Online Marketing Blog

Is blog optimization part of search marketing? Absolutely! Blogs are web site content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. Blogs are really no different than web sites.

If you can optimize a document and that document gets indexed, categorized and ranked by a search engine, it’s part of search marketing in my book. As such, marketers should be aware of how these kinds of channels can be used within the overall online marketing mix. Blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimization.

Dave Sifry has released his quarterly State of the Blogosphere report which informs us that Technorati is now tracking 57 million blogs.  With this report comes some fun blogging stats:

• 100,000 blogs created daily (Q3)
• 55% of all blogs are active
• Over 70% of pings are from known spam sources
• English and Japanese remain the two most popular languages
• Blogging Elite – 500 or more blogs linking in the last 6 months

According to the report Technorati continues to spend quite a bit of time fighting spam blogs, or splogs.
FYI: Online Marketing Blog is ranked 1,179 out of 57,000,000 blogs.

Later today I’ll be presenting here at DMA-06 on a panel called, Blogs, RSS and Podcasting with Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit and Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts. Basically, my presentation will cover how blogs can be used as public relations tools in the context of “Push and Pull PR”. The presentation is broken up into:

• Opportunity
• Push and Pull PR
• Blog Optimization & PR
• Blogger Relations
• Case Study

The “opportunity” section explains how many journalists are ignoring the noise of getting pitched by so many PR firms and company PR staff. Whether it’s a pitch by phone or email, many members of the media go online (98%) to find news sources (76%), story ideas (92%), experts and to research press releases (73%). The percentages come from a study done by Middleburg/Ross.

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.

If you would like more of a variety of blogs to vote for, then go ahead and fill in the write in form. I know I did. I put one in for Search Engine Roundtable and another for Matt Cutts. Good luck guys!

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.

Today’s interview is with Phil Hollows, Founder and CEO of the popular RSS to email service, FeedBlitz. With an active circulation of 682,330 and 53,955 active feeds, FeedBlitz is likely the most popular RSS to email service available. I had a chance to preview some features of FeedBlitz a while back and have been using it personally and with our PR and blog consulting clients ever since. Recently Phil took FeedBlitz on as a full time gig, has secured investor financing and is hiring. What better time than now to check in with Phil for a peek behind the FeedBlitz curtain.

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.

The Consumer’s Dilema:

More products and more marketing channels have not resulted in greater customer satisfaction.

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.

What options for blog focused analytics are out there?

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.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last week, Rebecca Lieb moderated a session including Dave Balter from BzzAgent, Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen BuzzMetrics (Intelliseek) and Jim Nail of Cymfony who presented on creating and measuring buzz using blogs.