Online Marketing Blog

Blogs have been one of the big buzz items in 2006 along with social media. It seems companies are still trying to figure out whether blogging is worthwhile for their business and where social media fits in within overall marketing strategy. The number of “blog consultants” also appears to be growing at a much faster rate than business blog adoption.

For our clients, we use blogs extensively in both our public relations practice as well as for search engine optimization. One of the most productive uses of blog software as a content management system is for an online media room.

The sheer irony of this post nearly kills me as I’ve had it in my queue to post for a few weeks now. In a presentation I gave at SES Chicago, a video interview with WebProNews and in previous blog posts, I have articulated both a naive confidence in the social news communities at being able to capably police spam as well as reasons not to spam social media in the first place.

And yet the effort was made within the digg community to disallow any stories from Online Marketing Blog from being submitted to digg with no chance of a human evaluation of the situation or process of reinclusion. digg has taken a DMOZ style persona in handling such matters with the puzzling part being domain names can be banned as a result of actions that have nothing to do with the owner of the web site. At least Google and Yahoo are mature enough to have a review and reinclusion processes in place

There’s a bit of a meme going around regarding the potential use of Google Reader as an alternative to digg. The idea is to be able to view the the most popular shared feeds. Steve Mermelstein starts out with a post, “Google Reader Could be a Digg Killer” which caught the attention of prominent bloggers Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble with nice roundup by Jason Lee Miller from WebProNews.

One of my pet peeves is ugly websites. Now I know that not everyone has the time to put into a new site, but it’s worth the time and effort. Online visitors first impressions of your company is your site. If they like it, they’ll continue to look around the site but there are plenty of alternatives if they don’t like it. Lack of design may make the user feel there is also a lack of security, product quality and/or customer service.

One of the big things right now is that Web 2.0 look. Now I don’t know if you can really target a look and feel to Web 2.0 necessarily, but is the characteristics that make up some of the biggest Web 2.0 companies websites that are making up this look and feel.

I can’t believe it was 3 years ago today that Online Marketing Blog was launched. Here is the inaugural post from December 28th, 2003.

The design we launched with. Ewwwwwwww!

Here is the design from 2004-2005

Originally published on the Blogger platform, we moved to WordPress after about a year and a half. Our SEO designer and blog marketing maven, Thomas, has been an invaluable help with the back end of the blog, the design and posting from time to time. Most recently, he helped with the coverage of the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference. For the most part, you can find Thomas blogging over at Blogger Design.

In a recent email newsletter from SEO Research Labs, Dan Thies announces, “As of January 1st, I am closing the doors on my SEO training programs.” That’s a pretty bold statement, but Dan’s not quitting entirely. He’s just moving the show to another venue.

I can’t provide exact details because the others involved in Dan’s new venture have yet to make their announcements. But here’s what I do know. Dan has established his authority as a search marketing expert and has been providing search marketing coaching and training for several years now. Over the years the search marketplace has become more complex and his students often have more issues to deal with than just search marketing.

Early this morning Techcrunch scooped a story on the sale of certain assets from Performancing to PayPerPost. Here is the press release from Business Wire with all the “formal” details.

Here is the lowdown: PayPerPost is acquiring the Performancing Metrics and Exchange features and the Performancing for Firefox blog editor and Performancing Partners ad technology will be retained and launched under new brand names.

What makes this interesting is that one of the owners of Performancing is Patrick Gavin who is also co-founder of Review Me, a competitor to PayPerPost. Patrick was nice enough to provide me some of the inside scoop “off the record” as well as this “official” comment:

Here’s a roundup of the fifteen most popular posts or resources for 2006 hosted here on Online Marketing Blog. (not counting the home page):

1. RSS Button Maker
2. Getting Listed in News Search Engines
3. Interview with Adam Lasnik of Google
4. Social Bookmarks Tool
5. Blogger Relations 101
6. 25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog
7. Matt Cutts Videos
8. New Rules for Social Media Optimization
9. Google Dance V Photos
10. Online Marketing Blog Resources
11. About Online Marketing Blog
12. Yahoo Terry Semel Interview Video
13. Gmail for Business
14. Interview with Chris Pirillo
15. Matt Cutts on Toolbar Data
    

Top ten referrers:

• Google
• digg (ouch!)
• Yahoo
• marketingterms.com
• Bloglines.com
• Technorati.com
• MSN
• My Yahoo
• TopRankResults.com
• StumbleUpon

In a recent conversation with a big brand company conducting their search marketing vendor selection process, I was asked what “our angle” was. What makes TopRank different from other SEO firms?

The question was followed up with the observations that other SEO vendors this company had talked to all seemed to distinguish themselves by focusing on certain aspects of search engine optimization. Some focused on content, some relied on links and others focused on code and the technical side of SEO.

I am a fan of the adage, “Fact tell and stories sell”, so whenever I can, I like to use an analogy or story to explain things. Hence came the “zone or man to man” idea to explain tactical versus holistic search engine optimization.

If you’ve checked out your feed stats recently, you may have noticed that Pageflakes readers are growing; fast! To bad it’s not a reality.

It turns out that there is an issue with Pageflakes or that someone is spamming in the name of Pageflakes and inflating the subscribers.

Check out all the details over at Techcrunch and don’t forget to read the comments as they have good points there too.

[tags]pageflakes[/tags]

I couldn’t help myself. The Best Buy employee walking around the games area with a Playstation 3 under his arm was just too tempting. I was there to buy a Nintendo Gameboy Advance game for my oldest and I had to ask, “How many of those PS3′s do you have?”. The BB guy said “6″. I said, “I’ll take it”. And walked out of the store with 1 game, 3 Blu-Ray movies, an HDMI cable and a 60 gig PS3.

Somehow I’ll rationalize this as a purchase for the kids, but who’s kidding who? I know what a stand alone Blu-Ray DVD player costs right now, so in my mind, this was a good deal. Besides, we used our old PS2 for movies 90% of the time anyway.

What a year 2006 has been and I would like to thank all the amazing people who have taken part in our firms’ success and especially the readers of TopRank’s Online Marketing blog.

After updating the design, covering happenings in the search marketing industry, publishing numerous text and video interviews and blogging most SES, Pubcon and DMA conferences, the readership for this blog has grown tremendously from a hundred plus RSS subscribers in December 2005 to around 3,300 currently.

There has been a lot of hard work put into creating original content on this blog as well as paying attention to industry news. Technorati ranks us at 778 out of 59 million blogs and we’re around 9,000 for traffic on Alexa. Not bad for a niche blog on online marketing and PR!