Central Perk

miercuri, 14 august 2013

Eight Ways Obamacare Helps You

Featured

The benefits of the Affordable Care Act are pretty straightforward: the law makes it easier to get insurance you can afford, ensures you have the care you need when you get sick, and covers the preventive services you need to stay healthy for free.

Click here to learn more about all the ways Obamacare helps you.

The Fundamentals of Building and Managing Your Community

Posted: 13 Aug 2013 07:28 PM PDT

Posted by MackenzieFogelson

When it comes down to it, your job is to get stuff done. If you're in marketing, it doesn't matter if you work in-house, out-of-house, for a tiny company, or for the largest brand in the world.

Your job is to get results.

I may be biased, but building community sure does seem like one of the best ways to not only keep pace with the continuous change we're experiencing in the web marketing industry, but also to achieve big goals for your business.

There's a lot of work that comes along with building a community, and it does take time. But it's a powerful and sustainable solution to heighten brand awareness, build trust and reputation, establish the right connections, and lower the cost of customer acquisition.

There's a lot of ways you can build a community around your brand. We've found that there are some very fundamental pieces that will make building and managing your community a success (each conveniently falling within a five-step process).

The fundamentals of building your community

We've tried a lot of things as we've helped many of our clients (and ourselves) build community. We've found these five core steps, forming this fundamental structure and process, to be quite powerful.

In a nutshell, here's how it breaks down:

1. Figure out your goals

Hopefully you're getting tired of hearing me say this by now, but you've got to set goals for your whole business, and not just for SEO or content or social media. These goals are the building blocks for the strategy and direction of your business (not just for your marketing or your community).

You can have huge and lofty goals that are more visionary for your company and then also smaller, short-term project type goals that you have in mind for improving things, building things, and just overall stuff that you'd like to accomplish. Have a mix of both. When you get to the part where you're developing your strategy, you can prioritize and plan for accomplishing all of these things.

Some really important things that we've discovered as we've helped companies set their goals:

Think voice and buy-in
When setting goals, it helps with buy-in if you give everyone in your company a voice. That doesn't mean that everyone and their mother comes to a goal-setting meeting. You can ask individual teams to send a list of their top three goals via email. The marketing team can organize, consolidate, filter, and then use these suggestions as a framework for what the company is looking to accomplish.
Mo' money, mo' problems
The goals you set for your company need to go beyond revenue goals. Certainly the end goal of all of this community building stuff is to grow your revenue. Think beyond that, though, and include the direction that you want to take your brand. Think about how you can focus more on your customer and improving their experience.
Break it down
It's okay for goals to be high level: "we want to be thought leaders," or "we want to improve customer service," but it's your job to break those more visionary goals down by asking, "what does that really mean? What does that actually look like?" This will bring these goals down to a more granular level, so that you know what exactly what you're attempting to achieve.

When working with clients, we have found that they need our help getting focused and setting the right goals. So we normally ask them to provide us with a list of goals for their company as a whole (they can send departmental goals as well), and then we do a little discovery research in order to propose the set of goals we'd recommend working on. We present these proposed goals and discuss them both for buy-in and to set the tone for the work that's ahead.

2. Define meaningful KPIs

Once you have goals defined, you've got to work on defining key performance indicators so that you can actually measure the goals that you have just defined (which translates to proving your value). The reason we define KPIs before we develop a strategy is for buy-in. We've found that it is important to have a discussion about KPIs to bring unspoken expectations to the surface. This provides an opportunity to get everybody on the same page.

Come to the KPI meeting prepared with the goals you're proposing in one column and some suggested KPIs in another. Then ask the question:

"What kind of data would you like to see in order to prove that we're effecting change?"

This provides the C-Suite (or whoever else approves your budget) with an opportunity to review the KPIs you're proposing to serve as an indication of progress. It also allows them to provide their feedback for additional KPIs they'd like to track. From this conversation you can gauge whether you need to spend some more time on education and buy-in.

Keep in mind that not everything is easily measured. And not everything is going to be measured in Google Analytics. Be creative with how you can prove the value of your efforts. Avinash has some great posts to get you thinking in this direction.

Side note: I'm hesitant to provide examples of KPIs because they are going to be different for every company and every goal. Defining KPIs isn't easy. It's something dynamic for which you've got to test, collect data, and adjust. But don't adjust the KPIs to tweak data to make your efforts look good. It's okay to own up to data that doesn't quite get you where you want to be in your initial iterations; that's the contrast you need to figure out how your efforts need to be adjusted in order to get you where you want to go.

3. Develop a creative strategy (and select your tools)

Now's the challenging (but fun) part. You've got to come up with creative ways to reach these goals you've set. Develop a strategy that will serve as your detailed road map.

Keep these things in mind as you're working on strategy development:

Strategy jam FTW
Hold a strategy jam session with a small group, and have everyone come to the meeting with ideas ready to roll. During your meeting, don't filter any of the ideas. Just think up a list of all the creative ideas for reaching the goals you've set.

After the strategy jam, schedule an additional meeting to filter, organize, and prioritize the ideas that made the final cut during the jam. This is certainly where you match up budgets (make sure you can actually afford to do what you're proposing), team resources, and time frames for deliverables.

Once the budget and resources have been vetted, you can throw a high-level outline of the strategy over to your boss, team, or client. That way, if they don't like the direction you're headed, you haven't wasted time by flushing out any ideas in detail just yet. If you have to ditch something, no harm done. This also provides another opportunity for buy-in because you're showing that you value their input by asking for their feedback.

Once you receive feedback on your high level ideas, you're ready to develop your road map in detail.
12-month vision; iterations of 2-3 months
When working on developing the detailed plan of your strategy, it's probably a good idea to show all of the creative things you want to accomplish in the next 12 months (that vision or higher level plan), but then of course you want to detail the first 2-3 months on a day-by-day/week-by-week basis so that the whole team has a road map.

Working in iterations of 2-3 months toward your goals will allow enough time to get some momentum and collect some data, but isn't so long that you can't change course if your ideas flop and you need to do something different.

As you move along into the execution of all of this stuff, note that you'll need to hold strategy jams every three months or so and repeat this same process. It's a lot of work but makes such a big difference in results.
Match tools to goals
As you're planning out your creative strategy, now is the time to select the tools that are going to get the job done. Our typical set of tools for building community tends to be SEO, social media, content, email marketing, and outreach. Whatever it's gonna take to accomplish your goals.

4. Do all the work in the execution step

Now that you have your plan written, get to work. Make sure the proper tracking and measurement is set up so that you're collecting data on your KPIs. Then follow your strategy and be consistent. People on your team (and on other teams) are going to keep coming at you with things that will seem emergent but aren't necessarily part of the strategy. This is where you get to tell them to "check the goals, baby" (and the plan that you've established that will get you there). There will be things (time-sensitive things) that may force you to derail your strategy. But be careful to stay focused on goals and keeping your attention on the actionables outlined according to the strategy.

Part of your execution will most certainly be the daily management of your community (and I've provided some fundamentals on this below).

5. Evaluate your progress with analysis

Now's your chance to figure out what's working and what's not. What needs more time? What are you missing? Analyze the data you've collected and then do something with it.

Whatever you do, don't be lame and adjust your goals or KPIs just to make your efforts look good. Part of the process of measuring this stuff is determining what works. You're going to fall flat on some stuff. That's what testing is all about (and that's why you work in iterations of 2-3 months and allow for agility).

As you build your community (and your business), remember that these are your bones. This is the stuff that will keep you grounded. No matter what comes at you as you're growing your community, always bring it back to these five core steps.

The fundamentals of managing your community

If you're working on implementing the five core steps of community building, you've got your bases covered. So what about the fundamentals of managing this community? What is your community manager's role? What are the key pieces that will be part of their job? How do they play a part in this community building stuff?

If we had to pick five things to focus on, this is what we'd choose:

1. Working with strategists and strategizing

So this is the way we work this at Mack Web, but you may have a different dynamic (working in-house vs. agency), so you can shape this however it works best for you.

We have strategists who are responsible for developing and directing strategy and for analyzing everything they possibly can in order to make a difference in our clients' businesses. In order to effectively do this and help those businesses grow their communities, they need to work in perfect harmony with the community manager.

Depending on who you have on your community-building team, there will be someone (probably your CMO) who needs to operate like our strategists by keeping their fingers on the pulse of the business, setting goals, developing strategy, communicating with internal and external teams, keeping up on product development, engaging with customers, and executing all of the pieces that come along with the strategy so that everyone is getting stuff done and accomplishing goals.

You're going to have all kinds of other people inside of your company who are also playing a role in executing your strategy and building your community. Some people are going to write content. Some people are going to create assets like infographics and video. Some people are going to be reading and learning and sharing knowledge.

Your strategist is responsible for leading this team. And of course, working closely with your community manager to ensure that they're maintaining the thriving flow of your community.

Certainly there is strategy to all of this good stuff. Community managers will work with strategists to develop actual strategy and ensure that the base of your community is growing.

2. Learning and identifying

One of the biggest jobs your community manager has (as well as other people on your team) is to become a subject matter expert in your industry. But they also need to learn about tangential and related industries that may become vertical and new market opportunities.

So the deal with reading and staying up on industry knowledge is that your community manager has to be a lot of places soaking up information that could be valuable to your company (or your clients).

What will help with narrowing focus here (and making the time spent on social media as valuable as possible) is identifying the WHOM:

WHOM to follow
Your community manager will be responsible for doing the digging to identify the people and companies you need to be following on social media. This also means narrowing down the blogs you should be reading and engaging with.
WHOM to engage with
Again, you're looking to strategically target an audience of both influencers and friends. These are the people with whom your community manager (and of course other key members of your team) are going to focus on building relationships. They're going to share their stuff, ask them for feedback, and look for ways to engage them in your community.
WHOM to monitor
Monitoring and listening is a really important part of your community manager's work. They'll be watching for all kinds of opportunity in your community and on social media in general (more detail on this below).
WHOM to emulate
Ideally, you'll want your community manager to find a community management mentor. There are so many amazing community managers to learn from. Your Community Manager will want to find a few to emulate and try the things they do with their community. It's their job to add your company's personality, style, and align with the goals that you are working toward.

3. Blogging

Two things here that we've found to work well for community managers in relation to the blog:

Manage blog content
Depending on the size and roles on your team, your community manager could be the one to manage the content that goes on the blog. They can work on scheduling, launching stuff, and making sure there is a variety of content (see the Knowledge Spreadsheet idea below).

Certainly, the community manager is an ideal person to engage with those who comment on your blog. And they can also make sure that spam is being consistently removed.
Generating content and seeking guest opportunities
Ideally you want all kinds of voices on your blog, and your community manager is one of them. In addition to being featured on your own blog, your community manager can be focused on finding other reputable blogs where your team can contribute knowledge. In alignment with your strategy, your community manager can take the WHOM they've identified (above) and seek out matches for guest blogging.

Guest blogging on other reputable blogs is an opportunity to build relationships with key companies and influencers. It allows your company to find other possible communities to strategically attract to your own community by providing them value. Your community manager can find these opportunities and bring them to fruition.

4. Engaging, monitoring and listening, and brand loyalty

Your community manager is a bridge that connects all of the places where your customers and community members will experience your brand. They can help build that experience that connects the online and offline worlds with your website and social media outlets, the blog, and any other place that is an open door inviting people into your community and your business.

Your community manager can focus on these things to assist with engagement:

Relationships
Your Community Manager will continuously develop relationships both on and offline. They will go to events. Talk to people. Make friends. Among the most important friends that they will make are other community managers. There's a kinship there that is key to forging beneficial partnerships and also learning to be a better community manager.
Monitoring and listening
Monitoring and listening is also part of engagement and is a big part of a community manager's role. Social monitoring and listening is a dirty job. Seriously. It's a lot of work. There are tools that can alleviate some of the pain, but when it comes down to it, monitoring and listening on social media requires a real human sifting through stuff other real humans are saying and that can be arduous. You really do have to be dedicated to sherlocking (which is the term we use to describe rooting around and researching and otherwise detecting) conversations, and doing what it takes to find opportunities that can be taken advantage of. A community manager's job is to find those nuggets of opportunity, analyze them, and put them into action.

In general you'll want to have your bases covered by listening for things like:
- Brand-specific content (brand name, product names, employee names)
- Keywords (discovered through SEO research)
- Competitors
- Industry-specific content and other content opportunities
- Relationship opportunities

Brand loyalty
Another way to increase engagement and accelerate community growth is by embracing your community members in an expression of gratitude for their brand loyalty (something Joanna Lord discussed at MozCon). These efforts need to be tied to your overall company goals. Your community manager can research, identify, and suggest possible ways to reward your community members and encourage brand loyalty.

Your community manager can create a brand loyalty program. A process they can use to decide how to reward your customers and your community (with all kinds of swag) and when such rewards should be given out.

Cultivating brand loyalty can also come from performing "random acts of kindness" in your community. I remember Moz doing this when my cup broke shortly after returning home from my first MozCon conference.

Just as with engaging, monitoring, and social listening, your community manager will want to keep track of all brand loyalty efforts so that you can evaluate the effectiveness of this program. This will certainly be part of setting goals, defining KPIs, and strategy development when you're back working on building your community base.

5. Training

Whether your team is in-house or you're working with clients, education is a really powerful part of your community manager's routine. Especially because not everyone on your team is going to be overly excited about the power of community and using social media.

As a community manager, you've got to rally the troops and get them to contribute to community management efforts. But they don't need to be on social media to do this.

I've talked about this hack before, but we've been using this internally to manage the Mack Web community and it's worked so well for us (and our clients) that I'm sharing it again.

This is a Community Management Knowledge Spreadsheet and it's made a tremendous difference in the quality and variety of value that we've been sharing with our community.

Remember when we talked about identifying the WHOM and finding targeted blogs to be reading and engaging? Share those sources with your team (and encourage them to provide you with others). Then ask them to contribute what they're reading here on your knowledge spreadsheet.

Everyone in your entire company can contribute here. Your community manager then plays bouncer and decides what is appropriate and useful for your community (making sure it's actually a fit for your community), where it gets shared (be respectful that each outlet has different needs), and when. Getting your team to participate in ongoing learning is just one way to train your team ongoing and manage your community.

There are going to be many other things that your community manager can do to contribute to the management and growth of your community. Your community management fundamentals may look entirely different. Again, it all depends on the goals that you're wanting to accomplish for your business.

Wrapping it up (a.k.a conclusion)

Building a community is a great way to put integrated marketing into action (which is what is going to help you weather the Goog and build valuable assets in your business). These community building and management fundamentals will help you grow your community from the inside out. They will keep you focused on creating quality content and resources. They will encourage you to continually work on improving your products and services. They will motivate you to engage with and listen to your customers and their feedback. Using these fundamentals will help your entire team â€" strategists, community manager, and the rest â€" accomplish goals for your whole business.

Have you tested these community building and management fundamentals in your company? What have I missed? Looking forward to our conversation in the comments below.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Inside In-depth Articles: Dissecting Google's Latest Feature

Posted: 13 Aug 2013 04:29 AM PDT

Posted by Dr-Pete

Last week, Google launched its latest feature, the "In-depth articles" block. Like News results or local packs, in-depth articles are a rich SERP element that sits in the left-hand column but doesn't count as a standard, organic result. Here's an example, from a search for "rainforest":

We originally spotted in-depth articles in testing as early as July, and as of August 6th the feature officially went live for English queries on Google.com. Over the weekend, I re-tuned our MozCast 10K engine (which tracks a set of 10,000 queries and their features) to take a deeper look at in-depth articles. This post covers what we know so far.

Variations on a theme

All in-depth article blocks we're currently tracking have three results â€" I've seen no exception to this rule yet, although that could change as Google collects more data and adapts. There are a few minor variations to how in-depth articles appear. Here's a complete snippet, which includes an image thumbnail, title, description, publisher icon, publisher, and author (from a search for "presidential candidates"):

Some in-depth article listings don't have authorship (from a search for "wedding pictures"):

Finally, some listings don't have publisher icons or names (from a search for "jobs"):

So far, every in-depth article result I've seen in the wild has had an image, title, description, and either a publisher name or domain name. Image thumbnails seem to be taken directly from the articles and cropped.

In testing, we saw some in-depth article blocks in the middle of search results, but every example I've seen since launch has appeared at the end of the results page â€" after organic results, but before the bottom ad block. That's only based on anecdotal evidence, as we're not currently tracking the position, and Google is likely to mix things up as they move forward and test new variations.

One oddity â€" in-depth article blocks seem to appear on pages with nine organic results, suggesting that the in-depth block itself may be treated as result #10. It's getting harder and harder to tell the true count of rankings, but it looks like natural result #10 is getting pushed to page 2, and the block is simply inserted.

Some basic statistics

Across the 10,000 queries that MozCast tracks, 352 displayed in-depth articles the morning of August 12th, which equates to roughly 3.5% of queries. By volume (using Google's "global" volume metric), these queries accounted for 6.9% of total volume for our 10K data set, suggesting that the search terms tended to be higher-than-average volume.

Google has suggested that in-depth articles will typically trigger for "broad" topics, but that's a bit vague, so let's take a look at a few examples from different ends of the spectrum. First off, here are ten high-volume searches (as measured by Google's "global volume" metric) that triggered in-depth articles on 8/12:

While these cover the range from a popular novel to a trendy mall store, it does seem like searcher intent is fairly vague in these queries. Someone searching for "led" could be shopping for light bulbs or trying to figure out when Robert Plant is playing near them. The in-depth results for "jobs" contained one article about Steve Jobs:

There's been some speculation that "broad" might refer to "head" queries (often, single-word searches). Here's the distribution of the 352 queries by number of words (the number in parentheses is the percentage for the entire 10K data set):

1-word = 37.5% (21.1%)
2-word = 50.3% (45.6%)
3-word = 9.1% (24.4%)
4-word = 2.6% (7.0%)
5+-word = 0.6% (2.0%)

It's important to note that the keyword set we use does not contain very long-tail queries and is generally skewed toward shorter phrases. The average word count of all 352 queries is 1.80. For reference, the average word count for our entire 10K data set is 2.24 â€" so, Google does seem to be leaning a bit toward shorter queries. For reference, here are the five longest queries that showed in-depth articles in our data set:

Our 10K engine tracks a wide variety of queries (by volume, competitiveness, length, industry, etc.), but they do tend a bit toward commercial keywords. We don't have exact data on brand vs. non-brand queries or commercial vs. informational, but it does appear that in-depth queries are appearing across a wide range of intent.

The news connection

Clearly, it's hard not to see a news and big media connection in these in-depth articles. Are in-depth articles a replacement for news results? No (at least not for now) â€" many of the results we tracked had both in-depth articles and a news box. For example, a search for the popular novel "50 Shades of Grey" showed standard news results:

â€¦as well as in-depth articles (note, that there's no overlap between the articles):

Are posts with news results more likely to show in-depth articles? It certainly looks that way. Across our entire 10K data set, 16.8% of queries contained a news result block on August 12th. For that same time period, 55.7% of queries with in-depth articles contained news results. There's almost definitely some algorithmic connection between these two entities.

The big winners (so far)

So, given the news connection, do the major news sources have an advantage? At least for now, it seems that way. The 352 searches with in-depth articles on August 12th contained 1,056 articles, which were housed on 123 unique root domains. The top 10 root domains accounted for almost 57% of the total allotment of in-depth articles. Here are the top 10, in order:

nytimes.com (20.4%)
wsj.com (6.1%)
newyorker.com (4.5%)
guardian.co.uk (4.3%)
wired.com (4.1%)
vanityfair.com (3.9%)
businessweek.com (3.8%)
nymag.com (3.3%)
theatlantic.com (3.3%)
thedailybeast.com (3.2%)

Within our data set, the New York Times alone accounted for one-fifth of the articles listed in in-depth article blocks. Most of the heavy hitters were generally considered news sites â€" other big brands like Yahoo.com and MSN.com had isolated articles, but Google didn't seem to show them any particular favoritism.

To be fair, some smaller news sites and niche sites did show up in the list. Here's an in-depth article listing from the West Virginia Gazette, for example (from a search for "routers"):

Here's an example of a niche publication, Yoga Journal, getting listed (from a search for "knee pain"):

Clearly, big publications have an early-mover advantage right now, but what's unclear is whether that advantage is baked into the in-depth article algorithm or is just a consequence of other authority and content factors. So, that leads us to the million-dollar question: what does it take to break into the in-depth box?

Getting in on the action

While big news organizations have an advantage, there's no compelling evidence that in-depth articles are a private club. In fact, Google has already posted a support document with advice on getting listed in in-depth articles. I'll give you a quick-and-dirty summary:

Use Schema.org article markup
Set up authorship markup
Set up a Google+ account, including your logo
Properly handle paginated articles
Use "first click free" for paywall content

Ana Hoffman wrote a good post that goes into more detail on these in-depth article support factors. Of course, these aren't sufficient conditions to get listed â€" domain authority, content quality, and traditional ranking factors undoubtedly are also at play here. The good news is that Google is telling us that you do have a chance at getting in, and there are ways to help the process.

I suspect Google will be experimenting with and expanding in-depth articles over the next few months, so all of this data is preliminary and subject to change. If you're a news site or have reputable, long-form content, I'd strongly consider at least putting the signals above into place. If anyone manages to break into an in-depth box, we'd love to hear your story.

Update (August 14, 2013)

Just one day after this post went live, Google is already playing with the format. Here's a new look for the "50 shades of grey" in-depth box, where only the first result shows full data:

The block is now in the #8 organic position (not #10), and I'm seeing other blocks moving around. Expect Google to test and tweak this feature significantly in the coming weeks.

10 Resources to Pass the Google AdWords Exam

Posted: 14 Aug 2013 03:46 AM PDT

It's been almost five years since we wrote about this topic and we thought it was probably time for an update. The key question is, of course, "Have things really changed in the last five years"? From an AdWords features perspective, a lot indeed has. However, in terms of resources, all you really need to pass the exam is still just the AdWords Learning Centre. However, if you want to be an AdWords Exam 'ninja', then these additional resources may prove useful:

1. The Official Resource

OK, I'll start with the official resource. The AdWords Learning Centre is Google's own training tool for AdWords; as such, it's easily the best resource for obtaining information on all of Google's ad policies in a clear and concise way. The Learning Centre breaks its course down into short sections, so it is easy to just do a bit at a time. There are also handy links prompting you to try out the lesson in your AdWords account, along with tips and links to related topics on each subsection. The exams and the Learning Centre modules have been updated this year, so they cover enhanced campaigns as well as the current interface.

2. More from the Horse's Mouth

If you really want to stay up-to-date with Google's feature upgrades, then it's imperative you have a browse through the official AdWords blog to see what's new. Whenever there's a product update, the announcement is made via the AdWords blog. It's also worth noting that exams aren't updated frequently so they may not cover the most recent changes, making it even more important to follow the Adwords blog.

3. Books

Advanced Google AdWords by Brad Geddes is a solid resource for getting a deep understanding of managing AdWords accounts, as is David Szetela's Pay Per Click Marketing an Hour a Day. If you want an easy but in-depth introduction to AdWords, I'd also recommend Google AdWords for Dummies by Kristie McDonald. However, due to the nature of books, there are likely to be a lot of changes to AdWords and recent updates that won't be covered. However, these books are very good at instilling a firm foundation on PPC basics. If you're an advanced PPC professional, these books can help provide you with a refresher on some basics and workflow.

4. Learning by Doing

There really is no substitute to hands-on experience. No amount of reading will actually give you the necessary skills to be a half decent AdWords practitioner. It's in the doing that you really get a grasp of the AdWords concepts. So, if you have had a decent amount of time working on an AdWords account, I'd suggest only focusing on areas you're not too familiar with when doing your revision. For example, billing, video advertising etc. In other words, areas in the AdWords account that you don't deal with on a day-to-day basis.

5. WordStream

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time checking out the WordStream blog and tools. They've also got a couple of useful guides on taking AdWords and other PPC exams:

A Dead-Simple Google AdWords Certification Guide: Costs, Tips & Tricks for Google Certification

5 Tips for Passing PPC Certification Exams

6. PPC Podcasts

If you're fed up of reading, there are other resources you can use. I'd recommend checking out webmasterradio.fm's PPC-Rockstars, which has short podcasts on a variety of PPC issues.

7. A Heroic Resource

PPC Hero has got some fantastic resources such as the 'PPC Hero Guides', 'blog series', and a great range of helpful whitepapers.

8. Paid Resources

Certified Knowledge has a good suite of resources, tools and community support for members. However, prices seem to be a tad bit pricey for my liking. I must admit, I've never subscribed to their membership, so I perhaps I shouldn't comment. However, judging by their course content, it does look well worth some research.

PPC Hero also has a subscription service to their pro memberships. This will give you access to all their tools and resources.

9. Quality Scores

Quality scores are one of the cornerstones of PPC account management. If you're looking for in-depth information on them, then these resources will give you a thorough understanding of why they are important and what you can do to improve them:

10. #ppcchat

Lastly, I'd highly recommend following the #ppcchat hashtag to engage with like-minded PPC professionals. This weekly Twitter chat attracts industry specialists who discuss, debate and share their thoughts on a wide variety of PPC topics. Hat tip goes to Matthew Umbro for founding and hosting these highly informative weekly chats.

Well, I hope this list has been useful for you! However, it's quite possible that I've missed out a fair few other resources that I'm probably unaware of. I'd be really grateful if you could share any good resources you know of with us in the comments section.