Internet Marketing Strategy

IDG News Service (New York Bureau) — Despite a growing list of alternatives, WordPress continues to be the most popular blogging platform among the world’s most popular blogs, a study has found.

WordPress is used by 49 of the world’s 100 most popular blogs, according to a survey posted Tuesday by Pingdom, a company that offers a service to test website uptime.

“At 49 [percent], WordPress is clearly the dominating blogging platform as well as of growing importance as a more generic CMS,” or Content Management System, the survey concludes. Forty of these sites use the WordPress software in-house, and another nine sites use the service hosted by Automattic.

WordPress’ popularity, at least among these highly trafficked sites, has been growing. In 2009, WordPress was used by 32 of the most popular blogs, an earlier Pingdom survey found.

 

In contrast, some of WordPress’ competitors have lost their hold among the top blog spots over the past three years. Movable Type, the next most popular platform on the 2012 list, is used by only seven of the blogs in 2012, down from 12 when last surveyed. Another once-popular blogging platform, TypePad, has dropped even more dramatically in usage, from 16 sites to two, between 2009 and 2012. – WordPress Leads the Blogging Platform Pack by Joab Jackson

Our social media team has done our fair share of LinkedIn trainings and presentations for clients, both in the B2B and B2C spaces. What we’ve learned is that for many professionals, LinkedIn is one of those networks they know it’s important to be on, yet they aren’t on it, don’t completely fill out their profile or they fill it out and rarely come back.

LinkedIn is the professional social network with more than 150 million users in 200 countries (according to LinkedIn). It doesn’t require as much day-to-day maintenance as Facebook and Twitter, yet it deserves proper attention because it provides numerous opportunities for building relationships, marketing and business growth.

Earlier this year, I was invited to be part of the Macomb-Oakland University INCubator’s Lunch and Launch series, where professionals from metro Detroit speak about various topics related to social media. I chose LinkedIn, and it proved to be a topic of interest because I had a full house! – How to Fully Take Advantage of LinkedIn by Nikki Little

Significant effort ends up going into helping key executives of larger brands understand the role that search should play in marketing and how to budget it. Discussions generally end up focusing on how the search strategy should integrate with the other marketing efforts by the business.

Integrated marketing continues to be a hot topic, and was the subject of a keynote panel at this year’s SES New York. These types of panels are great because they help provide a much deeper perspective on the industry.

For search marketers (when I use search marketing I mean SEO and PPC collectively) looking for a quick tidbit, this isn’t the type of panel for you. This panel forced you to step back and really assess things at a strategic level.

Two major points clearly emerged from this panel:

1. Clear confirmation of the need to view marketing activities as an integrated whole.
2. There remains a huge gap between the way most in the search marketing industry look at their task and the way traditional marketing people do.

Dana Todd (SVP, Marketing and Business Development, Performics) moderated the panel, which featured Lars Feely (Group Search Director, Neo@Ogilvy), Brenda Fiala (VP Strategy, Blast Radius), Mark Huffman (Executive Production Manager, Procter & Gamble), and Giovanni Rodriguez (Digital and Social Strategy, Deloitte Consulting LLP).

SEO vs. PPC vs. Marketing Overall

In our industry we sometimes view search as the central focus of everything. After all, people are increasingly moving online, and we have studies that show us that online spend is continuing to grow in a huge way. – Integrated Marketing: Why Search Needs a Large Seat at the Table by Eric Enge

Here are the top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of April 7, 2012… [Read more...]

We’ve previously reported that brands get 46 percent more engagement with Facebook Timeline brand pages, according to Simply Measured’s studyof 15 early adopter brands. Actually, fan engagement increased 14 percent; content engagement was up 46 percent; and interactive content engagement skyrocketed 65 percent. You need to run out and post more photos and videos, stat! Right?

But wait… EdgeRank Checker also put out a study and they found that brand pages are seeing a drop in engagement, regardless of whether they’ve switched to Timeline. Their sample size is far larger, at 3,500 pages, so I’m tempted to buy into this one a bit more.

Wildfire had a look at 43 brands over a period of 42 days and they report double-digit increases in People Talking About This, Likes per post, and comments per brand post for 45 percent of brands representing 85 percent of total pages on Facebook. Megabrands with over 10 million fans, however, actually saw a decrease in engagement, reported ClickZ.

I think I want to believe in Vitrue’s study, though. Those guys claim to have seen engagement lift over 190 percent with the new Timeline! Of course, Vitrue also “studied” the value of a Facebook fan back in 2010 and came back with the much-contested $3.60 a head figure.

There’s also SimpleUsability’s eye-tracking study, which showed that, despite some creative Facebook Timeline efforts from brands, Timeline brand page users actually find some of the new elements confusing. – Conflicting Facebook Brand Page Studies Highlight Universal Truths in Online Marketing by Miranda Miller

Everyone wants their website to be popular. You want to get your idea or product out there and the internet is a great way to do that. After a while of things going smoothly you start to get complaints – the website is slow, people in Europe are having a hard time downloading files, the server is getting overloaded. You need to start optimizing your website to provide a fast, consistent experience for everyone that visits.

There are a multitude of different things that one can do, and one of the easiest is to start using a Content Delivery Network, or CDN. For the most part setting up and using a CDN is much easier than attempting to rewrite a site to be horizontally scalable and can provide many different benefits.

What is a CDN?

A CDN is a collection of servers that share a set of static files or content and are usually geographically separated. The CDN takes care of incoming requests for a file, figures out which is the best server to use, and then routes the request to that server. A CDN might have a set of servers in the eastern US, the western US, Asia, and Europe. When a visitor from the UK visits your site, the CDN detects they are in Europe and will route requests for files to their European servers instead of the servers in the US.

In most cases sites will put large video files, images, documents, javascript, cascading style sheets (CSS), and other rarely-changing files up onto a CDN service. Dynamic content will still be hosted like normal, such as from a server in Dallas, TX. It is rare that a website will be hosted entirely on a CDN. – Does your site need a Content Delivery Network? by Chris Tankersley

As a mobile advertising pundit who lives and breathes the mobile advertising world including its demographics and growth stats, I remain confounded that more brands have not yet jumped fully into this unique opportunity to reach audiences.

Of course, there are the early adopter companies and forward thinking organizations playing in this space but I am surprised that brands have not yet leaped on board in a way that matches the audience adoption of the mobile platform.

Look at the audience stats. For example, by the end of 2011 it has been estimated that there are 1.2 billion active mobile-broadband subscriptions in the world. That’s 17 percent of the global population. What’s more, mobile-broadband subscriptions have grown 45 percent annually over the last four years and that mobile-broadband subscriptions outnumber fixed broadband subscriptions 2:1. (source ITU) – Why aren’t more brands using mobile advertising? by Dale Carr

As Anil Dash pointed out this weekend, arguments about the ethics and functionality of save-for-later apps like Instapaper and Readability have reached the same fever pitch as Blogger-vs.-WordPress-vs.-Tumblr had a few years ago. It’s a matter of passion and honor (and name-calling) for industry leaders, but users just go on using the apps they like.

That’s as it should be, but there’s definitely something worth arguing about for people who publish on the Web. Read-later apps are competition for noisy, ad-ridden websites. They represent a simple fact: Users hate our sites. What should we do? Should we let Readability handle our money and user experience as a middleman? I think we can come up with much better ideas than that.

The Competition

Websites should think of Instapaper as competition. People are spending their reader-experience (RX?) dollars elsewhere, period. They don’t want to pay publisher sites with impressions on ads they don’t value, so they pay Marco Arment for a better reading experience. If publishers want to get those RX dollars, they have to deliver a great experience Instapaper can’t provide. It’s pure and simple competition. – Websites Have to Get Better by Jon Mitchell

Your company focus and marketing message should be so clear that it’s driven home in every opportunity you get. When clients experience:

• your print media (business cards, posters, flyers, etc.)
• your online media (websites and social media sites)
• your office space

There should be a consistency in the message and that’s where your branding pieces come in to play. But before you start printing things, the message has to be core and clear.

What is your company about?

Can you explain it in a simple to understand mission statement or tagline? Be clear about:

1. what your company is
2. who it serves and
3. how it gets it done

If you do that, you can relay this standard to your team and this clear message becomes a measuring stick in your business. If you don’t live up to it, then you’re off track and you know it. And when you know, then you can do something about it.

To get to the core of your company, tackle it from different angles. Understand what your company looks like and feels like from a client’s perspective. Then, dig a little deeper and find out what your prospects see and feel. But don’t stop there. – The Total Package: A Marketing Message That Resonates by Jamillah Warner

Here are the top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of March 31, 2012… [Read more...]