Category: News & Trends

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It’s Girl Scout Cookie Delivery Time

Time for a commercial break…

I live in Maryland and this year I am, again, my two girls’ Girl Scout Troop Cookie Mom. This means I will have over 150 cases of cookies containing 12 boxes each of wonderful tasty cookies in my house. That is 1,800 boxes of cookies and the girls are still selling!

With over 21 girls in their troop, and an average of about 125 boxes sold by each girl, and some girls selling 500 boxes, cookie time is hectic and huge business for the troop. It is not all about making money for the troop though, the money raised goes to the Council to help girls participate in scouting who cannot pay and a small portion stays with the troop to fund fun activities for the girls themselves.

Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts are some of the best activities that you can involve your kids in. Not only do they help to build self confidence, team work, and leadership skills, but scouting is just great fun for the kids AND parents alike.

If you have a Girl Scout in your family now’s the time that you buy cookies to help them make their goal. As for me, the tons of cookies arrived this past Tuesday and are filling my living room waiting for the girls to arrive to pick up their orders. It is bound to be a great sale, so do your part and support Girl Scouts this year by buying cookies. By the way, I have more room for cookies and can order more!

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Are You Stealing Images?

We typically do not install images on the blogs that we write for, or for that matter on our own blog. Part of that is due to time constraints and part is due to actively working to prevent a copyright violation. But this does not keep clients from following along behind us and adding photos of their own to our blog posts that we write for them.

Here’s one example, I saw an image on a new blog that we were doing and sent a quick email to our writer reviewing copyright law on images and asked where she had gotten the image. She was surprised one was even added to her post which means she did not add it but rather the client had.

Many clients simply do not understand that you can not just right click on an image your find anywhere, on Flickr, or even Google images for that matter. Someone some where owns the copyright and to just right click and grab the image is akin to stealing. You wouldn’t go to a stop and just pocket something and walkout. Why is it that people feel that you can just take any image they see?

When we use images we only use images from the Microsoft Clip Art Gallery and from iStockPhotos (where we buy images for $1 for a one time use). These are great places for inexpensive images, but never do we visit a site and right click and grab something.

Commercial businesses can end up in a copyright infringement lawsuit by grabbing someone else’s content or images. Why waste the time when the right thing is to create your own images or use legitimate resources.

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AdWords Trends

We’ve seen a strong downward trend in the cost per click in Google AdWords starting in January. If your account is still set up for clicks based on the cost per click increases you had to make in September and October to salvage your AdWords business, now is the time to take a careful look to see where you can start trimming back.

Google had a decrease of about 64% in income in the fourth quarter of 2008. The economic stagnation is finally hitting Google AdWords with advertisers moving out of the mix causing profits to fall for Google and impacting the cost per click in Google AdWords. With over 5 years as a professional account manager and managing accounts for businesses in a broad number of sectors, we are seeing several strong trends in activity.

  1. The opportunities to drop the cost per click and still retain excellent ad position on AdWords is happening right now. Although this is not across the board in every business, we are seeing a marked trend down in the cost per click needed to retain page position.
  2. Although impressions for many accounts still remain high, we are starting to see a drop in impressions for some accounts as a reflection of decreased searches.
  3. For our client accounts at this point we are not seeing a marked decrease in conversions. In fact for many clients due to the decreased competition online for clicks, we are actually seeing an increase in conversions.
  4. For my own business, I am seeing more clients come in to AdWords for the first time as well as more prospects wanting information or just consulting but wanting to self manage their accounts to keep expenses lean.

My biggest tip on AdWords at this time is to review your cost per click to see if you can start to drop your bid without impacting performance. For some account this means as much as a $1 per click drop and for others we are incrementally moving down at $.05 to $.10 at each review. For some accounts some keywords can go down and other hot property keywords have had to go up in cost per click, but the general marked trend is a downward drop in the cost per click.

If you haven’t read Jeremy Chatfield’s predictions on what will happen with Google AdWords for 2009 I would recommend that you click in to read his blog post on this topic.  I think as Google gets squeezed more by the economic realities of our time, we will see Google try to squeeze more dollars out of each click and work hard to stop the slide in their revenues by looking to creatively increase the cost per click for advertisers. We’ve already seen Yahoo add a minimum cost per click level on many keywords which is simply a bogus “grab for cash” and Jeremy expects Google to do likewise this next year with a big push on using broad match, minimum cost per click bidding, and “spin” on the impact of personalized search.

Jeremy’s been right before particularly on the September 2008 AdWords quality score adjustment. It will be interesting to see how Google reacts as we see an even greater decline in their profits for the first quarter of 2009.

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Fiesta, The Best Online Game Ever!

Fiesta Tip and Info

Fiesta Online from my view is the best game ever : ) . I have an account that is a fighter level 29. He uses an axe in Fiesta. At level 20, you fight your shadow in a cave, but you have to find the shadow and it has 5,000 health. You have at least 300 health then. You get skills and you can make stones and other stuff too.

How to make your weapon hit more. You can make your weapon hit more when you buy elrue or make it and refine the item. Elrue gets the weapon to level 1-3 lix gets it to 4-6 xir gets it to 7-9. You can refine a shield too. Then your weapon will change color at level 3, 6 , and 9. There are patches on the game too.

My son Billy who is 12 years old has written this blog post as part of “Go With Your Mom to Work Day.”