I just created a Captivate session demonstrating how to create content on my Drupal site, Christmas Australia

Captivate creates SWF content. That’s usually ok, except when I recorded the demo, I used a custom screen size to fit exactly what I wanted onto the screen. That meant that my Super Video converter could not convert the SWF file into another format such as MOV, or MPEG.

So I had to find a site that would allow me to upload SWF videos. Nope, YouTube doesn’t like them, nor Google Video, nor Vimeo. Photobucket will let you, but only for paid upgraded members.

So I Googled swf video sharing sites, and found Megaswf.com. Beautiful!. A few site that lets you upload SWF files - how rare is that - any gives you an address to share it from. It even reformats the size, so it will fit better.

Not sure if there are any bandwidth restrictions, but this is a particular niche. I’ll do a correctly formatted one for other Drupal functions, convert those and upload those to Youtube. Later.

Pretty happy. (You can watch it at Creating Content on Drupal if you like)

I was doing keyword research for a client yesterday.

Rather than trust any one keyword source, I used a few.
1. The free Google Keyword suggestion tool, to see how many searches happen in a month, and how tough the competition is.
2. A dummy AdWords campaign. Throw heaps of money at it, and estimate the number of clicks possible.
3. A paid keyword database. One of the most high profile keyword sources, with a relatively costly monthly subscription.

The variations were stunning. The paid database was under-estimated by multiple orders of magnitude. (This was for Australian figures). Apparently the figures come from deals with ISPs, select SEs and panel samples.

Given that the future was unreliable, I thought I’d try the past.

Went to Google Keyword Suggestions, and looked for the phrase “choosing a dog”.
Google suggested 1300 searches last month. (although the average is 1000/month)
I have number 1 position at Google for that phrase, so I went to Google Analytics to see how much traffic they sent me last month, specifically from Google. I got 284 hits, which was pretty nice. It also meant that position 1 at Google got me 21% of their searches last month. Not bad for MyDogSite.

Tried it with another keyword, to see if that was a fluke.
Google Keyword Suggestion tool said that last month, there were 6600 searches for “Halloween Australia” in Australia. I went to Google Analytics, and looked at my stats. Last month I got 521 hits from Google for that one keyword. Again, it was number one for the keyword at Google for most of the month, so that equated to 7% of the traffic. For interest, that was www.halloween-australia.com, so it would look pretty relevant to searchers.

For fun, I tried one last search, on a smaller scale - for “David Jones Christmas windows” (I’m a Christmas junkie). Google said there were 36 searches last month. I got 4 of them. So 11% from position 1. Small scale, but it’s a niche. (See my Christmas Australia site).

Now the paid tool, whose name I no longer want to mention, said that I should have received 7 searches all year, for “Choosing a dog”. That’s a little different to Google’s figures of 1300/month, and my actual 284 hits.

They have a disclaimer that the figures cannot be comprehensive, and are meant for comparing to other keywords, relatively. Fair enough. But those figures are out by more than an order of magnitude. They’re just misleading for my purposes.

Yep. We are no longer subscribing to that service. The free Google tool has won.

I have a site I advertise on Google AdWords.

It’s expensive, so I only pay for around 6-7 clicks per day. And I get annoyed when people spam those clicks.

Yesterday I had a business proposition entered in my request-more-information form.

They were trying to flog me the latest google backdoor secrets offer, promising they could get me Google traffic for a lot less money, beating the system, and buying their product. They apologetically were sending me to a free website at GoDaddy - with ugly free ads at the top of their splash page.

They tried to make out that it was a business approach.

Give me a break guys. Could there be anything less inspiring that what you did?

You clicked on my Google Ad, costing me money.
You don’t have a proper website.
You didn’t use the correct form on my website.
You didn’t research me.

My ad already has a 15% CTR, enough conversions to keep me happy at a small scale, has great relevance between the 4 keywords I chase, against the ad title, content and domain. I’m a Perry Marshall accolyte.

You’d better be pretty sure that you can improve my stats. And next time, try to get a proper website up, if you’re selling Google secrets.

That was the most laughable moment of my inbox yesterday.

I love these business rules, from Yanik Silver.

34 rules for the maverick entrepreneur. Running a business can and should be fun.

http://www.maverickbusinessinsider.com/