Russ Swallow recently became a client and has joined the blogosphere. He calls himself the 3700 year old man since he helps about 100 companies/year implement their benefits plans and has been doing it for 37 years. He has "3700" years of experience doing it, compared to the average HR manager that does it once/year. Atleast that's his math. I've explained to him that it doesn't work that way. But, Russ is a lot older than me. So, he must be right.

I am also a client of his. Russ knows his stuff. Here's a post he wrote about disability insurance. I'm looking forward to seeing more from him. 

If you haven't read on Rick's Rainmaker blog or Dave's Sales Management blog yet, Guy Kawasaki has created an aggregator of sales blogs on his aggregator site, Alltop.

Ever since I saw him looking for "marketing" blogs on Twitter for Alltop, I've been pestering him and telling him he needed a sales.alltop.com page too. 

It's launched with a bunch of my favorite blogs, as well as some new ones that look great. 

If you have other suggestions, you should send them to Guy via twitter.  

This is a guest blog post written by the President of CloudBurst Consulting, Adrian Tennant. Adrian is an Internet marketing speaker with 13 years of online marketing under his belt.

One of my biggest pieces of advice to businesses today, especially those in travel/tourism, is to consider international opportunities. How do you best reach foreign visitors?

In 12 years, the web has transformed into a multi-lingual content environment. In 1996, 75% of the content on the web was written in English; today it's more like 25%, or to put it another way: 75% of the content is in a language other than English. In the Internet World stats report for last year, 81% of the world's Internet users are located outside of North America. So how do you tap into this potential market?

To attract users from outside the U.S., your website must be visible on local search engines. Many international users speak English as a second language but perform searches in their native languages on local search engines. Fortunately, completely translating your entire website into several different languages isn't always necessary. What is important is that you have at least one page translated, or better yet, have a new page written specifically for this purpose by a local expert. That page must also have the meta tags in the top of the page (which are invisible to users) and the keyword phrases properly translated. This way your site can appear in German, French, Mexican and Japanese search engines - or whichever geographic locations you are targeting.

For the U.K. it's a slightly different approach, but the same issues apply - they use Google.co.uk, which is not the same as Google.com. And no one in the U.K. takes a vacation, they go on "holiday" - so there's still a translation issue! I recommend that whenever possible, a micro-site is hosted in the U.K. if you're targeting that audience; similarly, a micro-site for the French market is most effective if hosted in France.

Hopefully this provides you with a clearer picture of what is needed to start bringing international visitors to your website

I (Pete) have zero experience with online marketing outside of the US. I'd be interested in hearing from some other people who do. At HubSpot, we generate a lot of inquiries from UK and Australia businesses, mostly because Website Grader, our free SEO tool, is an international success.

I have a backlog of guest posts to publish onto my blog. And a backlog of ideas for blog posts.

Selling has to come first. Blogging second and is an evening activity.

In the last month or so, I've also written quite a few posts on the HubSpot blog that have generated a lot of buzz and comments.

Here they are, most recent to oldest:
How Your Sales Team Can Support Your Online Marketing (This one is new and is in desperate need of a first comment.)
Why Leaving Blog Comments is Not a Link Building Strategy
Doing a website redesign with SEO in Mind
The Single Most Important Ingredient in Your Internet Marketing Strategy
Plan Your Internet Marketing Strategy Before Launching Your Website
13 Ways to Use Your Blog to Improve Your Sales Process

When I relaunched PC4Media as a project a few months ago, my goal was to create a network of businesses that blog. I've enrolled about 60 or so companies. All engage at a different level. Some are doing great like my favorite MA real estate attorney, Dave Lima. Some have too many other priorities in the way and haven't really gotten out of the gates. 

Many businesses think that blogging is just about publishing information. It is about publishing information. But, a business that engages in a conversation through their blog generates much more value out of their blogging activity. 

Here's what I wrote to describe my members:

The PC4Media network of businesses are all experts at what they do. But, more importantly, they are committed to publishing educational, informative and engaging information about their industry, their business and their experience. Further, they are committed to engaging the broader community online in a transparent conversation, while supporting each other as they each grow their respective businesses.

Rick just published a post called "Experts that Share" that says the same thing much more succinctly:

I enjoy the freeflowing exchange of expertise and ideas with people that are good at what they do and realize that collective thought is usually much more productive than the sum of individual thoughts. 

John Battelle calls it well: MSN's new deal to pay the users of its search engine is less about paying it's users. It's more about having tighter relationships with vertical sellers. By making the ad network cost per action (cpa), as opposed to Google's cost per click (CPC), they're creating a system that every retailer should participate in. There's no risk and little complexity. You offer to pay what you can afford in order to outbid your competitor.

I agree with Greg Yardley, that the simple act of paying users presents as much potential risk of losing the perception of impartiality and trust - as it does potential rewards of gaining loyalty for the search engine.

However, there's a whole other demographic that LOVES cash back, coupons and all other "discounting" methods that make them think they're getting a deal. As long as the cash back program sticks to "tangible products" and not services that require trust, I think MSN is in safe territory.

But, this move is less about gaining short term market share. It's more about getting rich data about profit margins from retailers, and at some point: lead generation companies.

Then, Microsoft will pick off vertical after vertical, creating vertical search engines for products, services, etc. Said well here:

Microsoft is in a tough spot. They've gone on record to say they want to compete against Google. They're not really going to get there with horizontal search so they've got a strategy to go vertical search. So they're assembling the Microsoft Office of vertical search. You'll see them buy a real estate site, a job site, a travel site, and weave that together into a search volume competitor to Google.

This closes the window for companies sucking off of Google's SEO and ppc tit to establish vertical service businesses as middle men between businesses needing clients and online media companies selling eyeballs and clicks. At some point, Google, Yahoo and MSN will make it simple and obvious enough for every business to do what they want: just pay a % of their margins for new business - directly to one of the big 3.

In the meanwhile, there's a lot of money to be made as middle men. But, it's a fragile balance. The reason that it is possible is because Google insists on the separation of ads from content in order to maintain impartiality and therefore, trust with users. Will MSN challenge that? Will they maintain (err establish) trust with it's users? It might if it serves a better search result.

I'm gradually switching from Bloglines to Google Reader. (I'm not the only one.) 

For my blog newbie readers, the reason I am using a feedreader like Google Reader is to accomplish the following: Once I started reading more than 10 blogs, it became a hassle to go to 10 different websites. A feedreader allows me to subscribe to all of these blogs and read them inside my feeder, so I only have to go to one site to read 10+++ blogs. The feedreader also knows when there's a new article on a blog automatically. So, when I log in, I only have to skim the new stuff. SO MUCH MORE EFFICENT!

Watch this video if you're still confused.

For all of my readers, I'm switching to Google reader because it allows me to share posts with other people who also use Google Reader. It also allows other people I'm connected with on Google Reader to share stuff with me very easily. So, please connect with me if you're using Google Reader too.

I'm also taking this opportunity to clean house. Reading "tech industry" blogs is less and less important to me. Helping my clients generate leads online is more and more important to me. So, it's more important that I use my blog as a networking and teaching tool. So, I'll be reading a lot more of my clients' blogs and some of the blogs of their peers - in order to assist clients in their online networking and blog readership building process.

In short, if I read you and you read me and you want to stay connected, connect with me on Twitter, Linkedin and/or Google Reader.