Interesting report from the Onalytica blog, measuring who the top 25 most influential business bloggers are, with full disclosure on their methodology for defining ‘influential.

Not sure I agree with their results, purely because they have a mix of blog networks (Corante), multi-author blogs (Businessblogconsulting) and famous single bloggers like Steve Rubel @ Micropersuasion.

Download the PDF of the report here.

The Results

Technorati Tags: blog research, blogosphere, business blogging, influence

Have you been reading Darren’s Blogging for Beginners series? No? Well you should. All of us should. It’s a great check-in for old hands and newbies. Today’s installment is on writing good content and another must-read on the blogosphere (maybe I should bone up on this since content is my topic for the Blogonomics Business Blogging Cruise … and BTW there is less than a month left to get discounted pricing). Darren’s series is something that you should certainly start with when you’re considering a business blog … or encouraging clients to blog.

Speaking of which …. if you are starting blog … this is another important article to read: 23 Questions for Prospective Bloggers – Is a Blog Right for You?. Let’s face it, while all of us here contributing to BBC are sold on blogging and lots of us are making careers of it, it isn’t for everyone. Starting with Darren’s post … ask yourself these questions … and you’ll be in a good position to know if a blog is right for you.

Tags: Business Blogging, Darren Rowse, How to blog, Blogonomics

Many blogs offer email subscriptions to their blog, usually via Feedblitz or Bloglet. As I mentioned in a previous post, now AWeber, more well-known for its autoresponder service, is also offering an email broadcasts of RSS feeds.

What I like about service is how customizable it is; you can create an HTML template that complements your blog design. AWeber also offers a series of predesigned templates for you to choose from. HTML and plain text versions are automatically generated. Confirmed opt-in is required, so you’ll only be sending these emails to people who really want them, keeping you safe from charges of spamming.

There’s no additional fee for this service for people who are already AWeber members, but membership is $20/mo. (AWeber memberships also offer powerful autoresponders and the ability to publish email newsletters.)

I especially like the flexibilty you have with the layout and the ability to add messages to outgoing emails. In the example above, you can see that I created links to articles on my Web site. Through the admin system these messages are easy to change, even if you’re not comfortable with HTML. There is also the ability to track clickthrus and view other reports. You can also choose how many posts will appear in a single email broadcast.
Two things I don’t like about the current AWeber offering, however:

1. You can’t choose between full text and excerpt; the system automatically limits your email with a “Read more…” link.
2. Images and links you may have created in your feed do not carry into the email version.

Tom Kulzer, the CEO and Founder of AWeber says both these features are being considered for a future release.

One other thing that may work against AWeber is the fact that Feedblitz now offers many if not all of these feed related services, plus others, for just $4.95/mo. Although I haven’t yet tested Feedblitz, it appears to offer a compelling alternative.

Marqui, the blogging and communications company, in conjuction with FreeRange Communications, the mobile RSS company, have released a great whitepaper on RSS entitled “RSS Rx: How Marketers Can Make the Most of RSS Technology.” The document is a quick read, at only 15 pages, but gives a really great overview of RSS for marketers in a conversational tone that is very much a Marqui thing. (I mean, really, look at their website and you’ll see what I mean)
The document cites nearly every RSS study done to date, and highlights some of the prominent RSS purveyors throughout the document. (Full disclosure: Pheedo is mentioned in the document)
There is also a fair bit of prescriptive content on ‘what do do next’ with your new-found RSS knowledge, such as the following:

Marketers interested in incorporating RSS into their activities should first take a hard look at their Web site. What content does it have that can – and should be – distributed? For example, does your site have blogs, forums, press releases, product information, support information, email newsletters, audio presentations or whitepapers? If not, can any of these items be added?

Even companies relying on third-parties to manage some of these items might be surprised to find that adding an RSS feed is an option. For instance, companies using a newsletter service to manage their newsletters should ask if the service comes with RSS feeds since more and more services are adding this capability.

Marqui has made the whitepaper available for download on their site in the downloads section.

Technorati Tags: Freerange communications, Marqui, RSS, whitepaper

For the past couple of days I’ve been playing around with a trial version of Blogbeat, a real time blog traffic reporting system. So far I’ve been really impressed.

You can drill down to find out what your most popular posts are, how people found them (search engines, other sites, etc.), and track your search page rank.

Unlike Google Analytics (assuming you were one of the few who signed up for Google Analytics in the first five minutes before they shut the door), Blogbeat provides the information in real time. It took me about 5 minutes to install the script on my blog and minutes later I was seeing the traffic reports.

Once you’ve logged in Blogbeat also offers some common results in simple language: “which posts were most popular today?” and “who sent the most visitors my way?” are a couple. Finding out what search terms are attracting visitors is also a click away.
You can also even subscribe to the reports via RSS.

My only complaint is about the user interface. The information is easy to understand, but the font is a little big (too much scrolling required) and there are too many words in different shades of light grey. Also, it wasn’t always clear what report I was going to see when I drilled down a certain path.

If you’re looking for inexpensive traffic report solution ($6/mo for up to 500,000 monthly page views) and you want something with more cowbell–don’t ask–Blogbeat may be just what you’re looking for.

Since blogs are technically web sites with feeds, (ok, I’m simplifying just a bit), then there is no reason a blog cannot be effectively marketed like a web site. To this end, Stephan made a great post about optimizing this blog, pointing out some important tips that bloggers would do well to follow.

In my experience working with both search engine optimization and blog marketing, I’ve found that there are more ways to market a blog than a site without a feed. A few of the many resources to help you do this include:

RSS Button Maker – This nifty tool created by Thomas McMahon allows you to fill in your blog name, url and feed url and pick the buttons you want to create. Hit submit and it will output the code for about 20 or so RSS feed reader/aggregator RSS subscription buttons with your feed information embedded. Then all you need to do is copy and paste the code into your blog template.

A study performed by Ipsos-Insight sponsored by Yahoo (pdf) indicated that RSS feed subscription buttons or “chicklets” are the preferred way for users to subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed.

This tool also creates the code for several social bookmark services to make it easier for your readers to add your blog to del.icio.us, digg, slashdot or furl.net. Should your blog get bookmarked enough, it may make the “popular” list from one of these services and that can drive significant amounts of traffic.

RSS to Email Tools: FeedBlitz and R|mail – Sign up for these services and then place the code in the template of your blog. Visitors can opt to receive your posts via email. At first I wondered, why would anyone do that? RSS is so much more convenient. I can say from personal experience, 1/3 of the daily visitors to my own blog choose this option and we’ve had similar rates with blog marketing clients. Those are blog visitors you might not have otherwise had.

Monster Blog Directory Submission List – This list shows the “add a blog” or “add your feed” urls for over 80 different blog and RSS search engines and directories. The list gets edited monthly to add new sites or to edit urls. One of the advantages to having a blog as part of your company web site is that with a feed, you can get your site listed in these directories or search engines and a site sans feed cannot.

One thing I will note, is that blog marketing tools are only as effective as the quality of the content on the site they are being used to promote. There is no substitute for quality content and also the social networks between communities of like-minded blogs to draw traffic.

AWeber is a company/service that I usually associate with autoresponders and email newsletters. We use them to deliver our 7 Days to Success e-courses. (The last "s" may be superfluous; I’ve yet to write a second one.)

That’s why I was surprised and excited to receive an email from them announcing their newest service: AWeber Feed Broadcaster. This new service allows you to:

• generate HTML/plain text emails from your RSS feed,
• choose from several attractive templates (beauty is in the eye of the beholder) or create your own,
• decide how many posts will appear in each newsletter,
• add specific marketing messages to your email newsletters, and
• add the signup box to your blog.

Why would you want an email newsletter generated from your RSS feed?

Well, most people still don’t "get" RSS feeds, but everyone "gets"
email and email newsletters. Plus, there’s no real downside. Current belief is to deliver your message in as many ways possible to
reach the customer in a way they want. (Blogs, podcasts, TiVo, etc.) If people want to read your blog
delivered via email, why not let them?

Perhaps in a couple of years (or months) this will seem superfluous,
but for right now it can greatly extend your marketing reach.

While there are certainly other services that generate emails based on your blog posts (currently flyte’s web marketing blog uses Bloglet), I’ve yet to see one that looks so sophisticated.

I haven’t yet trialed the product, so this isn’t a review, just a
head’s up. The service is included in your regular paid AWeber account,
so if you don’t use AWeber yet, you’ll need to sign up.

If you’re looking for additional information there’s a great video tutorial here, and an F.A.Q.

When I’ve had a few weeks of experience with AWeber Feed Broadcaster I’ll post a review.

It’s easy to get started blogging…today’s blogging software is inexpensive, easy-to-learn, and does most of the heavy lifting for you.

However, it’s a lot more difficult to build a successful blog: one that attracts prospects and clients, establishes you as an expert or an industry leader, and helps you attain search engine "findability."

There’s some great advice out there for big companies and CEO’s who want to blog; just check out Debbie Weil’s BlogWrite for CEOs. However, when you’re a small business owner like me, not all the advice is directly transferable.

I wish the "today" me could go back and talk to the "then" me and give him (me?) some good advice on business blogging. It would have saved me a lot of time and frustration over the past year.

If you’re interested in learning from my mistakes, check out The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make. (Email registration required.)

Plus, if you’ve got some of your own mistakes that you’d like to share, please take advantage of our comments and trackbacks below. After all, failure (or a mistake) is a much better teacher than success.

Have you ever wanted to post a comment or trackback to a blog and you get the following message:

"If you have a TypeKey identity, you can sign in here."

Unfortunately, if you don’t have a TypeKey identity, there’s no link to get one. Even clicking on the "sign in" link doesn’t help.

If you’ve been stymied in the past, read on…

TypeKey is a tool for bloggers to reduce comment and trackback spam on their blogs. To quote the TypeKey homepage:

Enabling TypeKey on your own site increases accountability for the
content that appears on your weblog and stops comment spam cold.

Unfortunately, it also stops some potential commenters cold.

However, TypeKey is free and only takes moments to set up:

Step 1: Go to TypeKey.
Step 2: Register (for free) by completing your info and copying an overly-cryptic confirmation code.
Step 3: Wait for the confirmation email.
Step 4: Return to the site to enter your confirmation code.
Step 5: Edit your information as you like.

That’s it! Although WordPress
fans will tell you there’s better ways to stop comment and trackback
spam, now you’ll never have to worry about TypeKey stopping your own
comments or trackbacks.

Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen has posted a Alertbox update on blog design: Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes.

Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.

The top ten are:

• No Author Biographies
• No Author Photo
• Nondescript Posting Titles
• Links Don’t Say Where They Go
• Classic Hits are Buried
• The Calendar is the Only Navigation
• Irregular Publishing Frequency
• Mixing Topics
• Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
• Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

I think all these issues are a good starting point for discussion.

Google added an RSS reader to their growing list of blog related tools and this could be good news for your blog.

No, I don’t really think that the world needs another RSS reader (unless you are really into GMail and this syncs right into that)

What it may mean, however, is that you now have a way to get your feed indexed by Google and into their Blog Search tool. Getting you feed indexed by Google isn’t really that hard, but if you subscribe to your RSS feed via the new Google Reader, I assume they have to crawl your feed in order to deliver the results to you, their loyal client.

This appears to work very much like adding your feed to a MyYahoo page.

Quite a number of blogging books are being written today. (Talk about stating the obivous.) Debbie Weil is writing one on corporate blogging. Jeremy Wright’s new book, Blog Marketing, will soon hit the shelves. Scoble and Israel’s Naked Conversations is scheduled for release in January. Rick Bruner ought to write one as should Steve Rubel. Heck, even I’ve been approached by a publisher to write one, not that I have anything to say that hasn’t already been said.

However, if you buy only one blogging book this year, pick up a copy of Blog!, by David Kline and Dan Burstein. If ever there was a book that presented a "meta" view of blogging past, present, and future this is it.

I’ve just started reading it, and the book’s introduction is worth the price. Take, for example, this paragraph…

The results of this unusual moment in time may be nothing short of a new paradigm for modern human communication, conversation, argument, and collaborative knowlege creation. Blogging represents one important wave that is contributing to restoring the lost voice of the ordinary citizen in our culture.

Damn, that’s good!

The book is over 400 pages, so it’s going to take me a while to finish it at the snail’s pace by which I usually read. It’s not the quantity, but the quality, and I intend to savor every page.

While you’re at it, check out David Kline’s blog Blog Revolt.

I know we have been singing the praises of the new ping service called Pingoat but I recently discovered they have added another very useful service.

Fill out a simple form and Pingoat will create (and even FTP to your site)an XML Google sitemap. See for yourself.

More and more companies are contemplating whether they should start a business blog, it seems appropriate to shed more light on marketing considerations for blogs. While business blog marketing effectiveness can be improved in many ways, here are three fundamental considerations: content, frequency and distribution.

Content – Know your audience. Your blog posts must be
interesting and useful to your readers. Develop your unique voice and
don’t be afraid to post things others will not agree to.

Frequency of posts are important as there
is a direct correlation to blog popularity and frequency of posts. Post
3-5 times per week at a minimum. Consumers of information are beginning
to realize  only a fraction of sites are updated in search engines
every day, but that blog and RSS search engines like Google Blog Search, Technorati, Bloglines and Feedster are update hourly.

Distribution of your blog is important. A common issue from
people new to blogs and RSS feeds is where to find them. Marketing a
blog brings additional advantages over a traditional web site. A blog
and associated RSS/Atom feed can be promoted within the blogoshpere as
well as through traditional directories, search engines and web site
linking. The opportunity for blog exposure is much greater than a
regular web site alone. Make it easy for news feed subscribers to find
your blog through both web site search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and
RSS search engines (Google Blog Search, Bloglines, Feedster,
Technorati).

Here’s a list of search engines and directories lists and a list of Blog/Blog and RSS directories for submissions. Also, be sure to ping regularly with services like Pingomatic, Pings or Pingoat.

A list of additional blog optimization and marketing tips can be found at this recent post from Online Marketing Blog.

Someone asked me yesterday where to go for a "blogging 101" and I was momentarily stumped.
There’s so much information out there it’s hard to know where to
begin. I decided to be literal and look for resources labelled Blogging
101… or close to it.  Here are a few 101 links to get you started. I include RSS and podcasting because they fall under
the umbrella of corporate blogging.

Blogging 101

Blogging 101 by Rebecca Blood (on MSN Spaces)

Blogging 101 by Kari Chisholm

Blogging 101 v. 1 on BlogWriteForCEOs

Blogs 101 by Rich Meislin in New York Times’ Technology section

Blogging 101 by Technorati

Business Blogging 101 on the NEWPRWiki

Global Voices’ Intro to Blogs

Weblog Basics on About.com

Wikibooks’ Blogging 101

Wikipedia definition of Weblog

Click "Continue reading" for Podcasting 101 and RSS 101 resources…

Podcasting 101

Podcasting 101 on MacZealots.com

Podcasting 101 on TechWeb

Podcasting 101 by Merle Stinnett

How to Record a Podcast by Glenn Fleishman

RSS 101

RSS 101: "Really Simple" 5-Step Guide to Get Started

RSS 101 Screencast by Alex Barnett

RSS 101 for Marketers (Forrester report, July 2005)

RSS Marketing

These are by no means the only 101 resources for blogging,
podcasting and RSS. If you know of others  titled "101," leave a note in
the Comments below and I’ll add them.

After blogging on how to save a step with Ping-o-Matic and use it for multiple blogs, Denise Wakeman and Arnoud alerted me Pingoat, a competing ping service.

So far, it’s been a great experience.

ss Blog ConsulFirst off, it’s much faster than Ping-o-Matic. It pings about 50
different services, categorized into General, Non-English &
Special.

The site is clean and fast-loading. It’s got a blog, a community forum, and even a Google sitemap generator, if you’re so inclined.

But perhaps best of all, it appears that Kailash Nadh, the site owner and a recent high school graduate from Kerala, India, is adamant about keeping spam blogs from using his service! He regularly blacklists blogs that appear to be automated, with no original content.

He even has a section of his Pingoat forum
dedicated to people who have been blacklisted feel they have been
wrongly accused. It makes for great reading, even when you should have
gone to bed hours ago. Here’s a typical rejection slip:

First i would like to welcome you to the pingoat.com community forums.

After reviewing your blog, and reading your dispute statement in detail, we have come to this conclusion:

Your blog will remain blacklisted. your blog is very blatantly fed via
a content generator, however if this is truly not the case, this would
be required to be proven on your end, it may not be fed via a content
generator, however it strongly appears as so, please re-evaluate the
blog and adjust whats needed

Our suggestion to getting your blog removed from our blacklist:

If it is spam and you have no intention upon creating your own
unique content, then i am sorry to tell you, that pingoat will not
allow you to ping the blog

And last but not least, stop spamming

That’s just great stuff.

Many of you bloggers may already be familiar with Ping-o-Matic. It’s an online tool that lets you ping several news aggregators at once. For me, it’s become part of my posting routine; once I’ve saved my latest post I just visit their site to let the world know.

But there’s some cool ways to get even more out of Ping-o-Matic, especially if you have more than one blog.

Instead of bookmarking the home page, bookmark the results page.

Ping-o-Matic, as cool as it is–or maybe because it’s so cool–often suffers from slow downs. I’ve waited sometimes 30 seconds or more for the page to load. (OK, so I’m part of the "Now" generation.) By bookmarking the home page you’re doubling the amount of time you need to wait for your pings to be sent out.

The other benefit of bookmarking the results page is that this allows you to save multiple ping blasts…one for every blog you contribute to. For example, the ping for my blog, flyte: what works online, is:

The ping for Business Blog Consulting is:

By bookmarking the results page, I can quickly ping all these resources for either flyte: what works online or Business Blog Consulting. Now, if I could just find a couple more hours in the day to blog the way I want to….

One last thing I would recommend: occasionally check to see if Ping-o-Matic has added new sites to the list they ping; I only discovered they added News Is Free and Topic Exchange while putting together this post!

If you’re looking for an entry-level/introductory article on search engines for blogs, check out the Personal Journal section of today’s Wall St. Journal (9/7/05). Alternatively–for the next seven days–you can follow this link to read New Search Engines Help Users Find Blogs online.

The article focuses its attention on blog search engines such as Technorati, IceRocket, Feedster, DayPop and Bloglines. It looks at how they differ from traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo, and how they differ from each other.

Since this article appears in the Personal section of the WSJ,
its focus is on how this affects you…personally. It’s not an in depth
look at the marketing strategies of these companies, their business
plans, or target audiences.

There are, however, some good
examples how current event searches–such as "William Rehnquist" and
"video music awards" pull better results at the blog search engines
than at Google.

One thing that does seem to be overlooked is the
impending entry into this arena of Google, Yahoo and MSN. Once these
three giants jump in, it’s hard to know if there will be room in the
pool for some of these upstarts. More likely, some or all of these
companies will be acquired as these new media giants look for new areas
for expansion.

Although there are plenty of tools for checking the popularity of your blog, for many of us Google provides much of our blog traffic.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger reports that Google’s currently updating their backlink and PageRank. What does this mean to you?

Backlinks, also known as incoming links, are the number of links from
other Web sites or blogs that point to your Web site (or blog.)
PageRank is Google’s rank from 0 – 10 of the value of incoming links
and is part of their algorithm for determining how your blog ranks.

To determine your backlinks type "link:www.yourdomain.com" into the
Google search box. (Do I really need to say "without the quotes?") As
you may know, the number and quality of incoming links effects how your
blog ranks at Google and other search engines.

(In case you’re interested, Business Blog Consulting has 3,260 incoming links and a PageRank of 7.)

Darren goes on to talk about one of my favorite page rank tools, Keyword Tracker.
With this tool you can find out how your blog ranks for specific terms,
such as "business blog" or "blog marketing". Darren says you have to
run the report each time you want it updated, but if you have access to
a cron you can have your server run the request for you.

A while back I wrote a Keyword Tracker tutorial that will walk you through the setup process.