Marketing Pilgrim

If I didn’t know better Charlie O’Donnell and many others are reading my mind. Lately I have been seeing a lot of discussion around social media noise and our inability to filter it out or manage it in such a way as to continue to make it a productive part of our days.

Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for Friendfeed has to do with my goal to reduce the amount of digital noise - an approach that regularly sees me turn Twitter off until at least noon to reduce the number of distractions.

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If this is not the complete guide to optimizing a WordPress blog then I have not seen it yet. I am not saying there is not a better free guide out there and I challenge anyone who knows of one to link it in the comments of this blog post and share with us what we all have been missing.

In my mind however Joost de Valk has come thru with an extremely useful and detailed guide showing how to effectively optimize a WordPress blog. The Guide covers seven major topics plus it provides a conclusion all of which are worth reading. The seven major topics are:

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PageRank (PR) sculpting has popped onto the radar of most online marketers over the last few months and it has become a controversial topic. Like with so many new techniques in the online marketing world, some talented internet marketers are touting the value and success that they are having by using the nofollow tag to sculpt their PageRank, by directing as much link value to their most important pages as possible.

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The devil is in the details and sometimes it is easy to overlook opportunity even when it is staring you right in the face. Thankfully not everyone misses the obvious opportunities to take advantage of the hard work they have already done.

Andy Beard has an excellent nearly step-by-step explanation as well as links to a video, from Stomper Net made by Andy Jenkins, showing how to take an existing Google listing and work to get an indented listing to go along with it.

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Within the mass confusion that can erupt when there is a blog controversy, occasionally a thoughtful post will emerge. Last week ShoeMoney wrote about the Death of SEO and here on this blog Greg Howlett supported that theory, while I spoke up to disagree with those opinions. Others have also been discussing the topic and Joost de Valk, has chimed in as well, after reading a blog post from one of his colleagues entitled Reactionary vs. Visionary SEO.

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Greg makes my point for me at the end of his post: How Branding Will Replace SEO.

Also, since many customer conversations take place online, your inbound link profile will improve as will your traffic and conversion rate. And by the way, so will your SEO.

I’d like to start out by focusing on why I disagree with Greg, but I also want to point out why I also approve conceptually with what Greg is saying.

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When it comes to marketing everyone is out to compose the most compelling message possible and then measure an audience’s reaction to that message. The question then becomes are measuring the tools that web marketers use reliable? I think the general consensus is that many of the tools that rely on JavaScript are less reliable than marketers would like them to be.

Stone Temple Consulting has performed a quality test showing that where one locates the JavaScript that our analytics tools rely on matters. The two things that the test showed were one that page load time matters and two that the amount traffic to a server can adversely affect page load time. They had to take both of these concepts into account when performing their test.

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Have you ever wondered what information advertisers are collecting about you? More often than not the individual advertising that you are seeing when you visit your favorite website is based on an advertising profile that has been built up over time based on your individual online behaviors.

CNET is reporting that Jeff Weiner, Executive Vice President of Yahoo’s Network Division, can already imagine a day in the not too distant future where when you see an advertisement on Yahoo, there would be an icon that would allow you to view your ad profile so you can understand why that particular advertisement was delivered to you.

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I was working on writing a comment for the latest blog post by AJ Vaynerchuk at ShoeMoney.com but it turned out that the comment morphed into something more, so I thought bringing some attention to the post as well as my thoughts on it might be a good thing.

AJ selected the names of fifty prominent internet marketing veterans and compared where Twitter and Facebook ranked respectively for their names on Google. The results were unexpected.

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Andy Beal and I have both talked some about Network Solutions and their recent policy decisions as to how they manage their domain name purchasing services. Well TechCrunch is reporting that now Network Solutions has adopted the practice of “hijacking unassigned sub domains” by placing ads on these sub domains without notifying the site owners.

This “new” practice, and I call it new because this is the first we are really hearing of it, is already affecting hundreds of thousands of sub domains. How long this has been going on is hard to tell, but based on Network Solutions recent behavior closer scrutiny will most likely be applied to all of their business practices.

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As I was roaming through the blogsphere, catching up on some of the news and notes I have missed in recent weeks, I read one of Jeremy Zawondy’s recent blog posts addressing a very similar topic. He poses the question does the convenience of having access to someone with answers inhibit people from thinking about and solving their own problems, when they know a quick email, twit, or IM will get them the answer without them having to make any real effort?

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There are a lot of different ways to approach social media marketing. Still it seems many marketers are unwilling to engage with social media services while desiring the benefits the media represents. I was reading an article this weekend by Skellie, which I am not going to recap in its entirety, but you should go read it. Skellie’s article made me chuckle and in a way also made me sad because it really shows why so many internet marketing campaigns fail.

“The most common question I get from bloggers who want to know about getting Dugg is this: should I start using Digg — is that necessary?”

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