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Well, another holiday season has come and gone. Hopefully, you’re reading this as you take a break from swimming in the big pool of money you made last month. If not, then maybe your holiday campaign made a slight misstep in how you marketed yourself.

Take a look at your marketing materials. Which of the usual holiday greetings did you use the most? Was it “Happy Holidays,” “Merry Christmas” or a combination of both?

More and more, companies tend to use “Happy Holidays.” Their reasoning is, it encompasses everyone and their various beliefs, traditions and customs during the season.

But is “Happy Holidays” necessarily that best thing to say if you’re trying to sell merchandise and make a profit? A recent article in a New York Times blog says “Merry Christmas” is infinitely more popular than “Happy Holidays,” at least as far as printed media goes. What’s more, it’s been that way since at least 1800.

The folks at Conversion Voodoo decided to find out whether that popularity continued when those slogans are applied to online marketing. Using a 100,000+ customer list for one of their clients, they tested three different Email headlines on December 21. Each subject headline was sent to an equal number of people on the mailing list:

Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

The Results, while predictable, were pretty amazing:

“Merry Christmas” was the big winner, garnering over 1800 clicks – nearly 2 percent of the total audience solicited, and close to 6 percent of the audience targeted with “Merry Christmas “. “Happy Holidays” and the combination greeting both reported about half the click rate of “Merry Christmas.”

So what’s going on here? Why is “Merry Christmas” so much more popular? The studies don’t go into that, but obviously “Christmas,” at least in America, makes one think of gifts. Wish someone merry Christmas and you single the day out from the holiday pack, which starts a month earlier with Thanksgiving and ends a week later with New Year’s Day.

So if “Happy Holidays” didn’t make you happy this season, you know what to do next December. Target the holiday and see if things don’t improve on your end.

Whether you have a writer on staff or not, everybody at some point needs to write something important for their website. Gabriel Smy of SmyWord.com has come to the aid of would-be and need-to-be writers this holiday season by compiling 40 quick writing tips on his site. Here are just a few of them:

#1. Don’t worry about whether you’re a writer or not. If you write, you’re a writer.

#2. Have point you want to make before you start writing. #3. Tell your readers what you want them to do. Call to action is vital.

#5. Your title is the most important thing. Take the time to come up with a good one.

#6. Edit, edit, edit. Write everything you can then start cutting.

#9. Why should the reader care? Give them something to care about in every line your write.

#12. Use the same “person” throughout. If you start in first person, stay there.

#15. Lose the redundancies; “in my opinion, the fact of the matter,” etc.

#25. Show, don’t tell. If you can illustrate it instead of describe it, do so.
#27. Proofread and use Spell Check.

#32. Never use a long word where a short word will work. #33. Use active sentences: My dog ate my dinner. Not: My dinner was eaten by the dog.

#35. When you finish writing, take off the top paragraph. Chances are you can get along without it.

Remember back when you started your blog?

You couldn’t wait to get on and speak your mind. You built up a little audience, started getting some feedback, worked in the keywords and all that…

…then time passed. Blogging became a chore. So you hired bloggers to write for you. And they got bored. It’s not you. It’s not them. It’s just the way it is if you don’t offer proper incentive to keep a blog current.

So how do you keep bloggers interested in turning out good content for you?

Heidi Cohen at Content Marketing Institute (CMI) has three suggestions on how you can keep your blogging team on track:

1. Set goals and related metrics for your blog. Make sure your bloggers understand blog analytics and the goals you’re interested in achieving. As a result, bloggers will compelled to keep the quality levels up, since they are competing with other bloggers for rank. Elements to track include:

Think for a minute what it would be like if you woke up tomorrow and you couldn’t use Google. It wouldn’t be pretty, would it? Many companies might be ruined. However, blogger Tim Peter on Mike Moran’s Biznology Blog says that having to make it without Google is a very real prospect happens every day. Google changes its algorithm, and suddenly you’re not only off page one, you’re off of Google, trying desperately to get back on.

Peter poses the question: “If (Google’s) next algorithm update—or a future regulatory-mandated change—knocked you out of their index, would your business survive?” He then offers seven tips to help keep yourself in the game should you find yourself on the short end of the Google Stick:

1. Go where the customers are. Yes,your customers use search but they also use email, social media and mobile phones. B2B companies also have the advantage of LinkedIn. You can also rely on Facebook and other more targeted marketing channels.

2. Set your objectives. Once you’ve found your customers, what do you expect out of each of these sources? Leave lenty of options for rethinking your marketing channels as things change – and they will change.

3. Improve your web presence. By that, Peter doesn’t mean to spruce up your website, necessarily. It means to reconsider everything about you that your customers react with online – your Facebook pages, Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn, etc.

4. Keep growing your opt-in contact list. Find out how your customers wish to be contacted. Then use those tools to communicate. Eliminate the methods that your customers ignore.

5. Peter advises blogging, but only ikf you’re good at it. If you’re not, find someone in your organization who is. Allow for plenty of keyword-rich content that flows and provides valuable information for your customers.

6. Explore additional media. Display advertising still works; just make sure it carries the same general message as your online marketing. Don’t forget Email and affiliate marketing opportunities, as well.

7. Investigate other additional media models. There are CPM and CPC, but Peter advises looking into Cost per Acquisition (CPA) too.

Even with Google on your seide, Pepter says you should be doing all these things. That way, if you ever find yourself trying to battle your way back to the top, these tips will help keep you in the game.

If someone – anyone, be it Google or the greasy spoon diner down the street offered you $6 billion to sell your company, would you do it?

In a second, you say. But wait. That’s exactly what happened to Groupon the other day. Groupon.com offers incredible, one-day deals in major cities to consumers, in the hopes that the consumers will take advantage of the “steal,” then continue to fraternize those businesses without the need for a special offer.

Sounds good on paper; works good, too. Which is surprising, considering that any business offering a one-day Groupon deal has to put up or shut up: offer perms for $10 on Groupon, and you have to keep your promise.

So it’s no surprise that Google wanted Groupon, bad. So bad, it apparently offered to buy the company for $6 billion. And Groupon said no.

Why? Frank Reed, guest blogging on Mike Moran’s site, speculates it’s because Groupon has something that Google has been craving for years and has been unable to cultivate for itself: A personality.

Reed says that by buying Groupon, Google would have availed itself to 1,500 sales reps with “in-your-face” experience at negotiating company-friendly advertising deals that business owners feel are well worth the loss of a day’s worth of revenue. It’s this real people aspect that Google has never been able to master. In attempting to purchase Groupon, Reed says, it was effectively trying to “buy” a personality. Groupon saw right through it.

Certainly, Reed says, Google needs to “put a human face on the company.” But buying it is not an option – at least as far as Groupon is concerned.

Augie Ray at Forrester.com says he’s sick. Sick of the repetitive practices he sees in social media that don’t help anybody at all. As a guide to those of you who would like to make him feel better, Ray compiled a list on his blog entitled.  “Eight Things I’m Sick of in Social Media.” 

Here’s what turns Augie’s stomach, in ascending order of wretchedness:

1. Automatic direct mailers. The “flood of self-serving, generic messages” Ray gets in his Twitter box every day make him sick because they get in the way of the messages he really wants to read.
2. Peer pressure. Do you really need all your Facebook “friends”? Do you even know who most of these people are? How many of these people did you meet once at a conference or something and you never saw them again?  Do the right thing and weed them out.
3. Narcissism: Nobody wants to know what a great weekend you had when you flew on a lark to Monaco for a gambling spree. Especially people you work with. This type of narcissism extends to companies that constantly blow their own horn online, and never link to anyone else. 
4. Check ins. “The sooner Facebook and others can turn the stream of check-in data into affinity information, the better,” Ray says. Offers that pop up whenever you happen to check in on a friend’s activities should be banned, Ray says. It’s one thing when you’re checking on a common interest; something else entirely when you’re just glancing at innocuous Facebook updates.
5. Facebook haters: You don’t like it? Get out. But if you’re in any kind of business, you’d better face it: If you’re not on Facebook, you’re losing potential business. It’s free, it’s easy to maintain, why wouldn’t you get with the program
6. The search for easy social media answers. Ray says people want answers to a lot of the social media questions to confuse them. The problem is for most things, there are no easy answers to anything. Social media has no universal best practices or strategies. It’s all unique all the time. Do your research, take notes and develop your own social media philosophies.  
7. Claims of social media backlash and fatigue: This is connected to the Facebook haters. It’s easy to pull out of Facebook and stop updating and staying in touch with your customers. But at what cost?  For every person or firm that “pulls out” of regular social media interaction, there are ten more coming in. Ray says just as the Internet of 2010 is very different from the internet of 2000, by 2015 we may not recognize what we now call social media. Don’t leave now; you may not recognize it when you come back in.
8. The “Next Big Thing.” Ray asks, does anybody care what the next big thing is going to be? Why worry about something you can’t predict? He says it could be something from Google or Bing or Facebook. It could be geolocation, mobile, cloud or scores of other advancements happening all at once. Ray says there’s no point to finding the next big. Instead, try cracking the code on listening to customers.”

Creating a good SEO campaign takes planning. You need to predict the best keywords for the task, know the market and industry that you’re marketing to and making some assumptions as to what size of an audience will jump at your eventual bait. While you can’t completely predict human behavior, analyzing search data can help.

Dimitri Szotos at WebSEO.com recently put together a list of his favorite “7 Web Tools to detect useful insights and trends.” While most of them are fairly predictable, a couple are probably overlooked more than they should be.

1. Google Analytics: If you use nothing else in your search data tasks, this is the tool you use. Analytics lets you see how users interact with your website. You can see which sources and keywords drive the most traffic and use it to help you determine how targeted you really are.

2. Google Webmaster Tools. This newly improved tool now allows you to see all the keywords people have used to access your site, total impressions and clicks, click through rate, average ranking position and much more.

3. Google Trends: A true analytic tool, trends shows you the total search volume for terms as they are used around the world. It can help you predict possible increased of demand for your product or service anywhere on the planet.

4. Google Insights: Similar to Trends but more visual in presentation, Insights uses a heat map to display interest in terms at various locations. It also reports to you the top 10 related searches and rising searches.

5. Google Keyword Tool and Search Terms Report: While it’s been overhauled by Google (much to the dismay of many online professionals, Szotos still recommends Keyword Tool because of its ease in helping you determine the popularity of a term. The search terms report that the tool delivers to your dashboard is particularly helpful.

6. Microsoft Audience Intelligence Tool: The first recommended tool outside of the Google realm lets you enter a term or website address and find out the demographic orientation of the page. While these are estimates, this information can provide a lot of knowledge on your target audience as a whole.

7. Yahoo! Clues: This tool, currently in Beta, offers up search queries from specific demographic groups.

Szotos is quick to remind us that what these tools deliver are trends, and not absolutes. But usually, where the crowd goes is a good idea of where you should be marketing your product or service.

If you use Google Adwords at all, you know that you have two choices when it comes to putting your advertising out on the page. You can choose the accelerated path , where most of the ad impressions are released during one part of the day, or the standard path, which spreads your ad impressions out over a more even period.

Does it really make a difference in ad performance? That’s what the investigators at TheSearchAgents.com wanted to find out. Comparing the speed vs. timeliness angle to the old “Tortoise and the Hare” story, the investigators worked with one of their own clients to test the effectiveness of each type of ad placement.

Using a fixed daily budget of $2,000 and giving each delivery method two weeks, they discovered:

Like the tortoise in the story, the switch from accelerated to standard delivery resulted in better ad performance. While total impressions actually decreased 21%, click-through rates increased by 27%, and conversion rates increased by 17%. The number of clicks increased slightly as well. The total cost per acquisition decreased 24%

The study then focused on times of day when the two campaigns were most active. Under the accelerated plan, most of the ads were run for the day by about 10 a.m. The Standard method of delivery allowed for more impression for less money. This allowed impressions to run until at least 6 pm daily.

So it appears, in PPC anyway, that slow and steady really does win the race.

With the onslaught of social media, a lot of commentators on business blogs and even social media sites themselves have predicted (or proclaimed) the demise of email marketing as a viable selling method. This would be worth noting, says Tim Roman at FathomSEO.com, if only it were true.

In his article “5 Reasons Why Email Marketing Trumps Social Media,” Roman goes so far as to say that direct email should remain the basis for any online marketing. He reasons are:

1. Users: The four largest email providers in the US alone can claim well over 800 million regular users. This is much higher than the 500 million users currently found on Facebook, Roman says.

2. Tracking: Email allows you to see who received and opened your mail, and who of those clicked through to your offer.

3. Targeting: You can demographically segment by any criteria you wish with direct mail, which means you can create targeted messages, which can cut down the overall amount of email you send out in the first place.

4. Control: Facebook or Twitter can change their standards at anytime, and wipe your page away in an instant. By managing your data on servers, you’ll never lose a single document or message that might otherwise be tossed.

5. Customization: Your email can look as unique as you wish. The logo can be whatever size you need. Plus, it can be as long as you want, because there are no character limits! You choose where the links go and much more.

So while Social Media can deliver the crowds in bulk, Roman makes the point that it still has a long way to go for delivering targeted traffic in the manner of direct email. It seems the expected demise of direct response is a good several years away, if ever.