Online Marketing Blog

MIMA Summit 2006 Sitelet goes live.

Another journalist writes foolishly about SEO with trash like, “The easiest way to get a link is to rent space on a “link farm”, a simple web page that contains only links to other sites.” - via SEM 2.0

The New Influencers - A book in progress on blogs, PR and social media by Paul Gillin. via Steve Rubel

CIOs give blogs some credit. CIO Jury.

Business Week is taking votes for their annual Best of the Web, which is not to be confused with the most excellent web site directory and blog directory from BOTW.org. There are 23 categories and two of them are related to blogs. The selection for “favorite blogs” includes an interesting mixture ranging from Scoble to Sand Hill Slave to Tech Crunch.

At the time of this post, there are only 744 votes so far with Tech Crunch the clear leader, but I think the SEO/SEM readership out there could make quite an impact on that if they wanted to.

Spotlight on Blog Marketing Interview with Phil Hollows of FeedBlitz

And now for something completely different. Since so much of what’s covered here on Online Marketing Blog deals with the marketing of blogs, I thought adding some interviews with people involved with blog marketing would be of interest to our fast growing audience of readers.

In the past I’ve written tips about marketing business blogs with an emphasis on content, frequency and distribution. Just like with optimizing web sites for better search engine rankings, there’s an abundance of information and tips on how to use blogs for business.

As far as business blogs go, the two implementations that I see most often are blogs as a component of SEO or blogs as a public relations tool. Granted, this bias is a manifestation of the focus of my company’s blog consulting practice, but I think the insight into what’s been working can benefit any type of blog.

The one session that I was able to blog at the ACCM show this week in Chicago was, “Top Three Search Marketing Opportunities for Merchants” which combined blogs and social media with paid inclusion and shopping search engines.

The session was moderated by Heather Lloyd-Martin, who opened up with: “There’s no secret sauce in search. But there are things that catalog marketers might no know about. There are things they can leverage.”

Heather asked the audience, “How many of you have B2B catalogs?” About a third of the audience raised their hands.

First up was Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit.

Last week, Nick Wilson of Performancing mentioned their new blog metrics service has been in Alpha testing and will be released to public beta soon, as in tomorrow possibly.

I believe there’s a huge opportunity in the blog metrics and analytics space. Many blogs use free programs with limited functionality and some have been able to get into Google Analytics. However, the measurable outcomes for a content publisher, particularly a blog, are different than for an ecommerce site. Therefore Google Analytics and many other stats programs are not the best fit for blog metrics.

One of the areas of online marketing and PR that continues to gain interest is buzz marketing through blogs and similar consumer generated media. Blogs are many things including marketing tools and also voices to be heard. Consumer voices that provide insight into your marketplace. The availability and ease of communications and creative tools make consumer generated media a force to be reckoned with.

Today I noticed that Al Gore’s Current TV is looking for consumers to create commercials for its commercial sponsors (AdJab). I think you’ll see more of that as marketers and comsumers embrace the medium.