Online Marketing Blog

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.

We also hold an all hands meeting every two weeks to do in-house training, discuss certain strategic information and for Account Teams to report on clients and demonstrate new tactics. We hold these meetings at our office on Lake Minnetonka but today we’re starting a tradition and having the bi-weekly meeting literally ON the lake.

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

All the segments have been added. You can tell by the last few that it ends up being a pretty funny conversation. At least it was to us.   Enjoy.

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.

In this session we’ll be providing both high level and practical insight into how public relations practitioners can and should leverage social media and search engine optimization to extend their reach and media relations effectiveness. Here’s the official session description:

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.

I noticed that the first of four podcasts with Barry Schwartz was posted today, where he pointed out many of the forum and online resources he tracks for Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land. Did Barry say 400 plus blogs and sites tracked??? WOW. I don’t know how he does it. I’m sure the assistant helps, but it’s amazing all the same.

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 Digital 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.

Also, readers of our blog can get a 10% discount by using this code “10TRR” when registering.

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.

Tomorrow I’ll be doing a presentation on SEO and Public Relations. The buzz about SEO and PR has been strong the past few years, especially with Greg Jarboe, Jamie O’Donnel, Sally Falkow, Amanda Watlington and many others including TopRank making significant headway into developing new strategies and tactics for clients.

March has been a bit crazy so far as we’ve been rolling out an enormous SEO campaign for one Fortune 20 client and are in the final stages of signing another. On top of that, March will be a speakorama on blogs and public relations.

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting for the IABC chapter in Minneapolis at St. Thomas University with Sarah Bjelland, a VP from Wells Fargo. The event was called, “Delivering Insight into Business Blogs” and I presented on social media in general, trends with business blogging, applications for blog software in a corporate communications strategy and best practices for corporate blogs.

Today I’m doing an online radio interview over at RSS Ray on social media and search engine optimization. Our discussion will cover fundamentals of social media and how businesses, small and large, might use such tactics as part of their online marketing mix. We’ll also discuss blog marketing and press release optimization.

The kind of social media optimization and marketing that gets the most play these days is hitting the home page of digg or getting tons of traffic from Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, reddit, etc. Many of the SMO/SMM campaigns we run achieve these kinds of results, but it’s not the end goal. If you’re familiar with the services we provide at TopRank, you’ll know we take a holistic approach to search marketing and view things like social media on a longer term basis.

Our search marketing agency, TopRank is hiring for a Search Engine Marketing Specialist position. We’re looking for someone with 2-3 years experience, particularly with paid search (creative, bid management, analytics, account management). The position is on-site at our office on Lake Minnetonka in the western suburbs of Minneapolis.

I’ll be posting a more in depth job description and requirements on the TopRank site later this week, but if there are super talented, super smart, local search marketers in the Twin Cities looking for a huge growth opportunity, email me your resume: seo at toprankresults dot com.

Todd And (Andrlik) published a list of 150 marketing blogs and I’m happy to note that Online Marketing Blog is ranked at #5 between Brian Clark’s most excellent Copyblogger and Church of the Customer’s Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. With Seth Godin at #2 and Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion at #17 I’m pretty amazed. This is a dynamic list and you can read about the ranking criteria here.

A few people did interviews with me that were published this week. One with Michael Gray as part of his awesome collection of local search marketing interviews, “Local Search Tips, Tricks and Secrets“.

The other interview was with a UK search marketing agency blog, ViperChill where I talked about everything from getting into the search biz, starting a blog about scotch and tips for people starting out in the search marketing business that want to get noticed by the industry.