I've seen quite a few posts this past week from popular marketing bloggers asking if blogging is finally losing steam. They note a number of popular bloggers have been taking long breaks and others are simply abandoning their blogs completely. With the growth of social networking sites like Facebook, marketers are asking if the day of the blog is coming to a close. I found myself asking the same question last week and I've realized blogging is only just getting started.

John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing asked if blogs are losing steam and posts about Dilbert creator Scott Adams giving up on his. With Adams, it doesn't seem to be about blogger burn-out so much as it's about marketing let-down. John says Adams is giving up because he thought "some negative comments weren't worth it and, because people were choosing to read the blog via RSS, he wasn't making more money because of it."

It's not just the bloggers who aren't getting the conversions that are calling it quits. Some bloggers who were in it purely for the joy of writing or to share information are having a tough time as well.

On Monday, Drew McLellan writes:

The first time I got jammed with work and let my blog go unchanged for four or five days, I felt terribly guilty, like I was playing hookey from school or sneaking out of work to go to the beach. But I was busy, and I guess nothing struck me at the moment as something worth writing about.

It's a feeling I've had on many occasions myself. Six months ago, I was at the peak of blogging. On a good day, I was churning out upwards of 6000 words of content a day. That usually equaled one full article and two to four blog posts on Search Engine Guide and an additional post or two on The Lactivist. Then summer rolled into fall and I found myself being crushed under the weight of writer's block.

I'd log three or four hours reading through my feed reader looking for inspiration. I'd surf discussion forums, browse through reader email and look at PowerPoint slides. Nothing. In fact, there were days were I wondered if it was time to hang up my hat. The need to blog hung over my head like a two ton anvil waiting to crush me.

In fact, I got so frustrated, I made a post on my hobby blog saying I was thinking about quitting since I couldn't post as often as I thought I should.

The response was overwhelming.

"Don't go away! Just post when you have time, you're on my feed reader."

Talk about a "duh" moment.

Those of us who began blogging back before feed readers were common remember the need to churn out content like a maniac in order to give readers a reason to return. "Don't blog unless you can commit" was common advice from marketers. After all, there was nothing worse than teasing visitors with fresh content and then not delivering.

These days, things are a little different. With the growth of feed readers, more people are skipping their daily tour of URLs and waiting for the content to come to them. My own reading habits are reflective of this. I follow about 250 blogs on a daily basis via my feed reader. If I had to visit each and every one of those 250 blogs each day to find their latest posts, I'd be narrowing down the list pretty quickly. Thanks to Bloglines and Google Reader, I browse RSS feeds instead and probably only actually visit about two dozen blogs a day.

Yes, it's important to blog with consistency. You can't put a blog up and only post six times a year. That said, the days of needing to post every single day, or even multiple times a week may be gone. There are plenty of fantastic bloggers in my feed reader who only blog weekly or a couple times a month. With feed readers making it easier than ever to follow multiple bloggers, it's now more about quality than quantity.

You still need to give some thought to your plans before you begin blogging. Consider your audience, your goals and how much time you can realistically devote to your blog. Once you've done that, chill out and post only when you have something worthwhile to say.

You may find that once you lift the burden of "I have to post today," the ideas will start flowing like water.

Debra Mastaler knows and she's more than happy to tell you. Her latest column on link building over at Search Engine Land is a gold mine of information for anyone having a hard time building links a really competitive niche. Always ahead of the curve, Debra looks beyond the standard link bait and aims to help site owners learn the value of using a public relations style campaign as a link driver.

She writes:

Reputation link bait is the combination of two marketing strategies: pitching the media with an interesting story, and developing link bait. Traditionally, media pitches involve floating story ideas to journalists in conjunction with an upcoming event, while link bait is written to attract links from a wider audience by using controversial content. Reputation link bait uses each tactic, but with a twist?instead of promoting events and controversy, it focuses on promoting a company's overall image through positive buzz. In a nutshell, reputation link bait is a tactic used to promote a company using newsworthy and trendy angles to build a positive corporate reputation.

Basically, Debra's talking about good old fashioned marketing. Creating a hook and dangling your hook over the right audience in search of bites. While a random article about something funny or odd in your industry may score well on social media sites, history has shown these hits often fail to deliver in terms of conversions. What Debra is talking about will result in not only links, but conversions.

After all, why just build links when you can build links and attract customers at the same time?

Many SEOs obsess over search engine algorithmic details. They spend hours looking at the minutest of details hoping to achieve the perfectly "optimized" web page. In the process they often forget that the web page can't just be optimized for search engines, but must also be optimized for human visitors.

Optimizing for spiders and visitors are both important for a web site's overall success. But I don't think they are necessarily equally important. In order for the search engines to be able to index and rank a site, a "search engine friendly" website architecture must be implemented. And while having a search engine friendly site is good, it must not be accomplished at the expense of the visitor. At best, it must complement the user friendliness of the website. At worst, it must be invisible.

Can a proper balance between optimizing for spiders and humans be struck? Can you achieve the perfectly optimized web page for search rankings, while also maintain a perfectly optimized page for your audience? Well, no. In fact I don't think there is such thing as a perfectly optimized page for either search engines or users. If there were such a thing then sites such as Amazon would not invest millions of dollars in user testing every year. But since perfection is unattainable, what you can do is find the most effective balance between being both user friendly and search engine friendly.

When looking for the perfect balance between search engines and human visitors, there are nine distinct paths available. When developing, updating or optimizing a website, every decision must have a question asked and answered to determine if what is being contemplated is the best course of action. The question is: Is this good for my visitors and the search engines. Based on the answer to that question you'll have an idea of whether or not you're facing a sound course of action.

Path 1: Bad for spiders, bad for people



One of the problems many websites face is that they were designed to meet one, or a small group of people's particular likes and dislikes, with no regard to anything beyond that. I've run across many business owners who have invested thousands of dollars into creating a "pretty" website, only later to find that it is not structurally sound in regard to meeting the needs of the search engines. Nor was it very usable or able to meet the shoppers needs. The developer, or the person fronting the money, decided what looked good and went forward without any other considerations. This is obviously one of the worse courses of actions that can be made as a web site is being developed.

Once you've gone down this route the only course of action is to stop and go back. You'll have to re-invest into your website to make it more search engine friendly and in the process learn more about the wants and needs of your target audience. Yes, you'll lose time and money. But the worse scenario is doing nothing and to continue to lose time and money every day as neither search engines nor your visitors give your site the time of day.

When faced with any decision, and it is determined that a course of action is bad for search engines and users, run away. It doesn't matter how many people think that the proposed change looks good, your business depends on being able to get exposure and persuade your visitors, not the web designer or the managers who don't know enough about web marketing to make sound decisions. Going down this path will only lead to disaster.

Path 2: Indifferent to spiders, bad for people



There are many changes you can make to a site that are not going to effect search engine accessibility issues at all. Things such as having a 100% tableless design or achieving full validation of your HTML are a couple things that come to mind that, on a small scale, don't really matter a whole lot. Both have their benefits but by themselves don't really have a significant effect on the search engines (unless you're removing some genuine search engine road blocks or excessive code bloat). Overall these types of changes don't have much sway when it comes to overall search engine performance.

So the next question to consider is if the change being considered will be good or bad for your target audience. If it can be determined that while a change won't effect your performance on the search engines, but would ultimately create a negative experience for your visitors, then this is another path that you want to avoid. The only possible outcome is still a net negative.

You won't have helped your goal in pushing rankings up, but by creating a negative visitor experience you will have hurt your ability to get conversions. Even if the net negative effect on your human visitors is small, over time it will add up. And for what? For a change that, at best, didn't improve performance on the search engines? It's just not worth it.

Path 3: Good for spiders, bad for people



Surprisingly, this is a mistake that many SEOs make. Of course, these are the SEOs that are focused exclusively on achieving top search engine rankings, no matter what the cost. To be fair, many of them are talented individuals who study the search engine algorithms excessively. The only drawback is that they often don't know how to balance the needs of the spiders with the needs of the human visitors.

The result if often a very fantastically search engine friendly website, that is, at the same time, one that has extremely poor visitor conversion rates. Many businesses and SEOs that implement these kinds of strategies often appear to be very successful at getting results. Rankings are strong and traffic increases, and even the number of conversions increase due to the the increase in traffic volumes. But what often gets lost is that those increases can actually be hurting the business.

How can more sales be a bad thing? When you're losing credibility in the process. When you have to pay more for lower conversion rates. When the costs of being successful is more than the profits being realized. While many decisions that improve ranking performance feel positive, many won't be good enough to be sustainable over the long-term, especially those that create a negative user experience. If the overall net gain is positive, then a justification can be made for this type of decision. But while it's better than the previous two, it's certainly not the best path to choose overall.

Of the nine paths business owners and SEOs face with their online marketing campaigns, these are the worst of the bunch. In the next installment we'll look at another group of paths to SEO enlightenment. While the next three are not the best options available, you certainly could do worse.

“Just one question before I buy…when you f*** it up later, do I get my money back?”…Aimee Mann

So, I get the following email in one of my Gmail accounts that somehow bypassed the spam filter…

Subject: Suggestion re: toddmintz.com ¹

Dear Website Owner ²,

If I could get you five times the RELEVANT traffic at a substantially reduced cost ³ would you be interested? N------- P-------- can place your website on top of the Natural Listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN ⁴. Our Search Engine Optimization team delivers more top rankings than anyone else and we can prove it. We do not use "link farms" or "black hat" methods that Google and the other search engines frown upon and can use to de-list or ban your site. The techniques are proprietary, involving some valuable closely held trade secrets ⁵. Our prices are less than half of what other companies charge ⁶.

I would be happy to send you a proposal using the top search phrases for your area of expertise. Please contact me at your convenience so I can start saving you some money. Please do not hesitate to email or call me if you would like further information.

Sincerely,
P--- R---------
VP Sales
N------ P--------
26500 W. A----- R---⁷
Suite ---------
C--------, C------- 9----

I'm guessing that most everyone reading this article has received SEO spam and regular readers of Search Engine Guide know enough about the SEO process not to be suckered into believing the sorts of claims made in such emails. However, as a public service to all, I am going to deconstruct this particular spam and shine some light on the assertions it makes. The numbers that follow correspond to the annotations above.

1 & 2) Clearly, my contact information was scraped by an email harvester and my website was never actually examined by an actual person. Their software couldn't determine that toddmintz.com is the only website that I own in which I make no attempt to earn revenue …it is a place where I've posted two of my more personal stories …a reminiscence on witnessing Marvin Gaye's National Anthem live and a Fictional Google Western modeled on the ending of the movie 3:10 to Yuma. If a human would have examined my site, they would have easily been able to see that there isn't any commerce going on, that my name is “Todd Mintz” (knowing the name of the person you solicit will certainly increase the success of the solicitation), and that (if they looked at the bottom of the home page and or Googled my name) that I am in the same business that they “purport” to be in.

3) It isn't difficult to increase traffic 5-fold on an unoptimized website…especially if the site gets almost no traffic to begin with. However, business do not earn revenue from increased traffic…they earn revenue from lead generation / sales. Before any SEO campaign commences, a website needs to be optimized for converting visitors into revenue which involves not only SEO but copywriting & website design. Only once this process is complete should the traffic-building steps of SEO commence.

4) A common phrase in SEO spam…this generally means one of two things:

•  The company gets you to the “top” of Google/Yahoo/MSN via PPC.
•  The company gets you ranked highly for a nonsense phrase that adds no value to your attempt to generate revenue online.

Top rankings don't mean anything unless the term is relevant to a targeted visitor and the website is able to convert them into a customer.

5) Never work with an SEO firm that will not lay out in great detail the techniques they use to optimize a website. More than likely, their “proprietary” techniques involve spamming the search engines which could generate short-term traffic but also can get the site banned. Even if they don't use “link-farms” or “black hat” techniques, there are still plenty of ways they can screw everything up.

6) I'm sure their services are cheap…but are you getting any value for the price? SEO isn't a “one size fits all” service and deciding to go with a company because they offer the lowest price is a recipe for disaster.

7) Would you trust an SEO company that doesn't give out its actual physical address? A few minutes of Googling enabled me to determine that the address listed in the email is a UPS store…the same UPS store used by a very active adult media enterprise. Furthermore, I saw examples of guestbook spam and bloggers ripping these folks for email spam. I didn't see any SEO scholarship associated with this company which is a pretty strong signal that it's not a quality firm.

So would you trust your marketing dollars to such a company? Or, might it be better that you engage an SEO either through a referral from a satisfied customer or because you've read their writings on their topic online and can determine that the person is knowledgeable and actively engaged in the search marketing community.

At my former place of work, I had co-workers forward me SEO spam as if they were serious sales solicitations. I was even asked to contact such folks to try to learn about their offerings (which I never did). Clearly these messages somehow resonate with intelligent business people and perhaps I'm way too close to the SEO process to see how they could possibly find customers gullible to fall prey to their tactics. However, businesses can keep safe from such SEO predators by following one simple rule…even if the offering sounds good (and I concede this is probably the best written SEO spam that I've received), IT'S STILL SPAM and no good will ever come to a business from responding to and engaging with a company that contacted them via such methods.

Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.

Last week I attended and presented at SMX-London. It was a great chance to meet with British search Marketers that don't get to make it out to the US conferences, and to hear a different perspective on familiar topics from mostly British presenters. Friday saw the "Search Marketing for Retail" seminar, which was moderated by Rob Kerry of Ayima.com.

The first presenter to hit the stage was Finlay Clark of BigMouthMedia who gave an overview on the topic starting with the challenges online retailers face. The first challenge was in protecting the brand. Make sure that you use the NOODP tag if you're listed in the ODP (DMOZ), as it's likely that your description over there does not contain a strong call to action. If you have affiliates, remember that they are going to be directly competing with you online for your brand, don't let them get in there first, or allow them to get ahead of you. Finally, think about the impact that universal/blended search is having on the SERPs, think beyond the blue text links.

The second challenge involved influencing the brand message. Here he gave a really great tip: Go to Yahoo Answers and look at what's being asked and said about your company. This helps you in two ways. The first is that it gives you a view on any reputation management problems that may be bubbling up over there, and the second is that it points out questions that aren't answered on your website. By reviewing these questions, you can build out your FAQ section, or make modifications to product and service pages which improves the user experience by giving them what they're looking for.

The third challenge involved tracking the true source of the sale. In other words, tracking the whole journey from research to purchase, not just the final click or the final session. The fourth and final challenge dealt with the issue of keeping your staff and in-house knowledge. What happens when you're training people in a fast growing industry where they may leave for brighter opportunities as soon as they're trained?

Next he moved into opportunities. The first was feed proliferation, where he talked about optimizing for as many attributes as possible. He suggested you ensure that your EAN (bar code) numbers are in the feed, and get reviews on popular sites. However, he did mention that this generally leads to conversions of less than 1%.

With social media being such a big talking point this year there was no surprise when he next highlighted that as another opportunity. If you're going to put together a viral widget you have to make sure that you have the right creative concept that both ties in with your strategy and resonates with the intended audience. Then you need to have the right promotional strategy. Uou need to make it easy for the community to talk about you. Contribute to the debate and become a part of the community. Publish quirky stats and trends; interesting data that people will want to read and respond to.

Finally, he wrapped up his presentation with some predictions for retail

• Marketers will realise that they can't rely on their sites alone
• Google will keep pushing Product Search and Checkout
• Social networks will allow us all to become affiliates
• More retailers will have fingers burned from social channels
• Advanced sites will track more effectively and coordinate channels as one big marketing operation

The next presenter to take the stage was Warren Cowan of Greenlight. He talked about the opportunity for retailers who sell multiple product lines. They have SKUs they can use in search. Why is this important? Because searchers do search for SKUs as well as for branded terms. Of course the challenge for retailers managing thousands, or hundreds of thousands of SKUs is that managing campaigns for so many products can be a logistical nightmare. This is especially true for fast turnover industries. So how should you handle it? Run around like a headless chicken in a farm full of spreadsheets? No, you should simply relax. Ok, not too much, but you shouldn't try to get every product and every SKU listed. Concentrate on your popular, high ROI products.

Warren then rounded out his presentation with some PPC tips. First, dynamically integrate your price in your ad copy. It's been proven to increase click through rates and quality score, which in turn will improve your rankings and lower your costs. Second, you need to have your inventory system integrated with your campaigns. You don't want to be wasting money advertising product lines you can't sell.

Stewart Hunter of The Search Works was the penultimate presenter and started off by throwing out some figures on the growth of online sales. Last year's year on year growth was 54% while this year it's estimated to be between 33% (by Logan Todd) and 58% (by Forrester).

Stewart recommended that you always think about seasonality in your online keyword buys, including keywords that have previously 'failed'. Perhaps it wasn't the right time for those keywords. Perhaps you've improved your landing page or your call to action. Perhaps your site now appeals more to the people searching for those words. Make sure that your online budget is flexible enough to take advantage of sudden surges in demand, or the natural growth of demand. He finished his presentation by repeating the call from Finlay Clark to track the full sales cycle, in order for you to truly appreciate and leverage online's influence over offline.

The last presenter was Graham Hansell of Sitelynx who presented on the niche topic of electrical retailers in the UK. As someone who spent 4 years working for one of the companies he discussed, I really enjoyed this topic. As you may expect, retailer search branding is the biggest driver of traffic, with over 60% of traffic coming from searches involving retailer terms (i.e. Comet Televisions.) You should ensure that you do have common misspellings included in your terms. For example, "Curries" is a top 30 traffic term for Currys.

Local Search is a big opportunity for retailers who should ensure they have their locations in the various mapping sites. Mobile search is still in the infancy stages, but will be a major driver in the future.

The long tail is also a huge driver for companies, with less than 40% of all search terms being generic. In fact, retailers such as Amazon.co.uk generate over 75% of their traffic from generic terms.

Graham wrapped up his presentation with his list of opportunities for online retailers:

• Create Video reviews for your products / services
• Create Podcasts for new products
• Publish PDF manuals for products that you sell, people will bookmark you as a resource, and return to purchase
• Reach out to social media and networks, help real groups
• Build links to opinion formers in the blogosphere