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.

My good friend and fellow Duct Tape Marketing Blog Channeler Zane Safrit, CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, has a wonderfully thoughtful personal blog post that follows an interview he conducted with a Communications major at Northeastern University on the subject of blogging.

The student was writing an essay on blogs and Zane is one of the most articulate and passionate bloggers I know – you should to get to know him.

This week the search marketing conference Pubcon X was held in Las Vegas with many great sessions, one of which, RSS Feeds and Podcasting was particularly well done.  Presenters included:  Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo, Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, Daron Babin of New Gen Media and Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.

Presentations ranged from the how-to’s of podcasting and tools, podcast optimization, using RSS to uncover and promote hidden publisher content, industry data on podcasting and of course, Jeremy focused on Yahoo’s tools involving RSS and Podcasts.

Detailed coverage of the session can be found at: "Pubcon X – RSS Feeds and Podcasting".

Build your bomb shelters now, the world has gone completely fucking insane. CNN Money attributes (in an ephemeral link) a spike in Yahoo’s stock today to its distribution deal with Gawker Media:

The Internet portal signed a distribution deal with Gawker blogs in its
efforts to get more original writing content on its site.

I
was setting up a client’s new blogs in TypePad this afternoon when I
got this error. You may wonder why I’m still using TypePad for blogging
clients…I’m wondering the same thing myself.

What’s more frustrating is the only option is to click the OK button. How about a "Not OK" button?

This is just a day after TypePad users received an email from TypePad offering a
rebate on 0, 15, 30 or 45 days, depending on how much the user was
affected.

While we are not done with our work, and
there is always the chance of outages on any web service, we believe
that the worst performance is behind us, and it is now time to focus on
how we can make these problems up to you.

Well, I
was debating between 15 or 30, but I’m glad I held off. Now I’ll take
the full 45, though I’m not  sure that will make a difference.  Business bloggers need a platform they can rely on, not a rebate when it goes down.

This feels like a dysfunctional relationship where I keep on hoping my significant other will change and everything will be fine. And we all know how those turn out.

According to the Wall St. Journal and Paid Content, Gawker’s Nick Denton has signed a partnering arrangement to distribute content to Yahoo that will be featured on their news site.

I’m of the mind that partnering is smarter than acquisition at this point in the blogosphere.  Let’s see how this one plays out.

Neville talks about an interesting, really cool IMHO, thing the U.K. supermarket chain Tesco is doing.  Not only are they sending out traditional e-mail marketing e-mails to customers (on the quantity or quality concept) they have created a “deal of the day” RSS feed.  Now, this rocks.  Frankly, I’d love to get my store flier in RSS.  Maybe, the just before the end of the day … how about a quick recipe for an easydinner and oh … here are the ingredients … oh and severalof them are on a special web-recipe sale. How about that.

From Neville:

So my prediction is – more RSS feeds by consumer-focused businesses such as supermarkets. It’s getting easier for people to use RSS (often without realizing it) and will get easier still as more businesses offer information via RSS, as simpler ways of describing it emerge (like ‘ live bookmarks ,’ for instance), and as it becomes ever more easier to get the information offered via RSS. (Related development: expect more advertising in RSS.)

It’s the heir to the direct marketing throne.

The end of an era where we can’t meausure podcast listenership is almost over, so says Audible.com. I’m betting that this was ‘all the rage’ at the Portable Media Expo near Los Angeles today.

According to an article in today’s Wall St. Journal (sub. req.), Audible will be releasing technology, already deployed in it’s audio book products, for the podcast market which will help track and measure the listenership of any given podcast that’s run though its proprietary system.

Audible is making its tracking service available to outside podcasters.
The company will charge three cents per downloaded podcast to report
whether a downloader listened, and for how long. Audible will also
offer tools that will stop the podcast from being emailed to others. It
will charge five cents per download to track listening and attach the
access restrictions. For half a cent per download, Audible will insert
an ad relevant to the podcast.

Let’s all line up, nice and orderly now, to get in partnership with Audible to better track ads in podcasts.   The technology will be made available some time next quarter.

Tim Manners, publisher of Reveries ‘Cool News’, has released a blogging survey in the face of some of the negative blog related data coming out of AdAge and Forbes.  The objective is to get the marketers’ and agencies’ takes on the real skinny of what’s going on with blogs and gauge the sentiments of the marketers who have to defend ‘the brands and the lives that blogs allegedly destroy’, according to the Forbes article.

In an email to Cool News Today subscribers, Tim put it this way.

In view of the rapidly growing impact of blogs, we have developed a survey to
get underneath the hype and find out how marketers (both brand and agency)
actually view blogs — as a potential useful tool or lurking danger — and to
what extent, in fact, our readers currently monitor blogs as the Forbes
article recommends:

Take the survey here:
http://response.surveyincite.com/survey/18667.jsp

The results of this survey will be available to all participants to
judge for themselves whether they are ahead or behind on the blogging curve.

There have been a number of blog surveys this year but none has really given us the ‘complete truth’ or the whole picture.  However, I think that the more of these we do and the higher the response rates, the closer we get to having a real understanding of what the blogosphere means to the advertising and marketing community.

In his Fast Forward column in September’s issue of Media magazine, editor-in-chief Joe Mandese highlights a scene from Back to School where Rodney Dangerfield is shopping for textbooks when someone recommends that he buy used ones because the key passages are already highlighted from previous owners.  In reply, Dangerfield responds, "But what if they were morons?".

I’m not about to call everyone who’s not bought into the metaphor of customer community, citizen contributed media and dialogue that blogging stands for a moron.  That wouldn’t be nice.  However, I would argue that the path we’ve traveled to marketing riches before has been written over by a new generation of marketer.  Your customer.

A friend of mine, who’s trying very hard to shift the mentality of an old-world company through the power of blogging has this to say about her struggles, which typifies the argument that many are having inside the walls of corporations around the world.

This group is afraid of blogs. They don’t see anything but the danger in blogging.  They are afraid of the conversations and afraid to "lose control" of our message.

You want fear?  Understand this.  In talking with some of the folks at I/PRO recently, they cite a well known fact that the major panel based web ratings firms like ComScore and Nielsen have a pretty good idea of what’s happening on the top 100 sites on the web.  They know little about what’s really going on in the long tail, which is where I/PRO’s ‘sweet spot’ lies, based on their methodology of auditing sites well beyond the top 100.  Media planners around the country are waking up to old media, and even the top 100 sites, becoming less relevant to the greater population than the millions of blogs that make up the long tail.

I think that the tagline for the citizen contributed media world should be "The Long Tail Wagging The Old Media Dog."  Because that’s what old media, and an old media command and control mindset really is.  Just an old dog.  How ironic that ‘cynicism’ is the Greek word for ‘a dog’.  (taken literally, the ‘piss on ideas’)

For those who fear the new media, blogging infiltrated world, the only real safe path is in partnership with your customer.  A change of attitude is what’s required here.  An attitude that the conversation, community, citizen participation and the Internet as one great big wonderful media lab is what’s required here. 

The point here is that marketers need to always be asking the question "but, what if they were wrong?" (let’s not call anyone morons here).  What if what I know about marketing, my customers, and what I think about blogging is wrong, or at best, misguided.

Yeah, what if…

If you’ve been following the tech news for the last week, you already know that beleaguered Sony Corporation has another problem on its hands; it appears that music CDs from subsidiary BMG are being shipped with hidden Digital Rights Management software that automatically installs on your computer if you simply listen to one of them. Know as a “rootkit” because of how it ties into your Windows operating system, this situation is pretty astonishing and it’s another splendid example of where a large corporation needs to clearly think through its crisis management strategy, to identify the thought and opinion leaders who are basically dictating the community response to the situation, and communicate with them directly.

In the 21st Century, those thought and opinion leaders are online, and if they’re not writing their own weblogs, they’re certainly paying attention to the so-called blogosphere. Which leads to the question of Where’s Sony?

Personally, I find this entire topic quite fascinating for a number of reasons: First, some of the case studies I worked through in business school were on damage control and crisis management, so having something cause negative publicity and then being forced to respond shouldn’t be anyhing new to any senior manager at Sony. There are good and bad examples of this sort of crisis management, but one of the cornerstones of any approach is to take your response to the community most affected by the problem.

But it’s not quite that simple either, and a group of professionals from the group LinkedInBloggers recently tossed this question around, with some very thought-provoking results:

      Does Sony Need a Damage Control Blog?

You might well be surprised by what these active bloggers have to say on this subject…

More and more businesses are starting to discover and explore RSS (Real Simple Syndication) as an alternative to email marketing.

RSS allows you to syndicate your content very easily; it’s most commonly used in blogging and podcasting as an RSS feed is automatically created by most blogging and podcasting platforms. However, RSS can be created for your Web site as well, and is fast becoming an important communication channel for businesses.

In Your 7-Step RSS Marketing Plan, Rok Hrastnik holds your hand while you dip your toe in the RSS ocean.

Come on in! The water’s fine!

Whether it’s the debate raging in the online professional networking community of LinkedIn about spammy waves of invitations received by LI members from competitor Doostang, the breathless hype about Web 2.0 or even blogging itself, I argue that many of the discussions in the tech industry parallel the societal debate about evolution versus intelligent design. Do things evolve, does change beget improvement, or do we all just spin our wheels pointlessly, foolishly thinking that creation is a series of small steps?

Read my thoughts on this topic for yourself at:

    Intelligent Design, Evolution and the Tech Industry

I tried to remain agnostic, but you’ll learn more about my own theological and philosophical viewpoint as you read the article too. And, please, don’t hesitate to add your own commentary on this topic!

Here’s a topic that I know is of interest to many bloggers, both business bloggers and otherwise: how can you turn your site traffic into some sort of money stream, even a small one? It turns out that there are many different ways to make a few dollars, but one of the most popular is Google AdSense. The AdSense program offers every blogger a simple way to include contextually relevant advertisements on your very own blog pages.

Understanding exactly how AdSense works, what you do and don’t need to worry about as a participant in the program, and how they calculate payouts is a subtlety that most people skip, unfortunately. Further, it’s not easy to find a clear explanation of every step required to configure and track your own AdSense results from your site online either.

That’s why I just spent rather a few hours writing up a long and detailed article about Google AdSense, including many best practices and a critical warning that you should heed lest you get kicked out of the program before your blog can even make you that wonderful first dollar!

Rather than duplicate it here on the Business Blog Consulting site, however, I’d like to instead beg your indulgence and ask that you click on the following link so you can read all about Google AdSense for yourself:

      How do I get started with Google AdSense?

Questions about AdSense or even commentary on whether business blogs should be monetized are more than welcome too, of course.

A few months ago Technorati invited over 30,000 subscribers to its email newsletter to participate in a 18 question survey on blogging. There were 821 respondents.

The survey found that most bloggers blog to position themselves as an authority in their field and were fairly skeptical of corporate blogs, noting more trust in individual employee blogs.

You can view much of the raw results in tablular and graphical format on the Edelman site and some analysis on the Edelman blog. Technorati has published their own summary findings of the survey and eMarketer has published their take as well.

eMarketer is also offering a new report on business blogging:

The Business of Blogging report aggregates the latest data from Blogads,
Forrester Research, Gallup, Harris Interactive, InsightExpress, Perseus
Development, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Quris, Technorati, TNS
and many others—with eMarketer’s objective, unbiased analysis to give you the
information you need to make well-informed business decisions on the future of
online marketing.

Traditional media seems committed to sending out mixed messages about business blogging:
Fortune – No escaping the blog

Forbes – Attach of the Blogs

BusinessWeek – Blogs will Change your Business

Reports like “The Business of Blogging” seem more attractive to those looking for objective insight. But is it objective?  I have not purchased the report and if anyone else has, I would be curious about your thoughts on it.

GM’s Smallblock Engine blog shuts down tomorrow today after exactly one year, perhaps the first highly-publicized Fortune 500 blog to bite the dust. This sounds like a natural death. It was an event-driven blog, created for the 50th anniversary of the Corvette’s small-block engine. And the party is over. Makes sense. (Dave Hill, chief engineer of the Corvette, is also retiring which kind of wraps it up nicely.)

You could say it created a category for corporate blogs: event-specific and time-limited. It never got a huge number of comments from readers. But that’s OK too. Remember, a blog is just a tool. Use it anyway you want as long as you make it a good read, you’re honest and a bit of passion shows through.

Addendum: in April 2005, halfway through the year, the GM folks blogged about whether or not to turn the smallblock engine blog into a powertrain blog. A number of commenters said "oh, yes please do!" But one guy left an astute remark:

"Keep to one topic… don’t try to take on too much in one blog."

Here’s Rick Bruner’s Nov. 2004 post crowing about the launch of the Smallblock Engine blog:

"This is big: the biggest car company in the world now has a blog… "

According to a newly released report from Pew Internet & American Life Project teens are very blog savvy.  According to the report, 19% of teens are blogging, and 38% of teens are reading blogs. The number of teen blog readers translates to 8 million young adults.

Teens are adopting the use of the internet for many functions including downloading music, using IM, making online purchases, and more importantly to the blogosphere, they are deemed to be "content creators".  The study reflects

Today’s online teens live in a world filled with self authored customized and on demand content much of which is easily replicated, manipulated and redistributable.  The internet and digital publishing technologies have given them tools to create, remix and share content on a scale that had previously only been accessible to the professional gatekeepers of broadcast, print, and recorded media outlets.

What does this mean for the future?

Contuinue Reading