Online Marketing Blog

Recently I did a podcast for AllBusiness.com , recently acquired by Dun & Bradstreet, along with their Marketing Director, David Saries. The audience for AllBusiness.com is small businesses, so the questions were flavored toward the perspectives many do it yourself or hands on web site owners and online business owners have.

The podcast discusses a variety of topics ranging from a definition of SEO to common SEO mistakes. We also discuss emerging online marketing channels and whether small businesses can “do SEO in-house” or not. You can listen to the full podcast here: “The Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization”

My blogging and marketing friend, John Jantsch has been providing practical marketing advice to businesses large and small long before I ever started blogging. Actually, it was in part because of John that I started contributing to AllBusiness.com and Business Blog Consulting.

John has long been a trailblazer at using blogs as a marketing tool via Duct Tape Marketing blog and I will readily admit, I have watched John for quite a while to learn his methods of blog promotion. A marketer’s marketer, John’s advice has been highly valuable as we’ve grown our small business.

Earlier this week Matt McGee of Small Business SEM blog did an interview with me about public relations for small businesses. Matt has had a lot of marketing experience so he asked some great questions that I think businesses small and large will benefit from.

Here are a few sample questions:

Are press releases better for traditional publicity purposes or for SEO purposes — or can the same release do both? How?

When the Yahoo Publisher Network blog editor Michael Mattis asked me to write an short marketing article for small businesses I knew exactly what to write about. As much as anyone, I am a proponent of new and interesting online marketing strategies like using social media for marketing, but I am also a firm believer in tried and true tactics, such as promoting one’s site offline.

After going through the routine hoops with Yahoo, the article has published on the YPN blog today, “Signal to Noise“. The article covers the basics as well as a few new, low cost tactics including:

Google Watch - Steve Bryant from eWeek

Online Marketing Research - Oleg Ishenko

Original Signal - Marketing - A collection of feeds from leading marketing blogs (including ours, yeah!)

Big Marketing for Small Business - Rajan Sodhi

I’d also like to share a few blogs from the TopRank team:

Blogger Design - TopRank’s own SEO Designer, Thomas McMahon aka TwisterMC

Creative Marketing - SEO/PR Account/Project Manager Jolina Pettice

Media Relations - SEO/PR Account/Project Manager Karen Sams

I’ve managed to get myself into another interesting speaking situation. Last week it was both Pubcon and Bulldog Reporter. This week it’s a chat over at “Conversations with Experts“, with Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakemen of Build a Better Blog System. I’ll be talking about search engine optimization for small and medium businesses with some blogs and press release optimization thrown in for good measure.

Here’s the “official” description:

Search Engine Optimization with Blogs and Press Releases
Gone are the days of optimizing web sites through a sprinkling of keywords and submissions to the search engines. Today’s savvy marketer integrates a mix of tactics to gain the credibility and authority necessary for dominant search engine rankings.

According to a recent study by Wells Fargo and Gallup, small businesses prefer to rely on word of mouth over paid advertising. Out of the small businesses that are looking to advertise, 57 percent said they anticipate spending on internet advertising this year. - Via iMedia Connection