Best of 2007: Amusing and Creative Marketing Stuff

Sell your soul on eBay. Buy trash at Target. "404 Error" pages that are actually entertaining. A bedtime story about search engines. A rap about link building. What's going on here?

It's the final—and best—installment of WebMarketCentral's Best of 2007 series. Here are some of the most humorous, creative, and just plain odd, yet strangely relevant to interactive marketing, blog posts and articles from 2007. I hope you have as much fun reading these as I had writing about them!

A Bedtime Story (or The Future of Search) by Alt Search Engines

The delightful story of a grandfather and his amazingly-tuned-in-to-search grandson talking about the "future" of search engines, when they will be able to show a virtually unlimited number of results on a single page (NoFoodHere), display search results as two-dimensional maps (KartOO), search within a tag cloud (Quintura), and do other cool things.

Hitchhikers Guide to Linkless SEO by SEOish

How to improve your Google PageRank, create link bait, use social media optimization, and other SEO advice presented as Douglas Adams would have written it, if he were an SEO guy. A must-read for fans of the Hitchhiker's Guide who also need to drive web traffic.

404 Pages - Funny, Geeky, Disturbing by Squareoak

404 error pages don't have to bland. Here are a collection of some of the most creative and imaginative ways to tell site visitors they've mistyped a URL or reached a page that no longer exists on your site. Want even more interesting ideas for your 404 error page? Smashing Magazine provides an extended collection.

The GoogleBalt's Great American Road Trip: Five Street-View Optimization Tips by MediaPost Search Insider

With Google driving the country gathering scenes for its Street View maps, Rob Garner outlines five things you may want to do (e.g., dress for success, keep your blinds closed) and not do (grow pot on your windowsill) lest the Googlebalt's cameras snap you.

Does Sex Sell? by The Origin of Brands Blog

Sure it does, says best-selling author Laura Ries in this entertaining and insightful blog post, for products like " perfume, condoms or erectile dysfunction drugs," but...hamburgers?!

Behind the Scenes of Branding by Marketing Genius from Maple Creative

Skip Lineberg provides a rare glimpse inside the branding discussions at a major advertising agency, as the assembled marketing team works through crucial concepts such as a product's Brandapalooza Index and Brangelina Factor.

The 6 Most Overhyped Technologies by Cracked

Writer Chris Bucholz reviews six technologies that some people decided were so cool they had to be developed and hyped without wasting time on silly things like market research, including eBooks and the Internet on your TV.

Funny Adwords Contest: Round 2 by Google Analytics Blog

Mark Curtis supplies a very funny yet cautionary post on the dangers of using variable keyword insertion in Google and Yahoo SEM ads.

Link Rap w/da Moserious by The Link Spiel

No one is sure why we really needed this, but Moserious does a rap here about link building. So bad it's actually kind of good.

The complete Best of 2007 series:

Best of 2007: SEO Analysis Tools
Best of 2007: SEO Keyword Research Tools
Best of 2007: News Articles on Social Media Marketing
Best of 2007: Blog Posts on Social Media Marketing
Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEM
Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on Google AdWords
Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEO (Part 1)
Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEO (Part 2)
Best of 2007: Website Design
Best of 2007: Blogging for Business
Best of 2007: Marketing Research
Best of 2007: Interactive PR
Best of 2007: SEO Copywriting
Best of 2007: Strategy and Branding
Best of 2007: Web Analytics
Best of 2007: Web 2.0 Sites
Best of 2007: Cool Online Tools
Best of 2007: Miscellaneous Marketing Stuff
Best of 2007: Amusing and Creative Marketing Stuff

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Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

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All Time Greats

Getting More Out of Each Click with "Post-Click Marketing"

With the economy now officially in a recession (as if we didn't know that), marketers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. On the interactive marketing side, few marketers will get budget increases enabling them to drive more clicks. The challenge, then, is to maximize marketing productivity—to get more leads out of the same number of clicks. This is the first of two posts that will look at how to improve conversion rates to get more value from each click. One answer to this challenge is provided by "post-click marketing," a.k.a. lead automation management vendors. While the specifics of each service vary, all of them essentially: automate the process of extracting visitor IP information from your log files; match the IP address to an organization; filter out ISPs; and map the company name to one or more external databases to provide additional information (company size, industry, key contacts etc.). The better services also use geo-location filte...

Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEM

Search engine marketing (SEM) is one of the fastest-growing categories in all of advertising, because it is both measurable and logical: present your ads when people are searching for what you're selling. A well-crafted search marketing program can provide not only broad brand exposure at a very reasonable cost (with CPMs of $10 or less), but also high-ROI lead generation. As with any other type of advertising, however, a poorly-designed campaign will be a disappointing waste of money. In addition to best practices in search engine marketing , the following articles and blog posts were among the best of 2007 at providing helpful guidance for creating and managing effective search marketing programs. Five Common Paid Search Mistakes That Can Sink Your Campaign by Search Engine Guide Blogger Jennifer Laycock explains how common mistakes such as "ego bidding," writing a single ad for all keywords, and directing all of your traffic to a single landing page can limit the res...

Marketing Automation: Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight

This content has been moved to Marketing Automation: Like Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles del.icio.us tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles icerocket tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

The 8 Layers of a B2B Web Marketing Plan

One way to think about designing a B2B technology web marketing plan is as a series of layers, like an onion. At the core is SEO—simply making your website "findable" through organic search to buyers who are looking for what you offer. Working out from the center are concentric layers of additional investment and sophistication. Small companies and start-ups with modest budgets will focus most of their efforts on the inner layers or rings, which are primarily designed for lead generation. As the company and its marketing budget grow, efforts can be expanded to the outer layers, which are aimed more at branding but support lead generation efforts. Ideally, a company eventually reaches the outer layer where pure branding activities (such as print advertising) help to maximize the effectiveness of lead generation programs (such as SEM) near the center of the circle. This diagram shows how different types of web marketing programs can be prioritized in order to maximize the retur...

Best of 2008: Social Media Optimization, Part 2

This content has been moved to Best of 2008: Social Media Marketing on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foertsch Kate Morris TopRank Online Marketing Blog Jessica Cameron-Ruud Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch CircleUp Traffic Travis del.icio.us tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foertsch Kate Morris TopRank Online Marketing Blog Jessica Cameron-Ruud Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch CircleUp Traffic Travis icerocket tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foe...

Marketo Releases Marketo Lead Management 3.0

Marketing automation software vendor Marketo today announced the launch of its Marketo Lead Management 3.0 software suite. With more than 200 new features, the release is the most significant since the product's initial launch in early 2008. Promising deeper support for a "conversational model of marketing," the new release provides 75 user interface enhancements as well as new features including: More fine-grained control over segmentation, targeting, and triggering; "Progressive profiling" on forms (i.e. additional profile is requested as a prospect moves through an interactive process); Native integration with Salesforce.com ; Web visitor profiling; and Automated duplicate lead removal. Pricing starts at $1,500 per month and the company now has more than 150 midmarket and enterprise customers. Marketo competes with products such as Eloqua , Silverpop Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz), and Manticore in the marketing automation / demand generation sp...

The Best Web Marketing of 2008

Which types of online advertising provide the highest ROI? Who's really clicking on your PPC ads? Why do PPC costs keep rising? How can you convert more clickers into buyers? Are Web 2.0 technologies now mainstream? Learn these answers and more from this collection of blog posts and articles, some of the best reporting on online research topics so far this year. Online Marketers See High ROI from SEO by Marketing Pilgrim Blogger, SEO expert and PR pro Janet Meiners reports on an MarketingSherpa study detailing the growth in paid search and organic search engine optimization. Read her post to discover which types of online advertising get a thumbs up—and which are losing favor with interactive marketers. Who's really clicking? by iMedia Connection Sandeep Krishnamurthy , Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce at the University of Washington, paints a bleak picture of the future of PPC advertising—then gets blasted for it in the Comments by some fairly high-profile...

SEO Link Building of 2008

Unless you are optimizing only for some extremely niche keywords, off-page optimization—building links from other websites to yours—is a critical and significant factor for SEO success. The blog posts cited here, some of the best of 2008 on the topic of link building, provide guidance on how and where to obtain valuable external links. They also offer advice on ineffective tactics and "bad neighborhoods" to avoid. Local Search Ranking Presentation - SMX LoMo 2008 by Website Promotion Is Not Voodoo Will Scott , president of Search Influence, shares his presentation from the San Francisco for SMX Local Mobile event. His deck actually covers the organic search marketinging basics—keywords, content and links. But his section on "where to get links" is particularly helpful for anyone seeking to optimize local search results. 8 Directory Submission Red Flags by Small Business Search Marketing Matt McGee offers advice on what to avoid when obtaining links throu...

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