Online Marketing Blog

If you’re on the Marketing Sherpa mailing list, then today you would have received notice of the 3rd Annual Benchmark Search Marketing Survey. Each year Marketing Sherpa conducts the survey to capture insights from search marketers around the globe.

Last year’s survey involved over 3,000 participants, making it likely the largest search marketing survey of its kind, offering spicy tidbits such as: Agency optimized campaigns experienced a 110% increase in traffic compared to in-house optimization campaigns at 38%.

Stefan Tornquist, Director of Research for Marketing Sherpa was able to answer a few questions about this and last year’s survey:

What are some of the most significant insights that came out of last year’s survey?

That’s potentially a very long answer, but for me, there were two things come to mind:

Last Friday was the due date to get your survey completed for the 2006-2007 edition of the Marketing Sherpa Search Engine Optimization and PPC Firm Buyer’s Guide. There were 126 companies profiled in the SEO Guide last year.

The survey questions this year were pretty much the same as last year but also included questions such as: “What is your ideal client?”, “What is your nightmare client?” and “How many clients did you lose due to training them to do SEO in-house?”. The actual wording was different, but you get the idea.

The revenue categories were also different with the minimum category at “Under $1m” and the next category at “Under $5m”. That’s going to lump an awful lot of small SEO firms and consultants in the first category.

Marketing Sherpa released findings of a Technology Marketing survey that include blogs and podcasts as two of the top 5 lead generation tactics for technology, hardware and software firms. Overall, the top 5 lead generation tactics were:

1. Free Trials
2. Webcast
3. White paper
4. Blog
5. Podcast

Of course, if you’re a really good marketer, you would be able to tie in four or five of the above into one campaign, especially when integrated with a blog. Not that you need to offer all five to have a successful campaign, but providing options for how to interact or make contact with your company allows you to reach more of your target audience. A podcast may work for some people, a free trial or a white paper for others. One of the new features of this report is the 13 prospect personas of prospects such as CIOs, IT professionals and business owners.

Marketing Sherpa quickly announced the winners of their blog awards today. After a snafu with the voting service, voting was extended until Monday. Winners included:

Best Podcast on the topic of Marketing
Joseph Jaffe

Best B-to-B Marketing Blog
Brian Carroll

Best Blog on Email Marketing
Chris Baggott

Best Blog on Search Marketing
Barry Schwartz and friends

Best Blog on Advertising
Steve Hall

Best Blog on Marketing to a Specific Consumer Demographic
Andy Wibbels

Best blog on Affiliate Marketing
ReveNews Group Blog

Best Blog on the Topic of PR
Matt “PodBoy”

Best Blog on Small Business Marketing
John Jantsch

Best Foreign-Language Blog
Marketing-Blog Biz

Best Blog on General Marketing Topics
Seth Godin

Marketing Sherpa announced earlier this week their blog and podcasting awards. Unfortunatley, the service they were using for the survey could not handle the traffic. The landing page for voting says they have recorded all the votes to-date, but any new votes must use a different url. The new survey is being handled by Survey Monkey.

I posted the link to the nomination form last week, but I guess some search bloggers don’t read this blog (aka Top Rank) and did not get nominated or did not nominate themselves. If you want to play, you’ve got to show up, right? Actually, quite a few very good and very popular SEO/SEM blogs did not get listed and should have. Maybe next year?

Conversion Optimization: Picking Up Where SEO Leaves Off, via ISEDB
Seth Godin on Passive vs Active SEO. AKA Content and Link building.

John Jantsch adds 14 new blogs to the Duct Tape Marketing network. Press Release.
Aaron Pratt does an excellent Interview with Bill Slawski

Marketing Sherpa marketing blog voting goes awry and switches to survey monkey. Please vote for “Top Rank” here.

Marketing Sherpa is running their third annual blog awards with even more categories this year. It’s a testament to the growth of blogging to have some many niche topics – especially within marketing.

Of course there is a search marketing blog category and Online Marketing Blog (aka TopRank) has been nominated along with several other very popular SEO blogs. Rather than voting for just one blog in each category, you can rate each blog in each category as “excellent”, “not bad” and “blah”.

It’s kind of funny that while this blog is clearly titled, “Online Marketing Blog” many references from other blogs, press and these contests use the text from the url instead, “TopRank Blog”.

Please take a moment and vote for “Top Rank” in the “Blogs on search marketing” category.

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!