Online Marketing Blog

Search Engine Room here in Sydney has officially wrapped up and it’s back to business for us. Well, sort of. The time difference between Australia and back home makes things a little tricky but thanks to Email and a great team, the show goes on. We’ll have 4 days to check out Sydney, which is both awesome and a crime since we’ve come so far and there’s so much to see. Maybe next time it can be a longer stay.

Photo Courtesy Michael Visser

On day two I presented on a panel called, “Blog Marketing and Optimisation” with Andrew Pascoe (second from right below) who writes the Under The Rotunda blog and gave a great introduction to blogging as well as methods of deriving traffic via search and aggregation sites like Techmeme and Digg.

We’re starting day two of Search Engine Room and I’m really looking forward to it. Day one went very well with some really interesting presentations on a variety of topics ranging from vertical search to link building. I did a presentation on SEO and PR and it seemed to go pretty well. Quite a few people asked me after the session if we had an office in Australia. Hmmm.

We had a great lunch with Gavin Appel from Hitwise who shared all his secrets with us. Actually, it was great to hear the story of how Hitwise has grown and developed over the years. They are a global brand and have done very well for themselves.

Susan and I made it to Sydney, Australia early this morning and go to watch the sun rise over Eastern Australia during the descent. After a few hours getting through customs, then getting our bags x-rayed on the way out and then getting checked again to get into a line to get to the exit of the airport, we made it outside for the line to the taxis. It might have been a lot of hurry up and wait, but we were just thankful to be outside in the fresh air.

Tomorrow I’ll be doing a presentation on SEO and Public Relations. The buzz about SEO and PR has been strong the past few years, especially with Greg Jarboe, Jamie O’Donnel, Sally Falkow, Amanda Watlington and many others including TopRank making significant headway into developing new strategies and tactics for clients.

March has been a bit crazy so far as we’ve been rolling out an enormous SEO campaign for one Fortune 20 client and are in the final stages of signing another. On top of that, March will be a speakorama on blogs and public relations.

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting for the IABC chapter in Minneapolis at St. Thomas University with Sarah Bjelland, a VP from Wells Fargo. The event was called, “Delivering Insight into Business Blogs” and I presented on social media in general, trends with business blogging, applications for blog software in a corporate communications strategy and best practices for corporate blogs.