There's a post over on SlyMarketing blog today about the difficulty of getting press attention to your latest and greatest idea - particularly the product or service you might be marketing. The difficulty he identifies is that the local newspaper is focused on something else, namely soccer! what else and the specific local area.

This is an extreme example but encapsulates not so much the difficulty of how to get press attention but rather the opportunity it opens up. This is a traffic generation strategy much loved by Andrew Reynolds, one of the UKs leading direct mail marketers.

His advice is not to write a press release and ship it off to every journal under the sun. Rather to research the publications that are big in your niche, study the style of their articles and then write an article for them. Note I said an article, not a press release.

The editors of most niche publications are desperate for copy. Something, anything to fill those empty spaces that will attract readers because it is the reader numbers that attract the advertisers that pay their salaries.

If you deliver to them an attractive article about the niche in which both their publication and your product belong - and you just happen to major on your product as being newsworthy; and it is written in their house style and is the length they are comfortable with so it fits into their usual page layouts then it is quite possible they will print the article without even editing it.

And what did you put into your article? Why, your website address, the product name, your company name and contact details so that the readers of that publication will have no difficulty at all in finding your website or picking up the phone to order. All in a nice subtle way, but just make sure they are there.

So what's the secret? It's the research and tailoring the article to fit easily and neatly into the editors product. After all, what editor is going to complain if a contributor makes their life so easy?

If you don't K.now about K.nol yet then it's time to get with it.

Ask Google what a knol is (define: knol in your Google search bar) and Google tells you: "Knol is a project planned by Google for user-generated articles on topics ranging from "scientific concepts, to medical information, from …  http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol

- and as you can see it draws it's information from Wikipedia.

Apparently, Knol was announced in December 2007 and was opened in beta to the public on July 23 just 6 days ago, with a few hundred articles mostly in the health and medical field.

The Google view seems to be that it wants to build a source of knowledge as an alternative to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has it's own problems as anyone can edit the content much to the annoyance of many politicians who find their life stories being adulterated by their enemies. But it has built up a phenomenal reputation and body of knowledge. So to compete Google is going to have to pull all the stops out if it is to achieve comparable recognition.

In contrast to the peer review editing of Wikipedia, a Knol, the word Google has invented to describe their nuggets of knowledge (my phrase!) can only be edited by the author and should therefore maintain it's integrity.

But there lies the rub. What is to prevent people publishing rubbish? The wiki concept, in its pure form, applies peer review to content so that it is constantly improved. It's a shame that some people just can't stop themselves being vandals and corrupting the information

Since Know opened its doors there has been a storm of comment and no little criticism particularly in the SEO community. Why? Because there appears to be little difference between a knol and and article when used for promotional purposes in that if you are first to get an article/knol published in your subject area then Google is going to rank it and you are going to get recognition.

So the real question is whether Google was going to allow the ranking to develop naturally and according to it's normal algorithm or whether it was going to give it's latest baby something of a boost.

The evidence so far seems to be that Google is boosting knols up the search engine rankings above existing content. Evidence for this has been supplied by Aaron Wall, a highly respected SEO operator in a post at www.seobook.com

So it looks like there is going to be lots of argument probably for months to come as Google works to either justify it's approach or to modify it's algorithm so that it's own product is downgraded. Hardly likely, is it?

From the average marketers point of view there is only one thing to do. If writing up your content and calling it a knol rather than an article is going to get you high search engine rankings then get to it. Get your knol machine in gear and start writing knols.

One of the methods recommended to generate traffic to your website is to locate highly ranked blogs on your subject and make a Comment on a recent blog post. Naturally, you include a signature file after your post linked back to a page within your own site that is relevant to the subject.

This is an opportunity to obtain both one way links deep into your site for the SE spiders and also a doorway into your site for human traffic that is already interested in your subject matter.

While lapping up this sort of information from your teacher/mentor this traffic strategy sounds eminently sensible while at the same time rather difficult to pin down. How do you know this use of blog comments really works?

Well, here's the proof. I recently put up a new blog site. The subject is something of a hobby of mine rather than a project I was aggressively marketing and is in a very small niche market, in fact I don't think it's a market at all.

So my inspection of the weekly scheduled Google Analytics report that was sitting in my email In tray for a blog on which I was expecting little traffic anyway was quite cursory until the large percentage of referred traffic caught my eye.

By the way, if you are not using Google Analytics then you really should - especially when it is so easy to install on Wordpress blogs.

Drilling down into the report I found that most of the referred traffic was coming from a single inbound link and isolating that link in the report told me that it was a single, very cursory comment I had made on a high ranking blog.

The effect was to attract in excess of 100 visitors to my site that day and although the traffic diminished it has stabilized at around 15 unique visitors per day.

The great thing about this, other than the traffic, of course, is that I am using Google Reader to scan and monitor relevant RSS feeds to give me content and ideas for my site. So I had actually taken the news content from the high ranking site and put a little effort into re-writing it then posted it on my blog.

So I had up-to-date, relevant content on my blog. It was only as an afterthought that I put a very cursory comment on the 'donor' blog. Result: a flock of birds killed with one stone. Fresh, new content for continuity and SE ranking, participation in the subject community, lots of inbound traffic and a long lasting inbound link.

Blog comments? Yes, they work gangbusters!

The latest version of Wordpress has been released today to make bloggers lives even easier. It has a number of useful additional features related to being able to being able to go back to previous versions of posts as well as making posting directly from the web even easier.

Later - 18 July: And the inevitable has happened. A security problem with the new release. Those who should know tell me not to upgrade until the problem sorted out.

Anyway, watch the 3 minute video for a preview.

Wordpress is set up with the ability to automatically tell others whenever you have spoken. After all, there is no point in publishing if no-one comes to read what you have written.

Many new users of Wordpress are puzzled about how this notification to others takes place, especially when the first words they come across are things like 'ping' and 'ping servers' when they are possibly still struggling with the basics of logging in to their new blog.

Although Wordpress is set up to deal with it automatically, in practice there are many choices available. Wordpress calls them Update Services and you will find them in your Writing Settings right down at the bottom of the page.

The default setting on installation is, from memory, Pingomatic and Pingoat. These services distribute the fact that you have just published a new post by 'pinging' a number of ping servers. However, there are a multitude of other ping services.

What there is not is any common opinion about how successful or otherwise any combination of ping servers might be. Indeed there is an argument that multiple ping servers will often be notifying the same servers many times and this can get your message blocked as spam.

Myself, I work on the basis that even if some get blocked I would like to at least make the effort to get my message out there by as many channels as I can. So I use a pretty big list.

There's a useful article on the basics of 'pinging' - where I just found out that a ping is a 'groper'(!) and my page on blogging for more information.

I know, I know, I must be a year too late for social marketing. That's because at my age I'm probably a generation too late. When I first saw stuff about Myspace, Facebook et al the thought filled me with dread. The idea of putting all your personal stuff out there for unknown people to rake over really turned me off. And Twitter! Someone explained it to me and I said; 'What's the point? Why do I want to spend my time writing inconsequential nonsense when all the advice is to stay focused.

Anyway, the creaky old oil tanker of my attitude is beginning to turn. I've just seen a neat idea related to Twitter that led me to rethink my attitude so I'm going to give it a go. I suppose I'll have to give all the others a go too, oh woe is me.

What's the bright idea?

Ahah! Subscribe to Twitterfeed. That way, Twitter will automatically send your blog feed to your friends. So every time you make a new blog post Twitter will automatically distribute it for you. Now that's what I call smart. One up to social marketing!

I've just completed a very useful teleseminar led by Diane Corriette about monetizing your blog. Diane focuses on helping women with successful businesses off line to take advantage of online marketing methods in order to expand their business and blogs are a major plank in that strategy.

As I've already determined for myself, blogging is a great way to publish and manage your own website without paying webmaster rates.

In effect, the blogging software keeps your content correctly coded within strict parameters as well as giving you the means by use of Categories and Tags to identify and label your content so that you, your visitors and, most importantly, the search engines can find it at any time either now or in the future.

The greatest benefit, of course, in this busy world is being able to publish and edit your website content from anywhere you can access the internet. You can find out more about the technicalities on my page about blogging.

With a piece of software which is essentially a content management system all nicely signposted with your categories and tags then getting search engine attention is pretty easy. First of all decide on half a dozen keywords related to your niche or subject area.

Then pick one for each of your posts. If you are writing to your niche anyway then your content should automatically fall into one of your keyword areas. Then ensure that your keyword is in your post title, then in the first and last sentence of your post. If you can spread it around within your post, together with other words and phrases associated with your subject then so much the better. But certainly do not overdo it.

After that it is just a matter of consistent persistence. Post regularly 2 or 3 times a week and over a 6 month period you will find yourself steadily climbing the search engine rankings. A friend of mine, Raymond Chua, set himself the task of posting every day for 365 days on his site about the Law of Attraction.

The result? In 1 year he reached #10 in Google in a niche with 18 million websites. That certainly demonstrates that you need nothing more than a little time and determination to get the ranking and the traffic that comes from that. Once you have the traffic then you will be in a position to seriously monetize your blog.

This is a new blog post from Flock.

Allowing me to publish blog posts without even having to access the blog.
How cool is that?

More about Flock when I've had a chance to study it better.

For all newbies to the internet marketing game the problem of information overload of 'the greatest next big thing' recommendations from 'gurus' is a real problem.

If you have not seen Scott Boulch's latest report, 'The Internet Marketing Cure', then I would recommend it for its take on the current state of this business.  In it, he recommends that every time your receive a recommendation to buy some product you reply and ask for proof of the affiliates success with the product.

No reply means you unsubscribe from their list as they are not providing real value.

Rick Butts was the first to grasp the nettle and you can see the response it has generated over on his blog

You really should go and read the comments.  Wow! That's how to start a conversation.

There are a very few fundamentals to internet marketing and list building is one of them. Why? Because unlike the real world, your presence on the web is completely invisible to potential customers unless you go and stand in their way and make them fall over you. In internet jargon that's called 'driving traffic'.

In reality, it's more like finding a herd of stampeding cattle and making sure you go stand in front of them.

So once you've got someone's attention you sure don't want them to disappear again like someone walked into your high street store, took a look around and walked out again without buying anything. At least they walked in so there must have been something about your shop/products/staff or even the pattern on your carpet that attracted their attention. So you want to make sure that you can communicate with them again just in case you can work out what it was that they liked and offer them some more of the same - up to the point that they might buy something from you.

You can't do any of that if you do not know who they are. So your number one priority the first time they wander into your store is to get their name and email address and their permission to communicate with them again. That's called list building.

I recognised a little while ago that you can work your socks off as I have done for some time learning individual skills and applying them to various projects with varying degrees of success. But without an automated system you are working very hard for little progress. What you really need is automation which is exactly what the internet is good at.  If you are into online marketing and are not using the one unique characteristic of the internet then you have to ask yourself if you are barking up the wrong tree.

That's why I shall shortly be launching my automated list builder called www.ListLegions.com that embodies all the fundamental aspects of marketing whether online or offline.

Giving value to your prospects before you ever offer them something to buy, gathering their details to add to your list, using viral marketing concepts to persuade your subscribers to pass your message on to their friends, offering all the services of your own system to them so they can benefit too and automating as much as possible of these marketing basics so that subscribers can concentrate their time on marketing and not on the mechanics.

It's an abiding principle of marketing that you have to give in order to receive - and I am planning that ListLegions.com is going to do just that by making list building as easy as possible for my subscribers.

Bruce Bird