Online Marketing Blog

Monday morning I’m off to New York for the DM Days conference. I will join several other members of the DMA Search Engine Marketing Council including: Heather Lloyd-Martin, Amanda Watlington, Detlev Johnson, Kevin Lee, Mike Moran, Jeanette Kocsis and Matt Bailey as well as John Marshall in presenting two sessions that provide a wide range of specific recommendations for a DMA member site.

Topics include: creating a business case for search marketing, web site evaluation, technical optimization, user-experience, content optimization, web analytics, pay per click, online pr and integrating web marketing with other media. I guess it’s sort of a SES “pimp my site panel” but without the hats and it occurs over two sessions.

More info:

PRWeb has announced a viral, direct to consumer powered press release that offers $1000 to bloggers that find all 10 of the new features PRWeb has added recently. Rather than offering a single or multiple press releases announcing all the features, PRWeb is experimenting with having bloggers blog about the features, then have them trackback the press release. It’s a clever way to get attention and links I think. Here are the details:

To participate, bloggers must:
1. Successfully identify all of the new enhancements made to the PRWeb platform since June 10, 2006.
2. Create a blog post that identifies these enhancements and discusses their impact.
3. Post a TrackBack/PingBack into this press release.

Cond?© Nast Portfolio editor-in-chief, Joanne Lipman interviews Google CEO, Eric Schmidt in NYC on: challenges in China, the future of advertising, Google’s new payment service, Yahoo and Microsoft and whether Google is getting too powerful.

This was covered in depth by Danny at SEW.

            Subscribe to this Feed

The Google “Inside AdWords” blog has announced the addition of “ad scheduling” or as it is more often know as, “day parting”.

“Ad scheduling can also help you improve your ROI by ensuring that your ads run when it makes the most business sense. For instance, a local business may only want to run their ads during business hours, or an online retailer may want to boost their bids during their busier-than-normal lunchtime shopping period.”

When Andrew Goodman spoke here in Minneapolis at the MIMA event this week, he mentioned the impending addition of this feature to the AdWords program, but I’m not sure how many people caught it.

Kevin Newcomb over at ClickZ also has more details including several quotes from Richard Holden, director of product management at Google.

            Subscribe to this Feed

Marketing Sherpa has extended their annual blog voting and awards to include podcasting this year.   Anne Holland and her team are taking nominations for blogs in several categories with and without podcasting.

Categories include:

• B-to-B marketing
• Search marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing
• PR
• Advertising
• Marketing to a specific consumer demographic (ie. women, kids)
• Blogging or podcasting as a marketing tactic
• Viral, word of mouth, buzz, social marketing
• Small business marketing
• Non-English language blogs on marketing
• General (multiple topic) marketing
• Other specific niche topic related to marketing

Nominations are taken until tomorrow, June 16th midnight so if you would be so kind as to consider nominating Online Marketing Blog - www.toprankblog.com in the category you feel is most appropriate, (Blogging as a marketing tactic or Search marketing maybe?) that would be great!

            Subscribe to this Feed

With so many blogs being created every day, it’s a mystery to many bloggers how to make their blog stand out. There are many types of blogs or purposes for blogs and a certain number of tactics are applicable to just about all of them.Some companies choose to hire a blog consultant, but others like to try things internally. For those “DIY” companies and individuals interested in practical tips for marketing and optimizing a business blog, try out the following list of blog marketing and optimization tips:

1. Decide on a stand alone domain name www.myblog.com or directory of existing site www.mysite.com/blog. Sub domain is also an option blog.mysite.com. Avoid hosted services that do not allow you to use your own domain name!

PRWeb has announced the launch of their Evangelist affiliate program. Currently in beta, the program is available to a limited number of participants to start. The program offers a comission on services ordered from PRWeb via affiliate links and ads.

“Evangelists and power-users of PRWeb can now receive an agency-level referral fee for their word-of- mouth efforts.”

At the last Search Engine Strategies conference in NYC I talked with David McInnis about the idea of an affiliate program (he brought it up, not me) and I thought it would be a great idea. The type of product/service PRWeb offers should be very conducive to a successful affiliate program. At the same time, some affilates can get pretty aggressive and quality is an issue of prime importance for any wire service. To that end, PRWeb is limiting the initial participation of the program and then expanding to ensure quality.

Google is building new monster sized computing center, “as big as two football fields with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky”. via New York Times.

Google’s Picasa now offers a web albums option.

Google Earth gets upgraded with more images and new UI.

Roald from Technology Evangelist posts photos from Google’s Geo Developer Day. They’re doing some pretty cool stuff on the TE blog, so be sure to check it out.

Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable revisits the task of getting into Google News as a news source. If you can do it, I HIGHLY recommend it. Here’s the Google news source recommendation page.

            Subscribe to this Feed

Aaron Wall has posted an excellent article on search engine relevancy over at SEOBook.com explaining his perception of the different relevancy criteria used by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Aaron offers both a short version and long version. Yahoo is great, but can still be manipulated. Google is best at determining relevancy. MSN is still new and currently easiest to manipulate. Ask is good, but their small market share does not necessarily warrant specific attention from a SEO perspective.

This is a great resource offering some very useful tips and insights for those that are grappling with understanding how search engines determine what’s relevant. This article is not just for newbies though. Aaron pays attention to concepts like the importance of site age, editorial and social factors that you don’t see in other articles of this sort and that are increasingly important.

JupiterResearch has release their “US SEM Executive Survey 2006″ reporting that 40 percent of search marketers spent at least $500,000 on search in 2005, compared to 12 percent in 2004. A significant number of those companies are using search marketing to satisfy their online branding objectives.

The JupiterResearch survey also found that, while search marketing has traditionally been used for direct marketing purposes, more marketers are seeing the value of search for branding.

While generating immediate sales of online products is the goal of 37 percent of sophisticated search advertisers, 31 percent say building brand awareness is their main objective.

Via DM News

            Subscribe to this Feed

I was perusing DM News in anticipation of a new article coming out that I’ve submitted recently and came upon this one from last year:

Search Engine Guide Case Study: Walmart.com and What’s Missing From Your Web Site Team?

Many blue-chip companies allocate incredible budgets to their Web site development projects. It takes a top-notch, interdepartmental team to create a successful e-commerce site. Even with a crack team of Web designers, Web and database programmers, user experience professionals, content developers, quality assurance and project managers, an important component is often missing.

Though most do a great job at emphasizing usability for visitors and technology for performance, many of them miss out on usability and performance for search engines. Full article

Last week I had two interviews on SEO, blogs and press release optimization. One was a podcast and the other published in a newsletter. You can find the podcast interview over at the Novita Issue Communications Blog where Ernie Landante keeps me honest and runs through questions on the synergy of search engine optimization and public relations as well as some of the mechanics of the press release optimization process. At least until I started making death threats.

The good people over at Web Certain have started a new “Ask the Experts” feature for their newsletter and in a brave move, decided to do an interview on SEO and blog marketing with yours truly. Topics range from Google dominance to how clueless most corporate executives are about blogging.