Online Marketing Blog

My co-worker and public relations goddess Karen Sams has posted a nice list of press release optimization tactics over at Media Relations Blog. She covers:

• Keywords
• Headlines
• Text links
• Landing pages
• RSS feeds

A question that often comes up when I talk to public and media relations professionals about optimizing press releases, is whether or not an “optimized” release can actually perform double duty as an effective communicication tool with journalists as well as search engines.

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If you are interested in RSS industry benchmark metrics, RSS marketing best practices and want to compare your RSS marketing results with those of your peers, then you will be interested in the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey being conducted by MarketingStudies.net.

Here’s the hype:

“Participate in the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey, conducted by MarketingStudies.net and aiming to research the RSS marketing landscape, to receive a free copy of the full 2006 RSS Marketing Survey Report, bringing you top RSS marketing best practices and metrics to compare your RSS marketing practices with those of your peers, to improve your RSS marketing results.”

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This week I learned a very important lesson with RSS. Particularly with FeedBurner. A reader of this blog requested that I expand the number of posts in our feed from the default 12 to A LOT more than that. I met him half way and that created a HUGE RSS file. I did this without consulting the people that I know who are far more technically adept at RSS than I (Thomas, Amanda, Rok). Shame on me. Why, you ask?

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Next week is ACCM, the Annual Conference for Catalog, Internet and Multichannel Merchants at the enourmous McCormick Place in Chicago. I’ll be speaking on a panel called 15 Sizzling Hot Search Ideas for Merchants along with Lisa Papageras of What on Earth and Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing with moderation duties handled by Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks.

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It looks like the good people over at Best of the Web are celebrating two years of doing monthly promotions by having a “Cinco de Mayo” promo during the month of May. The object of desire is a 10% discount on the directory submission cost, AND an entry into their contest to win an Applie iMac Powerbook:

Am not sure about you, but a 17″ Mac Book Pro would look mighty handy on the desk, on the couch, the deck - where ever your computing takes you. More info at the BOTW blog. If nothing else, getting into a quality directory like BOTW.org at a discount is worthwhile all on it’s own. FYI, they also have a blog directory.

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I signed up for a Sphere beta account late last year. I played with it a bit and like many “Web 2.0″ apps, found it interesting, still in development and then I moved on. However, Andy Beal recently made a post about Sphere, so I checked it out again.

Today, Sphere V1.5 has been released and is publicly available. What’s new in this version:

• custom range histogram;
• sphere it bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you’re reading on the Web;
• top queries this hour/ this week;

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Over the past 2 1/2 years the readership of this blog has grown tremendously though networking within the industry, great search rankings, RSS and email subscribers and syndication. But in that time I’ve never established a blogging policy or standard per se. Now is as good as ever.

A while back Barry from Search Engine Roundtable posted his code of ethics and I’d like to use that as a basis for mine. Why re-invent the wheel, right?

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