MyBlogLog has been taking the blogosphere by storm the past few months, even before the acquisition by Yahoo. However, MyBlogLog is not a recent phenomena, it started out as a blog statistics service by Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson in March of 2005.

I’m a fan of MyBlogLog (TopRank Community) and despite some of the infrastructure issues related to their increased popularity, am very optimistic about what the resources brought on by Yahoo will do for the community.

In order to find out more about MyBlogLog, I contacted CEO Scott Rafer through the MyBlogLog messaging tool and he surprised me not only with a quick reply, but a yes to answering a few questions. I was rather impressed and appreciative of this considering how busy he is right now. Most people active in the blogging world will know Scott Rafer’s name from having previously worked with Feedster.

In this quick set of questions Scott talks about how he got involved with MyBlogLog, the acquisition by Yahoo, future enhancements, fighting spam and advice for other budding tech companies with similar aspirations.

First, can you tell us about your background and how you made the transition from Feedster to MyBlogLog? Is it true you connected with Eric via LinkedIn? What was/is your vision for MyBlogLog?

There was 6 months between Feedster (left sept 05) and MyBlogLog (joined Mar 06). They were entirely disconnected. In Jan 06, an investor pal put the idea for a distributed social net into my head. I couldn’t get it out.

As I was trawling around the net over the next few weeks, I kept running across MBL’s click-tags. “AH HA!” It occurred to me how they did what they did, and I reached out to Eric via LinkedIn — we had Sean Bonner of metroblogging in common. I called him up; he got Todd on the phone; and I said, “Do you know what else you can do with that?” They quite reasonably said,” Who are you?”.

It all cascaded from there.

Offering the Feedster 500 a free MyBlogLog pro account was a clever marketing move. What kinds of marketing and promotion tactics were most successful?

The widget made us. From a non-automated perspective, commenting on other people’s blogs relentlessly seems to be the most productive thing.

How many people have signed up so far?

A bit over 50k have profiles.

What rate per month?

The acceleration with Yahoo makes that tough to track. We grow at about 2% a day on average.

How did the acquisition come about?

We started chatting with happy next of Mybloglog users at Yahoo Search Marketing, and then BradleyH got excited at the Web 2.0 Conference.

Now that you’re part of the Yahoo! family, will things change?

More resources, great brand, and more process. A huge net gain. The details are tough to figure out so soon.

I understand MyBloglog Will be part of the Yahoo Developer Network. Does that mean MBL will integrate with any other Yahoo social media services?

We’ve pulled in Flickr pix and will do all we can to keep integrating. Check out kentbrewster.com for a Del.icio.us prototype widget. He blogged about it. We’re running hither and yon in the company, where people have been incredibly welcoming, to offer information and our help.

Are there any infrastructure updates in store? MBL is a bit slow at times.

The widget’s was sucking wind over the weekend but we seem to have fixed that now. Yahoo ops guys are getting all set up to bring us on to their servers soon. From there, we should be in great shape.

What efforts are you making to keep spam out of MBL?

One doesn’t share the details of these things in order to avoid road mapping for that crowd. However, we are continually active trying to remove the incentives to spam without ruining the system for more sincere users. It’s a battle of inches that never ends.

Are there any feature enhancements planned that you can share?

Private label communities like community.techcrunch.com for everyone as soon as we can.

Any advice for other virtual companies with a cool idea that want to get purchased by Yahoo for millions?

Per Ed Sim and Josh Kopelman, companies are bought not sold. it’s darn inconvenient, but true.

Thanks Scott!

For more info on MyBlogLog, check out the Techcrunch profiles here, this post by Om Malik about the night the sell decision was made, these cool MyBlogLog tools from SoloSEO and Search Engine Journal’s great post about what the acquisition means for MBL and Yahoo.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | Interview with MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer | http://www.toprankblog.com

• Rothman Marketing Blog – Israel Rothman writes about internet advertising.
• SEM Clubhouse – Christine Churchill, Jim Gilbert, Mike Churchill & Jeff Martin from KeyRelevance’s blog about search.
• WebConnoisseur – Dustin Woodard‚Äôs thoughts on search, web analytics and the web in general.
• Charlotte Internet Marketing – Keith Schilling’s Big Brush Media Blog.
• PPC Blog – UK PPC specialist Dan Sharp offers news, articles, discussions, and all things pay per click.
• Web Professor – Scott Horne’s take on online media.
• SEOidiot – Paul Madden is a cartoonist, designer, salesman, blackhat, & SEO.
• Syndk8 – Earl Grey’s blackhat SEO forum.
• Pilkster – Simon Pilkington’s SEO & marketing scrapbook from Australia.
• The Google Cache – Russ Jones & Jeff Staub of Virante blog about search marketing.
• ZZ Online Marketing – Mark Cook’s blog about trends in search marketing.
• Alister Cameron – Blog consultant & web designer.
• Stir Crazy Blog - Group blog offering articles & advice on web and graphic design, SEO and SEM from Acclivity.
• SEOspace – Jody Nimetz of Enquiro thoughts’ on organic search engine marketing with a B2B twist
• Sponsored B2B – Rick Tobin provides useful best practice info and leading edge research to help you build a better performing PPC strategy.
• Semfire Search Engine Marketing – Christine Parfitt’s search engine marketing company’s blog.
• Website Promotion Today – Because web site promotion is about more than SEO – according to Christine Okelly.
• WhoisAndrewWee.com – Andrew Wee on blogging, affiliate marketing & social traffic generation.
• Web Analytics Book – Daily web analytics news from anonymous, who grew up in Germany and now lives in NYC.
• Blizzard Internet Marketing – Group blog and newsletter from the team at Blizzard Internet Marketing.
• Mr SEO – Joe Balestrino’s SEO blog.
• Web Marketing Watch – Sage Lewis provides a daily video web marketing show.
• Skrentablog – Rich Skrenta, co-founder of Topix.net, blogs about industry analysis with a few personal items.
• The Mu Life – Muhammed Saleem’s personal blog about social media & networking.
• Cornwall SEO blog – Lyndon Antcliff’s SEO & social media blog.
• Conversion Rater – Pat McCarthy shows you how to make the web convert for your goals.
• Web Metrics Guru – Marshall Sponder of IBM writes about web analytics and the search marketing industry.
• Communicontent – Founder of Threadwatch, Performancing and now ClickInfluence, Nick Wilson blogs on web development, social media and technology from Denmark.
• Search Engine Tigers – Simon Heseltine’s search engine blog.
• GoodROI – Greg Niland’s blog, also the host of GoodKarma Online Marketing Radio Show.

The number of new blogs should slow down a bit since now we’re around 330 search marketing blogs. The OPML file is getting updated as well.

Future enhancements of this list are in store including ranking and more specific categorization!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | Search Marketing Blogs Update 0119087 | http://www.toprankblog.com

Not all the new blogs we learned about this week will be added today. There are just too many. We’ll try to moderate the number of new blogs posted to about 30 per week.

Please note: While we wait until Friday to post all the new blogs reviewed for the week, the RSS feeds for new blogs are added throughout the week. ie, the OPML file is updated just about daily.

On the suggestion of Michael Gray, I contacted megite.com and they’ve created a very nice “river of news” format of all the feeds. Check out the custom megite for toprankblog. Thank you to Matthew for that and I’m looking forward to seeing how we can customize.

This week’s tips to bloggers!

1. Include a descriptive tag line near your blog’s logo or title. Give readers something to quickly understand the purpose of your blog
2. Give your blog some identity. Use your name, a catchy blog name, logo, unique design. So many great blogs are using the same blog template as everyone else. When you use a common blog template, it makes your blog look like a spam blog – splog.

And now here are this week’s search engine marketing blog updates:

• Aaron Shear on SEO – This pedigreed SEO with a history at Inktomi, SEO Inc and now shopping.com blogs about search marketing.
• AGoToGuy’s Marketing Blog – Joe Holcomb, CEO of AI Gateway with previous work at BlowSearch and Kanoodle blogs about search engines, internet marketing and online advertising.
• Alister Cameron – Blog consultant, web designer and father of four blogs about blogging and search marketing.
• Andy Beard – Lives in Poland, runs his business from the UK and blogs about the search industry, blogging, niche and affiliate marketing.
• Apogee Weblog – Richard Ball of Apogee Web Consulting blogs about search engine marketing, small business growth, web analytics and pixel advertising.
• Convertup – Brian Thibault, aka Bonez / TBO, blogs about usability, search engine rankings and general website marketing strategy.
• Earl of Grey’s Blog – Runs syndk8 blackhat SEO forum, Affiliate Earners and probably other things I’ll never know about. Also blogs periodic and humorously sarcastic observations of the search industry.
• Eradicate Perplexity – Scott Orth does his best to demystify search engine marketing.
• First Page Fitness Blog – Everett Sizemore blogs about his specialty area of search marketing – health and fitness SEO.
• freshblog – The team at Fresh Egg, Ammon Johns’ UK search marketing agency post about work, search marketing and industry observations.
• Fused Nation – Scott Boyd, aka “marketing guy” blogs about UK search marketing news, gossip and discussions.
• Got Ads? – John K. blogs about advertising revolving around Google.
• ibrian – Brian Turner’s business blog. He also writes for SEOmoz (until Rebecca comments that he doesn’t anymore) and Threadwatch.
• Internet News – A general internet marketing and search news blog by Gwen Harris.
• Jaan‚Äôs Search Marketing Blog – Jaan Kanellis, aka “IncredibleHelp”, blogs mostly about SEO with a few rants about the industry here and there.
• JazzcatSEO – Nate Kartchner writes about becoming an expert SEO along with linking, SEM, SMO and copywriting.
• Lies, Damed Lies – Microsoft’s Ian Thomas, who leads Microsoft’s new web analytics solution effort, blogs about online marketing and web analytics.
• Mike the Internet Guy – Recent winner of best local search blog, Mike Belasco writes about all aspects of marketing online.
• Occam‚Äôs Razor – Intuit‚Äôs Avinash Kaushik offers quantitative and qualitative insights into online marketing.
• pepperjamBlog – The team at Pepperjam blogs about search and affiliate marketing along with search engine industry observations.
• ReveNews – Publisher Jim Kukral and friends blog about the affiliate marketing industry covering topics from ecommerce to analytics to blogging.
• SearchQuant – Chris Zaharias writes about the paid search and search engine advertising industry.
• Search Market Pro – Search engine marketing news & articles from Rob Kerry, aka “evilgreenmonkey” and friends.
• SEO Blog – Bob Mutch writes about link building through directories and social bookmarking.
• seoassassin.co.uk – Brendon Scott, aka “TallTroll” writes negatively on SEO and affiliate marketing.
• Speaking Freely – Dean aka, “DigitalGhost”, writes freely about SEO, search engine research and spam detection.
• The OneBoxer – Brian Mark’s new blog about how to best optimize for Google one box results.

Whew! This brings the Big List of SEM Blogs to just over 300!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | Search Marketing Blogs Update 011207 | http://www.toprankblog.com

Surprisingly, Matt Cutts lagged way behind in the SEO category, but he did win best Google blog over the corporate Google blog. Jeremy Zawodny also beat out the Yahoo Search blog. Hmmm, do you think there might be a message there?

Other winners in categories related to marketing or online included TechCrunch who blew away the Web 2.0 category. Darren Rowse of Problogger led the Webvertising category.

Also, Seth Godin and Steve Rubel tied for “best marketing blog”. I think Duct Tape Marketing guru John Jantsch should have been included in that category. Hint hint Randy.

There are many, many other categories unrelated to marketing, which you can check out on the voting results page.

What do these kinds of “awards” mean? Well, for the most part not a whole lot except in most cases, you get to find out about blogs you might not otherwise read about. I’ve found that the same blogs win year over year in these kinds of things (Marketing Sherpa, Search Engine Journal, Weblog Awards, etc) so finding new blogs is not as common – at least with these kinds of awards.

I’ve found that the best way of finding new blogs is by visiting the blogrolls of blogs you like, shared blogrolls/opml files and through services like MyBlogLog. Of course if you’re looking for blogs about search and online marketing, then look no further than the Big List of SEM blogs.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | Blog Awards | http://www.toprankblog.com

Blogsmith is is owned by AOL / Time Warner and it powers some of the largest blogs on the net including Engadget, TV Squad, Download Squad and my favorite TUAW. With Blogsmith powering these blogs, they’ve had time to work out the bugs, optimize the code and make sure that everything runs at peek permanence for tons of visitors. Even with all that testing though, giving any service to the general public will render issues.

All the details are not yet known, but Brian Alvey writes that Blogsmith would be hosted application much like Blogger or TypePad. You have the option to have your own domain, but you won’t get the option to download the code like you can with WordPress.

So at this point, Blogsmith’s effect is to early to speculate. There is no official word on the details, if it’s free or what the backend looks like. However, it could be a big player in the blog software area in 2007.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | The next big blogging platform? | http://www.toprankblog.com

SEO Blog of the Year
Search News Blog
Best Search Marketing / Contextual Ad Blog
Best Link Building Blog
Best Search Agency Resource Blog
Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006
Best Social Media Optimization Blog
Best Black Hat SEO Blogs
Best Local Search Blog
Best Affiliate Marketing Blog
Best Web 2.0 Blog

*BONUS* Best Search Engine Marketing Community / Forum
*BONUS 2* What’s your favorite Search Podcast?

Every year these things run there’s more and more competition. I have to say, there are some really, really excellent blogs in these lists. Competition is fierce in the SEO category and some of the categories are no brainers.

TopRank was nominated in the “Social Media Optimization” category and my name (Lee Odden) is listed in the “Search Engine Blogger” category. Whichever your favorite blogs are, please be sure to vote!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Vote for your favorite search blogs | http://www.toprankblog.com

Nice job Chris and Loren!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Search Engine Journal Updates Design | http://www.toprankblog.com

WebProNews Blog – Fairly new and it’s about time! Mike, Chris and all the WPN gang are revving it up lately.
Web Ink Now – David Meerman Scott’s blog on public relations, marketing and blogging.
Social Media Group – Canadian business blog on social media and corporate blogging.
Natural Search Blog – One of Stephan Spencer’s blogs on SEO.
Abhilash – “Boutique SEO With a Little Brown Sugar”. A persistent SEO with a sense of humor if nothing else. Finally met Abhilash in Vegas last week.
Joe Dolson – Usability and web design wisdom.
Search Engine Land – Danny Sullivan’s new blog with Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz.
Search Rank Blog – SEO goodness from David Wallace. We’ve both been in the SEO biz for what, a million years and we still have not met at a conference?

My current favorite SEO Blog?¬† SEOMoz. I don’t know how they do it.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Search Marketing Blogs 112006 | http://www.toprankblog.com

The new design sports links to Andy’s consulting services of which I now have first hand experience. My public relations agency recently engaged Andy to provide some training via webinar to our PR team on the subject of brand monitoring and reputation management. Eight of our staff were in attendance and I have to say, Andy knows his stuff. Not only is he a great consultant on SEO firm management and search marketing, but he has established himself as a subject matter expert on the topic of brand monitoring and competitive intelligence as well.

Like Rand and Jim, I wholeheartedly endorse hiring Andy Beal as a consultant. He’s a search marketers’ “search marketer” and I have no doubt that those who make the investment are getting a distinct, competitive advantage.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | MarketingPilgrim 2.0 | http://www.toprankblog.com

Google Alerts are very useful to see who is writing about you or your cliens. It’s also use for identifying when optimized press releases or articles are getting indexed.

It’s good to see blogs getting more play in the mix of Google search functions. What’s next?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Google Alerts on Blogs | http://www.toprankblog.com

Online Marketing Blog gets about 5-10 pitches per week on average, which provides more than enough of a sample on how blogs are getting pitched these days. What’s the verdict? It doesn’t look good.

A few of these pitches are right on or just lucky. Many are simply crap. Some come from friends but never make it to a post. Some are from complete strangers, but are very relevant and get in. Some are borderline where I’m interested, yet I never hear from that company again.

To help pros and flacks alike, here are some pitching guidelines sure to help you resonate with the blogger audience.

1. Be relevant. It seems so simple and obvious, yet it is the biggest mistake made when pitching bloggers. Look at the categories of the blog and look at previous blog posts. Is your pitch REALLY relevant for the blog? With a lot of the pitches we get, you can tell there’s been no attempt to look any further than the title of the blog. For example, I get pitches about things like online advertising or creative interactive advertising campaigns and if you look at our categories or previous blog posts, we clearly do not cover advertising.
2. Personalize. Getting an email pitch with no personal reference at all, or just a press release and no message is a sure trip to the trash folder. Even more annoying is when there is an attempt to personalize, but it’s copy/paste and the fonts are completely different between the template being used and the “personalized” content, which often ends up not being very accurate anyway. Take the time to research the blog, make comments and get involved. Be honest about who you are in the comments and provide thoughtful insight that is of value and relevant to the blog post.
3. Make it easy. Time and time again, I get pitches with one sentence and then the full press release copied into the email. Please don’t do that. Most bloggers don’t write 600 word stories in response to a press release. They are far more prone to link to a press release. So provide a summary to the blogger of the release, and a link to the full version. Some bloggers might just copy and paste your summary, add some commentary and a link to the full release you’ve provided. Remember, popular bloggers are very busy. Make it easy for them to blog your story.
4. Schwag is good. I’ll admit it. I don’t mind getting books sent to me to review. In almost all cases I will at least mention the book in a post if it’s relevant to the topics we cover. I know one thing is for sure, if a search engine or company sent us schwag, we would absolutely post a photo of it along with some honest commentary. Does it suck or is it cool? People want to know!
5. Be persistent. Don’t be offended or give up if a blogger doesn’t take your story the first time. Be courteous and smart about repeat attempts though. Watch to see if they really do pick up on your story before sending another pitch. Of course, this is not a problem if you actually read their blog.

Here are a number of additional resources on blogger relations and pitching bloggers:

• How to chat up writers – WebProNews
• How to get bloggers to write about your product – Dave Taylor
• Blogs and Public Relations – Online Marketing Blog
• 7 Tips on Pitching Bloggers – Influential Interactive Marketing
• Tips for PR Workers from the Journalists that Hate Them – Valleywag
• What Journalists Hate in PR People – India PR Blog
• Blogger Relations, Two Tips – Media Guerilla
• Pitch.Me Del.icio.usly – Steve Rubel
• Barging into the Blogger’s Circle – Washington Post
• What Reporters Hate About PR People – David Maister
• Building a Bridge Between PR and the Blogosphere – Blog Forward (Brian Solis)
• Finding Bloggers in Your Market – Blog Forward (Brian Solis)
• Blogger Relations for Click.TV – Shel Holtz
• How to suck up to a blogger – Guy Kawasaki
• Top ten things you can do to get blogged – TechCrunch
• Pitching bloggers – Andy Lark
• Pitching Blogs – NewPR Wiki

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Blogger Relations 101 | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

Since Patrick was on a plane today, Andy Hagans was good enough to answer a few questions about Feedvertising. Basically Andy says Feedvertising is a way to give RSS feed publishers a lot more control over ads and the market is still very new, maybe too new to make a lot of predictions.
What prompted you to develop this tool?

Advertising via RSS is a small but emerging market. We took a look at existing products and didn’t see anything that was very impressive, from a blogger or advertiser standpoint: pricing was often confusing and inefficient; the ads were often graphical or JavaScript-based, resulting in banner-blindness; and finally, most systems left bloggers without any control over what ads ended up in their feed.

We developed Feedvertising with the idea that bloggers should be able to monetize their RSS feeds while maintaining complete control; i.e., they can manually add their own ads or promotions, or sell space through the TLA system, or do a combination of both.

What kind of earning potential is there for advertisers and what’s the business model for Text Link Ads with this tool?

The business model for TLA is to help monetize those feeds where the blogger chooses to do so through the TLA system. We think the earning potential is great, as reaching the influencers who use RSS is a very important marketing objective for companies who are trying to gain mindshare among early adopters or bloggers. Right now we are testing the price points, so the exact numbers will probably change over time.

What do you think of the RSS advertising market? What are some innovative uses of RSS where advertising might be most productive? ie, advertising on a blog feed is one thing, advertising on a new product RSS feed is another.

Again, this market is pretty immature, but so are all marketing channels in the beginning. Our goal is to stay innovative as this channel evolves and expands. As long as we stay commited to delivering value to both bloggers and advertisers, the feature set should move naturally with that.

What kinds of blogs are best suited for this kind of advertising? What kind of traffic should a blog/RSS feed be getting in terms of hits or subscribers before it makes sense to advertise?

Without getting into numbers, it really comes down to advertiser demand. If your blog has a smaller number of RSS subscribers, but those subscribers are mostly business executives (or any other valuable audience segment), there is still going to be demand from the advertising side.

That said, we think Feedvertising is a great product for ANY blog, even a new one or one with small readership; at the very least, you can use Feedvertising to cross-promote your own feature pages, or other sites.

Thanks Andy!

There are other great reviews of Feedvertising at TechCrunch and Problogger.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Monetizing with Feedvertising | http://www.toprankblog.com

At the time of this post, there are only 744 votes so far with Tech Crunch the clear leader, but I think the SEO/SEM readership out there could make quite an impact on that if they wanted to.

If you would like more of a variety of blogs to vote for, then go ahead and fill in the write in form. I know I did. I put one in for Search Engine Roundtable and another for Matt Cutts. Good luck guys!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Business Week Best of the Web | http://www.toprankblog.com

Current blog network members include:

Adrants
Advertising for Peanuts
Duct Tape Marketing
Entrepreneur’s Journey
Logic+Emotion
Marketing Headhunter.com
Marketing Pilgrim
Marketing.fm
MarketingVOX — The Voice of Online Marketing
Micro Persuasion
Online Marketing Blog
ProHipHop – Hip Hop Marketing
Small Business Branding
WonderBranding: Marketing to Women

Familar names (at least to me) from this list include: Steve Hall, John Jantsch, Andy Beal, Tig Tillinghast and Steve Rubel. You can subscribe to the combined RSS feed which is hosted by FeedBurner’s new network feature.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Marketing and Advertising Blog Network | http://www.toprankblog.com

I just received my copy of Debbie Weil’s new book, “The Corporate Blogging Book – Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get it Right”. Debbie has worked long and hard on this book and with a forward from Bob Lutz, Chairman of General Motors, it promises to serve as an excellent guide to companies looking to find their place in the blogosphere. Chapters range from “Top Twenty Questions About Corporate Blogging” to “Should the CEO Blog?”. Check out the companion site where you can download a free chapter or order it via Amazon.

Both Debbie and I are involved with BusinessBlogConsulting.com started by Rick Bruner that now includes an impressive list of business blog consultants and marketers.

Debbie was named one of the most influential authorities on “business blogging” by Onalytica – the same organization that listed TopRank as one of the most influential authorities on “blog marketing“. You can find more information about Debbie and her consulting practice at DebbieWeil.com.

The timing of getting this book is amazing as I just finished doing an hour long teleseminar with Annie Jennings PR on the topic of blogging best practices as well as some blog optimization and marketing tips. It went so well I got a call from a listener minutes after the seminar to do business. I’ll post a link to the audio file when it is available.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | The Corporate Blogging Book | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

It is interesting that newsletters are not on the list, especially since blogs and email newsletters are such complementary marketing tools. If you want a broader view of how companies are using blogs, take a look at the recent research from Porter Novelli and Cymfony where 76% of respondents reported increases in web traffic and media attention as a result of their blogs.

Another great resource for lead generation is InTouch CEO, Brian Carroll’s new lead generation e-book.

Full results of the Marketing Sherpa survey are available in the “MarketingSherpa’s Business Technology Benchmark Guide 2006“.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Blogs and Podcasts for Lead Generation | http://www.toprankblog.com

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Major Update at Technorati | http://www.toprankblog.com

• Summarized daily recaps
• Interactive Cartoon Barry, provided by SitePal, will also give short recaps virtually, click the play button here to see an example.
• Personal life things
• Business related things from RustyBrick
• Rants on anything, even search
• And more!

It’s a pretty cool blog especially with the animated SitePal feature that uses Barry’s voice. The design is very slick. In fact, seeing the cool design of the Cartoon Barry blog was the last straw for me in my procrastination over when to update the design of Online Marketing Blog. Thomas is working on putting the finishing touches and hopefully we’ll have it up and running early next week.

Speaking of Barry and next week, I believe he will be posting the quadruple coverage schedule for Search Engine Strategies San Jose tomorrow. Barry, Ben, Chris and I are going to cover most of the sessions. We did the quadruple coverage thing at SES New York earlier this year and it worked pretty well. I’m weighing in as a half-weight though and will only be blogging about 2 sessions per day and none on Thursday. However, if I can get my flight changed and add another day with the hotel, I will be heading up to San Francisco on Thursday to AllBusiness.com offices for a video shoot on SEO tips for a promotion they’re doing. It should be fun.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Cartoon Barry | http://www.toprankblog.com

And now for something completely different. Since so much of what’s covered here on Online Marketing Blog deals with the marketing of blogs, I thought adding some interviews with people involved with blog marketing would be of interest to our fast growing audience of readers.

Today’s interview is with Phil Hollows, Founder and CEO of the popular RSS to email service, FeedBlitz. With an active circulation of 682,330 and 53,955 active feeds, FeedBlitz is likely the most popular RSS to email service available. I had a chance to preview some features of FeedBlitz a while back and have been using it personally and with our PR and blog consulting clients ever since. Recently Phil took FeedBlitz on as a full time gig, has secured investor financing and is hiring. What better time than now to check in with Phil for a peek behind the FeedBlitz curtain.

Tell us about your background. How did you get involved with blogs, RSS and starting FeedBlitz?

I first started blogging when I was VP marketing for an enterprise security software company, OpenService, about a couple of years ago. I was looking for a way to reach our prospects and customers more informally and more frequently than the traditional monthly newsletter or press release permitted. Setting up a blog was the obvious answer, and it worked well. The blog let us build a closer and more trusted relationship with our market, helped establish thought leadership, and brought good SEO benefits – carefully written, good relevant blog posts can often appear on SERPs relevant to the business.

So the blog was great, but I wanted too get email updates going to push the content out to our readers. RSS was part of the blog, of course, but I wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible. RSS is tech heavy, unfamiliar to many and potentially user hostile, and I wanted a more familiar, comfortable way to reach our readers. In other words, email. Plus we had a five figure house list already receiving monthly email newsletters from us, so it made sense to get the blog to them using email since they were already used to hearing from us that way.

I signed up with Bloglet, which was the market leader at the time. It worked fine, But then I signed up with FeedBurner, and Bloglet didn’t like FeedBurner’s feeds. Say what? Support messages bounced and all of a sudden my pet project was at risk from an unsupported service that wasn’t playing nicely with my other systems.

I wasn’t about to let that happen. After extensive Googling and asking around I found a few alternatives, but none of them had what I really liked about Bloglet – it’s publisher features. I needed a service that let me manage my subscribers, and there was nothing else around that could match these criteria.

This was the perfect opportunity for me. I saw the complaints about Bloglet online, and the market gap that nobody was filling. And, as luck would have it, from some experimental work I’d done at home in the late nineties, I happened to have an embryonic email marketing system partially written. I figured that all I had to do was dust it off, get it fed from an RSS feed and I’d be done, and maybe others would be interested in using it too.

Well, the work was of course much more complex than I’d originally thought, that’s for sure. But that was the beginning of the project that became FeedBlitz. Many, many late nights later, once it was more or less ready, there still weren’t any products filling the gap. So I mailed a few people who had been public about their dissatisfaction with Bloglet, invited them to check it out, and it grew rapidly from there.

I should let you know, the first SEO service I started in 1998 was called Net-Blitz. So naturally I like the name you’ve picked. How did you arrive at the name FeedBlitz?

Really? It’s a small world I’d owned the domain blitrzware.com for a while (but I let it go before FeedBlitz – drat!). As I was searching for a domain name all of the obvious ones had gone, and then I remembered Blitzware. FeedBlitz was available, I liked the “lightning” connotation of brightness, intensity, speed, and it hearkened back to the Blitzware name I’d used before. Perfect!

So now you have moved on from OpenService, gained some financial backing and are taking FeedBlitz full time. What are your plans for FeedBlitz? Feature enhancments? Where do you see FeedBlitz in the next year or two?

1) FeedBlitz will remain the Internet’s preeminent RSS to email service. We’ll continue to add more value and more capabilities, more easily delivered for publishers.

2) We will set the bar higher and higher in terms of the benefits we deliver for both our standard and premium services.

3) We will innovate and automate enterprise-class messaging and communications using RSS and “Web 2” for all.

As I look at the RSS to mail market today, one of the core strategic decisions I have to take is deciding what we’re not going to do, because the realm of possibilities is so large. It boils down to this. Our mission is messaging using RSS and related technologies to underpin what we deliver. And our philosophy is to make your messaging work with whatever services you want to use. So you will see us enabling greater and simpler integration with third party services, instead of adding features or services that are already successful and prevalent in the broader market. We will stay focused, in other words. We’ll also make it easy for third parties to integrate FeedBlitz into their sites and services.

The next three months is going to see significant innovation from us on all these fronts. There will also be enhancements that make more use of content in a typical RSS feed. The FeedBlitz blog is the place to track new features and announcements. We’re also using some of our investment on a professionally redesigned web site that will be radically easier to use, as well as being easier on the eye.

FeedBlitz has become a very popular RSS to email service. How did you market it? What marketing plans do you have in the future?

Thanks! There were really two strategies at work. One was to make the most of the market opportunity created by Bloglet, so we made it utterly painless to migrate subscribers out of Bloglet and into FeedBlitz. (We’re an open system too, so publishers can grab their readers at any time).

Secondly, we worked directly with a few key bloggers who seemed to want the services we offered. We paid attention to them, used their ideas to improve the service, and so they’d blog about us and recommend us to others.

As a result, our initial success and work integrating FeedBlitz metrics with FeedBurner enabled FeedBlitz to be set up as FeedBurner’s email engine of choice last Fall. FeedBurner effectively became a channel for us, and that’s still the case for publishers wanting more sophisticated capabilities and customization.

Together, these three approaches delivered a phenomenal word of mouth / viral effect that just keeps on growing, with time and customer care being our #1 investments.

Going forward, we’ll be making the most of our partnerships and innovation to keep momentum up.

When we check our RSS stats, about 1/3 are from FeedBlitz, a 1/3 are from Bloglines and the rest from MyYahoo and other feed readers. Is that common for your subscribers?

It really varies. The FeedBlitz News blog’s readership is over 95% by mail. The more RSS-aware your readers are, the smaller the number of email subscribers you should expect to get. So, for example, a tech heavy blog talking to a tech savvy audience might see incremental circulation of order 10%. On the other hand, a blog talking to consumers about a hobby or family matters might get over 50% of their readership from FeedBlitz. But regardless of your content, everyone will see incremental readership because now you’re giving your readers choices about how to read your content.

Enabling readers to subscribe to your content using email takes advantage of a familiar medium. From a publisher perspective, it also makes it personal – you know the addresses of most of your subscribers. Those are all potential leads. RSS aggregators can’t tell you who is reading your content, so from a marketing and sales process, aggregator circulation is a lot less valuable than an equivalent email circulation count.

For the most part, FeedBlitz is used to convert blog posts that are published in a RSS feed to Email. What other applications and uses are you seeing?

The beauty of RSS and related technologies such as OPML reading lists is that FeedBlitz just works. As “Web 2.0” grows, FeedBlitz will be able to deliver these innovative applications directly to users inboxes.

Indeed, many sites and systems are publishing RSS feeds, beyond blog posts. We’re seeing email updates of eBay auctions. People are using FeedBlitz to deliver their local weather forecast to their inbox every morning. Using FeedBlitz to track tags in, say, Technorati is a great way to automatically gather market intelligence about what people are saying about you (and your competition). We’re seeing users replace listservers and simple discussion groups with blogs and FeedBlitz – the content is richer, and less prone to spamming. And it sends blog updates too, of course.

We’re also seeing more traditional corporate marketers realizing that a blog coupled with FeedBlitz is a simple yet powerful combination that can do the job of much more expensive systems – but for much less time invested and at a better price point. It’s for these users that we are the only RSS to mail service that offers a blog-based autoresponder capability, for example, as well as the recently introduced “newsflash” broadcast option which sends updates to your readership that are NOT in an RSS feed.

As we move forward and enable even simper integration of FeedBlitz with other services, I expect our publishers will produce a swath of innovative applications that will incorporate FeedBlitz, and I expect that you will see much more FeedBlitz in places other than your inbox.

Please explain what’s behind FeedAdvisor and what has been the response to it? Any plans on making it into an open blog/RSS feed search tool?

FeedAdvisor is a new spin on searching and ranking blogs. It’s like Amazon.com’s feature that recommends books to you based on “People who bought this book also bought….” So FeedAdvisor looks at subscription patterns and says “People who subscribe to your feeds also subscribe to ….”

FeedAdvisor works because of the subscription patterns it detects. It’s time is yet to come, I believe, but Tom Evslin (our investor) and I have had some very interesting conversations about how it will grow. It can’t become just another search engine because (a) there are a lot of these about anyway, (b) generic search doesn’t have the subscription information that FeedAdvisor uses to analyze the data, so in fact it won’t work. Amazon’s feature is the same; they work from their sales patterns, and don’t incorporate (say) Barnes & Nobles’. As FeedBlitz grows and more users join, it will become increasingly comprehensive, and we will be able to build out the information in it to augment our other services.

Starting FeedBlitz and working with thousands of subscribers must have exposed you to some interesting and innovative blog and RSS marketing trends. What insights can you provide regarding marketing via RSS? What aspects of RSS marketing should companies be aware of most?

I think the thing to think about is not “RSS Marketing” but “RSS-powered marketing.” If you position programs based solely on content delivered to or in RSS then your return will be low and you may be disappointed unless you’re dealing with a very technical audience for whom RSS is old hat. For example, many are disappointed by ads placed purely in RSS feeds as they perform relatively poorly compared to other media. Targeting RSS as a niche medium isn’t the path to success.

On the other hand, if you build, augment or replace your marketing programs and technologies with services and products that use RSS as the underlying data mechanism, and simply treat your pure RSS feed as an integrated part of (as opposed to distinct from) your web marketing, you’ll do very well. Why? Not necessarily because it’s RSS per se, but because technologies that have RSS at their core are much more flexible, easier to use and just as capable Рif not more so – then their older online or desktop cousins. For example, you can ditch your expensive content management system for a blogging platform. It’s faster, cheaper and probably better for most of us. Add FeedBlitz and your newsletter production is painless, more frequent, and automatically linked back to your site. Plus it’s a boon or search engines because now your content is changing rapidly and, thanks to trackbacks and comments, relevant blogs get a lot of high value link love, with other people – your readers Рdoing all the work for you.

The power of these technologies is illustrated by the fact that corporations are now building large, complex and content rich web sites solely on blogging platforms – the efficiency gains alone make this approach worthwhile for a lot of non-data driven content. That’s a clear trend that will only accelerate.

In the end, I believe RSS will disappear into the woodwork, just as HTTP and SSL and SMTP have now. It will become the glue that enables dynamic web sites and content to link together seamlessly. It’s the applications that use RSS that are key, not RSS itself. And the same is true for marketers. Ask yourself how you can take advantage of RSS to reach a more technically savvy audience or to automate otherwise tedious and repetitive tasks (e.g. newsletter production). RSS-powered automation and services enables us to spend more time doing marketing, and less time (and money) doing production.

What are some of your favorite business blogs and blogs about blogging?

I believe in actionable, relevant and practical solutions to practical problems. So of the well known blogs, I follow Fred Wilson, my investor Tom Evslin, Chris Pirillo, TechCrunch, Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion, Guy Kawaski and Seth Goldstein (all by FeedBlitz of course). At the enterprise level I think Charlie Wood is on to something with his work in salesforce.com and RSS. I use Technorati and Google blog search for market and competitive intelligence.

Ssshhh, don’t tell anyone I said this, but I find most blogs about blogging to be very cliquey and practically irrelevant; I don’t read them. I don’t care about this video blogger or that format war or whoever such and such an A-lister has annoyed this week. It’s all too incestuous and irrelevant for me.

What 3 tips can you provide to bloggers that are considering or using a RSS to email service?

1) Why not? You’ll get 10-50% circulation boost, push content delivery, better SERP placement, gain lead information, develop metrics, all automatically.

2) Customize your emails to match your branding and messaging, and enable subscriber tracking metrics to measure your activity and effectiveness.

3) Don’t wait. It’s fundamentally free, takes only a minute or so to set up, just do it.

Some excellent insight and advice. Thanks Phil!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | Interview with Phil Hollows Founder of FeedBlitz | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

Thomas will be implementing an upgrade to the tool in the near future that allows you to display subscription options as a drop down rather than displaying all the buttons. This is good news for some blogs as it will make more space for ads or other features like tag clouds, blog roll links, categories and archives.

If you can’t wait, then visit the RSS Feed Button tool page now and create your own subscription buttons with RSS feed embedded automatically. It takes just a few seconds and is very easy to apply to your blog.

Speaking of Thomas and his blog marketing talents, he has launched a new blog called, Blogger Design which you can find at, yes you guessed it, bloggerdesign.com. There he will post blog optimization tips, tools, design tips and usability thoughts related to the world of blogging

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2006. | RSS Buttons for Your Blog | http://www.toprankblog.com