With all the buzz about blogs, you’d think that people with really popular blogs would make tons of money. There are people in the blogosphere claiming to get $100,000 checks each month from Google for their AdWords campaigns. And maybe they do, but how many of those bloggers are out there and should we all aspire to this lofty goal?
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Having a website entitles you to no privacy, leaving every company on the Internet equally vulnerable to their enemies. Now, this sounds like a bad thing, but there is an advantage to this openness and I have already said it. EVERY company is equally open to scrutiny, meaning you have the same chance as everyone else to spy on the competition.
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Search for any term in a search engine and you will get a list of results. From that list of results you can click on any link directing you to a website.

Type a URL in the address bar and a website will pop up.

Follow a link from one site to another and land on a website.

How to get to a website is the easy part. What to do when you get there is the hard part, this is where landing pages come in handy.
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“Try a little tenderness”

These words from the great voice of Otis Redding describe perfectly what a relationship should be between a website and its owner. Websites should be coddled, loved and spoiled. Remember that websites work for you 24/7, they represent you and everything your company stands for 100% of the time, so they need to be maintained.

But without any site traffic, the love you give your site won’t be apparent to anyone but yourself. Maybe you get some traffic on occasion, but it trickles off. So what can you do to your site to keep visitors interested and give others a reason to view it as well?

Get out the fly paper because we’re going to make your site sticky.
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Abraham Lincoln once said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” In the business of online marketing, the best way to sharpen the tool is to find a better tool. As online marketers, we are always on the lookout for better tools for our clients.

Here is a list of 100 Web Applications for Small Business.

Some of our favorite tools are:

• Omniture
• Keyword Discovery
• Quickbase
• KeywordSpy

Keyword spy was brought to our attention by Rob a 262 blog reader. Thanks for the addition Rob!

If you are an e-commerce business, you need to make sure you get Internet Retailer Magazine. 

In their June 2007 issue, they just published The 2007 Top 500 Guide.  This issue provides mountains of data on what the best e-commerce websites are doing online.  It is full of great information!

Here is just a brief overview of some of the great data:

• According to a study by Shop.org and Forrester Research, online purchases in the U.S. increased by 25% last year, helped by a 61% increase in apparell sales (sparked by liberal return policies).
• The same Shop.org and Forrester Research report estimates that online retail sales, including travel, grew from $176 billion in 2005 to $220 billin in 2006.  Excluding travel, online retail sales reached $136 billion last year.
• Forester Research Cross-Channel Sales Forecast Report estimates that online research influences more than $400 billion in in-store sales, and predicts that figure will exceed $1.1 trillion by 2012.  This applies to automobiles, consumer electronics and computers.  Growth is expected for apparel, beauty products, home furnishings and appliances and jewelery. 
• According to Hitwise, search traffic accounts for 25% of Internet retail traffic (Google accounts for almost 16%).  Travel sites received 31% of their traffic from search enignes. 
• According to eMarketer, U.S. ad spending on social media will hit $900 million in 2007 (72% of which goes to MySpace and Facebook), up from $350 million last year.  By 2007, it’s expected to reach 2.7 billion.
• 30 million, or 17%, of the 176 million U.S. Internet users that accessed the Web via a PC also used a mobile device in January 2007.  Users under 35 account fo 46% of this audience.

Check out the magazine for a lot of other great information.

David Sifry is the CEO of Technorati, and he had written a great post on The State of the Blogosphere and Social Media. It provides great information on blogs and other social media trends. Great information!

Here is a quick summary:

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day
• 1.5 million posts per day
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 – up from 12 in the prior quarter
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
• English second at 33%
• Chinese third at 8%
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags

There are a couple of great e-commerce tools we recommend to all of our e-commerce website clients. These tools let customers participate in live chat.

Each of these tools is a little different, but they’re all relatively inexpensive. Live chat tools help online visitors send quick instant messages to you so they can find what they need quickly and efficiently. Otherwise, they may get frustrated and leave your site because what they want to find is buried somewhere.

Some of these tools will allow you to track visitor activity on your website in real time, monitor PPC campaigns, view web analytics reports, and get real time page error alerts.

Live Chat Tools

• Live Person
• BoldChat
• Who’s On

Having an avenue to communicate with clients is really important for e-commerce sites. These live chat tools allow you to do that without breaking the bank.

Webstie analytics tools, like Omniture (the tool we use) and Google Analytics (a free tool), are meant to help companies look at their website traffic and analyze the data in order to make good business decisions about marketing and website usability / design.

Website analytics software can tell you things like:

• How many visitors you get (unique visitors, repeat visitors)
• Who your visitors are (what country, what state)
• Where your visitors come from (search engines, other websites, email)
• What they do when they get to your site (pages they click, where they exit)
• If they perform the desired ‘call to action’ (buy, fill out a form, sign up)

I recently worked with two very large Fortune 500 clients (we still love small business customers too) who had over $5 million each invested in website analytics technology that did not work. Their IT guy made excuses and blamed it on his predecessors. The software vendor blamed it on the hardware configuration and the old IT guy. My thought was “Hey, who gives a damn. Someone give me the $5 million back right now.”

If I paid someone $5 million, I assure you the damn thing better work, or I would be getting my money back. By the way, if you want to give me $5 million and get nothing in return, I could write this blog from the beach instead of my office! Sometimes big companies amaze me!
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With over 70 million blogs on the Web, searching for the best blogs can be an overwhelming process.  The good news is, there are a lot of “Top Blog” lists out there.  Everyone likes a Top 10 list – especially in the blogosphere where we like to scan.

The most well known top blog list is from Technorati.  This a list of the Top 100 Most Popular Blogs on the Web.  This list is based on the number unique links acquired in the last six months.

Another great list that focuses on marketing blogs is The Power 150 Top Marketing Blogs by Todd And.  Todd’s rating system is based on:

1. Google PageRank
2. Bloglines Subscribers
3. Technorati Ranking
4. Subjective Ranking by the List Author

There is also a list of over 300 Search Engine Marketing Blogs.  Of course, our favorite search engine marketing blog is right here.

These top blog lists serve two purposes.  First, these lists help us all find the best of the best.  Second, they serve as link bait for these sites.  People all over the Web link to these lists of top blogs and check them regularly for updates. 

Once you have found a few blogs you like, you should check out NetVibes.  They have a great tool that enables you to browse the lastest headlines from your favorite blogs all in one place.  And you can setup different tabs for the different types of blogs you like to read. 

I read over 100 blogs using this great tool on topics ranging from search engine marketing to leadership to blogging.  I think that knowledge is the only thing that separates our Atlanta search engine marketing firm from the competition, so I read all the time.  My favorite blog is Be Excellent from Six Disciplines.

If you need help setting up or marketing your blog, give us a call at 404-541-9780.  Happy reading.