial intent of not and their answers were correlated with the algo’s results.

We aren’t given any idea of how these human evaluators were chosen or why. Was there something that made these particular humans any more well-equipped to make that determination than others? Do they have an specific expertise in evaluating commercial intent? Did the testing involve 2 testers or 20,000? MSN’s explanation of the study doesn’t say.

So, I dug a little deeper and read the original research paper on Commercial Intent Detection presented by MSN engineers in 2006. I found that the study was based on the opinions of just 3 human evaluators:

We asked 3 human labelers ro label the search queries and pages. Each query or page is labeled as “commercial”. “non-commercial”, or “confused”. Each query was labeled by the 3 labelers separately. After labeling process on queries, we keep the queries/pages that were agreed by at least two labelers with non-confused labels.

What????? Are they kidding? I’m no scientist, but this seems like a very flawed process. Was any of the data cross-checked with the conversion tracking systems of real websites to confirm whether searches for those terms actually resulted in a sale or not?

My Simple Test 

Here are the results of a quick test I did using the tool. 1.0 is a 100% probability, so I interpret a .8478 as about 85%. The first column is the search term and the second column is the percentage of probability of commercial intent of the searcher:

I think that pretty much demonstrates the tool’s usefulness - or lack thereof - in evaluating keyword phrases.

How It Could Be Improved 

Chances are, we all have at least 3 people on staff who are very well-qualified to label a keyword phrase as having commercial intent or not. Why? Because they regularly view and analyze online sales through sophisticated tracking software. They know the phrases that brought buyers into the websites they manage and the click paths they took once there. Maybe next time, MSN adCenter Labs could at least use experienced Search Engine Marketers as their human labelers and, by using enough of them (way more than 3!), they may get useful data.

Commercial Intent of Web Pages 

The second function of the tool is interpreting the commercial intent of a web page. However, there’s no information at all that tells you how MSN adCenter Labs accomplishes that. I tried entering pages with and without ads on them and pages with BUY NOW! all over them and couldn’t really come to any conclusions. This part of the tool doesn’t even have any entertainment value.  

Conclusion

The most discouraging thing about MSN’s Commercial Intent Detection Tool is that nothing about it appears to have improved since it was released. It is what it is and it’s not likely to get any better.

I’m afraid I can’t put much stock in this tool as something useful for serious marketers. I think your own experience and instincts can give you much better insight to the commercial intent of a search phrase. Of course, we all have tracker data to fall back on when we really want to interpret commercial intent in a meaningful way.