Have you seen the Feedster Top 500 blogs list? Some of the contributors to this site are on it. Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion is #56, LaShawn Barber’s is #121, Jeremy Wright’s Ensight is #348, and Dave Taylor’s site is #459. Congrats to all these for being…popular! Hey, they all have something to say that’s worth reading. If I missed any other of our contributors who made the list, please forgive and leave a comment mentioning your ranking.

BTW, read the MarketingVox article about media buyers using the list as a planning tool.

There appears to be a packed house here at the Business Blogging 101 Seminar presented at the Blog Business Summit by Dave Taylor.  This is promising to see with the number of people wanting to know about how to use a blog as a business tool.

Dave wanted me to mention his Madonna look with the michrophone on his head, what he does not realize, is he needs to  change the wardrobe somehow to complete the look.  If my electricity holds out, I’ll be blogging some of the more finer points.

"The future of business is findability."

Many businesses attending all have websites, but few update their content often.

"The tool that people are using are blogs to update their content".

"The difference between a website and a blog is managing a site versus managing the content".

Dave emphasizes content management to increase your search results through blogs.

I was really hoping to make it to the Blog Business Summit in San Fran but, alas and forsooth, it was not to be. Nevertheless, it kicks off today with a Pre-Conference Business Blogging 101workshop. In fact, our very own Dave Taylor will be the presenter.

Several of the contributors to this site will be attending the conference and should be blogging about it here as well as their own sites. Me, I’ll just watch from the sidelines.

The anti-blogging blogs (or the reality-check blogs–take your pick) continue. This one is from Jim Logan and his post The Temptation and Reality of Business Blogs.

Jim rightly points out that blogs are probably not the tool a small business and solopreneurs should use to immediately grow your revenue. He also gives a list of some marketing endeavors that might have a more immediate impact on your company.

However, I would argue that business blogging should fall into Stephen Covey’s second quadrant: important but not urgent.

I don’t think many people would argue that a business blog alone is
enough marketing for any company…even a business blog consultant.
However, it can be a great, long-term investment for companies and
businesses looking to have a conversation with their prospects and
clients.

Where do you rank business blogs in importance when it comes to your company’s marketing?

Mark Cuban writes that "splogs" or "spamblogs" or "zombie blogs" are becoming more and more popular through the use of free blog services like Google’s blogger.com

Blogger is by far the worst offender. Google seems to be working hard to adjust their relevancy indexes to exclude
splog from having influence on search rankings, but they dont seem to be doing anything more than removing reported
splogs. Kind of like going after the zombies one at a time with a shovel. Can we get some help on this Google ?

We hear that there are 80,000 new blogs set up per day, and there may be reason to believe that many of those blogs are nothing more than Zombies.  How do we combat this problem?  Some say that anything with a blogger.com URL could and should be banned as spam.  This is akin to "Kill them all and let God sort them out."

[via The Blog Herald]

 

Certainly
the dangers are massive, for both blogging and the companies concerned.
One hopes that blogging is developed and entrenched enough to withstand
an assault from corporates looking to exploit another ‘open source’
medium? But the market is powerful and I have a feeling it will be the
corporates who do it badly that will, in the end, feel the pain. “Don’t
go toward fake blogs. Don’t launch character blogs. Use a blog for what
it’s for, transparency,� said Steve Rubel, vice president of client
services at CooperKatz & Co., a New York PR firm.

The August 15, 2005 issue of BusinessWeek has an article on podcasts going mainstream and the impact Apple’s iTunes is having on indie shows and media giants in Podcast: David vs. Goliath.

As podcasts become a more common tool in small businesses’ Web
marketing toolbox, (as business blogs already have,) how will they
compete against media giants who can just reuse or re-purpose existing
content?

The article suggests a few things such as joining more informal networks (away from iTunes) such as Techpodcasts, the Association of Music Podcasting or Podcastoutlaws.

Small businesses may need to focus on their niche rather than a broad audience to begin. If Seth Godin is right in All Marketers Are Liars, finding an untapped niche that shares your world view might lead to something bigger…like a top 100 ranking on iTunes.

In addition to my other volunteer efforts to help Global PR Blog Week 2.0 be a valuable discussion and event for both public relations professionals and anyone else interested in the present and future of business blogging and PR blogging, I’m also contributing two articles of note:

Why CEO’s Shouldn’t Blog

Fake Blogs: New Marketing Channel or Really Bad Idea?

I have some thoughtful opinions on both topics, and have already started to draft up notes and some specific points I want to make, but in the spirit of an open dialog, I would like to invite you, my faithful readers, to add your own thoughts on these two topics too!

You are welcome to agree with my position, disagree vehemently, or even just point to weblogs that you think are fascinating or wicked cool examples of the specific topic.

In a week or two I’ll begin pulling my articles together and will hope that I can quote at least a few of you therein (with links to your own sites, if you’d like: indicate as such in your comment if that’s something that appeals to you) either supporting my position CEO blog-wise, or offering a smart perspective on so-called fake blogs.

So…. what do you think about CEO blogs and fake blogs?

Note: to keep things organized and coherent, I’m requesting that you add your comments here: CEO Blogs and Fake Blogs: an open discussion at The Intuitive Life Business Blog. Thanks!

Technorati’s David Sifry has an excellent piece on spam and fake blogs that gives as thorough an explanation of the subject that I’ve seen. If those things get your goat like they do mine it’s a post you’ll want to read.

In a recap of a study done by The University of  Glamorgan in the United Kingdom, Michael Martine discusses the difference in designs of websites by men versus women and discusses some issues that should be looked at before you decide on a plan for your blog design.  Perhaps Michael will launch a Battle of The Blog Sexes.

Although I’ve seen several blogs link in the last few hours to comScore’s "Behaviors of the Blogosphere" study that I posted about earlier (though admittedly not the feeding frenzy I’d expected), I’ve also seen a few questions about the methodology. So I thought I’d take a bit of time to address some of those.

A convenient way to do that is for me to answer questions that Darren Barefoot emailed me today. I haven’t asked Darren’s persmission to answer these questions in this forum, but I figure as a fellow blogger he’ll be cool with it:

* Are there more details about your methodology? I’m no statistician, but page 3 of your report doesn’t describe how data was gathered from "1.5 million US participants", nor how those people were selected. There’s an asterisk in the first paragraph of page 3 which suggests more details, but I can’t figure out what it’s referencing.

Let me start with the most important thing: my opinion is the best information market research can give us is this: "Is it bigger than a breadbox?" This research study satisfactorally answers that question for the blogosphere: Yes.

There is no flawless methodology in market research. It’s an inexact science. Samples get biased, corners are cut trade-offs are made, yadda-yadda-yadda. It’s always directional, at best. Research wonks like myself obsess on the details, and if it’s details you want, it is details you will get. This will be one of my "long posts." It’s late and I’m bored, so I’ll dwell on the details. (Man, rereading it, I went completely OCD on your ass!)

In fact, I’ll begin by sharing a new favorite quote, from the second page of How to Lie With Statistics, a classic work (1954) by Darrel Huff (and wonderful illustrations by Irving Geis):

I have a great subject [statistics] to write upon, but feel keenly my literary incapacity to make it easily intelligible without sacrificing accuracy and throughness.
– Sir Francis Galton

You’re right, Darren, it looks like that there should be some footnote on that page that’s
missing. I’ll call it to comScore’s attention and see if we can get
clarification and update the PDF. I’ll also invite them to elaborate in the comments here. And, BTW, they do offer a Methodology page on their site, though as Cameron Marlow complains it could be more detailed.

I can tell you that comScore’s panel is one of the largest in the world
for media research. By comparison, TV viewing habits in America are
laregely determined by a panel of a few thousand maintained by Nielsen
Media Research.

One funny thing to me is that within the bubble I live —
Internet advertising and media research — no one argues much anymore over the methodology of comScore and their chief rival Nielsen//NetRatings, in part because we’ve heard the explanations before but also because they’re such household names in our sector we don’t think to worry about it much. All the biggest web sites and online ad agencies and advertisers are quite familiar with comScore and their numbers. But apparently in the blogosphere they’re not so familiar.

How the panel members were selected… I’d have to defer to comScore for a thorough explanation there, but I’m sure there was an element of "self-selection" along the lines of recruitment to participate in the panel through banner ads and other "customer acquisition" tactics. So one potential bias could be that they get "joiners" in their panel. They also recruited some people with free utilities, such as a virus detector. Everyone gets a clear explanation, though, that their online surfing will be monitored for aggregate research purposes, which they have to opt into.

But they address the bias in various ways. First and foremost, their panel is really, really huge by conventional research standards. Most opinion polls the results of which you read in the newspaper or elsewhere are based on samples typically of 1,000 (or fewer) respondents on the low-end or 20,000 on the high end. comScore’s 1.5 million research subjects simply shatters most research constructs.

Cameron rashly writes, "Given that they do not justify their sample, nor provide margins of error, the initial sampling frame should be considered bunk." He couldn’t be more wrong. I was the ultimate project manager for this research. Two years ago, I made the well-considered decision to steer this research in comScore’s direction precisely because I believe they have the mother of all research panels. Theirs is really the only one I would trust to project reliably to audiences as small as blog readers.

To the extent to which all that wasn’t made more clear in the methodology section is partly comScore’s modesty and partly time constraints getting this out the door.

You can make statistically sound projections based on relatively small subsets of a population. But with a panel this gynormous, projections are quite sound. So that’s one thing that corrects the sample bias: humungous sample size. The Advertising Research Foundation gave comScore the seal of approval based on that alone.

Also, they weight results from the survey against a regular (quarterly? semi-annual?) random-digit-dial (RDD) phone survey. I don’t know the size of that sample, but it’s sufficiently big to be statistically reliable, and RDD is typically known as one of the best random sampling methodologies for populations, because virtually everyone (in the U.S., anyway) has a phone, and numbers are generated randomly, which gets "unlisted" households (curiously, though, it doesn’t get cell phones, so it does tend to under-sample Gen Y).

(See, this stuff get’s really geeky. But you asked.)

Your question also asked how the data were gathered. ("Data" is plural for "dataum"; use the plural verb form, people!) Again, comScore can correct me, but they use some kind of combination of a "proxy network" (a farm of servers set up to cache all web content panelists surfed) and/or some software on panelists’ machines. They have some mechanism, in any event, for seeing everywhere panelists go and everything they do (including purchases, SKUs, money spent, etc.). Then they suck all that data up into the mothership, a multi-terrabyte (I imagine) datamart thing. Results are recent and highly detailed.

* Why is there no discussion of margin of error?

Uh…an oversight, I guess. The whole reason with going with comScore is their accuracy based on sample size is superior in the industry. With 1.5 million panelists’ behavioral data, they can project with extreme accuracy on thousands of sites. Margin of error, within a certain "confidence level," is a measure of reliability in terms of variance, were the same survey to be administered numerous times. So, for example, a sample size of 2,000 respondents, more or less randomly selected, will represent a given population, say 290 million U.S. residents, within a "margin of error" of 2.19% , meaning, if 20% of survey respondents said "I like gum," it could be more like 18-22% in 95 similar surveys out of 100 times it was conducted (i.e., a 95% "confidence level").

So, to have a panel of comScore’s (1.5 million) represent a U.S. online population of 204 million, at a confidence level of 95%, your margin of error would be 0.008% (meaning "dead on"), according to this margin of error calculator. [comScore folks or anyone else out there, please correct me if I’m misrepresenting or mistaken in anything here. I’m not an actual statistian, I just play one on the Interweb.]

* The first graph on page 6 discusses unique visitors to particular domains. These don’t jibe with the sites’ own reports. For example, Boing Boing claims 4.6 million unique visitors (http://www.boingboing.net/stats/) in Q1 of 2005. Yet, the comScore study only reports 849,000. The same goes for Slashdot, which reportedly sees 300,000 – 500,000 visitors on a daily basis. Surely in three months they receive far more than 911,000 unique ones? Which numbers do you claim to be more accurate–comScore’s or the sites’ own?

Assumption 1: I don’t see where you get the 4.6 million unique visitors figure for BoingBoing. When I look at one of the first sections of that page you link to, I see a monthly range of 1.8 to 1.5 million "unique visitors" (UV). So, in the months of our examination, Q1 2005, BoingBoing’s monthly UV stats range from 1.45 to 1.66 million. So, let’s assume for the three months you’re probably talking about an undupilicated audience of 2-3 million, by their site stats,

Factor 1: How does BoingBoing stat package collect uniques? How does it work at all? I can’t be bothered to find out those answers, as stat packages vary (widely) in methodology and accuracy, but one key question is do they count "unique visitors" by IP addresses, cookies or some other means? Probably IP addresses, which is the most common. At least this package distinguishes "visits" from "visitors," as many don’t and bloggers often get confused thinking "visits" (which is surfing sessions) is the same as visitors (unique people), as visitors can have multiple visits during a month.

In any event, if it is using IP addresses to distinguish uniques, as I bet it is, those can be highly variable. Many ISPs assign IP addresses randomly every time a user logs on, so if you are on dial up or you shut your computer off during a month, you might show up as several IP addresses to BoingBoing on your repeated visits throughout the month. Not to mention the same person surfing from work and home being counted twice. So the likelihood is an overcount due to IP address counting.

comScore doesn’t have this problem when it comes to unique identities, because it knows (at least to the household level) that people are unique visitors, because of its persistent software relationship with the computer. )

Factor 2: International traffic. comScore’s panel used for this study comprises only U.S. residents. For advertiser purposes, that’s what most advertisers care about. Also, because of it’s very construct, it would be nearly impossible to get 100% international panel coverage (e.g., Iraq, Nigeria, Belize, etc.).

So their numbers exclude traffic from international sites. (The Methodology section of the report says the sample is U.S. only, but it doesn’t dwell on the point.) Many U.S. sites may between 10-50% traffic from international visitors. That may also explain a lot of the variance.

There is more I could say here, but I think that’s sufficient, as those are probably the main factors for the differences. That and simply that log files analysis systems can also be quite flaky. I once had a client when I was freelance who had two stat tracking packages installed on her site, and there was a 10x difference between them: one said something like 10,000 visitors a month, and the other said 100,000. Go figure.

* The definition of ‘unique visitor’ in the study reads "The number of individual people visiting a site in a given time period." Meanwhile, the text addressing the most popular blogs says "Examples include DrudgeReport, which drew 2.3 million visitors who visited an average of 19.5 times, and Fark, which drew 1.1 million users an average of 9.0 times in Q1 2005."

What’s the ‘given time period’? Clearly you don’t mean a unique visitor in Q1, 2005, because you discuss each visitor coming to a site x times.

Yes, we do mean for the first three months of 2004, DrudgeReport drew 2.3 million unique U.S. visitors who visited an average of 19.5 times (at total of 44.3 million visits during that period). That means, it’s audience is both large and hugely loyal. Fark had 1.1 million visits who visited 10.1 million times (an average of 9) in the first quarter.

Beyond that, Blogdex’s Cameron Marlow, a would-be friend of mine and Ph.D. student at MIT, raises quite a fuss about the methodology of the study over at his blog Overstated (that’s an understatement), where I have to be honest he gets it pretty much entirely wrong. Most of his concerns should have been refuted in this post, and others I argued in his comments field.

This morning I sat in on the Search Engine Strategies session on “Earning from Search and Contextual Ads”. Great session. It was fun to hear Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. proclaim his love for Google (he wasn’t very complementary of Yahoo!). And Jen of JenSense.com gave a plethora of useful tips and advice on optimizing your revenue from AdSense, YPN, etc. Will Johnson of Yahoo! and Gokul Rajaram of Google gave their view from the ad network side. And Scott Meyer, CEO of about.com shared some of their experiences as a high-earning publisher too.

I’ve blogged a recap of the session. So have a read if you’re looking for some contextual advertising tips to make money from your blog.

I’m pleased to announce a new report that I expect will shortly by the buzz of the blogosphere, from comScore Networks: Behaviors of the Blogosphere: Understanding the Scale, Composition and Activities of Weblog Audiences (PDF).

I say I’m pleased because I had a hand in it. Actually, this thing has been many months in the making. I first discussed the idea of analyzing blog reader behavior using comScore’s 1.5 million research panel of web users who have given explicit permission for comScore to track them everywhere they go online. Anyway, we finally got it done, and I think everyone with an interest in the scope of the blogosphere will find it interesting.

uhA few comments on the methodology, as I’m a research geek after all. We started by examining "top 100 blog" and "blog ecosystem" lists from sites including Technorati, Daypop, BlogStreet, Bloglines and others, most notably TruthLaidBear, the entire list for which is over 14,000 blogs (I see down at teh level of Insignifant Microbes it’s now more than 34,000 blogs, but for our analysis we went just beyond 14,000 deep).

Based on those thousands of blogs, comScore identified the 400 biggest blogs and blog hosting networks. We further categorized those blogs into various (non-exclusive) categories, including Political, Tech, Hipster, Women Authored, Business and so forth. comScore then looked at all the members of its panel who visited those sites during Q1 2005.

Just to get bloggers all wet, we actually produce a list of the top 25 blogs in the (English-language) blogosphere, by unique quarterly visitors (Q1 2005) and by number of visitations (i.e., user loyalty). It’s sure to generate controversy, as the top bloggers by traffic and visitation are not necessarily the ones that show up at the top of everyone else’s lists by number of in-bound links (or at least they’re not in the same order), but that’s just a question of understanding comScore’s methodology: actually tracking of hundreds of thousands of blog readers and making statistically sound projections accordingly.

Perhaps the more important findings, however, will be those about the size and demographic and behavioral make-up of blog readers. Highlights include:

• 50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. population
• Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in that period, and four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each
• Of 400 of the biggest blogs observed, segmented by seven (nonexclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women
• Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections
• Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online

Gawker Media and Six Apart co-sponsored the research. Gawker’s publisher Nick Denton shares his own thoughts on his blog.

Less than two weeks from today, some of the brightest and most successful business bloggers will be meeting in San Francisco to both share what they’ve learned — good and bad — about business blogging, and to explore future directions for weblogs and how blogging can benefit companies large and small.

Speakers at the Blog Business Summit include DL Byron, Molly Holzschlag, Robert Scoble, Jeffrey Zeldman, Darren Barefoot, Rebecca Blood and Anil Dash. Oh yeah, I (Dave Taylor) will be speaking there too, and debating best practices with Robert Scoble.

If you’re just coming up to speed on business blogging then you already know that reading Blog Business Consulting is a superb way to get involved, but for many people, a more focused workshop is a better strategy. If that describes you, then you’ll be quite interested to learn about the dynamite Business Blogging 101 workshop I’ll be leading on the 16th of August too.

There’s no better way to spend three days learning about weblogs, business blogging, and how to keep track of the blogosphere buzz than to make plans now to attend the Blog Business Summit at the historic Palace Hotel in San Francisco, August 16-19. Register now while there’s still space.

We hope to see you there!

  Our very own contributor Steve Rubel is on the advisory board of this conference taking place in New York City, October 17-18, 2005.

BlogOn 2005 Social Media Summit is the premier executive conference for
forward-thinking marketing, communications and media executives who are
considering strategic initiatives that leverage social media — blogs,
social networking sites, collaboration tools and syndication feeds.

I’m looking forward to seeing the lineup and the speakers for this event.  This should prove to be a great forum for getting the message of Business Blogging into the hands of those that matter.

Any search engine optimization consultant will tell you that links are the currency of the Web. They’re also the currency of the blogosphere. Without any inbound links, you’re just blogging to yourself. In Mike Grehan’s seminal piece “Filthy Linking Rich“, he explains how those rich with links just keep getting richer.

So how can new business bloggers get a jump start in the search engines? Simple: just whip out your wallet. The business of text link ad buying has matured, and it’s on the up-and-up. We’re not talking about “buying PageRank”… what we’re talking about is a totally legitimate business practice of buying text ads where you choose your hyperlinked words carefully based on keyword research and your advertisement appears on a reputable, relevant website. And of course, it links directly to your website, sans click tracking, so the ‘search engine juice’ flows unhindered. If the practice weren’t legit, would you see such well-respected link-building pundits as Eric Ward on the board of the link broker Text-Link-Ads.com?

Buying links is not quite as simple as I make it out. Yes, you can use a broker and they’ll happily take your money. Caveat emptor! In order to make an informed purchase, you’ll need to evaluate the quality of the links using a number of criteria. Here’s such a list of criteria, courtesy of the ABAKUS SEO Blog:

1. Inbound site traffic and page traffic.
2. Inbound dot gov and dot edu links.
3. Click though traffic you get from the page.
4. Site in DMOZ and Yahoo directory.
5. Age of domain and time of domain being used (longer the better).
6. Inbound links shown to that page on Yahoo (link:http:www.domain.ext/page/).
7. Ranking of page for the keywords it is optimized for.
8. Relevance of theme of site and page to your site and page.
9. Alexa ranking (lower is better).
10. Deep link compared to home page links.
11. Location of link.
12. Length of allowed description text.
13. PR of page (still matters a bit).

Personally, I’d also add to the list:

1. Appearance of any link advertisers on the page that would attract the attention (negatively) of the search engines (e.g.: casinos, Texas Hold’em, Viagra, pharmaceuticals, insurance, Rolex, etc.)
2. Quality of the landing pages of the existing link advertisers (if you find any are spammy-looking, turn and run!)
3. Placement of the link. (i.e.: being relegated to the bottom of the page as footer links is not ideal)

I’m trying to decide if Blog-zilla is for real or a some type of blogspam program. I’d love to hear your thoughts, particularly if you’ve tried the thing.

A recent NY Times article reports that online retailers are beginning to drink the Kool-aid and jump on the blogging bandwagon. They cite specifically Ice.com, eHobbies.com, and Bluefly.com.

Two
of the retailers express some concern over the effect their blogs will
have on the bottom-line. Since the blogs include links off to other
sites, their marketing gurus feel it will lead readers away rather than
driving traffic to their ecommerce sites. That’s a valid point, since
the primary purpose of the blogs is marketing and driving sales.

One retailer questioned the appropriateness of putting product links
inside the blog posts. A quick review of all three blogs showed they
each did, with Ice primarily using hyperlinked images of its products
to draw visitors in.

Another retailer not mentioned in the article, Stone Creek Coffee, has also just added a blog. From what I can tell, the blog is part of their home page.

Bluefly asserts that their blog
has had a positive effect on sales, even stating that visitors who
click to the blog “have been more likely to make a purchase than those
who visit Bluefly directly.� I think they call that “qualified
traffic,� which is certainly one thing a blog can do for you.

Here are some random thoughts…

• Blogging
  as a marketing channel will vastly increase in popularity over the next
  few months. I congratulate retailers such as these who are willing to
  lead the way.
• Yes, definately include links to products in the blog posts. That’s why you have the darn thing anyway!
• Rather
  than giving readers a sales pitch, tell a story. Talk about the
  experience of using the product. Refer to other related articles found
  on the web and work a product link in. Do what eHobbies does in showing
  photos of their employees having fun playing with products.
• If
  blogs are going to prove themselves as viable marketing tools, then
  it’s imperative there be some system in place to track their
  effectiveness. That should be a given and not something difficult to
  do. After all, blogs are just a website and you can track statistics
  about site visits, referers and page views, have unique URLs for each
  product which can be tracked through to the ecommerce site and on
  through to purchase, and track movement from the blog to the main site
  as well.

I contend that, though blogs are not for the faint of heart,
they will prove themselves to have viability for retail marketing. In
an ideal scenario the benefits they provide will occur in sequence:

1. They’re
   niche-driven attracting readers who are interested in the topic at
   hand. That’s qualified traffic. It makes sense that those will be some
   of the best customers.
2. If the blogs are routinely updated visitors will come back again and again, many of those being existing customers.
3. Trust and brand loyalty will result.
4. Many
   of these customers will become evangelists for you and talk about you
   via their own consumer-generated media outlets (blogs, IM, chat rooms,
   email, etc.).
5. Your blog will become a center of influence around which a community of interested customers/shoppers develop.

What’s not to like about that!

Here are links to each of the blogs mentioned: Ice.com, eHobbies.com, Bluefly.com, and Stone Creek Coffee.

[Special thanks to Rich Ottum for stimulating my thinking about this issue in two blog posts he did.]