Online Marketing Blog

Finding good blogs can be a challege. If you’re into voting for blogs, KBCafe Blog Award Voting is going on between now and Dec 31st. There are several search engine and marketing related categories including:

Best Google Blog
Best Yahoo! Blog
Best Microsoft Blog
Best Webvertising Blog
Best SEO Blog
Best Marketing Blog

This blog, Online Marketing Blog is somehow mentioned in the Best SEO Blog category along with some very good company: 

Search Engine Marketing Weblog – More of a news blog on search engines with some SEO.
Matt Cutts – Not an SEO blog per se. It’s about putting the kibosh on SEO. He even dreams of it!
Search Engine Roundtable – More about SEO than any others in my opinion.

Spotlight on Search – Barry Schwartz

Here’s the next installement in the series of Monday interviews called "Spotlight on Search". Today’s interview is with Barry Schwartz, who runs a web application development business called RustyBrick, edits and writes the Search Engine Roundtable blog, serves as moderator on numerous forums, provides editorial coverage and speaks at Search Marketing conferences AND is now running a new forum.

Lee: Tell us about your background and your business, RustyBrick

Barry:  RustyBrick is a Web development firm my twin brother and I started back in high school, actually.  My brother is the tech side of the business and I am the business side.  We have 8 employees right now, looking to hire two to three more PHP/MySQL developers.  So if you know any coders willing to work in the New York area, please send them my way.

When I first started Online Marketing Blog in Dec 2003, it was mostly a reblog. I would post links to articles I found interesting on the web. I would also add comments to those links.  When I transferred the blog away from blogspot.com hosting to it’s own domain name and WordPress, I also stopped posting news links for the most part and moved those sorts of posts to a blog I was using to develop article ideas. I’ve had Thomas update the layout of that blog and it is now called Search Marketing News.

This is the first SES conference I’ve been to where there were no large scale events sponsored by any of the major search engines. There are smaller, invite-only gatherings, but they only involve a small number of attendees. 

I opted to check out some of the Chicago steak houses recommended to me by Jolina, one our Public Relations rockstars, who is from the area.

On Sunday, Andy from WebCertain and I first checked out Harry Caray’s.  This place is definitely a Chicago tradition in sports bars. Unfortunatley, their interpretation of what "medium" means was very different than what Andy and I had in mind. Service was excellent though.

In just a few weeks, Online Marketing Blog will be 2 years old. Dec 28 to be exact. It started out as a blogspot blog using Blogger (still ranks #1 for "seo blog" on Google ??) and I finally got it moved to it’s own domain name and WordPress in the past month or so.

Starting out as a personal project rather than an intentional marketing effort, I spent the greater part of those 2 years experimenting with what to write and what audience OMG serves. In the end I just write whatever I feel like and have time to. Sometimes it may come off as a business blog especially with the gratuitous self promotion (hey, I’m a marketer) but there are often articles, tips and resources that come as a result of working in the search marketing business and being active in the industry.

According to a white paper on RSS (pdf) sponsored by Yahoo and Ipsos Insight, providing easy ways for users to subscribe to RSS feeds using their favoriate feed reader or aggregator can improve distribution of that feed.

Thomas, our SEO Designer and blog marketing guru, has made a very cool tool for quickly creating up to 14 RSS feed subscription buttons or chicklets for your blog.

Just fill in the blog title, blog url and feed url and the for will reply with code for subscription buttons to: Rojo, My Yahoo, Bloglines, newsgator, My MSN, Pluck, NewsBurst, searchfox, Google Reader, My AOL, del.icio.us, Feedster, Furl and Yahoo My web.

I must say, it is a very useful tool!

[Update: Thomas has added even more subscription buttons as well as bookmarking tools.]

In this session on day two of the Pubcon 10 conference, presenters provided very good insight into how podcasting and RSS are being used now and what’s in store for the future.

First up was Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit.

Sound files (podcasting) is not such a new topic. What’s new are the tools for production and distribution. Podcasting is growing fast. Avg subscribers per podcast 65. It’s not realistic to expect a large audience right away, it must be built up.

According to TDG Research, there will be 56.8 million users of podcasts by 2010.

How cane search marketers make money from podcasting?

• Content
• Advertising
• Publishing (RSS)
• Marketing Podcasts to listeners
• Tools such as directories to help listeners find podcasts

Just a reminder/announcement that I am posting links to very interesting news bits, stories and blog posts over at Online Marketing Resources Blog, when I do not have time to write a complete review here.

Today there are goodies ranging from a new Google patent that will make personalized search standard for everyone to the new and very cool Yahoo Maps beta. Check it out.

Tags: Online Marketing

I received my login to the beta version of the new blog search engine Sphere this morning. Founded by Tony Conrad, Martin Remy, and Steve Nieker, Sphere is a true blog search engine and not a RSS feed search engine, like Google Blog Search.

From the invite email:

“The primary focus of our product is relevance. We want to make sure the most relevant blog posts make it to the top of our results. We’re also working hard to ensure that our results are as fresh and comprehensive as possible.”

Search results look pretty good with post title, blog title, snippet, and how long ago the post was made. Each result also has a link to a “profile” which may be something blog owners can “claim” ala Technorati in the future.