Online Marketing Blog

Business Week is taking votes for their annual Best of the Web, which is not to be confused with the most excellent web site directory and blog directory from BOTW.org. There are 23 categories and two of them are related to blogs. The selection for “favorite blogs” includes an interesting mixture ranging from Scoble to Sand Hill Slave to Tech Crunch.

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.

Marketing.FM has announced a new network of marketing and advertising blogs syndicated under one RSS feed called the Marketing and Advertising Blog Network. The initial group of blogs has over 50,000 subscribers and cover marketing, media, advertising agencies, PR, branding, television, radio, internet, new media, interactive advertising, and influential discussion. Online Marketing Blog is happy to be included with this project.

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

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.

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

Technorati has turned three says Dave Sifry and has rolled out a major update. Below is a screenshot and here’s the rundown from Sifry’s Alerts blog.

Award winning SEO blogger Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable and RustyBrick has started a new blog called the “Cartoon Barry Blog“. What will you find there?

• 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!

Spotlight on Blog Marketing Interview with Phil Hollows of FeedBlitz

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.

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.

Nick and company at Performancing are gearing up their ad network according to a blog post today. Via Threadwatch.

When Performancing Metrics was launched, I was able to ask Nick a few questions about his intentions for Performancing and an ad network was definitley part of the vision:

Lee: It seems the grand Performancing plan is to develop free tools that will help your growing network of professional bloggers be more effective and then roll out an ad network as well as other revenue generating services. Is that on target, and if not, can you clarify?

Marketing Sherpa quickly announced the winners of their blog awards today. After a snafu with the voting service, voting was extended until Monday. Winners included:

Best Podcast on the topic of Marketing
Joseph Jaffe

Best B-to-B Marketing Blog
Brian Carroll

Best Blog on Email Marketing
Chris Baggott

Best Blog on Search Marketing
Barry Schwartz and friends

Best Blog on Advertising
Steve Hall

Best Blog on Marketing to a Specific Consumer Demographic
Andy Wibbels

Best blog on Affiliate Marketing
ReveNews Group Blog

Best Blog on the Topic of PR
Matt “PodBoy”

Marketing Sherpa announced earlier this week their blog and podcasting awards. Unfortunatley, the service they were using for the survey could not handle the traffic. The landing page for voting says they have recorded all the votes to-date, but any new votes must use a different url. The new survey is being handled by Survey Monkey.

I posted the link to the nomination form last week, but I guess some search bloggers don’t read this blog (aka Top Rank) and did not get nominated or did not nominate themselves. If you want to play, you’ve got to show up, right? Actually, quite a few very good and very popular SEO/SEM blogs did not get listed and should have. Maybe next year?

Marketing Sherpa is running their third annual blog awards with even more categories this year. It’s a testament to the growth of blogging to have some many niche topics - especially within marketing.

Of course there is a search marketing blog category and Online Marketing Blog (aka TopRank) has been nominated along with several other very popular SEO blogs. Rather than voting for just one blog in each category, you can rate each blog in each category as “excellent”, “not bad” and “blah”.