Online Marketing Blog

Here we are again with this week’s additions to the big list of search engine marketing blogs. Of course the OPML file and plain text file have been updated as well.  Enjoy!

• RSS Ray – Offers articles on internet marketing and also hosts an online radio show.
• TMA E-Marketing blog – Minnesota search marketing firm blogs about all aspects of marketing online.
• In Search of Stuff – Humorous look at the search marketing industry by Scottie Claiborne and Michael Motherwell.
• Alibi Productions Blog – Drew Stauffer’s blog about marketing online.
• Startuplay – A guide to China internet marketing written by Sergey Mirkin, a Russian born, Silicon Valley educated fellow living in China.
• Search Insider – Media Post’s group blog on search marketing.

Is blog optimization part of search marketing? Absolutely! Blogs are web site content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. Blogs are really no different than web sites.

If you can optimize a document and that document gets indexed, categorized and ranked by a search engine, it’s part of search marketing in my book. As such, marketers should be aware of how these kinds of channels can be used within the overall online marketing mix. Blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimization.

It seems that every week I find a new and exciting WordPress plugins. There are literally hundreds out there and many that are still un-discovered.

I thought I’d take the time to post my 5 favorite blog plugins in hopes that you might find some useful ones. I’d also like to hear your top five so I can discover some new favorites.

Thomas’ Top 5 WordPress Plugins ~ In No Particular Order

Optimal Title
- This re-arranges your blogs title page to be [post name ] – [blog name] which is good for SEO.

Headspace2
- Automatically create blog post descriptions. Or write your own.

Live Search
- Update your search box to show results as the user types.

Blogs have been one of the big buzz items in 2006 along with social media. It seems companies are still trying to figure out whether blogging is worthwhile for their business and where social media fits in within overall marketing strategy. The number of “blog consultants” also appears to be growing at a much faster rate than business blog adoption.

For our clients, we use blogs extensively in both our public relations practice as well as for search engine optimization. One of the most productive uses of blog software as a content management system is for an online media room.

Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts traveled to Chicago all the way from New Zealand and shares information about the blog SEO session here at Search Engine Strategies Chicago where he’s presenting on RSS feed optimization. He also talks about his daughter’s success with optimizing her Neopets blog and he offers tips for search engine conference attendees.

Stephan writes for several blogs, most notably, Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings.

Later today I’ll be presenting here at DMA-06 on a panel called, Blogs, RSS and Podcasting with Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit and Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts. Basically, my presentation will cover how blogs can be used as public relations tools in the context of “Push and Pull PR”. The presentation is broken up into:

• Opportunity
• Push and Pull PR
• Blog Optimization & PR
• Blogger Relations
• Case Study

The “opportunity” section explains how many journalists are ignoring the noise of getting pitched by so many PR firms and company PR staff. Whether it’s a pitch by phone or email, many members of the media go online (98%) to find news sources (76%), story ideas (92%), experts and to research press releases (73%). The percentages come from a study done by Middleburg/Ross.

For the past week I’ve been beta-testing a new product from Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagans of Text Link Ads called Feedvertising. Other beta testers include Jim Boykin, Phillip Lessen, Brian Clark and several others. This is a service that allows you to monetize your RSS feeds with ads. Text Link Ads will sell the ads for you, or in my case, I just put in ads for some things I’m doing with Marketing Sherpa. You can do it either way or both.

Not only is Feedvertising a potential money maker, but it’s also a clever way to cross promote other areas of your blog, company web site or other web sites that you publish.

There’s a very good tutorial on Feedvertising over at Tubetorial or you can check out the Feedvertising site.

With all the buzz about social media optimization the past week, I thought it would be timely for us to present two updated tools for encouraging the sharing of and linking to content as well as distribution. These are concepts that are fundamental to the notion of social media optimization or SMO.

The first tool is one we’ve received excellent comments on and it’s called the Social Bookmark Creator. In order to make it easy for readers to save a blog post or a web page for reading later or to aggregate resources using a social bookmark service, we’ve created a tool that allows you to add a social bookmark menu after each post or on a static web page.

Moderated by Detlev Johnson of Position Tech, this panel included: Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts, Rick Klau of FeedBurner and Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit.

First up was Amanda with yet again, a unique presentation. There is still lots of unclaimed territory with blogs.

Less than 6% of Fortune 500 companies are blogging according to SocialText. 35% of companies plan to start a blog in the next year.

RSS distributes content and drives traffic.

Build your feeds right from the start. Questions to ask:
- How many feeds are necessary
- How much content is needed to keep it fresh
- Should you publish an excerpt or the full feed
- Will the feed include other media
- How will you propagate the feeds initially and on an ongoing basis
- How to measure performance

Marketing Sherpa released findings of a Technology Marketing survey that include blogs and podcasts as two of the top 5 lead generation tactics for technology, hardware and software firms. Overall, the top 5 lead generation tactics were:

1. Free Trials
2. Webcast
3. White paper
4. Blog
5. Podcast

Of course, if you’re a really good marketer, you would be able to tie in four or five of the above into one campaign, especially when integrated with a blog. Not that you need to offer all five to have a successful campaign, but providing options for how to interact or make contact with your company allows you to reach more of your target audience. A podcast may work for some people, a free trial or a white paper for others. One of the new features of this report is the 13 prospect personas of prospects such as CIOs, IT professionals and business owners.

Wired recently ran another “How To” with this one including sage advice from Technorati founder, Dave Sifry on how to make your blog more popular:

1) React quickly. (Nothing is more fun than calling an A lister on hype or fluff)
2) Make your posts easy to read. (Usability never goes out of style)
3) Link, link, link! (Amen – link in and link out)
4) Optimize for search engines. (Get some tasty blog optimization)
5) Post, post, post! (Yes and no – It’s just not always practical to post 5 – 10 times a day)
There are also several tips on sprucing up your MySpace site, Amazon Picks and reblogging. Check it out.

A while back Thomas aka Twistermc, whipped up a handy tool for creating RSS subscription buttons to place on blogs. This makes it easy for the reader to subscribe to the blog using their favoriate RSS reader or aggregator. (See the buttons down the left side of this blog) This particular tool has been very popular and is the source for many, many links to Online Marketing Blog and to the blog marketing tools page over at TopRank.

I was checking out some of these links and noticed that some pretty interesting referrers. There are quite a few prominent SEOs using the RSS Button tool including: Mike Grehan, Rand Fishkin, Jim Boykin, Dan Thies, Kim Krause and several others. I think that’s pretty cool actually.