February 2008

According to Wired, the Air Force has decided to block “just about any independent site with the word ‘blog’ in its web address.”

I’d imagine that rules us out. It rules out blogspot, too.

Looks like wordpress.com should be OK, as long as you don’t put “blog” in the name of your blog.

Before I start painting with too broad a brush, the Wired piece makes it clear that not everyone in the Air Force thinks that preventing soldiers from the dangers of inaccurate reporting on blogs is a good idea.

To me, the whole thing seems a little knee-jerk to me, like sticking your fingers in your ears, chanting “the blogoshpere doesn’t exist” three times and clicking your heels. I wonder what they’re reacting to?

I also wonder if they blocked Google Reader?

Occasionally, when I’m talking to people about the work I do building blogs for clients, they’ll ask the question that everyone still seems to have about blogging: “I don’t get it. Why does having a blog help?”

I usually look at them like they’re crazy for a few seconds, and then say, “OK. Give me an example of a business, and I’ll tell you how having a blog can help.”

Then they tilt their head for a bit and think about it. They invariable say something like “What if I have a trucking company?”

Then they smirk: they’ve got me!

“Well,” I respond, “let’s say that since you’re a trucking company, you primarily need two things: you need people to drive trucks, and you need clients who want things trucked.

“There’s a lot I don’t know about the trucking world. There’s probably a lot that nobody outside of the trucking industry knows. It’s pretty safe to say that there aren’t a LOT of people who dream of being truck drivers, but I bet that there’s something interesting, or at least oddly appealing, about traversing the open highways for a living.

“If you wrote a blog about the ins and outs of trucking, and people who were interested in trucks (or being a truck driver) could find the answers to their questions and get a sense of your (undoubtedly good) personality, what company do you think they’ll look to first when they need to get hired?”

The point of blogging for your business, in many, many cases, is about generating relationships and awareness in your target market, before they’re even looking for your product (or service, or whatever). When the times comes, they’ll look to you first, because you already have a relationship with them.

Let me start off by saying that if you’re not reading ProBlogger, you should be. Consistently good content? You will find it there.

Today (well, tomorrow if you go by the post date) there is a guest post there by Sudeep D’Souza with his 9 tips for successful blogging.

I think the most important one is tip number 9:

9. Writing a good post takes time and patience

There may be few gifted bloggers out there that can churn out interesting posts easily. Some have this skill from practice, and for some, it is a gift, but for the majority of us it is hard work right from coming up with the title to the way the post is structured to the content of the post. Be prepared to go through many iterations of it before you come up with the post that you would feel proud to publish.

I like to think of myself as one of those few, talented, sometimes annoying writers who can spit out well-oiled posts with nary a re-write and few ticks of the clock.

But the fact is that I need to check my grammar, look up words like “nary” to make sure I’m using them right, and re-write my headline a few times to make sure I’m including the right keywords. In fact, I think the “gifted, write-once” blogger is largely a myth.

I bet that if you look at the top bloggers, almost all of them re-read their big posts before they take them live.

The good think about blogging is that you don’t have to be literary to be successful. But that doesn’t mean that good posts come easy. You still need to think about structure and phrasing.

Concise and convincing writing will be quoted, credited, and linked to far more often than mangled sentences, no matter how good your ideas are. It’s worth a second pass to get there.

If you haven’t read Chris Anderson’s latest idea-behemoth (ideahemoth?) Free in this month’s Wired, you should probably do yourself a favor and check it out.

If you’re too lazy to go read it now, here’s the important bit for what I’m talking about:

The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

The essential idea is that the cost of thing on the internet is dropping to the point where those costs might as well be nothing.

This is especially true for blogging.

If you’re in a business where the cost of production is very real, and will remain very real (think: building lawnmowers), there’s no reason why you should offer your customers something for free that is not your primary product.

If you build lawnmowers, and you offer free, good advice about lawnmowers online, who do you think people will go to for their lawnmower needs? I bet you’re higher up the list.

The idea behind business blogging and marketing online is to establish expertise, so that when a need for your product or service arises (as it surely will), you are the person that your customer seeks out.

in the article How Can a Company Protect Its Reputation on Web Sites? Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal writes about the realities of expunging negative information posted about your company on the Web. In many ways he gets it right, but in a few aspects, he’s a bit deficient in his coverage.

He implies that there’s not much you can do to demote negative content in Google search results, which is SO not true. We have a client who was involved in a lawsuit several years ago (which they won btw) and their attorney had posted about his efforts on their behalf. The content was not really all that negative, but it was the fifth item from the top when you searched for their name in Google. Our client wanted it sent to as far below the fold as possible, so largely thanks to our efforts, it moved from position 5 to position 65. It went from the first page of search results to the sixth.

How’d we do it? We launched a blog that mentioned them frequently and invoked a blogger engagement campaign that got others mentioning their name as well. It worked like a charm. Worthen references Daniel J. Solove, an associate professor at George Washington University Law School who is also a blogger, so I am guessing he concurs with us on the power of blogging.

Here are a few key quotes from the article and my thoughts.

“Once information finds its way online, it’s almost impossible to get it off.”
If he means that Google won’t forget about it, that’s generally true. Otherwise, pages come and go all the time.

“One thing not to bother with is so-called search-engine optimization, in which you hire consultants or buy software that’s supposed to make good information rise to the top of Google rankings.”
True. We’ve posted many times that most SEO efforts are largely ineffectual voodoo in comparison to spending the same money on content creation.

“A better bet is to confront the accusations head on. If a blogger writes that your company has poor customer service, leave a comment on the site saying you’re trying to fix the problem. Similarly, never ignore false rumors, as these can spread like wildfire on the Internet. Mr. Solove says to address the rumor on your Web site as early as possible.”
We couldn’t agree more.

Want some help pushing the bad stuff down? We’re happy to help.

Mike Grehan over at the Clickz network claims that the “super-booster link,” by which I assume he means a link from a high-profile, respected blog, is worth more than hundreds of unimportant links.

He’s certainly somewhat right. Getting linked from a site with a high PageRank will do a lot more for your own PR and authority than getting a bunch of links from a couple of splogs. That is as it should be.

This goes in line with what I wrote last week about writing good SEO blog posts: writing good content is the same as writing content for SEO. Why is it the same? Because good content will generate links from real bloggers, which will give your site more authority in Google’s eyes.

I would caution, however, about the difference between a real ’super-booster’ link and something that shoots up the list on Digg.

A big hit on Digg is far more transitory than good relationships with other bloggers. Don’t get fooled by big traffic spikes, it’s retention that you’re really after.

I watched Meet the Press yesterday and as expected, much of the conversation surrounded the Obama/Clinton race.

Chuck Todd, News Political Director for NBC made a statement that hit me as particularly relevant to those who follow the blogging space:

“If you really look at why Obama’s beating Clinton, It’s not on issues, it’s on authenticity.”

Seems to me that it’s true. Hillary’s pontifications have more of a contrived “press release” tone to them while Obama is more “bloggy” and authentic.

This reinforces the “This is our conversation” image of Hillary that was so brilliantly put forth by Obama supporters in the “1984″ spoof.

Hey marketers! Authentic sells….

Everybody knows that Alexa, although flawed, is how you compare traffic between your sites and other sites. Sure, your numbers probably aren’t accurate, but it’s a graph you can point at.

Well, now that Allen Stern at CenterNetworks is showing us that Alexa stopped updating their numbers on the 15th, and seem to be giving up on tracking statistics anymore, where do you go?

My current favorite tool is Compete.com.

It works pretty much the same way. You put in several domains (up to three without logging in) and it’ll go munching and then serve you some results.

Just for fun, I put in my blog, Jason-Preston.com, Teresa’s blog, Teresacentric.com, and this blog. Here’s the results page, complete with disclaimer: they don’t have much data, so they did some informed guesswork to fill out the chart.

As you can see, I’m being soundly crushed

There’s an amazingly big market for buying links on pages with high pageranks. At least, I assume there is based on the number of offers made and the kind of prices being attached to them.

If you want a real-world account, you need look no farther than Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger, who recently fended off a particularly persistent link-buyer.

While it can seem tempting to throw cash at a problem like “low page rank,” as I’ve said before, it essentially comes down to having good content. Many bloggers choose not to sell links for the very reasons that Darren outlines in his post. Most importantly: they feel it compromises their integrity.

You’ll be better respected and, in the end, you’ll have more success if your links develop organically.

Why is an organic link better than a paid link? Here are two reasons:

1. It is completely legitimate, and there’s almost no chance of getting sandboxed by Google or others
2. An organic link is likely to be followed by more links from the same source

Over at MarketingVox you’ll find a list of 10 trends for enterprise blogging in 2008.

It’s a good list that puts a finger on a lot of the important shifts that blogging has caused and will continue to cause in marketing. It also serves as good advice for anyone looking at corporate blogging as they move forward.

I think this is the real gem in the list though:

Marketing democracy. Blogging is the great democratizer. No one can buy their way up to the top of the organic search pages. Blogging technology is cheap, easy to use and doesn’t require IT assistance or equipment. You only pay for consumption.

This is one of the reasons blogging is so trusted. Combine the cost of blogging software (basically nil) with the “fairness” power of Google search (REALLY hard to game it), and people generally wind up on blogs thinking that, some way or another, you’ve earned your place with good content.

That’s a powerful assumption.

There’s a five-part series at Copyblogger called SEO Copywriting 2.0.

It’s a really cool and useful breakdown of what you can do with your copy to really boost your results in Google. I’d recommend reading the whole series for good ideas on how you can tailor your blog posts for a better showing.

But it’s a five part series, and let’s face it, most of us are lazy. So here’s the big not-so-secret secret: almost 90% of what you can do to get good search results is get linked to.

As Brian Clark puts it:

That’s why any true SEO copywriter is simply a writer who has a knack for tuning in to the needs and desires of the target audience. And due to the pursuit of links, those needs and desires have to be nailed well before you’ll ever show up in the search engines.

…

“Ask yourself what creates value for your users,” sayeth Google. As those brainy engineers continue to diligently create better algorithms, combined with people-powered social media tagging and blog-driven links, copywriters with a flair for prompting link response and conversions will become vital members of any search engine marketing effort.

In other words, good SEO copywriting is linkbait.

I think that it goes a little bit farther than that, though: I’m betting on Google. Google’s entire business is based around providing the best search results to whoever is searching.

So my strategy has always been this:

1. Who do I want to reach?
2. What are they searching for?
3. What is the best response to that question?

And that’s what I try to write.

There are a whole range of different options for a company facing the often scary, usually slippery dive into the blogosphere. Some companies opt to have what amounts to a company spokesman blogging (or sometimes it comes naturally - think Calacanis and Mahalo). Some companies choose to sponsor blogs like InFlightHQ, which lets them dip their feet into the blogosphere while also remaining essentially hands-off and risk-free. Some companies have company blogs, where multiple employees are encouraged to post.

These are all smart strategies for getting your company out there.

My personal favorite is the company spokesman approach. It’s hard to imagine how much good Scoble did for Microsoft while he worked for them. Imagine how much it helps to have Major Nelson personally apologizing to gamers for difficulties on Xbox Live. And one thing that Scoble does exceptionally well is make himself a public figure.

Take a look at his travel post. He’s got dopplr tracking where he is at any given time. He’s got his calendar published on Google Calendar, so that people can see when he might be available without having to bug him first.

I remember at the last BBS Seattle, Scoble talked about how he ended up with on a TV interview because he had his phone number posted on his blog, and the expert they were looking for didn’t have their contact information readily available.

The point is this: if you’re going to be the company evangelist, you really should make yourself publicly available. Post your phone number. Tell people what cities you’re in. Put your calendar online so people can see when you might be available.

The more people can reach you, the more they can feel like they know you, the better you’ll be at your job.

If you’ve looked at the traffic statistics for any given web site nowadays, you’ll see the ridiculously high portion of traffic that comes from Google. The reason being, put simply: Google is the navigation interface to the web.

So I think it behooves most webmasters to keep an eye on what “The Google” itself is recommending for webmasters in terms of making your site nice and Google-friendly. After all, if you speak their language, it’s a lot easier for them to communicate with you.

OK, you get the metaphor.

The Official Google Webmasters Central blog recently posted a list of their top 7 most requested posts (essentially, the most FA FAQ). If you’re running any sort of link-tracking or affiliate program, you might want to pay particular attention to the post about duplicate content.

Self-hosted blogging engines are a type of Content Management System. Which means that at its core, WordPress is an adaptable engine that can be tweaked or prodded into practically any shape and size—from media-centric designs like Teresacentric to I-don’t-know-how-to-classify-it sites like PaidContent.org.

Increasingly, as we work with clients on what they want their sites to do, we’re seeing concepts with community-oriented features that require a more robust system like drupal.

But the back-end functionality and the front-end presentation are not necessarily linked to one another. Just because you’re using WordPress doesn’t mean your site must necessarily look and feel like a blog.

I remember talking to an IT guy at Yahoo! hosting a while back, trying to get the information I needed to do a WordPress install for someone. He said, “WordPress? That’s a blogging thing. Why would you want to use that?”

To me, that’s like hearing a doctor go “screw this fancy x-ray thing, let’s open you up!”

We’ve been saying it from the beginning: the architecture and the content are two different things.

A few days ago DuctTape Marketing linked to a couple of places where you can buy premium WordPress themes. If you’ve got a WordPress install up and running, and you’d like to re-skin it so that it doesn’t look like a blog at first sight (maybe for your company home page), this is probably a good way to go. You still get the SEO benefits and back-end ease-of-use that comes with Wordpress, but your web site doesn’t have to draw up immediate associations to the blogosphere simply because of the layout.

Of course, if you don’t have a WordPress install already, or you want something more robust with an engine like Drupal, you can opt for a custom site build.

Unless you’ve got a private line on a big-name blogger like Scoble, the chances getting him to notice you, your company, your product, or that facebook message you sent him last week is pretty damn small.

The fact is that “A-list” bloggers are inundated, and no matter how cool you are, there are a lot of demands on their time, and only so much of it can be spent responding to every single comment and every single e-mail.

Part of the advantage of a blog (and indeed the personal computer) is that you can talk to thousands of people, one-on-one, at the same time. But that doesn’t make you any better at receiving thousands of communications, one on one, at the same time. When you hit a certain size, as a blogger, there’s only so much you can humanly respond to. (duh)

Blogspotting calls it right:

So is it axiomatic that once your scale extends beyond the camp fire, or perhaps beyond the range of a single human voice, your ability to respond to a single customer or voter flickers and dies?

If so, there’s good news: For every blogger who grows big and turns off comments, new opportunities sprout for attentive newcomers and small-fry.

When we work with clients on blogger engagement, we often encourage them to reach out to not the A-list bloggers in their space, but the B-list or C-list bloggers. Those who are topical, enthusiastic, and who aren’t completely swamped with invites, messages, and requests.

A lot of the time, the A-list bloggers “outsource” their content filtering to these smaller blogs - they’ll find cool products or topics on bloggers who have a much smaller readership. Which means that by courting the B-list, you’re also courting the A-list—albeit indirectly.

I spent part of last night poking my nose through various books in Barnes and Noble, including All Marketers are Liars, which will probably end up being the first Seth Godin book I actually buy (I never get tired of his blog).

One of the themes that I see recurring in Seth’s writing is this idea that a good marketer will tell stories, and a better marketer will tell authentic stories.

For any given business, this is so much easier than it ever was before. Blogging as a medium conveys a different feel than a press release or a television commercial. Viral YouTube videos have an aesthetic that no prime-time spot can ever hope to emulate.

What if the Blair Witch Project had come out as a series of YouTube videos? The medium affects the content.

Remember that when you blog, you’re not crafting a reality for your docile viewers, you’re sharing your reality with other people. And that can be a powerful story.

Newsweek recently ran a piece on companies that do online reputation management.

The idea being that pretty much any employer nowadays is going to type your name into Google before making you an offer, and you want that presentation to be as pretty, white, and clean as your actual resume. When you boil it all down, what these companies are essentially trying to sell is SEO for the individual.

If you’re not careful as a company, other sites can creep above your home page as a result in a Google search for the terms that you want to own, even if they’re searching for something that matches your exact domain. I’ve seen it happen.

For example (and no, it’s not a business), if you search for Jason Preston on Google, hoping to find Jason-Preston.com, you get a bunch of profiles and posts about some other Jason Preston, who apparently needs to have his Marc Jacobs tattoo removed. It looks like this:

My point is this: simply owning a domain doesn’t mean you’re going to own the search result.

There are several factors that affect your results, some of which you have a lot of control over, and some of which you really don’t have control over.

Here are some tricks you can use on your blog to improve your showing:

1. Make sure you write descriptive post headlines that include the keywords you’d like to see rank high in Google. If I posted more about myself, or at least shoved my name into my headlines more often, I’d have a better spread of the Google results page.
2. Use the SEO Title Tag WordPress plug-in to put extra keywords into your permalink post page headers. This means that Google has an extra set of keywords, aside from your post headline itself, to associate with a page.
3. Include outbound links in your posts. It makes Google notice your site more, and it makes other people notice your site more, which can get you inbound links, which makes Google notice your site more…
4. If you have multiple blogs at multiple domains, link between them, and use the terms you want associated with your site as a link, the way I’ve used my name to link to my site in this post.

That’s what Jeff Jarvis is asking on BuzzMachine.

I’ve written before (yes, I know the page formatting is broken) about why I think Big Media as a collective is going to stick around a while longer, and while the piece is pretty outdated by now, I still stand by my conclusion: I would love to own a newspaper right now.

It’s not what the property is inherently, it’s what you can do with it. I think that big media stands to gain so much from the internet and newer, digital media technologies. By now, many papers are embracing blogs as new tools for news and commentary…and finding them successful.

The problem that old media faces is not that the fundamental demand for news has gone down, but that the fundamental desire for personal touch has gone up.

First thing I’d do with a newspaper is experiment. Tell all my reporters to start writing in first person. I understand the sanctity of impartial news, but I think there’s a difference between bad reporting and personal reporting. Lord knows I see right through the phrase “When one reporter tried to…”

Let’s shake it up, newspapers. Let’s make it more personal.

What would you do?

By now it’s almost common knowledge that an unbelievably large portion of your traffic is coming from Google, followed by the rest of the search engines combined, and then finally, you have a few referrals from other sites.

One of those other search engines is actually often overlooked, because it’s search database is filled, tagged, and categorized voluntarily by everyone as they surf the web: del.icio.us.

Fred Wilson posted recently about how you can get a surprisingly large amount of traffic from del.icio.us search if your posts are being tagged on their system. Here’s the traffic chart he posted:

So make a habit of tagging your posts in del.icio.us with relevant tags, and you could see your traffic take a jump.

Yes I did just fit that all into a post headline. I don’t think it’s news to anyone at this point that Microsoft has proposed a buyout of Yahoo! for $44.6 billion.

I do happen to think that Robert Scoble has called exactly what Google is doing in it’s work to oppose the bid:

Google stands to gain HUGE by slowing down this deal. Every month longer that this deal takes is tens of millions in Google’s pockets. Why? Well, the real race today isn’t for search. Isn’t for email. Isn’t for IM. It’s for ownership of your mobile phone. I met the guy who runs China’s telecom last week in Davos. He’s seeing six million new people get a cell phone in China every month. So, every month that Microsoft and Yahoo will be stuck in some courtroom arguing out why this is a good deal means money in the bank for Google as they close mobile phone deal after mobile phone deal.

Scoble’s absolutely right, the place you want to be right now is in mobile phones. Between the iPhone and Google’s phone operating system, Windows Mobile is going to start facing some tough competition.

I also think that Fred Wilson is right about what Yahoo! should do: break into little pieces.

There’s another reason why I don’t think a purchase of Yahoo! makes much sense for Microsoft. I suspect that many of Yahoo!’s best services will languish under Microsoft’s ownership and that users will leave. It’s happening already under Yahoo!’s ownership to services like Flickr and Delicious and MyBlogLog. It will be worse under Microsoft’s ownership.

There’s a definite lack of innovation in the innovative services that Yahoo! gobbled up recently that Fred lists there. It’s disappointing, and I think it’s in some ways an inevitable side effect of being part of a larger company that needs more “organization.”

Things get done faster when there are fewer barriers, period.