With all the buzz about optimizing and marketing with social media as well as the emerging meme in public relations on the social media news release format, there is an opportunity to help marketers better understand how these concepts can be applied in a practical manner.

Too often tactics get promoted as the latest and greatest trends without any substance or real world references. This interview is intended to provide a framework for understanding how marketers and public relations professionals can increase their reach and ability to be found by consumers as wel as the media by incorporating SEO concepts along with PR and social media.

Cindy caught up with me at the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference to talk about doing this show and it seemed like a great idea. I had just presented on Push and Pull PR in the context of social media release optimization during the public relations panel. I had not done any interviews yet on this topic, so it seemed fresh and timely.

You can tune in to the show by visiting the eMarketing Talkshow site at 4PM PST/6PM CST/7PM EST this Friday, December 1st. If you don’t make it for the live show, the archives will be available in four segments when they are posted next week.

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Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.

Discuss your thoughts about the explosion of blog readers at WebProWorld.

It’s no secret in the marketing world that young men with money are the most difficult group to reach. For this demographic, with money to burn and unsettled spending habits, building a career usually takes precedent over TV watching, which is why tons of ad money is piled into Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl.

And the more astute also noticed the network’s counter programming of “Everybody Loves Raymond” on Monday night, soon to be followed this season by “Two and a Half Men.”

Point of fact: it’s just hard to get their attention. The latest blog numbers should be of supreme interest, then, to e-marketers as this arena of media captures that coveted attention.

The key findings of the blogosphere report from comScore Networks:

The total number of blog visitors in 1Q 2005 increased 45% over the same period in 2004. Admittedly, this hardly keeps up with Technorati’s report that the total blogosphere doubles every 5.5 months. Nevertheless, its an upward trend as the public becomes more aware.

Five hosting services for blogs had more than 5 million unique visitors. The top five hosting services are blogspot.com, livejournal.com, typepad.com, xanga.com, and Gawker Network.

Four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each. The top blogs are freerepublic.com, drudgereport.com, fleshbot.com, and gawker.com.

Of the 400 largest blogs observed, the most popular blogs were (in order) political blogs, “hipster” lifestyle blogs, tech blogs, and blogs authored by women (women’s blogs, if I were to guess, are probably often visited by young men).

Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger, and connect to the Internet via high-speed connections.

Blog readers visit nearly twice as many web pages and are much more likely to shop online.

“The fact that we found 30 percent of the online population to have visited blogs clearly underscores the commercial importance of consumer generated and driven media,” Dan Hess, senior vice president of ComScore, said in a statement.

“It’s noteworthy that while the blog audience is already quite large and growing, its demographic composition relative to the total population will appeal to many marketers.”

Gawker, the fifth most visited host, reports that 65% of its audience is between the ages of 18-34, 46% male, and that over one third of them have a household income of over $75,000.

Gizmodo is rife with testosterone, pulling in an 86% male audience, a large number of whom have high income levels. Read a more detailed Gawker report here.

We’ve already discussed why blogs are important to a market strategy. Now its up to the savvy e-marketer to take advantage of these statistics by creating their targeted blog advertising campaign. Good luck.

Where do you advertise? Links, FFA’s, Classified ads, opt-in email, news groups, message boards, search engines? All of them are limited in how many characters you can use. In the ocean of ads, you have to grab the viewers attention, then make them click.

Grabbing there attention does not mean SHOUTING! Viewers tend to see all CAPs as spam. Better to use spacing to grab initial attention. Example:

[Subject] Make Money Under One Plan!! this is HOT see what you think Internet Spy Kit!!! Kill Your Credit Card Debt! Bologna Sandwiches… Opportunity Triple your Income/ 1 Million Emails Retire Working at Home!!

Some use a trick with characters to try to get you to see them. I don’t mind this is it is not used to extreme.

[Subject] Make Money Under One Plan!! this is HOT see what you think Internet Spy Kit!!! Kill Your Credit Card Debt! >>>Bologna Sandwiches<<< Opportunity Triple your Income/ 1 Million Emails Retire Working at Home!!

You'll notice I used another trick for attention getting. Getting to the meat of the matter, don't you want to find out why someone would have a link about bologna sandwiches? Be careful with this one though. If you use it in an email campaign, it better be humorous or about bologna sandwiches, or your email recipients may call it spam.

[Body] "...with 45 easy payments of $499.99, you'll still be able to afford bologna sandwiches."

That might be hard to stomach. Usually a question that needs to be answered is good for a headline. You have to read the email or click the link to get the answer.

[Subject] "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"

[Body] "Practice!"

In a banner advertising campaign, where I'm actually using a button, I have been getting a good response using very simple text. "Webtools" is the text and the button is sent to a specific audience of webmasters.

Out of the masses of ads, you have made them see yours. It's not as simple as that, but out of trial and error and tracking I found out what works for me. You have to find what works for you, because there are various ways to get from point A to point B.

Ezine Adswap Tracker Pro http://www.HomeBasedProfit.com

Wise Wolf Pages 2001 http://hop.clickbank.net/?dsextonj/wolfdens

Adtrackz http://hop.clickbank.net/?dsextonj/adtrackz

-Must bring them (back) to your website.

Sometimes you have to hold your prospective visitors by the hand and drag them to your website. A great tool to help with this is called an autoresponder. The better ones are time delayed and handle multiple messages.

Instead of sending the recipient information or ads with each message, invite them to come (or come back) to your site to receive a freebie. Don’t use same freebie in each message as this message will get thrown away or opted-out. Offer something unique pertaining to your website once a week.

If you offer the same thing everyone else does, the tendency will be to ignore your message. Do you offer your own software, ebooks, or samples of your product? Maybe a discount coupon?

Active E-Book Compiler http://hop.clickbank.net/?dsextonj/wildcom2

GetResponse.com http://www.GetResponse.com/?36491

The objective is to get visitors to your website. This method not only works in autoresponders, but in your opt-in list and ezine as well and is not limited to them.

Thinking outside the box and being innovative will bring surprise results (though not always good ones). To be cutting edge, new ways have to be discovered, but don’t lose your basics.

The end result you want to achieve is getting visitors and changing your visitors into customers. No matter how you get visitors to your site, you must have a quality product and/or fantastic customer service.

The ideas given here are a drop in the bucket of imaginative resources. If you can master these two “Must’s”, you’re on your way to becoming the internet marketing virtuoso. Read, study, invent.

Dale Sexton owns and operates ‘PageCrafters.net’ and
publishes ‘Small Business Tools magazine’. Both are
focused on tools and tips to run your small business
or start a business. You can reach him at
pagecrafters@p… and sign up for ‘SBT
magazine’ at http://pagecrafters.net/newsletter.html