Everyone has gone social: you, your competitors, your partners, your customers, your leads, your friends–everyone.  So now what?

It’s time to set up a system to mine all of the qualitative data that is floating around out there and put it to good, practical use.  Try using this list of 13 truly useful things you can actively learn from monitoring social media:

1. Who’s in bed with the competition?

Who’s blogging favorably about them?  Who’s providing them with good reviews?  Who’s following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and active in their community?  Who’s presenting with them on webinars and co-sponsoring collateral with them?

Get some good monitoring going on around your competitors names, and keep an eye on their online reviews and their social media account followers and activities.

Find their biggest fans and start to court them away.  Everyone knows how big a competitive win is – but a competitive win who is loud in the social media world is the biggest competitive win of all.

2. Who loves you?

Similar to above, who’s blogging about you? Tweeting about you? Commenting about you on Facebook? Giving you positive reviews?

It’s standard practice to reward someone who refers you new business, so make it standard practice to reward those who are essentially referring you to the masses.  Provide these “fans” with some appropriate reciprocal love.  Perhaps it’s a link back, or a coupon or some other offer.  But make sure you let anyone who speaks positively about you know that you are listening, you really appreciate it and you’d love it if they do more!

3. What do people love the most about you?

Monitor trends in positive mentions about you in reviews, blog posts and other social media channels such as Twitter.

Sometimes what we may think are our biggest selling points are not what people love us  for most.  Pay attention to what people like  best about you, and start to actively promote those.  One technique we like is to actively call them out in your search ads using quotations.  Quotations lend more trust than just touting yourself, plus it will be in your audience’s own words.

4. What do people dislike the most about you?

While you’re poring through all of your praise, also start to document trends about any negative comments, or “if they only had….” comments.

Use “if only they had” information to inform your product development, road map and / or inventory adjustments.

5. What are your competitors hiring for?

Keep an active query in your reader (i.e., TweetDeck or HootSuite or Seesmic) that monitors job postings for your competitors.

One of the biggest hints about what they are up to next can be inside of those job postings.  Many companies are surprisingly candid about direction and weaknesses inside of their postings.

6. What are your competitor’s future plans?

Along those same lines, keeping an active query in your reader that includes your competitors name along with the word plans or powerpoint or pdf docs.

Many companies are surprisingly lax about what gets out into the web, you’ll be surprised about how much free competitive intelligence will flow your way.

7. Negative keywords for PPC campaigns.

Keep a query of your head keyword terms inside of your reader and monitor the headlines and themes of blog postings and news articles that are coming in.

Add anything and everything that isn’t relevant to you as a negative keyword in your ppc advertising campaigns.

8. New target keywords for PPC campaigns.

Same query as above, but this time monitoring for new ways people are talking about your space, or new needs and reasons that are rising up.

Take advantage of these by adding them in as new target keywords to always have your PPC campaigns on top of current trends.

9. Who are the influencers and thought leaders in your space / area?

Same head terms query – both of blogs and also of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Use this to identify who the big influencers are online in your space.  Then, make them your best friends and court them to talk about you.

10.  Hot topics for blogging

With that same head terms query, you can easily get a pulse for what is trendy.

Use trends to write blog posts about with your own opinion, expertise, and helpful information.  When you promote trendy blog posts, they will garner you the most value.

11.  Audience profiling

Where is your audience and how do they participate?  Do they blog? Do they write reviews on local sites? Do they attend webinars?  Do they download podcasts? Are they active on FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Questions or other communities?

Monitoring your audience’s activities and where they are most prevalent will help you figure out where to spend your precious marketing dollars and dedicate your marketing content and time.

12.  What should your Sales Tools & Collateral address?

What don’t they like about you? What is your competition promoting as their biggest advantages?  What are the current hot topics and needs?

Develop sale collateral around these so your sales force is always armed with the latest and greatest sales objections they are likely to run into and the most prevalent ways of discussing the current market climate and needs.

13.  Link building opportunities

Did someone mention you, but forgot to include a back link?

Reach out to them and kindly request that they add a link!

It’s all free data, so start to make social media one of your best sources of information today!

When looking to hire or partner with someone to help with your search marketing, the traditional ideas of a fancy advertising agency tend to pop into people’s heads –fancy glass office, dressed fancy, talks fancy, creates fancy messaging and images, etc.  However, when it comes to search marketing, Fancy Nancy isn’t likely to get you very far.

Her sophistication and wit will likely mean that her content won’t reach, attract or convert the average searcher you are seeking out.   For online marketing, you should be thinking about working with Redundant Rhonda.  Qualities you really want are redundant, simple, monotonous and patient.

Why am I advocating for Redundant Rhonda?  Who in their right mind wants a boring person to handle activities related to marketing and advertising?

Here’s why…

Quality #1: Redundant

Being successful online is all about keywords.  From search to social, SEO to paid, from your home page to your landing page, keywords (in your audience’s voice) are the heart and soul.

Keywords are not fancy.  These are basic phrases that your leads use to research your offering and find you.  Long tail keyword generation is helpful – there is nothing fancy about this – which is just different combinations of the exact same words or plurals, singulars, prepositions, etc.

Once you know your keyword targets, these keywords and their variations must be redundantly used everywhere you are online:

Pay-per-click keywords

SEO keywords

Website copy

Blog titles

Blog copy

Landing pages

Pay-per-click ads

Website URLs

Google Local profile

Twitter profile

Twitter handler

Facebook profile

Tweets on Twitter

Internal anchor text

Inbound link anchor text

Press releases

Videos

Photos and images

Getting the picture?

Just to clarify: I said redundant usage – which should not to be confused with spammy usage!  Redundantly use your keywords in natural ways that any average person reading the English language would expect to see.

Quality #2: Simple

While Fancy Nancy is likely to come up with some very catchy tag lines, online searches are less about award-winning copy and more about helping people weed through information overload to find you, quickly comprehend what you do and contact you. Fluff need not apply.

Your PPC ad copy (in addition to being redundant) needs to simply state what you do, why it’s better than anything else, and inspiring a click-through.

Your website copy (again, in addition to being redundant) needs to very simply state in easy-to-read copy what it is you do – and why it’s better – with a clear call to action indicating what the visitor should do next.

You only have a few seconds to get a searchers’ attention and turn them into something valuable, so simple words lead to the fastest possible comprehension and action.

Quality #3: Loves Monotony

For managing and optimizing your search marketing, you will need a data geek who is happy with monotony.  My guess is Fancy Nancy would like to jump off the building at this point.  You’ll need someone who is happy pouring over tons of data, slicing and dicing it in oodles of formats, making some optimization adjustments based on the data, and then reviewing all of the metrics again.

The process goes like this: analyze, slice, dice, adjust, analyze, slice, dice, adjust, analyze, slice, adjust… there is no end game. (In the world of consumer products, it’s called “lather, rinse, repeat” — check your shampoo bottle!)  The world of search marketing is constantly changing, so the monotonous process will repeat itself again and again and again.

Quality #4: Patient

While some aspects of search marketing, like pay-per-click, carry with them some instant gratification, the process of getting to great results whether on PPC, SEO, landing pages or social takes time and patience.  Fancy Nancy is likely to want some immediate accolades for a campaign that is launched, but in the world of search, great downstream benefits can take quite a bit of time and stick-to-it-ness.  It can take quite a while to find pockets of great success – which may not last long before the world changes and you need to find new pockets of success.

So, as you think about your search marketing support system, remember this: forget the glamour, the glitter and the fluff and seek out someone who understands how to get you found, keep attention and create real results online.

A great pay-per-click (PPC) keyword strategy is central to any campaign’s success, so getting your list right is absolutely critical. Once your campaign is live, the Yield Web Marketing Suite works every day to make recommendations to you about new keywords you might consider together with negative keyword recommendations. This guide, then, will help you create a great keyword list in advance of launching a new campaign in four easy steps: 1) Questions; 2) Keyword Tools; 3) Variations; and 4) Assembly.

1) Questions.

Use the following question categories to start making your list. As you go through and answer these questions, keep your thoughts organized into the different buckets – we’ll keep using these categories in future steps. Throughout this guide we’ll use an example of a restaurant for you to get a feel for how it works.

Names: What are all the names of the products or services that you sell? (i.e., restaurant, dining, dinner, bar, grill, happy hour, brunch, buffet, steak joint)

Adjectives: What are common adjectives used to describe those products? (i.e., steak, fine, fancy, all you can eat, affordable, 5 star, best)

Attributes: What attributes does your product have? (i.e., fireplace, live music, bands, entertainment, lounge, full bar, gift cards lakeside, lakeshore, shore, on the water, views)

Searcher Desires: What actions does the searcher want to take with your product? (i.e., eat, takeout, drink, dance, walking distance)

Website Actions: What are the actions you want people to take on your site? (i.e., reserve, reservations, order)

Website Information: What types of information do you offer on your site? (i.e., reviews, specials, pictures, menu)

Location: Where are you located? (i.e., San Mateo, San Mateo, CA, San Mateo, California, Bay Area, South of San Francisco, Close to town, in town, by town, around town, near town, local)

Emotions: How are your searchers feeling, or what do they want to feel? (i.e., hungry, romantic, casual, low-key, cozy)

Events: Under what circumstances does the searcher need you? (i.e., special occasion, group party, valentines, anniversary, thanksgiving, girls night out)

2) Keyword Tools.

Now that you’ve got a starter list, let’s expand it beyond the terms that you naturally think of. Following are some great tools you can use to expand your keyword list. As you find related terms through these following keyword sources, put them into the buckets you started to use above. It will make building your actual keyword list later on much easier. Also, as you go along and see words that you don’t want your ads to appear for, and make note of those for your negative keywords list.

Thesaurus.com: Enter your words from above and jot down all the applicable terms for saying the same thing. Their visual thesaurus can is a great way to see the data. Jot down antonyms that you wouldn’t want your ads to appear for as negative keywords.

Quintura.com: Enter some of your key product phrases from above. Click on items that are related to you to see more ideas appear. Be sure to read through the results on the right-hand side of the page for even more ideas.

Google Search: Wow, this one seems boring, eh? But, it’s a great tool. Enter you basic keywords – as you are entering pay attention to the related searches that Google displays as you type. Then after you click search take some time to read through the ad copy, the organic listings and check out some of the websites. You’ll be surprised how many variations on your keywords you’ll discover here.

Google WonderWheel: As long as you’ve got Google open, click on the Show Options link at the top. Then on the left-hand side click on the Wonder Wheel option. This works in a similar way to Quintura. Just click around the wheel to find related terms.

Google Related Searches: One more option inside of Google is the Related Searches. Click on the Related Searches link (you’ll see this right above the Wonder Wheel option). Click on any of the related searches at the top to view their results and scan through the page for great terms.

Competitor Websites: One of those few times your competitors actually have some value to offer you! Visit your competitor’s websites and look at the terms they use to describe their product and make sure you’ve got those covered as well. This is also great insight into the keywords they are likely using in their pay per click campaigns.

Google Alerts: Sign up for a comprehensive Google Alert pertaining to your product. This is a fantastic source to find out how people are talking about your product and what they are looking for. It’s also one of the best sources to develop a robust set of negative keywords.

TweetBeeb: Keep track of what people are saying about your product type, industry or location on Twitter. Similar to a Google Alert, but based on Tweets.

Yahoo Answers: Do a search for your product or industry and look for the terms that people are using to talk about it and what they are typically seeking.

3) Variations.

You should now have a pretty hearty list of categorized words and also a great start at a list of negatives. Now it’s time for just a few finishing touches to the words that you have identified so far.

Singulars / Plurals: Make sure to include the singular and plural version of all of your keywords.

Hyphen, Non-Hyphen, 2 words, 1 word versions of the word: web site, website, web-site,

Apostrophe and non-apostrophe versions of words: San Mateo’s, San Mateos

4) Assembly.

Drum roll please… all that’s left is to assemble your keyword research! Here’s how to put your keyword phrases together:

Names + Adjectives (lakeshore restaurant, fine dining restaurant)
Names + Attributes (restaurant with live music, byob restaurants)
Names + Searcher Desires (eat at bar restaurant, Chinese takeout)
Names + Website Actions (restaurant reservations, order restaurant gift card)
Names + Website Information (restaurant reviews, restaurant menus)
Names + Location (restaurants in san mateo, local breakfast buffet)
Names + Emotions (romantic restaurant, cozy steak joint)
Names + Events (restaurant for valentines, thanksgiving brunch)

To branch into longer-tail keywords, just use combos of three categories at a time. For example: Event + Name + Location (i.e., “special occasion restaurant in the bay area”).

Now you are off to the races. If you don’t have a big enough budget to support your fantastic list, start small and slowly introduce more as you find the keyword niches that bring you customers.

One common scenario we run into is a business that is located in a particular area, but provides service to people across the country, or multiple countries.  A few examples here include real estate agents, travel guides and hotels – pretty much any business that focuses on relocation or visitors.

For these types of advertisers we find that running campaigns targeted toward their local area is often not productive.  We’ll use the real estate agency as an example here – many people like to check out photos of houses on the market and what they are listed at in their own neighborhood, but they have no intention of buying or selling and if they did, they already have a realtor that they would use.  These searchers can spend a bunch of money from a PPC ad perspective for zero return.

Often time real estate agents find many more leads by advertising to the rest of the country and excluding their local geographic region to avoid those curiosity browsers.

Google has a very easy-to-use geo-targeting feature called excluded locations in which you can set that you want to target all of US and Canada, except for San Francisco metro, for example.

However, for these types of businesses this exclusion feature will not work.  Although it does exclude searchers from this area, it also sets up the cities in the metro area as negative keywords.  These excluded locations are secret double agents – you will see the exclusion set up in your geographic targeting, but you will not see them listed in your negative keywords list, even though they prevent keywords with these cities listed in them from appearing.

So, if you are a real estate agent targeting keywords such as “san francisco ca houses for sale” and “san francisco ca real estate”, your ads will not appear for these search terms if you have excluded the San Francisco metro geographic area from your ad display.

The workaround?  You must set up you geo-targeting the “positive” way – checking every state individually and all the metros in California that you want included (except for San Francisco metro).  This way your ads won’t appear locally, but Google won’t block your ads from appearing for your keywords which include the location.  The Yield Web Marketing Suite enables this activity simply by clicking the Geo-Target button in the Campaign view.

People like to talk about what size of keyword is best to advertise for. There’s always lots of hype around long-tail keywords, but we still see a majority of campaigns with very short-tail keywords.

We are here to tell you that you can have a successful PPC campaign regardless of keyword size; however, different sizes do require different strategies and with them come varying levels of difficulty.

Our recommendation to advertisers is usually to start off with the medium tail keywords and through daily research, build out a very robust negative keywords list and a hearty set of long tail keywords to help branch out into more profitable territory and broaden exposure.

If you have a high-quality keyword list, you will very likely see high-quality prospects arriving on your site because the site contains information that they are searching for.  Qualified prospects, of course, lead to fast sales.  And remember, a keyword can be a single word or a number of words that, when bundled into a phrase or one idea, constitute a single keyword — for instance, a single keyword could be “search” but also “search engine marketing”.

Though on first blush the exercise of creating a keyword list seems easy, it takes a little more effort than you might think.  But it doesn’t have to be painstaking, either.  Here’s a few easy steps to help you get to an initial keyword list that you can refine and build upon over time.

Step One: Think about your business. What kind of business are you?  Do you sell products? Services? Both?  If you sell both, are they integrated in some essential way?  Who are your competitors?  What is the “space” that you play in? (For instance: are you in the home improvement space or the pet services space or the food and beverage space?)  As you think about your business, jot down the key words or phrases that come to mind.  Don’t spend time wordsmithing or refining – just make it a stream-of-consciousness effort.  You can come back and clean it up later.

Step Two: Think specifically about your products or services. What do you offer? What about these make you particularly proud? How are your products or services different from your most direct competitors? (For instance: are they better?  Less expensive? More efficient? Delivered with a smile?)  If you offer multiple products within a single category (i.e., home furnishings), what are they (i.e., sofas, chairs, side tables, coffee tables, etc.)?  If you offer multiple products in multiple categories, list both the categories and products within each.  Again, as in step one above, capture all the keywords or phrases that come to mind.

Step Three: Think about the people who look for your goods or services. Who are these folks? What motivates them? Where do they work?  Where do they live? Do you serve multiple categories of buyers (i.e., both consumers AND businesses)?  If you do serve multiple categories of buyers, what might be the differences in their individual search behaviors?  Again, as in the steps above be sure to capture all the words and phrases that come to mind such as “bargain shopper” or “small business”.

Step Four: Refine and “stem” your keywords. Once you’ve completed the exercises above, you may have long lists or very short ones.  Both are okay.  Using Microsoft Word or Excel, or the equivalent Google Docs, sort your lists so you can see similarities grouped together.  Then, go through your lists and make sure each keyword or phrase makes sense, and represents something a regular person (with respect to the space you play in) would type into a search box.  Remember: don’t think “this is what I would do”, but, rather, “this is what my customer would do.”  Once you’ve done this, it’s time for some “stemming”.  This has to do with the multiple variations of a keyword or phrase any normal person (within the context of your space) might use.  Think back to elementary school when you were forced to conjugate verbs and then do this with your lists.  For instance, if the keyword (or verb in the keyword phrase) is “create”, then play with “creates”, “created”, “creating”, etc.  Then, add the most sensible of these to your list.

Step Five: Factor in location. If location has any bearing on your goods or services, it’s important to include this in your keyword lists.  For instance, if the apples you sell are Washington apples, that’s important.  If your IT services are located in Silicon Valley, say that.  If you’re a national service, but deliver results locally, then you may need a more sophisticated keyword strategy.  For instance, a national dating service might want to include “single women in Chicago” and “single men in Atlanta” – and for every other major city they serve.  Once you’ve considered this, add any geographic details to any or all of your keywords or phrases where that makes sense. (Remember: search engines also enable you to target your ads by geography, so if you’re going to buy ads for delivery only within a narrow geographical region, you many not need to include geographic keywords in your list.)

By undertaking these five relatively easy steps you should have a strong initial list of keywords that will help you with all your Web marketing initiatives.  Whether undertaking a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign on the major search engines or undergoing a search engine optimization (SEO) effort, a strong keyword list is your crucial first step.

Time for a Small Plug. We can help, too.  Our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes a keyword list optimizer that is completely automated.  When combined with our automated PPC campaign management, SEO and landing page optimization (LPO) modules, you’ll have everything you need for a successful search engine marketing (SEM) program.  And because we do all the work for you within our fully automated and integrated systems, you’ll have more time to run your business and win in your space.

To take advantage of our free thirty-day trial, just click here.

To find more of our blog posts on Web Marketing 101, go here.