Lee Odden

I just happened upon this blog on RSS, RSSApplied.com. It’s a group blog on RSS marketing and offers some excellent practical uses of RSS in marketing and communications.

“RSS has the potential to power your entire internet marketing mix, but only if you tightly integrate it with your marketing strategy. In this weblog, you will discover all the facets of RSS marketing, from content delivery, communications, and direct marketing to search engine rankings, traffic generation, promotion, and media relations”

Just about every day I find the concept of RSS marketing creeping into conversations and this is a resource I would recommend to those who want to learn more.

Yahoo has made another interesting acquisition, this time the blog tracking service blo.gs.

From Jim Winstead, blo.gs founder:

this is the sort of good home that i was looking for – yahoo! Obviously has the resources to run and improve blo.gs in pace with the incredible growth of blogs (and syndication in general), and in talking with them it was also clear that we had some of the same vision for the future of the service and the ping/notification infrastructure..

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo comments:

What are our plans for the service? Simple. Keep it running, make it scale, and make it even better (a lot like the Flickr plans).

BetaNews reports that WinZip has added Google Toolbar and Desktop Search software to it’s Windows archive program. The article references this method of bundling as akin to how spyware and adware companies market their products. Not the most flattering comparison.

Google is not alone, Yahoo also planning to offer its Yahoo! Toolbar with Macromedia Flash and Adobe’s Acrobat Reader.

Marketing Sherpa announced the winners of the 2005 Readers Choice Blog Awards today.

Over 2000 votes were cast for blogs in 9 different categories. Thank you to everyone that voted for Online Marketing Blog, I appreciate it!

Winners included:

Best individual’s blog on the general topic of marketing and advertising
Seth Godin’s Blog
Honorable Mention: Adrants

Best group weblog on the general topic of marketing and advertising
MarketingVOX
Honorable Mention (Tie): Marketing Genius – Church of the Customer

Best PR-topic blog
Media Guerrilla
Honorable Mention: Strategic Public Relations

Best B-to-B marketing-topic blog
Guerrilla Consulting
Honorable Mention: B-to-B Lead Generation Blog (Congratulations Brian!)

Best blog on small business marketing
Duct Tape Marketing (Congratulations John!)
Honorable Mention: Small Business Trends (Congratulations Anita!)

Join MIMA SEO-SEM Group

If you’re a midwest interactive and/or search marketer, you may be interested in one of the new discussion groups offered through the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association.

Groups include: Industry Trends, Email Marketing, Online Advertising and I am the moderator of the SEO/SEM group. How did that happen?

Check out each group and join a few. Heck, join them all! Each forum is moderated by an industry professional 😉

There are a lot of great interactive and search marketing pros in the Twin Cities and greater Minnesota so this is great way to share ideas and find excuses to be nerdy. But in a cool way.

While rumors are plentiful on Yahoo and Skype right now, here’s some very interesting coverage regarding the possibility of a Yahoo browser. Inside Bay Area reports:

Yahoo Inc., owner of the most-visited Web site, may consider developing its own Internet browser to help attract more users and advertisers toits Web sites, Chief Executive Officer Terry Semel said.

“You could look to Yahoo to do most everything that makes sense on the Internet going forward,” Semel said Friday in an interview in New York. Developing a browser may make sense “at some point in time,” he said.

Yahoo has been hot on new service developments lately and a Yahoo browser would really top it off. I can’t imagine it would be anything other than a version of Firefox though. I’ll certainly be watching Yahoo Next. By the way, I noticed they’ve added a RSS feed to the Yahoo Next page. Cool.

DMNews posted an article today about an LA marketing firm that now offers integrated email with RSS marketing.

Here’s the cool part:

“… the RSS feed in the e-mail is personalized, addressing the reader by name and including marketing messages that pertain to him. Readers also can view a list of past e-newsletters, press releases or e-mails they have received from the publisher. ”

Personalized RSS feeds is a very good thing. I just wonder if they’ll have the same tracking metrics that you get with email.

Importantly, the exec from Dynamics Direct also points out that RSS is not to replace email, just augment it.

A study conducted by Penn State reinforces the need for companies to include organic or natural search engine optimization into their online marketing programs. Over 80% of the test searches conducted, respondents went to the “organic” search results.

“Consumers have a bias against the links that businesses pay search engines to provide,” said Jim Jansen, assistant professor in the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). “By themselves, sponsored links appear not to be a viable business model and should be only one part of an online advertising campaign.” via Gary Price

The Online Marketing Blog/2005/02/growth-of-organic-search-engine.html”>discrepancy between online marketing budgets allocated to sponsored search and the higher clickthough rates of organic search has become an increasingly important issue. I guess it’s not important enough though, with studies by OneUpWeb and Fathom SEO showing a significant number of companies lacking in site optimization.

Google Advertising Professionals sent out an email today announcing several updates including a new blog called Inside AdWords:

Highlights:

• Updated Learning Center: Find printable text lessons, content updates, and new training material.
• Inside AdWords: Stay on top of new AdWords features, tools, and releases with the new AdWords blog.
• Promotional Credits: Bring in new clients with free AdWords advertising.
• Qualified Professionals Features: Get added exposure with company-level qualification and a Professional Status page.

Updates include enhancements for both qualified and unqualified program members.

Thank you to everyone who took a moment to vote for Online Marketing Blog in Marketing Sherpa’s Readers’ Choice Blog Awards.

Online Marketing Blog is listed on Question #6, “Blogs on Online Marketing“.

Voting ends tomorrow, so if you haven’t had a chance to vote, please cast your ballot for Online Marketing Blog today. I would really appreciate it. If you know of others that would benefit from this blog, please pass it on.

There are a lot of great blogs in each category and I hope this blog has been helpful enough to earn your “excellent” vote. Please vote today.

I’ve been playing with TagCloud and found it to be a pretty cool tool. A description from the web site:

“TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feed you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.”

I’ve created a few “tag clouds” that have been very useful as news aggregators:
SEO – just a few of the SEO blogs I read each day.
Search Engines – Official blogs of the 4 major search engines.

What’s also great is that TagCloud includes Y! Q search so you can perform a related search within the TagCloud search results.

There’s an interesting thread on WebmasterWorld today with GoogleGuy and Henk van Ess trading fun-filled posts about the outing of Google Rater Hub.

“… The system that was up at eval.google.com was a console to evaluate quality passively, not to tweak our results actively. But when henk van Ess submitted his own blog to Slashdot, he asserted “Real people, from all over the world, are paid to finetune the index of Google,” and that made it sound like people were reaching in via this console to tweak results directly, which just isn’t true at all.