Online marketers who are searching for ways to bring more traffic to their sites will often be told to produce Linkbait content. The caveat should, of course, be that the content of the linkbait should be true.

Recently a high-profile example of what many would call unethical SEO practice stirred up some controversy. (more…)

There is lots of speculation about an imminent economic downturn. Whether it’s happening now or will happen later (or much, much later), as marketers, we must ask ourselves how is this going to impact my job, my budget — and my career? How can I prepare for it?

For the last few years, we in the online marketing space have been enjoying pretty strong tailwinds. For the first time in a long time (I have been around the block for a while), Marketing has been able to leverage revenue growth into larger budgets with relative ease.

Scrooge-like CEOs and tight-fisted CFOs have been allowing growth in marketing and advertising budgets less grudgingly than usual. They still consider it ‘a mystery wrapped in an enigma’ – but have been arguing less with Marketing about the need to spend.

So I wonder how seriously most marketers are taking concerns about a slowdown in the economy when developing and executing their demand-generation and marketing plans.

Whether or not a downturn is imminent, or already here, this is probably a good time for Marketers to take a breath and do some contingency planning.

The current model Marketing has been using to budget goes something like this: “I need a bigger budget because our revenues are growing, and media costs and the cost of pay-per-click keywords are escalating. So if we want growth to continue, we need to spend more”

But what happens when revenue growth slows down? (more…)

According to MarketingSherpa’s “Search Marketing Benchmark Survey,” search marketing budgets are set to increase in 2008. OK, nothing new here.

But wait, here is the gem:

According to Stefan Tornquist, MarketingSherpa’s research director, “Most of the budgets were growing because search marketers thought that keyword prices would go up”

So, in other words, marketers will spend increasing amounts — to get the same results.

WOW, that’s impressive.

*Smart* marketers, however, will optimize the online conversion rate and get more business from the traffic *already* coming to the site…

So - no need to increase the budget. Just market smarter.

For years now I have been subscribing to my RSS feeds in MyYahoo. If some headline and brief summary seemed interesting, I would of course click through to the source of the article to read the full text.

From a traffic-building perspective, this worked very well for the publishers of content that interests me: as long as the brief copy presented was relevant, I was bound to click-through to read all of it.

But no longer.

With the new MyYahoo! Portal format, I can now mouse over the RSS feeds and read what seems to me to be the complete article or post without having to click through to the website publishing the content.

This is bound to have an impact on the ability of RSS feeds to generate traffic to websites and will put more pressure on copywriting skills so that people actually want to get the full story after mousing over…