Online Marketing Blog

Monday morning I’m off to New York for the DM Days conference. I will join several other members of the DMA Search Engine Marketing Council including: Heather Lloyd-Martin, Amanda Watlington, Detlev Johnson, Kevin Lee, Mike Moran, Jeanette Kocsis and Matt Bailey as well as John Marshall in presenting two sessions that provide a wide range of specific recommendations for a DMA member site.

Topics include: creating a business case for search marketing, web site evaluation, technical optimization, user-experience, content optimization, web analytics, pay per click, online pr and integrating web marketing with other media. I guess it’s sort of a SES “pimp my site panel” but without the hats and it occurs over two sessions.

PRWeb has announced a viral, direct to consumer powered press release that offers $1000 to bloggers that find all 10 of the new features PRWeb has added recently. Rather than offering a single or multiple press releases announcing all the features, PRWeb is experimenting with having bloggers blog about the features, then have them trackback the press release. It’s a clever way to get attention and links I think. Here are the details:

To participate, bloggers must:
1. Successfully identify all of the new enhancements made to the PRWeb platform since June 10, 2006.
2. Create a blog post that identifies these enhancements and discusses their impact.
3. Post a TrackBack/PingBack into this press release.

Cond?© Nast Portfolio editor-in-chief, Joanne Lipman interviews Google CEO, Eric Schmidt in NYC on: challenges in China, the future of advertising, Google’s new payment service, Yahoo and Microsoft and whether Google is getting too powerful.

This was covered in depth by Danny at SEW.

The Google “Inside AdWords” blog has announced the addition of “ad scheduling” or as it is more often know as, “day parting”.

“Ad scheduling can also help you improve your ROI by ensuring that your ads run when it makes the most business sense. For instance, a local business may only want to run their ads during business hours, or an online retailer may want to boost their bids during their busier-than-normal lunchtime shopping period.”

When Andrew Goodman spoke here in Minneapolis at the MIMA event this week, he mentioned the impending addition of this feature to the AdWords program, but I’m not sure how many people caught it.

Marketing Sherpa has extended their annual blog voting and awards to include podcasting this year.   Anne Holland and her team are taking nominations for blogs in several categories with and without podcasting.

Categories include:

• B-to-B marketing
• Search marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing
• PR
• Advertising
• Marketing to a specific consumer demographic (ie. women, kids)
• Blogging or podcasting as a marketing tactic
• Viral, word of mouth, buzz, social marketing
• Small business marketing
• Non-English language blogs on marketing
• General (multiple topic) marketing
• Other specific niche topic related to marketing

With so many blogs being created every day, it’s a mystery to many bloggers how to make their blog stand out. There are many types of blogs or purposes for blogs and a certain number of tactics are applicable to just about all of them.Some companies choose to hire a blog consultant, but others like to try things internally. For those “DIY” companies and individuals interested in practical tips for marketing and optimizing a business blog, try out the following list of blog marketing and optimization tips:

PRWeb has announced the launch of their Evangelist affiliate program. Currently in beta, the program is available to a limited number of participants to start. The program offers a comission on services ordered from PRWeb via affiliate links and ads.

“Evangelists and power-users of PRWeb can now receive an agency-level referral fee for their word-of- mouth efforts.”

Google is building new monster sized computing center, “as big as two football fields with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky”. via New York Times.

Google’s Picasa now offers a web albums option.

Google Earth gets upgraded with more images and new UI.

Roald from Technology Evangelist posts photos from Google’s Geo Developer Day. They’re doing some pretty cool stuff on the TE blog, so be sure to check it out.

Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable revisits the task of getting into Google News as a news source. If you can do it, I HIGHLY recommend it. Here’s the Google news source recommendation page.

Aaron Wall has posted an excellent article on search engine relevancy over at SEOBook.com explaining his perception of the different relevancy criteria used by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Aaron offers both a short version and long version. Yahoo is great, but can still be manipulated. Google is best at determining relevancy. MSN is still new and currently easiest to manipulate. Ask is good, but their small market share does not necessarily warrant specific attention from a SEO perspective.

JupiterResearch has release their “US SEM Executive Survey 2006″ reporting that 40 percent of search marketers spent at least $500,000 on search in 2005, compared to 12 percent in 2004. A significant number of those companies are using search marketing to satisfy their online branding objectives.

The JupiterResearch survey also found that, while search marketing has traditionally been used for direct marketing purposes, more marketers are seeing the value of search for branding.

While generating immediate sales of online products is the goal of 37 percent of sophisticated search advertisers, 31 percent say building brand awareness is their main objective.

I was perusing DM News in anticipation of a new article coming out that I’ve submitted recently and came upon this one from last year:

Search Engine Guide Case Study: Walmart.com and What’s Missing From Your Web Site Team?

Many blue-chip companies allocate incredible budgets to their Web site development projects. It takes a top-notch, interdepartmental team to create a successful e-commerce site. Even with a crack team of Web designers, Web and database programmers, user experience professionals, content developers, quality assurance and project managers, an important component is often missing.

Last week I had two interviews on SEO, blogs and press release optimization. One was a podcast and the other published in a newsletter. You can find the podcast interview over at the Novita Issue Communications Blog where Ernie Landante keeps me honest and runs through questions on the synergy of search engine optimization and public relations as well as some of the mechanics of the press release optimization process. At least until I started making death threats.