Lee Odden

Online Public Relations and Blogs

Lee Odden     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Blogging Strategy, Interactive Marketing, Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, Online PR, Podcasting, Press Release Optimization, RSS, SEO, Social Media, TopRank Agency News

dma06ppt.gif
Later today I’ll be presenting here at DMA-06 on a panel called, Blogs, RSS and Podcasting with Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit and Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts. Basically, my presentation will cover how blogs can be used as public relations tools in the context of “Push and Pull PR”. The presentation is broken up into:

  • Opportunity
  • Push and Pull PR
  • Blog Optimization & PR
  • Blogger Relations
  • Case Study

The “opportunity” section explains how many journalists are ignoring the noise of getting pitched by so many PR firms and company PR staff. Whether it’s a pitch by phone or email, many members of the media go online (98%) to find news sources (76%), story ideas (92%), experts and to research press releases (73%). The percentages come from a study done by Middleburg/Ross.


Online Public Relations and Blogs
Lee Odden

Monetizing with Feedvertising

Lee Odden     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Blogging News, Blogging Strategy, Online Marketing, RSS

Feedvertising

For the past week I’ve been beta-testing a new product from Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagans of Text Link Ads called Feedvertising. Other beta testers include Jim Boykin, Phillip Lessen, Brian Clark and several others. This is a service that allows you to monetize your RSS feeds with ads. Text Link Ads will sell the ads for you, or in my case, I just put in ads for some things I’m doing with Marketing Sherpa. You can do it either way or both.

Not only is Feedvertising a potential money maker, but it’s also a clever way to cross promote other areas of your blog, company web site or other web sites that you publish.

There’s a very good tutorial on Feedvertising over at Tubetorial or you can check out the Feedvertising site.


Monetizing with Feedvertising
Lee Odden

New Tools for Social Media Optimization

Lee Odden     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Online Marketing, Social Bookmarking, Social Media

With all the buzz about social media optimization the past week, I thought it would be timely for us to present two updated tools for encouraging the sharing of and linking to content as well as distribution. These are concepts that are fundamental to the notion of social media optimization or SMO.

Screen Shot of 2 New Social Media Optimization Tools

The first tool is one we’ve received excellent comments on and it’s called the Social Bookmark Creator. In order to make it easy for readers to save a blog post or a web page for reading later or to aggregate resources using a social bookmark service, we’ve created a tool that allows you to add a social bookmark menu after each post or on a static web page.

Social Bookmarks


New Tools for Social Media Optimization
Lee Odden

Blog Optimization – SES San Jose

Lee Odden     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Blogging Strategy, Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, RSS, Search Engine Strategies

SES San Jose
Moderated by Detlev Johnson of Position Tech, this panel included: Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts, Rick Klau of FeedBurner and Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit.

First up was Amanda with yet again, a unique presentation. There is still lots of unclaimed territory with blogs.

Less than 6% of Fortune 500 companies are blogging according to SocialText. 35% of companies plan to start a blog in the next year.

RSS distributes content and drives traffic.

Build your feeds right from the start. Questions to ask:
– How many feeds are necessary
– How much content is needed to keep it fresh
– Should you publish an excerpt or the full feed
– Will the feed include other media
– How will you propagate the feeds initially and on an ongoing basis
– How to measure performance


Blog Optimization – SES San Jose
Lee Odden

Blogs and Podcasts for Lead Generation

Lee Odden     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Blogging News, Blogging Strategy, Online Marketing, Podcasting

Marketing Sherpa released findings of a Technology Marketing survey that include blogs and podcasts as two of the top 5 lead generation tactics for technology, hardware and software firms. Overall, the top 5 lead generation tactics were:

  1. Free Trials
  2. Webcast
  3. White paper
  4. Blog
  5. Podcast

Of course, if you’re a really good marketer, you would be able to tie in four or five of the above into one campaign, especially when integrated with a blog. Not that you need to offer all five to have a successful campaign, but providing options for how to interact or make contact with your company allows you to reach more of your target audience. A podcast may work for some people, a free trial or a white paper for others. One of the new features of this report is the 13 prospect personas of prospects such as CIOs, IT professionals and business owners.


Blogs and Podcasts for Lead Generation
Lee Odden

Dave Sifry on Marketing Your Blog

Lee Odden     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Blogging Strategy, Online Marketing

Wired recently ran another “How To” with this one including sage advice from Technorati founder, Dave Sifry on how to make your blog more popular:

1) React quickly. (Nothing is more fun than calling an A lister on hype or fluff)
2) Make your posts easy to read. (Usability never goes out of style)
3) Link, link, link! (Amen – link in and link out)
4) Optimize for search engines. (Get some tasty blog optimization)
5) Post, post, post! (Yes and no – It’s just not always practical to post 5 – 10 times a day)
There are also several tips on sprucing up your MySpace site, Amazon Picks and reblogging. Check it out.


Dave Sifry on Marketing Your Blog
Lee Odden

RSS Buttons for Your Blog

Lee Odden     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Blogging News, Blogging Strategy, Online Marketing, TopRank Agency News

A while back Thomas aka Twistermc, whipped up a handy tool for creating RSS subscription buttons to place on blogs. This makes it easy for the reader to subscribe to the blog using their favoriate RSS reader or aggregator. (See the buttons down the left side of this blog) This particular tool has been very popular and is the source for many, many links to Online Marketing Blog and to the blog marketing tools page over at TopRank.

I was checking out some of these links and noticed that some pretty interesting referrers. There are quite a few prominent SEOs using the RSS Button tools. I think that’s pretty cool actually.


RSS Buttons for Your Blog
Lee Odden

Blog Address: Directory or Domain?

Lee Odden     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Blogging Strategy, Online Marketing

Recently I fielded an emailed question from a reader as to which is better home for a blog: as part of the company web site (www.company.com/blog/) or as a separate domain (www.companyblog.com)? I get this question often and see it mentioned in the forums as well.

There are many factors that influence whether your blog should be part of your site or it’s own domain name including:

  • Branding
  • Hosting platform
  • Blog application (software or hosted)
  • Resources for promotion
  • Resources for content production
  • Purpose of the blog
  • Timeframe for expected results
  • Target audience

Blog Address: Directory or Domain?
Lee Odden

25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog

Lee Odden     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Blogging Strategy, Online Marketing, SEO

With so many blogs being created every day, it’s a mystery to many bloggers how to make their blog stand out. There are many types of blogs or purposes for blogs and a certain number of tactics are applicable to just about all of them.Some companies choose to hire a blog consultant, but others like to try things internally. For those “DIY” companies and individuals interested in practical tips for marketing and optimizing a business blog, try out the following list of blog marketing and optimization tips:

  1. Decide on a stand alone domain name www.myblog.com or directory of existing site www.mysite.com/blog. Sub domain is also an option blog.mysite.com. Avoid hosted services that do not allow you to use your own domain name!

25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog
TopRank Marketing Editor

Defining Tagging

TopRank Marketing Editor     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Blogging Strategy, Online Marketing, SEO, Social Bookmarking

This is a re-post, with minor edits, from my blog, Blog on a Stick. I felt that it was worthy of posting here too.
-Thanks Thomas

For those that are just jumping into the blog world, or the Web 2.0 world for that matter, there is a new idea out there called tagging. Much like folders or categories, it’s a way of keeping things organized.

Lets start out simple with folders.

On your computer you have folders. Maybe a documents folder for paperwork, pictures folder for pictures and so on. You’ve probably even created your own folders. “Christmas 2005” or “Work Documents” The idea is to keep your files organized on your hard drive. Simple enough.


Defining Tagging
Lee Odden

Link Building for Blogs

Lee Odden     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Blogging Strategy, Link Building, Online Marketing, SEO

As blogs continue to mature as marketing tools, there are an increasing number of “blog optimization” articles and posts appearing. However, many of these resources underestimate the importance of inbound links.

To think that researching and placing keywords in the “right places” alone with improve a blog’s traffic is only part of the story. Blogs are simply web sites/content management systems with some special features. Getting web sites to rank well and to engage more traffic involves a large number of variables and the same goes for blogs. The difference is that there are unique linking opportunities with blogs that are not common with web sites. These include:

  • Trackbacks
  • Comments
  • Social book marks
  • Tagging
  • Blogrolls
  • Guest writing on other blogs
  • Blog, RSS directories

Link Building for Blogs
Lee Odden

Pubcon Boston Day 2

Lee Odden     Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Blogging Strategy, Marketing Industry News, Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, Online PR, Podcasting, Press Release Optimization, Pubcon, RSS, SEO

Lots of great sessions on Wednesday here at WebmasterWorld Boston Pubcon. Unfortunatley, I was only able to attend two of them (one as a speaker) due to a teleconference I did with Bulldog Reporter.

I thought the Public Relations panel in the morning went well. Robin, Lawrence and David all made strong presentations. What I liked best about the session and this is corroborated by feedback I received from attendees, was the diversity of perspectives offered.

Lawrence Coburn offered a small company’s inside perspective of what he called “dumb luck PR” and how to take advantage of that and snowball it. Very cool story actually. Television personality and CNN maven 🙂 Robin Liss shared her perspective on getting TV coverage. David McInnis gave a rundown on press release optimization and some of the new features available at PRWeb. My presentation covered the notion of applying search engine optimization principles to blog and press release optimization.


Pubcon Boston Day 2