Just a short post to mention 3 conference sessions I'll be giving in Feb and an announcement about a new copywriting training course from my colleague Jonathan Gabay. If you're attending either of the events it would be great to see you - do collar me and say 'Hi' if you get a chance - it's always good to meet people 'In Real World'. If not, I'll be posting the presentations here and at my Slideshare at the end of Feb - see all Dave's Digital Marketing presentations on Slideshare. The talks are:

Search Engine Strategies

Wed 17th Feb 2PM - Introduction to Paid Search Marketing

Technology for Marketing

Tues 23rd Feb - Keeping Your Audience Engaged integrating Email marketing and Social Media Marketing Wed 24th Feb - Keynote: Optimising Your Digital Marketing Mix

Copywriting training course: March 2010

I'm also pleased to tell you about this new course on copywriting from Jonathan Gabay who…

I'm always surprised by the popularity of tactical predictions for digital marketing at the start of the year. But I shouldn't be, one of the most common questions I get asked through the year 'is Dave, what's the next big thing, what's new in digital, what should I be thinking about?' As always, I've been keeping an eye on what the specialists are saying and I have written a roundup of most useful predictions on digital marketing tactics that are close to my heart like SEO, Social marketing, Email marketing and analytics. My own predictions aren't the run-of-the-mill predictions of innovations, rather they're about what the most savvy digital marketers get already, but others maybe don't because they're stuck in trad media thinking or it's so difficult to change the way their marketing is managed and resourced. So here are my recommendations for…

Well, it's near the end of January, so time for a predictions roundup. This time I'm separating the tactics from the strategy and I will post soon on my predictions and recommendations for approaches to digital marketing strategy. I've grouped the trends / predictions in these 4 tactics areas: 1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 2. Web Analytics / Website design 3. Email marketing 4. Social media marketing I know that many specialist agency and client-side digital marketers focus on the individual tactics that matter most to success for most companies in online marketing. These key tactics are SEO, Social, Email marketing and Analytics, so here's a round-up of the most popular posts in each of these categories. In my commentary, I've also picked out what I think really matters most or is a significant new trend in 2010 limiting myself to two posts from the best known commentators in each area.

2010 Search Engine Optimization predictions

1.…

Just read an interesting post on Ecommerce strategy over on Econsultancy from Matt Curry who runs the Wiltshire Farm Foods website amongst other things. He's discussing a new year review to prioritise the activities to improve performance and is using a useful 'divide and conquer' framework to think through the factors which drive performance of an Ecommerce site and how you measure them. The diagram he uses reminds me of this diagram that I have in my Ebusiness and Ecommerce Management book taken (with permission) from Ashley Friedlein's 2003 but still relevant book (see end of post for reference). I think Ashley's diagram is stronger since it not only looks at referrers but splits out first time and repeat visitor types. Here's the diagram:

Matt's diagram is a good way to look at all the factors, but Ashley's works back one…

Great to be at the sixth year of this Econsultancy event - I was there at the start. speaking at the first couple of events, but today speakers are exclusively client-side experiences which is fine by me, I can relax. As always the talks are structured around the famous Econsultancy Wheel which is a good model for developing a digital strategy:

Customer acquisition session

ACQUIRE 1: Social media, viral marketing, creativity... Andy Hobsbawm and James Alexander, Founders, Green Thing Great description of developing business. From a digital perspective, my takeaway was developing a social media distribution strategy, i.e. 1. Post blog post or offer on site. 2. Syndicate to primary networks manually so personal, e.g. Facebook, Twitter 3. Automate distribution to less popular social networks and popular video sites where relevant  via Tube Mogul ACQUIRE 2 : Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development, Telegraph Media Group Julian's angle was…

Since digital marketing is so well established, integrated into the marketing activities of most companies today, it is inevitable that we will question. What's next? "What's the next big thing" is the question I'm asked most often. You may have noticed the recent comment pieces on post-digital marketing in New Media Age such as that by Mark Cridge and Mark Walley which proclaim we are in a "post-digital" world since digital has become a mainstream activity of traditional agencies. I side with Michael Nutley of NMA who argues that the danger in a post-digital mindset is that digital is just treated as another channel and it's not placed at the core of thinking and it's unique attributes exploited. Many succesful campaigns show the need for specialists in social media, search and mobile marketing for instance.

Recommended post-digital world presentation

The excellent presentation/book I have embedded below on the post-digital concept by…

I announced the publication of the 4th edition of my Ebusiness and Ecommerce management book via Twitter recently and a couple of people asked me what was new. Fair question! So, here from the preface is a chapter-by-chapter summary list. [amazon-product]0273719602[/amazon-product] [amazon-product region="us"]0273719602[/amazon-product] If you're not familiar with the book, I have also included this figure which provides a framework for managing resources needed for sell-side E-commerce in a large organisation. It gives an idea of most the ebusiness management issues that I tackle in the book. OK, so on to the changes. The chapter structure of previous editions has been retained, but many other changes have been incorporated based on lecturer and student feedback. There are two main new features. First, new case studies in boxes "Real-world E-business experiences - The E-consultancy interview" are introduced at the start of most chapters. These are interviews with…

ThinkVisibility is a refreshing change from the corporate SEO conferences like Search Engine Strategies and SMX.

I have added a short summary for each talk I attended and have now embedded the presentations. The best ones to watch out for are:

2. Chris Garrett - AdAge Top 150 Blogger on Blogging for SEO 6. Tom Critchlow of Distilled on Reputation Management 7. Patrick Altoft of Blogstorm on Link-building Joanna Butler on Advanced Analytics Moving to Mobile: Simple Strategies for SMEs Avoiding Common Accessibility Mistakes

Kudos to Dom Hodgson for putting this event on in Leeds to attract the active SEOs / digital marketers in the North of England. I went to Uni in Leeds, so it was nice to go back and nicely laid back since it was Saturday (although getting up was a struggle).

OK, here's the tips I picked up:

1. Tim Nash - Link-building / Info architecture specialist on understanding link equity

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This Subdomain vs subfolder issue is one of many decisions on business blogging for companies deciding on setting up a blog. If you get the decision wrong you may not take advantage of the authority of your existing domain and so your blog won't attract much traffic initially. I've recently setup a new Wordpress blog to replace my legacy blog, so I thought I'd share my experiences in case anyone passes this way. Initially I set it up on a subdomain http://blog.davechaffey.com. I pointed all my run-of-site nav links at this sub-domain. I think I felt that the longer-term benefits of being on a sub-domain and pointing back to the main site might give some SEO benefits. I used this earlier discussion on Subdomains vs subfolders for SEO to inform my decision. There's clearly no right or wrong answer. After a week it was in the index, but not featuring for any 3-4…

Google was 10 in September and produced in this new timeline - useful for case studies Google launched its Chrome browser - read Google Chrome marketing implications A major change to Quality Score will roll out in early October. The main changes are: Keywords no longer marked inactive for search - so keywords which previously didn't trigger ads are more likely to trigger ads (although these have a low quality score) and this could increase competition "Minimum bids" will be replaced by "First-page bids" - showing the minimum needed for the ad to appear on the first page (as an exact match). Quality score calculated dynamically so maybe more opportunity for ad to appear in certain situations on the content network and when targeting locally Read more details on Changes to Google Quality Score and a more recent posting here.…