Whatever your political persuasion — right, left, or center — the blogosphere is a great place for bloggers to share their political views and make plenty of friends and enemies. We try to follow the conservative, liberal, and everything in between of politics and political blogs/blogging — but only when it intersects with business blogging.
Have a read below of our latest entries on politics and political blogging…
The following is links to resources for attendees for Todd and my panel (along with Six Apart’s Deborah Schultz) blog panel at the WOMMA conference in Chicago today.
Useful Blog Tools for Market Intelligence
Blogs About Business Blogging
Examples of Business Blogs
Blog-Related Research
Todd Sattensten has also been posting a few relevant posts for this presentation, including "Using Blogs for Word of Mouth Marketing" and "Blogging Panel Live at WOMMA – Before"
Deborah Schultz, marketing director of Six Apart, also offers this perk, supposedly for attendees to this panel, but she also encouraged me post this here, a life-time 10% discount code to a TypePad account: "womma05"
UPDATE:
Sitting in the session Customer Evangelists: Motivating Customers to Talk About You, which followed ours on blogging, Ben McConnell of Church of the Customer
, and he asked for a show of hands as to how many people have been to a Build-a-Bear Workshop. Now, as someone without kids, I’ve never heard of this fast-growing company, which, as you may gather, lets you build your own personalized toy bear. Half the hands in the room went up. A few minutes later, Ben showed a screenshot of Robert Scoble’s Microsoft blog and asked how many people in the room had been to the site. This, bear in mind, at a conference about customer-evangelism marketing, and for any of you first-time readers, "The Scoblizer" is perhaps the most widely read business blog. Maybe five hands went up, two of which were mine and Todd’s. Wow. That puts things a bit in perspective. Why am I always drinking the koolade of "the next big thing" while oblivious to what Middle-America actually cares about (the conference is in Chicago, after all).
Aside from Google AdSense and Overture Content Match, what other networks are there that focus on blog advertising besides these?
And don’t say Weblogs Inc. or Gawker, as those are publishing ventures, not networks in the sense that any existing blogger could simply leverage them to sell ads on their site.
Rok Hrastnik has just produced a huge study on RSS and its power for both marketing and publishing. Price: $39.95. He sent me a preview copy, but I confess to having been too busy lately to have given it proper attention, so I’m just going to rip off what my pal Tig over at MarketingVox said about it:
European e-marketer Rok Hrastnik spent the last year or two researching
an exhaustive review of syndication technology on the web, finally
releasing to Marketingstudies.net
a 550-page definitive ebook on RSS and the marketing uses of
syndication. The advance copy sent to MarketingVOX is written in a
detached, rational tone, in some contrast to the sales pages’ hard sell
copy. Of particular interest will be the technical background
information and the near comprehensive set of interviews of industry
figures, which serves as an indication as to where RSS is heading and
what significance it has to marketers and publishers.
MarketingStudies: Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS
Six Apart, maker of the popular blog softwares Movable Type, TypePad and most recently Live Journal (via an acquisition just announced) has taken a true blog “industry” leadership position in battling the vexing problem of comment spam. Their latest line of defense is this detailed document describing how spammers attack and how bloggers (using various blog publishing systems) can best respond. I haven’t read all the way through this yet, but it looks like such a useful resource, I thought I’d post it immediately.
Six Apart: Guide to Comment Spam
Two updates:
My new favorite sport is antagonizing direct marketing guru (read "dinosaur"; JUST KIDDING!) Bob Bly, who suggests in his latest blog post that there are only a couple of dozen marketing blogs out there. I know there are a heck of a lot more out there than that, but I’m too busy/lazy to spend a couple of hours compiling a huge list of them.
So it occurred to me that maybe you’d all help me with the work. Please list your blog in the comments field if (and only if) it’s a marketing-oriented blog (I’ll delete submissions I deem off-topic). Feel free to add others you know of. (<a href> tags are allowed in comments.) And spread the word; if successful, this post can serve as a resource to those looking for such blogs. If enough participate, I’ll update this post with the list so it’s easier to scan.
Otherwise, I’ll just look like a dope if only four of you bother… <gulp>
UPDATE:
The response to this challenge wasn’t quite as overwhelming as I’d hoped, so like usual, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Therefore, I spent the last hour surfing marketing blogs, and let me tell you something, there are a lot more than a couple dozen marketing blogs out there. Suffice it to say this is just the tip of the ice berg, but one that I’ll update from time to time (it’s a TypeList, so that’s easy).
[This is a teaser of a post. I have original research data about RSS usage to report, but I ramble on and on first and only deliver the goods in the last paragraph.]
I’ll admit it, when I first discovered RSS, I was all excited about it, too. I even gave in to the hype and joined the popular speculation that RSS might be a viable alternative to email for marketing purposes. But then, like the guy in Monty Python’s Holy Grail who complained of having been turned into a newt, I got better.
Frankly, I’ve always been a bit underwhelmed by RSS. I know that’s not cool to admit (the gals over at BigBlogCompany will probably get their panties in a bunch to hear me say it), but there it is. Yeah, in principal it’s great, but having tried several RSS syndication apps, I haven’t been impressed with the execution. The main thing I hate about most of them is the ephemeral quality of posts: if you let a few days go by without checking in on your feeds, the older items scoll off into the ether, and if you want to go back and look at old links, you’re SOL. I did love NewsGator when I first discovered it and even paid the $30 for it. The idea of having RSS feeds turn into email messages really clicked for me. The only problem is I don’t use Outlook for my email. I’m a Eudora user and have been for many years and I’ll give up on Eudora in favor of Outlook when you pry it from my cold dead hands. For a while, I was using Outlook exclusively for my NewsGator RSS feeds, but somehow I couldn’t keep up the momentum of regularly using yet another Internet communications app; I haven’t checked my NewsGator feeds for months.
But I do have a point here aside from just my own lukewarm experience with RSS. I just came across a post titled Seven Reasons to Switch from EMail Marketing to RSS Advertising on Pheedo.info. Bill (whose last name is not apparent on the site; what’s up with that?) gives these seven reasons to back up his thesis:
(Bill’s orignal post on Pheedo has links on all of those reasons for more context.)
I don’t get this. Aside from Blacklists, those all seem to me like reasons to stick with email marketing, signs that legit marketers are going to triumph over spammers in the end, or at least competitive advantages they have now to distinguish themselves from spam. Frankly, I’m happy to go on record predicting that spam is on the retreat. I firmly believe in 2-3 years, spam will be much less of a problem for email users and legit marketers compared to today.
But, more to the point, switching from email to RSS? Don’t be a fool. By all means, introduce RSS. Despite my personal lack of fascination with RSS, I do believe it has a role to play and a more promising future, even if that may not be in the near future. Note that the post I linked to above (on MarketingVox) where I had given into dreaming of a time when RSS may present an alternative to email, I was writing in the context of Microsoft saying it will introduce an RSS reader into its Longhorn operating system. When Microsoft comes out with a free RSS reader, particularly one built into the OS, then I think RSS will go mainstream. What they should really do, in my opinion, is buy NewsGator or just rip off the idea. But Longhorn isn’t due out till 2006, so let’s not hold our breath.
But here’s the kicker, the reason why I hope you made it all the way to the bottom of this rambling post. Why not kill your email program in favor of RSS today? Because virtually 100% of Internet users use email and virtually 0% of Internet users use RSS today. Sure, we all assume it’s not a lot of folks who use RSS, but I’ve got the actual number. This July, I conducted a survey for my client Quris, an email marketing services provider, of 2543 Internet users from Harris Interactive’s panel. I am still writing up the report for this research, so this is an unreported scoop, but I trust Quris won’t mind. One of the questions we asked was about various digital communications media and devices they use, including this choice:
I use a “news aggregator” to subscribe to websites (using “RSS” or another “XML” syndication language).
The response? Thirty-five people out of 2543 checked that option. That is 1.4% of the total, that five years after RSS has been available to the world.
Sure, go ahead and dump your email programs in favor of RSS. But don’t come crying to me when you realize how dumb of a choice that was.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post titled Promoting Your Blog with some advice about driving traffic to your blog. Since then, I came up with another really good technique: get Farked.
Here’s how you do it:
A) Write a funny post. This step is a doozie, because you may not be funny. Really what you need to do is find some original, offbeat content. Observe something that others haven’t about the world (e.g., a wacky business idea someone has put in place, as was my case recently — see below).
a1) Adding a picture of a scantily clad woman probably helps, as Adrants can attest.
B) Submit the link to your funny, scantily clad post to Fark and/or CollegeHumor. These sites, largely collections of funny links, get absolutely sick traffic.
C) Cross your fingers and hope they accept your submission for publication.
D) If they deem your post worthy and link to it, watch your traffic counter spin like a pin wheel in a hurricane.
I recently experienced this with BizNetTravel, a business blog I help a client publish on the travel sector. In my not-so-humble opinion, it’s quite a good blog that gets too little recognition and traffic for the effort I and Adrants’s Steve Hall put into it. The other day I wrote a post about a funny service called ScooterMan (click the link for details). As an afterthought, I added a picture of a woman in a bikini with a scooter (that I actually stole from someone else’s site who linked to my post). As another afterthought, I submitted the link to CollegeHumor.
I didn’t check the logs for a couple of days, but CollegeHumor published the link. Fark then picked up the link from CollegeHumor and also pointed to BizNetTravel.
KA-BOOM!!!
A site that normally gets a few hundred visitors (on a good day) suddenly got nearly 10,000 visitors on a Sunday. It’s slowed down since, naturally, but we’re still way over normal in the residual traffic. The link has also gotten picked up by many other smaller funny link sites.
Just thought I’d share that happy technique. 🙂
Mark your calendars and call your travel agent: July 23 in Berkeley, CA at the Haas School of Business, BlogOn is an event about “The Business of Social Media,” focusing on blogs, social networks and syndication.
Speakers include Andrew Anker, EVP of Six Apart, Jason McCabe Calcanis, chairman of Weblogs, Inc., Dan Gillmor, columnist and celebrated blogger for San Jose Mercury News, JD Lasica, big deal blogger of New Media Musings, Craig Newmark, the Craig of Craig’s List, Tony Perkins, founder of AlwaysOn Network, Mark Pincus, CEO of Tribe Networks, Doc Searls, big deal blogger, David Sifry, CEO of Technoratic, and many others.
Registration costs $495 before July 1 and $550 thereafter.
Todd S. has taken another approach to a directory on business blogs (which, in some sense, my site already is): he has created an alphabetized wiki. (“What’s a wiki?” you ask? It’s basically a blog that any reader can edit or contribute to. Here’s another definition, or just check out Todd’s site and you’ll get the idea.)
Definitely a different animal than my site, as all entries here have my subjective spin, plus categorization, while the BizBlogDirectory features descriptions by the site managers. My guess is it will get big fast. Something certainly to keep an eye on, and also a good place to register your blog, if you haven’t done so already.
A friend, who has had an on-again / off-again blog for more than a year (mostly off-again) writes to say he’s now determined to blog every day and asks how should he go about getting more traffic to the blog. It’s a pretty basic question, one to which I have only some pretty basic points of advice, namely these:
The main thing I’d say is to stick with it. After you’ve been at it diligently for a month or so, you may be able to reach out a bit more to get in-bound links. But until folks have confidence you’re really dedicated to it they may be reluctant to link to you, if they fear you’re going to lose interest after a few weeks.
Also, periodically produce a really utilitarian post (like, for example, this one) that people are going to find particularly useful, not just interesting. Dedicate an hour or more to rounding up a lot of links on a theme or analyzing a trend in detail and debunking common misperceptions or otherwise really doing some real work of investigating, aggregating or articulating something that a lot of people are going to find useful. That is more likely to get you a lot of links to a particular post than just general posts along the lines of “Here’s an interesting article” or “Boy am I steamed about what Bush said today” or whatever. How-to pieces are good for this. Read the lists of most popular links among bloggers on DayPop, Technorati, Blogdex and Popdex to get a sense of what kind of blog posts get lots of people pointing to them. It’s a law of nature that people love lists.
Beyond that…
1) Definitely publish an RSS/Atom/XML feed. Are you still using Blogger? If so, you can click a button and turn on RSS [make that Atom, another version of XML feed, as Mike clarifies in the comment section of this post]. (For that matter, you can start an XML feed with pretty much any standard blog publishing platform.) You’ll get a lot more pick-ups that way.
2) Engage with other bloggers, particularly in their comment sections. Also email them. Politely make them aware of your blog, especially in context (e.g., “Joe, nice comment. You may be interested in something I wrote along similar lines…”)
3) Register your blog, and your RSS feed, everywhere possible. Here’s a list of such sites to start with.
4) Create a “blogroll” list of your favorite bloggers in the margin. Bloggers like the quid pro quo when it comes to links. Just by virtue of listing a bloggers does NOT mean s/he will link back to you, but it certainly improves your chances. It also makes it more likely that you will come to their attention, as they will likely see traffic from your site in their logs and maybe the link itself on Technorati.
5) Of course, plug your blog in your email signature, and, for that matter, on your business cards, if it’s really that important to you.
6) Consider your headlines carefully for the kind of phrases that people may search for on search engines. Remember, B.L.O.G. stands for “better listings on Google.” Also, along these lines, make sure to set your archives to list each entry on a page of its own (possible with Blogger only in its more recently updated version).
Here are some other similar pieces of advice:
I’m sure there are lots of other posts out there along similar lines. I welcome anyone who can point some more out to please do so in the comments, and I’ll update the good ones here in the main body of this post.
Wayne Hurlbert has been blogging on the subject of “blogs in business, marketing, public relations, and search engine optimization for successful entrepreneurs” since last October. Is his blog “competition” for mine? Well, it’s a big happy bloggy world out there, so I’m not really worrying about it. He doesn’t seem to be solicitiing consulting business from his blog so directly, which is the stated purpose of my blog. He’s been at it longer, though I think I am on track for more posts per week at this rate. The subject matter is also somewhat different, where he’s offering more how-to stuff, such as his recent post on blog promotion, where I have set myself the sisyphean goal, at least in the near term, of cataloging every example of a business blog I can find. Eventually I’d like to get to more content-oriented posts, too, but in the foreseeable future I seem to believe there’s value in just a big directory of examples of business blogs.
Anyway, Hurlbert is definitely offering value on the subject in his own way, so check it out. While you’re at it, check out his roller derby blog. (Whatever.)
Dane Carlson, an entrepreneur, has started this blog seemingly just as a resource to other aspiring entrepreneurs, not as a promotion for his own business (in fact, it’s not even clear from his About page what his business is). He explains more of the blog’s mission:
Business Opportunities is a moderated list of legitimate of business opportunities for entrepreneurs. Its presented like a weblog with chronological archives and extensive outbound links.
Yesterday I found this directory on Yahoo that seemed quite apropos to this blog: …/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Weblogs/Business/
For the hell of it, I submitted myself to the directory. My experience with Yahoo in years past is that it can take months to get approved into the directory. I’m delighted, however, to report that this site is already at the top of the directory with a shiny yellow “NEW!” lablel. That’s gonna be good for my Google PageRank!
🙂
I realize I’m posting a lot about social network sites today, which is arguably somewhat off-topic for this blog, but this newest service, Multiply, I think is worth mentioning because it is the first of the many, many social networks I’ve seen that takes the obvious step of blending the benefits of social networks with other tools such as blog publishing and photo galleries. Duh. I’ve been banging at my friend Adrian Scott, founder of Ryze, about that for a while. I strongly suspect this will quickly become a matter of parity for all the social network services that survive a year from now.
Here’s the press release, and here is social network expert Judith Meskill’s comment.
YASNS stands for “Yet Another Social Network Service,” I assume. Anyway, this is a comprehensive list of dozens of social network services compiled by one of the space’s leading experts, Judith Meskill. Eyeballing it, it looks like she’d identified well over 100 different services, in the follow categories:
thesocialsoftwareweblog: YASNS Meta List
About.com’s marketing maven Laura Schneider maintains a list of marketing-related weblogs.
This blog (by an anonymous author, as far as I can see) appears to have a media revenue model (i.e., ad support), as opposed to consulting. It just celebrated its one year birthday last week (Happy Birthday!). Various useful resources for business bloggers, which I will monitor regularly.
Wayne Hurlbert has been blogging about the intersections of blogs and businesses on this site since October 2003. It doesn’t appear to be a business blog itself, in that I don’t see any About Us or consulting service links on the blog, but it is a useful resource for folks following this trend.
As usual, you can count on me to rip off all of his best links for this blog. (As either Stravinsky or Picasso is meant to have said, “Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.” Probably Stravinsky said it first, then Picasso simply stole it.)
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Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing
Andy Bourland of Bourland.com
Rich Brooks of Flyte
Paul Chaney of Blogging Systems Group
Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus
Josh Hallett of Hyku
Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting
Lee Odden of TopRank
Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts
Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life for Business
Jim Turner of One by One Media
Dana VanDen Heuvel of BlogSavant
Des Walsh of Thinking Home Business
Debbie Weil of WordBiz and BlogWrite
Jeremy Wright of Ensight
Rick E. Bruner is co-author and principal analyst on this report
Our own contributor Jeremy Wright is the author of this book
"The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right" with a foreword by GM's Bob Lutz..and the rest by Debbie Weil.
Produced by contributor to this site Debbie Weil. Rick E. Bruner is one of the featured experts in this report
This report is written by contributor to this site BL Ochman
I guess this was inevitable
