Business Blogging

ProBlogger Darren Rowse says he’s got a contest going for people to win a copy of Web Design for ROI, a book that he’s been enjoying in the past few weeks.

The book is called Web Design for ROI, and I have not read it, but I know that there’s plenty of research out there showing that web (and blog) design can have very significant impact on your ROI. I would be surprised if this book turned out to be a waste of time.

The funny sound bite that turns up most often on this subject is “the uglier your site, the more money you make.” Often this can be true, and while it’s a bit baffling at time, I chalk up a lot of the revenue to mis-clicked PPC ads. If you’re not paying for your site with AdSense, you might want to look a little bit further.

When I’m sitting down to sketch out a new blog or web site layout, I always ask myself two questions before I start, and the answers guide the layout and structure of the page. I suggest you do the same with your web site, and it might just improve your ROI:

1. Where is the user most likely to arrive at my domain?
2. What is the most important thing for them to see on my site?

In a lot of cases the answers will be, respectively: individual blog pages, and google ads. That’s what gives rise to “ugly” sites (permalink pages plastered with ads). But in your case the answers might be “Users land on FAQ answer pages and I want them to see our accessories store.”

That right there informs your web design. Check your pages - do they make a sensible path for the user?

The contest at ProBlogger is pretty easy to enter - just go leave a comment on that post letting him know what your favorite blog design is and why. Give it a shot.

One of the truly brilliant aspects of blogging is the ability to put humans into a place where previously no humans existed. I bet that if you ask practically any average traveler today whether or not there are actual humans working at the TSA, most of them will say “probably not.”

In several months, that number will be lower. Jake McKee, an outstanding community guy and a speaker at our last Web Community Forum conference, posted about the TSA blog’s launch today.

He has some good advice for the budding bloggers over at the TSA:

Introduce the team and the objective

A blog is a conversation and the first step in a conversation is an introduction. Before you jump into the content, introduce the concept of the blog, introduce the team members we’ll be hearing from. What do they do? Where do they work? What’s their background? Why is the blog titled “Evolution of Security”?

This is a really good point. I think that a lot of what the TSA is trying to do with this blog is get some sort of a human connection between travelers and what has traditionally been a faceless government entity with terrible marketing.

In order to accomplish that, they’re going to need to make sure we know who’s blogging. Some of that should certainly be some introductory posts.

I disagree with Jake about jumping into the content - I generally don’t think there’s any reason to hold out on good content if you’ve got it ready to go, but there’s no reason you can’t sprinkle the blog with some self-reflection.

A blog isn’t going to fix everything of course - people are still going to have bad experiences at the airport, and not every TSA employee is going to be nice to every passenger, but if the blog helps travelers walk into the security line with a more tolerant attitude, it could make things go more smoothly for everyone.

In any case, it’s good that the TSA is blogging. I’m sure they’ll learn quickly.

In the Wall Street Journal article New Services Help Bloggers Bring in Ad Revenue, reporter Kelly K. Spors says “If you’re not making money off your blog, 2008 might be the year.”

Spors profiles several bloggers and the services available to generate revenue. Here are some revenue specifics to inspire you:

Rhett Butler, founder of Mongabay.com, a site with articles on rainforest conservation and other environmental issues, makes $15,000 to $18,000 a month from AdSense, using various types of ads. Mr. Butler says his blog currently gets about 1.3 million unique visitors per month.

He’s planning to eventually experiment with Google’s video player ads and create his own video content for the site. “The rainforest has always been my passion, but I never expected to make a living off of it,” says Mr. Butler, who quit his job as a product manager in 2003 when he realized he could make a living off his site.

Darren Rowse, the Melbourne, Australia-based writer of ProBlogger.net, a popular blog that teaches other bloggers how to make money, earned roughly $250,000 in 2007 off ads on three blogs he writes. Mr. Rowse says he makes the most off traditional display advertising, where advertisers pay a fee to appear, but he also has used affiliate ads and Google AdSense.

The great thing about Problogger.net is that the site is all about how to achieve the kind of success Darren has. Lots of great tips and techniques straight from the horse’s mouth.

A blog is a lot more than posts in a row. A blog is a content management system - often, a very complex and powerful one.

We use Wordpress to run this site, which lets us create posts, pages, dynamically generate an event schedule, manage a dynamic sponsors database, offer e-mail subscription to our content, syndicate our content through the RSS ecosystem, allow users to suggest conference sessions and allow said users to vote on which sessions seem best, and a score of other things that often remain invisible to the visitor (SEO, for example).

Hmmm…that’s a lot of stuff.

If it’s time to re-work your company website, it would be a good idea to sit down for a minute and figure out what that web site needs to do. Chances are it needs to do a lot of blog things (which are hard to build into a non-blog system) and a few non-blog things (which are very easy to build into a blog system).

If Intel’s advertising budget is anything to go by, and I would argue that it is, the shift from mainstream TV and Print to the Internet is coming into full swing. A few days ago the New York Times ran a piece interviewing Intel on their shifting advertising budget.

There’s a ton of good stuff that shows how Intel really gets it:

A survey of how consumers are influenced in their buying decisions, which Intel undertook this year, showed that “three or four out of the top five sources have something to do with the online media,” Mr. Maloney said, including search engines and blogs in addition to Web sites.

I’d recommend taking a look at the rest of the article.

Basically, research has shown that when people get ready to buy things, they go online to find out more about the product. So instead of watching a TV ad then hopping in the car to check out something at the store, consumers are making more of their purchasing decisions at home, before they even go to the store.

I wonder if blogs encourage people to like your company?

Darren Rowse posted today about an odd little result he got from blogging “off-topic:”

The second wave of responses was very interesting and a little unexpected. About 24 to 36 hours after publishing the post I noticed a second wave of incoming links to the site - from real estate blogs and other related topics (for example this one from Decorating Diva). What interested me about these secondary linkups was that they picked up the ‘off topic’ components of the article as their primary focus.

(And here’s his third wave - the people who are interested in the people who are interested in his off-topic stuff, right? )

I think it might be a little strong that going off topic can help you find new readers. That implies that these “new readers” are likely to become regular readers, which I don’t think is true.

Writing off-topic posts will certainly send your blog in new directions and I’ve always advocated a good mix of posting - a little personal, a little about, I don’t know, Martians, and a majority about what you’re actually supposed to be posting about.

The thing is that you still have an editorial focus. And for Pro-Blogger, that means that he’s got some Real-Estate bloggers interested in a post that is largely tangential to what he writes about. They’ll probably come back a few times, but unless their interests also line up with blogging tips, they’re unlikely to become regular, active readers like his core group is.

That’s fine. And I’d still say go for the occasional off-topic post. But just…don’t go nuts, that’s all.

Our good buddy Liz Strauss is asking some very worthwhile questions about blogging for business. She’s working on a series of posts about what she calls “inside out thinking,” that we are very much looking forward to.

We encourage you all to go post your responses.

We are incredibly adamant that business bloggers should host their content on their own servers. Nobody — not Six Apart, not our friends at WordPress, not Blogger — should have control over where or how your content is hosted.

Ultimately, Facebook presents the same problem. Servers crash, stuff happens and your content is locked away inside an extremely limited walled garden.

Facebook is a great tool for online community building, but the long-term future of online communities rests with the ability for bloggers and site owners to link their sites together via a “friend standard.” This is what I meant when I said that the Facebook killer may be the Web itself.

A business blog running on your own domain, on your own servers means that nobody controls your content but you. Facebook holds a lot of promise, but it can’t promise that.

So while we love Facebook and social networks and online community building tools, we’re also still completely gonzo about business blogs, and blogs in general. This is a medium with real staying power.

Since we’ve recently expanded our editorial gamut to a discussion of online community building tools, I want to know how you’ve used your business blogs to build community. Do you cross-promote with other platforms?

How do you encourage conversations?

There’s been some speculation since we canceled the September Blog Business Summit that we’ve abandoned the blogging and blogging for business spaces outright. I understand why it would be easy to think that. We’ve made a pretty dramatic transition. In just a few days, we pulled the plug on our Chicago event, launched this new site, and announced our intention to put on a event in Seattle this December that is not strictly about business blogging.

It’s absolutely no wonder that people are getting the wrong idea.

But like Steve posted yesterday on the Blog Business Summit site, we do plan to do more Blog Business Summits. It’s true that we don’t have a specific date in mind, but blogging is as much a community building tool as any social network. If you doubt it, look no further than Liz Strauss’ blog where she hosts open comment nights and put together a whole conference based on getting those people together in the flesh-and-blood world.

If businesses overlook the power of blogging as a community building tool, they’re sunk. [Update: It has been pointed out to me that this last statement was overgeneralized and somewhat inaccurate. Businesses that overlook blogging are not, in fact "sunk." What I meant to say is that businesses who overextend themselves in the social media space without a place to call home -- a blog in most cases -- are at a distinct disadvantage. Everyone should have a hub.]

In fact, I’m just now getting ready to post a video - as soon as Revver approves it - about how to bring the RSS feeds from your multiple business and personal blogs into Facebook. That’s a community building move because sharing content starts conversations, and conversations are the building blocks of community.

Blogging, bloggers and this incredible space we’ve created out here on the Web are still at the forefront of our imaginations, our interest and our intellectual curiosity. The rapid-fire changes over the past few days are really just an expansion of our editorial gamut, not an abandonment of the space that got us started.

Cross-posted at Web Community Forum.

After much consideration we’ve decided not to host the Blog Business Summit in Chicago this year.

We are contacting all of our speakers, sponsors, and attendees to notify each and every one of them personally of this news.

Despite strong participation from sponsors and our long-time community members, we just weren’t seeing the registrations we hoped for from the local, Chicago-area bloggers and PR/marketing professionals that were required to support the event.

Our conferences have always relied heavily on local participation, and our feeling is that Chicago has been very well served this year by at least two excellent, and very reasonably priced blogger conferences: SOBcon and BlogHer. A third event close on the heels of these other shows is obviously a tough sell. In addition, it’s clear from discussions with local marketers that blogging has normalized and is not the disruptive force it was back in 2004 when we launched the BBS.

As our pal Robert Scoble said in 2006, blogging is rapidly being subsumed under the larger heading of social media and online community/conversation building. For those serious marketers that “get it”, blogging is just one tool in their arsenal that needs to be mastered.

This is why we as a company are expanding our editorial gamut. The BBS team has launched a new blog: the Web Community Forum

And as you’ll see when you visit the Web Community Forum site we’ve created a new event focusing on the best practices for commercial and political ventures who want to use Facebook as a community building tool. Our sense is that many of the same people who attended our first three blogging conferences are now shifting their attention to building and engaging with their communities there. We hope to see many of your faces once again.

On the Web Community Forum site, we’ll cover how people, businesses, and political campaigns are using technologies such as Facebook, Twitter and, of course, blogs to reach out to core constituencies and build communities. We’ll talk about best practices and great technologies - from WordPress plugins to Facebook applications - that enable community engagement.

We ask for your patience and understanding as we move forward with the logistics of canceling this Chicago event. We are committed to providing excellent customer service to our entire community as we move forward.

If you’re a Chicago BBS speaker, attendee, or sponsor and have not heard from us by noon PST Tuesday. Please feel free to contact us. Here are our phone numbers:

Steve Broback - (425)-503-2093
Kim Larsen - (425)-556-1941
Teresa Valdez Klein - (206)-229-9335
Jason Preston - (206)-235-8981

One trend I see among business bloggers is to write blog posts by committee. That is, they ask others to read and edit blog posts before they publish them. This practice has its place in school papers, formal reports and books. But a blog post is none of these things.

As our speaker Liz Strauss is quick to point out, a blog post is about starting a conversation. How you write that blog post is as important as what you write.

Bloggers are very fond of citing a study in the Journal of Educational Psychology that supports this assertion.

Here in Kathy Sierra’s words:

So one of the theories on why speaking directly to the user is more effective than a more formal lecture tone is that the user’s brain thinks it’s in a conversation, and therefore has to pay more attention to hold up its end! Sure, your brain intellectually knows it isn’t having a face-to-face conversation, but at some level, your brain wakes up when its being talked with as opposed to talked at. And the word “you” can sometimes make all the difference.

The key to a blog post is to start a conversation, because conversation are the building blocks of community. And if you’re a marketer, you want to be building community the natural way.

Just a quick post this morning to say that Mack Collier of the Viral Garden has a great list of ways you can make your blog better with Feedburner.

Steve and I are headed into a webinar in 15 minutes covering the basics of RSS and feed reading. It was organized by our good friends and sponsors at PR Web.

From Edison’s Desk Ratings:

Transparency: 7/10
Meets Stated Goals: 10/10
Reflects Company Culture: 10/10
Overall Good Example: 9/10

I had an interview the other day with Todd Alhart of General Electric’s global
research group. Todd is one of the masterminds behind “From Edison’s Desk”,
a blog that GE uses for three purposes:

• To raise awareness about the depth and breadth of the research
  currently being undertaken by GE scientists.
• To showcase GE’s research and innovation to science and engineering
  enthusiasts.
• To increase awareness among GE scientists across its four R+D
  facilities worldwide in Niskayuna, NY; Bangalore, India; Shanghai, China;
  and Munich Germany about what others are doing.

GE launched the blog in January of 2006 as part of what Alhart describes as
a “communications research project.”

One thing that sets From Edison’s Desk apart from many other business blogs
is the pace. We advise most of our clients to post at least once a day, but
GE’s blog only gets a new post only once a week.

[click to continue...]

I recently posted about how the Firefox plug in Update Scan can help bloggers discover great non-syndicated content that Google hasn’t picked up on yet.

Here is another approach that’s even better at putting content in your hands that not only isn’t syndicated, but also may NEVER get indexed by Google unless you put it there.

Check out this recent post I made about taxes on private jets.

It’s based on an article contained in a magazine that is one of hundreds that still don’t get the Web. You know the ones — their philosophy is “hey, we work like dogs to research and write all this stuff for our subscribers, there’s no way we’re going to put it up on the Web for free!”

[click to continue...]

Our good buddy Jeremiah Owyang just got back from giving a business blogging presentation at the Frost & Sullivan conference in DC. He posted seven points today that I think are great advice for business bloggers:

1. Identify the bloggers in your community.
2. Read their blogs, subscribe to them, and really read them
3. Leave comments on their blog, or link to them from your blog
4. Build a real and human relationship with them, get to know them
5. Treat them with the same types of importance as other forms of influencers (media, press, analyst)
6. Grant them exclusives, invite them over for lunch, get to know them.
7. Be human.

We’ll be covering the practical how-to’s of this at our conference in September.

I’ve never had much fun with anti-virus software. In the past I’ve called McAfee Malware. But according to the Wall Street Journal it looks like those with an active scanner are doing a little better than those without:

In May, a virus in a banner ad on tomshardware.com automatically switched visitors to a Web site that downloaded “malware” — malicious software designed to attack a computer — onto the visitor’s computer…users of an online forum hosted on the Tom’s site discussed the case, with some people noting that their antivirus software had protected their computers and others lamenting that a virus had been downloaded onto theirs.

[begin deep portentous rumble]

So…wait? You can get a virus by loading a page that has an infected ad on it? This is bad news indeed. Needless to say the rest of the article has quotes from a variety of ad networks touting their screening features. But that virus-laden ads will probably continue to slip through the system.

In fact, the article mentions that almost 7% of all sponsored link ads—those are the text, google kind that physically can’t carry a virus themselves—lead to suspicious sites that might automatically stuff a computer full of malware.

[Insert ominous music and possibly thunder].

As a blogger this raises an important question: should you worry about ads on your site?

Many online bloggers rely heavily or entirely on ad revenue to cover their costs, ads that are automatically served by Google, RightMedia, or some similar service, and serving a bad ad could go a long way towards destroying your traffic.

…but realistically, I think this issue is more or less a non-issue. Let’s think about it. It’s a known problem, and one that if unchecked, could create serious roadblocks for a multi-billion dollar industry’s product. Guess what? They’re going to stay on top of it.

And that scary 7% statistic? That’s for ads that link to sites that might download malware. And they’re sketchy looking. You can trust people to be smart enough not to click on sketchy ads.

The kind of ad that infected computers from Tom’s Hardware is not likely to happen nearly as often as 7%, and if you serve only text ads, it will never happen. The gaps in ad security will get smaller and smaller as flash/ajax/whatever’s next technologies make it harder for ads to inject malware into your systems.

Go blog. Be happy.

[begin playing Bobby McFerrin...]

I have an addictive personality. I’m apparently 82% addicted to blogging. I’m probably addicted to video games. And I’m certainly addicted to Firefox.

Which is why I’m surprised to notice that I haven’t particularly missed it in the past two days while I’ve been using the new release of Flock. To be fair, Flock is built on the same foundation as Firfefox. The code is open source, and anyone is allowed to snag their own copy, develop it in their own particular way, and then release it back into the wild. And that’s exactly what Flock is doing.

As far as I can tell, the basic idea behind Flock, and what sets it apart, is the way it integrates a whole bunch of features that in other browsers are essentially extensions and plug-ins.

It boots up with a nifty “My World” homepage that is coupled to whatever actual home page you choose. MyWorld is a bit like custom Google or Netvibes in that it aggregates a couple different search engines, a favorite feeds widget (generated from the built in RSS reader), a favorite sites widget (which also appears to be automatically generated–cool!), and a favorite media widget.

When you go to sites like FlickR and YouTube, Flock recognizes the site, pops up a media bar, and prompts you to “enable advanced features”:

The RSS Reader is pretty solid. It’s integrated as a sidebar and the feed display gives you several important options (headlines, full feed, partial), and it lets you split into two columns if you want:

And then the blog editor is reasonably good. It was a quick two-step process to get it set up with my self-hosted WordPress install. I particularly like how it asks if you want to append your post with a credit to Flock, rather than simply inserting it like Performancing. I wish it would let you save drafts, though. In fact, I wish any editor would let you save drafts in MySQL so it could sync with your web back-end drafts. Someone please do that.

Overall, Flock is a good package. It’s different than Firefox, definitely, but it has the same core reliability, and while it doesn’t have as many extensions (it does have some), a lot of the desirable features are already built in.

If you’re tired of your current browser, or just looking to check out something new, grab yourself a copy of version 0.9.0.

If I were responsible for giving the Sprit of the Blogosphere Award, I’d give it to Liz Strauss. Our speaker Andy Sernovitz put us in touch. I had a really lovely chat with her yesterday and came away with a renewed vigor for blogging. That’s usually how I know I’ve had a great conversation with someone.

One of the things that struck me during our chat was that “online community building” is becoming a buzz word, kind of like “synergy” or “paradigm.” She told me a story about a corporate marketer who told her that he was going to build a community on his company’s website. She asked him what he would do to get the people to come there and how he would work with them. He kept returning to the “community” angle, and she kept asking, “but what about the people?”

Liz has an astonishing number of comments — tens of thousands, in fact — on her blog. She’s very proud of this. She hosts open comment nights and spends inordinate amounts of time getting to know her readers. She explained to me that the secret to good blogging is understanding that your posts should be conversation starters rather than statements. The only way to really engage with people is to leave your posts unfinished.

About halfway through our conversation, I started feeling guilty. I realized that I didn’t spend nearly enough time engaging with the commenters on any of the blogs I write for. I asked her, “how do I make sure that my commenters understand that I do care about them when there just aren’t enough hours in the day?”

“You just did,” she replied. “You show up. You read what they’ve written and you make sure they know you were there.”

The moral of this story is that the business buzzword of “online community building” doesn’t really cover what needs to happen when a company sets out to build a community around their brand. Many corporate marketers seem to be approaching the issue with an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. But if you want to have a successful online community, you need to step out from behind your role as company spokesperson/spin-doctor and actually talk to people. Talk to them like you talk to your friends. Be yourself.

This mentality — which represents a real paradigm shift, not just a buzzword — will be a subject of renewed focus at the conference this September. We’ll be talking about technology and numbers and ROI to be sure, but we’ll also be talking about the real power of social media: the people that use it.

Spam is a giant, fourteen-headed version of Bette Midler - it just won’t go away.

Google and other search engines spend countless hours and resources hunting down and shutting down spam and black-hat SEO tricks. According to various links on the internet, most notably TechCrunch, Google most recently laid down the law with Squidoo:

The reports indicate that some Squidoo pages have seen a 75% drop in traffic, and in other cases have either been removed from high ranking positions on Google, or removed all together.

Squidoo itself isn’t a spam site. In fact, I think Squidoo is a fairly good idea—you might call it user-generated About.com, where each author (lensmaster) gets a little kickback on the Google ads served for their answer.

But Squidoo made the mistake of allowing their service to be too easily spammed, and if Google finds one of those fourteen heads sprouting out of your domain, they’re going to chop it off. And if they get a little bit of your shoulder…oh well.

To their credit, Squidoo is on top of things, blogging about it, and I’m sure they can recover.

The lesson here is that if you’re not careful with your SEO strategy, BAD THINGS can happen, even if you’re good people with good ideas. There is a far more effective and less risky way to raise your search engine ranking:

1. Get a blog
2. Write good stuff

Come learn about it at our conference in September!