Archive for May, 2006

Better organization is much more than the key to better blogging – it’s the key to better living. Easier said than done, I know. But there is a website that can help you out. Ariane Benefit’s Neat Living is about simplifying, letting go of clutter, organizing, “thinkbuying,” resisting consumerism, getting healthy, working with passion, charity, ethics, and having fun too! The blog is packed with tips and great ideas to help you get out from underneath all of the clutter that is keeping you from realizing your true potential. Ariane’s posts exude passion and motivation. In fact, I’m going to cut this post short so I can tidy up my office workspace, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.

Multiple Choice Question

Q: What is one of the primary benefits of business blogging?

A: Increase online exposure through improved search engine rankings.

B: Create new business relationships and nurture long time partnerships.

C: Improve internal and external communications.

D: Get Smarter (Improve industry knowledge).

E: All of the above

If you answered “E” – all of the above, you’re right. While most people focus on benefits A-C, one should not overlook the fact that following blogs in your industry will make you more knowledgeable. There are literally hundreds of quality blogs for each business industry/discipline. In my RSS news reader, I have about 10 blogs that are focused on Business Blogging and about 20 more blogs focused on Marketing. I am positive that if there is breaking news or something profound being said about either of these topics, that I will find out about it in one of the blogs that I follow.

Case in point. For the past few weeks, I have been trying to find a site that provides ongoing case studies that discus how small to medium sized businesses have integrated blogging into their marketing mix and the benefits that they have received. Well, today I opened up Bloglines and found what I was looking for.

Want to convince your company that a blog can help them?

Naked Conversations has a great heads-up on The Pajama Market. The Pajama Market focuses on a different small-business every day, and how they have integrated blogs into their marketing mix. Everything from pubs, to resorts, to knitting companies are covered. TPM covers how each business is utilizing the blog, their favorite posts, and how effective they feel the blog is in helping the business grow.

If you’re like me, catchphrases like ‘markets are conversations’ are good up to a point, then you need to see real-world examples of ideas being put into action. TPM gives us that, and shows what can happen when a business actually tries to COMMUNICATE with their community, instead of just advertising whatever stale one-way message you want them to hear. The Pajama Market definitely goes in the ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ file.

The difference in my perspective in contrast to Patrick’s is that most of the value to me in blogging is to allow people to “meet” me and allow us to create conversations through the blog. Much like having an open studio, a blog allows me the opportunity to discuss my ideas about art, about blogs, about conversations in cyberspace, The blogs let me feel out the audience, share my personality, show some of my work and in general share what’s going on in my life with people who are interested in doing a little evesdropping. – Susan Reynolds
Essentially, my view on the monetizing issue is that a blog can serve a perfectly useful and even productive function in a business by helping raise awareness of the business, helping to build trust and providing other benefits, none of which need to be directly attributable to this or that sale of goods or services on or directly from the blog. – Des Walsh

For myself, increased traffic to my website (tripled) has resulted in a doubling of revenues last year alone, and it’s going to be even better this year.

But I blog for the pleasure of writing, and it also serves to clarify my ideas, thoughts and purpose. I also learn through writing. That is just how I consolidate things I’ve read.

Why do you blog? I mean, besides all the money? Sure, increased traffic is good, so are the relationships and new opportunities, and reaching a global audience. For me, it’s not “show me the money,” it’s “show me the fun!” – BlogSquad

Indeed, you are all absolutely 100% correct. After reading through the comments and re-reading my post I realize that I came off like a used car salesman. Just to clarify, I do not believe that the main reason businesses should be blogging is to hard sell products/services. On the contrary, blogging, IMHO, is about initiating and nurturing relationships that will help to generate business. However, not offering the occasional call to action on your blog is like handing out your business card at a networking event and not telling the person to please call if he/she ever needs your services.

Dennis D. McDonald says it best here:

I’ve found that I am more successful when I incorporate a call to action in the targeted communications I direct to target clients via phone and email. I use embedded referrals (links) to my blog as a supplement to my resume and to illustrate capabilities relevant to solving specific problems I think ae relevant to that client.

In that respect, I view my blog as an integral part of my sales process, but I do not use it by itself specifically in a “call to action” sense.

But what actions do I promote via the blog? That’s a fair question and one that I use my blog visit records and Google Analytics to help answer.

When I do a targeted emailing or call campaign I can measure a variety of things:

1. I can often tell when a targeted person has visited my blog after an email since I can track specific IP addresses.
2. I can tell how often my resume, my about me page, my white papers, and my RSS feed page are visited by using Google Analytics ?Äúconversion goals?Äù tracking process.

These responses to my “calls to action” are much less concrete than, say,”click here to add item to shopping cart.” But they do give me some sense of how well my blog is doing in terms of the overall cycle of communications relative to my networking and business development activities.

You’ve jumped into the blogosphere with both feet. After diligently developing and sticking to your blog strategy, you begin to see the fruits of your labour traffic to your site continues to increase each week and you’ve started to get good reviews from peers and colleagues. Everything is going according to plan except that you have not been able to monetize your traffic presumably the main reason for starting your blog.

This is something that I have been wrestling with. You’ll notice in my previous post that I concluded with, “If you’d like to learn more about business blogging, please feel free to download our Corporate Blogging 101 whitepaper. If you’re already up to speed on business blogging basics but would like to discuss whether it makes sense for your business to have its own blog and a rough estimate of how much it would cost to get your blog set up, please feel to contact me.” Is this something that I should be putting at the end of every blog post or is this too in your face?

The question at hand is this – What have you done to create an effective call to action in your blog?

I’m looking for case studies on how blogs word of mouth potential
impacted a small businesses bottom line. I’m primarily interested in
knowing if there are case studies whereby a retail shop had set up a
blog and the benefits that the retail shoped reaped from the blog.

My reason for asking is that I run a web design and blogging
consultancy and I have a friend of mine who runs a coffee shop in my
neighborhood. She’s pretty internet savvy and wanted to know if a blog
could help her. I think it could, especially from a WOM perspective,
but I wanted to read up on some case studies before talking further.

This was a post that I received from a group to which I belong – the LinkedInBloggers group on Yahoo. Unfortunately, I have been to busy to respond until now.

I firmly believe that there are some businesses that would not see much benefit from blogging. On the other hand, with a bit of creativity, I think you could find a compelling reason for most businesses to have a blog. A coffee shop blog is a slam dunk IMHO.

Aldo Coffee is a great example of a coffee shop blog. The Aldo blog/website lists their menus, event schedules and other interesting tidbits without making the site cluttered or busy, but most importantly the blog tells a story that draws people to the coffee shop. The only thing that I would do differently is insert coupons with every post that readers could print out and redeem at the coffee shop. Adding coupons to newsletters/blogs worked amazingly well for me back when I was in the business. I talked about this back in March and you can find the post here. The following is an example of a branded coupon. Please excuse the fact that it doesn’t look that great – I’m no designer and I was in a hurry

Back to the original question that my fellow group member posted in which he was looking for case studies that showed a direct impact of blogging on a small business’ bottom line…Unfortunately, I haven’t come across any such case studies. However, I don’t think that a lack of concrete ROI evidence should prevent a small business owner from starting a blog especially when the cost of getting started can be extremely inexpensive – free if you sign up with a service like Blogger.

If you’d like to learn more about business blogging, please feel free to download our Corporate Blogging 101 whitepaper. If you’re already up to speed on business blogging basics but would like to discuss whether it makes sense for your business to have its own blog and a rough estimate of how much it would cost to get your blog set up, please feel to contact me.

One of the RSS feeds I use to help keep my finger on the pulse of blogging and all things Web 2.0 is Jeremiah the Web Prophet. Jeremiah recently added a cool little widget called a tag cloud from a company called ZoomCloud to his blog and then wrote a post about it. What is a tag cloud you ask? From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

A tag cloud (more traditionally known as a weighted list in the field of visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.

First things first. The tag cloud generated by the ZoomCloud widget is not a traditional tag cloud. In fact, it really isn’t a tag cloud at all. In Flickr and Technorati, two sites that have brought tag clouds to the masses, users create their own tags (‘design’, ‘cats’, ‘California’). When enough people have used the same tag, it begins to show up in the cloud. Once a lot of people have used it, it becomes a visually dominant element, encouraging others to click it ?Äî and subtly discouraging them from creating their own tags. (Source: Zeldman.com). ZoomCloud, on the other hand generates a “tag cloud” by mining your blog and creating tags for the most popular terms. So while a ZoomCloud cloud tag may be a useful navigational tool, it should not be associated with a true tag cloud that develops organically through user contribution and participation.

Even though the ZoomCloud cloud tag is not a true cloud tag, I believe that it is a useful tool that has the following advantages:

• It gives a great visual representation of what your blog is all about to people who come to your blog for the first time.
• It is a great way for your readers to navigate your site. It’s similar to a reader clicking on one of your blog’s categories to see all of the related blog posts, but using a tag cloud for navigation provides a bit more definition and breadth because a tag from a tag cloud usually transcends multiple categories.
• It helps to keep the blog owner on topic. If your blog’s focus is on high-tech marketing, but the term “ex wife” makes it into your tag cloud, this may be a sign that your blog is drifting off topic.

Am I going to add the ZoomCloud script to my blog? I don’t know. The problem is that I only have one sidebar and it’s already looking a bit cluttered. Adding ZoomCloud would just be over the top clutter. If I had another sidebar, I would definitely give it a try.

Since this post was written this service has been discontinued

I read about an interesting new service this morning from an RSS feed of one of my favorite tech blogs. The service is called WhoLinked. The idea behind WhoLinked is straight forward; it’s a service that publishes a list of sites that link to your site on your site. Installing WhoLinked is EXTREMELY easy – I had it installed in under 5 minutes.

WhoLinked adds value to your blog because it provides your readers a roadmap to conversations that revolve around the same topics found in your blog. Being able to show a list of sites that link to you also adds a bit of credibility to your blog. It doesn’t replace your blog roll, but it does compliment it.

More from the Technology Evangelist

Real World Experience

I installed WhoLinked on Technology Evangelist around two weeks ago. What have I learned so far? I haven’t determined what effect it has on credibility, although our RSS subscriber base seems to be growing a bit faster than usual. More importantly, it has generated a measurable bump in traffic from sites you link to who have WhoLinked.com installed on their site, including WhoLinked.com, where we’re currently displayed in their #1 WhoLinked position after linking to them back on April 20th:

(more…)

This week’s blog under the spotlight is Laura’s Winning Ideas, hosted by Laura Ricci. The tagline in the header sums up the focus of the blog: Proposal Expert, Laura Ricci, Muses on How She Reached Her 85% Hit Rate, Creating and Managing Dynamic Teams and Living Through Turnarounds Supporting Good People Doing Great Things

Style/Design: B+

The design is a simple yet professional. I think a nice graphic in the header would add a lot to the overall look and feel. The one thing that I don’t like is the Google AdSense ads that appear after each post on the home page. While the ads do a nice job of separating each posts, it is kind of cheesy. She is clearly successful at what she does and she certainly doesn’t need the pocket change that she gets from these Google Ads.

Focus: A

Laura has a very focused blog. She has 7 distinct blog categories and when viewed as a whole, it does a great job of summing up her service offering.

Content: A+

Laura’s content is rock solid. Not only is it well written, it is extremely informative and always on target.

Overall Grade: A

A must have feature for any blog is a blog-to-email subscription option. This allows those readers who do not use RSS aggregators such as Bloglines (my favourite) and Rojo the ability to receive all of your blog updates in their email inboxes. I use Feedburner and like it a lot.

There is a new service called Zookoda that just launched. I read about Zookoda today on Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch.

If you are a blogger looking for a solution, either of Zookoda or Feedburner will work. I like Feedburner because, frankly, I don?Äôt want to spend a lot of time formatting templates and going through detailed reports: Feedburner?Äôs one-size-fits-all approach is perfect for TechCrunch, and I like the fact that all of my RSS and email subscription statistics are managed in one dashboard. For bloggers looking for a more robust, customizable solution, or who want more detailed reporting, Zookoda is a very user friendly product that will work extremely well.

That was enough for me to give Zookoda a try. After 15 minutes of unsuccessfully trying to get it to work, I went back to Feedburner. Hey Michael, Zookoda is not user friendly.

Message to Zookoda: Make your service intuitive to set up. You should have a step by step set of instructions for each service offering. Make it simple. I had such an unpleasant experience that I will never try your service again, especially when Feedburner is so easy.

Being a vocal member of the blogosphere and proponent of corporate blogging, its easy to lose perspective on actual acceptance of blogging in the corporate world. The Makovsky 2006 State of Corporate Blogging Survey conducted by Harris Interactive® slapped me back to reality.

…only minorities of top executives surveyed are convinced to “a great extent” that corporate blogging is growing in credibility either as a communications medium (5%), brand-building technique (3%), or a sales or lead generation tool (less than 1%). In contrast, most executives are somewhat or not at all convinced of blogs’ growing credibility in these areas, (62%, 74%, and 70% respectively).

Among other highlights of the survey:

• Even though 12% of senior executives say their companies have taken legal or other action in response to a blog, only 20% report having a formal process in place for monitoring blogs written about the company.

This is frightening. The blogosphere is the place where conversations are taking place. Its the place where your customers are talking about you. Its the place where your competitors are talking about you. Joining in these conversations should be priority #1 for businesses – and you dont need a blog to do that.

• A minority (15%) say that someone in their organization is currently writing a blog related to the company or its activities.
• Only one in five (21%) report reading business-related blogs once a week or more frequently.
• Only 30% of senior executives report that they have a thorough understanding of the term “Internet blog.”
• Forty percent believe that their companies should have corporate policies to address the writing of blogs unrelated to the company or its activities. This compares with the 77% who believe their companies should have such policies concerning the authoring of blogs sanctioned by the company.

Absolutely! Before you unleash your corporate blog(s) you must have blogging policies in place. You can find out more about developing corporate blogging policies here.

• Further, 8% report organizing a team of dedicated people to write sanctioned blogs about the company and its activities.

I wonder what percentage of these companies have employees that are writing unsanctioned blogs? I guess if they are not monitoring the blogosphere then they will never find out. Ignorance is bliss.

• Three percent said their company changed its product, service, or policies because of publicity generated by a blog written about it.

Andy Beal summed it up best on his blog – Could it be we need to come up with a better way of explaining what a “blog” is? I bet if they conducted a similar survey and asked “Are you interested in hearing what your customers think of your business?”, we’d get a different response.