Jan 3 2008
Search Marketing Standard Magazine Review
By Jeremy Schoemaker
43 comments »
I have had a subscription to Search Marketing Standard
Traditional print magazines that try to be “industry news” periodicals that are echo’ing zero second news available on the internet just will never work. I do not think that is really rocket science.
Industry magazines I do like which are more opinionated and less trying to “report news” are:
- 43 Comments. What say you?
- RSS
- Delicious
- StumbleUpon
- Furl
- Digg
Maybe the publisher will run across your blog and make some changes.
Or as they say make your own
Either way putting them on blast will get their attention. It is hard for print to keep up to date with the internet and the real world speed of light we have grown to expect.
first - never heard of the two you mags you mentioned but i will def. be checking out. So thanks!
second - print magazines are a dying breed - we want the info n-o-w…its amazing though the example you gave: 5 month old news…wow. I’d expect maybe a month at most…but 5, thats just not right…lol
I have read those and they are OK. Revenue is more 10,000 foot level. I still think there is something cool about a magazine, I love Business Week, but I think it is hard to write about new features or topics in the SEM/SEO field. As you said, by the time it gets to press we have already tried it on our sites and could write our own articles.
Its interesting, I never really thought of reading a magazine about web related info, I usually just keep an eye out around various webmaster forums. Now you mention it I may check a few out, however as you said the problem seems to be that their info is out dated, whereas related blogs and forums are usually highly relevent and upto date !…
Thanks !
Hey Vizion, I’d like to disagree with you. I still like reading print mags… I love the feel of having a mag in my hand. I dont really care if the news is old.
Ok 5 months is a bit too much… but yes, I really dont mind 1 month old news.
I was trying to find a decent marketing magazine. Most of them do not offer anything new, just old stuffs. Anybody could recommend some good ones?
I get revenue magazine and actually read it. Always has some interesting info and thoughts.
Print magazines are definitely not going to disappear anytime soon. Sure, thanks to the WWW, the latest news and great information are always just one click away, but that doesn’t mean that we will see the end of traditional magazines or books
Have to say I agree…lots of fluff “reporting” and the articles are often common knowledge even for newbies. I really do not consider myself an SEO at all but even I can’t say I’ve ever really been excited about anything I’ve seen in the magazine.
Can’t really report news on a tech field with a 3-month lead time print mag.
so what are some good search marketing news letters?
I bought a year subscription when I saw there was a coupon code.
For $1 per magazine, there really isn’t much to lose.
I dig Revenue as well - somehow they started sending it to me free. Business 2.0 is good too.
I think they’d be better served offering up more commentary of the news or maybe interviews and forward thinking articles. I’m guessing the time from writing to print is what hurts them and unless that can be improved without adding a lot of cost, they’ll need to figure out a different angle.
I don’t think everyone in the world is still using the internet as much as we do.
That said, SEO topics are targetted at webmasters… who use the internet on a daily basis to manage their WEBSITES :)… so they should be uptodate and targetted.
Hard to keep up though if you run a hardcopy magazine.
John
if you look at the magazine sales you’ll see a steady decline - i like magazines myself. I check out inc.com regularly but i still get the magazine.
no i don’t think they’ll full disappear but i think you’ll see more and more closing down the doors. The magazines ‘features’ are hardly worth the 3.75 at the stand anymore because…well, we know about “so and so”
Sure, I’d say it is likely that people will read less print magazines in the future and that entrepreneurs will be a lot more tempted to start an online magazine rather than a traditional one, but the big players as far as print magazines are concerned are here to stay
I love Revenue magazine even though it’s a bit behind the news as well. It’s hard for a magazine these day to be on top of everything.
There are definitely going to be some that suffer but you also have to remember that magazines have the ability to reach entirely different segments than online as well. I think newspapers are in more danger than magazines.
I’m a big fan of Revenue magazine too, but i agree with the sentiment that print is hard to keep up with blogs and other news sources that allow instant publishing.
That’s a very good point, the readers of some mags hardly ever go online
when you’re on the john, print is much nicer
I’ll have to check out Revenue Magazine. Seems pretty cool.
Thanks Shoe!
Care to share this info?
As far as I’m concerned, there are definitely times when I’ve had it with staring at a computer screen and definitely appreciate a good book or magazine
Shoe, didn’t you have some major issue with Revenue magazine a few years back? Or it might have been them with you?
I agree - I get a lot of these publications at my day job, and I’m not really crazy about most of them.
DM News is a weekly direct marketing paper, and while it does have some decent information, much of what they write on technology and the internet is just painful to read. They whine about the Post Office way too often, though. I think I read a useful feature in Website Magazine once, but I often just pitch it. If you’re interested in e-commerce, Internet Retailer is actually pretty interesting, though. It’s handy for me, working for an e-commerce site, but it could also be helpful for an affiliate to see things from the other side.
One thing I do like about industry magazines, though, is that their classifieds are a good way to find out what other people are doing, and to locate jobs in the industry. I’ll admit that I’ve stolen some ideas/purchased some products that I found by checking out ads I found in the back of trade publications.
Nice site, thanks for keeping us informed & updated, regards adam
yea I’ve actually never read a magazine that reports much on web related technologies/services. Would be interesting if there were more magazines that focused purely on the web, but then again that would also be pointless since they could easily show their stuff online.
There isn’t anything better than picking up a couple of magazines and a Cafe Mocha and sitting in one of the comfy chairs at Barnes and Noble in the middle of the day when the rest of the world is working. I don’t think print mags are going away anytime soon.
Absolutely,
the coupon code is 67SEG.
My post on it:
http://mixedmarketarts.com/2007/12/19/anyone-still-buy-magazines/
Full credits go to searchengineguide.com
Print magazines will not go away until we come up with technology that is large as a piece of paper and is able to display electronic images and text. The reasoning? Because we need something to read while doing #2.
And I agree a SEO magazine. Who thought of that one. I wonder where does the magazine’s site rank in google under “SEO magazine”. Let me see…they are not even in the top 5. Instead they are in the seventh spot.
Thanks Shoe for the tips on the other two magazines.
Chris
Indeed, there are situations when even carrying your laptop is not an option so that print magazines are definitely not becoming 100% useless. Will readership decrease in the long run? Most likely, but that definitely doesn’t mean that they will disappear altogether.
Jeremy,
I suspect you did not read our magazine at all because if you did, you would notice that we are not reporting news, not even trying to. There is no point, blogs do it much better and faster. So when we’ve covered GWO in the last issue, we were not reporting on the fact that it came out, we were giving advice on how to use it and for what.
It might be difficult for some of you to believe, but there are plenty of people out there who do not go over hundreds of RSS feeds from SEM blogs on daily basis. The magazine wasn’t even meant to be a useful resource for people like you, Jeremy, or Danny Sullivan or Barry Schwartz. It is a resource for all of those business owners and marketing managers who are still trying to figure out whatta hell is this search marketing field all about.
Most of the articles in the mag go from beginners level to intermediate. There is nothing we can tell people like you that you don’t already know.
As for print dying, I would agree and disagree. I think that the large, all encompassing publications will die out because online resources have a better grasp on specific niches but niche publications will stick around, at least for while.
It is amazing what people who have never used the internet think about it. There is still a vast market that will be reading magazines for years to come.
Sure, we have people who are not yet accustomed to the Web on the one hand as well as “dinosaurs” such as myself who prefer the printed alternative from time to time on the other as a refreshing alternative.
Even if you’re not covering news and are only offering advice, the fact that blogs do it faster is still an issue: by the time you offer advice about a certain product, for example, most blogs have already covered it and have offered advice as well.
But as far as the issue of print magazines dying out is concerned, I personally doubt that we’ll see that happening anytime soon, at least not on a scale which makes generalizing possible.
That’s the problem with print mags versus 0 second blogs
i subscribe to magazine but don’t really read them
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Industry Mags are dead regardless on the industry. The only value is in ranking and collecting data not news. The few in the industry that I work in, it is really their only value. They really cater to the “Mom-and-Pop sort of stores, not the big guys.
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