Online Marketing Blog

I’ve had some back and forth with collegues recently about the popularity of podcasting, live audio streaming and also how podcasting fits within the social media category of communication channels.

eMarketer says podcasts are rising in popularity: “As a percentage of Internet users, podcast downloaders will grow from 9% in 2008 to 17% in 2013″.  The Pew Internet & American Life Project also indicates an uptick in podcast popularity, stating that 19% of all internet users have downloaded a podcast in 2008, up from 12% in 2006.

It seems to me that live streaming audio is likely more on the rise but I did not find any research at eMarketer or at Pew about the distinction between podcasts and streaming audio on the web. Hopefully you can help me out by taking this poll. 

With concerns over the recession and its impact on marketing, we decided to run a TopRank Reader Poll to discover reader (and their networks) preferences for digital marketing tactics in 2009.  Companies world-wide are cutting costs as well as looking for creative, high impact and accountable marketing.  Our amazing readers both on Online Marketing Blog and followers at @leeodden helped uncover the top tactics.

Over the past 11 days 532 readers have cast 1559 votes for their 3 top digital marketing tactics for 2009 with Blogging, Twitter and Search Engine Optimization topping the list.  Equally interesting was that out of the top 10 tactics, 6 fall into the category of Social Media Marketing. See the full list below along with other statistics about where voters came from as well as info about the readership of Online Marketing Blog.

There are more companies blogging now than ever. How do you measure results? Measuring the social web is a different thing than what most web analytics packages offer. It can be easy to start a blog, but making it successful requires an excellent feedback mechanism. Blog analytics is one of those sources of feedback to know what’s working and what’s not.

We’ve listed interesting blog analytics tools of various types before, but now’s your chance to vote for (up to two) of the best software focused on measuring what happens on blogs. 

Let’s face it, we’re experiencing more than “interesting” economic times, especially those with a marketing responsibility in-house and at agencies.

To tap in to the stream of marketing-savvy collective wisdom online, we reached out to our network with a top internet marketing tactics poll for the next 6 months. Over 400 business marketers responded, making this the most popular poll Online Marketing Blog has run to-date. Readers were asked: What 3 internet marketing tactics will you emphasize most in the next 6 months?

Here are the results of the poll:

• Search engine optimization (36%, 149 Votes)
• Blogging (33%, 134 Votes)
• Pay per click (26%, 107 Votes)
• Email marketing (22%, 89 Votes)
• Social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) (21%, 86 Votes)

At the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto, I’ll be presenting along with David Snyder and Chris Winfield a hotly anticipated session called “Twitter: Ultimate Time Waster, or Great Tool?”. With the fast growth and uptime growing pains, debates about Twitter are plentiful so let’s settle it once and for all with a Twitter poll:

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I’ll be sharing the results at SES Tornoto, so be sure to pass along this post and see if we can break our poll response record.

Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter here: @leeodden

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Earlier this week we started a poll on what online marketing tactics our readers would use most in 2008. The polling plug-in allows for only one choice and over 100 people have responded so far. We’ll keep the poll running for another week or so, but here are the top ten tactics rankings so far out of 35 listed and the percentage of votes for each.

With the vote count at over 150, I’ve updated the top ten as of 02/13/08:

• Blogging (27%)
• Email marketing (16%)
• Search engine optimization (14%)
• Pay per click (9%)
• Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) (5%)
• Blogger relations (4%)
• Online public relations (3%)
• Viral marketing (3%)
• Free content (white papers) (3%)
• Corporate web site (3%)