One of the benefits of contributing to Business Blog Consulting is the opportunity to tap into the expertise of some of the best and brightest bloggers. The lively discussions that occur “off-blog”, on the contributing bloggers’ Yahoo list, are often as valuable as the BBC blog posts. With the permission of Rick, Dana, Jeremy and Dave here is a recap of a recent thread on monitzing blogs.
The Question

What kind of revenue return can one expect from a blog that gets an average of 12k unique visitors a day and whose readers are engaged to the extent that some posts pull over 600 comments? The blog focuses on the champion racing horse Barbaro. (Backstory is on Diva Marketing)

As you might expect there were a range of opinions and projections along with specific tactical advice.
Business Blog Consultants’ Responses

Rick Bruner
My $0.02: it’s going to be hard for a consumer blog site to command much over $1 CPM on average (maybe $3, as Dave states, but as I say, not much over). A few reasons: little perceived premium for those audiences. Even if they are focused, they’re not big, so they’re a pain in the ass to buy.

Also, BlogAds creates extra work for advertisers in making them recreate a different type of creative units for a small audience, compared to the leaderboards and skyscrapers and boxes their agency already created for the mass online ad audience, which BlogAds doesn’t support.

The biggest reason, however, most bloggers can’t make decent money from ads is this: they don’t sell. They expect the mountain to come to Muhammad. Their logic seems to be, “Hey, I spend a lot of hours on this thing, I get a few thousand people, advertisers should do the work to find me and give me money.” That ignores the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. A few thousand visitors a day is small change compared to the big sites dominating the online ad space.

That’s where Tig and Rafat have stood apart. First, they’ve aggregated an audience (B2B) that commands a high CPM ($30+). Second and more importantly, they both personally broke their asses for hours a day actively selling ads, calling agencies, making a real business out of their sites. Now, they’ve both hired ad sales teams.

Dave Taylor
It can be all over the map. Let’s look at AdSense since it’s easy. AdSense effective CPM can range from under $1 to over $10, depending on placement, subject and the click thru rate. If this blog uses a typical placement they’ll see approx 2% CTR (ballpark). Racing will draw some good ads, but much of the gambling is prohibited by AdSense, so let’s just guess that these will be okay value ads and the overall effective CPM with that CTR will be about $3.

Now we can do the math: 12,000 visitors/day = 20,000 page views/day. At a 2% CTR that means that this 20,000 page views account for 400 clicks. If we stick with our resultant effective CPM based on this, that’s really $3 per thousand views, or 20,000/1000 * 3 = $60/day. That’s $0.15/click, not bad for AdSense. Multiply that out and we might be talking about approx $20k/year.

These are all out of thin air, of course. The ads could be more valuable, the CTR could be higher (or quite a bit lower), producing an effective CPM far different than my guess of $3. There are also lots of other advertising alternatives, including BlogAds, etc etc, and
they could just sell their own adverts so they could delve into gambling ads directly, which I imagine would be far more profitable for the site.

Jeremy Wright
Hard to say, BlogAds is its own little economy. We (b5media) have a few similar sites that get 100$/week for a BlogAds ad spot. They’re in the Entertainment space, though.

I’d probably get the blog included in one of the BlogAd Networks, price a unit at 100$/week and then raise it as it starts to fill up. Personally I think a unit’s worth about 250$/week on that site, but it’s always hard to tell with BA’s buyers.

Dana VanDen Heuvel
That would depend a lot on the advertiser and the category…horse racing…not sure what’s out there on that, in terms of advertisers… It’s not like B2B tech where they’re getting $50CPM…at least, not that I know of.

You’d have to find the right category advertisers to make a go at it…or do
Google AdSense.

BBC Readers
What advice would you give?

I found on Kevin’s LexBlog some tips from Allison Shields and her post on how to get your site noticed (it applies to blogs too):

• Practice ‘education marketing’ – make sure that your website and your other marketing materials provide value to those in your target market. Educate them about your area of practice. Let them know that you know what their needs are, and that you have a solution that will benefit them.
• Remember the ‘so what’ rule – for everything you write on your website, stand in your clients’ and potential clients’ shoes. As you’re reading, ask yourself ‘so what?’ Why should your clients or potential clients care about what you’re saying? Focus on what’s in it for them, and speak in their language – using a lot of technical legal terms will confuse your readers, and they may not come back.
• Make sure to have not only good content, but current content, on your site. If you want people to come back, they have to have a reason to think there will be something new for them when they return. Offer them something THEY want – be a resource for your target market. Become the place to go for people who are seeking answers in your area of concentration.
• Don’t try to be all things to all people – carve out your niche. To get noticed, you have to be different than everyone else out there. Showcase your unique talents, skills and personality. Make sure web visitors know why you are the one that understands their particular problem.

For me, education marketing, find your niche, and current content are key (Allison has many more tips on her blog).  For example, on my personal blog, I don’t stray too far from tech and blog-related stuff.  Sure there is an occasional non-tech post, but not often.  But the same token my science blog is about … yeah, science.  I personally use the “so what” or “this means” whenever I’m writing a marketing document or presentation. So in practice do something like … Selling point [think to yourself “which means”] we have a cure for the common cold.

What’s your best tip for getting noticed?  No, outright bribery doesn’t count.  Okay, sometimes it does.

Tags: website marketing, blog marketing, business blogging

PRSA’s Issues and Trends has a good article about PR bloggers today.

The article looks at blogging from several angles and makes some salient points:

• You should figure who would be interested in your content – will you reach the right audience? PR professionals tend to read PR blogs and this may not be the best audience for building a PR practice.
• Blogging will not necessarily boom your business, but it will raise your profile and build your reputation as a thought leader. Steve Rubel’s rise to Senior VP at Edelman is cited as an example.

How can you tell if your blogging is successful?  As with any business stategy, set a goal before you start and measure your results.  It does not have to end up in the top 10 blogs in your category to be a success – it just has to reach the right people and resonate with them.

From iMediaConnection this morning comes some hints at how to track the buzz around you and your business on the blogosphere.  The tips and techniques are good ones, but they miss a couple important things.  First let’s look at the metrics they suggest:

• Technorati: Blogs linking to your site
• Technorati: Total incoming links to your site
• Bloglines: Citation search total
• Analytics: Pageviews
• Analytics: New Visitors
• Analytics: Repeat visitors
• Analytics: Referrals
• Analytics: Organic
• Analytics: Direct
• Datasource: New Members/Subscribers/Customers
• Datasource: Revenues from (direct sales/affiliates/partners/resellers/etc.)
• Alexa: Weekly rank
• Email: Opens
• Email: Clickthroughs
• Email: Forwards

Super.  Lot’s more here than just bloggy buzz, but let’s run with it.  Since I’m in charge of the metrics stuff at Qumana, well I’m usually up to my elbows in all this data.  So … what’s missing?  Well first an RSS reader.  The blogosphere is about immediacy if nothing else and you have to keep on top of it.  You need to subscribe to the RSS feeds provided by Technorati, Google, etc to be able to react and contribute to the conversation.  Bloglines and Lektora (disclosure I work for the company that makes Lektora) are two good choices.  Then for buzz and conversation measurement I really like BlogPulse.  Here is an example of a BlogPulse trend search comparing me (Tris Hussey), Debbie Weil, and Rick Bruner:

What this shows is that, well, sorry Rick … but no one is talking about you.  I tend to be talked more about than Debbie, except recently because Debbie just launched her book (man I gotta get cracking!).  Imagine doing this for your brand, CEO, competitors.  Something like this:

This compares Qumana (my company) to Ecto and Microsoft’s new Live Writer.  As you can see Qumana is talked about more than Ecto, but Live Writer is clearly a blogosphere darling at the moment.

Bottom line: check out the analytics article (there are good suggestions there), start subscribing to RSS, and add BlogPulse to your toolkit for some fast measurements on the bloggy buzz

Tags: buzz metrics, blog metric, buzz mesurement, buzz marketing, RSS

Recent studies indicate that 85 percent of workers in America with Internet access admit to spending an average of 2 hours per day on personal e-mails and Internet activity, while 80 percent of employers monitor that activity, according to a press release from Bracewell & Giuliani

B  & G is giving Human Resource Management Association members in Texas the low down on employee surfing and blogging in the workplace and the legal implications of corporate monitoring of employee online activity.  

Different companies obviously see blogging very differently.  Here’s what Sun Microsystems has on their site;

Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.

Sun certainly is not too concerned about their employees blogging. When he spoke at the Syndicate Conference late last year Jonathan Schwartz said they attribute the revitlization of Sun’s brand to their blogging.

But employee blogging can be a minefield.  Last year’s upset over the image posted by Niall Kennedy speaks volumes on this subject.  The flap over the image aside, Niall’s point about fear and the availability of the ‘new printing press’ in the hands of everyman is very valid.

Technorati supported Niall 100%, but it did create some backlash.

“We do not censor people’s blogs, and we take the censorship allegation extremely seriously,” wrote Dave Sifty. “I actively encourage our employees to blog, and to express their opinions. However, many readers do not make as clear a distinction between personal and work lives as many experienced bloggers do, and will view a provocative image on a blog in the worst possible light, especially when presented by the company’s Community Manager.”

There may well be bumps in the road when you start blogging in your business.   It’s a given with a new form of expression that gives a voice to anyone and everyone.

It’s wise to set guidelines for your employees when they blog.  But don’t let the FUD get you – the benefits blogging offers far outweigh any fears you may have.

 

 

In a case which has evident implications for Canadian bloggers but also for bloggers worldwide, Kazaa Australia boss Nikki Hemming is suing Canadian blogger Jon Newton and others for defamation, on the basis of an article earlier this year on Newton’s p2pnet site, as reported in this week’s IT Today section of the national daily The Australian (not a hyperlink permalink, no guarantee it will be there indefinitely).

The suit is over material posted on p2pnet and anonymous comments on that post, some months ago at a time when Hemming was in court in a Sydney case. Included in the suit with Newton are his ISP and four John Doe, anonymous commenters. The article has since been removed from the p2pnet site.

Jon Newton is disputing the suit vigorously and observes that if Hemming wins the case ‘it’ll open the door even wider for lawsuits against Canadian bloggers’  .

Canadian internet law professor Michael Geist has commented on the case and its implications in his BBC Online article Free speech, libel and the internet age. Geist draws attention to how the legal frameworks in different jurisdictions have a variety of implications for internet intermediaries, such as internet service providers and even individual bloggers who allow comments.  

The difficult question is not whether these sites and services have the right to voluntarily remove offending content if they so choose – no one doubts that they do – but rather whether sites can be compelled to remove allegedly unlawful or infringing content under threat of potential legal liability.

The answer is not as straightforward as one might expect since the law in Commonwealth countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia varies depending on the type of content or the nature of the allegations.

Canadian media lawyer Dan Burnett also comments on the different treatments in different jurisdictions, in his statement as reported at the August 5 Toronto Freedom of Speech Online concert and benefit. Burnett sees Canada as being laggard in reforming the law and comments:

In addition to the reforms we are lagging behind already, the internet age raises some new and fundamental questions. How does the right of reply on wiki and reader-post sites affect the law? Are we going to hold site operators liable for automatic posts by others? Are (we) going to recognize a defense for a person who operates a public forum for debate?

So where are bloggers without ready resource to internet lawyers to go for advice on these matters?

It seems not uncommon for bloggers to refer, on defamation and other legal issues, to the Electronic Frontier Foundation Legal Guide for Bloggers. That’s good as far as it goes, and there is some good advice in the document, but unless I’m missing something the document is a legal guide for the United States of America, not a global guide. (Actually, from a chat today with a lawyer friend very knowledgeable in these matters, I would seriously doubt whether a comprehensive global guide of any depth in this area is likely to emerge in the near or distant future.) 

Whatever the peculiarities of various legal jurisdictions, clearly some degree of prudence is needed in terms of what we post to our blogs and what we allow in terms of comments. Dave Taylor had some good advice on this in his post last year SEO Book’s Aaron Wall sued over comments on his weblog: Dave saw the case as ‘a wakeup call to business bloggers who haven’t yet thought through their own comment and comment moderation strategies’. 

And however the currrent case in Canada turns out, it too is clearly a call to look at the posting and comment moderation policies for our own blogs and those of any companies to which we consult.

Putting out money where our mouths are, we’re hoping to put money where our mouths are. That is, this site is all about using blogs for business. Yet, despite the name of the site, that would imply we are a consulting company, up until now, BBC (as we contributors hubristically call it) has been something of a labor of love. Granted, of the contributors are consultants themselves, who benefit from the exposure this blog affords their practices. (Myself, I took a day job two years ago.) But basically, this has been a not-for-profit exercise in information sharing.

Then I noticed something a few weeks ago: we get a decent amount of traffic. Enough that I figured, well, if blogs are supposed to be a good way to make money, let’s give it a try. So, you will notice as of today, this blog has ads on it.

Mostly we write here about how to use blogs as a marketing vehicle for companies with other, larger business models. But we also do comment from time to time about pure-play blog publishing businesses, a la Gawker, Weblogs Inc or Federated Media. One of the real secrets of blog publishing, however, is the B2B model. I have several friends who are making a full-time living off of business-oriented ad-supported blogs, such as Steve Hall at Adrants, Rafat Ali at PaidContent and Tig Tillinghast at MarketingVOX. So I figured we should give it a try, too. We’ll let you know how it goes. As the man falling from the 20-story building said as he passed the 10th-floor window, “So far, so good.”

After talking to more than 500 people one on one at SES San Jose over the last few days, I now know that very few people understand the power of RSS.  We asked questions of eveyone who came by our booth and this is what we discovered:

Most people know what RSS is, but only about 10% are using it on their websites.  Of course everyone who has a blog has a feed.  But the big surprise to me was that they don’t know what it can do – or why they should pay more attention to it.

In our panel about News Search Nan Dawkins of RedBoots spoke about how to use your blog and pitch other bloggers to get coverage in Yahoo News and Google News. I followed with our case study on the use of RSS and content syndication to get broad pick up and coverage in Yahoo News. (Featured July 21 in PR Week)

The question I got most frequently after that session was “How did you do that?”  When I asked them if they have a feed of their content, many who blog said yes.  But they has not done anything with it. Their feed was not even registered with the 100 + news aggregators.  Many bloggers don’t use Technorati tags or leverage the power RSS feeds can offer. 

They know they have a feed, but they have no idea what it does or how to promote it.

Over the next six weeks I will be writing a series of articles on The Power of RSS and Syndication – a little mini-course, if you will. If this is of interest to you, please let me know

 

 

 

I’m always on the lookout for stories about bloggers who get into trouble with official government agencies, because I think that the freewheeling and fairly tolerant blogging community is one that’s hard to understand when you’re a government official. When we add MySpace to the mix, you know the result is going to be even more volatile because people who haven’t been exposed to MySpace and its social networking ilk imagine a sort of prim and proper social chat community rather than the chaos, immaturity and just plain weirdness that is pervasive.

So when is a slightly sexually suggestive comment on MySpace grounds for an investigation from the City Council? When you’re a volunteer committee member? Read on:

Over the past month I have had nothing but frustration with Dreamhost, who happens to be my ISP (Internet Service Provider). The server has been down or very slow for hours, seemingly days at a time. My email has been inaccessible on and off throughout the month. And to make things worse, I couldn’t even get through to their online support area to find out what was wrong.

Well, today I got their newsletter in which they included a link to their weblog, which went into excruciating detail about what their problems were for the month of July.

Here’s a link to the post.

A good lesson for all of us here is that when things go wrong in your company and customers are affected as I was, simply telling the truth about what happened and what you are doing to correct the situation is sufficient to keep their business and happy with you.

If only Dell would learn this lesson…

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

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

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

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

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

Now, what to do with my movie?

Strumpy (aka Amanda Chapel / anonymous PR blogger / tall, athletic, Pantene shoulder-length black hair, perfect perky boobs – ed. note: you’ve got to be kidding) is all fired up today with his/her new meme: The Death of Corporate Blogging.

God, (s)he’s clever the way she/he/it writes.

But (s)he’s wrong: corporate blogging – or at least the widespread use of blogging as a business communications tool is NOT dead. And I’m not just saying that because my new book, The Corporate Blogging Book (Penguin Portfolio August 2006), is coming out next week.

Well OK that’s one reason I’m saying it.

Corporate blogging is just getting started

The real reason is oh so simple. Far from being dead, corporate blogging – the use of a blog either internally or externally as part of a company’s online communications and marketing toolkit – is just getting started.

As Ken Yarmosh, who live-blogged my Washington DC book launch yesterday, put it:

“Despite the echoes we often hear in the halls of geek-dom, the blogosphere is not saturated yet. There are many, many more voices to come, blogging on everything from finance to real estate, to yes, even air conditioners. And I know, because I’ve met them this afternoon.” – Ken Y.

Look, I’m sifting through the stack of business cards I got yesterday and here are the kinds of corporate blogging wannabes who attended (I won’t use specific names out of respect for their privacy): commercial real estate, attorney-at-law, non-profit foundation, custom publishing group, government affairs office, board of trade, three or four national associations and so on.

Strumpy, read my book

Strumpy, read my book for god’s sake and maybe you’ll get it. I make a lot of points. Three of the key ones are this:

It’s not about being cool

Corporate blogging is not about being cool. It’s about following your customers where they’re going… and that’s online. You gotta be there to interact with your customers. It’s that simple. Blogging enables an instant (or almost) conversation with them. And that’s what people want. They want to be heard. They want to be acknowledged. Then they’re more apt to do business with you and your organization.

A blog is just a publishing platform
A blog is just a platform, a powerful, simple, inexpensive Web publishing system. Why in heck wouldn’t most companies adopt this platform? Call it Web 2.0. Call it common sense. Call it budget cutting. Who needs a whole IT department that takes months to update a page on a corporate site, when a non-techie manager can do it in minutes with blogging software?

Customers are driving this – not consultants
The new world that PR practitioners, marketing strategists and other consultants are touting is here. We haven’t concocted it as a way to line our pockets with gold. Marketing has become a two-way conversation between customer and corporation. The big guys at the top have lost control or at least complete control. A lot of the best creative stuff (new ideas, great writing) is bubbling up from below.

With 40,000 or 60,000 or whatever new videos being posted everyday to YouTube, with trackbacks and tagging and RSS and digging and Technorati and del.ici.ous and all that cool stuff innovating, fine tuning and becoming easier for the non-techie to use every day… well I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that corporate blogging is here to stay.

Remember, those ordinary people are customers. They’re driving this thing. Not the corporate blogging consultants.

Sorry Strumpy, stuff it.

Update: See here.
Technorati: the corporate blogging book , corporate blogging , debbie weil

Do you RSS?  Lots of businesses wonder what blogging can do for their business.  Even more wonder about the mysterious RSS syndication format.  From WebProNews comes 11 Practical Uses for RSS in Business.

1. Use Your Own Content
2. News Headlines
3. Upcoming Events
4. Thoughts/Commentary
5. Articles
6. New Products
7. Weekly/Monthly Specials
8. Newsletters
9. New Links
10. New Members
11. Ticker RSS Feeds
12. Using Content From OTHER Web Sites

What do all of these have in common?  Simple, effective, easy transmission of information.  Concrete things you can do to ignite your presence on the web.  Some of these require something like blogging.  Putting out news, analysis, opinion, and events are made easier when you have a blog because RSS is de facto built into blogs, but things like a news ticker can be made from easily and freely available scripts and services.

So what are you waiting for?

Tags: RSS, RSS for business

bk_keywords:RSS,blog,business blog,corporate blog.
–>

Nick Wilson at the Performancing blog does a great job of summing up what it takes to increase your traffic to your blog through search. Extremely straight forward recipe for success.
Wilson says it comes down to three things:

1. Copywriting
2. Links
3. Networking

I encourage you to read the full article for all the details. Print it out and keep it by your computer everytime you write a post.

Steve Rubel thinks Yahoo! may be ranking RSS feeds. Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo! responds in the comments.

If this is true, what is the ranking based on, traffic? As a seller of RSS ad inventory, not all feeds are created equally. Measuring traffic alone doesn’t work in the advertising world. What is more important is who is reading it (demographics, decision makers, etc) and how active the feed is. Feeds that have 50 subscribers can make just as much money as those with 1,000. It all depends on the audience it reaches.

If your a blogger looking to generate revenue from your feed, don’t be too concerned about the size of the feed. If you are reaching a highly engaged audience that advertisers want to speak with, your feeds may be more valuable than you realize. However, if you do have a feed that is not highly targeted or the content is not tighly focused, don’t expect the money truck to be backing up to your front door anytime soon.

Over on the Blog Business Summit site there is a little bit about an inter-change between a blogger and a PR company.  The specifics aren’t really important to this post, the bottom line is though.  If you are a business about to start interacting with the blogosphere (starting a blog, blogger outreach, etc), you need to understand the audience first.

When you think about it, it makes perfect business sense.  Would you start marketing your product or service without doing demographic research?  Didn’t think so.  So, first read blogs, subscribe to blogs, search blogs.  Just get a feel for the audience.  And before you approach a blogger with a pitch, make sure he/she is open to them and if the pitch is relevant to them.

Do your homework so you don’t get burned.

Tags: business blogs, business blogging, blogger outreach

 

I love getting new books to read. All my friends know that I am a voracious reader. Well today I received Steve and DL’s book in the mail (book blog here). I’ve only flipped through it, but at first skim it looks interesting. The book is titled “Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business”. I think most of us here would agree (and maybe now I’m stepping into a contentious issue) that business blogs are really just now starting to catch on. I think small biz blogs are doing well, it’s the big guys that still have some work to do.

And well Canada Post has been painfully slow this week so I’m still waiting for Debbie Weil’s Corporate blogging book (book blog here). Sigh. Well at least I know I’ll have reading material for a while.

Not to be left out I’m also writing a book, but not about blogging but working from home. Have a visit over to Daddy Wears Slippers to Work, I’ll make sure I put the coffee on for you.

Tags: blogging, blogging books, book blogs, Debbie Weil, Steve Broback, DL Byron

Because it’s bogus.

What I mean is that, as amusing or clever as anonymous blogging can be (of course sometimes it’s nasty), it’s still slippery. Only half credible. And therefore ultimately an artifice. It’s not real. It’s not *authentic.* It doesn’t carry the weight of legitimate commentary.

The obvious, of course, is that an anonymous blogger is cloaked by er, anonymity, and can toss grenades at anyone or any company without fear of being personally attacked in return.

By contrast, the essence of effective business or corporate blogging is that it *reveals* something about the individual blogger… his or her smarts about a particular issue or discipline. We are usually as interested in the “who” of a good corporate blog, as in the “what.”

And the connection with Strumpette is…

Update

Ooooh too cool… here’s my back and forth with Amanda Chapel (aka Strumpette) that clarifies what I’m trying to say about anonymity as it relates to corporate blogging.

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

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

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

Onalytica has published the results of their analysis on the most influential authorities on “blog marketing”. The top 20 influential sites/blogs include:

• New York Times
• Josh Hallett – hyku
• Seth Godin
• Steve Rubel – Micropersuasion
• Businessweek
• ClickZ
• Wired
• Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman – Next Level Biz Tips
• WebProNews
• Danny Sullivan – Search Engine Watch
• Fast Company
• Lee Odden – Top Rank Results
• Marketing Sherpa
• Darren Rowse – Problogger
• AllBusiness.com
• Hugh Mac Leod – Gaping Void
• Jeff Jarvis – Buzz Machine
• Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba – Church of the Customer
• Mitch Joel – Twist Image
• Steve Hall – Adrants

Business Blog Consulting alumni Steve Rubel was listed and I’m happy to report current contributor Josh Hallett of hyku and my own company TopRank were listed as well.

The analysis focuses on influence and popularity showing that the most popular authorities are not necessarily the most influential. Popularity was measured by the number of referrers and influence was measure by the authority of the referrers.

Limiting the measure of popularity to link referrers seems a bit simplistic. Traffic would appear to be a logical factor as well.

In the previous analysis on the most influential authorities on “business blogs” (full report pdf), Business Blog Consulting was listed as the fourth most influential sandwiched between BusinessWeek and CNN.