Changing attitudes about money and spending mean that interruption or awareness ads have less traction. People have less discretionary money which means that they aren’t interested in learning about new products or services. Companies will need to work at grabbing the attention of people much later in the sales cycle, in other words those who are considering a purchase. Internet marketing makes this possible.

Think about how often YOU use search engines. Google has become the source for product research. It doesn’t matter if the product is running shoes or guitar strings or great airfares, people want to know what has worked and what hasn’t for others that have already made the purchase. We research online to ensure that we’ll get value for our money.

If your product or service appears in Google or Yahoo you have a much better chance of catching a potential buyer at the moment they’re considering a purchase. Search engine marketing can make that happen. A recent poll shows that SEO is the top marketing choice of more than 400 marketers, closely followed by blogging and pay per click marketing. This shows that SEO is maturing as a marketing medium, and that marketers recognize the value of being present in search results. And, search marketing has two advantages over other types of advertising; its cost effective and measurable. Now more than ever, SEO and PPC are a smart choice for marketers.

When compared with print, radio or television campaigns, search marketing is considerably more affordable. And, while no reputable SEO firm will guarantee rankings (see why), it is common for clients to see increasing traffic quantity and quality for months after the SEO work is completed. Most traditional advertising campaigns stop producing leads as soon as your checkbook closes.

Search marketing is also measurable. With quality traffic monitoring it’s possible to see exactly what you’re getting for your money. If your strategy is working you’ll know it, and if it isn’t you’ll have enough information to be able to see why. Did you pick the wrong keywords? Are landing pages under performing? No other form of advertising gives this level of accountability.

The recession is affecting everyone and every business, so it’s just silly to think that old marketing methods will continue to produce. Savvy business owners will be looking for alternative ways to capture the attention of potential clients. Search engine marketing could definitely help.

I assume this means that marketers are testing the waters to see if they can capitalize on Twitter’s success, but they’re breaking one of the rules of social marketing. Social marketing only works when you have something people actually want, you have to add value (I hate that term but it fits). The best example I can think of is Dell. The only way this medium will last is if people are enjoying it.

A new trend is emerging. Unfollow everyone and start over. I just learned about it last night. At first I bristled against this but after giving it some thought I think its brilliant. The whole point of social media is to connect with people online. If you aren’t saying anything that I want to listen to, then why would I maintain the connection? Loïc Le Meur unfollowed everyone in his Twitter account yesterday, and is slowly adding people back. Its beautiful. Its the equivalent of hitting the refresh button. It preserves the value of Twitter for him. The alternative is to ditch social media altogether, and where’s the fun in that?

I don’t have 23,000 followers, so I probably won’t need to do this anytime soon, but I’m also not following everyone that finds me. If your Twitter account has become unruly then this could be just the trick to set things right. I promise I won’t be offended if you drop me, there’s a chance that I’ll unfollow you.

I have been blogging for six years now, and have also created accounts on just about every social site that I could find. I have loved Flickr since day one, it is THE place to share and peruse photography. And, it meshes with my blog perfectly. Facebook took me a while to warm up to, but now I love it. I enjoy keeping up with the daily lives of my friends, and I’ve even regained contact with some that I had lost touch with years ago. Twitter is even more fun. I’ll admit that it took me months to understand the point, much less embrace it. Now I’m addicted, I love it more than ice cream.

What I’m saying is that I ‘get’ blogging, and I also ‘get’ social media, and there (currently) is no site that makes me want to give up my blog (whether I have 2 readers or 50,000 isn’t the point). What’s more, I’m not going to stop reading blogs. My Bloglines account is loaded with dozens of RSS feeds that I check almost daily. Some are friends, some are blogs with tips for saving money or that provide social commentary, but I love all of them. If one of them drops I’ll go looking for other blogs to enjoy.

If I feel this way about blogging, then there are others. And if a community of people aren’t going to ditch their blog and want to read others, then blogging is certainly not dead. The fact is that Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, etc do not replace blogging, they enhance it. Conversations that happen in more social spaces generate ideas that get explored on blogs which prompts further discussion… and on the cycle goes. Besides, if marketing sites are still publishing a guide for blogging, then what about it is dead?

Blogging is not dead. Blogging is doing just fine.

Over the past several months a new trend has been emerging. The technology changed more than a year ago and the way that we use the web has been catching up. I’m just getting my head around it now, and holy cow is it cool. I’m still grappling with these concepts so please forgive me if this post is a bit janky. I’ll cover some broad trends and then give a couple of concrete examples.

For the past couple of years sites have been displaying data from a number of sources through RSS, that isn’t really new. There is an increasing number of sites that allow users (and other sites) to submit data remotely as well, through API’s. What this means is that you don’t even have to visit a site to take advantage of its services. In some cases the sites, or web applications, don’t offer anything on their own site other than an administration panel. Gravatar is a site that offers a centralized avatar storage and distribution for the rest of the web, all you can do on their site is update your email address and picture. But, once that’s done every website that takes advantage of that service displays your avatar. Similarly, create an account at OpenID and you can access dozens of sites with those credentials. Last.fm keeps track of the music you play on your computer or iPod and gives you tools to display that list on any site you wish, your blog, Facebook, MySpace, wherever. Twitter, Flickr and Delicious also make it a snap to share information on any other site you choose.

There is a shift toward decentralized content, the information that you view on one page could be pulled from a dozen or more places. These mashups are fun and useful, but its not just content that is being shared between sites, now applications are, too. I can think of a few examples for WordPress. Disqus is a blog plugin that replaces, and adds functionality to, your blog engine’s commenting feature. Comments display as threaded, and they extend across similar sites. I have already reviewed Zemanta, which is a tool to help add links, images and related articles to your blog posts.

There are several Firefox add-ons that extend the functionality of Gmail, making it a great alternative to Outlook. RememberTheMilk has an add-on that allows you to see and manage your task list from within Gmail (that’s actually one of my favorites). Xoopit indexes your email and gives you quick access to images and videos that have been sent to you.

Some people are referring to this as the semantic web. The way I understand the semantic web, this is incorrect, though I’m certainly no expert so I don’t necessarily claim to be right. My understanding is that semantic is a way of categorizing the information contained within a web page so that computers can make sense of and utilize that content. I guess maybe this fits within semantic in a general way, though I consider this to be more along the lines of content/application distribution.

This is a pretty exciting trend within web development. As each of these sites/tools develops more ways of interacting with them, the functionality of the web increases. Distributing content across a number of sites increases the chances that someone interested in your words will see them, increasing the value that those pages bring to readers. And, transferring applications to the web opens up a myriad of opportunities as well. I’m excited to be working in this industry right now.

Twitter and Facebook Status exploded the use of these tools. You only have 140 characters to fit a link and the thought that goes with it, so the shorter URL the better. It was through Twitter that I found out about Snurl, and I started using it right away. Hey, two digits is two digits. I don’t get why they need three different URLs to accomplish this (Snipr, SnipURL and Snurl), but whatever.

Last month I found out about two more on the same day, bit.ly and is.gd (short for “is good”). What on earth? Can there really be enough of a market to justify the existence of all of these? I mean, a short URL is a short URL, right? I decided to take a closer look at each of these, and there are some minor differences.

Each of these has their own API for developers, a bookmarklet that you can drag to your browser toolbar, and they copy the shortened URL to you clipboard automatically (if you have Flash enabled). So in terms of service offered, they’re on equal footing. Bit.ly seems to have the most white space (read, simplest layout). Snurl and Bit.ly are both ad free. When Snurl copies the URL to your clipboard it also copies the domain that it is linking to, which is a little annoying but if you create an account you can disable this in your profile settings.

Some of them allow you to create links to other short URL tools, which bugs me but I can’t say exactly why. I did some experimenting with this, and it looks like when you create a link to another URL shortening tool only one gives you a warning screen before forwarding you on, is.gd.

I don’t see all four of these sites surviving in the long run. And developers, if you just thought of the coolest domain to use for this, either stop now or come up with something awesome that takes the concept further, because this market is already kind of tapped.

The two that I personally like the most are bit.ly and is.gd. I like the simple layout of bit.ly, and their blowfish logo is kind of cool, too. I think is.gd is the one I’ll be using from now on. The main reason is that its the shortest. I mean, if you really want a short URL then this is IT, right? I also like that you don’t have to create an account or edit the string that gets copied to the clipboard, and if someone tries to point you to another URL site you get a warning note. Nice.

This was only partially succesful, comment spam is still a huge problem. Today there is a growing community of search marketers reversing the trend by not only removing the nofollow attribute from their site, but also keeping a list of sites that “dofollow” their links. If a site owner wishes to remove the nofollow attribute the software must be modified, though there are plugins available that make this easy for most blog software.

Link building is one of the holy grails of SEO, so any site that passes link juice to commenters is valuable within the SEO community. This makes getting a link as easy as leaving a comment on a site. Do a search for nofollow or dofollow and you’ll find several sites with lists. The three that I’ve found the most helpful are:

• http://courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/
• http://www.stephanmiller.com/the-ultimate-dofollow-blog-list/
• http://nicusor.com/do-follow-list/

Just as you might expect, these links don’t have much value. Most of the sites that pass link juice are PR3 or less, and if the site has any popularity at all your link will reside among dozens of others. If you’re going to post comments to earn links the best strategy is to post early and post often. Subscribe to that blog’s feed and try to be within the first few comments on a post, and try to do this for a number of posts. If your comments are informed and helpful, or contribute to the discussion, then you may even earn a few visits.

This blog is follows links. As an SEO I see the value of this, so this is a way to give back to the community. Your comment does have to add something though. If you’re commenting on a post that’s six months old, or your only thought is “nice blog” it will probably not be approved. I’m also not going to approve comments with links to porn, illegal or hate material.