Debbie Weil is a corporate blogging and social media expert, online marketing consultant, speaker and author of The Corporate Blogging Book (Portfolio). She consults with large companies, CEOs and senior executives on how to create blogs that connect with customers and attract media attention.

This is a must-read on Digital Grit’s blog. Click here to learn how Keywords, Content, Code, Links and Technology are the 5 forces of SEO. (A play on Michael Porter’s 5 Forces Model which is a staple in business school curriculum (curriculae??).

Bryan Eisenberg, a ClickZ colleague, has just published a compendium of his best columns in a new book: Call To Action: Secret Formulas To Improve Online Results. It’s terrific and I highly recommend it. Lots of articles on persuasion architecture (one of his favorite topics), as well as online copywriting, measuring success, etc. The book has been edited and organized into sections. A great resource. Sample chapter here (scroll down).

For a blast from the past, here are the almost 50 columns I wrote for ClickZ about B2B email marketing and e-newsletter marketing.

Been collecting these for a week or so.

• Ran across this nifty page on Robert’s Echo blog. Includes everything from the "origin" of blogs, stats on blog readership, recommended PR blogs, link to a Forrester Research executive summary, lists of internal and external corporate blogs and more.

• Another page with all things blog (including links to RSS tutorials and basic blog definitions) penned by the Singapore-based Rambling Librarian.

• Comprehensive list from Dave Taylor’s Intuitive Life blog with links to other articles.

• 101 writing tips from Kari Chisholm on writing a thought leadership blog. (He writes a grassroots advocacy blog.)

Remarkable stat courtesy of an HP Small Business Survey released last week. Thanks to CorporateBloggingBlog and Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends blog for the link. Anita makes a key observation: while 10% of small biz owners may be including blogs in their marketing plans, half of all small businesses do not even have a Web site! The takeaway: think of a blog as a kind of Web site. If you need to make a choice? It’s a no-brainer. Launch a blog in minutes with a service like TypePad. You’ll instantly have a more powerful presence online than if you build a static site from the ground up.

Great article by MarketingSherpa’s Anne Holland on why “exact verbiage” is so important online. I.e. the specific words you use on landing pages, in text ads, on your site, on (yes) your blog…

You need to be aware of what keyword phrases your customers search on. That translates into how you’ll be found in the search engines. And you need to be absolutely consistent in your use of words and phrases in order to get higher response rates (more click-throughs) from online readers.

People like consistency. Sounds boring. But it’s not. When the title of your sponsor text ad matches the headline on your landing page, visitors know they’re in the right place… and what to do next. Click & buy.

Hurry on over to DoubleClick’s (free) knowledge center. If you haven’t already seen it, you can download the Q4 2004 Email Trend Report released in March 2005. Highlight: the average open rate for HTML emails continues to decline. It’s now 32.6%.

In addition, DoubleClick’s director of research Rick Bruner (he also runs BusinessBlogConsulting.com) has just published a new 22-page report: The Decade in Online Advertising: 1994 - 2004. Rick has posted his favorite chart from the report here. It’s a trip through history, starting with Mosaic in 1993 and a flatline for number of Internet users and dollars of Internet ad revenue. By the end of 2004, Internet ad revenues were $9.6 billion and number of U.S. Internet users was about 170 million. Most notable stat: no medium since B&W television has penetrated U.S. households as fast as the Internet. It took only 8 years. Compared with 9 years for radio, 10 for the VCR, 17 for personal computers, 39 for cable TV and 70 for the telephone. I.e. the Internet was virtally unheard of just over a decade ago. (There’s also a good section with blog stats.) Hey Rick, a great report! Looks like your day job suits you.

Get them here in my review of MarketingSherpa’s terrific new Landing Page Handbook.

1. Acknowledge the bail factor

2. Make your landing page headline match the copy in your ad

3. Keep your “hero” shot (product image) on the left side of the page

4. Write hotlinked copy that prompts action

5. Offer something useful and unexpected on your Thank You page

Read my full review.

Here’s a thoughtful “short list” of resources for online marketing. Put together by Toby Bloomberg in her Diva Marketing blog. Thanks to Aimee Kessler Evans for the pointer - from the Digital Grit blog. She writes it for marketing agency Digital Grit. Clever, huh?! Lets Digital Grit show off their knowledge/expertise about the latest in online marketing tactics.