Online Marketing Blog

This session covered Blogs, RSS and Podcasts with moderation duties performed by Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink.
First up is Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit. “The Art of the Feed”.

The “elegance” in RSS is in the distribution possibilities: Desktop reader, email addon, web browser and mobile devices.

The art of RSS is evident in blogs, sites, pdc, vblogs, rss search engines and web 2.0 applications. (press releases via PRWeb)

Build your RSS feeds right the first time. Considerations:
- What do you want to feed? (content sources)
- How many feeds?
- How much content is needed to keep the feed fresh?
- How much content should you include in each feed entry?
- What kind of content will the feed include? test, audio or video?
- How will you ping the feeds at first and then on each update?
- How to measure performance?

I just got into Boston for the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference and as I am trying (in vain) to catch up on a few things, I saw Danny’s post today over at Search Engine Watch blog about having written for 10 years about search engines. Wow.

Maybe “Anniversary” is a better word than “Birthday”, but you get the point.
As usual, Danny’s post is VERY thorough, detailing how he started out all the way to a list of thanks to the people who helped him make Search Engine Watch what it is today.

After reading that post, I thought: how in the world will I ever be able to come up with interesting interview questions for Danny?¬† He’s the most transparent search engine expert on the web! There’s Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Watch blog, the Search Casts, the conferences, articles, newsletters, a personal blog and he drops in on forums and discussion threads too.

Dave Sifry has posted his quarterly State of the Blogosphere with these results including the observation that technology product launches attract a significant amount of interest:

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Here are previous reports: February 2006, July 2005, March 2005, October 2004.

Still think blogs are a “passing phase”? Blog marketing is no place for a “herd mentality”, but it’s nothing to procrastinate over either.

About a month ago, Grant Crowell of Grantastic Designs posted an article at Search Engine Watch on SEO for podcasts, which pointed out how straightforward it would be.

Stephan Spencer also wrote up an informative list of Podcast SEO tips on his blog.

I would also like to point out a few things regarding how podcasts can support your online marketing efforts, particularly in conjuction with online PR.

The first is the very cool Podcast recording, production and hosting service offered by PRWeb Podcast. More details in this press release.

As an example, TopRank recently did a PRWeb Podcast in conjunction with Blogs, SEO and online PR press release recently for the upcoming WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Boston. David McInnis, the CEO and founder of PRWeb and I are speaking on the same panel about Public Relations.

I received an email the other day from a site called Search Engine Feeds claiming to be running a Favorite Search Engine Feeds vote for the next month or so. You can nominate your SEO or search engine related blog. If you’re in the mood, feel free to vote for “Top Rank Blog” near the bottom.

Posting has been REAL light lately because we are running at full speed here at TopRank. We’ve been very fortunate to sign on some fantastic projects in the past few months. The number of blog consulting and blog marketing projects has increased tremendously and I think it’s an indication from the business community that blogs are becoming more accepted as marketing tools and not just virtual podiums for pontification.

[TopRank is a full service provider of digital public relations services]

I did an interview recently and thought some of the Q/A would be useful for Online Marketing Blog readers:

What’s the difference between online PR and offline PR?

Basically, online PR invlolves activities geared towards influencing media, communities and audiences that exist solely on the Internet using online channles. That includes search engines, blogs, news search, forums, discussion threads, social networks and other online communication tools. Brand reputation monitoring and management is also a focus area for online PR.

Offline PR deals with the same things except with print, radio TV, conferences/events and other “real life” venues. One difference between online and offline PR is in pitching. For example, before pitching a print journalist, the publication’s editorial calendar is researched to see if there are any planned story opportunities. The subsequent pitch is specific to the upcoming story.

This week we’ve released the first version of two WordPress plugins. One for the Feed Subscription Button Maker and one for the Social Bookmark Tool.

If you have WordPress, these two plugins work quite well and are easy to integrate. I’m still working on figuring out how to get an options page in the WordPress admin area itself, however that’s not stopping me from releasing the first versions.

Both have been tested in WordPress 2.x and work great. The Social Bookmark Tool plugin works in WordPress 1.5 also but the Feed Subscription Button Maker (aka Chicklet Creator) plugin does not at this time. If there is an interest in 1.5 support, let me know.

All suggestions and comments are welcome.

Thanks
Thomas

I leave in an hour with the clan to California for a nice long weekend. Being a glutton for work, I will have my laptop with me so my post title is probably not entirely true. Travelling with a group of 5 can be interesting especially if 3 of them are 7 or under. Unless Thomas breaks from the massive mountain of work in front of him, posting will be rather light for a few days.
A couple of quick items:

In case you don’t know about it already, check out SEO Blog RSS feed aggregator site, SearchBrains.com. This site is an awesome way to track what’s happening with most of the top SEO blogs all in one place.

Thomas here and I just wanted to let you all know that I’ve released a Firefox extension called yExplore to quickly access the Yahoo Site Explorer.

Back in September Yahoo released their site explorer and it’s quite a handy little tool. However, I wanted quicker access to the tool so I created the yExplore Firefox extension. It simply allows you to right click on any web page, select yExplore and it’ll open Yahoo Site Explorer in a background tab with the URL already submitted.

A few more details are available at my yExplore Extension page or you can get yExplore from the Mozilla site.

Today is Day Two of the eComXpo conference. This morning at 8:30 am CST is the “Big Blog” panel with Amanda Watlington, Greg Jarboe, Constantin Basturea and myself. Check out the show: http://www.ecomxpo.com/speaker

I have one free full conference pass (worth $149) to give out, so leave a comment below if you’d like to use it.

Lots of speaking events in the next 30 days or so:

WebmasterWorld Pubcon Conference  PR, Blogs and SEO РBoston РApril 18-20.

Bulldog Reporter Audio Conference – Public Relations and SEO – April 19.

Conversation with Experts TeleSeries, April 26.

ACCM conference – Search Engine Optimization Panel – Chicago – May 8-10.

Spotlight on Search Interview with Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld.

Recently I had the opportunity get the scoop from WebmasterWorld and Pubcon Search Engine Marketing conference owner, Brett Tabke. In this interview, Brett gives an interesting perspective on RSS, insight into how web services can be the next “golden goose” of revenue and the good news that Pubcon is kicking things up a notch in terms of advanced content.

The upcoming Pubcon in Boston has some really impressive speakers lined up. Personally, I think it’s smart of you not to have a search engine specific keynote speaker; there are only so many of those. What made you decide to pick Malcolm Gladwell as a keynote?

Matt Cutts leaves Google for Yahoo – Matt Cutts Blog

Jeremy Zawodny leaves Yahoo for Google – Jeremy Zawodny Blog

Scoble leaves Microsoft for Google – Scobleizer

Pin all your romantic hopes on Google Romance

Google Blogscoped tries with Google Rooms

The Register does it’s thing with China Buys Google

Google buys the French National Library – Pandia

Others: Google Browser, Google Quantum-Based Spam Filter, 1×1 pixel AdSense Ads