Sherpa Carries Weight

One of my Google news alerts yesterday told about a new marketing survey that should have bloggers crowing – and those who aren’t blogging thinking twice.

The report is published by MarketingSherpa – and a summary of the report, “Best & Worst Lead Generation Offers for 2006 – Rated by 1,900 B-to-B Marketers” (someone needs to help these guys work on their titles) is available on their web site – www.marketingsherpa.com. The full report costs $297, but Ann Holland, who just happens to be the President of Sherpa, summarizes the findings with three takeaways.

Her very first takeaway is: “This year for the first time, blogs have joined top-rated tactics to entice prospects. I suspect this is as much due to the traffic generation from search engine friendliness of blogs…” (Exactly what we learned in Kim Snider’s NSA blogging workshop).

While blogging is coming up fast on the inside for tactics to generate new leads, don’t stop at this article when it comes to the MarketingSherpa web site. This Rhode Island research firm makes their valuable articles “free to view” for 10 days after publication. They also offer free newsletters on a variety of Internet B-to-B and B-to-C marketing topics, and access to their case studies. They sell stuff, too, of course.

When it comes to topics like search engine optimization, Google Adwords, web analytics and web marketing tactics you have to watch yourself. These fields are rife with thieves and gangsters. We’ve already written about the Flat Word of Hucksterism in the article “Advertise Yourself – the Flat World Way”, but it’s real, so beware. Basically, people want your money.

MarketingSherpa will teach you the basics for free – and, judging by the level headed, non-sensational free stuff they offer, MarketingSherpa qualifies as a representative of the Flat World of Value, instead of the Flat World of Hucksterism.

Here are just a couple of examples. The most current article on their list as I write this is called “15 Practical Tips to Turn Speaking Gigs into New Business.” The most recent Case Study is, “How to Get 350 Positive Media Mentions for a Business Services Firm in Six Months” (really, Sherpa, get a title writer).

There are a lot of people who want to take your money to teach you more about Internet marketing. There are far fewer who will get you started with good information for free – www.marketingsherpa.com is one of them.