Online Marketing

Occasionally I'm lucky enough to connect to someone who shares a lot of similar interests (marketing, podcasting, entrepreneurship) for one of my interviews. For this podcast, I found just such a kindred soul in Marcus Couch, the Director of Online Marketing for Entrepreneur Media, the publishing company behind Entrepreneur.com, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Entrepreneur Press.

One of the fascinating challenges of facing marketers today is how to use technology to enable true personalized/1to1 communications. But in order to reach that advertising nirvana marketers are going to need customers and prospects to give up a lot of information repeatedly with only a vague promise of a better experience. Not exactly a great sales pitch!

I love new technologies as much as the next geek marketer but only if they improve the customer experience.

Recently, I chatted with Scott Madlener of the Performance Communications Group about their new ISAT technology. (It stands for Internet Secured Application Technology).

ISAT seems to have innovated on basic website technology and improved the customer experience at the same time by using an integrated approach. Perhaps it's not applicable in every instance but still worth exploring.

Check it out

Most blogs have a fairly small readership, usually a handful of friends, peers or family members. But there are the occasional standouts that achieve 1,000s of readers through some combination of hard work, luck and the right niche. TechCrunch's 300,000 plus is the common example. Recently, I was lucky enough to interview a sharp entrepreneur named Collis Ta'eed who took his new blog/community (FreelanceSwitch) from 0 to 4,000 RSS subscribers in under 30 days.

Forrester Research just released a new research study about email. The study found that email is now so ubiquitous that 97% of all consumers, and 94% of marketers are using email. Bottom line, if you're not thinking A LOT about email marketing, you should be. For this podcast, I chatted with an expert in the field, Chip House of ExactTarget.

Marketing with widgets is receiving a lot of attention these days. From MyBlogLog to Feedburner to Yahoo's Widget Gallery to Fox Interactive's new Spring Widgets Platform, every company is looking to use this new technology concept to add value for their users, market themselves on the cheap and build competitive advantage online.

Lead generation is one of the fastest-growing but often overlooked areas of online marketing. From the free iPod folks to the very targeted services of the company of my next interviewee, this is a strategy that you should understand and consider using. Gary Kreissman is the president and co-founder of Precision Prospects, a company that specializes in delivering qualified leads to financial and technology companies.

In my continuing thread of interviews with web analytics and web analysts, I connected with Jeff Cram of iSite Design. Jeff recently wrote an interesting article entitled Building a Website for Analytics and I wanted to pick his brain about this subject. We also talked about how rich media (Ajax, et al.) is changing page view-centered approach of web analytics and online marketing.

Enjoy!

Gerry McGovern, my 107th interviewee, has two huge factors going for him in life. The first is an uncanny knowledge of website content management and how to design powerful user experiences. The second is an accent that is ridiculously cool. I can't decide which I'm more jealous of.

Gerry was generous enough to share his knowledge about the long neck, how to design better web experiences, and more.

Enjoy!

Love it or hate it, email is here to stay. And as long as email is the killer app online, marketers will use it and so will our evil and distantly-related cousins, the spammers. For my 91st interview, I was lucky enough to get to talk with Des Cahill, CEO of Habeas, the "Email Trust Authority" company.

Des was nice enough to share his thoughts on the future of email, spam, feeds, online reputation and more.

Enjoy!