An interesting post over at Search Engine Roundtable discusses a thread on whether it’s detrimental to cloak your e-commerce site for religious holidays.

The situation is that some orthodox Jews shut down their web site on the Sabbath. So if you go to a site such as B&H from sundown Friday to darkness of Saturday night, you should get a sign that says they are closed.

The problem is that search engine spiders don’t observe the Sabbath, or Rosh Hashanah, or Christmas, or Patriot’s Day (Maine & Massachusetts.)

Whether it’s your Web site or your business blog, should you be able to shutter it during religious holidays without losing your search engine rank?

Shimon Sandler first raised the issue, and now you can follow the thread Cloaking for Religoius Reasons at the SE Roundtable’s forums.

Google “chopstick instructions” and the flyte blog comes up third. Until a few days ago, we were number one, and still are if you include the quote marks.

What does this mean for you? It shows how you can drive traffic to your blog (or Web site). And, if you were a Chinese restaurant or sold Asian cooking implements, the power of driving qualified traffic to your blog.

It was a few Friday afternoons ago and I was a little fried. I read the miserable translation of the chopstick instructions on the chopstick wrapper (“Chinese glonous history?”) and found it funny. So I scanned in the wrapper and blogged about it.

I purposefully wrote a post title–which would become my page title–that should capture the interest of anyone wanting to learn how to use chopsticks, “Chopstick Instructions: How to Use Chopsticks.”

Within about two days I was number one for “chopstick instructions” and I find that I get a few people every day who come to my blog looking for chopstick instructions.

Now of course, I can’t take advantage of this audience. If any of them are interested in Web design and Internet marketing it would be a random occurance; certainly not worth the time of scanning in the wrapper and blogging about it.

However, it shows that there are people out there looking for help in certain areas of their life or business. What instruction manual or how-to can you post to your own blog to drive qualified traffic?
You need to get inside the head of your best customer or prospect, determine what she wants, and help her achieve it.

And, unlike your Web site that may have a certain structure, you can easily throw in how-to articles on your blog on anything you like, just to test the reaction. You can also write articles that might take advantage of current events, such as “How to Vote Twice on Election Day” or “How to Eat Your Kids’ Halloween Candy Without Them Discovering It.”

What are your best prospects looking to achieve? Now you have your writing assignment.

SixApart is hosting a series of Business Blogging Seminars in cities across the US. According to their informational page, participants will:

• Learn how to create effective blogging strategies and policies
• Hear dynamic use cases from specific industries
• See the latest blogging technologies demonstrated, including RSS and podcasting
• Have your specific business blogging questions addressed in our Q&A sessions

Now, of course this will undoubtably feature how to use a TypePad or Movable Type blogging platform to create a presence in the blogosphere. However, there will probably be good information even if your a dyed-in-the-wool WordPresser.

Current cities include:

• Washington, DC (9/28) (10/19)
• Detroit, MI (10/30)
• Boston, MA (11/2)
• San Francisco, CA (11/13)
• Chicago, IL (11/16)
• NYC, NY (12/11)
• Miami, FL (12/14)

Hey, Six Apart! How about Portland, ME? I’ll even put you up.

If you’d like to get more information or register, go for it. (BTW, in the interest of transparency, that’s an affiliate link.)

KnowledgeStorm and Universal McCann have begun to release an emerging media series study into how blogs, podcasts and other RSS technologies affect technology purchasing decisions.

So far only the podcasting study has been released (free with registration), but they’ve released some teaser factoids:

• 53% of respondants get business and technology information from blogs
• 59% of business and IT professionals are somewhat or very familiar with RSS
• 70% pass along content from blogs

Of course, they don’t go into detail (at least yet) on whether these people are making a buying decision on what they read at Engadget, or whether an RSS feed is helping them choose the right server or keeping them up with last night’s episode of Lost.

You can read the abstract and register for the free report here.

Thanks to Media Buyer Planner for the link.

Business 2.0’s September issue (coming soon to the Web) features a cover story called Blogging for Dollars.

Most of the people featured in the story, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing and Drew Curtis of Fark, are all A-list bloggers.

In fact, the focus of the story is on how individuals or a few people together can generate significant revenue through blog ads by targeting a niche. (Hmmm…kind of like what’s going on here.)

While this makes for a good cover story, it doesn’t help those of us who are blogging for our business, as opposed to making blogging our only business.

I can only imagine the number of people who now think that quitting your job and starting a blog is a viable career option. For every Dooce there a hundred thousand million or more bloggers typing away in obscurity who don’t have the talent for turning a phrase the way she does.

How many more snarky blogs do we need that target celebrity blunders? (I can only imagine the number of ones and zeroes that were sacrificed this morning to tell and retell, examine and reexamine Paramount’s booting of Tom Cruise.

How many tech/gizmo/blogs can survive before we’re oversaturated? I mean, I can’t believe there are even that many new toys to talk about.

While the article gives some lip service to the possibility that a downturn in the ad market would hurt these bloggers, it doesn’t really spend too much time dwelling on it. Of course there will be a downturn in the ad market…there always is. Often followed by a upturn. Then another downturn. Then….

Also, because of the low cost of entry,  most individual bloggers will always have to be watching their back, because it doesn’t take a lot of brainpower for someone else to start writing in your niche and steal some of your thunder.

If you’re planning on quitting your day job to blog in your niche, this article’s probably required reading. If not, reading about people who make millions do exactly what you do can either be inspirational or infuriating.

But, if you blog to market your business, tips like blog “at least half a dozen posts every weekday before lunchtime” probably won’t do you much good.

At Business Blog Consulting we have a category called “Dangers of Blogging,” but I’ve always thought it best served stories about Microsoft employees who like to take photos of Macs being unloaded in Redmond or flight attendants who take “revealing” photos of themselves at work and blog about it. (If by “revealing” the airline meant “without comfortable shoes.”)

What we really need is a category called “Dangers of Pissing Off a Blogger.” That could be a real help to the PR and marketing people who read this blog.
Case in point: Eric D. Snider has a Web site that hosts his “Snide Remarks” articles and his blog. Recently, he was invited to a press junket for Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center that he ruminates in an article called “I Was a Junket Whore.”

In it, he talks about how no real journalists with ethics would go on a junket and how much Paramount spent on wooing him to get him to write positive things about the movie. He followed that up with a blog entry where he tore into another “junket whore.”

Paramount’s response?

Well, I knew Paramount wouldn’t like the article if they happened to read it, and I figured they wouldn’t invite me on any more junkets. But they went a step further and banned me from all their press screenings, too — the ones that ALL critics (not just quote whores) go to. They also convinced their regional publicists to ban me from screenings for the other studios those publicists handle.

Snider of course noted all this on the article and the follow up blogs. It even got him (and Paramount) some coverage on NPR and perhaps some other media outlets. (Plus, the blog you’re reading now.)

Now, personally I don’t agree with everything Snider says.

But if the goal of the studio is for the film to make a profit, then it’s absurd to spend so much promotional money on things that, in the end, won’t actually increase ticket sales very much.

Actually, all of the money they spent on Snider’s hotel room and flight and dinner stipend probably wouldn’t buy one commercial on a nationally broadcast show, plus most people would Tivo right over the commercial anyway. Plus, Maggie Gyllenhaal is a beautiful, sexy actress and I’ll fight anyone who says different!

That being said, Paramount and other corporations need to learn how to handle bloggers better. In this case, ignoring Snider probably would have been in their best interest. Most people probably know that junkets are meant to sway reviewers, and those who don’t probably don’t care.

In other cases, especially when bloggers are angry about bad customer service (AOL?), or batteries that make good campfire starters (Sony? Dell?), it’s best to take care of the problem immediately, starting with the most prominent bloggers.

In still other cases the best solution may be to tell “your” side of the story, and let the chips fall where they may. After all, soon enough someone will be blogging about another customer-service-story-from-hell and you can go back to running your business.

Adding Technorati tags to posts has never been easy in TypePad. In fact, I created a little movie a while back so that clients could watch it as many times as they like.

But now TypePad has added a Technorati Tags field near the bottom the New Post page. Just separate your tags with commas and you’re all set. No need to muck around with the Edit HTML tab.

While this is a good solution for most users, not being able to get under-the-hood does frustrate me on a few points:

• I don’t like to brand my tags as “Technorati Tags.” I prefer the more agnostic “Tags.”
• I like the flexibility of sending those links to places other than the Technorati tag pages. I.e., a tag on Search Engine Optimization could point to my page on SEO at my own Web site.
• I prefer pipes over commas. (I know, small thing.)

However, if you’re a TypePad user and you’ve wanted to take advantage of tags (which help drive additional traffic to your site) without learning HTML, this is a great solution for you.

Now, what to do with my movie?

For those of you looking for rules (I hate that word–how about “guidelines?”), case studies and advice on how to market with blogs, you may want to clear your calendar for this Thursday, July 27th at 12pm EST.

Co-blogger Jeremy Wright is hosting Truths of Blog Marketing: Reaching Customers, Building Your Brand, a Web seminar for MarketingProfs.

The seminar goes for $99, or is free for Marketing Profs’ Premium Plus members. Another argument for becoming a member is Kelly Goto’s Tuesday, July 25th seminar: Demystifying Website Usability: Rapid Research for Marketers.

The Web and the blogosphere can be incredible tools to connect with customers and prospects. Unfortunately, if you’re not doing a good job your customers can use these same tools to let the world know.

AOL found this out recently when one of their customers tried to cancel his account. Vincent Ferrari had heard horrible stories about AOL’s “customer support” so he decided to record his conversation.

After 15 minutes he finally got through to a human being. The call resulted in something that’s a cross between Dante’s 9th ring of hell and Orwell’s 1984. The king from Monty Python’s Holy Grail had an easier time explaining to the palace guards to keep his son locked in his room than Ferrari had explaining that he just wanted to cancel the account. “I don’t know how I can make this any clearer, just cancel my account,” he says time and again.

Ferrari put the recording on his blog, but was overwhelmed by the social bookmarking traffic. You can now listen to the whole painful affair at Putfile.com. When something’s this painful or funny, it’s very likely to go viral.

That virus got Ferrari on a number of talk shows and got him an official apology from AOL.

The lesson here: treat your customers with respect, because they just might be blogging.

By the way, if you think Ferrari is just a crank about customer service, read this recent post on his experience with Audible.

A nascent blog directory, iBlogBusiness, has recently launched to serve people looking specifically for business blogs.

The concept isn’t revolutionary, but it could become a good resource for those looking for other business blogs.
Since adding your own blog is free, it’s probably worth the two minutes it takes to submit your URL to iBlogBusiness.

Getting quality incomings is essential to good search engine ranking; since iBlogBusiness hasn’t been around long enough to provide good PageRank, you should also submit to the blog directories listed in Robin Good’s Best Blog Directory and RSS Submission Sites page.

A quick (unsolicited) kudo to our own Toby Bloomberg; her Diva Marketing Blog is TypePad’s Featured Blog of the Day today (6/5/08.)

Great job, Toby!

A lot of small business owners are interested in blogging, but they afraid of starting a blog for fear of not knowing what to write about.

Often, when we’re consulting with a client on their blog we create a “recommended reading list.” It’s usually a combination of blogs from the client’s industry, similar industries, and a “usual suspects” list of blogs on blogging, like Business Blog Consulting (or my own blog, dammit!)

Well, I think I’ll be adding Pajama Market to my usual suspects. It’s a combination of “Small Business Blogs of the Day” and interviews with those small business bloggers. And yes, the “Web site of the Day” concept is sooo 1997, but for small business owners interested in blogging, this is a valuable resource.

Recent featured blogs include Green Cine Daily, featuring movie reviews from a DVD rental company, Wool Winders, a knitting blog from a knitting store, and The Tap Room, a blog from a London pub. How’s that for variety?

If I have one complaint (and apparently I do) it’s the dearth of categories. Currently there are only four: Blogging Info, Personal, Small Business Blog Interview and Small Business Blog of the Day. It would be great if there were some categories that covered the type of businesses, such as “Retail”, “Service Industry”, and so on. As small businesses fall of the home page they tend to disappear.

Still, if you’re a small business owner and you think there’s nothing for you to blog about, be sure to check out Pajama Market first.

If you are already blogging your small business, well maybe you should submit your blog for consideration!

Today, for the first time in over a year, there’s a new post on Bloglet’s home page.

Bloglet began as a hobby of mine to help manage the random blogs I’d read on a daily basis. This was back when words like “blog” and “rss” had yet to enter most people’s vocabulary.

Now “blogs” are being mentioned on the Daily Show, but Bloglet still remains a hobby. It’s obvious that I don’t have the time to turn this hobby into something that offers a fair level of service to users.

Bloglet, for those of you who don’t know, was an early free service that allowed visitors to subscribe to email versions of your post. The service was always a bit spotty, and I remember on several occasions having to log into Bloglet and resetting my account after realizing that it had been a week since I received my last update.

If you’re still using Bloglet, Feedblitz is offering a Bloglet-to-Feedblitz converter of all of your subscribers, which is now promoted on the Bloglet home page.

Other options include Feedburner and AWeber.

Any business still relying on Bloglet needs to convert their subscribers sooner rather than later, as Bloglet says they may be phasing out the site entirely over the next few weeks.

There’s a new kid on the block for searching blogs by the name of Sphere.

It sports a clean and simple interface, and from my brief experience, is lightening fast. (Yes, I said it: a fast blog search.)

The default results appear to be relevancy (as opposed to recency) but that can be quickly changed. All search results pages offer an RSS button to subscribe. As a nice feature, when you click on it you have the option of seven different chicklets, including Yahoo and Bloglines among others.

On the search results page you also choose from “Featured Blogs (beta)” or “Related Media.” The featured blogs link takes you to a page of related, featured blogs along with the option of suggesting a resource.

Related media takes you to a page with books, news, photos and podcasts related to your search.

Sphere also offers a few additional tools from their Tools page including a search widget for TypePad.

A couple days back I posted “Net Neutrality and Small Business on the Web” at flyte’s blog, alerting small business owners and entrepreneurs about some legislation that might affect their online business.

I stood up for net neutrality, the idea that all information should be treated equally on the net, and that ISP’s like Verizon and AT&T shouldn’t be able to give preferential treatment to their partners and other large corporations willing to pay a premium for such a benefit. In my mind, changing the current method (which Verizon and AT&T are lobbying hard for) hurts small business.

Within hours there were five comments at my blog (which is a lot for me): four against and one for. (And I wrote that one!)

Commentors questioned why the government should be interfering with yet another aspect of our lives (point well taken) and felt the market should sort it out. Some felt we should leave well enough alone. However, it seems to me that big ISP’s are lobbying for a change to the current system.

Just a few moments ago I got an email from Andy Wibbels — a smart guy if ever there was one — asking for support of net neutrality. Andy asks us to “imagine if the eletric company made your refrigerator run slower if it wasn’t a Whirlpool brand.”

Alternatively, imagine if the passing lane on a highway could only be used by giant corporation’s trucks, and all other traffic needed to take side streets.

What if your competition was a Verizon partner and their blog came up faster in a browser at the expense of your own? GM’s FastLane Blog might benefit from this change, but probably not your blog.

Well, now you’ve heard those in favor of net neutrality. What do the rest of you think?

The first mistake I mention in “The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make” is not getting your own domain name for your blog, and using something.typepad.com or something similar.

However, you need to be careful if you use the registrars to research a blog domain name. (Or any domain name, for that matter.) Wired’s Monkey Bites blog reports here and here on a situation where someone put a desired domain name into a shopping cart at GoDaddy but didn’t check out right then. (Happens all the time.)

When they returned the next day to purchase the domain name it was gone, purchased by someone else and for sale for an inflated price.

The same thing happened to someone I know when she put her titular domain name in a shopping cart at GoDaddy but didn’t check out. The next day — poof! — it was gone.

Slimy? Yes. Illegal? Probably not.

In short: if you researching a domain name at the registrars, be ready to buy it right then!

Recently SixApart began offering Widgets (add-on modules) to increase the functionality of TypePad blogs.

TypePad bloggers can view the gallery of widgets and choose from such categories as:

• commerce
• content
• games
• job search
• music
• photos and video
• publishing tools and
• search

Some of these widgets are painfully beta, while others will appeal to a very small audience segment. However, if you’ve been looking to add search to your TypePad blog or promote your eBay auctions, be sure to check out the new TypePad Widgets.

Recently I wrote a post on optimizing your TypePad blog titles for the search engines. Today I read a well-documented article called Search Engine Optimization for Blogs by Bill Hartzer.

In it he discusses techniques to use if WordPress or Movable Type is your platform of choice. He also has some good information on promoting your blog. (Although, how he forgot Stephan Spencer’s fantastic collection of WordPress plug-ins I’ll never know!)
If you’re using your blog as a lead-generation tool be sure to check this article out.

Click image for free report

Last Friday I spoke at the annual conference for NAPO: The National Association of Professional Organizers, on the topic of “How to Plan, Build and Promote a Business Blog.”Since this is a constantly evolving seminar for me, there were significant changes from what I submitted in January and what I presented in March. I posted the handouts to my Web site for any attendees who wanted to download them.

I then decided to open that up to anyone who wanted to download and review the handouts. The target audience for the seminar is entrepreneurs and small business owners, but there’s a lot of information in there for anyone.

The download is free, but an email registration is required. (1MB, PDF.)

Six Apart, creator of MovableType and TypePad, has rececently acquired SplashBlog, “a mobile photo blogging application and service that allows users to instantly publish photos from a camera phone to a blog.”

According to the Six Apart press release,

The addition of the SplashBlog team and the rich mobile blogging technologies they have developed will help assure that our users will continue to have the best user experience and most advanced features available when they blog from mobile devices and cell phones.

Just going to prove that there’s no run-on sentence like a press release run-on sentence.

Others also weigh in:

• John Cook’s Venture Blog
• San Francisco Business Times