Marketing Pilgrim

Since we last chatted, the Niagara Falls uprooted itself and relocated inside my nasal cavity. As a result I have been coughing, blowing, and sneezing my little rear end off. In between being sick and trying to manage my clients, I haven’t had time to write a proper editorial this week. So I figured I would have the little guy above stand in for me. Because sometimes when you feel your worst you need to be reminded to believe in yourself and to just keep rocking on.

Tune in next week where I will talk in length about how stupid we are all becoming! (seriously, its gonna be a doozie!)

If you think about it, search engines are pretty smart. They can look at a block of text on your website and make a decision about whether you’re discussing the Stanley Cup playoffs or your grandmother’s chili. But as smart as they are, they can’t always pick up on the nuisances of a page and that’s where Schema.org comes in.

Google, Bing and Yahoo! have all announced their participation in the program and that’s gotta be some kind of landmark, right? Like Mr. Macy and Mr. Gimble shaking hands with Santa Claus? The idea is to develop a singular markup language for microdata sets that will allow all search engines to pick up on like bits of information across a variety of webpages.

Have you built a mobile app to promote your business yet? If not, add that to the To Do list for June, because according to the latest MilennialMedia S.M.A.R.T. report, application downloads are still on the rise.

Application downloads popped up 26% month-over-month with entertainment, retail and travel being the major users. Mobile Social Media (aka Mocial) is also on the rise with marketers looking to up their Facebook and Twitter followers.

Looking only at mobile retail, the report says that mCommerce doubled month-over-month, and Mocial grew 115% in that same time period.

Need some mobile app inspiration? Check out 5 Crazy Things You Can Do With Your iPhone and before the next full moon, download the Werewolf Locator app. You’ll be glad you did.

Who wants to provide an explanation as to what just happened in my Google Reader this morning?

I subscribe to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog’s RSS feed to keep up-to-date with the 2-3 posts the team publish each week. Except this morning, the feed looked like this:

What the fudge?

OK, maybe I’m seeing things. Maybe this is not actually coming from the Google Webmaster Central feed. So, I went to “Manage Subscriptions” to take a look. Nope, it shows the same items, take a look:

OK, I thought, maybe someone found a way to hijack the feed, Maybe China is redirecting Google’s RSS feeds to phishing or spam sites. Well, maybe not, because those new items above all go to the same personal site of a photographer. I’m guess they have no idea that this happened.

We want to take a quick time out from sifting through the Internet marketing news for you to ask a favor.

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And be sure to take advantage of the great offers from our Channel Sponsors.

SEO Channel – SEOmoz

Marketing Pilgrim’s SEO Channel is sponsored by SEOmoz, the leading provider of SEO tools and resources. Take a 30-day free trial, and see why over 10,000 marketers currently use SEOmoz PRO

Inbound Marketing Channel – HubSpot

I am not trying to rain on anyone’s IPO parade. What the people at Groupon have done is pretty amazing. But just because there are big revenue numbers associated with the company, it’s important to see if the thing is profitable. As of yesterday’s IPO filing, it is not. This chart from SAI tells the story.

And remember when Groupon raised $950 million not so long ago? Guess what that did? It simply paid out the early investors in handsome sums. It did little to build the business. You can get the details in the All Things Digital post.