Marketing Pilgrim

Every couple of weeks, we like to take time out to thank our advertisers. Without the support of the companies listed below, we would not have the resources to provide the same detailed coverage of internet marketing news.

SEO Copywriters - offering well-researched, interesting and informative content for any business in any industry.

Text Link Brokers – if you looking to buy links – for traffic or SEO – Text Link Brokers has a vast network of link partners and great pricing. They even offer a beginners guide to buying links.

We’ve already seen an increase in news related to online reputation management in the last few days, and now Wired magazine lists it as one of the top trends for 2007.

Their excellent article “The See-Through CEO” looks at how businesses are becoming more transparent with their communications and how consumers are wielding a lot of influence over your online brand equity.

“Online is where reputations are made now,” says Leslie Gaines Ross, chief reputation strategist – yes, that’s her actual title – with the PR firm Weber Shandwick. She regularly speaks to companies that realize a single Google search determines more about how they’re perceived than a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. “It used to be that you’d look only at your reputation in newspapers and broadcast media, positive and negative. But now the blogosphere is equally powerful, and it has different rules. Public relations used to be about having stuff taken down, and you can’t do that with the Internet.”

Now that we’ve established that you can use the exact same commercial is more effective online than on TV, we should also point out how much more effective video is than static advertising, even online.

A DoubleClick (they’re for sale, folks!) study released this week that states that Internet users itneract more with video ad than they do image ads.

Here are the hard numbers:

Online video ads experience click-through rates ranging from 0.4 percent to 0.74 percent depending on the online video format. By comparison, the click-through rate for plain GIF or JPG image ads ranges between 0.1 and 0.2 percent, based on DoubleClick data.

The study’s conclusions include:

• A healthy portion of exposed audiences interact with video ads (8%)

iMedia Connection has two useful articles in as many days. I like to read their articles, but I seldom feel prompted to link to them. But these might be helpful. Check them out:

• The Best Website Metrics Are…: If you don’t already know it, your website should be measurable. It should be giving you lots of beautiful data. (I love data. That’s why I love web analytics.) Even if you already have well established web analytics on your site, this article can helps you define which metrics you really need to be watching. And, while it’s very interesting, how many countries your visitors came from doesn’t make the list.
   
• Social Media: A Business Marketer’s Guide: If you still haven’t gotten into social media marketing, this article give a short but very helpful overview of how to evaluate a social site (including UGC sites and blogs) to see if it’s a good fit for your business marketing.

Despite support from some adult sites and anti-porn activists, the ICM Registry’s proposal for a .xxx top-level domain was rejected by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in a 9-5 vote. ICANN states that a .xxx TLD would be difficult to enforce worldwide as well as create “public policy concerns.”

From CNET:

“ICM’s response does not address (the ICANN Government Advisory Committee’s) concern for offensive content and similarly avoids the GAC’s concern for the protection of vulnerable members of the community,” ICANN stated in the meeting. “The board does not believe these public-policy concerns can be credibly resolved with the mechanisms proposed by the applicant.”

ICANN also noted that ICM’s proposal could raise significant compliance issues with law enforcement agencies around the globe, many of which have different laws governing pornography.

E-consultancy has published a free 12- page briefing on the Paid Search industry in the UK.

The document is packed full of useful information, including:

• An overview of the UK market (including market valuation and trends)
• A write-up of the key points emerging from the discussion
• New statistics
• Useful resources

Topics discussed included:

• Yahoo!’s launch of Panama platform
• Landing page optimization
• Bid management technology
• Quality of traffic on content networks
• Budget allocation and resourcing

Hey, you can’t beat free!*

(*well you could if they paid you to read it, but they’re not, so go read it cos, it’s free, which means you don’t have to pay for it…..no, they’re not going to pay you to read it, so stop asking!)

We have some news and then a big ‘ole mess to bring to your attention.

First, the news. AOL has announced that it’s Advertising.com unit would manage advertising sold on the new online video site being built by NBC and News Corp.

Ok, now the mess.

1. Google owns 5% of AOL, yet AOL is involved in what might be Google’s biggest video competitor.
2. Will Advertising.com now exclude the management of video campaigns outside of this new venture? I’m sure Lightningcast will still want to work with video sites other than this new venture.
3. What happened to News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media? They just acquired Strategic Data Corp to provide ads to MySpace, why didn’t they use the same outfit for the new video site?

Headaches, headaches!

Over at SEO Refugee, “Skitzzo” posts a bold proclamation that “SEO is Dead” (linkbait anyone?), and I agree, to an extent.

While at Search Summit Australia, I was asked to name the winners and losers for 2007. I chose the title “search engine marketer” as a loser – not for the skills, just the name. You see, search marketers have grown their talents tremendously over the past few years, and to say that we focus just on the “search engines” is a misnomer.

I for one, refer to myself simply as an “internet marketing consultant”, because I believe so much that I do, cannot be labeled as being just search engine related. With the rise of social media, web analytics, blogging, reputation management and linkbait – among just a few new skills – search marketers are leading the way, when it comes to online marketing.