I just read the greatest article on the Online Marketing Blog by TopRank (which I read religiously) about a keynote speech given at the Media Relations Summit by Mike Moran of IBM. The best idea from the article is that you can sip from the “web 2.0″ cup, you don’t have to drink from the fire hose. There’s a lot of new ideas out there and the whole marketing world has turned upside down, does that mean you have to put your entire business on hold and go obtain a doctorate in online marketing? No!

(It’s not that I don’t want the competition, I’m overwhelmed with business and would be very happy to share my workload.)

It’s just that you are already an expert at what YOU do. So Mike and I both recommend that you grab a single idea that intrigues you and look deeper into how you can use it. That will lead to the next step and the next in a nice, comfortable, organic fashion.

So continue to do what you do best, don’t worry about that which doesn’t excite you. If you like to write and are interested in blogging, go for it in a manner that suits your personality, work-style, comfort level and budget. Blogging just might lead you to some new ideas about viral marketing or social media networking. Or it might not.

Or if you dislike the idea of writing on a regular basis, maybe you’ve been using LinkedIn for a while now and are interested in finding out how to leverage that better.

Whatever it is, there’s a door out there for you to stumble through and you will naturally be led to the tools and techniques that will work best for you.

Along the way, be prepared to be wrong . . . a lot. So what? Just dive in and sort it out later. As Mike says, don’t over-analyze and close the door that’s open before you.

I liken this to what’s wrong in foreign language teaching in our country. We’re teaching kids who have already passed the best language acquisition stage how to speak another language and picking apart their grammar so that they can’t communicate an idea without getting a bad grade. Let them make mistakes, congratulate them for getting the idea across and learn the grammar by ear before you give them all the rules and mark up their progress with your red pen.

Internet Marketing, like learning a foreign language, can happen naturally. It doesn’t have to cramp your style!

Welcome aboard.

It is important for businesses developing content for their business site, or any article or post that plays a part in your on-line presence, that they first develop a long-term content development plan and a scalable structure.

For example, if you wanted to add a statistics page related to your industry but you haven’t gathered that data yet. You still need to launch your website without it, so you do two things:

• Plan a scalable structure - find no more than 7 main “categories” of information on your site. Let’s use an example that seems pretty flexible. Home | About | Products/Services | Portfolio | Contact | News. That seems like it would cover just about anything. A statistics page could fit quite nicely under News. It is also beneficial to consider how your blog “categories” relate to your site structure, there is a brilliant and powerful internal linking strategy in having a footer link on your site to each blog category, as well as blog links in the sidebar of your site navigation. There are other ways as well, this is just an example.

• Develop content for both Phase I and Phase II - Mention the importance of statistics, or better yet use a pretty dramatic and relevant statistic on your home page and product/services landing pages. Then, when you have the content page ready you can put in a hypertext link to it from those pages. This has an enormously beneficial effect because it is both enhancing the visitor experience as well as following Search Engine Optimization best practices. The theory is that a contextual link has a higher relevancy factor than a navigational or “link page” link, even for internal linking.

You will also, of course then add the full statistics page in the News section as well.

So if you get a content idea, either for your site or your blog, consider where it fits in your structure/categories and always consider internal linking best practices for full SEO benefit.

I love that I get an email from my website telling me every time someone links to one of my articles from their blog. I’ve spent so much time helping clients understand who and how people are linking to them. Sometimes, looking at Analytics, clients have been surprised at unsolicited links that have appeared just because they are putting the original content out there.

Taken directly from the WordPress Codex:

Pingbacks

Pingbacks were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with trackbacks. The official pingback documentation makes pingbacks sound an awful lot like trackbacks:

For example, Yvonne writes an interesting article on her Web log. Kathleen reads Yvonne’s article and comments about it, linking back to Yvonne’s original post. Using pingback, Kathleen’s software can automatically notify Yvonne that her post has been linked to, and Yvonne’s software can then include this information on her site.

There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.

Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).

1. Pingbacks support auto-discovery where the software automatically finds out the links in a post, and automatically tries to pingback those URLs, while trackbacks must be done manually by entering the trackback URL that the trackback should be sent to.
2. Pingbacks do not send any content.

The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:

• Person A posts something on his blog.
• Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.
• Person A’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

The pingback is generally displayed on Person A’s blog as simply a link to Person B’s post. In this way, all editorial control over posts rests exclusively with the individual authors (unlike the trackback excerpt, which can be edited by the trackback recipient). The automatic verification process introduces a level of authenticity, making it harder to fake a pingback.

Some feel that trackbacks are superior because readers of Person A’s blog can at least see some of what Person B has to say, and then decide if they want to read more (and therefore click over to Person B’s blog). Others feel that pingbacks are superior because they create a verifiable connection between posts.

Verifying Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Comments on blogs are often criticized as lacking authority, since anyone can post anything using any name they like: there’s no verification process to ensure that the person is who they claim to be. Trackbacks and Pingbacks both aim to provide some verification to blog commenting.

Ah, this bodes well!

One of our biggest challenges relocating to Oregon has been high speed connectivity. I miss my residential DSL! It screamed compared to my very expensive satellite connection, it was only $15/mo.

The bad news is that Oregon isn’t on Open Range Communications‘ (they won the contract - but who are they?) list of areas that will be affected. It does mean, I hope, that there is government acknoledgement of the importance of rural citizens to have broadband access similar to that available to our city denizens.

KizmeTech.com has plans to launch an on-line resource service that collects local reviews of Internet Service Providers so that people may make more informed decisions from those that are seen advertised. If you read this and have a review, please send it along as a comment, or via the Contact page of this site.

And Thanks in advance! As KizmeTech grows in popularity, content and page rank, the link love you get from providing a review will be well worth the few minutes of time. I will be developing a form specifically to collect these reviews shortly.