Online Marketing Blog

Tomorrow the PRSA is conducting a teleseminar “PR and Social Media - What every practitioner needs to know“.

Take a first-hand look at the phenomena that are redefining the practice of public relations.  Hear from three digital PR pioneers about the array of new tools, strategies and channels available to today’s practitioner from Facebook and Second Life to blogger relations, digital video and search engine reputation management.

As has been the case with a number of public relations industry events, I am tasked with bringing a search marketing perspective to a PR and social media focused panel. A similar session was held at the PRSA International Conference last year, “Social Media for PR Practitioners“, so the seminar tomorrow will be a nice update.

What a year 2007 ended up to be for TopRank and 2008 has already started with a bang. We’ve been fortunate to work with small companies like Smart-Kit and Web Awards as well as some of the largest companies in the world including NWA, HP and McKesson. New clients for 2008 already include PRWeb, Radian6 and SPS Commerce.

Along with the tremendous growth we’ve experienced, TopRank has several positions open. Since Online Marketing Blog has such a talented group of readers, we’re curious if some of those readers have the right stuff or perhaps know someone with the right stuff to join our energetic, growing marketing company based in Minnesota. The open positions include:

Loren Baker’s Search Engine Journal has recently taken nominations for best search marketing blogs in a variety of categories. I am happy to say TopRank’s blog, aka “Online Marketing Blog” has been nominated in 4 of the 19 categories.

Thank you to friends and readers of Online Marketing Blog for nominating us! You can now vote for TopRank’s blog (5 for best!) in the following categories:

The great thing about winter in Minnesota when you’re in a computer/indoors intensive profession, is that there aren’t as many distractions to go outside. Compared to all the snow and ice, back link analysis and code optimization seems pretty appealing.

I’m not sure how many of our readers are in warm climates, but I thought I’d share a few chilly Minnesota photos from today:

Lake Minnetonka on the way into the office in the am. I really shouldn’t be taking pictures and driving at the same time.

If someone has a better photo, please link in the comments

On day three, the last day of sessions at WebmasterWorld Pubcon here in Vegas, I participated on a panel called, “Search and Blogging Reporters Forum” with Rand Fishkin and Andy Beal.

Moderation duties handled by Mike McDonald. Basically, it was a round table-style discussion about blogging in the SEO industry as well as blogging as a marketing tool. There were some good points about using blogs as a public relations tool as well as some debate about hosting team blogs separately or all under the company domain name.

When I looked at our Feedburner chicklet this morning I noticed what must have been a joke: 9999.

What are the odds of that happening? I jokingly posted to Twitter that someone at Feedburner must have been messing with me and David Petherick of Digital Biographer sent me a direct message on Twitter that he had just subscribed to put it over the edge at 10,000. Thanks David!

BTW, if you’re interested in social networking/social media check out his site. Lots of good info there.

They say you should face your greatest fears head on and public speaking has been one of mine since I was a kid. Being shy didn’t help during those school speech assignments one bit. Anyone with me on that one?

Having worked in the search marketing/web dev business since 1997, it was only 2 years ago or so that I began to speak at events about SEO, marketing with blogs and online public relations. I think there were 3 speaking events that first year. This year it looks like 16 and there are already 8 events booked for 2008. Things can change quickly in internet time.

Several TopRank employees wore costumes for Halloween today and here are a few photos:

Princess Amie Krone - Operations

Beer Maiden Tabitha Anderson - Public Relations

Hockey Dude Jeff Nolan - SEO

Black Eyed Pea Thomas McMahon - SEO/Blog/Email

See, it’s not all work at TopRank - some fun is allowed from time to time. 

Happy Halloween!

The big year of 2007 is winding down and there are more than a few conferences coming up. It’s been a busy year for TopRank speaking events with our involvement in the search, direct marketing and public relations industries. Here are our remaining speaking events this year. We hope to see you there:

Nov 1, 2007 - Bulldog Reporter’s PR University - Teleconference
“Boosting Web Traffic: Best New Ways PR Can Supercharge Websites to Drive Investors, Journalists and Customers to Visit Online”

Nov 30, 2007 - Advanced PR Technology Conference - San Francisco, CA
“Press Release Optimization” and “Corporate Site SEO”

This week will be some light blogging for me as I’ll be on vacation for the rest of the week. We decided it would be a Cirque du Soleil - fest so where better to go for that than Las Vegas? We’ll see 3 of the Cirque shows there so hopefully it will satisfy any urges for peculiar French inspired circus acts for a while.

Local NBC affiliate NBC11 covering Silicon Valley stopped by the Search Engine Strategies conference yesterday. I happened to be at the right place at the right time and news reporter Scott Budman asked if I would do a quick interview.

My pal Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal was nearby during the interview so I gave him my camera and he took a few shots:

It went pretty quickly and I didn’t think a lot of it afterwards until several people mentioned to me that they say me on TV during the evening news. I haven’t found an online version of the clip, but did get one forwarded to me that I could download but not share.