Jason Preston, Marketing Coordinator, Blog Business Summit

Many of you probably spotted this post on Gawker last week about the hypocritical “pay-me” blogosphere. A survey recently conducted by APCO on the “state of blog relations,” apparently suggested that bloggers are asking for a little palm grease from the PR industry.

I wonder if that was intentional.

This survey was distributed to bloggers and PR people in order to compare the responses from each group. Let’s look at the question that evokes that response. According to Gawker:

And the biggest disconnect of all didn’t really make the bloggers look like the righteous bunch. 96% of flacks disagreed with this statement: “It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients, but it is not up to me to tell them to disclose the payment.”

But almost half of bloggers agreed. They want to get paid, yo!

That suggests to me that the question on the survey looked something like this:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement:

It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients, but it is not up to me to tell them to disclose the payment.

I smell confounding variables. That is a two-part statement, and I could choose to agree or disagree to either part, neither part, both parts, who knows. A better survey would have broken them out:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statments:

1. It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients

2. It is not up to me to tell bloggers to disclose the payment

I suspect that most PR people thought to themselves “well, I’m OK with paying bloggers, I guess, but if I pay them I’d better tell them to disclose the payment.” So they marked disagree.

Similarly, most bloggers probably thought to themselves “I don’t mind getting paid every now and then, but damnit it’s on my terms, it’s my blog, and I’ll decide when, where, and how to make a full disclosure.” So they marked agree.

Are there some bloggers who are out there to make some cash by being dishonest? Of course. Does this survey prove that “some bloggers” is 50% of the blogosphere? Hardly.

As Mark Twain once said, “facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.”

1. Your tagline is “just another wordpress weblog”

2. You’re on Blogspot

3. Your About page says “This is an example page”

4. You’re using the default template

5. You’re using a theme with the word “AdSense” in its name

6. Your permalinks end in numbers, like “?p=847″

7. Your posts end with “[souce: Engadget ]” or “Read original article”

8. Your readers get Carpal Tunnel from trying to scroll past the ads

9. Your posts are authored by “x9872ldy7d0-3″

10. You’re using a domain that ends with .info

Feel free to add yours in the comments…

Last week our friend Buzz Bruggeman pointed us to the New York Times article about being a “blogging star,” including a run-down of advice from popular bloggers like Mark Cuban and Xeni Jardin.

It reminds me of Calacanis‘ training video on how to become an A-list blogger in 30 days.

The Times articles is well worth a read even if blogging stardom isn’t what you’re after. There’s good, solid advice for everyone:

The hurdle that stops many would-be bloggers is fear of clicking the “Publish” button. Xeni Jardin, who juggles blogging at the quirky alternative-news site BoingBoing.net with a career as a freelance journalist for NPR, Wired magazine and others, resists the urge to polish her blog prose the way she would a radio script.

If you glanced at Techmeme this afternoon, you’ve probably noticed that fully half of the screen is devoted to Arrington’s rant about the VC money pouring into the blogosphere.

Most of the discussion is about who would make the dream team?, or, is Arrington just trying to rattle the boat?, or even making a bid for inclusion.

But what does this mean for business bloggers?

Money pouring into the blogosphere

This is going to sound similar to my answer to the next part, but here goes: 90% of all business bloggers will not be significantly affected. VC money is for media companies who aim to make their money by producing blog content.

You are blogging to create a connection with your customers, and to build a relationship that leads to trust, friendship, and hopefully, patronage.

The number of venture-backed, advertising-based media properties on the internet is not going to make much of a difference in your blogging. The same was that, if you’ll buy the analogy, a few new newspapers wouldn’t affect the way you go about conducting a monthly luncheon.

Should you network multiple blogs?

Again, wrong field. Don’t let Arrington’s call for uber-networkness tempt you to explore dividing your blogs.

Mike’s concept is interesting in itself: do blogs really offer the same product that the standard news media offers? I think the answer is a resounding no. I’ll let Paid Content speak to issues of factual accuracy.

The media-producing blogs will probably roll up in some way or another. Blog networks invariably seem to do better as a business than single blogs do. But again: don’t be tempted to follow that model if you’re blogging for a business.

Why would your customers want to see multiple blogs? The advantages of a network apply to companies trying to develop a media property: larger footprint, more ad inventory, diverse but niche topicality.

For the typical business blogger, these do not fall high on the list.

As always, Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has great advice for people who struggle with regularly finding interesting things to blog about.

All too often, a potential blogger will raise the very valid concern: “I’m worried that I’ll run out of things to blog about,” and some new media maven who has a literal hardline between their frontal lobe and the Comcast pipes running to their house will casually dismiss it: “There’s always something to write about. You’ll see.”

That’s not necessarily the case. It can be very helpful to schedule your editorial, and if you’re a blogger (or a potential blogger) who is worried about being regularly inspired, Darren’s post is well worth a read:

The first step in a journalistic system for blogging is having a plan for each month. Set up a spreadsheet, a table in a word processor, or a calendar on your desk - it doesn’t matter how you do this, but you need a monthly plan. On that plan you need to mark out the days you will definitely blog. This might be every day, just the weekdays, the weekends, every Wednesday - whatever works for you and your audience. Now you have a visual plan of what’s needed you can start filling in the blanks.

Essentially, he advocates mapping out, by month, the days you will blog and the topics that you will blog about.

If that sounds like too much work for you (it sounds like a lot of work to me, and as a blogger I am both inherently lazy and constantly wearing a bathrobe), you might try a more “intermediate” system like the one I like to use. It works especially well if you have a blog that covers a particular beat or topic:

1. Create a folder on your hard drive.
2. Whenever you run across a link that fits your topic, ask one question: do you need to blog about it immediately for it to be relevant?
3. If the answer is yes, blog about it.
4. If the answer is no, add it to the folder.
5. If you think of an idea not tied to a link, create a text file, put in the headline, and save it to the folder.
6. Whenever you do not know what to blog about, refer to your folder.

If you live in Seattle, you ought to check out the Seattle PI’s big kahuna: The Big Blog.

Mónica Guzmán (who writes for The Big Blog) and I were having a discussion a couple weeks ago about whether or not what she does should really be called “blogging.”

There’s a whole list of things that she has to do that have nothing to do with the way that I post. What she does is absolutely, unequivocally, journalistically superior.

She checks her sources. I make up words. She clears posts with an editor. I am source, writer, and publisher. She writes about things that are verifiable. I operate on wild speculation.

Why in the world should what I do be given the same name as what she does?

No matter how many times we tell people that a blog is just the system you use to publish, the fact is that people have not separated the platform from the content in their minds.

It’d be nice if you could say “I’m a blogger,” and get the follow up question, “what kind?” — the way that if you said “I’m a writer,” people might ask, “for what? TV? Magazines? Newspapers?” — but you can’t. And ignoring that won’t fix it.

She does “blogging PLUS,” and I think that giving it a linguistic distinction is probably a good idea. Mark Cuban explains why pretty well in his post:

I’m sure the NY Times, like all major media outlets hopes that because it is branded a NY Times blog, that readers will have the perception and expectation that it will be of a higher quality than say, Blogmaverick.com.

That when readers actually read the blog, they will see that its of a higher quality than say, Blogmaverick.com. It may well be that some do. The marketing reality however is that there is a significant risk that they will not. That rather than assigning the brand equity of the NY Times to the blogs hosted, they will take the alternative path of assigning their perception of what a blog is to the NY Times, there by having a negative impact on the brand equity of the NY Times. That’s an enormous risk for any mainstream brand to take.

I don’t think it has to be “Real Time Reporting” (kinda lame sounding), but it shouldn’t just be straight “blogging.”

There are satsumas and there are oranges. I feel like right now we’re calling everything oranges.

OK, you can all tell me why I’m wrong now.

When I read about a “visual” search engine on TechCrunch, my first thought is “that’s probably a gimmick.”

In search, as with blogging, what matters most is what you put on the plate. If you’ve got great original content on a really crappy looking web site, you’re going to do better than a really good looking web site with really crappy content.

In other words, the prettiness and usability really is secondary. There are studies that conclude this (I’ve been told - never seen one myself).

But that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.

Usability can only be ignored if your competitors are ignoring it too. I have this dream that one day, someone will go around on the internet and start a web site that offers the exact same (or better) content than an existing, ugly site. But this new site will be pretty, clean, and usable.

You want to smack your blogging competition? Write just as well, and make your site more enjoyable for the viewer.

This is why Apple is successful. They manage to consistently marry great design with good functionality.

According to George Dearing at InformationWeek, Acquia has raised $7 million to develop and sell a “suite of services it says will make Drupal enterprise-ready.”

In other words, Drupal will be getting the structure and support that many enterprise-level customers like to see.

Dearing is also absolutely right about the existence of social publishing opportunities, and I think he’s also right about the larger shift they indicate.

We’re starting to see more and more clients in the social media space looking to build ambitious and robust community systems on the LAMP stack, and we consistently recommend Drupal for the more expansive projects.

I think Acquia is making a good investment here.

Last week Jason Calacanis wrote a list of about 20 ways that startups can save money. It’s a good list with a lot of sensible advice.

Fred Wilson also went through the post, and added his thoughts to several of Jason’s points. I couldn’t agree more with Fred on this one:

Really think about if you need that $15,000 a month PR firm. - There are some really good PR firms out there and if you can get one of them to work with your company, then it may be worth considering it. But a mediocre PR firm is not worth it for sure. I encourage our portfolio companies to hire a person inside the company to be an “evangelist”. That job includes blogging actively, reading and commenting and linking to other blogs, reaching out to the media and industry analysts and gurus, going to conferences and events, and generally getting the word out. That person can be young and not particularly expensive, certainly nowhere near $15,000 a month. And they have two things that a PR firm cannot offer. They work for you and they represent your company exclusively.

I am consistently surprised when startups choose to forgo blogging as a PR strategy. A startup environment lends itself so well to blogging, and no other approach packs as much bang for the buck.

Fred is absolutely right that having a dedicated, energetic blogging evangelist will go a lot farther than a monthly contract with most PR firms. It will help create personal relationships between your company and your customers, give you an authoritative, authentic outlet for new information, and can create opportunities for feedback and community involvement that surveys and focus groups will never provide.

If you’ve been paying attention to travel, tech, and the blogosphere (or just Engadget), you’ve undoubtedly noted that the TSA recently caused Michael Nygard to miss his flight because they couldn’t figure out what the hell his MacBook Air was.

It’s a funny story.

I’m also willing to bet it’s an isolated one. MacBook Airs are probably zipping through security lines in airports all over the world. But it only takes one story like this to generate all kinds of negative buzz.

What not everyone knows is that the TSA does in fact have a blog: Evolution of Security. Their last post was March 4th.

Step up to the plate, guys. This is a perfect opportunity to respond and engage. You may even make a few friends if you do it right.

If you haven’t heard about “1,000 True Fans” yet, you should go read Kevin Kelly’s post.

In it, he argues (roughly) that that the Long Tail creates a problem for any creator: how do you make a living? Kelly’s solution is that an artist must find their 1,000 True Fans, and through the use of new digital technologies, rely on that “sweet spot” for a realistic living.

Or, in his words:

But the point of this strategy is to say that you don’t need a hit to survive. You don’t need to aim for the short head of best-sellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle, that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for.

For the more detailed version, go read his post.

He writes for “artists,” but I think the concept absolutely applies to a business. In the digital “Long Tail” world, not every business can be a “hit.” But wallowing at the long end of the spectrum is not the only other option.

By using new technology — blogs, social media — you can connect with a core group of customers that will be your “True Customers.” They could provide a support base for your business and allow you to reach out and grow in different areas.

It’s an interesting idea.

One of the beautiful tricks you can pull on the world is to use the internet to convince people that you’re an expert in something.

In ways that people do not fully realize, the internet is incredibly democratizing. In order to be an expert, you don’t need a long and thorough record participating in a given industry. You don’t need to have credentials from any particular institution.

You just need to know what you’re talking about.

Maki over at Dosh Dosh does a weekly “advice column” based on questions that get sent in by readers. This week’s article is about how to build a reputation online. The advice is geared towards a student looking to build a name in the art field, but the branding advice applies equally well to companies aiming to establish a good online reputation.

Maki breaks it down into four big steps. I’ll let you read the article for the meat and potatoes, but here’s the dressing to get your taste buds wet:

1. Build a home base on the web.
2. Identify and participate in the right communities.
3. Initiate media outreach to get publicity for your brand.
4. Create online ventures to develop your net worth.

There’s a big article in today’s New York Times about Check Out, Wal-Mart’s employee-driven blog.

The NYT calls out the obvious:

Known for its strict, by-the-books culture — accepting a cup of coffee from a supplier can be a firing offense — Wal-Mart is now encouraging its merchants to speak frankly, even critically, about the products the chain carries.

This unusual new Web site, which was quietly created during the holiday shopping season, has become a forum for unvarnished rants about gadgets, raves about new video games and advice on selecting environmentally sustainable food.

Of course, in many ways it should come as little surprise to see a company plagued with bad public image in a digital age turn to blogging. Letting Wal-Mart buyers (people who choose what is sold in Wal-Mart stores) blog about the products sold at Wal-Mart is a particularly smart move, since it kills several birds with one stone:

1. Wal-Mart gets a set of public-facing personalities
2. Wal-Mart commands enough market share that bad-mouthing a product won’t force a supplier away
3. Wal-Mart appears to open up while not opening up at all

I’ll have to keep an eye on the blog over time to really back-up my third statement. But from looking it over the posts are talking about the products they carry, or products they might carry, or who they’re working with to determine what products they should carry.

They’re not really talking about anything internally Wal-Mart.

I have to hand it to the Wal-Mart team. That is a pretty smart move. It’s still an interesting blog, and I think that it’s a blog that will be well worth having as people learn to know and like the people who are blogging. After all, these are Wal-Mart employees!

It’s a good trick to think about if you’re worried about the risks of starting your own blog.

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.

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.

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