In addition to profiling business blogs, I plan to use this site to keep track of a number of useful resources for bloggers, especially those that advance the interest of business bloggers. So here’s one. The About Us page explains:

There a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. However it would be expensive for all the services crawl all the blogs in the world all the time. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you’ve updated so they can come check you out. They get the freshest data possible, you don’t get a thousand robots spidering your site all the time. Everybody wins.

So why would you want to be on these sites? One word: traffic.

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This isn’t breaking news — it was first reported by the sources below a few weeks ago — but I’m still getting caught up with my backlogged notes for this blog.

Anyway, news is that Microsoft is readying something called Blogbot, a kind of search tool focused on weblogs for release in the next couple of months. The idea is likely to be something similar to its Newsbot search service, already in beta in the U.K., which is strikingly similar to Google News (at a glance, anyway). A U.S. version of Newsbot is also expected in the next few months. Makes me think the new blog aggregation service Kinja may have its work cut out for it.

Reports on Blogbot come from Seattle P.I.’s Microsoft Blog, the San Jose Merc and eWeek.

Microsoft has already demonstrated itself to be quite blog savvy, with a host of blogs of its own, including that of its corporate evangelist Robert Scoble, the round-table video blog of several of its product architects at Channel 9 and a large collection of other company-sanctioned bloggers.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/

Debbie Weil’s WordBiz organized a teleseminar on the topic of Business Blogs a few months ago, in which I partook as one of the “experts.” She’s done a nice job packaging the audio of that seminar with a companion PDF report. Some of the points she promises you’ll learn from the report:

• Why blogging is better (and easier) than updating a regular Web site
• How blogging is different than sending an e-newsletter
• The best technology for publishing – and subscribing – to blogs
• How a blog fits into an overall marketing and communications strategy
• Plus, the tools you need to start your own blog right now!

Price: $59.

WordBiz: Blogging for Business

CEO Henry Copeland launched this do-it-yourself ad network for blogs nearly two years ago, and at that time there was a fair bit of skepticism that the business would ever pan out. Well, it has. The service now has more than 200 blogs using the system, each of which has at least 3,000 ad impressions each week. Some, such as InstaPundit and DailyKos, have millions of readers per month. The service has proven particularly popular with political advertisers — more than two dozen candidates in the presidental and other races have used it to reach political junkies through blogs. But many smaller and medium-sized companies are also find blogs a great way to advertise niche products. Blogs are ideal “for products that have a sensibility, not commodities, those looking to find audiences with a particular mindset,” Copeland said. Some of the biggest bloggers using the system are now earning thousands of dollars a month in advertising.

I have counseled BlogAds about its overall business strategy.

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BloggerCon, celebrating its second year this year, is the premier conference of serious webloggers, organized by one of the original bloggers, Dave Winer, who blogs at Scripting News and is founder of blog software producer Userland.

The event this year is free, hosted at Harvard University, where Winer is a visiting scholar. The schedule of events includes topics such as “What Is Journalism?” “Presidential bloggers,” “Librarians,” “Blogging in Business,” “Blogging as a Business,” “Religion” and other stimulating sessions.

UPDATE:
Lilioa.com has a list here of several people who blogged the event.

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Jeff Jarvis has set up this wiki (definition) to support his “Blogging as Business” session at the BloggerCon conference.

Because this site is a wiki, it means any reader can contribute to and edit the content (click the “edit” link in the left-hand menu of the site).

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I’m delighted to see MarketingSherpa is reselling this report. I am its co-author and primary analyst, written originally for MarketingWonk, which did not do the greatest job of promoting the report. Leave it to MarketingSherpa, though, to market it right, as they are experts at report sales.

MarketingSherpa’s sales copy includes this:

Business Blogs sidesteps gee whiz hype to focus on practical realities. You’ll learn:

• How 45 companies in a wide array of industries (including both B-to-B and B-to-C) are using Blogs today for marketing, customer relationship building, PR, and corporate communications.
• Specific tactics to get readers for your Blog (with more than one million blogs out there, getting attention is your biggest challenge.) Includes 17-best online resources, and quick tips on syndication.
• How and where to advertise on third party Blogs if you want to take advantage of the Blog phenomenon without building your own. (Note: Response rates are currently more than double the average online ad click rate.)
• Basics on creating a Blog – including writing-style, best updating frequency, recommended technology, and legal advice. (Who owns copyright on comments visitors post to your Blog? Find out.)

The report costs $99 and is worth every penny, if I do say so myself!

MarketingSherpa: Business Blogs: How Successful Companies Get Real Results With Weblogs

This site uses blogs as a marketing vehicle with a clever twist on the sweepstakes model. The basic idea is that marketers offer up some of their products as a prize for a sweepstake, which Blogstakes encourages blogs to promote. The hook, however, is that both a random visitor from one of the blogs and the referring blogger both with the prize. That is, Blogstakes tracks where the click-throughs to its site come from, and they give a prize also to the blogger from whose site the randomly drawn winner clicked. Because bloggers have some skin in the game, the site has been popular with bloggers who link to it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I was the winning blogger of one of the first contests, for Clip-n-Seal. I had written on MarketingVox about the launch of Blogstakes, and based on that post, I referred the winning entrant to the contest. I also received a sample package of Clip-n-Seal’s product, a clever device to seal open bags with, and I have to say, it is a terrific project. I think this marks the second time in my life that I won any such contest (once, when I was around 25, I won a CD in a radio call-in drawing, the first CD in my collection!).

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