Online Marketing Blog

Readers of Online Marketing Blog may know that after last week’s WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference, I stayed over the weekend in Austin for the Interactive portion of SXSW. I’ve heard up to 9,000 people were registered for the SXSWi event and by looking at the conference sessions, hallways and restaurants/bars, it was undoubtedly the place to be. Below is a summary of my brief time at SXSWi in picutures where search marketing, social media and public relations people converged, networked, talked and listened.

If there were baseball cards for internet marketing and social media superstars then these three would be Upper Deck Premium: David Berkowitz of 360i, Frank Gruber from AOL and Brian Solis, owner of FutureWorks PR

The Pubcon South conference sessions have wrapped up and my whirlwhind 3 session speaking journey as well. I made it to Austin Wednesday night, re-did my Twitter session Thursday morning and presented at: noon, 2pm and 4pm. During that time I was still able to take a few candids of the good people attending Pubcon South. Here are a few of my favorite photos and links to blog coverage of the sessions I spoke on:

Super Session on Social Media for Business - Wayne Sutton, Lee Odden, Chris Brogan. Unfortunatley, Chris brought, but did not decide to wear, his pirate hat. Wayne was awesome. Chris brought the “tell it like it f-ing is attitude” also awesome. Watch WebProNews for a their video coverage of Pubcon South including a video interview with Chris and I about, what else, social media marketing.

My first time in Toronto did not disappoint. It was brief but very busy with plenty of sessions to choose from during the day. Here is a collection of my favorite photos taken during SES Toronto this week:

Matt McGowan, Joe Dolson and Todd Malicoat enjoying some pre-conference conversation

Kevin Ryan getting the most out of Google’s Bill Tighe during the Advanced Paid Search Panel

Chris Silver Smith really gave up the goods during the Web 2.0 and Search Engines Panel.

SEO myth-buster Jill Whalen tells it like it is as Matt Van Wagner thinks, “Damn, she’s giving away my secrets!”

Jeff Quipp, Jennifer Osborne, Emily Spence and Richard Zwicky working the exhibit hall

Yahoo’s booth complete with Wii and a big push for SearchMonkey

Day 1 at SMX Advanced has wrapped up quite nicely. Below are some of the session highlights and the gorgeous Bell Harbor Conference Center.

Danny Sullivan opening the show this morning in Seattle.

Everyone milling around, getting ready for the first of this mornings sessions

Blow Your Mind Linkbuilding Tactics panel this morning

Building Value for your SEO Business session, where we learned that we must invest in our clients and employees to increase the value of the company

Buying Sites for SEO panel, featuring Shoemoney in a fantastic video. You can view his SMX Advanced video here.

Danny and Matt, dressed as twins, during You & A with Matt Cutts to close the conference today.

In case you haven’t noticed, social media optimization (SMO) is the new big search marketing term. I think you’ll be hearing a lot about it this year and thought I’d give you an easy tip to get started.

First thing you need to know is what social media optimization is. Basically, it’s just getting exposure and traffic from social media sites like Digg, del.icio.us, MySpace and many others. For a more in depth explanation, check out the new rules for social media optimization.

What I’d like to share with you is one extremely easy way to get some social media exposure. It’s as easy as photo sharing.

Using photo sharing sites to host the images you use in your blog posts will give your site added exposure on other sites. Some photo sharing sites to check out include Zooomr, PhotoBucket and Flickr.

If I look back over all the blogs I read, most have photos associated with their posts. Maybe not every day, but quite often. It makes me wonder, do photos increase the number of subscribers to a blog?

If you stop and think about it, there are two kinds of people out there, the analytical/text people and the visual people. There are those than buy the New York Time’s best seller books and those that would prefer a magazine with less reading and more pictures. So, with that in mind, if your blog posts don’t include images, are you just targeting one audience then?