In a follow up to a previous article, it appears that comment spam is becoming a very big problem for blogs. As a blog administrator you want to get feedback from clients and your readership, but you just keep getting messages from spammers who just want to siphon off the page rank created by your diligent article writing. You could turn off the comments, but that would negate one of the benefits of blogging. You need a filter, and after exhaustive research I have determined that the best one out there is an excellent creation from the folks at Wordpress. It is called Askismet, and is available as a plug in. Check it out.

Interesting article in Marketing Shift about the continuing efforts of newspapers to find a way to become more topical and capture some of what is going on online. Hearst Newspapers signed up with Brightcove to distribute video from readers. User generated content is incredibly valuable, and the newspaper conglomerate can use video to generate increased ad revenues on its newspaper portals. Expect more efforts from traditional media to tap into the web 2.0, blog and video revolution as it continues.

I heard about this product from a client the other day. It sounds very much like a scam that was circulating a couple of years ago, where half a dozen companies in Vegas were selling the exclusive rights to a keyword. The theory is that when people have a certain toolbar, when you conduct a search on a specific keyword, then a website’s banner ad appears. I checked out the MySpace Guardian toolbar. It’s a great concept. Everyone is nervous about predators online, so they download the toolbar in their millions, and then receive your banner ad every time they search for your keywords. Sounds like a winner, except how many people have the toolbar, how does it protect you from online predators, and why will people not get sick of the intrusive banners? They are pretty big.

If anyone from the company would like to give me some feedback, it would be much appreciated.

Technorati, the pioneering blog search engine announced their take on the blogosphere earlier today in a post by David Sifry. The key points, or what I found interesting were;

*There are currently over 70 million blogs, with 120,00 new ones being created daily, or 1.4 every second.
*People post new content on their blogs 1.5 million times a day or 17 times a second.
*Spam is on the rise with somewhere between 3000 and 7000 new fake blogs being created every day. In December of 2006 there were 11,000 fake blogs created every day.

In February, Over 2.5 million post had tagged content, and 35% of all posts, or 230 million, used tags. These figures do not include the effect of Myspace. There are 250,000 new Myspace accounts created every day. Each one of them comes with a blog.

Our company harnesses the power and tremendous influence of blogs to help our clients gain market share and increase their online exposure. Blogs and viral marketing present a window of opportunity, and as always the early adopters are seeing the greatest gains.

It seems like every online marketer out there realizes that they need more links to increase the value of their website in the eyes of the search engines. They have been hearing that refrain for the last several years. Reciprocal linking, directory linking, run of site linking, link farms, text links, paid link advertisements, blog links, links from forums, links from video etc etc. So what is the most cost effective way of getting good links?

You could rent them on your favorite high pr site like a local news station. They would be happy to charge you $600 or $700 for a link on their page. The same link. You stop paying, and the link is gone. You run a 6 month campaign. You spend $4k or so, and you get the same effect as paid search, but without the traffic or the ability to track your success.

Or you could run a blog linking campaign with Triangle Direct. For around the same price, we can put your link into 20 or 30 blog articles. These blogs get a lot of attention, so you get some traffic from the readership of the blogs, and their friends. Your articles are also distributed by RSS all over the internet, so you get the added benefit of one link growing into two or three or ten. The article stays on the blog, so long after you’ve forgotten about it, it’s still promoting your site. And the link is keyword specific. It targets a very important term, and a url in your website that converts well into sales. For a twelve month campaign, you can have over 240 articles that might just turn into over 1,000 links.

Or you could just have that one link from your local news site. Along with a bunch of other links going to your competitors. Until you stop paying. Then your rented link goes away. The choice is clear. Go with the blog links. They are more beneficial and more cost effective.

I am hearing a lot about how local online advertising online has been ignored and is an incredibly valuable market that is repeatedly overlooked. Most small businesses would probably agree with this, as the first thing most of them do when they open the doors is to take out an ad in the yellow pages, join the chamber of commerce and print up some fliers. They have to get the word out, and they just don’t see the internet as being a place where they see value or feel at home. It is a fact that the vast majority of purchases are made within ten miles of home. Geographically specific pay per click and geo-targeting is somewhat tailored to the small business, but paid search is only a part of online traffic, so what about the rest of natural search? How does the small business compete with the directory sites out there?

Simple. They shoot video. Lots of video. They then optimize it for geographically specific terms, and then sit back and let the phone ring. Viral marketing on a local level is incredibly popular with print, tv, radio and other forms of promotion. The same should and will apply for online.

For those of you, myself included who are sometimes a little mystified as to the development of web 2.0 and the implications that it has on the internet moving forward, there is a great video posted on our business marketing blog. It was done by a professor Wesch, a professor of digital ethnography at Kansas State University, and posted on Youtube. Sums things up quite nicely.

One of the early indicators that a blog is beginning to get purchase on search engines, and some level of recognition within the blogosphere is when it starts to attract comment spam. This is an attempt by link spammers to gain positioning for their sites by leaving links in the comments section of your blog. It is somewhat ineffective due to the engines’ efforts to eliminate the practice, but that doesn’t stop your comments section filling up with hundreds of unwanted links. Most of these links are the usual spammy mix of profanity and gibberish, and so can be fairly unpleasant to look though. You could just turn off your comments, but that would defeat some of the purpose of having a blog and using it as a communications tool. I will recommend some other alternatives in upcoming articles.

If the spending of the fortune 100’s are a reflection of broader trends in advertising, it is going to be a good year for online advertising. According to Ad Age, the consumer giant is quietly moving its spend to digital media.

They reduced measured media spending by 22% and moved the spend to unmeasured media. That is an interesting way of describing online spend: unmeasured media. I am not sure what can’t be measured, as pretty much every visitor can be tracked through a website, but perhaps the terminology comes from the world of old media. It was also interesting to me that email and direct mail programs saw a big increase in funding, and the company set up a central fund for online marketing spend. I am sure that Johnson & Johnson will also be putting some budget into the new media of blogs, video and buzz marketing.

One of the oft ignored areas in internet marketing is the area of local search. It is full of smaller companies who traditionally give their marketing dollars to Yellow Pages, local radio and TV. The spend is surprisingly high, but not high enough for the advertising agencies to pay attention. It is these companies who would benefit most from Blog Marketing and viral video. Our clients are starting to dominate local search markets with their blogging and linking campaigns. The doit-yourself nature of blogs makes this kind of marketing extremely cost effective compared to other mediums, and the effect on a clients’ business is very strong.