Using Screen Savers for Promotion and Profit

[Tags: interactive pr, pr, SEO]. Reading a student's piece on giveaways has prompted me to search for online resources about them. Here's one, about screensavers; You might also check out 10 Reasons Why Screensavers Boost Marketing Results (registration required), while if you want to convert Flash movie to a screensaver you can do so with this or this kit.

What can we learn from Aleksey

[Tags: interactive pr, pr, viral marketing, SEO]. The latest victim of the unforgiving glare of YouTube is Yale student and self-proclaimed "CEO and professional athlete" Aleksey Vayner, who created a 6 minute video for a job application to a bank (read more here). The video has found its way onto YouTube, where its self-delusional and allegedly fallacious claims (the 140mph serve; the skiing qualifiers; and 'lifting' enormous weights albeit with three other men 'helping') have produced much amusement, and email-forwarding.

A savvy marketeer would rush out a parody (if the original isn't beyond parody); a savvier one will figure out the qualities that have made this so popular online.

Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) releases Marketer & Agency Guide to Email Deliverability

[Tags: interactive pr, pr, email marketing]. The IAB has released what looks like a very useful document in the Marketer & Agency Guide to Email Deliverability. Their site claims:

"This document reviews the definition of email deliverability, provides a perspective on how it has changed, and discusses the impact it has on marketers. [It] addresses the critical issues of how to measure, monitor and resolve deliverability issues, enabling agencies and marketers to increase the overall effectiveness of their email marketing efforts.

"Deliverability challenges can cause email messages to be placed in a Junk Mail folder, to be discarded before the recipient ever sees them or to include disabled links and/or images. More than 20%* of legitimate marketing messages are incorrectly identified as spam by server and client level spam filtering. The result for marketers is lower open rates, lower click-through rates, lower conversions, and lower revenues."

The Marketer & Agency Guide to Email Deliverability is available on the IAB website at: www.iab.net/emaildeliverability (PDF).

Pro-Wal-Mart Travel Blog Screeches To A Halt

[Tags: interactive pr, pr, blogging]. Online Media Daily reports on some phony blogging tactics:

"A pro-Wal-Mart blog called "Wal-Marting Across America," ostensibly launched by a pair of average Americans chronicling their cross-country travels in an RV and lodging in Wal-Mart parking lots, has been reduced to a farewell entry. One of its two contributors was revealed to be Jim Thresher, a staff photographer for The Washington Post.

"The blog, launched Sept. 27, was profiled in this week's issue of BusinessWeek, which exposed the site as a promotional tactic engineered by Working Families for Wal-Mart (WFWM), an organization launched by Wal-Mart's public relations firm Edelman. WFWM paid for the RV and all travel expenses, rerouted the trip's original plan, and plastered a logo on the RV's side. Although the blog featured a link to WFWM, it did not identify the organization as a paid sponsor."

How To Win Links & Influence Engines

[Tags: interactive pr, pr, SEO]. Here's a useful article from the Web Marketing Blog that covers strategies for getting links to your site and building your ranking on search engines. Sample quote:

"You will need to continue building links down the road to insure that the search engines continue to be influenced by how people have linked to you in the past and kept those links in place and also how new people are finding your site helpful and relevant. If the engines see a sudden spurt in link growth and then see that growth stop you are not likely to have a strong ranking indefinitely in any but the lowest competition sectors."

Search Engine Preparation Tool

[Tags: interactive pr, pr, SEO]. This is one of the best SEO tools I've seen in months: Search Engine Preparation Tool. Enter your webpage address and the keyword you want to optimise it for (i.e. the search term you want your site to come high up for), and it will tell you where you're going right - and wrong.