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The guys behing DuoBlogger, a blog created to share knowledge with webmasters and online advertisers (they did a great reveiw of WordStream recently!), are offering a new iPhone app that AdSense users should find interesting (and it's free!):

DuoSense is an advanced AdSense application aimed to both track and analyze your AdSense income. Core features include showing daily earnings, advanced plot-able statistics for earnings, PPC and CTR, plus a help center with AdSense coaching tutorials.

Here's a quick video showing how it works:

You can learn more about DuoSense on the DuoBlogger blog or at the iPhone app store.

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It's not often that I bookmark something just because it's awesome—most of my bookmarks here at the office are applications and login pages that I need for work. Dull, I know. But this week I found a resource that has nothing to do with work and that I know I'll want to return to again and again: a list of "The Best Magazine Articles Ever."

It's a long list of articles that date back as far as the '40s, so naturally it's full of things I haven't read. But I was happy to see a few of my favorites on the list—like "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage" by David Foster Wallace, an article about the politics of dictionary-making. I read this in college and, as a budding linguist, just loved it to death—I still have that copy of Harper's filed away somewhere, almost 10 years later. (Alas, my other all-time favorite, a "Junk Food Taste-Off" from the much lamented teen rag Sassy, didn't make the list.)

There is much, much more to explore in the list, from John Updike's seminal baseball piece "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" to Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail," one of a handful of articles directly related to our industry. (Anderson makes the list twice, with another Wired contribution called "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.") You'll find articles on politics, sports, celebrities, medical science, blogging, and supercomputers. Basically, you've got your leisure/self-improvement reading cut out for you for a while.

This got me thinking—what are the best online marketing articles of all time? Unfortunately, though my work has involved varying degrees of search marketing for the past five years or so, I've only been faithfully reading new material on the subject for the past year and a half. To boot, my reading has slanted heavily toward blogs as opposed to magazines. So compiling a list of the best online marketing articles ever would require a lot of catch-up time.

I can, however, point you to some of my favorite blogs posts about online marketing from the past year. These are the ones that stick out in my memory—usually if I remember a post or an article ten minutes after I read it, much less ten weeks or ten months, it's because it has a new idea or perspective I haven't thought about before. So my favorites tend to be commentary, analysis, and even satire more than nitty-gritty how-to guides. If you're good at spotting trends, patterns, new business models, or hypocrisies, you can probably count me as a reader.

Without further "adieu," as my brother would say, here they are:

The New York Times Algorithm & Why It Needs Government Regulation: I read this piece by Danny Sullivan, published just a few weeks ago, before I read the NYT piece it refers to, making it all the more effective. It's a brilliant satire of the New York Times' inane suggestion that we "give some government commission the power to look at [Google's algorithm] tweaks." Danny writes:

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July is almost over, folks! What's that mean? It means that time marches on, we're not getting any younger, and so on (it may be time to buy a youth-activating serum and/or update that unrealistically hot photo on your online dating profile), but mostly it means it's time for WordStream's best of the month! You voted with your eyeballs, and these were the top 10 most popular posts on the blog in July.

1. Want More Link Juice? Here’s an Easy Way to Get It: This how-to from Ken explains how to drain link juice from your existing content with internal anchor links.
2. The Evolution of Ranking Signals: Google Is Getting Past the Link: In this guest post, David Harry looks at other kinds of signals that Google may begin to value more than links.
3. How Tumblr Opened My Eyes to the Social Web: Curious about Tumblr? Terry Van Horne outlines its many capabilities and possibilities.
4. How Much Should You Earn as an SEO?: Here are some tips for figuring out how much you're worth, given your location, experience level and other variables.
5. Content Optimization Strategy: Revamp Your Content to Capitalize on Missed Long Tail Keyword Opportunities: Ken explains how to use your analytics app and our blog plug-in to rework existing content with long-tail keyword phrases.
6. Recommended Resources: Glen Allsopp: Not familiar with Glen Allsopp of ViperChill? You should be! Here's why.
7. How to Target Keywords with Blog Posts: A three-step process for identifying keyword opportunities to target with optimized blog posts.
8. The Creativity in PPC: Ad Copy Lessons from Advertising Masterpieces: Hanapin Marketing's Caleb Levell asks what we can learn from some classic advertising campaigns, and shows how to apply those lessons to PPC.
9. Building a PPC Campaign: Workflow & Mistakes to Avoid: Gab Goldenberg walks through the process of setting up a new PPC campaign, plus some gotchas to watch out for.
10. Recommended Resources: Dana Lookadoo: Another great resource, Dana of Yo! Yo! SEO regularly blogs and tweets about SEO and social media.

Our #1 most popular piece of content this month wasn't technically a blog post, but if you missed it, check out our awesome "Do You Know Who's Watching You?" infographic. (Then have Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me" stuck in your head for the rest of the day. You're welcome!)

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According to Matt Cutts, linkbait is anything "interesting enough to catch people's attention." Of course, the best linkbait doesn't just catch it but keep it. These five sites are worth re-visiting; here's why they work.

1. Lifehacker

Consistently named to lists of the web's best, Lifehacker (part of the Gawker Media family) is a blog of "tips and downloads for getting things done."

Why This Works: Far from a short-lived linkbait gimmick, this is a legitimately useful website full of life improvement tips (including time management, organization, and smart repurposing) geared toward the tech-geek type. Recent popular topics include "Turn an Older iPhone Into a Prepaid Voice and Data Unit," "Rename Files Fast with the Tab Key," and "IKEA Jerker Do-It-Yourself Treadmill Desk." Because clever how-to content is linkbait gold, and because this site has an active teach-savvy community, almost every post is ready-made linkbait! Lifehacker is a great model for sustainable linkbait that really adds value (as opposed to being merely a fun a waste of time).

2. Ships That Pass

Ships That Pass is "a collection of fake, imagined, and literary missed connections posted to Craigslist and then re-posted here with real and actual responses."

Why this works: The Missed Connections section of Craigslist is an awesome way to waste time in and of itself, and there's always room for good variations on a good thing. (For example, notice how many desserts are improved by adding ice cream or peanut butter.) When brainstorming linkbait, you don't always have to start completely from scratch; you can bootstrap by building a site or a tool that riffs on another site that's already established and popular. (Along these same lines, see the Firefox add-on that allows you to "dislike" something on Facebook.)

3. The Linkbait Generator

"Need catchy blog post ideas?" Enter a subject and the Linkbait Generator provides a list of absurd and hilarious titles that just might work.

Why this works: This tool that helps you brainstorm linkbait is great linkbait itself. Making it easier for people to do the things they want or need to do is a pretty failsafe way to get attention. Coming up with the concept is Step 1 of writing a great blog post. Other steps include keyword research (linkbait: keyword tools) and adding images (linkbait: a tool to help you find appropriate pictures for your posts). What other tasks or processes can you make easier for people?

4. Wordle

According to the site, "Wordle is a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text." You can then edit your clouds with different fonts, colors, and layouts.

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We created a fun (unless you're paranoid; then it's probably just unnerving) infographic that cronicles some of the things people can get access to on the Internet, particularly via Google and Facebook.

You can get at the full infographic by clicking on the below. Please Digg/link/etc. if you're so inclined:

Feel free to add your 2c in the comments as well, thanks!

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The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a small retailer in Alabama that profited from noticing and acting on a paid search opportunity.

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On-page SEO just isn't enough to secure great rankings. You also need incoming links, which signal to search engines that people value your content. You'll get the best results if these links are:

• From high-authority domains
• Relevant to your marketspace
• Deep, i.e., not just to your home page
• Optimized with targeted anchor text

So how are you supposed to get these links? Write great content and hope for the best? Yes, to some extent, that's a strategy, but unless you're very patient, you'll probably want to be more proactive about getting good links.

One way to do this is by writing guest posts for prominent blogs in your space. The WordStream blog invites proposals for and submissions of guest posts that cover topics of interest to our audience (including SEO, PPC, keyword research and management, social media, and general Internet marketing).

In return for your expertise, we can offer:

• Links back to your site, with the anchor text of your choosing
• A link from a PageRank (PR) 6 domain
• An opportunity to gain traffic and new readers

If you're interested in writing a guest post for WordStream, send me an email.

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The most thought-provoking thing I read this week was Joe Hall's regular column on Marketing Pilgrim, Cup of Joe: "Sometimes You Should Be Yourself & Sometimes You Really Shouldn't!" Here, Joe questions the common wisdom that the key to succeeding in social media is "being yourself":

We have all heard that the trick to social media is to be yourself. In doing so we create authenticity and transparency that others can trust. But the question emerges, when does being yourself get in the way of building a strong personal brand?

Joe recounts a kerfuffle that went down last week, mostly on Twitter, between Chris Pearson, who created the very popular Thesis WordPress theme, and Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress—who contends that Thesis violates the WordPress GPL (general public license). (UPDATE: Mashable announces that Pearson has agreed to a split GPL license for Thesis.)

I don't follow Pearson or Mullenweg, but I caught some of this argument indirectly, through retweets, and it looked pretty ugly. Joe writes that they were "trading more public jabs then the cast members of the Jersey Shore":

I was disappointed in both of them. I have been creating WordPress themes and plugins for myself and clients for the last three years. I have seen Mullenweg and the WordPress community grow and evolve into a truly amazing thing. And similarly I have seen talented entrepreneurs like Pearson rise from that community to create outstanding products and their own communities.

So it really troubled me to see two men that I really admire and draw so much inspiration from act so unprofessional in public. For me, their behavior was damaging to their brand.

Joe doesn't stoop to including direct quotes—but I'm not above it! Just to give you a taste of the flavor of the argument:

Jane Wells of Automattic, a startup that works with WordPress and other open source projects, had this to say on her blog:

There is a history of antipathy between Thesis/Chris and WordPress/Matt that predates me. I have to admit that when I first started working with the WordPress open source project and I would see their squabbling on Twitter, it reminded me of boys kicking each other in the schoolyard.

That seems about right. I don't think the tweets were really Jersey Shore–level, but certainly they weren't very professional. Both Chris and Matt have tens of thousands of followers, and even more people were following the argument that day via the #thesiswp hashtag, so the argument was very public. This seems like a case where being yourself and speaking your mind can be dangerous and damaging. So what's the answer—to be yourself or not to be yourself? Does personality have no place in social media?

I'm reminded of the words of Angela Chase, Claire Danes' character on the late, great My So-Called Life: "People say you should be yourself, like 'yourself' is this definite thing, like … a toaster." The point being, the self is malleable. You can let your personality show, without showing all of it. You can adjust your personality slightly to suit the situation.

I'm a fairly opinioned and outspoken person, but I don't think my coworkers would describe me that way (correct me if I'm wrong, guys), because I tone down the snark at work. I can think of a lot of situations in which I've had to be a modified version of myself—for example, when meeting people for the first time, especially when their impression of me really counts (employers, my boyfriend's parents).

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I heard about Problogger’s 7 link challenge via Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media. This challenge—to link to seven past blog posts that fit into seven categories—doesn’t set off my fear of heights or eating bugs, so I thought we should take a stab at it. As Lisa points out, this challenge can benefit “old and new readers” of our blog, by highlighting some of best posts from the archives that you may have missed. 

Without further ado, here are the seven (give or take) links:

Your first post: The first post on the WordStream blog, not counting the welcome announcement, was Larry’s “How to Achieve the Best Results for PPC & SEO,” a list of 10 best practices that formed the cornerstones (can you have 10 cornerstones?) of our product philosophy.

My own first post, on August 7, 2009, was “SMO Is the New SEO: The Rise of Social Media Optimization,” in which I argue that old-school linking is dying and social data is the new link. (Apparently the hot blog topics haven’t changed at all in a year.) The best thing about this post is the awesome bar graph I made in Snagit. Worth it.

A post you enjoyed writing the most: Tom had fun with “Snake Oil SEO – Who’s Really Selling Something, Here?,” in which he responds to one of the legion disingenuous posts that call SEOs scammers for spurious reasons.

Ken's favorite to write was "We've Moved!"—chronicalling our relocation from a grimy temporary space in the Financial District to our beauteous Back Bay digs with (mostly) working elevators.

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This is a guest post by Gab Goldenberg. Gab writes a blog for intermediate to advanced SEOs. He's offering a free download chapter from his advanced SEO book for the same audience. And while he's linking gratuitously, his sister Maya is a professional makeup artist for brides, celebs and others.

I haven't done PPC in a long time, so when I had to set something up for my dad's dental continuing education conference and travel business, it took a while to shake off the rust. I'm still figuring things out, but so far I've got some things flowing smoothly, and some mistakes worth learning from, too. So let's see what we can learn from this campaign.

(This was in the context of trying PPC again for my dad's dental CE cruises. I already knew the campaign strategy and so was able to create the landing page quickly, making the wireframe myself, having the graphics fleshed out by Angeles, and the HTML sliced by PSD to HTML CSS.)

If you don't have your strategy set already, you need to think things through first. (For instance, is it going to be an e-commerce or lead gen play? Who's the audience? Search or content network? Etc.) Here are the steps for PPC workflow:

1. Start by reviewing past campaigns for keyword ideas, impression and click-through rate (CTR) data, as well as ad copy ideas. See what keywords were irrelevant and which worked better. Draw up negative keywords accordingly.
2. Organize the campaign by keyword theme -- consider the slight nuances in intent between keywords and put yourself in the searcher's shoes. What exactly do they have in mind? Use campaigns liberally as an organizing concept.
3. For each campaign, jot down specific terms that match those slight nuances to show searchers that you get what they want, exactly.
4. Create the campaigns in AdWords Editor as per step 2.
5. Use SEOBook's keyword list generator for quickly building variations and adding the word "Phrase" or "Exact" at the end, so I can easily paste into AdWords Editor and have the match type set up.
6. Write the ads, using the ideas from step 3. Leave the destination URL blank. (See mistake #4 below.)
7. Adapt the landing page template for message match. Create one landing page for each ad group. Ad titles become h1s, ad copy becomes h2s, display URLs roughly match the destination URL, and the rest is generic.
8. Edit ads to include URLs of message matched-landing pages.

And here are some mistakes to watch out for: