SMO: The Latest in Search

First there was SEO.

Then came PPC.

Now the latest TLA (three-letter-acronym) in search engine marketing is SMO.

It stands for "Social Media Optimization". Basically it's about reaching your target market using Web 2.0/social media channels, such as blogs, YouTube, tagging, etc.

Frankly I'm not a big fan of Web 2.0 for business, for the simple reason that from my experience most Australian businesses are yet to successfully implement Web 0.7.

I believe marketing resources are better spent on the low-hanging fruit of online marketing, such as creating compelling content, SEO and PPC, rather than dabbling in a corporate blog.

However, Marketing Experiments recent exposé on SMO really caught my attention. They pitted a $10/hour blogger against a PPC (Google Adwords) campaign to see which would produce the better ROI.

The Adwords campaign generated 2,057 visitors for a cost of $1,250 (or 61c per visitor).

The blogger generated 93,207 visitors for a cost of $3,600 (or 4c per visitor).

Bottom line: SMO yielded a 1,427% greater ROI than PPC!

Read more about this experiment

BTW: the Marketing Experiments e-newsletter is a fascinating source of information on what strategies and tactics actually work in online marketing.