DM News is a well-respected trade magazine for direct, online, and database marketers. Their blog provides their journalists with a place to record observations, to opine, to let their hair down and to write more informally and about more obscure topics. Not everything warrants coverage in print, but some things definitely warrant a blog mention. The DM News Blog gives readers a much better sense for the people behind DM News, who they are, and what interests them. In other words, it’s an inside view into the DM News newsroom.
Of course, as a group blog, the blogging system supports multiple authors. It includes an RSS feed. Since DM News’ staffers go to plenty of conferences and trade shows, it’s not surprising that they blog frequently about what is happening at these shows; therefore a separate subcategory is dedicated to each of the major shows that DM News attends.
DM News, welcome to the blogosphere! Glad that Netconcepts could help you get there.
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Visit The Site: DM News Blog
Further Reading: DM News
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If your blog isn’t linkworthy, it’s not going to get very far in the blogosphere. Indeed, links are the currency of the Web, at least as far as search engines are concerned. No links = no rankings, and lousy links = lousy rankings.
One might even go so far as to valuate a business blog on its links (at least in part). For fun you might try out the free tool at the Business Opportunities Weblog and see how much your blog is worth. The computation is based on the link-to-dollar ratio of the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. According to the tool, this blog is worth $200,000. Anyone want to buy it from Rick? 
So how do you make linkworthy posts? In The Art of Linkbaiting, Nick Wilson and commenters offer some great suggestions:
- Offer a niche-specific blogroll, tool, How-To, or compilation of news stories.
- Post a scoop.
- Expose a story as flawed or a fraud
- Be a contrarian about a story, product, or prominent blogger’s opinion.
- Be humorous. Good topics include a bizzare pic of your subject, “10 things I hate about…”, and “You know you’re a when…”
- Publish or commission some original research
- Creative-Commons-license photos you made of an event you’re blogging about
- Make available for free a theme, plugin or piece of software
- Start a meme that others can replicate and that links back to you (e.g. buttons/stickers/tools for bloggers/webmasters to post on their sites, contests, quizzes, surveys, etc.)
Building links is both art and science. It requires a great toolkit as well as loads of creative ideas.
MarketingProfs is holding a webinar on Feb. 16 on the topic: “Inside Secrets to Building Links for Online Publicity, Buzz and Search Engine Optimization”. The undisputed link guru Eric Ward and I (Stephan Spencer) are both presenting. Sign up here.
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SEO can be broken into two distinct areas: “on-page” factors and “off-page” factors. On-page factors include anything that you can affect on the page itself, such as the title tag, body copy, H1 heading tags, image “alt” attributes, etc.
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Netconcepts President Stephan Spencer has some key advice for Technorati to counteract the challenge from its new blog search engine rival: Google.
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DiscountFlies.com has really missed the boat (yes, the pun was intended) when it comes to search engine traffic. They do not show up in the first 100 results in Google or Yahoo! when searching for the popular search term fly-fishing or for the more targeted term fishing flies. But all is not lost. With some concerted effort, DiscountFlies.com should be able to turn things around.
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HomeVisions is a brand of DMSI (Direct Marketing Services Inc.). If you are not familiar with HomeVisions, you might be familiar with some of DMSI’s other brands, including Montgomery Wards.
DesignTalk is a retail blog that strives to educate and add value on the topic of interior design and home decor. The blog is chock full of creative ideas and tips for home decorating organized in many ways, including by room and by application. The blog encourages you to ask a question which could be answered as a blog post, as well as posting a comment. The blog includes a newsletter and, of course, an RSS feed.
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Visit The Site: DesignTalk
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Not only are overly complex URLs unfriendly to users who might copy the URL and paste it in an email to a friend, or add a link on their own website to that particular page deep within your site, they are also unfriendly to the search engine spiders because they are a tip-off that the page is dynamically generated and could lead to what is called a spider trap.
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BalancedLifeProducts.com is a small ecommerce site, based in Madison, Wisconsin, that sells meditation and massage products such as yoga mats, meditation cushions, and reiki timers. The site doesn’t fare well in the search engines in the natural (unpaid) search results, so they have been relying on Google AdWords to fill in the gaps. It wasn’t hard to see why their rankings in natural search traffic were so low. After a quick health check-up of their level of search engine optimization, I made the following diagnosis…
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I heard at the Search Engine Strategies conference earlier this month in Chicago that the Ask Jeeves spider doesn’t cope well with websites that don’t have robots.txt. So if you don’t have a robots.txt file hosted on your blog’s document root, create a blank one.
Another detail often missed by bloggers is to create your own custom favicon.ico file. The favicon is a little 16 pixel by 16 pixel image that appears in the location bar on people’s web browsers; many of the RSS readers use it as well. Peter Brady at Performancing has some interesting things to say about whether or not bloggers need to have a favicon. My take on it is this: with a custom favicon, you look cooler and more with it, plus it differentiates you from the rest of the pack in your subscribers’ RSS subscription lists. If you don’t have time to mess around creating one in Photoshop, you can do a quick and dirty one pretty easily using the free web-based tool Favicon Generator. It took me all of two minutes to create my favicon for my blog using this tool.
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Search Engine Strategies — Chicago, IL
This session explores how search engines are dealing with blog and feed (RSS/Atom) content and why providing such syndicated content can drive new search-related traffic.
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com
Speakers:
Dick Costolo, CEO, FeedBurner
Nan Dawkins, Partner, RedBoots Consulting
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit
Filed under: Business Blogging RSS Marketing Seminars SEO
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