Online Marketing Blog

Marketing Sherpa has extended their annual blog voting and awards to include podcasting this year.   Anne Holland and her team are taking nominations for blogs in several categories with and without podcasting.

Categories include:

• B-to-B marketing
• Search marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing
• PR
• Advertising
• Marketing to a specific consumer demographic (ie. women, kids)
• Blogging or podcasting as a marketing tactic
• Viral, word of mouth, buzz, social marketing
• Small business marketing
• Non-English language blogs on marketing
• General (multiple topic) marketing
• Other specific niche topic related to marketing

Nominations are taken until tomorrow, June 16th midnight so if you would be so kind as to consider nominating Online Marketing Blog – www.toprankblog.com in the category you feel is most appropriate, (Blogging as a marketing tactic or Search marketing maybe?) that would be great!

The long awaited Ask.com Blog Search Engine has finally launched. There are two iterations: One for Ask.com in the form of another right side option. The other within Bloglines.com. The Ask.com blogs and feeds search is directed more towards general users. The Bloglines versions offers more advanced options for “prosumers” as Kaushal Kurapati from Ask.com called them in our preview call.

Key features include the use of Ask.com “expert rank” which breaks the web into communities and defines subject specific link popularity. This is combined with Bloglines.com subscription data to determine relevance in blog and feed search results.

Another key feature is the quality of content. Ask.com Blogs and Feeds search is available in 20 languages with 4-6 million articles indexed per day. There are 1.5 billion articles indexed overall. Blogs and feeds that are indexed only include the feeds that Bloglines users have subscribed to.

Dave Sifry has posted his quarterly State of the Blogosphere with these results including the observation that technology product launches attract a significant amount of interest:

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Here are previous reports: February 2006, July 2005, March 2005, October 2004.

Still think blogs are a “passing phase”? Blog marketing is no place for a “herd mentality”, but it’s nothing to procrastinate over either.

Phil over at FeedBlitz tells me they have now added weekly scheduling options:

“FeedBlitz has now added weekly email options to simplify weekly newsletter production from blogs and other RSS feed sources. Available as a “Turbo” upgrade, you select the day of the week you want your newsletter to be released. In the wee small hours FeedBlitz collects your posts from the previous seven days and mails them out to your subscribers, automatically.”

This is a good feature since a lot of blog readers don’t want daily updates and blog owners can use this feature to present their week’s blog postings as an email news letter.

Last week, Nick Wilson of Performancing mentioned their new blog metrics service has been in Alpha testing and will be released to public beta soon, as in tomorrow possibly.

I believe there’s a huge opportunity in the blog metrics and analytics space. Many blogs use free programs with limited functionality and some have been able to get into Google Analytics. However, the measurable outcomes for a content publisher, particularly a blog, are different than for an ecommerce site. Therefore Google Analytics and many other stats programs are not the best fit for blog metrics.

What options for blog focused analytics are out there?

Yesterday at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference I ran into Brian Prince, CEO of Best of the Web (BOTW.org), who clearly have plenty of fans as evident from all the black, long sleeve t-shirts worn by conference attendees. In fact, they ran out the first day of the conference and had to get more.

A few months ago, BOTW.org launched a new blogs directory. Yesterday, they took the next step and added search to the directory. You can search by posts, tags or blogs.

I agree with Brian that the blog search engine problem really hasn’t been solved yet. Technorati and Google Blog Search are the two I use most, but the emphasis on recency as an indicator of relevancy muddles the search results. Plus there’s so much blog spam. To their credit, Technorati has released some new features recently, including favorites and a “relevancy” slider tool, which shows they are continuing to improve.

Let’s start the rant engine folks….

CNET reports that uber blogger, Jason Kottke has pulled the plug on blogging for a living. All I can wonder is, why it took this long? What kind of business model is micropayments? The guy needs to stop drinking his own Kool Aid and treat that blog like a business, not an experiment.

It’s a bit disheartening, really. So much potential and opportunity not realized.

Kottke.org is one of the most popular, most visited blogs on the planet – #23 on Technorati’s list of popular blogs. Throw some damn AdSense on there Jason!

There are over 13,000 pages on that domain and over 450,000 inbound links. I hear some SEOs out there salivating. What could you do with a site like that?

Today PRWeb officially announced the launch of their support of trackback functionality with press releases. While press releases have traditionally been used to announce news to the media, PRWeb has pioneered a direct to consumer model that allows companies to announce news to a broad audience using PRWeb’s distribution channels.

The addition of trackback functionality creates a link between bloggers and press releases in a way that is not found elsewhere. Now when a blog comments and cites a press release distributed via PRWeb, it can send a trackback to the release, which will in turn create a link back to the blog.

Lots of blogging fun to be had in today’s reading:

Blogs to Riches – New York Magazine

Technorati adds authority weighting - Scoble. In a related post, Rubel asks, “What is authority?”

State of the Blogosphere Part 2: Beyond Search – Dave Sifry of Technorati

BlogCode helps you find blogs similar to yours. Scoble’s blog was listed in the top ten related to mine, but Online Marketing Blog is second page related to Scoble – via Scoble

How to Almost Live on Blogging – an interview in wired with Harold Davis who wrote Google Advertising Tools

Corporate Brand Blog: Liberator or Oppressor? – Chief Marketer

Enough about blogs – it’s time to get ready for work.

This is some cool news I missed yesterday. Fellow SEO blogger Barry Schwartz (aka RustyBrick) of the famous Search Engine Roundtable blog and SEO forum, accepted a role as News Correspondent at the Search Engine Watch blog. Gary Price, who previously held that responsibility has moved on to Ask Jeeves. I can’t think of anyone more deserving. You can read his first post here. Congratulations Barry.

Online PR is new territory for most marketers, even traditional public relations practitioners.

I recently had a Q/A with an offline PR agency specialist that I thought would be interesting to post here.

What are the most popular news feeds to subscribe to?

The beauty of RSS is that there are so many niche, quality sources. However, the most popular feeds overall may not be the best for any one individual. In other words, it depends on the interests of the user. Here are several lists of popular blogs/feeds:

• http://top500.feedster.com/
• http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/
• http://bloglines.com/topblogs

If a journalist is using an aggregator, which news feeds does it draw from?

Not “really” on fire, but lots of great info on Jim Boykin’s blog lately. I also like the polls that he runs in the sidebar.

A few great recent posts:

SEO PowWow Next Week – Jan 18th. (I wish I could go!)

Software vs. Manual Link Building and Management (look in the comments)

What does Google know about your domain names? by Nick Wilsdon