Month: August 2006

Internet Marketing Strategies – An Idea Whose Time Has Come

It’s difficult not to write as everyone else today is doing about Danny Sullivan. He has announced that he is leaving Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies. Barry Schwartz at SERoundTable has quite a slew of comments from most of the worthies in the SEO world. According to Danny Sullivan, he and Incisive Media could not reach a meeting of the minds, so divorce was inevitable. The kids will stay with Incisive Media, but it won’t at all be the same.

SEW and SES with Danny Sullivan stood way above the competition. Without Danny Sullivan, they will not have the same status at all. It becomes a level playing field. In such a situation, any one of a number of challengers could rise above the crowd. Indeed Danny Sullivan could start something new, if non-compete clauses do not prevent it. He could once more rise to the top, as cream is wont to do.

My own vision is that in this chaotic period some would stand back a little and see the bigger picture. SEO has a somewhat muddy aura, given the large number of charlatans selling impossible claims. The better SEO consultants know that the real objectives should be Internet traffic and sales. Even Search Engine Marketing is only a somewhat large slice of a bigger field. Perhaps Danny Sullivan or another could launch an Internet Marketing Strategies conference. Now that would have the biggest appeal of all.

Tags: Internet Marketing

Online Grows, Offline Shrinks

Reuters reports that the summer of 2006 continues to bring job buyouts and layoffs at U.S. newspapers. More nips and tucks will come as advertising dollars dry up and more readers cancel their subscriptions.

The Dallas Morning News wants to cut 85 positions through buyouts as it prepares for a restructuring this fall. The Plain Dealer in Cleveland said buyouts were coming. In July, the Chicago Tribune said it would cut 120 jobs and The New York Times Co. said it would cut about 250 jobs in its printing operations.

The Founder in Threadwatch said he was surprised since “this process has been moving along since the mid 1990’s .. and just now the newspapers are realizing that everyone is reading their news online, and mostly at news sites such as news.google.com , drudgereport or huffingtonpost depending on their political views.” Some are going online but with apparent reluctance since they seem not to have figured out how to monetize them in the same way they have handled the printed pages.

Tags: online, newspapers

Word of Blog Marketing

Word of Mouth Marketing or Buzz Marketing or Viral Marketing: you’ll hear them all. Well perhaps it’s time to use a more precise term for what most often is going on. If you can have Search Engine Marketing then you can certainly have Blog Marketing. There’s a recent story that shows the power of this approach. The headline: ‘Blogger relations experts join PR, ad teams’.

It describes how Nokia Corp. released its camera smart phone last fall. The marketing campaign cut back on news releases and flashy ads. Instead, the company sent sample products to 50 tech-savvy amateur bloggers with a passion for mobile phones. Word spread online about the N-series phone, driving up sales and contributing to a 43 percent profit boost for Nokia last quarter.

“So many blogs picked it up that it blew out our server twice,” said Andy Abramson of Comunicano Inc., who developed the blogging program for Nokia. “We were getting thousands of hits per second.”

Marketing firms are suggesting communicating with bloggers rather than simply pitching a product and giving away free samples. By following the blogs carefully and joining in the dialogue when it’s appropriate, a great quantity of text content and links can be generated about the new products. That’s the way to substantially increase a company’s keyword search ranking. Guerilla Marketing move over, here come’s Blog Marketing.

Tags: Blog Marketing

Fighting Evil

Google’s motto may be “Do No Evil” but it does go beyond that in fighting evil too. I learned from Ionut Alex’s blog, Google Operating System, that Google and Sun Microsystems fund a non-profit anti-spyware group called StopBadware. One of Google’s contributions to the project is that it now provides Malware Warnings on Google Search Results. StopBadware.org explains its mission thus:

“The internet has the extraordinary capacity to allow anyone, anywhere, to develop software, and to instantly distribute it, without cost, throughout the world. StopBadware.org was established in an effort to preserve this positive ability to generate and share information by exploring ways to solve the badware problem.”

There are many solutions that provide safety ratings for sites. One of the most popular is McAfee SiteAdvisor, a plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox. When you search with Google, SiteAdvisor displays different colors (green, yellow, red) next to search results and ads to show if the site sends spam, has malware, pop-ups, or links to dubious sites.

Tip of the hat: Joe Dolson

Tags: Google, malware