The IMPACT team consistently tries to improve your online and offline reputation.  One of the best ways that you can help us accomplish this for you is to utilize some of the top marketing resources available today.  However, because we know how hard it is to just go out there and figure out which blogs, articles, videos, and whatever other online content is trustworthy, we have compiled a few great lists of top resources for your enjoyment.

Top Search Marketing Blogs

If a good majority of your traffic is not driven by organic search results (and even if you are driving 80% of your total site traffic from search engines), it may be a good time for you to invest a few minutes each day to read through the following blogs:

  1. Search Engine Land — As one of the leaders in search engine news, information, and more Search Engine Land is led by an 11 year veteran (Danny Sullivan).  Overall, this is an outstanding spot for you to start your search for search engine knowledge
  2. Search Engine Optimization Journal — Nick Stamoulis, the owner of SEOJ, is one of the industry thought leaders in search engine optimization.  He takes a great approach to teaching how you can build outstanding online presence through SEO.
  3. Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog — As we well know, the search engines are consistently changing which make our lives as SEO experts extremely interesting and ever-growing.  However, if you ever find yourself lost in optimization land, Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog is the place to look for answers and recent happenings.

Top Business Marketing Blogs

Throughout the ever-increasingly difficult market that we live in today, it is vitally important for all business owners and managers to take a quick second out of each day and see what other industry leaders are saying about marketing.  These are the top 3 business marketing blogs today:

  1. Marketing Profs Daily Fix — As one of the best multi-contributor blogs for marketing, the Marketing Profs Daily Fix provides readers with priceless marketing information, tips, and strategies.  Personally, I read the postings on a daily basis to see what I can do to improve my offline reputation.
  2. Seth’s Blog — No, this doesn’t have the catchy name that a number of other marketing blogs possess, but it has some of the most significant content available with regard to business marketing.  Seth Godin has a long and experienced resume as a bestselling author and an industry thought leader.  I strongly urge you to read through what Seth has to say regularly.
  3. The Marketing Minute — Similar to Seth’s Blog, The Marketing Minute talks (in length) about methods to increase the visibility of a company’s brand.  However, instead of just providing simple tips and calling it a day, Drew McLellan utilizes anecdotal and interactive methods to tease out tips from you as well.

Top Marketing & Advertisement Blogs

As business managers and owners, we understand the power of advertisement; the ability to make your revenue stream climb significantly through ads is truly an art-form.  With that said, it’s important to both know what the competition is doing as well as know what new and exciting changes are happening.  Check out these resources:

  1. I Believe In Advertising — Whether you work for an advertisement firm, or you produce your own company’s ads, this is an amazing resource.  As one of the best blogs for advertisement information, tips, and tricks this site truly has everything that you want and need.
  2. Adrants — As a multi-contributor blog, former and current industry professionals provide outstanding tips and techniques to utilize with advertisements.  Not only do you get the best of their advice, but the comment community is significantly large so you also are able to read through anecdotal examples as well.
  3. Ads of the World — It’s extremely important to know what works within your industry, right?  Well, Ads of the World allows you an insider’s perspective as it collects and displays successful (and non-successful) advertisements in a variety of industries.  The other great feature to this site is the blog style they utilize – it expresses more of a “been there and this is what happened” than a “do it like this” style of writing.

Top Marketing Trends Blogs

One of the biggest time-savers in marketing is research, and instead of being behind the times in marketing for your company it is crucial for you to be on the cutting edge.  There are several blogs that take a marketing trends approach on occasion, but very few that specialize in this niche.  The following blogs are, what I consider, the best in the business for researching current marketing trends:

  1. What’s Next Blog — As I mentioned above it is incredibly important to stay ahead of the curve with marketing trends.  This blog is truly the place to stay on that path as BL Ochman updates the site on a daily basis with new and exciting information to help your company.
  2. TrendHunter — If you haven’t already discovered this resource, you need to venture over for a little while (and, of course, come back here to report).  With over 9 million views per month, 29,000 members (give or take), and a full menu of thousands of innovative trend reports and postings this is the mother of all marketing trend sites.
  3. MarketingVOX — As important as it is to stay ahead of the curve, it’s also important to read up on trending news and information.   MarketingVOX provides just that: a site that not only delivers marketing news, but also provides opinion based articles in relation to those news happenings.

There are countless other resources out there that can potentially help your business, and it’s our job to make sure that we allow you the opportunity to see what is going on in the world of marketing and advertising to bring that to reality.  Help out the IMPACT community by visiting these resources and providing some feedback in the comments section when you come back to our site.

Need Help?

If e-mail marketing is something that you are interested in for your small business but don’t know how to get started, contact us today to schedule your free marketing analysis.

Sources:
“The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing”-E-Book
SlideShare.net
Image Source: HubSpot, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing”, E-Marketer.com