Marhsall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web makes a supposition that may be inherently incorrect. A huge number of people online don't know the difference between their browser's address bar and search bar. Let's keep that in perspective. What will it take for them to learn? That particular point has created a great conversation over at Read Write Web including an extremely well thought out response from John Andrews . The path to Amazon.

Many established and well respected blogs within the online marketing community have recently started to make their audiences available to a variety of new voices. The opportunity for new bloggers to communicate their ideas on internet marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, paid search, affiliate marketing, and social media marketing have never been greater. Today Michael Gray announced on his blog that he was ready to start accepting guest bloggers .

If I didn't know better Charlie O'Donnell and many others are reading my mind. Lately I have been seeing a lot of discussion around social media noise and our inability to filter it out or manage it in such a way as to continue to make it a productive part of our days.

I cannot for the life of me understand why people suggest that intentionally under promising and over delivering is a good way to manage client or customer expectations. Stephan Spencer is one of many who has recently offered this level of advice and suggested that it is good advice for those selling in the SEO business. I however want to call shenanigans on this type of advice. While I believe managing expectations is ultimately extremely important,

If this is not the complete guide to optimizing a WordPress blog then I have not seen it yet. I am not saying there is not a better free guide out there and I challenge anyone who knows of one to link it in the comments of this blog post and share with us what we all have been missing. In my mind however Joost de Valk has come thru with an extremely useful and detailed guide showing how to effectively optimize a WordPress blog .

The devil is in the details and sometimes it is easy to overlook opportunity even when it is staring you right in the face. Thankfully not everyone misses the obvious opportunities to take advantage of the hard work they have already done. Andy Beard has an excellent nearly step-by-step explanation as well as links to a video, from Stomper Net made by Andy Jenkins, showing how to take an existing Google listing and work to get an indented listing to go along with it.

Within the mass confusion that can erupt when there is a blog controversy, occasionally a thoughtful post will emerge. Last week ShoeMoney wrote about the Death of SEO and here on this blog Greg Howlett supported that theory, while I spoke up to disagree with those opinions. Others have also been discussing the topic and Joost de Valk , has chimed in as well, after reading a blog post from one of his colleagues entitled Reactionary vs. Visionary SEO .

Greg makes my point for me at the end of his post: How Branding Will Replace SEO . Also, since many customer conversations take place online, your inbound link profile will improve as will your traffic and conversion rate. And by the way, so will your SEO. I'd like to start out by focusing on why I disagree with Greg, but I also want to point out why I also approve conceptually with what Greg is saying.

When it comes to marketing everyone is out to compose the most compelling message possible and then measure an audience's reaction to that message. The question then becomes are measuring the tools that web marketers use reliable? I think the general consensus is that many of the tools that rely on Java Script are less reliable than marketers would like them to be.

Have you ever wondered what information advertisers are collecting about you? More often than not the individual advertising that you are seeing when you visit your favorite website is based on an advertising profile that has been built up over time based on your individual online behaviors. CNET is reporting that Jeff Weiner, Executive Vice President of Yahoo's Network Division,

Individuals new to online marketing are constantly asking me the same question. What are the best low risk, high reward, homerun style marketing techniques? The type of online marketing that will inundate their web properties with incremental traffic and increased revenues. Yet these very same marketers seem to have an almost unhealthy phobic fear of failure regardless of the risk level.

I was working on writing a comment for the latest blog post by AJ Vaynerchuk at ShoeMoney.com but it turned out that the comment morphed into something more, so I thought bringing some attention to the post as well as my thoughts on it might be a good thing. AJ selected the names of fifty prominent internet marketing veterans and compared where Twitter and Facebook ranked respectively for their names on Google. The results were unexpected.

Andy Beal and I have both talked some about Network Solutions and their recent policy decisions as to how they manage their domain name purchasing services. Well TechCrunch is reporting that now Network Solutions has adopted the practice of "hijacking unassigned sub domains" by placing ads on these sub domains without notifying the site owners. This "new" practice, and I call it new because this is the first we are really hearing of it,

As I was roaming through the blogsphere, catching up on some of the news and notes I have missed in recent weeks, I read one of Jeremy Zawondy's recent blog posts addressing a very similar topic. He poses the question does the convenience of having access to someone with answers inhibit people from thinking about and solving their own problems, when they know a quick email, twit, or IM will get them the answer without them having to make any real effort?

There are a lot of different ways to approach social media marketing. Still it seems many marketers are unwilling to engage with social media services while desiring the benefits the media represents. I was reading an article this weekend by Skellie , which I am not going to recap in its entirety, but you should go read it. Skellie's article made me chuckle and in a way also made me sad because it really shows why so many internet marketing campaigns fail.

Sometimes the simplest solution is also the best solution. I was reading Marshall Kirkpatrick's most recent blog post over at Read Write Web where he discusses turning useful lists into custom search engines. At first I thought it was a pretty cool idea and in fact I still do, but I also think it is a solution to a problem that didn't exist in the first place.

It is smart, it is witty and in some cases it is inane. Gabriel Goldenberg has a post up at seoroi.com that provides a lot of food for thought and in my opinion also gives some poor advice. His is one of those provocative posts that encourages everyone to start thinking about the way they do their online marketing but also reminds everyone to not to believe everything they read.

The publishers of Search Marketing Standard have taken on a new project, SEM Compare. SEM Compare proposes to provide visitors with an effective way of contributing and looking at user reviews and rating of SEM Companies. With the site launch planned for March 17 th it appears that the project is ratcheting up its attempt to collect review data from anyone willing to take the time to fill out their questionnaire.

Lately Twitter has become my preferred social media tool of choice. Howard Rheingold has written a thoughtful post highlighting the virtues of Twitter. He covers Openness, Immediacy, Variety, Reciprocity, Audience, Asymmetry, and multiple level of interactivity with various sources. Now I have shorted and combined a few of Howard's reasons, but the two items that really struck a cord with me were the Immediacy and the Reciprocity.