If you write several blog posts weekly for many years, you are very well aware of what “writer’s block” means. It happens very often that you just need a couple of words, a single line of text to get inspired. But where to find those words?

To me keyword research and Google search has always been huge sources of inspiration. Whenever I have nothing to write about, I either start searching randomly using some wicked search operators or turn to one of my favorite keyword research tools.

Last week I randomly stumbled upon another cool way to get inspired: use your Gmail as your keyword research tool.

Now, that idea may seem a bit forced at first but what if we start thinking about it:

• Gmail stores tons of relevant information. If you are interested in the topic or have expertise in it (or both), you are likely to be subscribed to at least dozen of related newsletters – that’s a huge resource of relevant content weekly.
• Gmail stores tons of relevant user-generated content. Again, being interested in some topic, you are likely to discuss it daily and at least 50% of the most substantial relevant conversation happens via email (which is again, Gmail for many people)
• Gmail has killer search feature (Google is good at that stuff, you know) which can be further improved!

Just try it now. Pick a random search term, go to Gmail and try searching. Now scan through the search snippets (which are short extracts from your email containing your search term). Look how much keyword research help it can turn to be!

Now, let’s try to have a bit more fun with the idea.

1. Highlight your search terms more vividly

If you have Google Toolbar installed (which you are very likely do), set it to search your Gmail and that will give you the way to highlight your search terms from the Google Toolbar:

2. Search all folders

By default, Gmail will only search through Inbox folder. To make your search broader (and include Spam folder, for example, which can include various promotional emails that will turn useful for keyword research inspiration).

This Greasemonkey script will put ‘in:anywhere’ in your search requests to Gmail by default to force it to include all folders.

3. Make your search more targeted

Gmail labels can turn to be great help in using Gmail as keyword research tool. Let’s say you have subscribed to a number of email newsletters but don’t want them to clutter your email inbox (and/or want to be able to search within these emails only).

All you need is to go to Gmail settings and create a new filter by the sender’s email address (or addresses):

In the second step you can set all those emails to skip the Inbox (wile still being available for searching) and create an easy-to-remember label to organize them:

Now, whenever you want to search within the “TechWebNews” folder, just use label:techwebnews in the search field!

This could work for Google Alerts, Twitter Alerts and many other community updates you need (like LinkedIn groups alerts for example).

4. Gmail Advanced Search!

Don’t forget that Gmail is Google’s service – so it has a great advanced search platform. Some of the most useful (in this case) Gmail advanced search options include:

• [-word] to exclude any word from your search;
• [subject:word] to force any word to appear in the email subject
• “Date within” feature available in “search Options” that allows to control how fresh the content is going to be:

5. How far can we go?

If we think about it, email search can turn so useful!

• Subscribe to your competitors’ email newsletter, filter it with Gmail label and check which keywords they tend to search and how.
• Subscribe to Twitter alerts via email and track which words your base term tends to appear with;
• Subscribe to Google alerts and search most instant Google results and search within them.
• You name it!

Post images via opacity and DonnaGrayson

Related posts:

1. Keyword Research Services
2. SEO Competitive Research Series at Search Engine Journal
3. Organizing Your Keyword Modifiers (SEJ)

What determines the usefulness of some of your content (as compared to the rest of your articles you write)? The number of people who found it valuable enough to link to it? The number of people who found it great enough to Tweet it or vote on social media? The number of people who re-blogged it? There are plenty of criteria and it is a wise idea to evaluate your content against various combinations of the criteria. Another wise idea is to try to realize which part of one particular article accounted for its popularity and apparent “usefulness”. And here’s a great way to do that: see which part of your article is copied more than the other parts and thus get a clear understanding of what exactly appealed to your readers. In other words, create a copy heat map of you posts. Why can a copy heatmap be used to define the content quality? This is obvious, I guess: if you copy something on the page, you either want to share it or save for the future reference. In either case, you have found the content useful enough to share or save. Thus, by taking a look at what people copy from your pages, you can define what appeals most to them and how to create more content like that. Is there any tool that can help you create a copy heat map of your pages? If there were no such a tool, I wouldn’t write the post! Tracer, the tool that can be mainly used to protect your content and get links from content thieves, has another cool feature: the heat map of your content based on the number of times it was copied. Some examples? One of my most successful posts on color branding, has been copied multiple times. According to Tracer, the post most useful parts are:

• The table representing the color in business theory;
• The facts about colors listed below the table:

My other high-traffic post on optimizing images for search and social media appeals to the readers especially due to that part about making the images social-media-friendly:

What other heat mapping tools do we know? We’ve already seen a few tools that help you create heat maps:

• CrazyEgg shows which elements of your page gets clicked more often;
• Feng-Gui shows you the heat map of any image you submit based on the colors, orientation, contrast, intensity, element size, etc.

While these tools are definitely worth a try for various purposes; they can hardly be used to determine the quality of your actual content. So what are your thoughts? Do you use any of the listed heat mapping tools and if yes, then how exactly? Post image by steve phillips

Related posts:

1. Blatant Content Plagiarism – Am I To Thank You?

There is one cool joke that the worst nightmare of a web hacker is that he suddenly forgets all his passwords. Password fatigue (or password chaos or identity chaos) is the feeling experienced by many people who are required to remember and manage a lot of passwords.

And how many passwords do you need to keep in your head? I am sure as an Internet marketer, blogger and/or active social media user you must have quite a few passwords to manage.

This post will attempt to make your life easier or at least to encourage you to take it easier…

Creating a Good Password

These are plenty naturally. Most will just generate a random combination of letters and numbers which will be impossible to remember. Others are more fun, they generate passwords based on some criteria you specify.

One of such tools generating memory-friendly passwords is PasswordBird which creates passwords based on your (favorite) second and last names and (your date of birth):

Facts: How Good Is Your Password?

1. This table shows the approximate amount of time required for a computer or a cluster of computers to guess various passwords. The figures shown are approximate and are the maximum time required to guess any password.

2. The following infographic visualizes the “breakability” of some of the popular passwords based on their strength – it might appear a little funny but lot of people are actually using those simple passwords (via):

3. There are also a few tools that help you measure the “strength” of your password: here’s one of them called Password Meter that checks how strong your password is based on the combination of the following criteria:

• Number of characters;
• Number of uppercase letters and lowercase letters;
• Numbers and symbols;
• Repeat characters;
• Consecutive uppercase letters, lowercase letters and numbers;

Password Manager

Many people recommend LastPass, KeePass and Roboform.

As FireFox junkie, I am using a FireFox plugin for that (which probably is not really secure or..?). The plugin is Sxipper and I find it awesome and easy to use.

Sxipper claims to protect your personal data by keeping it secure on your computer and retrieving it for you when you choose to share it online. Besides, Sxipper recognizes OpenID forms and helps you manage your OpenIDs.

Immediately after the installation, the tool will offer you to import all your passwords in it:

After importing (or entering manually) your personal data in Sxipper, go to any page containing a login form and you’ll be able to select the username under which you want to login:

The tool has a plenty more options and features you can read about here including persona management, disposable email address, form auto-filling, etc.

Post img by by azrainman

Related posts:

1. The *Working* Guide to Reaching out to Influencers Using Social Media

Ok, just stumbled across this site allowing to create your own brain games and got a bit obsessed creating SEO-related crosswords, word search games, and puzzles. Here are a few of my quick creations in case you have a minute or two and are wondering how to spend them:

SEO Crossword:

SEO Word Search

Google Favicon Sliding Puzzle:

Ok, guess I should get back to work now. Let me know if you had at least some fun with that!

No related posts.

I recently shared on SEJ my latest favorite FireFox addon Search Cloudlet that generated a tag cloud of Google and Yahoo SERPs. I have also suggested its possible implication for keyword context research.

The interesting part of this whole thing is that the tool developers appeared to be based in my home country – Ukraine. Naturally, we got into contact and arranged to keep each other up-to-date of search news.

So today I received a message of them (it is hard to believe but we still communicate in English ) sharing the tool awesome feature: it now works for Twitter.

So, if you have it installed, you will see a tag cloud whenever you visit anyone’s profile or Twitter search.

For a profile page you will see a user’s favorite terms used, as well as who he recently addressed his tweets to:

For Twitter search see most popular term “neighbors” as well as recent related hashtags, most actively addressed Twitterers:

Related posts:

1. How to Create a Useful Twitter Retweet Bot
2. Use Gmail Search for Keyword Research and Inspiration
3. Search in Search: Raising Panic and What Else Google Has to Say

WinningTheWeb shook the Internet Marketing world by announcing the launch of the ultimate list of Internet marketing blogs. Now you will know where to refer to once you want to refine your RSS subscription list! Site categories include affiliate marketing, blogging, copywriting, Internet marketing, link building, make money online, SEO / SEM, and social media.

The blogs are ranked based on the overall score derived from the following important factors:

Feedburner RSS subscribers;
Alexa Rank;
Compete Rank;
Technorati Rank;
Google PageRank;
Yahoo inbound links;
StumbleUpon reviews;
del.icio.us votes;
L Links from Winning the Web;
V User votes.

You can sort the list based on any of the above metrics. What’s more, you can also search the list (and the search function works amazingly well by the way).

My favorite option is the ability to see the ranking history: you can see how your blog rankings change over time!

The service also offers very cute badges for all ranked sites (see mine under my photo in the sidebar!).

Post image: Taxi Ranks

Related posts:

1. The Internet According to Nan
2. The Art of Flattering – Social Media Marketing How To
3. Social Media Marketing – Think Long-Term

A few days ago I tested this blog homepage with one handy tool I recommend trying: Five Second Test. That was both fun and useful. Now what I did:

• got a screenshot of the blog home page;
• filled in the form;
• uploaded the screenshot there;
• posted the generated link at Twitter and asked my dear followers to take part in the experiment.

The participants were offered to look at the picture for 5 seconds and list max. 5 things they remembered.

Here is the screenshot I posted (click for the full-sized version):

Now the results (that were fun): 25 Twitteres took part in the test.

Most often mentioned page elements:

• Top post title (mentioned 10 times);
• Color – “red” (mentioned 10 times); examples:
  • red head;
  • red & white color scheme;
  • red letters, etc.
•  Top post image (mentioned 9 times):
  • cursive writing;
  • frosted glass;
  • window with signature, etc.
• SEO smarty (mentioned 8 times);
• SEO consulting (mentioned 7 times);
• My photo (mentioned 7 times):
  • your portrait;
  • Ann Smarty’s face;
  • author’s photo, etc
• RSS (mentioned 6 times).

The funniest result:

1: Red in top
2: SEO Consultants Signature – Whats your tactic
3: Damn…

Conclusions:

• SEO association ended up the most popular after all (together with SEO smarty and SEO consulting it was mentioned 20 times);
• I do realize the test was taken by people who knew me (as they are my Twitter followers) and most probably had already seen my blog before the test.
• The test is a good way to look at your own site “from outside”; so try it!

P.S. Guess what the trick with the post image is!

Post image: Infinite Usability Loop!

Related posts:

1. How To Effectively Test Website Design and Functionality
2. 5 Steps To a Smart Internal Site Structure
3. Search Within a Search – How This Could Mean Bad News for Your Site

While at SEJ I posted a list of my favorite SEO plugins, here I decided to follow-up with the list of extensions that save time and let you work more effectively:

Tools	Most useful feature	How useful I consider the tool
Foxmarks	Bookmarks synchronizer
Wizz RSS	RSS and Atom news reader for FF
Co.mments	Track any blog conversation
Read later	Quickly save a page for further reference
Morning Coffee	Schedule any site(s) to open on a set day
Page Saver	Easily capture a page
Google notebook	save and share notes
InFormEnter	help in form filling

1. Foxmarks – synchronize your bookmarks across several computers (most useful if you are working both at office and at home like me). Access your bookmarks from any computer anytime via my.foxmarks.com.

2. Wizz RSS – easily access your feed list via FireFox.

Most useful features:

• Sort the blogs in folders;
• See what you have already read (red bullet) and which post is new/not yet viewed (green button).
• synchronize your subscriptions across several computers with help of Foxmarks.

3. Page Saver – capture a page, resize and edit images.

Most useful features:

• capture entire pages (not just the visible part);
• scale captured images to any desired percentage.

4. Co.mments button – keep track of any blog conversation.

5. Read later – allows to bookmark pages to read them later; synchronize the pages using FoxMarks.

6. Morning Coffee – schedule your favorite sites to open on a set day of the week; synchronize your settings using FoxMarks.

7. Google notebook – quickly save links and citations and arrange your notes in folders; share your notes with friends; access them from any computer using your Google account.

8. InFormEnter – easy form filling.

Related posts:

1. Content Scam Alert: Using Foreign Characters to Make the Piece Look Unique

I have just posted another article at Search Engine Journal describing a way to monitor Google keyword positions over time.

Tracking SERPs is an important SEO technique that helps:

• to get a deeper understanding of how search engines work;
• to keep an eye on both your new and established competitors;
• to discover new SEO tactics and to learn their effectiveness.

Here is a short outline of the post to give you an idea:

Post image: North Narrabeen Rock Pool Before Dawn

Related posts:

1. My Google’s Addiction : Sorry Guys, but I Do Love Google Search
2. Use Gmail Search for Keyword Research and Inspiration
3. How to Ghost-Google: Searching Google without Google to Know about You

I will be posting on competition research at Search Engine Journal. The first post is already up and you are welcome to let me know what you think: Make the Most of SEO Competitive Research: Evaluating the Competition.

In the series I will be looking into:

• Evaluating your overall competition.
• Determining your direct competitors.
• Defining who to compete with.
• Exploring your competitors’ SEO strategies.
• Best free and paid tools to analyze your competitors.

You may get a sneak peek on what I will be talking about via the slideshow:

SEO Competitive Research is part of Don’s Home based business group project

.

Post image: rush hour

Related posts:

1. Use Gmail Search for Keyword Research and Inspiration
2. Keyword Research Services
3. Search Cloudlet Adds Twitter Tag Clouds