Research by MarketingSherpa indicates that two-thirds of all email marketers grew their optin email lists in 2009, while only 3 percent of organizations experienced negative growth or subscriber attrition.

MarketingSherpa found that business-to-business (B2B) email marketers faced significant challenges during the year. Although B2B lists tend to be more stable than business-to-consumer (B2C) lists (which are more than six times likely to experience faster growth), job shifts and job losses led to a dramatic increase in lost email addresses among B2B lists.

Over the last couple of years some people have asked me why we began publishing our Internet marketing blog and newsletter, Kikabink News. After all, it’s a big task to write, publish and send out so many Internet marketing news stories from Monday to Friday, with a weekly summary on Saturday.

So why do we do it? Hint: it’s NOT because of ‘the money’.

Here’s yet another social media tracking tool for you to check out. Currently in private beta, Viralheat tracks consumer generated content about a person, brand or company on 30 online video sites such as YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo, along with Twitter.

Viralheat’s Twitter tool provides data about the volume of mentions given to a person / brand / company per day and per week, along with a range of other data. The video tool, meanwhile, shows you how much a person, brand or company has been mentioned across 30 video sites, based on various metrics.

Google@Omgili is a new tool from Omgili that combines Omgili’s ‘discussion tracker’ with Google’s search engine. The result is a search that gives you Google results, along with discussions that link to those results.

What’s so special about this? Well, with Google@Omgili you can see which links are being talked about the most. On that basis Google@Omgili is another perspective on what web properties are hot or ‘buzzworthy’. For example, type in the website of a newly launched product and you might see how much discussion that product launch has elicited.

You might also able to detect some patterns or relationships between the level of chatter and the popularity or quality of a given link.

Try it out here: http://google.omgili.com

Source: Jolie O’Dell, “Search Mashes Traditional Web Search With Social Buzz,” ReadWriteWeb, May 24, 2009

If you’re in the business of selling information products online, you’ll know that while this is a highly lucrative and rewarding business… there’s also plenty of competition. So how do you come out on top?

A recent article by top copywriter Bob Bly indicates that, as an online information marketer, you have four main types of competitors to be concerned about… and to beat…

Quantcast has unveiled a new tool aimed at Internet marketers called ‘Quantcast Marketer’. The tool promises to give marketers insights about customer and prospect segments that Quantcast says have previously been ‘virtually impossible to obtain.’

Quantcast says its tool will enable Internet marketers to build detailed audience profiles for ‘digital events’. A digital event might be a website, a particular ad, or even an action associated with an advertiser.

Tinker is a new service just launched by Glam Media which allows you to keep track of Twitter posts about the same topic or ‘event’. Basically you input some keywords that describe an ‘event’ and then, in real time, Tinker starts streaming all the micro-blog posts about that event.

For example, let’s say a UFO lands on Tahiti. You head over to Tinker, create an event based on some appropriate keywords e.g. ‘Tahiti UFO’ and then Tinker will start displaying a stream of tweets about that Tahiti UFO.

Ya know, it’s not that easy to find the best blogs on a topic by simply searching on Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Lots of people realized this some time ago and the ‘blog search’ industry was born. But which are the best tools for searching blogs?

ReadWriteWeb, which tracks these kinds of things, posted an article last week setting out its recommendations for blog search engines circa January / February 2009.

The bottom line?

Have you bookmarked a whole bunch of web pages and then, one day, when you just know you bookmarked a page on a specific topic… struggled to find it again?

Or have you found yourself wasting time searching Google or Yahoo for something you have already bookmarked… somewhere…?

Qitera aims to help you avoid these kinds of problems.

It seems trite to say that, as marketers, our aim should be to understand our customers. After all, the better we understand our customers, the better able we are to communicate with them in a persuasive way. And yet, how much effort do we really put into getting to know our customers?

I’ll be the first to admit that WE could do much, much more to understand YOU and the prospects, subscribers and customers of our company’s various products and services. And that’s something we’ll be focusing on in the months to come.