NOTE: This article is being updated with new resources and additional information and will be a living document. Last updated: 29 FEB 2008. If you’d like to be notified when new links or information are added, subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog. What’s RSS?

In general there is a plethora of information available online for learning more about Digital Marketing. Before I go into specifics, one thing worth touching on is the importance of professional development. Most people say they simply do not have the time to learn or read or keep up.

The reality is that none of us “has” time. We “make” time for the things that are most important to us. If you have no time for professional reading or learning, then it is because other things are more important to you. Even though the amount of time in our day is finite, we control what we give our attention to.

One easy way to be sure that you make time to learn is to use Outlook or whatever flavor calendaring program you happen to prefer to schedule time with yourself. Understand that if you don’t block out time on your schedule, someone else or something else will.

One great way to ensure that you do make time to learn is to schedule a recurring block of time with yourself on Fridays each week. One hour, two hours or even three hours per week. Block it off, call it “Learning”, “Professional Reading”, “Sharpening the Saw” - whatever.

What you call it is not important. What is important is that you schedule a recurring appointment with yourself and that you keep that commitment to yourself. During this time, turn off your cell phone, close your email program and eliminate interruptions so you can focus on one thing.

The five types of resources I’ll outline here for learning about Digital Marketing are:

* Podcasts
* Sites and Email Newsletters (also called “Ezines”)
* Email Discussion Lists
* RSS feeds
* People

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Folks in case you did not get the memo from 1996 - There is no such thing as an Industry Average Clickthrough Rate. When you think about it - really think about it - there can’t be. When you think about it even harder, why would you possibly be interested in a non-existent metric that has absolutely no relevance whatsoever to what your company is doing online?

Why it does not exist

There is no magical brotherhood with a decoder ring and secret handshake where all advertisers and publishers send in their response rates for (enter month and year here) that is fed into a database that spits out a number. And even if there were, such data would need to be self-provided and self-provided data is inherently subjective. For a time, years ago, there was a company that tracked such self-reported data, but experienced advertisers knew that it was just not relevant and severely skewed.

There’s the response rate other people get, there’s the response rate you might get and there’s the response rate you will get.

Why even if there were an Industry Average it would be irrelevant

If I’m running a campaign online, do I really care about the “average” of a hundred other campaigns that may or may not be targeted to my audience, may or may not be accurate, may or may not have used good creative, may or may not have had web sites that truly sucked ass, may or may not have converted well, may or may not have had similar objectives to what I’m doing? No, I don’t. Here’s why…

Whenever you’re thinking about asking a group of people what the industry average clickthrough rate is, Just Say No. Stop and think before you send that email message or call someone. Think about what it is that you TRULY want to know. You don’t want to know an “Average”.

Why not admit what you’re really after? What you really want to know is how YOUR CAMPAIGN might do. Maybe you need this information to try to project results and ROI. Maybe you have been asked by upper management what to expect. Who knows?

Whatever the reason, Just Say No to the temptation of asking about The Unicorn. Instead, spend your time running some very basic projections: Worst-Case, Likely, Best-Case.

What should you use for Worst-Case scenario? 0.1% sounds good to me. Whatever you use, understand that many advertisers online consider a good response to be 0.5% or higher. 1% to 2% response rate would be great.

The response rate other people get

Understand that even if you ask others what they’ve been seeing for a response rate on video, banner or email campaigns, this information is not necessarily going to be relevant to what you are doing. The variables are just too many - different market, different ad creative, different placements, different product, call to action, goals, etc. Is it useful to you to know that another person is seeing a 0.5% clickthrough rate on one of their placements? It might be. I’m not you. Should it be? I don’t know. Only you can be the judge of that. Myself I tend to focus on the bottom line.

The response rate you might get

There is one surefire way to determine what response you yourself might get, and that is to conduct a test or series of small tests. With valid data from your tests you can predict with a fairly high degree of accuracy what you might see from a larger campaign. By conducting small tests you can minimize your risk.

The response rate you will get

As you conduct small tests and ramp out your campaign, the nice thing about advertising in a dynamic medium is that you can literally adjust and optimize your campaign on the fly as it delivers.

Of course this is all quite irrelevant anyway. You’re not truly concerned with response rate, are you? You do want visitors to DO SOMETHING once they visit your site, don’t you? Hells Bells then, let’s measure success by whether or not your campaign generates downloads then, or sells product, or generates leads, or generates phone calls. Sure, response rates are important, but don’t be so myopic that you lose sight of what truly matters, which is the Bottom Line.

A super-connecter, Adam Boettiger is a recognized expert in the field of digital marketing. With twelve years of online marketing experience spanning agency-side and client-side positions, Boettiger has helped small businesses and large brands realize their full potential online. Consulting Services

[Webware] If you’re not using Twitter yet, you may feel as if you’ve missed out. Twitter has not only tipped the tuna, but by some estimations, it has already jumped the shark. Don’t be put off by its excessive popularity with SXSW geeks or by the whining of Twitter haters who missed the fun. Twitter is an interesting and practical real-time messaging system for groups and friends. It’s just not completely obvious how to get into the “club.” So, here’s a newbie’s guide to this new platform. We don’t cover every feature of Twitter, but this should help get you started.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online service that enables you to broadcast short messages to your friends or “followers.” It also lets you specify which Twitter users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place.

Twitter is designed to work on a mobile phone as well as on a computer. All Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, so each message can be sent as a single SMS alert. You can’t say much in 140 characters. That’s part of Twitter’s charm.

Twitter is useful for close-knit groups (although there also are some fairly large mobs on Twitter). If you follow your friends, and they follow each other, you can quickly communicate group-related items, such as “I’m going to the pub on Fourth Street, come on along.” Twitter is conceptually similar to Dodgeball but is simpler to use.

If you enter items into Twitter, they can be private, so only friends you’ve authorized can see them. Items can also be made public, which means anyone who knows your Twitter ID can read and subscribe to them.

Full article @ Webware

This, along with “Is there an industry average click-through rate?”, is one of the most frequently asked questions of advertisers.

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[ClickZ] A Lehman Brothers report on 2008 online political ad revenue published last week is bullish, especially when compared to another recent forecast. The analyst firm predicts political advertisers could spend over $110 million on Web ads this year, with less than half that amount coming from presidential election-related advertising. Indeed, Lehman Brothers Analyst Douglas Anmuth believes the portion of ad spending online by political campaigns, pegged at 3.6 percent, will double by the midterm elections in 2010, and could hit double digits by 2012.

The “Anmuth’s Internet Inside Weekly” report states $42.5 million or 5 percent of all presidential campaign spending in 2008 will flow online. The remaining forecast $67.1 million in online political ad spending will come from other political advertisers, including congressional and public policy related campaigns. Mirroring other prognostications, the firm anticipates an incremental rise in online campaign ad expenditures moving forward.

Lehman Brothers also expects US online advertising to grow 24 percent to $26.2 billion in 2008, pointing particularly to presidential election and summer Olympics-related ad spending as key drivers.

The report suggests presidential campaigns will spend more of their ad budgets on the Web compared with statewide campaigns because they are national in scope. However, it’s important to note the ability to target ads geographically down to the zip code level has been a draw to presidential candidate campaigns during the primary season. Geo-targeting will most likely continue to be an attractive option to these advertisers once party nominees emerge, since the campaigns typically target ads heavily in important swing states or other tight-race regions.

More @ ClickZ

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[From Scobleizer.com by Robert Scoble] It’s sad to hear about layoffs at companies like Yahoo. Right now it seems like a bad time to be laid off. I’m here to offer some hope.

I laid myself off in February 2002. Remember that time? It was far worse than what we’ve seen so far in the economic turmoil of 2008. It seemed like EVERYONE was laid off. There was even a Website, fuckedcompany.com, that tracked layoff after layoff. No good news, like the funding of Automattic, was coming out. 9/11 just happened and it seemed to be particularly dire.

But even in that tough time I found a job working at NEC. Here’s some tips I learned from that time. More @ Scobleizer.com

[Web Worker Daily] With unemployment rates rising, the market going nuts , and big internet companies planning layoffs , it’s hard not to worry about a recession here in the States, if not a full on tech bust. The Web Worker Daily blog and career coach Penelope Trunk both list ways you can bolster your career in the face of possible layoffs (and job search), like creating an impressive online persona and doing something great at your current job to add to your resume. More @ Web Worker Daily

[ClickZ] In a 312-page report offering predictions on everything from online ad revenues to e-commerce trends and the virtual worlds for kids, the JPMorgan equity research team said it expects the online graphical ad market to improve and raised its global search revenue estimate to $30.5 billion from $26.2 billion.

In the report, “Nothing But Net,” JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan and his team said “blended CPM pricing bottomed out” in 2007, partly due to the glut of non-premium ad space made available through social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, but predicted an improvement in 2008 as technology matures.

“Social networking sites, as a general rule, have not been able to command very high advertising rates for their page view inventory,” Khan states in the report. “As time goes on, however, we believe social networks will develop better targeting and monetization of their page view inventory. Given the wealth of personalized information available to the sites, there are powerful avenues for improved monetization, although the technology remains fairly nascent.”

The report stated the increase in global search revenue will be due to paid search growing internationally, and a general increase in Web usage and price inflation. It also stated Google is still the clear leader in the space, with a 73 percent dollar market share, but that it may fall to 71 percent by the end of 2008 due to improvements at Yahoo and as AOL and Ask have renegotiated their Traffic Acquisition Costs (TAC) rates.

The report also predicted that the U.S. graphical advertising market will grow 19.9 percent and that the global ad market will grow 22.1 percent in 2008. The expected growth is attributed to improved targeting techniques, the rise of ad exchanges and a continued increase in time spent on social networking sites. The report also predicted a surge from the 2008 Presidential race, as political interest groups and candidates spend online.

More @ ClickZ

[ClickZ] U.K. Internet advertising budgets grew further in the fourth quarter of 2007 despite cutbacks in other channels, according to the latest Bellwether report from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA).

The report states overall advertising budgets took bigger cuts in the final quarter of 2007 than at any time in the last two years, with 19 percent of companies reporting a decrease and only 15 percent an increase.

Spending in the digital arena remained strong however, with Internet budgets rising at more companies than in any other category. Thirty-nine percent of companies involved in the survey said they had revised their online budgets upward during the last three months of the year, with only 7 percent revising them down. Back in Q3 2007, only 30 percent of companies increased their online marketing budgets, with 7 percent seeing a decline.

All main sectors reported an average increase in digital spending. The strongest growth was recorded in the auto, fast moving consumer goods, travel & entertainment and government sectors. This diversion of budget towards digital now gives it a nine percent share of the total ad market, up from 6 percent reported in the Q3 report.

More @ ClickZ

[ClickZ] Despite the abundance of ad networks serving small publishers and bloggers, barriers remain when it comes to adoption of those services — namely tech know-how and time. Triggit, provider of an application for easily incorporating affiliate network links, photos and video into Web site content, hopes to simplify the process for less tech-savvy bloggers and publishers.

The small firm launched its Triggit app in beta yesterday. The software allows users to drag and drop images or video onto their sites. It also lets bloggers writing about particular brands or products search directly from their Firefox browser toolbar for appropriate affiliate network links if they belong to those networks. It then automatically creates hyperlinks to the store pages for those products rather than requiring site owners to plug in special codes every time.

By introducing a new set of niche publishers to affiliate networks, and potentially ad networks, Triggit CEO Zachery Coelius expects the system to expand distribution for those networks to an underserved segment of publishers. The app has been tested in closed private alpha form by around 600 publishers. More @ ClickZ

It’s Friday. The weekend’s here and so is a weekly recap of this week’s postings:

This morning Microsoft pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo Inc. with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion in its boldest bid yet to challenge Google Inc.’s dominance of the lucrative online search and advertising markets.

Where to go for good advertising discussion? Adam Boettiger sheds some light.

What techniques do you use to follow-up on emails sent? iwantsandy is a free web-based app that does just that.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Agencies Describe Hurdles Facing US Mobile Ad Market

User-Generated Video Expects 34 Billion Views in 2008

17 Ways You Can Use Twitter - A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners

Google May Kneecap Domain Tasting

Have a great weekend!

Adam

[AP] Friday February 1, 8:08 am ET

Microsoft Makes Unexpected $44.6B Offer for Internet Icon Yahoo

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Microsoft Corp. has pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo Inc. with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion in its boldest bid yet to challenge Google Inc.’s dominance of the lucrative online search and advertising markets.

The surprise offer of $31 per share, made late Thursday and announced Friday, comes with Sunnyvale-based Yahoo in a vulnerable position.

With its profits steadily sliding, Yahoo’s stock slipped to a four-year low earlier this week and a new management team has been trying to steer a turnaround sees more turbulence through 2008.

The announcement sent Yahoo’s share price up 60 percent in premarket trading, while Google fell 8 percent.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080201/microsoft_yahoo.html?.v=14

Where to go these days for good discussion about digital marketing and online advertising?

Back in 1996 I started the i-advertising discussion list, a moderated email discussion list enabling online advertisers and publishers to exchange ideas, share experiences and learn from each other. Over the years I grew that community to over 12,000 members in 90 countries and acted as the group’s moderator, chiming in when needed with nuggets of advice. Then as an industry we got the One-Two Punch…

1. The bubble burst around 2000, causing a mass exodus of talent from the digital marketing space.

2. 9/11 happened a year later, which caused what few advertisers were left to freeze their adspend until they could figure out what was going to happen to the market and their segments.

A third factor has affected discussion within the industry - overload. In the earlier days folks got about 10% of the email volume they get now. These days it’s a chore just to keep your head above water and stay current by reading, let alone participating in discussions online.

While I still moderate discussion lists, I’ve opted to run much smaller, tighter communities. On the subscription side, I’ve also found that I get the most value from closed, by invitation only groups - some as small as 50 people in size.

So where do folks go for advertising discussion? One list that has survived is the LED Digest, run by Adam Audette. The list size is large but the topics are good, useful and moderated.

The reality is that many folks just don’t have the time to participate in email discussion lists anymore. The noise level is just too high and their commitments are many. In terms of keeping current on digital marketing, I turn to my closely knit network of relationships that I’ve formed over the years, I speak regularly with them by phone (and at times email), and I monitor a plethora of RSS feeds via Google Reader. Some of the articles I find you’ll see links to on this blog, so you may want to pick up the RSS feed for i-advertising.

Where do you turn to for good discussion in age where nearly everyone worth talking to is overloaded?

Truth is, it’s far more difficult now to punch through the clutter than it was even two years ago. How do you followup on email that you send to co-workers, customers, prospects etc.? Most of the time it takes more than one touch. Here’s a great and free solution I found that allows me to schedule ticklers for specific email messages I send.

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[Wikipedia] Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Dailymotion, Hi5, Gather.com, social web applications (webapps) such as reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, Flickr, iLike, Wikipedia, Squidoo, Last.fm, Twitter, Eventful, ePinions and others as well as within 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life, ActiveWorlds, Moove and There.com. The goals of each SMM program or campaign will differ for every business or organization, however most will involve some form of building an idea or brand awareness, increasing visibility, encouraging brand feedback and dialogue as well as to possibly sell a product or service. SMM may also include online reputation management. (more…)

Agency execs also point to the Apple iPhone as a trailblazing device that may open new mobile advertising opportunities, while causing developers additional headaches in the short run.

Angela Steele, vice president, global account director for Starcom USA, told event attendees her company conducted interviews with iPhone owners following the handset’s release. Compared to other mobile phone users, iPhone users often like their devices so much they hold a special affinity for any brand that has created advertising material to run on the device. More @ ClickZ

How to drive traffic to your site is an age-old question. Many marketers have tremendous success with Google’s Pay Per Click Program, AdWords.

A few alternatives are…

• Microsoft AdCenter
• Yahoo Search Marketing

[MediaPost] According to a recently published market report from AccuStream iMedia Research, user Generated Video (UGV) scored 22.4 billion views in 2007, up 70% over 2006. Semi professional content grabbed a 47.5% total share on MySpace TV, and the Screen Bites category on Crackle.com generated a 17.5% cumulative share of total views.

A more refined analysis, says the report, reveals average views per video of 10,695 in 2007. Crackle.com led the UGV group, averaging 216,596 per video, accelerated by its re-organization emphasizing category expansion and more professional content.

The real question is…is it being monetized and to what degree?

It has a social element as well, as it allows users to befriend and monitor each other’s messages or updates. So what you have here is a publishing tool that can be either public and private.

It is similar to an IRC channel although messages are displayed less rapidly. Some have called it a slower version of internet messengers.

Twitter gives you a fragmented experience of opinions, events, news, ideas and feedback largely because its structured to accommodate non-contextual usability: You can easily follow thousands of users and listen in and enter into conversations conducted among multiple users at any point. And this is usually the case.

On the other hand, Twitter can be actively used as a tool to push out messages that capitalize on the attention you’re receiving from other users.

Full story @ doshdosh

According to Jay Westerdal at Domain Tools, Google would block all domains if they are less then five days old. In Jay’s words, “This potential new policy change by Google could stop all Domain Tasting in its tracks.”

Domain tasting, for those not familiar with it, is the practice of registrants using the five-day grace period at the beginning of a domain registration to test the marketability of a domain name (full Wikipedia entry here).