Online Marketing Blog

No, this isn’t a lame attempt at a keyword stuffed blog post title. I’ve been noticing over the past year a significant increase in the number of references to “online marketing” by SEO blogs, articles and news web sites.

It would be easy to say I am biased due to the name of this blog and our agency both using “online marketing” in the names. I’ll admit that I probably am.

When I started working on selling and marketing web sites in 1997, the catch phrase seemed to be “web marketing” since the most common reference at the time was “world wide web”.

What will you do to improve your online marketing performance in 2008? There are so many options, challenges with agency selection plus a moving target when it comes to knowledge/expertise. Without previous campaign performance statistics, it can be a real challenge deciding where to allocate marketing dollars for the web when you’re looking at expanding into new areas of promotion.

Whether your success metrics are branding, traffic, lead generation or sales, the right strategy and mix of tactics can make or break a business that relies on internet channels. What ARE the best upcoming channels? We’d like to know your opinion in this week’s Reader Poll:

It’s Friday and the end of the Holiday bump that seems to make things move slowly. There’s lots to look forward to in 2008 and while getting an early start today checking rmail, feeds, Twitter, Facebook, etc the following links stood out:

Success with social media is very much centered on building profiles and one online marketing channel where profiles have been important long before social media became the latest online marketing poster child is forums. Danielle Winfield brings a nicely illustrated post on this topic, Ins ands Outs of Forum Marketing.

The OG’s of link building like Eric Ward are full of reasons why acquiring inbound links without consideration of direct effect from search engines is a sustainable and worthwhile marketing tactic. The ongoing SEO services many search marketers offer is often short sighted with a narrow emphasis placed on link acquisition and not on the broader importance of ongoing web site promotion through multiple channels.

In my constant search for good online marketing information, one resource continues to deliver the goods. Since 1995, and that’s a million years ago in internet time, Larry Chase has providede an excellent newsletter highlighting useful resources for online marketers world-wide.

The Web Digest for Marketers offers both an Internet Marketing Resource Directory and an email Newsletter which has over 125,000 subscribers. There’s also an interesting Resource Guide that you get for free when you subscribe to his newsletter.