Online Marketing Blog

At ad:tech last week, fellow PR/new media marketing practitioner and blogger, Rohit Bhargava and I were talking about his new book, “Personality Not Included - Why Brands Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Companies Get it Back”, and he mentioned that I should send him a list of recommended reading for a new bookstore feature he’s adding to his blog.

I thought that was a great idea and with so many smart marketers reading Online Marketing Blog, I’d like to invite you to share a few of your favorite books on the subjects of marketing online, social media and new media public relations.

They say you should face your greatest fears head on and public speaking has been one of mine since I was a kid. Being shy didn’t help during those school speech assignments one bit. Anyone with me on that one?

Having worked in the search marketing/web dev business since 1997, it was only 2 years ago or so that I began to speak at events about SEO, marketing with blogs and online public relations. I think there were 3 speaking events that first year. This year it looks like 16 and there are already 8 events booked for 2008. Things can change quickly in internet time.

Editor’s note: On occasion we reach out to people in the search marketing industry we’ve come to know and respect with a request to contribute. Today’s contribution comes from Microsoft’s adCenter Community Manager - Europe, Mel Carson. Mel’s job is to support, educate & evangelize through the adCenter Blog, industry forums, and to speak about adCenter at conferences such as SMX, SES, Pubcon and others. Mel writes his own blog at DigiTales & Other Stories.

This post tells a personal tale of getting involved with Microsoft at the beginning of adCenter’s deployment to the paid search marketing world along with some good examples of unique adCenter features and why Mel thinks it’s great working for Microsoft.

I recently discovered a test AdWords account setup by an ex-staffer and while there was never any activity, it didn’t make sense to keep the AdWords or User account live since it would never be used. A cancel request was sent to Google and this was the response:

“Thank you for your email. I am sorry to hear that you want to cancel your AdWords account. After reviewing your account, I see that you have not submitted your billing information, so your account was never activated. Therefore, you are not getting the option to cancel your account.”

We have more new blogs added to the BIGLIST than you can shake a USB key fob at this week. Step right up for your weekly dose of SEO, PPC, social media and web analytics. If you’re a Twitter fan, now you can get weekly BIGLIST updates at: http://twitter.com/biglist

• Conversation Marketing - Ian Lurie offers common sense internet strategies, tutorials and observations that really run the gamut of online marketing topics ranging from email marketing to SEO to blogging.
• Social Media Explorer - Jason Falls, a social media marketing professional, blogs all the social media angles including news, newtworking, PR and analytics.

With our BIGLIST of 400+ SEO blogs, it’s a great resource, but can be a bit overwhelming. There’s simply too much to monitor. That’s why I tend to favor a small number of news aggregators and sites via RSS or on the web. Here are a few of those tools:

Topics for this morning’s keynote centered on the notion of the “new P” platforms, video advertising and random references to Gilligan’s Island and weird porn.

The panel was moderated by Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of IAB. Panelists included:

• Suzie Reider, Head of Ad Sales YouTube.com
• Michael Barrett, EVP, Chief Revenue Officer Fox Interactive Media
• Arianna Huffington, c-founder and Editor in Chief Huffington Post
• Matt Freeman, CEO Tribal DDB Worldwide

Arriving at JFK was surprisingly un-eventful and smooth. Carry on is certainly the way to go. I walked right off the plane and to the taxi area where a town car agreed to take me to Midtown for the same price as a cab. There is no substitute for a ride with legroom.

Upon arrival at the Hilton where the ad:tech NYC conference was being held, I ran into Patrick Gavin of Text Link Ads/Media Whiz. A great guy and very successful as well. I didn’t think to take a photo, but in case you don’t know him, he looks like that fellow on the show “The Bachelor”.

Link posts are few and far between but there’s plenty to link to today with all the announcements at ad:tech and on the SEM web in general.

Monetizing the Conversation. BuzzLogic has announced their “Conversation Targeting” service, which enables the keyword driven monitoring of interlinking between blogs and other social media sites to uncover emerging “communities”. Once the “influencers” have been identified, you can use BuzzLogic’s interface via the Google API to place contextual or display ads on the sites of influence. There’s also a whole set of influencer management tools that allow you to conduct blogger relations and manage other outreach tasks.

Raise conversions by 55% you say? That’s what Marketing Sherpa says in the promo copy for their new Landing Page Handbook. One of the most popular posts we’ve ever had on Online Marketing Blog was the 10 Landing Page Tips by Jon Miller of Marketo. That’s why I think this new report from Marketing Sherpa may be of interest.

You can spend a lot of time testing and fine tuning landing pages on your own from scratch, but in many cases, it makes a lot of sense to get a bit of a head start. This guide is about both the art and science of landing page creation and optimization.

Next week I’ll be attending my last “blogging only” conference of the year, ad:tech New York, and possibly for quite a while. I will be performing blogging duties for the adtechblog.com along with Sara Holoubek, Richard Cacciato, Craig Peters, Steve Hall, Angela Natividad and Robert Gorell. With that many bloggers and over 10,000 people registered for the event, that’s what I call a blogger bonanza!

Attending conferences purely to blog has been great the past few years but speaking and performing editor duties for our media sponsorships has taken a much higher priority. Of course, when I am fortunate enough to be able to speak at a conference there’s always some blogging that goes along with it.

So many blogs and so little time! This week’s BIGLIST update brings you a mix of blogs covering analytics, social media, entrepreneurship, emerging media and a nice SEO aggregator.

• Leveraging Ideas - Sam Huleatt, a Brooklyn-based Internet entrepreneur & strategy guru writes about the social media space, strategies and entreprenuership.
• Analytics Talk - Justin Cutroni of EpikOne writes about the array of Google products, including analytics, he works with.
• Original Signal Transmitting SEO - Aggregation of the 15 most popular SEO blogs and web sites ranging from Search Engine Watch to Search Engine Land and TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog.