Online Marketing Blog

In the past I’ve written tips about marketing business blogs with an emphasis on content, frequency and distribution. Just like with optimizing web sites for better search engine rankings, there’s an abundance of information and tips on how to use blogs for business.

As far as business blogs go, the two implementations that I see most often are blogs as a component of SEO or blogs as a public relations tool. Granted, this bias is a manifestation of the focus of my company’s blog consulting practice, but I think the insight into what’s been working can benefit any type of blog.

As blogs continue to mature as marketing tools, there are an increasing number of “blog optimization” articles and posts appearing. However, many of these resources underestimate the importance of inbound links.

To think that researching and placing keywords in the “right places” alone with improve a blog’s traffic is only part of the story. Blogs are simply web sites/content management systems with some special features. Getting web sites to rank well and to engage more traffic involves a large number of variables and the same goes for blogs. The difference is that there are unique linking opportunities with blogs that are not common with web sites. These include:

I’ve managed to get myself into another interesting speaking situation. Last week it was both Pubcon and Bulldog Reporter. This week it’s a chat over at “Conversations with Experts“, with Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakemen of Build a Better Blog System. I’ll be talking about search engine optimization for small and medium businesses with some blogs and press release optimization thrown in for good measure.

Here’s the “official” description:

Search Engine Optimization with Blogs and Press Releases
Gone are the days of optimizing web sites through a sprinkling of keywords and submissions to the search engines. Today’s savvy marketer integrates a mix of tactics to gain the credibility and authority necessary for dominant search engine rankings.

Lots of great sessions on Wednesday here at WebmasterWorld Boston Pubcon. Unfortunatley, I was only able to attend two of them (one as a speaker) due to a teleconference I did with Bulldog Reporter.

I thought the Public Relations panel in the morning went well. Robin, Lawrence and David all made strong presentations. What I liked best about the session and this is corroborated by feedback I received from attendees, was the diversity of perspectives offered.

This session covered Blogs, RSS and Podcasts with moderation duties performed by Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink.
First up is Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit. “The Art of the Feed”.

The “elegance” in RSS is in the distribution possibilities: Desktop reader, email addon, web browser and mobile devices.

The art of RSS is evident in blogs, sites, pdc, vblogs, rss search engines and web 2.0 applications. (press releases via PRWeb)

This week we’ve released the first version of two Wordpress plugins. One for the Feed Subscription Button Maker and one for the Social Bookmark Tool.

If you have Wordpress, these two plugins work quite well and are easy to integrate. I’m still working on figuring out how to get an options page in the Wordpress admin area itself, however that’s not stopping me from releasing the first versions.

Both have been tested in Wordpress 2.x and work great. The Social Bookmark Tool plugin works in Wordpress 1.5 also but the Feed Subscription Button Maker (aka Chicklet Creator) plugin does not at this time. If there is an interest in 1.5 support, let me know.

Today is Day Two of the eComXpo conference. This morning at 8:30 am CST is the “Big Blog” panel with Amanda Watlington, Greg Jarboe, Constantin Basturea and myself. Check out the show: http://www.ecomxpo.com/speaker

I have one free full conference pass (worth $149) to give out, so leave a comment below if you’d like to use it.

Lots of speaking events in the next 30 days or so:

WebmasterWorld Pubcon Conference  PR, Blogs and SEO - Boston - April 18-20.

Bulldog Reporter Audio Conference - Public Relations and SEO - April 19.

Conversation with Experts TeleSeries, April 26.

eComXpo is coming up next week April 4-6 and offers a great lineup of online marketing presentations with keynotes by Bryan Eisenberg, Author of “Call to Action”, Anne Holland Founder of MarketingSherpa and Geoff Ramsey CEO of eMarketer .

I am participating on a panel called the Big Blog 8:30 AM - 9:30 AM on Wednesday April 5th. The session is moderated by Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit and includes co-panelists: Constantin Basturea of Converseon and Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.com.

There’s all sorts of buzz about blogs lately and yet so many companies are still wondering what to do about it. In fact, there are a tremendous number of business blogs that are not realizing much of their potential visibilty on the web. Why? Because they’re not optimized.

This is very much the same scenario that occurred with web sites in the late nineties. Back then I worked with a company that sold web sites - lots of them. But after getting the site up and running, the traffic didn’t come by itself. So we figured out optimizing for search engines and that was the start of my SEO career. Blogs can generate traffic without search engines, but WITH search engines it can be even better.