I began to notice that my blog comments were not posting on the blogs that I visited.

I went through a series of excuses in my mind after each failure to post my finely crafted comment.  I thought;

• What a lame website
• Did I click cancel instead of submit?
• Is CoComment “doing something” here?
• Is one of my 40+ FIrefox plugins playing tricks on me?
• Wait a minute something is going on here

Maybe I am being viewed as a low life spammer.

Where is the trouble?

I knew that quite a few of the recent blogs I visited were WordPress blogs, so I focused there.  I thought a Blogger blog gave the same trouble, but wasn’t sure.

Contacting WordPress Blog Owners

I began contacting blog owners vie email, twitter or whatever I could find.  All replied.  But the puzzle wasn’t becoming clearer to me. Mostly I just received confirmation that they saw no comment.

A friend suggested that maybe Akismet was invovled.  Hmmm.  Akismet is the blog spam solution that is provided in WordPress.  The parent company of WordPress and Akismet is Automattic.

Akismet could be working with only the limited set of information that I as a commenter provided, such as;

1. My local IP address
2. My email address
3. My website address
4. My name
5. My comment

To test my theory and reduce the number of factors I left two comments on www.digiphile.com.  The first comment was made with my customary information.  The second was made with a diffferent name, website, email and comment.

The first comment was not published and the second was published right away. I asked Alex to see if the first comment was marked as spam and it was. He was kind enough to publish both comments.

This proved that it was not the IP address that was being caught by Akismet.

The Solution

I visited www.akismet.com and poked around a bit until I landed on their Contact page, which was very revealing.

The Contact page has a paragraph explaining why the form does not use Akismet.  The reason is that inhocent people contact them about being caught and marked as spam by Akismet.  If Akismet was running on the form, those messages would not get through resulting in very poor customer service.

This was encouraging. I left a short message explaining my plight.  The following day I received a message from Akismet support apologizing for the problem and telling me that the problem is now fixed. Yippee.

Contact Akismet Support

If your blog comments are not posting, check and see if they are being marked as spam by Akismet.  If they are, just fill out this form http://akismet.com/contact/ and if you are inhocent you will get a pleasant reply in short order. Mine was within 24 hours.

Have your comments been disappearing on you?

What do you see in the icon? Think about it before reading on and please offer your thoughts in the comments below.

There are at least six answers that have been mentioned and a handful of representations are intentional.

1. A spider web
2. Partners – the people shoulder to shoulder in a circle
3. Navigation wheel of a ship – remember Netscape Navigator browser
4. A cross – the dark blue lines
5. Diversity – the figures of alternating color
6. A site – as in cross hairs providing focus toward the center

Others have seen a show flake, jumbo jets in a circle ready for take-off and people.

The inaugural Inbound Marketing Summit 2008 provided two outstanding keynote presentations and three tracks of seminars throughout the day in Cambridge.

I was thrilled to be invited as a guest, finding myself tagged as a member of the media. I felt a little bit anxious with feelings of obligation, but an honest reflection of the day is all that anyone can really expect.

This post brings a very unlikely combination of perspectives. Not only am I familiar with the subjects being presented and a few of the presenters, but I worked in hotels for years and am taking the role of speaker at my first hour long presentation to a large audience in early October.

Logistics

Parking in Cambridge is never easy. Parking at this event was very easy because it was in the same building.  The cost was $22 for the day. I never left the building for about 11 hours.

The event space was on the second floor.  The sign in desk was obvious and had ample room to register attendees.  The schwag bag contained a program for the day and two books, Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae, and David Meerman Scott’s New New Rules of Marketing & PR.  I had to chuckle because they are both books that I already own.

Attendees were required to walk through an area serving another convention which was confusing at first, but I think everybody figured it out quickly enough.  The hotel provided staff to assist in way-finding.

The first speaker was scheduled for 8:15 am.  However, the doors remained closed until 8:15 or maybe a minute or two later.  I still wonder why folks were not invited in before this time.

The reception area after the event was long and narrow with sun exposed glass walls.  The afternoon sun likely keeps this space warm even in the dead of winter.  A couple of the rooms were warm, but it could have just been me.

Presenters

It is an entirely different perspective when you are friends with hosts and presenters and even their agents.  A big benefit of attending events is meeting new people and learning new concepts. I often struggle with the tension between seeing friends and wanting to visit with them and the hesitation most of us feel in meeting new people.  I ended up doing both, hanging with the crew and meeting some folks that were new.

Brian Halligan opened the morning with a thorough explanation of inbound marketing, including a helpful history of marketing that culminated with where things are going in the future. This led very naturally to the opening keynote speaker.

David Meerman Scott really set the table for the entire day.  His presentation, which at one point seemed to show slide number 98 was clear and informative.  I really should read his book now.

Seth Godin was of course entirely entertaining, colorful, energetic and relatively predictable.  This is not a presentation of ground breaking discoveries.

Both presenters did a fine job of engaging the audience, clearly making their points while subtly not letting us forget the title of their current or upcoming book titles.

The five other presenters that I joined covered a range of topics, including;

1. Website re-design
2. Optimizing landing pages
3. Social media and PR
4. Social media strategy
5. Viral video

My favorite, was the subject that I deal with on a daily basis, site building and SEO.  I liked it because of the challenging ideas; namely that changing design is usually retrogressive breaking more things that it fixes.

Selling custom design for years, it was hard to embrace initially, but the case made was solid.  Site owners think of design first.  They really should think of content first.

Search engines can see the text, but not the design.  Awesome content brings visitors by way of the search engines. And, yes, I have seen design challenged sites perform well for their owners.

There was one presentation that I wanted to leave three or four times, but felt glued to my seat.  The information density was too high, the voice was monotone and the room was warm and dim, and I was hungry.

I was surprised to meet speakers on Social Mediafolks that were “not sold” on Twitter. I offered them some food for thought after the presentation, which they seemed to welcome.

Next Year

The Inbound Marketing Summit is a well balanced mix of content and networking. The speakers were all accessible and willing to speak with attendees.  I found the attendees eager to learn and meet new people.

This is a strong component of the summit that will be very satisfying to future attendees.

I encourage practitioners and managers in PR, marketing, ecommerce, web design and social media and those that need these kinds of services to attend the Inbound Marketing Summit. For a one day event in packs a punch that can’t be beat.

If you want to learn more about this year’s presentations, slides are available here; http://www.inboundmarketingsummit.com/agenda/ From there you can visit the blog and video streams.  These will give you a very good idea of the quality content that was available.

I’d be remiss in not mentioning the primary sponsor HubSpot who not only offers an internet marketing blog, but also website grader and press release grader.

There is a lot of value that the HubSpot team is pushing out to small and medium sized businesses.  Start taking advantage of this by visiting thier website and attending next years Inbound Marketing Summit.

Search Marketing Standard magazine is arriving in my mail box. If you are interested in SEO you can subscribe now at a 15% discount. Enter this coupon code at checkout: “FRIEND15“.

What will you find inside Search Marketing Standard?

My latest issue includes articles on:

Google, Social Media, Linking, Analytics, WordPress optimization, AdWords, Flash, Social Media Marketing and an SEO event calendar. There is even a crossword puzzle.

Articles are authored by longtime experts and up and comers alike, including:

Eric Ward, Kim Krause Berg, Chris Boggs, Joost de Valk, Bryan Todd, Grant Crowell, Gord Hotchkiss and Cameron Olthuis.

The magazine publishes four issues per year, which is nice flow of information that will not overwhelm you. With this discount you have a great opportunity to develop and affirm your own Search Marketing skills and pocket some change as well.

Take the first step in subscribing to Search Marketing Standard magazine.
And remember to enter this coupon code at checkout: “FRIEND15“.

There is good reading here.

What’s your take on the Search Marketing Standard magazine?

Yesterday Mike Volpe over at HubSpot ran another great webinar, this one on Press Releases. I am impressed with how much focused content he provided. I learned a lot. Here are the points that I noted. I use PR, press release and news release pretty interchangeably here.

He began by establishing the benefit of a news release and provided some facts based on heat maps and comparing organic with pay-per-click (PPC) traffic from search engine result pages and on and off page search engine optimization (SEO).

• 75% of clicks come from organic results
• 25% of clicks come from pay-per-click ads

Apparently more highly educated folks use the organic listings more, while those with less education use PPC comparatively more.

• A Phd uses PPC only 1% of the time
• A high school educated visitor will use PPC 50% of the time

The next battery of stats were about on page and off page search engine optimization.

• 25% of SEO is on page – title, copy, H1,2,3 and meta data
• 75% of SEO is off page – links

Links to your web site were described as having three importance factors, from good to best.

• a link
• a link with the specific anchor text of your choice
• a link with the specific anchor text of your choice on a trusted web site

News Releases include links and are a great way to distribute them to trusted sites.

The overall goals for news releases are:

1. Build improved ranking for your site in the search engines
2. Increase your site’s find ability through distributed content
3. Gain press coverage

Content suggestions

• Make it interesting, about your industry
• Trends, survey data, case studies
• 300 to 1,000 words in length

Style tips

• Spell out abbreviations, it’s better for the search engines
• Type out full names more than once in a release, same reason

Key Word notes

• 1-2 key words per release is sufficient

Love Links

Text of the link, Anchor text of the link, Page title of web site linked to, and the the on page text should all use the same keywords. This shows relevance.

• Place your link in the first 250 words. Some services will truncate the article at that point.
• Include one link that is the full URL.
• Link to your properties, not to others so much
• Link to interior pages of your site that focus on the same subject.

Your Boiler Plate

This is the text about your company at the bottom of the release. It should be key word rich and include a few links.

Post the news release

• Post the release on your blog or site
• Submit it to your RSS feed
• Tag your release on social tag sites

Distribution of your press release

Choose a wire service that allows links with anchor text. If you need multimedia support, look for one that supports that.

Send your release to only one service, not many. Remember that you get what you pay for. Some agencies are free and others are expensive.

Distribution is offered by these services, among many more;

www.marketwire.com
www.prweb.com
www.prnewswire.com – Steve did not recommend using their regular service at all.

Frequency

Remember that the release is intended to reach prospects and not the media. Some may choose to send them out as often as four times per month. Consider your audience and competition before deciding when not send out a release. A bad time to send a release may be a time when there is also less competition, like at Christmas time.

Measure

Before and after review your and track your

• Google page rank
• key word ranking in the search engine results
• the number of links to your domain name
• review the quality of those that are linking to you
• review the anchor text of the inbound links to your site
• the number of visitors
• the number of leads you get or conversions (downloads, signups etc.)

Focus future PR efforts on the media that brings the best results.

Social Media News Release

www.shiftcomm.com has a template for social media news releases. Consider embracing social media and multimedia press releases.

www.pr-squared.com has further resources.

Add your press release to your Facebook news feed

Write a Press / News Release Today about

• A story around the founder
• Staff you are proud of
• Customer utilizing your produce service in a unique way
• Results of a survey or poll
• Awards
• Unique story angle on something familiar

Visit this link to see the entire presentation on in-bound marketing press releases. Mike remained on topic and provided a lot of value in this webinar. Since we are both in the Boston area, I look forward to thanking him in person one day.

What tips might you add to this? What have you found successful? Please leave a comment below and click the green button to share this post.

Here is my technorati profile URL

Technorati Profile

And MyBlogLog
Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

And Bloglines
ckey=”4ED64CEB”

Marketing Sherpa (Note: per MS policy this link is live only until September 18th) released a new study on the text used in email links for newsletters. Bottom line, people don’t read, so don’t give them a link to “Read more”. They won’t. Makes sense to me.

What click link words should you use?

Here were the differences in clickthroughs:

o “Click to continue”: 8.53%
o “Continue to article”: 3.3%
o “Read more”: (-)1.8%

As always, test in your industry for vocabulary that is appropriate. Test using more informative words, like words that relate to the topic.

IContact is the second largest provider of email newsletters. Constant Contact is first. I had a chance to speak with David Roth, Vice President of Business Development, some months ago about his company. (Back before I had a blog.)

IContact’s delivery rate is reported as 99.1%, which is very good. They send 93 million emails.

In addition to newsletters, they offer surveys, auto-responders and list segmentation.

A unique feature: They provide an RSS feed of your newslettter that posts them on their web site. The result is that folks searching the web may find your content on the IContact web site. There is a public newsletter archive available. David reports that 50,000 people come to the web site through non-competitive search terms – means they are not searching for IContact or newsletter services.

The company is based in Raleigh Durham and was incorporated in July of 2003. March 20 2004 was their commercial launch.

They do have an affiliate program, however there is no support for the affiliates.

I almost switched from being a Constant Contact business partner. The reason that I didn’t was the templates to get a newsletter put together fast are better at Constant Contact. I have found that the support at Constant Contact has been great.

The reason I considered switching was because of the additional featues of surveys, auto-responder and list segmentation. Constant Contact now offers surveys and has list segmentation. I am staying put. I think that the other reason is that I had lunch with Gail Goodman. The ties that bind.