Online Marketing Blog

Hello Online Marketing Blog readers! My name is Mike Yanke and I am an Account Manager with TopRank Online Marketing.

Regular readers may know me as the guy who won the TopRank challenge with the blog post on Stephen Colbert’s marketing strategy, “Fish Wavers & Bridge Namers - How the “Greatest Living American” Reaches Unique Groups by Creating Unique Groups”. Regular lookers may know me as the guy who looks a bit like Brad Pitt in his sunglasses.

(Note from Lee: Everyone who meets Mike at SES, get a photo with him wearing sunglasses and post it on your blog with a link to this post. I will link back to you in a round up post!)

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Our emphasis on TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog has meant less attention to our company web site. However, as much of an asset the blog is, we simply could not go on any longer with a company web site designed by a non-designer (me) six years ago. I’m surprised more people have not made fun of how bad our current site is.

I am happy to announce the winner of last week’s TopRank Challenge blog post contest: Mike Yanke with his nod to Stephen Colbert, “Fish Wavers & Bridge Namers - How the “Greatest Living American” Reaches Unique Groups by Creating Unique Groups“. Congratulations goes to Mike with over 55% of the vote!

Mike chatting it up on the S.S. TopRank

In second place was Julie Brue’s post, “Cut Through Communication Traffic Jams with Email Marketing” with 25% of the vote and Thomas McMahon’s post, ” The Mobile Web - Optimizing and Being Found” with 22%.

Inspired by Marketing Pilgrim’s past Scholarship contests (which resulted in this handy free e-book) where participants submit articles to be voted on, we decided to do something similar, but internally here at TopRank. An invitation to participate in a contest was sent to the team 2 weeks ago and 8 decided to take up the offer. Each participant has since submitted an article to Susan Misukanis and myself on a topic of their choice or from a list of suggested topics.

Susan and I have scored each entry for: relevance to audience, objective reasoning, accuracy and style, revealing the top 3 scoring articles.

Sue, Jolina, Mike Y., Lee, Julie, Thomas, Dana, Max, Bill, Melinda, Roberta and Amie. Missing are Mike O., Chris and Anthony.

One of the cool things about working for TopRank is that during the summer, we operate on “summer hours”, which means the Friday work day ends (supposed to) at noon. Most of our team takes advantage of this but it’s pretty common to see the Account Managers sticking around a bit longer. I guess we’ll need to work on that.

David Brown and Brian Mark invited me to do an interview with them for the Beginning SEO Podcast recently. The interview was sliced and diced a bit according to the questions and have been posted over the course of this week. Here are the posts so far:

• Industry Conferences
• Does Page Rank Matter and Why Build Widgets?
• Who Can Really Benefit from SEO Consulting?
• Analytics Tools for Blogs
• NoFollow
• What’s One Thing New Site Owners Should Do?
• Competition

Coming up very quickly next week is the Media Relations Summit in Washington D.C. and I’ll be bringing one of our account managers, Mike Yanke, who works with many of our public relations clients to learn from some of the best and brightest in the PR and media relations industry.

I’ll be joining fellow SEO/social media/PR practitioners Jamie O’Donnell and Sally Falkow, who are both flying in from California, in a session called “Media Relations Unbound: How SEO and Social Media Have Revolutionized Our Reach”. I’m speculating that Greg Jarboe is on yet another exotic island vacation.

Tonight I’m recording a Beginning SEO podcast with David Brown and Brian Mark. I’ve known Brian through conferences for the past few years and I met David for the first time at SES New York. We sat next to the stripper pole in Epiar’s party bus (That’s David behind me) on it’s way to the Vintage Tub and Bath dinner party. Luckily for everyone, David and I stayed in our seats and left the dancing to Elisabeth.

Marketing/PR Agency Misukanis Odden is now seeking a new Marketing Account Manager to join our talented group of client-focused, online marketing professionals. The smart, internet savvy and highly personable candidates we’ll be interviewing will have agency side account experience (3-5 years) in any of the following industries: search marketing, public relations, interactive or advertising. Candidates will also possess a combination of creative and analytical skills which are critical for our client’s online marketing success.

The right person for the Marketing Account Manager position plays well on the strategy as well as the tactical side and has a neverending passion for learning. They are comfortable providing professional guidance to both clients and team players and are truly “people’ people.

I need to spend even more time offline. As a rule, I try to spend most of the weekend offline and schedule a post or two in advance. For some reason I’m still adjusting to CST and getting up waaaay to early and doing TopRank vanity searches of all things. Here are a few of those shameful links from this am:

Chitika Blog Bash started today with Chris Pirillo’s post, “10 Tech Secrets of an Earlier Adopter Tech Entreprenuer“. “30 days and 30 expert bloggers” says the promo copy. Other bloggers scheduled to contribute include Darren Rowse, Aaron Wall, Chris Batty from Gizmodo and myself.

Last week I posted a well received rundown of five reasons you should attend the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, April 10-13. A few additional items regarding TopRank’s involvement were not included and I’ve been getting a little chiding from our “gratuitous self promotion” department about that.

First, Online Marketing Blog has been named an official media sponsor for Search Engine Strategies conferences as well as the ClickZ events. This might not be news for the likes of WebProNews, BtoB, TARGET Marketing, Search Marketing Standard, Entrepreneur.com or Jupiter Research who are the other media sponsors, but it’s certainly big news for TopRank because it’s the first time a blog has been included as a media sponsor.

Susan and I made it to Sydney, Australia early this morning and go to watch the sun rise over Eastern Australia during the descent. After a few hours getting through customs, then getting our bags x-rayed on the way out and then getting checked again to get into a line to get to the exit of the airport, we made it outside for the line to the taxis. It might have been a lot of hurry up and wait, but we were just thankful to be outside in the fresh air.