That’s a quotation from Michael Jordan. Each month, I’ve titled my ‘Letter from the CEO’ post with a movie quotation, but this month I thought one about teamwork was most appropriate. The main reason is because I’m so proud of the Hanapin team.
Since March, when we started the reinvestment in our blogs, the team has really focused their efforts, and it’s paying off in spades. We’re engaging our readers more by getting topic suggestions from them and holding contests, we’ve restarted our blog series, and introduced new elements like the video blog and Twitter interviews. Overall, visits and pageviews have grown significantly as a result! Comparing the previous 90 days to the same time frame before that, we’re now up 19% and 25%, respectively, for PPC Hero! (We inadvertently lost some stats on SEO Boy, though we’re looking into whether a second analytics program was tracking.)
Since I’m already talking about the Hanapin team, before I get into what’s in store on the blogs this month, we have a lot happening that I want to share first.
We have two new Account Executives starting next week, who join the five who have already started this year! We’ve already begun looking for two more – with 2+ years of paid search experience managing accounts of $50K/mo in spend – and if you fit the bill, please email me at pat.east@hanapinmarketing.com. We’re also hiring for a sales and a marketing position too, and once those are filled, we’ll be at 80% capacity of the new office space we just moved into! And, most important, the team has been killing it on their accounts! Two clients have significantly increased their budgets this year – one has tripled and another has nearly doubled! We also picked up a competitor to Groupon, so the team is busy trying to slay that IPO’ing beast!
On to the blogs…
Last month, Jessica Cates posted her top five Excel tips for PPC managers, and it went off like gangbusters! Among our how-to posts, it alone comprised a third of our pageviews! Since it seems you liked it so much, we’re doing a full series on Excel this month. We’ll expand on the list of Excel functions in Jessica’s post and even create Excel worksheet templates.
Two more topics on deck are general campaign setup and which default settings to change (shocker – the default settings by Google aren’t always the best ones!) and a to-do list for everything PPC.
We’ll continue with the Twitter interviews, which we’ve named “Heroviews.” These are interviews with folks in the SEM industry that are conducted completely over Twitter. Our first was with Tom Demers and last month’s was with Matt Umbro, which focused on lead generation. We’ll announce this month’s Heroview on the PPC Hero Twitter account, and you can follow the interview with the hashtag #heroview.
The video blogs have been really popular too! Hanapin’s Creative Specialist Jessica Rooney launched a new feature, Ticker Tuesday, last month, and it’s slowly but surely attracting its own audience. Most notably, we’ve surpassed our monthly goal for pageviews by 21%! Similar to ESPN’s “Pardon The Interruption,” there’s a running clock on the screen that counts down the time. So far, we’ve covered topics such as bidding, adCenter’s quality score, and setting up data feeds in Google’s Merchant Center. There’s also a great 15-minute video blog on enterprise-level PPC and how to manage those large accounts.
For SEO Boy, we’ll write about creating custom reports in the new version of Google Analytics. We’ll also explore Klout – what is it, how does it work, and if you should use it.
Also on SEO Boy, our June contest is a blog scavenger hunt! We’ll post a question each week and readers will search through our archives to find the answers. As always, we’ll have a prize. I’m told it will be a “summer goody basket.” Maybe a tasting box from Foodzie?!
Last but not least, custom illustrations! SEO Boy has already celebrated ‘National Leave the Office Early Day‘ and we have two others on deck for both blogs. We’ll celebrate the First Day of Summer on 6/21 and Social Media Day on 6/30. And, in case you missed last month’s custom illustrations, here’s a quick recap: Star Wars Day, Cinco de Mayo, and Geek Day.
Thanks again for reading and helping make our blogs big successes!