In a recent study by Marketing Sherpa, reproduced in the Marketing Pilgrim, it appears that viral video is taking off, albeit a little slower than expected. Almost 30% of marketers polled reported great results from their viral video campaigns. Only two forms of promotion received a better reception; micro sites developed for a specific product or launch with the “cool factor”, and online games or puzzles. It seems that the downside of this poll is that if you put out a dull video no-one will watch it.

Given that two thirds of the people who responded to this poll reported that they were planning on a video marketing campaign this year, the message is clear. Do an interesting guerrilla video and take advantage of the window of opportunity that video presents.

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.

As we continue to see exceptional results from our blog linking programs, one thing that we are noticing is that the programs can be operated a lot like pay per click campaigns. In the old world of SEO, there was no real way to control rankings. You were lucky if you got your home page ranked. You weren’t about to argue that the home page does not convert for a specific category, or product.

Not so with our programs. If you want to target a category or product page for rankings, you can do that. I have heard back from several clients that not only are they seeing more traffic, they are also seeing significantly higher conversions into sales. And that should be the goal for any marketing campaign. If we increase your traffic, we are only doing a fraction of our job. An increase in sales is a true measure of our success.

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.