Skip to main content

The TruthLaidBear Comes Out of Hiding


If you're not familiar with The Truth Laid Bear, it's a kind of cool blog tracking site that's been for the past three years by the eponymous N.Z. Bear (no one knows what "N.Z." stands for except that it's not "New Zealand"). Today, the Bear came out publicly. Here's the bulk of his message:
    Folks:

    I hope you’ll forgive a brief commercial interruption. After five+ years as a pseudonymous ursine fellow online, the time has come for me to step out from behind the curtain.

    Hi ! My name is Rob Neppell. You may know me from such websites as The Truth Laid Bear and Porkbusters. I’m not actually a bear, but I play one on the Internet.

    The occasion? I am now ready to publicly announce the real "big thing" I've been hinting at for some time: TTLB is now part of my new company: Kithbridge, Inc.
    I’ve described Kithbridge as follows:

      Kithbridge, Inc. was launched as an evolution of one of the blogosphere's original and most successful blog-tracking sites, The Truth Laid Bear. While The Truth Laid Bear provides a portal and blog search engine for individual bloggers and blog-readers, Kithbridge provides customized technology, services, and strategies for businesses, political campaigns, nonprofits, and other organizations which seek to fully engage with the growing and dynamic world of the blogosphere and new media.

    I’m pleased to be working with a small group of great clients who have come on board already, and am now ready to open the doors and invite more on in.
So I checked out Kithbridge. "Innovative and effective strategies bring the power of blogs and new media to your organization"? The company sounds like a bit of an indirect competitor to me (or perhaps a future employer? One never knows.), though Kithbridge appears to be targeting the political market. The company has assembled an interesting package of offerings:

  • Blog tracking: while there are other ways to do this (Google Alerts for example), The Truth Laid Bear has some nice graphical tools that Kithbridge will be capitalizing on, which probably makes this feature worthwhile for organizations or individuals who garner a lot of blog coverage.

  • Custom Blog Feeds: "allow(s) clients to incorporate relevant blog posts seamlessly into their own web pages"—interesting, but it isn't clear what technology they are using for this. There are two ways to incorporate blog feeds into a website (that I'm aware of; there may be others): Javascript or PHP. Javascript is much easier from an administrative standpoint, but the feed content is invisible to search engines, so this method provides no SEO benefit. PHP is trickier but more search engine friendly, so it's what I use to post blog feeds and news feeds on WebMarketCentral.

  • Strategic Consulting: here are their questions, with my commentary.
    * Should my website include a blog?

    Probably not, but there are many other ways to use blogs for promotion. I'll address this topic in a near-future post.

    * How do I find out when bloggers are writing about my organization?

    Again, Google Alerts, Technorati...or Kithbridge.

    * How can I use new media to increase visibility of my company?

    Blogger relations, social media outreach and interactive PR for starters.

    * Who are the bloggers I should be reaching out to—and who are the ones I need to worry about?

    This is tricky and tedious. If Kithbridge can automate this process, they've definitely got something.

    * How can I get bloggers “on my side” to promote my products, services, or cause?

    Again, blogger outreach through interactive PR.

I'm a fan of the TruthLaidBear site and wish the now-public Mr. Neppell and his colleagues the best of success with Kithbridge.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Comments

All Time Greats

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Google AdWords and PPC

MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing strategy or social media tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! The Pure Unfettered Power of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and PPC Campaigns Just like optimizing your site to rank for keywords, you can use our online marketing tips to pay to run advertisements on Google so that your business is shown on the first page of search engine results. Ranking this way is instantaneous whereas SEO (Search Engine Optimizati...

How to Use SEO: Leverage SEO To Be Found Online and Boost Your Online Marketing

All businesses that want to attract customers online, no matter the business size or age, have few options other than Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO In The Box™ by Results Driven Marketing®, LLC There are roughly 1.8 billion websites online, and basic SEO allows Google to find and index or catalog your webpages.  After that, Google serves you up to searchers in the organic section.  The question remains: where they list your site, on page one or page 22 or further back? SEO controls your positioning. Do you want to be found online or not? If your business is online or you want your product or service to be found online, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must, and knowing how to use SEO to leverage the power of the internet is vital. Arguably, an effective SEO strategy gets you on the organic results section of the search engine results pages (SERP). Organic traffic is highly valuable and requires high-quality SEO. But even busines...

Top-Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Advertisements That Make Sense

MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource ! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper DM advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective Digital Marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top notch-digital marketing tip! Advertisement Congruence If your business is running ads this is one of our most important online marketing tips! Ad congruence is when your ads and landing pages look alike or have the same message. Have you ever clicked on an ad and been taken to a page that looked nothing like the ad? When your ads look like the web pages they lead to, customers will feel like they are in ...

5 Painfully Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid For Better Results

Every company wants their website to show up well in search engines, and their marketing teams understand the importance of search engine optimization. And after the thousands of articles and blog posts written about search engine optimization , SEO is no longer the black art it once was. It's still a blend of art and science, but the basics should be well understood at this point by web marketers and designers. To their credit, many have integrated this basic knowledge. Yet there are still a surprising number of sites that violate some of the most basic principles of SEO, and pay a penalty in poor search position. Here are a few still-common mistakes that are easy to avoid. Header Tag Abuse: Although header tags have declined somewhat in SEO importance , they still have somewhat of an impact on rankings—and they are an easy thing to get right. Sites that use words and phrases like "Overview," "About Us" and "Our Services" in their h1, h2 and h3 h...

Fishing for B2B leads? Choose the right bait.

Fishermen (fisherpeople?) choose their bait based on the type and quantity of fish they hope to catch. On the lakes of Minnesota, worms and small leeches are great for catching sunfish, and if find a good spot, you can catch a lot of them in a short time. However, it's likely that you'll also end up throwing many of them back because they're too small to be "keepers." Bait such as sucker minnows or spinner lures will attract larger, more exciting prey like northern pike. These larger fish are more elusive, so you likely won't end up catching many, but each one will be larger and more fun to catch than a small panfish. The same principle holds true in b2b lead generation. Different types of b2b lead generation programs can be used to draw visitors to your landing page, but once there, your incentive for response is the bait that determines the quality and quantity of leads you'll "catch." The greater the involvement you require of respondents,...

What is CRO and How Can It Skyrocket Your Conversion Rates? Expert Digital Marketing Strategies Revealed

‍ Image Source: FreeImages‍ ## Introduction to CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) In the world of digital marketing, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a crucial strategy that can significantly impact your business's success. CRO focuses on improving the percentage of website visitors who take desirable actions, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter. By optimizing your conversion rates, you can maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your digital marketing efforts. Why CRO is important for your business CRO is important for your business because it can directly impact your bottom line. By increasing your conversion rates, you can generate more leads, increase sales, and ultimately drive revenue growth. Instead of solely focusing on driving more traffic to your website, CRO enables you to make the most of your existing traffic by ensuring that a higher percentage of visitors convert into customers. In addition to boosting your revenue, C...

The Wrong Way to Build External Links for SEO

Anyone who's worked on search engine optimization (SEO) for any length of time understands the importance of building relevant external links to a website. But whether you do choose to SEO internally, outsource it domestically, or offshore the effort, it's important to get this process right. If you're doing it internally, follow established best practices for this effort (including the information below). If you outsource your SEO, ask your vendor exactly how they perform their SEO work. I frequently receive reciprocal link requests for WebMarketCentral.com . Some of the requests are well-written, some inelegant, some spammy. But I recently received the following message, which was among the worst I had ever seen: Subject: Link exchange Dear Webmaster, My name is (name), and I run the web sites.: http://www.clickatest.co.uk/(PR>2) http://www.clickajob.co.uk/(PR>3) http://www.freshpromotion.com/ I recently found your site and am very interested in exchanging links. Y...

Email Campaign, Newsletter and Banner Ad Click-Through Rates (CTR)

When planning online advertising and email promotion budgets, it's critical to calculate the likely ROI upfront whenever possible, as well as to establish campaign benchmarks. The first step is understanding the average and likely range of CTRs for various programs. The growth in online advertising, the proliferation of enewsletters, the emergence of new forms of information delivery such as RSS and the emergence of social media sites have all affected CTR, so planning based on current data is crucial. It can be challenging to find current statistics, but based on several studies, these are typical CTR ranges for email newsletter ads, email campaigns (blasts or internally-produced enewsletters), and banner ads. Email newsletter advertisements Open rates range from 28-40%, with an average of about 33%—meaning that roughly one-third of the subscriber base is likely to see your ad. The Advertising Is Good For You blog tracks these statistics from DoubleClick . The average CT...