Online Marketing Blog

Right along with Facebook, YouTube and blogging, Twitter is one of the most often written about social media communication tools. (Follow me @leeodden) We’ve run polls about how people use Twitter as well as aggregated tips from the Twitter community on how to get the most productivity out of it. This post shares a few new Twitter tools you may find useful.

TweetWheel - You may have a 100 or even 1000 followers. Which of your followers know each other? Tweet Wheel helps you find out visually. Note, if you have a LOT of followers, this will take a while.

Online Marketing Blog manages a list of over 500 search marketing blogs called the BIGLIST, but it’s not ordered other than alphabetically. A year ago I took a sample of SEO and SEM blogs that were publishing Feedburner counts and posted a list ranked by the number of RSS subscribers. Below is a re-ordered list of search marketing blogs by RSS subscribers as of today:

Matt Cutts

Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Land

SEOmoz

Search Engine Roundtable

Search Engine Journal

Online Marketing Blog

Search Engine Guide

One of the most entertaining keynote presentations at the Web 2.0 Expo by far was delivered by Forbes journalist, Dan Lyons. It’s a 15 minute long story of how Dan came to start the Fake Steve Jobs blog, it’s success and lessons learned. He also makes fun of EVERYONE. Enjoy:

BTW, if you want to see the 8 minutes before the video above, check this out on YouTube.

This session at Media Relations Summit includes Tac Anderson from HP, Jennifer Cisney from Kodak and Robert Scoble from Fast Company.

First up is Tac Anderson from HP, who shares a specific example of a tactical execution of a blog. HP has had bloggers for 3 years. 60+ blogs.

Example of using a business blog as a competitive response. Xerox announced a change in pricing. Charging more for the printer and less for the consumables - ink and paper.

With the TopRank BIGLIST at over 450 blogs, it can be a more than a challenge to read so many RSS feeds to stay current on SEM industry news. SEO blogs and news feed aggregators can make it much easier to track what’s going on whether its news, tips or events. This post highlights two services that have launched recently including Alltop from Guy Kawasaki and socialblogroll from Nick Wilsdon along with several others.

Alltop

Launched by Guy Kawasaki, Alltop is based on popurls and shows top stories for selected SEO blogs plus a preview pop up.

The Wonder Twins Track at SMX West: SEO and Blogging, provided the audience with information on how to best launch and promote a blog.

Here are 8 tips, from Aaron Wall of SEOBook, on how to gain traction for your blog.

Own a Niche

• Owning a smaller niche is an easy way to starting building personal brand
• #1 player gets more play in the media

Make Formatting a Priority

• Ensure you have a clean appealing design
• Highlight best practices
• Include an “About Us” page
• Make it easy for press to contact

While doing some research for a presentation, I was checking out the WordPress.com site on “types of blogs” looking for creative ways to categorize them. And what did I come upon, but this page which separates blogs types into two overall categories of “popular” and “banned”. Guess where SEO blogs fall? Sigh.

Even our dear WordPress which so many search engine optimization professionals sincerely love and prefer as a blogging platform, is misinformed or at least, subject to making sweeping generalizations. This is the “banned” category:

Another freezing week here in Minnesota means less time outside and more time checking out new search marketing blogs. I present to you dear readers, this week’s additions to the BIGLIST of SEO and Search Marketing Blogs.

• B(abble)log - A.C. (Anne Charlotte) Riley is a tenured online marketer and copywriter that blogs about all manner of marketing topics.

• Inside Facebook - Justin Smith, Jonathan Lipps and Collin Smillie blog about Facebook inside and out.

• NowSourcing - With Brian Wallace social media is the name of the game.

In this month’s Target Marketing Magazine, a TopRank authored article on how small businesses can gain a competitive marketing advantage by leveraging content promotion, blogs, social media and universal search was featured. Recently there has been some dialog and commentary on certain SEM channels about upcoming harder economic times calling for SEO to be taken back to the basics: “Textbook SEO” as Mike Grehan would put it. I disagree with the premise that companies should stop experimenting with new tactics and stick with the fundamentals. Effective SEO in any economic environment means getting more creative, not mundane.

There are a lot of data points that can be meaningful for tracking blog effectiveness. That is, tracking what happens when visitors arrive at and engage with your blog content. It really comes down to the purpose of your blog. Metrics for a blog that’s focused on making a web site more search engine friendly by adding crawlable content and attracting links is quite different than a blog that’s meant to build thought leadership or brand credibility.

Matt McGee recently reached out to a number of industry bloggers to be involved with a blog content award he’s calling “The SEMMYs“. Even though the SEJ SEM Blog Awards just happened, I thought I could at least be a judge - Matt being a good guy and all. If you read Small Business SEM, you’ll know that Matt picks the best blog posts of the week or so on a regular basis. He’s taken all of those posts from 2007 and categorized them to be voted on. This includes a few good posts from OMB like”Evaluating Client Search Marketing Readiness” in the SEO category.

In a recent study by Omnicom Group’s Brodeur and Marketwire about how journalists use blogs, it was found that blogs are are a regular source for journalists for improving the speed of reporting news as well as guiding tone, but not for improving quality:

• Over three quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue
• Nearly 70 percent of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis
• One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs
• About one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page