Online Marketing Blog

If someone has a better photo, please link in the comments

On day three, the last day of sessions at WebmasterWorld Pubcon here in Vegas, I participated on a panel called, “Search and Blogging Reporters Forum” with Rand Fishkin and Andy Beal.

Moderation duties handled by Mike McDonald. Basically, it was a round table-style discussion about blogging in the SEO industry as well as blogging as a marketing tool. There were some good points about using blogs as a public relations tool as well as some debate about hosting team blogs separately or all under the company domain name.

Do you have an interest in crochet? Extreme ironing? Wearing only green shoes? There is probably a social networking community out there for you so you can connect with like-minded people who share your interests. At SMX Social Media this afternoon Rand Fishkin and Liana Evans both spoke on how to find, use and leverage these smaller social networking communities.

To find these micro communities in your vertical, you can check out the web 2.0 lists of social media lists, search for topic relevance and coverage in a search engine and read the social media discovery blogs. The long tail of social networking sites and micro communities is very, very long. You will be able to find a targeted micro community focused on what your interest is.

I nearly missed mentioning this. Daniel over at Daily Blog Tips does an interesting form of interview where he asks two people the same questions and posts their replies as a sort of “face off”.

In the past he’s done this with Darren Rowse and Jeremy Shoemaker as well as John Chow and Matt Coddington. This week he did such an interview with Rand Fishkin and myself, which might have been better if it were with Rand and Danny or Rand and Matt Cutts, but hey I’m not complaining.
It’s not much of a faceoff since SEOmoz gets 10 times the traffic Online Marketing Blog does. Despite that, many of our answers are quite similar with the exception of the questions about reading just one blog and a one word description that describes the reason for blog success. Thank you Daniel for the exposure!

Rand finally pulled the trigger and proposed to Geraldine, aka “Mystery Guest” through a commercial during her favorite show, Veronica Mars last night. While it wasn’t during the Super Bowl as was planned and hoped, I personally think this route was a lot better.

It was an interesting thing keeping this under wraps considering there was so much PR ala Greg Jarboe, Jamie O’Donnel and Joe Morin going on. In fact, because our posts on Online Marketing Blog about the super bowl proposal, and then the update rank highly for “super proposal”, we received a lot of referral traffic from Google when the commercial didn’t appear during the Super Bowl and were looking for it on the web.

Sitting in on the link baiting session the presenters made it sound so easy. Rand talked about how, on average, a front page Digg post or exposure on Techcrunch can get you 2000 new inbound links. That’s an astronomical amount of links and the good thing is, everyone can can do it. Here are some things to consider.

• If trying to build link bait, brainstorm, research and find a good, unique idea.
• Design matters. Use that Web 2.0 look.
• Self submission is ok, but only submit what others will think is good. Not everything.

As I am writing this, Rand Fishkin is interviewing Vanessa Fox for WebProNews right behind me. Rand is asking Amanda about sitemaps, duplicate content and links.

P.S. Rand also calls Dave Naylor cold and smelly. Wait, I mean he described the experience of having Dave Naylor throw a beer at Rand as cold and smelly.
Wow, talk about blogging a conference in real-time!

Watch for the interview to be published over at the WebProNews Video blog soon.

I have to say, the Pubcon conference last week was one of the better search marketing conferences I’ve been to. The overriding impression from just about everyone I talked to was that the content was great and the networking even better.

Below is a roundup of Online Marketing Blog’s blog posts, photos and videos from the WebmasterWorld Pubcon Las Vegas 2006. I have to say thanks to everyone that let me put my Sony CyberShot to the test and do these 1 minute “interviews”. :

Videos
Brett Tabke - WebmasterWorld
(Happy about the conference, speakers and the next one in Vegas)

Unless there’s any doubt, I am a linking fanatic. I appreciate links like they’re gold. When I talk about link building with our team, I can never stress enough the importance of linking for traffic and SEO. To me, the best way to learn about link building is to get out there and do it.

However, if you’re new, you can save quite a bit of time learning from the wisdom of others’ experience. Here are three recent posts and one bonus link on link building I highly recommend:

Rand Fishkin presents his thoughts on why email is still king for link building.