Whenever faced with a new client, II like to see who is in their competitor space and get an understanding of the keywords they rank for and where they spend their online dollars. While no report is dead on, the folks over at Spyfu can give you a general idea via competitor analysis. What I like to do is put in my client's website and pull a report of top competitors. From there, I pick the top trafficked competitors and view their information. Great way to find what keywords they focus on. If you have any other tools for competitor analysis, post a comment.

If you are in retail and have a catalog that you mail, why not maximize that catalog by creating a free eCatalog? This process assumes you can get a PDF version of the catalog. Past that, it is just work you need to crank out.

• Open the catalog PDF in Acrobat. You will need a version that allows you to create hyperlinks. I used Adobe 8 to get it done
• Compile a list of web addresses that correspond to the products in your catalog
  • I like to do this in Excel or Notepad. Just use something easy to copy/paste in.
• Choose the hyperlink tool in Acrobat
• Draw a hyperlink box over a product
• A hyperlink window will open up
• Copy the link from your spreadsheet and paste the link into the hyperlink window
• Do this for all the products in your eCatalog

Now to embed the eCatalog on your site

• I like to use Scribd for this process
• Upload your eCatalog to Scribd
• Scribd will process the document and provide an embed capability
• Copy the embed code and paste onto your site It is just that simple.

You now have an eCatalog. For extra credit, you'll want to track the revenue generated by the free eCatalog. So be sure and tag all of your links with a naming convention that identifies the link as eCatalog. I like to use Google's URL Builder to tag my links. Then you can monitor the links in your Analytics package to see how much money the free eCatalog generated. Enjoy and let me know if you have implemented an eCatalog.

I get this question a lot. As if there is some magic algorithm I can pull up that will pin down the exact day and time to send customer's email. I've been on teams that test, test, test to pinpoint the day and I have been on teams that just wing it. What is the outcome? Both see comparable open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

My simple answer? Let the web traffic tell you. If my traffic tends to slip on Thursdays and Fridays, I am darn sure to send an email at the tail end of the week.