Online Marketing Blog

Seeing Frank’s post today reminded me it’s “Blog Day” where you share some of your favorite blogs. Excluding individual blogs and blogs of friends, here is a short list of blogs/blog aggregation sites that I absolutely check every day:

NewsNow Search Engines - Aggregation of MSM and blog posts about search engine industry news.
Search Brains - Aggregation of SEO blog posts from iEntry.
Micropersuasion - Steve Rubel always finds something new.
New PR - Digg style site on new media public relations created by Constantin Basturea.
Google Blogs ‘n More - Collects all the latest official Google Blog posts, plus Matt Cutts’ blog and the MSN and Yahoo search blog - from Phillip Lessen.
Search Engine Roundtable - Barry, Chris and Ben bringing it to you every day.
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog - The amount of original, useful content from Rand and company at SEOmoz EVERY DAY is absolutely mind numbing.

With all the buzz about social media optimization the past week, I thought it would be timely for us to present two updated tools for encouraging the sharing of and linking to content as well as distribution. These are concepts that are fundamental to the notion of social media optimization or SMO.

The first tool is one we’ve received excellent comments on and it’s called the Social Bookmark Creator. In order to make it easy for readers to save a blog post or a web page for reading later or to aggregate resources using a social bookmark service, we’ve created a tool that allows you to add a social bookmark menu after each post or on a static web page.

Lots of interesting news today. First Danny making a big move and now this about Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt joining the board of directors at Apple. Via Tuaw and thanks to Thomas.

You’ve got to love the mutual adoration quotes:

“Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of Apple’s board of directors,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.”

‚ÄúApple is one of the companies in the world that I most admire,‚Äù said Eric Schmidt. ‚ÄúI’m really looking forward to working with Steve and Apple‚Äôs board to help with all of the amazing things Apple is doing.‚Äù

Barry reports this morning that Danny Sullivan is leaving Search Engine Watch.

Wow. What’s next? Hell freezing over? Cats and dogs living together? What in the world will Search Engine Watch and SES be without Danny?

Seems things didn’t quite work out with Incisive Media. I think there’s less of a question as to what will Danny do without Incisive. He’s done pretty well so far and can probably do just about anything he wants on a go forward.¬† If you want to keep informed on what Danny will be doing on a go forward, he’s set up a Yahoo Group.
Best of luck to you Danny!

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One of the blog networks that I write for is hosted within AllBusiness.com. If all goes well, they will launch their new design on Tuesday. Here’s a preview screen shot:

The old interface was getting very busy which is a challenge when you’re a site like AllBusiness.com with millions of documents. I think the new design is much cleaner and it’s great to see the bloggers, ah I mean, “Advisors” posts brought up higher in the page. I guess this means I should get busy and start posting there regularly again.

We’re just finishing up with a 6 month promotion called, “6 for 06” with AllBusiness.com where several consultants (like myself) volunteered time to help out selected small businesses with certain problems. The company I worked with was AdventureOut.com, a California based outdoor adventure company that also hosts an online store.

Business Week is taking votes for their annual Best of the Web, which is not to be confused with the most excellent web site directory and blog directory from BOTW.org. There are 23 categories and two of them are related to blogs. The selection for “favorite blogs” includes an interesting mixture ranging from Scoble to Sand Hill Slave to Tech Crunch.

At the time of this post, there are only 744 votes so far with Tech Crunch the clear leader, but I think the SEO/SEM readership out there could make quite an impact on that if they wanted to.

If you would like more of a variety of blogs to vote for, then go ahead and fill in the write in form. I know I did. I put one in for Search Engine Roundtable and another for Matt Cutts. Good luck guys!

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Google announced tonight the availability of “Google Apps for Your Domain” which currently includes private-labeled: Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar and Google Page Creator. A free version and a paid version are available, without any further details on the paid version at this time.

Sign up and setup for the service is pretty easy and requires the same kind of validation as Google Sitemaps.

For Gmail, you can send and receive email using the designated domain name, but with all of GMail’s features. For Google Page Creator, you can create pages to be published under a subdomain, example, seo.yourdomainname.com so you’ll need to add a CNAME record.

Matt asks for your favorite Web 2.0 companies. Here’s a huge list from Seth Godin and another from SEOMoz.

Blogs have gone missing from Yahoo News reports TW. Steve Rubel notices too and suggests that Yahoo is building a dedicated blog and feed search tool. Maybe something like: reader.yrank.feeds.yahoo.com.
Update: Greg Jarboe offers some interesting insight suggesting that perhaps Yahoo is not permanently taking blogs out of news search results.

Are you into marketing via Wikipedia? Then you’ll be interested in the most popular Wikipedia pages. via Google Blogscoped.

Yahoo issues another Weather Report.

Google is updating backlinks reports Barry.

Cool Web 2.0 sort of shopping recommendation, tagging, and more site. ThisNext.com. Hat tip to Eric.

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There’s a growing amount of buzz about social media lately, but specifically of interest is social media press releases. As we fold the new media press release, press room and media relations tactics into our PR strategy, I’ve been monitoring a number of resources on the topic of new media PR and the hRelease or social media news release and offer some of those links here.

New Media Release Group - A Google group started to discuss the new media release format with participants ranging from independent PR consultants to PR Newswire and Market Wire.

New PR - Constantin Basturea’s “Digg style” site for new media public relations news.

Workspace for Social Media Press Release (hRelease) - hRelease is a community effort to define a new format for press releases via a community standard microformat

Eurekster has announced today that their social search product, SwickiPublisher, will be used to create a new vertical search engine feature on the Forbes.com home page via a tab called “Web” and on the search results pages.

I had the opportunity during the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference to talk about Eurekster with CEO, Steve Marder. Unfortunatley, I did not get a chance to write about that meeting during the conference, so I’ll include some of the things he shared here.

What is most interesting to me about Eurekster’s site search features is that it learns by analyzing clickstream data as people use it. Tagging or voting is possible, but not required. Eurekster is based, in part, on the notion of “collective wisdom”, or “wisdom of crowds”, where users’ actions and/or behavior provide information to the search engine on what content is relevant.

Marketing.FM has announced a new network of marketing and advertising blogs syndicated under one RSS feed called the Marketing and Advertising Blog Network. The initial group of blogs has over 50,000 subscribers and cover marketing, media, advertising agencies, PR, branding, television, radio, internet, new media, interactive advertising, and influential discussion. Online Marketing Blog is happy to be included with this project.

Current blog network members include:

Adrants
Advertising for Peanuts
Duct Tape Marketing
Entrepreneur’s Journey
Logic+Emotion
Marketing Headhunter.com
Marketing Pilgrim
Marketing.fm
MarketingVOX — The Voice of Online Marketing
Micro Persuasion
Online Marketing Blog
ProHipHop - Hip Hop Marketing
Small Business Branding
WonderBranding: Marketing to Women

Familar names (at least to me) from this list include: Steve Hall, John Jantsch, Andy Beal, Tig Tillinghast and Steve Rubel. You can subscribe to the combined RSS feed which is hosted by FeedBurner’s new network feature.

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Early this morning I received an email from John Marshall (as did other bloggers and pubs) announcing the merger of ClickTracks into a group of companies owned by J.L. Halsey that includes: Lyris, EmailLabs, and Hot Banana in a deal worth about $10 million.

I must say, congratulations to John, he’s a great guy, entertaining speaker, smart and very passionate about web analytics. The combined resources of the J.L. Halsey companies is sure to help ClickTracks offer a very valuable set of services to each group of customers as well as attract a new set of clients.

I am posting about this a little late because I wanted to make sure I had a chance to get some additional questions answered first.