If you missed Part 1 of my Making Data Sexy series, I covered cool tips for formatting data in Excel, including how to:

• Format as a table
• Format cells
• Filter and sort your data
• Use conditional formatting (the only way to add sex appeal to a table)
• De-clutter your spreadsheets

Now it’s time for the fun stuff…

In the video below I’ll show you how to set up graphs in Excel (because PCs and Macs don’t differ that much when it comes to charts I just did one video).  I will be compiling into 15 minutes what has taken me a couple years of intensive concentration to learn. It’s everything I learned the hard way by poring over Excel books at the gym, in nail and beauty salons, on airplanes, at sporting events, you name it. Yes, I’m that girl. You’re welcome.

But before we jump in, it’s really important to understand when to use each chart type. I’m going to just cover the ones I use daily — and so should you. They’re easy once you understand the basics.

Column Chart

This is my chart du jour. There is rarely a day that goes by that I don’t at least reference one. The column chart is great for most tasks.

You can chart out one item at a time like this:

Click for larger image.

Or if you have multiple items, you have two choices. You can either cluster them like this:

Click for larger image.

Or stack them like this:

Click for larger image.

Line Chart

If I have a lot of data points I’m charting out, I tend to use line charts. They’re especially ideal to show fluctuations over time.

Here’s an example of one that shows Facebook engagements over a period of a month:

Click for larger image.

You can do stacked line charts over time, but I’m not a fan. I’d much prefer to display the data as an…

Area Chart

In the same way I’m not a fan of stacked line charts, I’m only a fan of stacked area charts. The reason is that if it’s clustered, you could have data hiding behind whatever data series is in front. It’s tantamount to sticking the shortest kid in the class behind Baby Huey for a class pic. I was one of the two shortest kids in my class all through elementary school (I shot up to average in high school). That would not be a cool thing to do to your vertically-challenged data.

However, the stacked area chart is great for charts that have a lot of data points because you see how each piece contributes to the total, like so:

Click for larger image.

Pie Chart

The pie chart is to be treated with caution. I’ll use a pie chart if I have less than 10 data points, but I try to keep it closer to six.  Here’s an example of one that I pulled apart slightly to make the organic traffic pop more.

Click for larger image.

Combination Charts

There are times when you want to show two different metrics that have either different units of measurement or are so different in their values, one data set dwarfs the other. Good examples of these would be visits vs. bounce rate, visits vs. conversion rate, unique visitors vs. revenue, conversions vs. conversion rate, page authority and domain authority vs. number of partial match links, etc.

I’ll show you in the video below how to create charts like this:

Click for larger image. 

Where to Go From Here

If you’ve read the first post in this series (and watched the video) and then grasped these simple techniques, you can go test your skills by checking out our post on how to do competitive analysis with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. But if you want to kick off your Excel exploits by practicing with the data I use in the video, I compiled a starter spreadsheet that contains just the data for all the charts I went through here. Go play with the data and get comfortable with Excel’s charting tools.

The Goods

I’m (barely) resisting the urge to say 15 minutes will save you 15 hours of data or more on wrestling with data. But you can be the judge of that. Enjoy, data gumshoes!

P.S. Being from New Jersey, I have never talked as slowly as I did in this video my life! But, per Jon Henshaw’s advice, I recorded the video first and then made the audio to fit, and I gave myself too much time. I’ll get the hang over this eventually. I also aim to remember to plug my microphone in every time I record. Derp!

 To stay posted on our “Making Data Sexy” series, you may want to subscribe to our blog. Also, follow us on Facebook and hang out with us on Twitter.

Being resourceful is critical to getting the job done. As web designers and graphic designers we are constantly looking at the latest tools and tips on how to push our craft and better our workflow.

This list is some of the tools and resources that I have been incorporating into my processes, whether it is something that is inspirational by way of geeky interviews that talk shop about hard/software used like The Setup or a website like Designers MX and Stereomood that fuel my creativity by stimulating my ears with fresh music. Dive in and please feel free to let me know what tools or resources help you and how by posting a comment!

Lorempixum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. What? If you are a graphic artist or web designer and have to use dummy text or filler (or meat and filler) on a daily basis- you know. Lorempixum is that but with images and photos; a genius idea that allows you to specify what type of subject and size you want your filler image to be and it will generate an image for you to use. They even have a bunch of preset settings to choose from.

Little Big Details

User interface, the space where interaction between humans and machines occur, is everywhere. The Internet makes us, as users, appreciate the beautiful- intuitive- simplicity of a great interface, or leaves us feeling deeply annoyed and lost. I am always inspired by creative design in this area and Little Big Details is a Tumblr that shows off amazing examples to learn from and be inspired by. Definitely worth a follow.

The Web Font Combinator

The Web Font Combinator is a cool name for a site that lets you preview web font combinations and sizes instantly. Simple, helpful and to the point (or should I say pixel). Currently this tool only uses fonts supplied by the Google Font Directory, as well as a handful of common system fonts.

The Setup

Get your geek on at The Setup and read cool interviews with industry creatives and vanguards from all walks of life. They talk shop and get asked all the right questions from ‘setup’ of hard/software to inspiration. I love this: “Despite appearances, the site is not actually sponsored by Apple – people just seem to like using their tools. We’re a fan, too.”

Designers MX

Music is on almost 70% of my day when I am pushing pixels on the computer. It drives me when I need that boost and it puts me in that zone where I seem to loose track of time and look up at the clock and see that I have just spent the last 2 hours in Photoshop and forgot to blink. Designers love to make mixes of music. Designers MX asks creative leaders what music fuels their creativity. I love this concept and it is a great way to discover new music/ideas!

Stereomood

Piggybacking on Designers MX, here is another way to get inspired by music. The genius idea behind Stereomood is that you can pick a playlist to listen to based on your mood or emotion. Feeling happy, they have that. Feeling sexy… yep, that too.

What Web tools or online resources inspire you or make you more productive ‘on the reg’? I would love to hear!

Since Twitter’s rise to the top, people and companies have been trying to determine its worth. And quantify it.

The latest darling of the measurement crowd is Klout, but I don’t want to single out any one app here — TwitterGrader, PeerIndex and Twitalyzer are just a few of the tools that measure an accounts influence, or success, on Twitter. There’s nothing wrong with any of these tools if they’re kept in perspective and used as an indicator.

To be fair, this isn’t new, either. Not even on Twitter.

Back when #FollowFriday was still relatively new, everyone was trying to figure out who was being recommended the most. So sites cropped up that tracked it. One of the most popular at the time was Top Follow Friday. It was interesting, sure, to see who were the people being recommended the most.

But a curious thing happened. People started retweeting all posts that recommended themselves. Sometimes, they’d add a “thanks” or “tx!” or “tyvm” at the beginning of the tweet to make it less obvious, but often it would just be a straight retweet.

Why would anyone do that? Simple. It made you rise in the stats. Each tweet with the #FollowFriday hashtag (the site now counts #FF tweets as well) and your name counted as a separate endorsement. And how could they not? Unless someone was monitoring each tweet and deciding if it was a true endorsement or not, it would be unfair to discount any tweet.

The Oatmeal pretty much sums up what Follow Friday has become.

So some of the people at the top of the list were truly recommended by a large number of people. And others were there simply because they retweeted (and sometimes retweeted again) every #FF they received.

And so it is now with the vast collection of influence measurement tools online; nobody knows what is truly indicated by their scores. And worse – few people care.

Scores tap into our natural competitiveness and have the ability to make us unreasonably happy or sad – increasing your Klout score or any other measurement releases endorphins and gives us an extra bounce in our step.

The good news: On TwitterGrader, I have a score of a perfect 100! But I have no idea what that even means. My rank is 5,811. All those 5,810 people above me also have perfect scores.  And so do a lot of people below me.

I look at TwitterGrader and see a lot of names that make perfect sense to be members of the “Twitter Elite,” as they’re dubbed. But how many of them just figured out what it takes to rise to the top and did it? It’s like when students are taught exactly what they need for standardized tests so they score well, but they may not know where New Zealand is.

The top two members of the elite, last night, were Justin Bieber fan accounts.

In fairness, the epic slowed-down version of "Baby" was pretty great.

Heck, maybe they are the most elite accounts on Twitter. I mean, Justin Bieber’s awfully popular. But does it mean they’re the most important? Sure, if you’re interested in Justin Bieber.

But what if Radiohead is more your cup of tea? Or Beethoven?

That’s exactly why Klout came under scrutiny when it came out with its lists of the most influential topics of 2010 – Justin Bieber topped President Obama. And Klout made a good argument as to why, to a degree, that wasn’t just a whole bunch of hoopla.

The post linked to above pointed out that a YouTube video linked to by a Bieber tweet generated 10 times as many views as a video linked to by an Obama tweet. The missing part of that equation was where all those views came from — did rabid fans watch a well-crafted fan-made video 10 times just to hear Justin croon?  I’d wager that few people watched Obama’s Weekly Address more than once, no matter how awesome they thought it was.

Sure, Klout has a lot of things that are on the mark – a good measure of how often you’re retweeted, by how many people and how many lists you’re on. And I think its analysis of what kind of Twitter user you are is pretty astute.

They appreciate me!

That’s pretty accurate when it comes to how I use Twitter – I share a lot of content, whether through retweets or tweeting Tumblr reblogs or just other things I find throughout the course of my day.

There are so many tools out there that people can use to schedule tweets or automatically follow users that it is, as of yet, a wee bit difficult to determine just how much Klout means. Or your Twitter Grade. Or any other measure out there.

Just like people did with #FollowFriday, there are ways to juke your stats.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with checking your score or grade or how you stack up against other people. It is a measure of something.

Exactly what — well, that’s another question entirely.

Everyone gets it, whether it’s just somebody contacting you and pretending they know you, or better yet- the spam that makes no sense about oil in the desert with jet planes that are on fire.

Or, someone with terrible grammar and spelling trying to get my bank info.

But email spam is a dying breed, and so is the outreach that can be associated with it. Blogger outreach, when done the wrong way, can really make you want to gouge your eyes out. I’ve gotten outreach emails before that were very poor, and then I’ve gotten some that actually made me a little happy inside- like this one. I took out the part that can’t be shown, but you can get an idea of why I liked this.

Someone ACTUALLY took the time to get to know a little about me, and my blog, and then contacted me. While yes, this is considered “spam”, it’s coming with good value and shouldn’t be treated like junk. It made me respond and actually exchange a few emails with them.

Blogger outreach is slowly moving and shifting with the social media landscape, and it’s important that we start learning the proper ways to do BETTER blogger outreach, instead of more, and also how to tie in social media with the mix. There’s a never-ending value taking some of the weight of your outreach completely off email.

Email spam will (unfortunately) never die completely because there is some great value that come out of things that are considered spam. Think about it.

Spammy spam is?

1. An email from somebody you don’t know about something you aren’t sure you’ll care about
2. Unsolicited information about a product or service
3. Unsolicited attempts to sell you something
4. Absolute random crap that makes no sense at all

But how many times have you opened these anyway, and actually been appreciative of what you found? I know if it’s numbers 1-3, I’m generally a little intrigued because they’re usually targeted to my likes and interests.

Who is guilty?

We’re all guilty.

That’s right. You, you and me. Not of the above, but whether we like to realize it or not, when we’re trying to build our personal brand we may be doing a little unsolicited emailing. Better yet, when you’re working for a company and need to get in contact with somebody new, you’re also guilty of it.

So let’s forget how horrible old outreach tactics were, embrace our current tactics, and tie in social media with our email outreach for a better all around strategy and to help reduce the annoying spam that flies around our inboxes.

The Outreach Basics

Yes, this may be a little elementary to some who are reading this blog, especially if you’re in the Internet marketing field. But there are others who haven’t worked with outreach before, so I think it’s important to go over some basics before jumping into the social media aspect of things.

Why is outreach beneficial?

If you’re building your personal brand, there is nothing better to leverage than yourself. Likewise, if you’re working for a company, you’re representing them and need to approach people the right way. And let’s face it- sometimes you need to start doing outreach and you really want to do a great job and reach a large number of targeted blogs that might find your information useful.

BUT! If you’re able to reach 100 people in the click of one button, then you’re doing it wrong. Sending the same email to 100 people on a list because you think quantity is better than quality is completely W-R-O-N-G.

Take the time, do some research and really find out what blogs you want to target. What do you need to do?

• Research.
• Prepare.
• Personalize.

1.    Find out the general idea of their site. This is kind of a no-brainer, Make sure that what you’re trying to get in contact with the blogger about actually is something they believe in. IE: Do not try to contact a foodie blogger about something carnivorous when clearly they’re a vegetarian.

2.    Find out about the person. Look at their “about me” and whatever else they have around. What is their name? No one likes to be emailed and called, “Hey, you!” and they’re 50% more likely to respond if you actually address them by their name.

3.    Since you’re taking the time to check out their site, talk to them about something that you found interesting. When I’m doing outreach and getting familiar with a blog, I take the time to read a few articles over the course of a few days. If i find something humorous or awesome- I let them know.

4.    If you have the time work on visiting the blog and engaging the blog owner. And don’t just do it a few times, even after you get in contact with them for outreach purposes, keep visiting and occasionally sharing their content. Remember, you scratch my back, I scratch yours.

5.    If they do help you with a products/service/article, make sure you help promote it.
6.    Make sure you keep track of who you’ve had success with. Nothing is more embarrassing than contacting somebody and not remembering them after you’ve exchanged a few emails.

How Do We Shift Our Complete Email Dependency?

Outreach needs to evolve and move away from the association with mass mailing lists and impersonal spam messages. One way to do this is by integrating social media into your outreach mix.

Social media has been valuable in the past, and is slowly becoming more and more valuable as the days go on.

Think about it- if someone is reaching out to you, would you be more likely to take the time to write a blog post? Or would it be easier to send a quick tweet or post it on FB to reach your audience?

On the flip side, if you see someone with an interesting blog post, are you likely to write a blog post about it and integrate the link, or just click the handy dandy social sharing buttons (that I hope they have) for instant gratification and sharing with your audience?

Unless you’re looking for product reviews, it’s going to become more and more likely that bloggers are going to want to share your link/product/service through their social networks.

Even Tumblr, our new little rockstar, is becoming a popular way to share now- because if you find something on Tumblr you like, it’s easy to hit “reblog” or heart it.

Because of this, we need to let social media work for us. As you’re reaching out to various sites that you’re done research on, make sure that you’re also following them/liking them/engaging with them.

The Love of Influencers

It’s not new news (anymore) that even though link equity for social media is still evolving, social sharing on Facebook is being pulled into personalized Bing social search.

Don’t forget that if you’re doing outreach and someone shares a link on their Facebook page, it’s extremely likely that others will share it as well and it’ll start appearing in their friend’s personalized Bing searches if they have it enabled for social.

The power of utilizing social media is not something that should be overlooked, especially now from a search perspective. Reaching influencers in the vertical that you’re reaching out to is absolutely necessary.

There are many tools and sites that can help you identify influencers, advocates and do some social listening that you can take advantage of such as….

• Klout- Categorizes you into different segments of influence allowing you to see your (and other’s) true reach and amplification level. Klout score is actually now integrated into Seesmic if you use that to manage your Twitter accounts.
• TweetLevel- Another tool to allow you to find influence and engagement information on yourself and others.
• SocialSeek- Great social monitor that lets you track and find buzz around your brand, other brands, topics, etc so you can find out who is really influential and can reach a wide audience when sharing.

There’s tons more. Maybe that would make for a nice next post

Furthermore, the ability to reach out and have these influencers find interest in the product or service you’re reaching out around has the ability to act like a megaphone and reach a huge audience very fast- you know that when they’re influential, their audience is extremely likely to check out something that they share or put out there, and also likely to share it themselves.

Make Social Media Work For You

Aside from just randomly finding influencers and engaging them directly, why not start making interesting lists that others can follow which include these influencers? Make a list of your favorite bloggers, or your favorite financial gurus- and make sure it’s public.

Help bring value to their already influential accounts and let them know you find value in them too. Then start engaging and sharing with them.

Also, with more and more brands moving onto social networks and making Facebook tabs and applications, participating in Twitter chats, etc, it’s important that we can be stealthy like a ninja and ride the social media wave. You’ll be missing out on a lot if you don’t harness the natural power of engagement.

So Why Keep Some Blogger Outreach Through Email?

While it’s true that social media happens like an explosion, it’s good to have residual effects from blogger outreach that can keep the buzz alive since the very nature of social media is that it happens fast, and often times it happens all at once. And don’t forget, much like how email outreach can look spammy when done poorly, Twitter DMs and Facebook messages can be the same way. Don’t get me started on auto DMs…

Social media is an excellent complement and direction to take your outreach and it needs to move that way, but at the same time, you don’t want to neglect traditional blogger outreach- no matter how exciting and quick sharing with social media is when you find and build relationships with the right influencers in your vertical.

Blog posts can be searched and read multiple times and not get lost or pushed down quickly in the shuffle- often times staying on the front page or sidebar for a good amount of time.

The end of Email Spam?

If you’re thinking in terms of receiving an email that 100 other people receive, that isn’t personalized at all, then YES! I hope email spam is ending and will never rise again like a phoenix from fire and ashes.

But if you’re talking about blogger outreach, then no, it will never completely end. There is much value in blogger outreach and email is a great vehicle to get this done.

We all do a little spammy spam from time to time and chances are we don’t completely know who we’re reaching out to. How can we? It’s the online world. We can only do the best we can to build relationships off what we  know, and hope the blogger is open and receptive to us with warm and loving e-arms.

In moving forward though, we also have to consider and integrate the effectiveness of social media. There’s a whole big audience out there just waiting to hear what you have to say, and ready to share it.

If you’re interested in sharing this article, it’s probably really easy to click the “like” or “retweet” button up top. See how easy that is?

You can also become a fan of BlueGlass on Facebook or follow our fun (and informative) BlueGlass Twitter account.

The three tools below are free, easy to use, have rather basic functionality and deliver email alerts of your brand mentions. They take seconds to set up, so there is no excuse for not using them. I for one have been using the tools for ages, so here’s my insight into what you can expect:

Tracking Web Mentions: Google Alerts

Google Alerts is the most obvious choice when it comes to tracking web mentions of any word or phrase. Google has the largest on the web database of domains to crawl. Besides, it is the fastest to discover the new content that gets published on the web.

On the plus side:

• Fastest results and largest database;
• The ability to preview results before subscribing to the alerts;
• The ability to deliver results to email inbox or via RSS feed;
• Support of Google’s advanced operators
• Varied options.

Speaking of options:

• You can set filter results by media type (News, Blogs, Realtime, Video)
• You can set the updates to come daily, weekly or instantly;
• You can set to receive only “best” results or all results;

Limitation:

• Unlike what can be expected from a search giant like Google, the filtering and ranking algorithm of the tool often seems to be buggy: alerts tend to miss some important mentions, sometimes the will include a scraper instead of the original, etc.

For what it’s worth, despite some weirdness, Google Alerts is the best free tool to track web mentions of any phrase.

Tracking Social Media Mentions: SocialMention

SocialMention Alerts is another great free tool you should check out. Social mention claims to monitor 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.- so it does provide great results.

On the plus side:

• Large database of social media sites;
• The variety of options.

Alert options include:

• Filter alerts by media source (blogs, micro-blogs, networks, bookmarks, comments, images, news, vide, audio, Q&A, all sources);
• Filter alerts by language.

Limitations:

• Little or no context for web mentions: this also makes the email difficult for scanning and clicking through;
• No way to filter or group identical mentions (like Twitter RTs) which clutter the alert.

Tracking Comments: Backtype

Backtype Alerts is the tool run by one of the most popular comment indexing tool – Backtype.com.

On the plus side,

• This is a great tool to get alerted of readers’ mentions of your site (to be able to always participate in the related discussions).
• It delivers a lot of context for your keyword in your email inbox.

You have only one option: to set the alert to come daily, instantly, weekly or “never” (the latter will allow you to track results using the dashboard only).

Limitations:

• Smallest database of all three;
• Limited search options and unknown search operators.

Putting it All Together

Expanding the Possibilities

• The tools deliver email alerts including the search snippets for your main keyword (which is the context around it) – which makes it possible to find and monitor the natural neighbors of your tracked keyword. One free tool to do that is Gmail. See my post on using Gmail search for that purposes.
• With Gmail labels (or email filters in some email clients like Outlook), email alerts containing your brand mentions can be turned into tasks, archived or organized in multiple ways. Refer to this post of mine on de-cluttering your email inbox for some idea how labels and filters can be used.
• Any other tips? Please share them in the comments!

For more useful SEO and social media content, tips and inspiration, join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!

Here are the main Google Search Auto-Suggest sources and how they are different from one another.

1. Google News Suggest

Google News Suggest was launched back in 2009. It is an invaluable tool for search marketers. It could be surpassed only if Twitter had an auto-suggestion algorithm (which it doesn’t).

The awesome thing about Google News Suggest is that it would suggest hot trends to you, so you may know what’s hot without even searching the news (Google News Algorithm presents suggestions that are particularly relevant for news-related queries).

Here are the front page news and the suggestions that make it obvious:

Of course, there are results that will always be on top (no matter if there’s related hot news or not), but these searches are good to be aware of as well:

Google News is less effective at phrase extension than the main Google Suggest:

On the plus side, however, these few suggestions are GOLDEN for your hot news coverage:

2. Google Image Suggest

Google Image Suggestions were rolled out in April 2009. Unlike popular belief, Image Suggest uses a different database from the main Google algorithm which makes it another interesting tool to add to your keyword research algorithm.

The main reason why website owners should keep an eye on Google Suggest is that Google Image Search is still the easiest way to get traffic, so be sure to target it carefully.

The Image Search suggestions include many specific words like “wallpaper”, “cartoon”, “photos”, “landscape”, “logo”, “pictures”:

3. Google Product Suggest

Google Product Suggest was launched in September 2009 and it is obviously an interesting tool for e-commerce focused projects. Type any search term and get up to 10 product suggestions:

It also works GREAT for expanding your initial search with more and more e-commerce suggestions:

Now will someone please create a tool based on this?

4. Google Video Suggest

In terms of video search, we are given two different options: Google Video search and Youtube Search. We have already described how Youtube Suggestions can help with keyword research and brainstorming, so let’s take a look at Google Video search this time.

Like YouTube Suggest, Google Video suggestions could work in certain niches for video optimization and keyword ideas (and inspiration):

5. Google Maps Suggest

Google “smarter” search suggestions were introduced in April 2010. They got smarter in two ways:

1. Personalized suggestions (based on your search history and location): be sure to log out of Google before you check if your business pops up there (because you may have looked for it on a map multiple times and Google knows that).
2. Enhanced database (The search suggestions include additional information, such as the address of the business or the district that a place is in.

The latter has made the tool invaluable for local search optimizers and reputation management:

Now, would anyone point me to some wicked tools based on different suggestion algorithms? I was unable to find anyone and it would be awesome if they existed!

For more useful SEO and social media content, join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!

What can a marketer, a blogger or (a keyword) researcher actually do with Google Suggest?

1. Keyword Research and Story Brainstorming Assistance

Before I start talking about going from theory to practice and learning how to actually incorporate Google Suggest into your keyword and market research, let me remind you of a very important thing about this feature:

Google Suggest is personalized in many ways (including your search history, location, etc) – keep that in mind if you are using it for keyword research or anything similar.

The variety of tools based on the Google Suggest API makes it possible (and fun) to use the feature for keyword research and brainstorming. I am sure you will LOVE playing with most of the tools listed below:

1.1. Google Suggest Expansion

As you may have noticed, Google only displays top 10 (or fewer) suggestions for any term you enter. How can these sets of phrases be expanded?

1. Google Suggest Result Expansion… by adding each letter of the alphabet at the end of the provided phrase:

For example:

• seo a
• seo b
• seo c
• seo d
• etc

Each of these queries will result in 10 more search suggestions. See how easily the keyword set is expanded this way:

Now, good news! There’s a sweet tool that will do the whole job for you and let you export the entire set of results to a text file: Ubersuggest. This feature does the following:

1. Takes your base term and extracts Google suggestions for it
2. Attaches each letter of the alphabet to your base term and extracts Google suggestions for those as well

At the end you get dozens of terms starting with your base term:

2. Google Suggest Result Expansion… By digging deeper into each phrase:

Now, if you take any phrase you see suggested and enter it in the search box, you will see suggestions for that whole phrase – and you can go on this way until Google has nothing to suggest.

Waiting for the good news, aren’t you? I am not going to disappoint – there is a tool that expands Google Suggest results this way. It works terribly slowly but the outcome is well worth it. It also allows you to set the level of how deeply you want to dig into the results. Here’s an example of two-level digging:

3. Google Suggest Result Expansion… By providing several random (related) phrases:

To get more ideas, just provide more terms to search. This tool can be a huge time saver for that: it extracts Google Suggest results for multiple base terms (the tool is limited to 200 results, so providing more than 20 base terms is not a smart idea).

1.2. Google Suggest Result Visualization

While visualization tools are not as useful for keyword research, they can be an awesome help in brainstorming. Take a look at how this tool called “What Do You Suggest?” works as a mind-mapping utility for developing ideas and discovering new content angles:

This tool is another example of nicely-done Google Suggest visualization: it finds overlapping results for two queries. I have reviewed possible actual uses of the tool previously, including:

• Comparing two very close words (in meaning): e.g. [1200 calories - 1000 calories]

  

• Comparing two (almost) absolute synonyms: This would usually apply to an acronym versus its full version, e.g. [DIY - do it yourself]

  

2. More Fun Uses

Putting aside all the arguments on how Google Suggest may influence the searcher’s intent (and thus affecting his results, the feature can actually be a fun playground.

Here are just a few examples of how Google Suggest may speed up completion of your tasks and make your life easier:

1. Discover Alternatives to Tools and Apps

Imagine you are considering some feature-rich (paid) SEO tool but can’t decide on your keywords.

Search commands to use:

• versus
• vs
• or
• compare

2. Discover Most Obvious Competitors

(According to search users)

3. Quickly Learn the Meaning of the Word

This is only one of the various shortcuts available through Google Suggest (most of them don’t work from the toolbar search though – to play with them, use the web interface):

What else? Do you find Google Suggest tool useful or rather annoying? Do you use it and the tools derived from it? Please share your thoughts!

For more useful SEO and social media content, please join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!

For a short while you reveled in your prowess, much like a baseball hero celebrates knocking one out of the ballpark. Until you get up to bat again and wrestle with the fear of not being able to duplicate that win. There’s nothing worse than striking out after dominating the diamond.

If only you could read your audience’s mind, look over their shoulders to see what they want, what pains them, what piques their curiosity ….

What if I told you that you CAN do just that? Yep, sure can. With Google Insights for Search.

How You’ve Probably Heard of Using Google Insights

If you’ve been in Internet marketing for a little while, you’ve probably already heard about this power hitter of a tool, so I won’t cover the basics. If you’re not familiar with Google Insights, here are three videos Google put out to explain it. (Together they’re under five minutes.)

Traditionally marketers use Google Insights to compare relative search volumes of their target search terms. There are all kinds of ways marketers can find the best terms to optimize or bid on. It’s also a great competitive intelligence tool — and even a powerful predictor of market interest for different regions.

But this article is going to cater to bloggers. We’ll show you how you can use Google Insights to generate timely ideas for blog posts that will keep your blog relevant and competitive, regardless of your vertical.

Although an entire book could be written on all the different ways you can use the filters and comparison options to jumpstart your idea engine, we’re going to focus on the filters and cover some of the filter combinations you can take advantage of to find out what your audience is searching for. As our jumping-off point, we’ll tease out the search filters but include others as well in our examples.

You have four types of search filters to choose from: Web, Image, News, and Product. You can make your selection by clicking on the top filter in the top-right corner of the window.

Web Search

Okay, let’s say you have a blog that caters to those who are knee-deep in social media. It’s crunch time, and you just can’t bring yourself to blog one more time about Facebook and security. (The Interwebz thanks you.)

How do you know what’s hot? Well, one approach would be to choose the following options:

For this illustration, we narrowed our search to the U.S. — for the past 30 days alone (since social topics are as ephemeral as unicorn sightings) — and the Social Networks and Online Communities category. The secret sauce of this recipe is to click the Search button without putting any search terms in the Search terms field.

Hint: The more popular your topic, the more filters you can apply to narrow your range of search results. For this example, you can apply more filters because it’s a popular topic. But if you’re in a niche industry, you might need to pull up to a higher altitude to get enough results to choose from — for example, make the search worldwide, include more history, and/or choose a broader category.

Here are the results:

Of particular interest to a blogger especially is the Rising searches column. Those percentages refer to the increase in searches for those terms in comparison to the previous identical time period. Since we chose 30 days as our history filter, it will compare search volumes to the previous month. If we chose Last 7 days or Last 12 months, those percent increases would be referencing the previous week or year, respectively.

Image Search

Let’s pretend you’re an outdoor photographer, and you want to do a series for your blog on how to photograph various outdoor scenes. You have portfolio examples from all terrains, but you know you have a gravitational pull toward urban, beach, and mountain shots. Which series would be most popular?

For this beleaguered blogger, let’s see what the Image Search can tell us. As always, there are multiple ways you can go about attacking this research. You can limit your search to a particular locale (if, for example, you also sell prints from your site and you don’t ship internationally) or a tighter time period, if you want to go for immediate interest and aren’t as interested in persistent searches over time.

For this example, we chose the following options and compared the search terms beach, mountains, and city. For these general terms to be effective, we filtered the category to only include searches for Photo & Video Sharing (under the Photo & Video category).

(Click the image to enlarge)

News Search

Switching gears, let’s say you have a website that sells educational toys, with a large selection of science toys. (Special shout out to Bill Nye the Science Guy and Magic School Bus for ALMOST making science cool!) And, of course, you have a blog because you know that’s what the search engines your audience wants.

You wonder to yourself if there’s anything hot going on that swings science, and you turn to Google Insights to find that out. (Good call!) Here’s what we searched for:

And the clear winner goes to ….

Of course, this illustration breaks down because the Perseid meteor shower has come and gone. So you’ll obviously have to make sure your opportunity didn’t pass you by. But you get the idea.

If you REALLY want to go all Chuck Norris on your competition, you could tie your high-interest topic to something from your online store. For this example, a savvy business owner could have created a landing page with all of the appropriate astronomy kits, telescopes, and star-gazing accoutrements. They could have dialed up the call to action with a special, discounted it on Groupon, or used a promo code propagated on coupon-sharing sites like RetailMeNot. If you do that, just don’t forget to optimize your landing page for the event and not just the toy name.

Product Search

Let’s bring everyone home with a product search filter example, whudduyasay? Now you’re a blogger for a tech site that offers reviews, comparisons, and various informational posts on gadgets that have captured the minds and imaginations of your readers. If you’ve ever been deluged with press releases for the latest and greatest consumer electronics, you know it can be challenging to winnow through it all and separate the wheat from the chaff.

So you could do a search like this one:

Which would yield these results:

Imagine the delight of the manufacturer when you ask for a demo copy of their product because they’re killing it on Google Insights. You might actually be able to KEEP the product!

Your Turn

Let us know how you’ve used Google Insights or COULD use it to generate great blogging ideas. We’d love to engage with you here,  banter on Twitter, or connect with you on Facebook. Or all of the above.

Social Media for Firefox Extension

This tool is the the ultimate time saver for building powerful social media accounts. One of the secrets of top Diggers, Stumblers, Navigators, etc, is being the first to submit stories already becoming popular on other social news sites. For example, you can browse Reddit to find good stories already submitted and be the first to submit them to Digg. You can browse Digg and be the first to Stumble pages that are becoming popular there.

StumbleUpon Add-Ons

StumbleUpon helps you discover great websites that match your interests. Simply click the Stumble button and see the best websites. There are over 500 topics to choose from, and, the more you use it, the better your recommendations become!

Digg Firefox Add-Ons

As you browse the Web, you can see whether or not the web page you are currently viewing has been submitted to Digg and, if not, it lets you submit it with just one click.

Glue for Firefox Extension

Glue (formerly BlueOrganizer) connects you with friends around things you visit. Glue works automatically as you browse popular sites about books, music, movies, wines, restaurants, gadgets, stocks, actors, TV shows and other everyday things around the web. The Glue Bar appears right on your current page to show you friends who looked at the same things and what they thought.

Shareaholic for Firefox Extension

If you use sites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Gmail, and Twitter, you’ll want Shareaholic. Winner of the Extend Firefox contest, Shareaholic enables you to quickly and very easily share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via a wide array of your favorite web 2.0 social networking & bookmarking sites — such as Digg, Facebook, Gmail, MySpace, StumbleUpon, and many many others. This is the ultimate add-on for the link sharing junkie.

Add to Any Buttons

Help your visitors share, save and subscribe to your content with Add to Any widgets.

Add This Button

Makes it easy for your visitors to bookmark and share your content with others.

Yahoo! Buzz Buttons

Stories with the most Buzz may be published on the Yahoo! home page – you can impact what millions will see on Yahoo!.

ul.timate.info Add-Ons

The Mozilla Firefox add-on aims to simplify the way people interact with social network sites including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed.

What add-ons or plugins do you use? Share in the comments below or tweet your response to 10e20!