If you’re like us you have a slew of different ad campaigns running at any given time- newsletters, pay-per-click, stumbleupon, download directories, sponsored banner ads, auto-responders, etc. Tracking conversions means being able to identify the visitors to your site who ultimately complete the desired action and know which avenue brought them to you (and it’s useless to experiment across ad channels if you don’t track which ones are working). You can roll your own home-grown mechanism to track conversions but if you have a Google Adwords account, you already have access to their cross-channel conversion tracking system which will do this for you. Here’s how you can take advantage of it:

1. Signup for an adwords account if you don’t have one already.
2. You’ll need to add the conversion tracking code snippet to the thank you page on your site that the visitor sees when he/she completes the intended action on your site. Follow the instructions here to set it up.
3. Next you’ll create a new cross channel tracking campaign for one of your ad channels- let’s do it for your newsletter first. What may be confusing is that even though we’re in your adwords account, adwords could be one channel you can use this to track all your ad initiatives). Follow their 3-step wizard for specifying the details of this newsletter-specific campaign and get the landing page code and the tracking URL.
4. Put the landing page code snippet in your header or footer so it’s on every page of your site (you only need to do this once and it works across all channels that you track).
5. Lastly, look at the newsletter-specific tracking URL and grab just the part that says:
   “?gad=xxxxxxxxxxxx” and append that to any links coming from your newsletter. Rinse and repeat for each ad campaign you have running so that they all get a unique tracking URL.

You’re now collecting data on how each campaign is doing and you’ll know exactly which ones are performing well and which ones suck. You can see from our data below that we have a spread of 0% - 38% effectiveness depending on the particular channel - that’s critical info to know if you’re spending thousands on ads! Minor improvements in conversion can translate to huge savings in adspend as I explained here. Happy conversion tracking!

Tuesday night I did a presentation for the San Diego Java User Group on how to use Trac to manage the development a software project. Below is a video capture of that talk (~45min). We cover the big picture of what’s involved in effective project management, the qualities of what makes a good tool and then we walk through hands-on usage of Trac in a real project scenario to demonstrate how it fulfills these objectives.

I’ve also made the resources I used in the talk available for download including the slides, the notes and the final state of the Trac JumpBox from the demo so you can actually play with the exact data we used. Big thanks to Paul Webber for allowing me to present for the group. There were some great questions asked and I even learned some new stuff about Trac like the Mylyn Connector that allows you to interact with your tickets right from within Eclipse. There’s also a shorter video screencast that covers a subset of this talk (the screen is more readable than the projector in the video).

A couple people have asked me recently how we do our Grid7 podcast. We have a humble talk show we do with entrepreneurs and innovators bi-weekly over on Grid7.com and we just did our 24th episode. There may be more streamlined ways of doing things but these are the steps involved from my perspective:

Capture

“Garbage in, garbage out,” as they say. The idea is to capture the highest quality raw audio to start with. If the guest is local I try to conduct the interview in person because I think the face-to-face interaction is a better dynamic. I use the internal mic on my MacBook and record directly to a track in Garageband. If the guest is remote and I have a good internet connection, I’ll use my skype account with skypeout and capture using a great piece of software called Audio Hijack Pro. It’s nice because you can isolate the inbound and outbound audio to separate tracks and equalize the volume levels later. It generates an mp3 on your desktop and is straight forward. If I have a crappy connection I can record calls on my Treo using an app I have called CallRec. This captures the conversation as a wav file stored on the SD card. With a 2GB SD card, storage is a non-issue.

Produce

I use Garageband to refine the raw audio, add an intro/outro to the track and do the final mixdown. Provided the call quality was good, there should be no need to apply a noise filter. I have heard that Audacity is a good open source audio editor that’s available though I have not used it personally. Once I have things sounding right, I export the track to iTunes, right-click on the track -> “get info” and adjust the details in the ID3 tag. I then right-click and convert it to MP3. Once it creates the MP3, right-click-> “show in finder,” grab that file and ftp it to our server.

Publish

Last step is to publish the audio track to our site. We use Wordpress as a CMS for our website and it has an open source plugin called Podpress that makes it easy to serve a podcast. Provided you have the Podpress plugin installed and activated, you author a post as you would normally do for a text entry only you click the “Add Media” button under the textarea and tell Podpress the URL of your MP3. I like to add a paragraph or two on our guest explaining his/her background and the gist of the episode and also include a headshot. If you’re writing any type of extended entry, you want to author it in a text editor and then copy/paste it into the browser (I’ve had Firefox crash after authoring a long entry in the browser and it sucks). Podpress generates the proper RSS feed and even gives you a flash-based audio player that allows the visitor to listen directly from the browser. It handles stats and can syndicate your podcast via the iTunes Store.

Promote

You’ll probably want to list your podcast in the iTunes Store (and “store” may be a misnomer - it’s just a directory so you don’t have to charge $$ to be listed). There’s plenty of other podcast directories out there- google around. I added ours to Everyzing so that the audio itself is indexed and made searchable. Running your RSS through Feedburner allows you to get stats on the listeners that subscribe via RSS. Depending on the subject matter of each episode you can then submit them to various news sites as you go. We held the #1 slot all yesterday on news.ycombinator.com from an interview I just did with the Zenter founders.

Monetize

We have not actually tried to monetize our podcast yet. It currently serves more as a vessel of exposure for us and an in-roads to make connections and meet new people. There are various options for services that provide a simple way to splice in ads dynamically. I went though and researched a bunch at one point and found Kiptronic to be the most promising (plus it sounds like they now support video blogs as well if you’re into that). AdSense is always an option for the site itself. Feedburner lets you display ads in the RSS feed itself once you cross the 500 listener threshold. I experimented with Comission Junction but saw zero dollars ever come out of it. Amazon affiliate program was equally as dismal in terms of what it generated. We’re now in the Google PPA beta so that will be interesting to see how well it works. Short of having a program so popular that you can command a dedicated monthly sponsorship, a dynamically-inserted ad via a service like Kiptronic seems like the way to go.

Anyways, of the million ways of hosting a podcast, that’s how we do things with Grid7. If you have a podcast of your own, what tools do you use?

I had a terrible time trying to get a high-quality movie produced from a simple screen capture yesterday. After much googling it seemed there was no consensus on how to produce a quality screencast using iMovie. I solicited the advice of the helpful Refresh Phx people and after some tinkering found the export settings that produce an acceptable result. I captured the screen video using a neat little app called iShowU (which is like a shareware Camtasia for the Mac). I then brought the clips into iMovie. The first attempt at exporting produced this which was unacceptable quality. The key to getting the quality result involved these things:

The final result ended up like this which is not perfect but looks WAY better than the default output.

File this under the “probably-never-need-this-but-invaluable-on-the-day-you-do” category.

If you’ve been keeping your company’s accounting via Quickbooks and decide to start using the online banking feature that connects to your bank account to automatically grab transactions, you will run into a major annoyance for which there is currently no good solution. The online banking feature will grab the entire history of transactions from your account and keep them until you either add or match them. This would be fine if there was some way to remove the online retrievals that are duplicates for ones that have already cleared but you cannot match transactions that have already been reconciled and there is no “force delete” button. You’re basically stuck with no way to get rid of any of the transactions that were automatically pulled which have already cleared your bank.

I’m on Quickbooks Premier 2006 and I came up with a hack to remove these transactions and explained it briefly on the Intuit forums but I’m posting a mini-tutorial here because it was sufficiently-frustrating and the solution is anything but intuitive - I know of no other way around this problem short of voiding all your cleared transactions (which would be greater of the two evils). The essence of the hack is that you setup a dummy account called “Already reconciled transactions,” add the duplicates to that account to clear them from the match screen and then go through and manually delete all of them and lastly, delete that fake account. This is tedious but it does solve the problem so here goes:

1. Assuming you’ve already setup the dummy expense account titled “Already Reconciled” and you have successfully configured your quickbooks to talk to your bank, go to the online banking screen.
   
   
2. Click the “Go Online” button to retrieve all the transactions from your bank.
   
   
3. You’ll see a dialogue like the following as Quickbooks connects to your bank and pulls the history.
   
   
4. Now click the “view” button to review the transactions you just downloaded.
   
   
5. On this screen you’ll have a ton of unmatched transactions. If you have any history of reconciled transactions in your Quickbooks this is problematic.
   
   
6. Trying to match these with the ones that have already cleared produces the following error.
   
   
7. Instead, add the transactions to the register one by one.
8. And assign them to the fake “Already Reconciled” expense account you created.
   
   
9. This allows you to then go into your Chart of Accounts and do a custom report.
   
   
10. Create a filter that pulls all the transactions from this fake account.
    
    
11. Go into each of these transactions…
    
    
12. And delete it. The last thing you’ll want to do is kill the fake account once you emptied it with all the duplicate transactions.
    
    

This is a hugely annoying way of dealing with the problem but at least it works. A simple button to “force delete” in when matching transactions would save all these steps. Hopefully Intuit will clue in to this issue and fix it in a future release.

Del.icio.us is great. Here’s six ideas on how to get more out of it:

1. Offline browsing of your “toRead” items - Many people have a toRead tag they use to flag pages they plan to review later. Realistically with the massive daily influx of new info, I rarely get a chance to come back to these items when I’m on the computer. However, when I’m away from the computer waiting in a restaurant, having news feeds in my phone is perfect for killing time. Rather than read random news though, why not read what you already bookmarked? While most mobile phones support web browsing and you could do it that way, surfing over your phone’s connection sucks and this isn’t time-sensitive info we’re talking about since it clearly wasn’t critical enough for you to read it at the time you bookmarked it. Instead, use an offline reader like Avantgo to cache these items each time you sync your phone. Create a free account, download and install their client to your phone, login and get the autochannel bookmarklet here and then navigate to your toRead page. Use the autochannel bookmarklet to add this to your phone, set the link depth to “1″ and check the box to “follow off-site links.” This will grab your latest list of toRead items and cache them to your phone each time you sync.
2. Private saving for ubiquitous admin access - One of the advantages of using del.icio.us for your bookmarks is that you have access to them from any computer. You may have bookmarks to administrative features or sensitive info that you don’t want to share publicly though. Use the “private saving” feature in del.icio.us to conceal these bookmarks. You have to first enable it in under “settings > experimental > private saving.” Once you do this you’ll have a new checkbox on your posting interface in the upper-right that says “do not share” - this will make it so only when you’re logged into your account can you see these bookmarks.
3. Mind read your mentors - If you’re reading this then we already know you read blogs. And odds are that you have a few people you follow regularly who are consistently on-point with their thinking and what they explore and write about - your mentors. Unlike reading their blog though (the things they explicitly tell you) you can find their del.icio.us account and monitor it via RSS to follow their latest bookmarks. There’s a link at the bottom of every page on del.icio.us that allows you to get a feed of things that change. In this way, you know not just what these alphanerds are saying but also what they’re thinking about.
4. Expose yourself - The reciprocal thought to the above is that as an author of a blog yourself, you can expose your own bookmarks via your blog and make it easy for others to see what you’re thinking about. There are tons of options on how to pull this off. Personally I dislike the XML-RPC method of auto-posting del.icio.us links as blog entries - I prefer the linkroll javascript method of displaying the list in the nav as it keeps the most current ones on every page of your blog and doesn’t push them via RSS to people who just want to read what you write. They can always use the method above if they want to subscribe to your del.icio.us feed.
5. Watch the watchers - Be a bit of a “del.icio.us voyeur” and find out who has bookmarked things you’ve written and see what else these people are reading. You achieve this by finding an entry of yours that has been bookmarked by others and looking under the posting history column on the right to see the linked usernames. Clicking through theses user names will show you their account allow you to see other stuff they follow.
6. Create an open public dialogue on your site - Chris Pirillo proposed the idea of “freedbacking” recently whereby site owners encourage their visitors to tag their pages with the term “freedbacking” and make comments in the notes field to enable public feedback viewable to all. This is essentially what we’ve been doing on our Grid7 site since January via an iFrame on this page. You can do the same on your site and create this type of open public dialogue with your visitors. Keep in mind they may say bad things about you and it will appear on your site but doing it this way creates a “public whipping post” and forces you to deal with it immediately at risk of continued public embarrasment. Ultimately this creates an active community and more loyal following around your offering because people know you aren’t burying their criticisms and feedback.

It goes without saying that the Firefox extension for del.icio.us is a must if you post enough and as long as you’re at it, you might as well snag the FF Better Search extension so you have thumbnail images on all your del.icio.us links. If you’re new to del.icio.us and have a bunch of existing bookmarks from your web browser, you can use their nifty import feature to move all your bookmarks over and have it assign the most popular tags to the ones it already knows about. I don’t use their network feature because it doesn’t get me anything I can’t do via RSS. The people who I want to monitor I just follow individually via RSS by creating a “del.icio.us recon” folder in my bloglines and subscribing to each of their feeds. It’s better because they are now separated out by individual rather than being munged into one big list and they still have chronology.

If you have other ideas for how to get more out of del.icio.us, please share them in the comments section.