Online Marketing Blog

If you’ve been marketing online for any length of time, you’ve no doubt seen the brand “Duct Tape Marketing“. John Jantsch, the guy behind that brand is a true, “marketer’s marketer” as you’ll see in the interview below. Because of John early in my blogging experience, I was able to pick up a lot of great insights and secured blogging gigs with Business Blog Consulting and AllBusiness.com which lead to a number of media opportunities and consulting engagements.

In this interview, John talks about getting started, branding, blogging, SEO, outsourcing marketing and tips, getting referrals, specialization and a few of his favorite tools and technologies.

You’re well known, heck you’re famous, for many things related to small business marketing. Tell us about yourself. How did you get started blogging and where did the idea for Duct Tape Marketing begin?

On Wednesday October 1st, about ten of TopRank’s finest will be making the trek from the Western suburbs to downtown Minneapolis for the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association’s (MIMA) “sold out” Summit.

As in years past, MIMA Summit will take place at The Depot with a new focus on the subject of “mutualism”. Mutualism centers on the open use of material in the online world, in which web marketers and users alike participate with one another and share information together. In that spirit, I’m going to take the information provided by MIMA about the Summit and share with our readers.

Gary Koelling at a MIMA Event

It’s social media interview week here at Online Marketing Blog and we have another excellent interview with a social media sage just for you.

Gary Koelling is a blogger, Twitterati, public speaker and a social media pathfinder. He’s also Senior Manager, Social Technology at Best Buy. Best Buy is undoubtedly one of the “best” known brands in retail and in particular with many of the gadget-geeky readers of Online Marketing Blog. After seeing Gary speak at a MIMA event (pictured above) I thought it would be interesting to get a few of his insights as a social media evangelist within a large company as well as advice for others.

Online Marketing Blog readers may remember a while back that our blog was shut down by a previous host with no warning because of too much load on the shared server. When they did finally respond/contact us it was to sell an upgrade while web requests for our site returned a 404 not found message.

We turned to a local web hosting company, VISI, for a dedicated server and things have been running smoothly ever since. Our experience with VISI is documented on this post, “VISI – A Web Hosting Company That Rocks“.  We’ve been hosting with VISI for over 1 1/2 years and we’ve had very rare if any reason to contact them. When it comes to hosting, that’s a very GOOD thing.

Blogs are undoubtedly a big part of the social media world and that’s why the topic of social media was approached at Blog World Expo from many different angles from monetization and marketing to social media and blogs in corporate public relations.

This interview with Ford’s head of social media, Scott Monty touches on a few things large companies (or any size company for that matter) should be thinking about when evaluating social media as a communications, marketing and community building channel.

You can read plenty more of Scott Monty’s insights on his blog, The Social Media Marketing Blog and on Twitter at @scottmonty.

The Blog World Expo conference has brought together an amazing mix of marketing, social media and public relations voices making someone like myself feel very much at home discussing the convergence of these three disciplines. Jason Falls, Director of Social Media for ad agency Doe-Anderson, is one of those people who really “gets” the social web and what that means for marketing and PR.

Check out this interview with Jason after the “Blogs and PR” session we both sat on talking more about how to get the PR industry to wake up to the social web.

As you can see, Jason has a lot to say and he’s both insightful and entertaining. Read more of Jason’s social media smarts over on his blog at Social Media Explorer and I would also highly recommend that you connect with him on Twitter: @jasonfalls.

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Blog World Expo in Las Vegas this weekend is by far the most social, friendly and generally “buzzing” conference I’ve been to in a while. Bloggers are opinionated, natural networkers. Many bloggers might not be as open in other situations, but here amongst several thousand other like-minded individuals, people open up. Plus, it’s Vegas baby.

Here are a few of my favorite photos so far from Blog World Expo:

The audience during the “Blogs and PR” panel I was volunteered to join at the last minute. Fun!

Blog World Expo Founder Rick Calvert and Programming Chair Dave Taylor

Beautiful people blog too: Valerie Combs and Brian Solis

Chris Brogan aka ‘Jones Soda Famous” and moi

Woot Woot for the Blog Team! Geoff Livingston and David Berkowitz

Social media and search engine marketing: Are they two peas in a pod, complementary or two very distinct channels?

I think the answer is all of the above, depending on the situation.  The growth in attention to social media as a marketing, communication and community building opportunity deserves attention by all sorts of online marketers, especially those in search marketing.

How does social media affect search marketing?

Searcher expectations have changed.  – Searchers no longer have the sole expectation of searching to find information for a specific outcome. As people spend more and more time connecting, sharing and interacting with the social web, they now often expect to interact with what they find in the search results.

With search engine optimization a challenge for most company marketers to stay current with, how exactly are businesses supposed to confidently hire a SEO consultant? Google has an opinion on this if you haven’t noticed.

There’s an ongoing dance of sorts between search engines like Google and the search engine optimization community. They both want a win/win for the searcher (relevant results) and for the same reasons (revenue) but from different perspectives. Google uses the content of web sites against which to run its ads and make money for itself and it’s advertising clients. SEO consultants optimize those web sites to rank higher in the “free” or non-ad portion of the search results for a fee in order to drive traffic to increase their client’s sales.

We live in some interesting times with the economy, the war, natural disasters and the uncertainty that comes with a Presidential election. It’s enough to keep marketers on their toes that consumer online behaviors and technology change so often, but economic uncertainty makes it even more “interesting“.

The interactive marketing show will go on but in what forms?  Marketing budgets are often the first cut during a recession. Yet many online marketers have reported increases in client spending. Factors such as the health of the company and market, as well as tactics need to be considered.

There are many, many ways to market online, giving companies a highly measurable, high impact and low cost option to expensive and often unaccountable traditional advertising.  Which leads me to the following Reader Poll:

There’s a pretty big agenda in store for the upcoming Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference in New York also known as “DPAC II“.  Topics, people and conversations around media, marketing, publishing, and technology will all come together to help the digital content and advertising industry understand what’s next and what’s right for them. Anyone in the digital media industry, especially on the East coast would do well to attend this event.

Thanks to the organizers at DPAC II, Online Marketing Blog has 2 free passes to give away ($695 each value) to our readers.  Over the past two weeks we’ve watched comments made on our weekly BIGLIST Updates of SEO blog reviews where the opportunity to win a free pass to DPAC II was announced.

I wonder how many people reading this blog right now work for a company that:

1) Doesn’t have a blog
2) Has a blog but it’s on life support
3) Is considering blogging but not sure where to start
4) Has been blogging for a while, but wants to make it to the next level

Well, I’ve got some really good news.  On the heels of the OMMA New York conference Sept 18-19 comes Blog World Expo in Las Vegas Sept 20-21. What better place to have the world’s largest conference dedicated to blogging than the city that never sleeps because most of the active bloggers I know don’t sleep either.