Editor's note: Over at Small Business Trends we do a weekly series of PowerBlog Reviews of business weblogs. This is the fifty-fourth in that series.

This week's Review is about the Online Marketing blog. It's the brainchild of Lee Odden, the founder of TopRank, a search engine optimization firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

Lee is part of that growing number of professionals who use blogging as a kind of enforced discipline to stay up to date on their areas of expertise. Blogging requires them to efficiently gather news and information. The act of digesting the information and communicating it in a blog makes these professionals even more knowledgeable. Blogs are great knowledge management tools.

At the same time, Lee is providing a valuable service for clients and the public. Blogging also gives him a chance to practice what he preaches, i.e., blog optimization and promotion.

If you are writing a business blog, you are going to want to attract readers. After all, you don't want your hard work to go unnoticed, right?

I've learned quite a bit from reading this blog. You can too.

One of the things I like best about the Online Marketing blog is its niche focus. Lee adheres closely to the topic of search engine optimization, along with hard-to-find information about online marketing. That's what makes it so valuable.

For instance, Lee has an an excellent blogroll of search marketing blogs. I've noted before in these Reviews that compiling a niche-focus, single topic blogroll can be a source of competitive differentiation for a blog. People will bookmark the blog simply because of the great blogroll.

Even better, you'll find very specific posts with step-by-step instructions. Take, for instance, this post about RSS Marketing. It has enough detail to be truly useful. And it is about a subject that only the most knowledgeable insiders are aware of today. But I predict that leveraging RSS for promotion and marketing will become red hot later in 2005 and 2006. Blog posts such as this are one of the factors that set the Online Marketing blog apart.