Online Marketing Blog

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.

Here is a list of the week’s blog posts on Online Marketing Blog focusing on SEO, blogging and business of search marketing.

SEMPO Board of Directors Nominees (Lee) – Voting begins Feb 6.

Search Marketing Blogs Update 012607 (Lee) – 18 new search marketing blogs added this week. We’re now at 350 and Todd Malicoat added a new CSE.

Friday Search News 012507 (Lee) – Googlebombs, Interviews with Bruce Clay and Marissa Meyer of Google.

Content vs Links (Lee) – This debate is missing the most critical concept: distribution.

The Lowdown on Web Designers and SEO (Lee) – Why your web designer didn’t make your site search engine friendly.

Recommendations for Collaboration Software (Lee) – Looking for tips on cross platform hosted email and calendar software.

This Thursday I’ll be doing an audio conference as part of Bulldog Reporter’s PR University on search engine optimization and public relations. I did one of these in the Spring of 2006 and it went pretty well. I know a lot of practical, hands-on information was given out for the past conference. Attendees ranged from top 10 public relations firms in the U.S. to boutique shops and in-house PR professionals.

The panel this Thursday is very similar as last year and consists of:

• Sally Falkow from Expansion Plus
• Jamie O‚ÄôDonnell, SEO PR
• Lee Odden, TopRank
• Sarah Skerik, PR Newswire

Sue, Chris and Karen looking mah-velous!

With our move into the new office on Lake Minnetonka, we decided to do something different this year for our company holiday party. Instead of dinner at a swank and stylish restaurant downtown Minneapolis, we decided to have the party catered to our office via D’amico.

The crazy part of all this is that we’re still working on the “furnishing” of the office which worked to our advantage for the party. The other interesting consideration was that last year there were 12 people and this year we had 22!

I really wish I had taken more photos, but the food, conversation and Sue’s “team appreciation” presentation ala Powerpoint no less, were enough to distract me from my usual candid taking duties at social events.

I can’t believe it was 3 years ago today that Online Marketing Blog was launched. Here is the inaugural post from December 28th, 2003.

The design we launched with. Ewwwwwwww!

Here is the design from 2004-2005

Originally published on the Blogger platform, we moved to WordPress after about a year and a half. Our SEO designer and blog marketing maven, Thomas, has been an invaluable help with the back end of the blog, the design and posting from time to time. Most recently, he helped with the coverage of the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference. For the most part, you can find Thomas blogging over at Blogger Design.

Here’s a roundup of the fifteen most popular posts or resources for 2006 hosted here on Online Marketing Blog. (not counting the home page):

1. RSS Button Maker
2. Getting Listed in News Search Engines
3. Interview with Adam Lasnik of Google
4. Social Bookmarks Tool
5. Blogger Relations 101
6. 25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog
7. Matt Cutts Videos
8. New Rules for Social Media Optimization
9. Google Dance V Photos
10. Online Marketing Blog Resources
11. About Online Marketing Blog
12. Yahoo Terry Semel Interview Video
13. Gmail for Business
14. Interview with Chris Pirillo
15. Matt Cutts on Toolbar Data
    

Top ten referrers:

• Google
• digg (ouch!)
• Yahoo
• marketingterms.com
• Bloglines.com
• Technorati.com
• MSN
• My Yahoo
• TopRankResults.com
• StumbleUpon