Online Marketing Blog

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.

The two ice fishing houses on the lake outside our office. Besides the satellite TV, they’re probably outfitted with an easy chair, refrigerator, card table, hot plate and wireless internet. Oh, and probably a small fishing rod – you never can tell.

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.

There was some nice back and forth with Andy and Rand plus great questions from Mike and the audience.

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.

Hopefully what Jolina, Mike and I are posting from SES and Pubcon warrants continued growth of our subscriber numbers. The numbers reported by Feedburner for a variety of reasons fluctuate up and down, so tomorrow we could be back at 9500. Or it could be 10,200.

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”

Dec 4-7, 2007 – WebmasterWorld Pubcon – Las Vegas, NV
“Public Relations” and “SEO Blogger Panel”

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.

While in Las Vegas it’s possible, but unlikely, we’ll run into some of the search marketers speaking at the Shop.org conference. In fact, there’s one session on link building with Stephan Spencer and Eric Ward who I am speaking on the same topic with at the DMA07 show “Desperately Seeking Links” in Chicago Oct 16. Other SEMs on the Shop.org linking panel include Neil Patel from ACS and Rebecca Kelley from SEOmoz.

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.

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!)

Layout 2

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.

After careful consideration of our company goals, objectives, messaging and target audience, we’ve finally initiated a new site for TopRank Online Marketing. This site not only presents a new design, but an up to date perspective on TopRank’s holistic approach to marketing online combining SEO, paid search, social media, email marketing and social media. Other content and features include: videos, a small number of podcasts, a blog powered media room, articles, site search, email newsletter, white papers and case studies as well a significantly improved site architecture for improved user and search engine interaction.

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%.

Mike works as an Account Manager with a particular emphasis on public relations clients and programs involving an integrated mix of PR, SEO, email and social media marketing channels. You may soon start to see more of Mike’s writing over at our PR blog, Media Relations Blog in the coming weeks.

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.