Focusing more energy on the step after consumers sign up to receive more information or join the service will deliver a healthier business, according to Sean Works. He shows how to court consumers to give them a positive experience before becoming a paying customer. It's easy getting people to look at the products for free -- but getting them to pay is a little more difficult. He suggests improving the funnel experience and shows us how. Read the article here.

It's a story the electronics industry has been trying to tell for about 10 years. Then along comes Google to heighten awareness. Last week we heard about Google's latest project Art, Copy and Code, which will show how creative and technology work. This week at SXSW it's all about a "crazy pair of sneakers" that shows how connected objects can tell stories on the Web. Google isn't the first to do this. Engineers have been using near field communication, radio frequency identification technology, and other sensors for years.

Jacob Sterrett serves up some tips and strategies to compete for hyper-competitive terms against big competitors. Through images and stats, Sterrett demonstrates this by showing us the most expensive keywords in Google and ways to bid on keywords related to loans. Read the article here.

Rand Fishkin takes us through the steps showing how to improve marketing through new links and mentions through a tool the company developed called Fresh Web Explorer, which allows marketers to research and compare mentions and links to a domain. He highlights six strategies, which he tells us only scratches the surface. Read the article here.

Greg Kunkel tells us about three changes advertisers should know about Facebook's new News Feed -- which the company has been working on since early last year. He points to bigger and more visual ads, targeting according to the different news feeds, and still more ads. Kunkel tells us why marketers should care, and how the changes could improve ad performance. Read the article here.

David Kirkpatrick shows us how BabyEarth used tactics in Google product listing ads to differentiate PLAs from paid-search ads, along with testing and optimization, to achieve a 129% increase in average monthly revenue from the image ads. He takes us through bidding and testing, expanding the product targets, keyword research, and ways to analyze queries. Some of the improvements included 129 increases in average monthly income from PLAs, and 193% year-on-year revenue growth. Read the article here.  

Good news for marketers. Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton said Friday he will not include the tax in the revised budget plan scheduled for release next week. The Governor was set to add a tax to services, including online advertising.

Scientists at Microsoft, Stanford and Columbia University for the first time managed to detect evidence of unreported prescription drug side effects before they were found by the Food and Drug Administration by using data from queries in Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines, reports The New York Times. The study is based on data-mining techniques similar to those used by services like Google Flu Trends.

Real estate search engine Trulia has launched Trulia Suggests, a personalized real estate recommendation engine. The technology learns from the searcher's behavior on the site, and then serves up information on homes it believes will match the interests. After users seed the proprietary recommendation algorithm with a few likes or thumbs-ups, the service begins showing a selection of houses that should match the user's interests.

Search is fundamental to online marketing and advertising, but social enables and empowers everyone to have a voice, according to George Gallate, who joined RKG from Havas Worldwide. He took the role as CEO, bringing more than 20 years of experience in the digital marketing world, including building the social offering for Havas. The video clearly aims to introduce Gallate to a wider audience, but the message in his statements emphasizes a strong push into social marketing for Rimm-Kaufman Group. No doubt data will support the shift to search and social.