You may have noticed (and hopefully used!) Eurekster’s Swicki widget on the right column sidebar of this blog (under the heaading labeled “Buzz Cloud”). A couple more examples of swickis can be found on my personal blog and on my daughter’s blog.

Ok, actually no I won’t blog for steak. I’m a vegetarian. But I bet plenty of other bloggers would take up such an offer.

Rajesh Setty emailed Chris Pirillo’s Braintrust list earlier this month with an email titled “Bloggers – free steaks anyone?” to promote the site AllAboutSteak.com and its sponsor Kansas City Steaks. In it, Raj wrote:

If you are a blogger and would be willing to provide some visibility – KCS wants to reward you with a gift packet (of steaks) sent to your address.

His email conjured up in my mind an image of a homeless blogger holding up a cardboard sign “Will blog for steak” — rather than the more typical “Will work for food”. (NOTE: This could make for an excellent Halloween costume for you unabashed nerds out there!)

But it also got me thinking about what is the right way to approach bloggers to get them to blog about your company/products or a client’s company/products. Something about Raj’s email got me feeling a bit uncomfortable. Thankfully though, Raj followed up later with a clarification email to the list, stating:

I should have said it better. If you receive a “gift” of steaks, all you are promising is that if you like the technology and/or steaks, you would consider providing some visibility to their “We Care” campaign.

I’m glad Raj followed up with that clarification. I think it’s critical when doing blog outreach that you don’t tie compensation to positive coverage.

WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) developed a great set of guidelines — the Ethical Blogger Contact Guidelines, which provides some guidance around how to reach out to bloggers. Some good advice there!

So… will you blog for steak?

Anyone who knows the online retailer of shoes and handbags, Zappos will know that they are renowned for their stellar customer service. But this story blew me — and many other bloggers (such as Seth Godin, Jason Kottke, and the folks at 37Signals) — away:

I Heart Zappos

In this post, Ms. LaMarr shares a poignant and heartfelt story that brought tears to my eyes. She described how she bought shoes for her mom that didn’t fit, didn’t get around to returning them, then her mom died. Out of her heartache came one ray of light: from Zappos, the online shoe store where she bought the shoes. Not only did Zappos arrange for a UPS pick-up, they sent her a bouquet of flowers along with their condolences.

Guess what? The customer that Zappos treated with such care and concern happened to be a blogger, and one with some readership. The word of Zappos good deed spread like wildfire. It’s still spreading. This was no PR stunt, it was simply a genuine act of human kindness, and it earned Zappos a ton of kudos in the blogosphere. This is inadvertent blogger outreach at its very best.

Contrast that with the slap in the face that Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza issued to one of their supposedly valued customers by inadvertently CCing the customer in his email reply to his employee:

Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.

As you can probably guess, word of the Spirit Airlines CEO’s affront got out to the blogosphere. And boy did it turn into a blogstorm. Now this post is number 3 in Google for “spirit airlines.” Classic. I don’t feel any sympathy for the airlines. Ben Baldanza literally asked for it — “Let him tell the world how bad we are.” Oh brother.

All this just goes to show, one good (or bad!) turn deserves another. Karma is alive and well in the blogosphere.

Recently, at the BlogHer conference in Chicago, my 16-year-old daughter Chloe gave her first conference presentation on “professional blogging.” Chloe got to share her story about “making money while she sleeps,” based off of the popular virtual pets site, Neopets.

Watch some of the highlights from Chloe’s panel at BlogHer:

At 15, Chloe, like many teenagers, was looking for a way to make money. She had decided that she didn’t want to mow lawns in the neighborhood, babysit, or flip burgers–instead she hoped to turn her love for Neopets into dollars, by simply making a few, smart SEO decisions using keyword research tools like Google Suggest and WordTracker, and find trusted sources to build links for her blog. With the success of her blog, Chloe attempted to integrate Google ads, but wasn’t able to because of WordPress.com’s restrictive terms of service that forbids the use of AdSense or other third-party ads. Not long afterward, Chloe moved her entire blog to the domain neopets fanatic.com, which is currently ranking #4 for “neopets” out of 6.2 million results. (I’m so proud of her!!) Currently, her blog produces $20 to $30 per day in AdSense revenue, which totals an average of $700-900 per month for only a few hours worth of work on the site. If Chloe were working a minimum wage job at McDonalds, she’d have to work 25 to 30 hours per week to make that amount of money!

Chloe’s story should not be an unusual one. Anyone can turn SEO common “sense” into “cents,” by using the knowledge and the tools that are available.

Incentives work. Our whole economy is powered by incentives — as one of my favorite business books Freakonomics reveals.

Incentives work in the blogosphere too. Commentors will respond to incentives. Motivate your readers to comment with the following WordPress plugins (hat tip to Blogtalks.net):

• Show Top Commentators — to publicly recognize and name your top commentors on your blog
• Link Love — to motivate your commentors to post comments, because they’ll get links and PageRank from you. Most blog platforms automatically nofollow the links in comments, so that no PageRank is transferred. This WordPress plugin removes the nofollow, so that your commentors will gain an SEO benefit from their comments. Just make sure that your blog is pristinely clean of comment spam. You don’t want to inadvertently link to what Google calls “bad neighborhoods.”
• Comment Relish — to send Thank You notes to your new commentors. The plugin ensures that you don’t send regular commentors repeated thank you emails. So don’t worry, you want be inadvertently barraging your commentors with an onslaught of spam.

When I saw the following “motivational” poster for Blogging, I would have sworn it was yet another brilliant creation of the folks at Despair.com. But no, it wasn’t. It’s part of a home-made series by Ishkur. Classic!

Hat tip to Ilker.

What site has atrocious design, usability issues, a frustratingly restrictive web page creation platform, and countless junk/spam/abandoned profiles, yet the highest number of pageviews out of any other site? Why, MySpace of course!

MySpace.com is a slice of humanity – a very big slice. With tens of millions of users (and most of them NOT teenagers), MySpace apparently drives more traffic to online retailers than MSN Search, according to some recent Hitwise data.

MySpace is a site that should concern retailers and business bloggers alike. It’s where our audiences hang out.

The MySpace ecosystem is host not just to teenagers, but also concerned parents trying to keep tabs on their kids, college students, obsessed sports fans, realtors, and every one else in between. And companies too, from bars to bands, brands to quirky dotcoms.

Before you go off half-cocked with your MySpace marketing initiatives, you need to understand it. Just like with the blogosphere, the MySpace community can turn on you the moment you make your first misstep. So rule #1 is ‘keep it real’.

Another one of the critical factors is having ‘Friends’ in your network. For instance, Apple’s iPod Nano registered 1,500 friends on October 15; by October 27 that had risen to 37,070 friends. Nice marketing job Apple!

“Weird Al” Yankovic breathed new life into his musical parody career, thanks in no small part to MySpace and YouTube. On MySpace, Weird Al has accumulated 420,000 MySpace friends since he joined the site in July last year (I chronicled this a bit more here).

I interviewed Michael Boldin at Pugster.com, who has been using MySpace to generate traffic, sales, and a very respectable 8,000 friends. He shared several great tips for cultivating friends on MySpace, among them:

• When starting out, you need to get friends, even “bad” ones that tally up to a respectable number on your friend list. Start with bands; they are really easy, as they always grant Friend requests.
• Have patience. Invest time. Give people something interesting that isn’t related to your business. Develop trust.
• Keep it personal – just like emailing a friend.
• Fancy and high end vs. simplicity, school’s out on layouts, but don’t frustrate your visitors by moving stuff around.
• Seasoned MySpace users won’t wait for content to load, so no slow loaders.

More MySpace marketing tips here

Yesterday’s New York Times article “Some Bling for Your Blog” got me thinking about widgets and plugins and how most of them are serve no real purpose to the average blog reader and simply frustrate them by slowing the page downloading. The article showed screen grabs of a few cool-looking widgets: the trivia game Blufr, the Streampad music player, and the fund-raising widget ChipIn. But do those widgets really add value — enough value to counterbalance the extra download time?

What I would have liked to have seen in the article is a list of the best of the bling. Well, since they didn’t, I will take a stab at it myself. And please jump in with your suggestions too, via the comments. Here are my personal favorites:

• Swicki “Hot Searches” Buzzcloud (from Eurekster)
• Recent Readers (from MyBlogLog)
• Flash Photo Stream (from Flickr)
• Preview Anywhere (from Snap)
• “What Am I Doing” Twitter Badge (from Twitter)
• Film Loops (from FilmLoop)
• Number of Readers FeedCount (from Feedburner)
• “I’m online” Skype buttons (from Skype)
• del.icio.us Tagometer (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Linkrolls (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Network Badge (from del.icio.us)
• Timelines (from MyTimelines)
• Link Count (from Technorati)
• Polls (from PollDaddy)
• Now Playing (from SIGamp)
• BuzzBoost (from Feedburner)
• Books in my Library (from LibraryThing)

and these which are not really widgets, but plugins (for WordPress):

• Ultimate Tag Warrior (tag clouds)
• Share This (add to social bookmarking services)
• Recent Comments

Plenty more widgets at Widgetoko

In speaking last week with friend and colleague Alan Rimm-Kaufman, he told me of his company’s plans to switch their company’s site to WordPress. Very timely that he would mention that to me given my recent post about WordPress for non-blogs. I asked Alan to write these points up, they were so good. He agreed, and blogged it. In summary, Alan says WordPress provides company site owners with:

• editing without needing to know HTML
• easy handling of “rolling events” like speaking engagements
• post-dating of articles so they can automatically “go live” on the scheduled date (as is required with embargoed articles until their print publication date)
• reader participation through comments
• organization of the content using tags
• seamless handling of pre-existing URLs
• easy addition of new functionality (because it is “open source”)
• free support by the very responsive developer and user communities

I’ll just piggy-back on Alan’s points a bit:

• Because WordPress is such a popular blogging platform, it’s easy to find developers to work on it. It also certainly doesn’t hurt that WordPress is written in PHP — the most popular programming language on the planet!
• WordPress is easily extensible through the use of plugins. Many hundreds of plugins exist already. It’s also pretty easy (if you’re a developer) to write your own plugins. That’s a lot more elegant that directly hacking the WordPress code base.
• Maintaining inlinks to former URLs can often be accomplished just by making the “post slugs” (filenames) consistent with the old site then adding a rewrite rule to the .htaccess file that maps to the new URL structure. If that’s not possible, you can always create a comprehensive list of 301 (permanent-style) redirects to add to your .htaccess file.

So I made my case for running WordPress on non-blogs, based primarily on the positive impact on SEO that you’ll get out of doing so. This rounds out the reasons for switching to include compelling reasons beyond just search rankings.

Actually, I’ll add one more. WordPress allows you to add cool sidebar widgets, such as the Swicki buzzcloud, with the greatest of ease. I love widgets! (A swicki, by the way, is a custom search engine, like this one, and a buzzcloud is a tagcloud type thing but of popular searches rather than tags, like the one in the right column on my daughter’s Neopets Cheats site.)

Watching the excellent online seminar series by Apple, “The Podcast Recipe“, really inspired me to get serious about podcasting and make produce something really professional. If you want to start podcasting, or if you want to do it better, then this online seminar is essential viewing!

From that seminar, I also got inspired to reach out to one of the presenters, Joe Cipriano, for an interview. Joe is one of the most recognizable voices on TV and film. He does voiceovers for NBC, Fox, CBS, Food Network, and several motion picture studios. As you can imagine, this keeps him very busy. Yet he also manages to blog (his blog can be found here) and to even create video podcasts that give an inside view of his craft. I found his video from the voice over booth at the 58th Primetime Emmy Awards (he was the announcer) particularly fascinating.

For someone who is so highly sought after by the television and motion picture industries, Joe probably doesn’t need to do any marketing. So why does Joe blog? What does he get out of it? I was curious to hear his motivations for blogging and podcasting and any lessons learned along the way. Here’s what Joe had to say…

In what ways has the blog has been helpful to your business?

It’s given me a chance to meet and interact with some of my peers all over the world and and also young talent who are just beginning their voice over careers.

Any lessons learned by doing the blog?

When you start a blog…you’re going to get a LOT of spam 🙂 I spend the most amount of time deleting spam messages that come in to the blog.

Why did you start blogging?

My web designer suggested it about a year ago and I thought it would be a great way to interact with clients and others with an interest in voice overs.

What’s been the time commitment required to blog? Do you plan on increasing it?

I should spend more time with it, but I do like to come up with different ideas to present on the blog. Most of my blogging deals with entries from voice over hopefuls who have questions about studio equipment, moving their career along and tips on getting started in the business. I started a new entry recently that had nothing to do with the business of voice over with the title, “What’s Your Perfect Weekend.” It has nothing to do with voice overs and I encourage readers to submit their “perfect weekend.”

Where does podcasting fit in for you? And where will it in the future?

I have a couple of video podcasts up on the blog. I’ve gotten the most response to these. People are fascinated to actually see what a voice over session is like. To produce the video podcast, I use my MacBookPro and built in iSight in the bezel of the screen, recording directly into iMovie for these little video tidbits. I take the audio from the studio itself rather than the microphone in the MacBookPro. It gives the effect of the “real” full fidelity sound of the session.

What’s the pay-off been for you of doing podcasts versus regular blog posts?

I guess it’s the difference between reading a magazine and watching a video. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

So there you have it. Joe’s blogging is a way for him to give something back, to help voice over hopefuls break into the industry and hone their skills. Very cool! Good on ya, Joe!

In these troubled times of flogs (faux blogs) and disingenuity orchestrated by PR firms on behalf of their fat cat clients, bloggers like Joe are a breath of fresh air! They are the reason why I am still so enthusiastic about blogging.

I’ve made the case for WordPress as a CMS (content management system) for corporate sites, using the website of my company, Netconcepts, as the guinea pig. We switched from a home-grown content CMS to WordPress in August and the commensurate traffic increase over the few months since launch was significant. I shared some traffic graphs to illustrate, in a recently published case study. The funny thing is, I doubt many visitors ever guess Netconcepts.com is powered by WordPress just by looking at it.

Now that I’m convinced of the benefits of a search engine optimized, WordPress-powered corporate site, we decided to give WordPress a go on a microsite, one that we just finished for our client, Countrywide. The microsite is Credit Demystified. We’ve equipped the site with all the SEO goodies that I’ve blogged about before, like a tag cloud, tag pages, my SEO Title Tag plugin, Technorati tags, etc. One breakthrough we made with the site was adapting the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to handle static pages, and not just posts. More on that here.

I think using WordPress for a CMS on sites other than blogs has a lot of merit, in terms of the SEO benefit. Know of any non-blogs powered by WordPress, particularly ones that are having some success with their search engine rankings? I’d love to hear of them!

Remember the brouhaha over Marqui’s Pay Bloggers program back in 2004? People were so incensed that a company would dare pay bloggers to blog about them. Oh how idealistic they were! Those were the good ol’ days, before PayPerPost and Pay Per Digg. Now with ReviewMe having just launched, I see this system, of paying off bloggers, gaining more and more legitimacy. Programs such as these infuriate many ‘blogging purists,’ but the fact of the matter is, it’s simply capitalism at work. Like it or not, it’s here to stay.

Offering bloggers cold, hard cash is quite different from sending them free swag. Personally I think free swag offers distinct benefits over the payola route. As a blogger, I feel cheapened by the offer of cash. But the idea of free swag sounds kinda fun. Especially if it’s cool stuff. And as long as there are no strings attached. Several months ago Dave Taylor discussed whether free swag will get you a positive review by the blogger you send it to. The answer is of course, “not always,” but you should be willing to take that chance. Even if it’s not a good review, any link juice that comes out of it is good for your search engine rankings. My preference would be to make up “care packages” for your targeted bloggers that include free product samples and a nice, since, handwritten letter/card. Now’s a perfect time of year to send out such packages, with the holidays coming up. You can send them under the guise of a Christmas/holiday gift. Of course not all products are suitable for bundling into a care package. National Business Furniture would have a much tougher time picking out goodies to send than Steve Spangler Science or Discovery Channel Store.

As a blogger, I’d love to receive some instant snow or a DNA extractor kit, not so much a gun cabinet or sewing table. 😉

Then you don’t always need to invoke bribery either, to gain a link and mention. For example, a week ago I received a request from the folks at the wonderful association of online retailers Shop.org (of which my company Netconcepts is a member), asking for some coverage for their new shopping portal. It’s for a good cause, as all of Shop.org’s proceeds go to their Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund, for college students interested in e-commerce careers. So, here you go, Shop.org — Do your holiday shopping online and do some good at the same time. (Hope it helps guys, and good luck!)

In a case such as this, where it’s for a good cause, I’d say free swag could actually get in the way, and negate the emotional tug on the heartstrings with a rationalized economic analysis.

All of the above notwithstanding, the approach I endorse the most to ‘infiltrating the blogosphere’ is to build relationships with bloggers over time by commenting on their blogs (I’m talking about interesting/insightful/provocative comments, not empty throwaway statements like “Really useful post. Thanks!!”). Over time I bet you’ll start to capture their attention and interest. If you aren’t convinced of the value of commenting, you might want read this, this and this.

First a disclaimer. I’m a loyal fan of Woot.com. Not only do they offer unbeatable deals of some really cool gadgets, but they are also damned funny! It’s such a hoot reading their product of the day descriptions. Today’s was no exception:

For generations, American parents have trusted Barbie to prepare our daughters for adulthood, when they’ll be judged by completely unrealistic standards of beauty. Now, along comes everybody’s favorite plastic blonde with another reality check for the little she-tots. There’s no better way to say “Merry Christmas, and get ready for a lifetime of household drudgery� than the Barbie Real Vacuum by Bissell.
Ah, but we shouldn’t be so cynical. It doesn’t befit the season. Besides, the Barbie Real Vacuum is more than just a toy-slash-propaganda-piece; it’s an honest-to-Gaea cordless, rechargeable sweeper. A rotating brush, an easy-empty dust cup, and a washable filter make it easy for the wee lass in your life to make herself useful. Just one push of a button converts the Barbie Real Vacuum to a hand vac, and the whole thing weighs a mere 3.25 lbs, well within the capacities of all but the scrawniest kids.
It’s wonderful how those innocent, wide-eyed bambinas love to help out around the house. Take advantage while you can with the Barbie Real Vacuum by Bissell. After all, in just a few short years your little girl will be stealing your cigarettes and sneaking out of the house every night. There’s nothing the Barbie Real Vacuum can do about that, but at least you’ll have gotten some housework out of her in the meantime.

Feminist or chauvinist, you can’t help but appreciate such witticism!

Now to the point… Woot.com, having such clever, sharp-tongued writers on staff, surely could produce an exemplary blog, right? Certainly as a fan of theirs, I expect their blog to be absolutely killer! Unfortunately, it’s anything but. For the most part, it’s merely a copy-and-paste of their product-of-the-day descriptions. Attention retailers: Product description copy does not make for acceptible blog posts.

Because this is such an important point, let me restate it for emphasis… PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS DOES NOT A BLOG MAKE!

I think somebody must have let Magazines.com in on this, because a year ago they abandoned their uninspired blog which was full of nothing but product descriptions.</RANT>

Fellow Business Blog Consulting contributor Toby Bloomberg alerted me to this MySpacesque site for dogs and dog lovers: Dogster. If you thought a dog having a blog wasn’t out there enough, how about a dog with its own home page where it can share photos, connect with dog friends (a la LinkedIn and MySpace), and chat on forums as well as on its blog!

Dogster are monetizing the site through Google Adsense, banner advertisements and some sponsorship deals, but I think they have only scratched the surface of monetization with paid placement, contextually relevant text link ads and so forth.

I can’t imagine who the heck would actually pretend to be their dog talking and writing up a story from the dog’s perspective and posting it to this site or, worse yet, to maintain an ongoing DOG BLOG from the point of view of their pet. Sheesh! I imagine these are the same people who dress their dogs up in cute little dog outfits, surprise the little pooch with a dog birthday cake, and tuck them in at night into their doggie sofa beds.

The lesson for us business bloggers here is that it might make sense to think bigger picture — i.e. not just about creating a blog for our business or our client’s business, but rather expanding that vision and creating a full-blown social networking community where the blog is just a piece in the overall puzzle. Toby seems to think the concept has merit because she is offering a service to help companies create social networking communities. So give her a shout if you have an interest.

I’ve been pestering Gerry McGovern — one of the foremost experts on website content and author of the books Content Critical, The Caring Economy and the upcoming book Creating Killer Content — for a while now on why he doesn’t start blogging. I recently pinned him down on this question. I also asked him whether he thinks this whole blogging thing really has something to it, or if it’s all a bunch of hot air. And does he encourage any of his clients to blog. Here’s what Gerry had to say in my email interview of him…

You’d never know I might start one yet! In fact, because of your constant prodding, I’m talking with a group of my partners about starting a joint blog. I think blogging is amazing, and such a positive reflection of an open, inquisitive, questioning culture. There will always be a role for the book but the blog is the conversation where the next book might just be born.

Everything in its place. Let’s not get carried away. Blogging is a new form of conversation; a rough and ready way to share knowledge. It’s a form of research, a way of getting down and dirty and digging into the roots of an idea. To watch a brilliant thinker and writer blog is very illuminating. But I find that quality blogs–that I can go back to time and time again–are pretty hard to find.

I have so far not encouraged any of my clients to blog. Most of my clients–and they include some very large organizations–are still mastering the basics of how to manage content professionally. Blogging may seem simple, but it’s quite a sophisticated strategy, and it requires a very open, sharing culture.

I was surprised to learn that Gerry doesn’t encourage any of his clients to blog, even though he thinks blogging is amazing. I agree with Gerry that business blogging is a sophisticated strategy and it’s not for everyone, particularly when so many companies can’t even cope with managing their traditional web content. But I don’t think it’s all that hard to pull off. If Gerry starts blogging, I bet he’ll start recommending blog strategies to his clients! 😉

You can read my full interview with Gerry here.

The format of your URLs can impact your rankings either positively or negatively. For example, having some good keywords in the URL of a permalink where each keyword is separated by a hyphen (which is what WordPress does when you turn on URL rewriting in the WordPress Admin), can give you a boost in your rankings. It may not be a big boost, but Google engineer Matt Cutts has stated that: “having keywords from the post title in the URL also can help search engines judge the quality of a page.” He goes on to clarify this statement in the Comments of that post saying: “including the keyword in the URL just gives another chance for that keyword to match the user’s query in another way”.

I take that to mean that Google considers keyword-rich URLs in a blog to be a useful factor to consider in determining where to rank your page in the search results. In other words, it’s a good thing, so do it!

But the different blog platforms do URLs differently. Some blog platforms do not use hyphens to separate the keywords. Movable Type and TypePad separate keywords with underscores. Matt Cutts has stated that underscores are not treated as word separators by Google. As such, in a URL like www.myblog.com/several_relevant_keywords.html, Google sees 1 word “several_relevant_keywords” rather than 3 words “several relevant keywords.” In addition, these “post slugs” are arbitrarily truncated at 15 characters in both TypePad and Movable Type regardless of whether it is in the middle of a word or not, so it’d be more like “several_relevan.html” instead. Instead it really should extend the length and drop off the last word entirely rather than have a word fragment.

Hopefully the folks at Six Apart will read this post and decide to change their errant ways in regards to the way they formulate URLs. 🙂

If you are one for making long titles to your posts and you are using WordPress with URL rewriting turned on, then you are probably used to having permalink URLs that are quite long with numerous hyphens in them. i would suggest avoiding too many hyphens in the URL; that can look a bit spammy. Rather than letting WordPress create the file name for you, specify your own, taking the most important keywords from the title and stringing them together — each word separated of course by hyphens. Try to keep it to three or fewer hyphens. The place to specify the file name is in the “Post Slug” field in the “Write Post” page in the Admin. Alternatively you can trim down your file names automatically using the Slug Trimmer plugin for WordPress.

And for those of you who have post ID numbers in your URLs instead of keywords, I would suggest switching to keywords in your URLs. I think this is particularly worth doing if your URLs have a question mark in them — as that signals to the search engines that your page is dynamic. Search engine spiders are wary of dynamic pages because they can get caught in a “spider trap.” So best to adopt a URL structure that makes your pages appear static and spider-friendly.

Jessica Duquette, founder of In Perfect Order and blogger at It’s Not About Your Stuff, graciously allowed me to interview her via email. I asked Jessica for an interview because I was so impressed with her blog.

Jessica learned plenty of lessons about business blogging that she was happy to share, particularly about defining her niche and building relationships with other bloggers.

One “a-ha” Jessica shared was how valuable Sitemeter can be if you just know where to look; she regularly checks referral stats, who is linking to her, and the most commonly used search terms. This has proved to be a “goldmine” because it has enabled her to tailor posts to the topics people were most interested in, as well as establish contacts and collaborate with other bloggers in her field. For example, Jessica wrote about a post about how to do a cubicle makeover and as result got a flood of traffic from searchers querying for “cubicle makeover”; so now she is in the process of contacting a woman in Seattle who wrote a book on cubicle makeovers so that she can do a podcast with this author to post on the blog.

One crucial piece of advice for business bloggers that Jessica offered is to spend as much time connecting with other bloggers as you do on your own posts by visiting their site, commenting on specific postings that can then link back to your site, participating in blog carnivals, quoting excerpts from their posts and linking to their sites, and allowing others to do the same from your posts. “It only takes one lucky link from someone to turn you from 120 people a day to 12,000 visitors a day!” she says.

What about the benefits of blogging for her business? She’s already been featured in the Wall Street Journal’s Blog Watch column. And she’s slated to become a contributing blogger to Arianna Huffington’s new portal in the next few weeks.

She’s not only building her brand as an organizing expert with a twist, but is now collaborating with others on future new information products. As for those Google AdSense ads on her blog, they’re brand new so the jury’s still out on the revenue impact.

Of course there’s stuff she wished she knew before she got stung — like not quoting too much from other people’s blog postings instead of just summarizing with a link. Ouch! And how to be nicer to people who upset you! “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” she says. “Perhaps the blogosphere needs more clearly defined laws or set cultural norms about quoting others. But for now, it’s better to err on the side of caution.” 

That said, Jessica has found the blogosphere to be a warm, friendly and extremely supportive space and has been impressed by the willingness of A-list bloggers to share information, tips, and and correct her without asking.

“For that, I feel so grateful and humbled,” says Jessica. “My life and business have been immeasurably enriched by having a blog.”

You can read the full interview here.

I’m really disappointed to see that PR firms can stoop so low as to comment spam us bloggers on behalf of their clients. Here’s a comment that came into one of my blogs (to this page) a couple days ago, from Connors Communications (yes, I’ve nofollowed the link):

HitTail is a site dedicated to helping you chase the long tail of natural search… the first of its kind http://www.hittail.com

Doesn’t this smack of comment spam to you? Clearly these folks don’t understand the blogosphere. Granted they didn’t make the URL a clickable link like most comment spammers, but that was probably just out of naivete.

Talk about a public relations strategy that’s bound to backfire!

I’ve heard of PR firms starting faux blogs, ghostblogging, posting fake posts to discussion forums, and emailing bloggers with untargeted, brazen pitches. But comment spamming? This is a new one on me.

Anyone else seen PR firms posting thinly veiled ads for their clients into your blogs’ comments?

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz has graciously shared 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic, and there are some gems in there. I’d like to piggyback on a few of Rand’s points:

• 1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build) — I’d say that over 95% of the time, WordPress will do the job and will be scalable for future needs. I have yet to come across a client blog project that necessitated a custom-built blog software.
• 2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain — Rand makes a bold statement: “Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make.” I disagree. I can think of numerous examples where the blog is more trusted, more buzzworthy, and/or more linkworthy because it’s at an arms length from the company’s site. Consider the hypothetical example of an insurance conglomerate authoring a blog about getting a healthier lifestyle, in order to attract prospects to sell insurance to. Such a blog at Gettinghealthy.com sounds helpful and unbiased, whereas having it at metlife.com/gettinghealthyblog (remember, hypothetical example… metlife is just used here to illustrate the point) comes off as salesy and self-serving.
• 4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs — I’d just like to make it clear that you’re not doing this for link juice (most links in blog comments and forum posts have “link condoms” (rel=nofollow tags) automatically added). Instead, you’re doing this to increase your visibility to, and credibility with, bloggers who read those blogs and forums.
• 9. Invite Guest Bloggers — I really like this idea, and I’d like to add my suggestion that you also do phone or Skype interviews of guests and podcast those on your blog.
• 15. Archive Effectively — Rand highlights a tough balancing act: “For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). ” I find the “Optional Excerpt” in WordPress to be invaluable for achieving this balance. The Optional Excerpt is one of the fields in the Write Post form that most bloggers ignore, but if you use it, you can code your non-permalink pages (like your category pages) to display the excerpt instead of the full post or instead of the paragraphs proceeding a “more” tag in your post copy. That’s exactly what we’ve done on my company’s corporate site, which runs on WordPress — for example, all the testimonials listed on our Testimonials tag page display excerpts. That gives you more flexibility to summarize and highlight particular sections or keywords from the full post.
• 16. Implement Smart URLs — Rand says that “just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we’ve worked with.” I would definitely agree with that. We too have evidence that a blog or site with rewritten URLs flows PageRank more efficiently throughout the site. So don’t rest on your laurels if you have a blog with dynamic URLs, even if your blog is fully indexed by the engines. Your pages will rank better if you rewrite the URLs.
• 19. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days — What a great idea, to watch your traffic and increase your posting frequency and posting quality on days where your traffic is highest! It makes the best use of the traffic spikes. In fact, you might even want to hold back on publishing your very best posts and instead save them for high-traffic days.

Anyone working in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry knows that title tags are one of the most important elements on the page.

By default, blogs usually put the blog name first and then the name of the post. In the past, I have suggested rearranging those to put the name of the post at the beginning of the title tag to increase the keyword prominence within the tag itself. Or perhaps you should just drop the name of your blog altogether from these permalink pages.

I also shared how to customize the title tag of your blog’s home page.

But such tools are really quite crude. What you really need is a tool to fine-tune title tags on individual pages — from the home page, to category pages, to tag pages, to permalink pages. This may not work on your blog platforms but it definitely works in WordPress, so let me explain how to do it in WordPress and then you can try to fit it into your own blog platform if you are running on something else.

The idea is to create a custom field. We’ll call that field title_tag for the sake of argument. When that field is defined, the text in that field is what gets displayed as the title tag. If that field is not defined, then it defines the title the way it normally does.

In WordPress, you can define a custom field on a post and a static page. But what about category pages? Or tag pages (if you’re using a tagging plugin like UltimateTagWarrior)? Well, for category pages, there’s an easy answer: a category’s description (editable under Manage: Categories in the admin). For tag pages, there isn’t an easy answer as there’s no obvious place in the database to stick the custom titles.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a WordPress plugin that set this all up for you and knew where to grab the custom title from and when to display it? Well, you’re in luck! I just wrote it!

Introducing… the SEO Title Tag plugin.

This fantastical new plugin won’t just utilize the custom field as described above. It will also make your UltimateTagWarrior tag pages more search optimal by placing the tag name in the title of tag pages. It will reorder your blog name to go at the end of the titles. It will use the category’s description as the title tag on category pages, if defined. It will allow you to set a custom title for the home page (changable in the plugin’s Options page in the WordPress admin).

Once the plugin is activated, you will simply need to make a single edit to your header template, which is under the Presentation tab in the WordPress admin. (This is described in the installation instructions.) Then you’ll be able define custom title_tag fields in your posts and pages to your heart’s content!

Not running WordPress? Hmm… why not? 😉 Ok, well the concepts outlined above should still be applicable to many other blog platforms. Whether the approach will work on a specific platform — Movable Type, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, etc. remains to be seen. I’m not really familiar with those platforms. But I doubt it would work on a hosted blog platform like Blogger.com, TypePad, and WordPress.com. Have fun!