Google Docs is nice because it gives you the comfort of essentially using an online version of MS Word. You can write and edit docs online just as you would in Word, only slower. Some other nice features are as follows: share documents with others, revision control and notes, and exporting to a PDF file. (more…)

They let you search for lyrics too, but only found this to work occasionally.

Google Cheat Sheet

More Trend and Keyword Idea Tools
Yahoo! Buzz Index
Alexa
Dogpile’s SearchSpy

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

We are writing to inform you of a change to Google AdWords policy that may affect your Google AdWords account.

Google’s gambling policy dictates that advertising is not permitted for online casinos, sports books, bingo and affiliates with the primary purpose of driving traffic to online gambling sites and related content. In the coming weeks, we will expand this policy to additionally disallow ebooks that promote gambling-related content, sites where the primary purpose is ‘play for fun’ gambling, online gambling tutoring and sites where the primary purpose is gambling or casino games of skill.

We understand that this content may be promoted for legitimate purposes. Based on business considerations, however, we have chosen to no longer accept such advertisements.

When we make this change, Google will suspend all campaigns identified as being in violation of our revised policy. You have received this email because our system identified your account as potentially affected by this policy change. Please note that this addition to our policy applies to all advertisers, regardless of previous exceptions or acceptability of any campaigns.

We have thought very hard about our stance on online gambling advertising and the potential effect our policy decision could have on AdWords advertisers. However, as a business, Google must make decisions regarding the advertising that we accept. We apologise for the inconvenience this policy change may cause you.

Yours sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

**As stated in our Terms and Conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when reviewing AdWords ads created within the programme. However, this decision only concerns our
advertising and in no way affects the search results that we deliver.

Google offers broad access to content across the web without censoring results. AdWords Terms and Conditions: http://adwords.google.co.uk/select/TranslatedTermsAndConditions.html.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Many of my ads groups get some content clicks, but I’ve noticed a few that get tremendous amounts. It turns out they are ones with one word keywords. This makes sense because of course one word is much broader than two or more, but with the poor targeting of YPN it magnifies the effect greatly. Their algorithm is so primitive that you have to have a bunch of one word or very broad terms in your ad groups. The issue here is then if you want to spend money on the broad targeting, probably poor converting keywords. Probably not in many cases.

Instead, since you can separate bids between content and search, you make a separate ad group for their content network. In this separate group, keep your bids lower, but get as much cheap traffic as possible by having a ton of one word keywords in the same general topic of your niche.

The most interesting session I attended was Danny Sullivan’s forum. He not only knows the industry, but is great with the crowd and knows and references other experts in the crowd if there are questions more suited to those experts. He answered everyone’s questions, and for the bad questions, he handled well and moved on without wasting too much time. I can’t say this about a lot of the speakers. Many had lectures that were dry and regurgitated material you could read in an SEOBook. Beyond that their speaking skills were often poor and they never really gave out much in the way of tips.

The conference is mostly solo SEO’s and agencies. Although more and more companies are showing up, the conference is still mostly made up of people in the industry. The ratio of brick and mortar companies to others is not very high. You can tell by the clothes. Suit and ties, or even business casual clothes are rare. There are mostly street clothes in the crowds.

Hanging out afterwards is a big (maybe bigger) part of the conference. Networking in the hotel bar and attending the parties and dinners may be more fun, but could also be more rewarding for your bank account. You run across experts and talk to people about what they do and it’s a great way to build relationships.

The click fraud session was heated. I hear it was much more so in the last conferences, and this tame it was tame in comparison, but it still had a lot of life compared to many of the other sessions. The panel is well versed in the issues and although I actually slept through Shuman’s initial lecture, the Q&A got pretty interesting…

The location was a good fit. The conference was held in midtown on 6th Ave in the Hilton. The Hilton has many many conferences and handles them pretty well. I hear next time they will be doing it at the Javits Center which is bigger, but far away from the restaurants, bars, and everything else. I hope this isn’t the case.

Overall, I should say it was a good experience. It was my first SES and it opened my eyes up to the industry a bit more. If the conference comes to your area and you don’t want to spend a lot of money, even walking around the exhibit hall for a day talking to people is rewarding. There are a lot of people that just go and party with other SEO’s to have fun, but if you are serious about the industry, I would recommend attending the whole thing at least once if you haven’t already.

Living in NYC has many social, cultural, and practical advantages, but is it worth it if you don’t need to commute to a building and work in an office? The answer is yes. Living in an area that has a lot of professionals in your industry, and people in general, is extremely valuable. I have met people who help me with my workload for my websites, clients, other SEOs that are a big reason for some of my success, as well as high profile people in the industry.

Last night I attended the ProBlogger meetup in New York. I went with a friend of mine who has a high profile in the industry and before the event he introduced me to the head of sales and head of international sales for Yahoo. We then went up to the event where I talked to Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, won a prize (which consequently gave me a great link to my blog), and got a picture with him.

The food and drinks were paid for by TextLinkAds, so the guys from there attended. Bloggers came from all over the the New York area, and any area within a tolerable train ride of New York. Talking to them and hearing about their experiences is enlightening. You pick up tips, learn about other niches, and most importantly build contacts.

Many factors influence where people choose to live, but if you are in the internet marketing industry, and are looking for a place don’t rule out places just because they are expensive. New York, as well as other places, can give you advantages you wouldn’t get anywhere else.

I looked around and found a few alternatives to Google Analytics. Feel free to share more information in the comments.

Mint
FAQ: http://www.haveamint.com/faqs/
Related blog posts:
Mint versus Google Analytics
Mint: Fresh Visitor Tracking
Stat tracking the Mint Way

CrazyEgg
Demo: http://crazyegg.com/demo
Related blog posts:
Wordpress CrazyEgg
CrazyEgg.com - A Brief Peak - Cool Stuff

Clicktracks
FAQ: http://support.clicktracks.com/clicktracks/faq.php
Video: http://www.clicktracks.com/comparison.php
Related blog posts:
Tracking Customer Conversion
Review Clicktracks v5.0

I currently use AWStats and Google Analytics (without the conversion tracking on), a few scripts, the built-in tracking from the affiliate companies, or don’t have conversion tracking at all. I am looking for a better solution, and will provide an update when I find one.