Elanso

Earlier this week we started a poll on what online marketing tactics our readers would use most in 2008. The polling plug-in allows for only one choice and over 100 people have responded so far. We’ll keep the poll running for another week or so, but here are the top ten tactics rankings so far out of 35 listed and the percentage of votes for each.

With the vote count at over 150, I’ve updated the top ten as of 02/13/08:

• Blogging (27%)
• Email marketing (16%)
• Search engine optimization (14%)
• Pay per click (9%)
• Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) (5%)
• Blogger relations (4%)
• Online public relations (3%)
• Viral marketing (3%)
• Free content (white papers) (3%)
• Corporate web site (3%)

The original top ten are here from 02/05/08:

• Blogging (25%)
• Search engine optimization (14%)
• Email marketing (12%)
• Pay per click (8%)
• Blogger relations (6%)
• Online public relations (5%)
• Viral marketing (5%)
• Corporate web site (4%)
• Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) (4%)
• Webinars/Teleconference (3%)

Blogging really does make sense because it can serve as a platform for so many other tactics including SEO, email (archiving newsletters), blogger relations, PR, viral marketing, a compliment to the corporate site, a touchpoint for social networking and a place to promote webinars.

If you’re a company doing business and/or marketing online and aren’t using a blog in some way, you’re really at a disadvantage. The longer a company goes without a blog of some sort, the greater an advantage their blogging competition will have. Of course, not ALL companies need to have a blog, but the number of qualified reasons not to is getting smaller each day.

I am happy to say that of the top ten tactics listed, TopRank specializes in the top 3 (blog marketing, SEO and email marketing) plus several others.