Online Marketing Blog

Let’s start the rant engine folks….

CNET reports that uber blogger, Jason Kottke has pulled the plug on blogging for a living. All I can wonder is, why it took this long? What kind of business model is micropayments? The guy needs to stop drinking his own Kool Aid and treat that blog like a business, not an experiment.

It’s a bit disheartening, really. So much potential and opportunity not realized.

Kottke.org is one of the most popular, most visited blogs on the planet - #23 on Technorati’s list of popular blogs. Throw some damn AdSense on there Jason!

I received an interesting call yesterday from someone who wanted to know if I was going to SES in New York because she wanted to talk to companies that might be interested in buying a domain name she owned.

My response without knowing the domain name was, “Thanks but no thanks”. Then she shared that it was seo.com, which was interesting, but not for me.

I am curious what a domain name like seo.com would go for? Who would buy it? I guess another logical question is, “Is SEO.com really for sale?”. The whois info shows a holding company in NYC which is different than the info the person gave me on the phone.

Who hasn’t covered Google’s latest bid to take over the internet, Google Page Creator?

Lowdown: Easy to use, 100 mb of space, requires Google account, url is like: toprank.googlepages.com/home, differs from blogger in that this is for static pages and blogger is for journal entries. Seems like Geocities all over again.

Also, here’s some coverage of the coverage:

• A thread at WebmasterWorld discusses the ease of use as well as accessibility issues similar to Gmail.
• David Utter at WebProNews gets in on the action and points out how Google Page Creator takes the wind out of Microsoft Office Live Beta and the interesting message you get if you use another browser besides MSIE or Firefox.

Thomas has done it again. This time he’s created a social bookmark links creator to make it easy to add del.icio.us, digg, furl and more links to your blog.¬† A TopRank version is coming soon and I’ll post in more detail about how to use this excellent tool.

If you need a cool tool for creating RSS feed subscription buttons on your site, be sure to check out another TwisterMC creation: the Automatic RSS Feed Button Maker.

Loren Baker’s linkbait-like Search Engine T-Shirt Contest has a sponsor, Spreadshirt. With the sponsor helping to foot the bill, there will now be 10 Winners. Loren is still looking for a graphic designer though. If you’re up to it, email lorenbake@yahoo.com.

In my constant search for good online marketing information, one resource continues to deliver the goods. Since 1995, and that’s a million years ago in internet time, Larry Chase has providede an excellent newsletter highlighting useful resources for online marketers world-wide.

The Web Digest for Marketers offers both an Internet Marketing Resource Directory and an email Newsletter which has over 125,000 subscribers. There’s also an interesting Resource Guide that you get for free when you subscribe to his newsletter.

Today PRWeb officially announced the launch of their support of trackback functionality with press releases. While press releases have traditionally been used to announce news to the media, PRWeb has pioneered a direct to consumer model that allows companies to announce news to a broad audience using PRWeb’s distribution channels.

The addition of trackback functionality creates a link between bloggers and press releases in a way that is not found elsewhere. Now when a blog comments and cites a press release distributed via PRWeb, it can send a trackback to the release, which will in turn create a link back to the blog.

The Magazine DM News publishes a supplement called “Outlook” each year that collects interviews and articles from some of the leading direct marketers and their perspectives on the coming year in direct marketing. Executive Editor, Mickey Alam Khan has provided a list of trends that coincides well with what we’re seeing “on the ground”. A few trends related to search and blog marketing:

• Buzz marketing or word of mouth will be big - at least the buzz about buzz marketing will be big
• Ecommerce will emphasize “interactions not transactions” per Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli

My Yahoo news alert for “search engine optimization” sent me a link this morning to a Q/A article from USATODAY.com about SEO. A small business asked a question about bringing more traffic to her site, saying she had paid for “submission” services with unsatisfactory results. Ugh, people still fall for that?

The journalist talked to a “SEO expert”, which was really a web design firm for some suggestions.

Here’s my beef with the article:

Web designers are not search engine optimization experts. In fact, it’s web designers that keep most of us SEO practitioners so busy. That said, most SEOs are not web design experts either, with few exceptions.

graywolf has made some good observations about definitions appearing above the organic search results in Google. For example, if I search Google for, “what is plantar fasciitis” it returns:

Where the first entry is a Google dictionary item. When you click on it, 5 links to different definitions are displayed. The link in the first position is what gets displayed on the main search results page.

One thing I noticed, and it could be a cooincidence, is that all the pages listed had “Glossary” in the title tag, high up on the page and in the url.

I just got off a conference call with David McInnis, founder of PRWeb, where he announced several recent and brand new services.

PRWeb has been diligent in creating the leading direct to consumer press release distribution model to-date. Currently, around 1000 press releases are sent out a day.

PRWeb has positioned themselves as the first Web 2.0 press release distribution platform and has hired a new Web 2.0 content manager.

New PRWeb Services:

301url.com launched Dec 2005. Different than other url shortening services because it permanently redirects. Helps to avoid breaking urls. Good for bookmarking by making easy to recall urls. Also, free.

We’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2!

Not that you can tell on the outside, which you shouldn’t, but I’ve upgraded the Online Marketing Blog software to Wordpress 2.

Most changes have happened under the hood and on the admin side. However, all the changes should make the blog pages load faster and better.

I’ve also upgraded the plugins for maximum spam protection and other various features.

If you come across any issues, let me know in the comments below.

Thanks Thomas