Required Reading for Digital Marketing Professionals (Blogs)
One thing I love about working in the marketing world is that there’s never a shortage of things to learn or a shortage of content to learn from. The real difficulty comes from figuring out the useful stuff, from the not-so-useful stuff. With a bajillion blogs out there, which ones are a must-add to your Google Reader?
Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik – You cannot work in online marketing without understanding Web Analytics. Avinash, the king of all analysis ninjas, writes what I consider the most practical blog in the world of digital marketing. Whether you specialize in email marketing or social media or search (or all of them), Avinash explains how to set up web analytics, create reports that are actually useful (yes, “visitors” to your website & “pageviews” are actually useless metrics, reporting squirrels), how to figure out which KPIs matter to your business & the metrics with which to measure success. So for example, if you do “social media” stuff for your job, and one of your strategies is to “engage with influencers,” and you’ve managed to get your webinar mentioned in a few blogs, you’d probably want to know which of those blogs was successful in driving not just traffic, but conversions. You can do that easily if you’ve properly set up your tracking & goals, and next time, you’ll know which bloggers to reach out to again. Also, you will never again report numbers in aggregate & you will fall asleep thinking about segmenting data.
Web Strategist by Jeremiah Owyang – Jeremiah is an industry analyst and according to his blog, he strives to “deliver insight on disruptive technologies and their impact on how companies communicate with their customers.” This is a great blog for anyone looking for research and insight into the digital marketing industry. He mostly writes about social media. I found some of the research he conducted particularly useful when I was helping my company develop a corporate social media strategy (see: How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets) or when I was evaluating social media management systems (see: The State and Future of the Social Media Management Space) I like reading research about the industry, because it provides benchmarks for my own work
The SEOmoz Blog – Just like you can’t work in online marketing without understanding web analytics, you REALLY cannot work in online marketing without understanding search engines, how to optimize your website for quality search traffic, etc. SEOmoz provides practical information (e.g. “how-to” not just “what-to-do”) for search marketing pros. One of my favorite things about Rand Fishkin and his team at SEOmoz is that they conduct experiments and tests ALL THE TIME. We all know that Google’s algorithm is top secret, but thanks to SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey results, we have a pretty good idea of what the Google bots like to crawl and spit up in the SERPs. Also, did you know that social media impacts search?
I am also in the process of creating a book list, which will come out at the end of the year, since I still have a few books that I started but have not finished reading.
Add your favorite blogs or websites in the comments below.
