Online Marketing Blog

Spotlight on Search: Interview with Andy Beal

I’ve known Andy Beal via blogging and search marketing conferences for a while now and had the privilege of speaking with him on a SEO Blogger and Reporter panel at the last WebmasterWorld Pubcon in Las Vegas.

While I had great respect for Andy’s accomplishments at building search marketing companies and developing top notch blogs, his performance during the panel was genuinely impressive. His grasp of the big picture and business aspects of search marketing were/are very insightful. My public relations firm has even hired Andy for some consulting on reputation management and I am happy to recommend him.

Spotlight on Search: Interview with John Slade of Yahoo!

There has been quite a bit of buzz on the paid search marketing front with the launch of the new Yahoo! Search Advertising platform aka “Panama”. At the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Yahoo! announced the launch during a sponsored lunch. Dan Zarrella did a good a review of that session here.

Our YSM account recently went through the upgrade and we’re going through the process of getting familiar with all the new platform features. After talking to my contact at Yahoo PR as well as Mona Elesseily from Page Zero who has written a book about the Yahoo Search Marketing program, I thought it would be good to get some insight directly from Yahoo for Online Marketing Blog readers. John Slade, Senior Director of Yahoo Global Product Management was kind enough to field a few questions for me.

You may have noticed some tagging going on around the blogosphere today. Not the SMO kind of tagging but the “tag you’re it” kind of tagging. Marshall Sponder over at Web Metrics Guru got me yesterday, but I just noticed this afternoon.

Jeff Pulver started things off with this Holiday version of Blog Tag and this is the way it works: Once you’re tagged by another blogger, you write five things most people don’t know about you and then “tag” five other bloggers.

If you’re a regular reader to this blog, you’ll know I’m not one for many (if any) “cat posts” so it will be pretty easy for me to hit on a few things most people don’t know about me.

Here is this week’s batch of new blogs I’ve added to my SEO and social media blog list. Enjoy!

Joe’s SEM Blog – Joe Williams from the UK shares his wisdom on paid search and search marekting in general.

Search Marketing Standard Blog – So that’s where Garret French is hanging out! SMS also offers one of the few print publications on search marketing.

Chris Hooley ThinkBait – The guy behind DrinkBait has other interesting thoughts and a little drama too. He’s also going to Elite Retreat!

No Ignore – A marketer’s experiment at achieving $10k/month from the internet. Welcome Howard!
werty dot net 4.0 – You know when you meet some people and they just seem like “good people”? That’s what George Werty is like. I also thank George for introducing the notion of “meat coma” to the blogosphere.

Where as the WordPress admin isn’t bad, it could be much better. Check out this optimized and stylized version of the WordPress admin.

And it’s all available via a plugin.

WP Tiger Administration v3.0 became available today and it adds quite a bit of style to the admin area of your blog. It was organizationally designed to be a Mac style, now it’s just style. It uses the power of CSS2 to add subtle colors, a right had nav, a few icons and less clutter all around.

It works great in Firefox and Safari but leaves out Internet Explorer as IE doesn’t support CSS2.

Check it out and start administrating your blog in style!

When you size up the search marketing industry, you really have to marvel at all the different information sources, many of them conflicting, and how search marketers are able to stay on top of what’s current and relevant compared to noise and malarkey.

In the course of talking to prospective clients, prospective business partners, attending conferences and events, reading blogs, books, discussion threads, forums, newsletters and industry publications, you can get exposure to an amazing variety of observations about SEO. Many of them are spot-on. Some of them are tales of a mythical nature. A few are just plain bunk.

For some context on this post, I think it is important to note the distinction in intent for most search engine optimization efforts: SEO for publishers, blog networks and affiliates is a different thing than SEO for lead generation and on-site transactions/sales. Many tactics are the same, but the intentions and outcomes are very different.

Ron Belanger from Yahoo does a decent job explaining, “Engagement, Search and Social Media” in a video over at iMedia Connection. I like the context in which he presents social search – as a third channel to organic and PPC. Now if iMedia just offered some social bookmark links for the video!

WSJ posits a good question: “Google Tests New Ad Offerings — But Will Advertisers Follow?” In order to accomplish the transfer of ad dollars to other ad formats, Google will need to change existing mindsets about advertising in print, on radio and TV as being too expensive or complicated.

B2B Online’s recent survey gives us BtoB marketers a nice gift: “62.7% of marketers plan to boost budgets in 2007”

Pandia posts it’s Google Santa wish list and Google is listening.

I just noticed that Online Marketing Blog was included in the 9rules Network. So far there have been three, 24-hour submission rounds with hundreds of blogs trying to get in, but only a few make it, like Neil and Cameron’s Pronet Advertising Blog. In fact, although I’d met Neil at conferences before, I didn’t discover his blog until I found it on 9rules along with another favorite, Experience Curve.

Inclusion criteria are here, but basically include: passion for the subject, quantity and quality of writing, topics and design.

The benefits of being part of 9rules include the exposure on the site, in the communities and featured sections as well as participation with a private member forum. After looking at this blog’s server log for the past few hours, I can already see some nice traffic benefits.

Andy Beal lets the cat out of the bag with “Five Secret Strategies to Add $1 Million in Revenue to your Interactive Marketing Agency in 2007″. What the hell is he doing giving such advice away for free??

Mike McDonald of WebProNews interviews Rebecca Lieb from ClickZ and new Editor in Chief of Search Engine Watch.

Sean X. Cummings from Ask.com calls bull$#@! on 3 marketing strategies over at iMedia Connection. Check out the “Billy Badass” sunglasses on Sean!

Chris Winfield to write for SEO Buzz Box – Aaron scores!!!

Rand shares (most) of his kickass Firefox sidebar. Thank you Rand for all that you do!

The new Search Engine Land web design is officially launched.

Yahoo has issued a new weather report.

While at SES in Chicago, I got to hear Rick Klau of Feedburner talk a few times. While listening to him, I realized that Feedburner’s services are well worth the free account; not to mention the paid account.

Feedburner is a feed management service. It takes your blog generated feed and works with it to ensure maximum compatibility with all feed readers. It also help make sure that your podcast, images and video are all correctly embedded and then makes your feed user friendly by adding CSS and subscription buttons to your feed’s page.

Not only that, but you can put in your Amazon ID to ensure your Amazon links make you money, you can also tie your Flickr images into your feed, get click through counts, see how many subscribers you have, see how people are using your feed and that’s just a few features of the free account.

Today is the 13th which means it’s Blog Backup Day.  Don’t forget to do your backups.

When the Yahoo Publisher Network blog editor Michael Mattis asked me to write an short marketing article for small businesses I knew exactly what to write about. As much as anyone, I am a proponent of new and interesting online marketing strategies like using social media for marketing, but I am also a firm believer in tried and true tactics, such as promoting one’s site offline.

After going through the routine hoops with Yahoo, the article has published on the YPN blog today, “Signal to Noise“. The article covers the basics as well as a few new, low cost tactics including:

• Market offline, as well as online
• Announce your site
• Market with a blog
• Optimize content and links
• Keep your content fresh