Case Study: How a Headline Made the Difference Between 100 and 5000 Visits

Want to attract thousands of visitors? If you are a blogger struggling to succeed on the social sites, this post is a must read.

Blog Tools from Problogger

Here goes an excellent list of tools for bloggers, including Statistics Packages, Blog Editors, News Aggregators and News Sourcing Tools, Email Subscription and Newsletter Services, and more.

SEO tips for blogs hosted on Blogger (Blog Business World)

Blog Business World's Wayne Hurlbert shares insights on search engine optimization (SEO) for Blogger blogs.

The online business community has recently discovered the power of blogging, and as such are faced with raising the blog site’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). As a direct result of some of the blog characteristics, high search rankings are readily available for the careful blog writer.

Let Wayne navigate you through this rich and developing resource.


Tags: SEO, Blogger, links, Google.

English Language Blogs Have Narrow World View

B.L. Ochman on Rebecca MacKinnon and more...

English language media, and particularly American bloggers are xenophobic, says former CNN bureau chief turned blogger Rebecca MacKinnon. If they even cover world events, she says, they cover them very simplistically and only link to what mainstream media covers in rest of the world. Because of their narrow view, they miss a lot of stories and trends. "There are huge blogging communities developing around the work telling you stuff that you'd never get from mainstream media," she says.

In 2004, MacKinnon left a six-figure job at CNN, where she was Tokyo Bureau Chief and correspondent, to do a fellowship at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It is an absolutely worthwhile tradeoff, she says emphatically. She wanted to experiment with ways a journalist could use blogs to go beyond traditional reporting. "I feel that I am in the middle of new media innovation, working with people on the cutting edge of where media is going in the future," MacKinnon says.

The New York Times on Greensboro's Newspaper and Blogging Scene

Why Newspapers Are Betting on Audience Participation - New York Times

(thanks to the Walt Whitman of Cyberpoetry and virtual mayor of Blogsboro, Billy Jones, for releasing this link. And may he have a most excellent 4th (or fifth!) for having done so, and in such a timely and finessed manner. May he live to be a thousand. And not a day longer.)


The New York Times covers the Greensboro News & Record and its relationship to the blogosphere.
Newspapers should take note.


Pregnantatis Excerptatria:

Now, a popular site called Greensboro101.com provides residents with what it calls an alternative media hub. Mr. Robinson is considering joining forces with Greensboro101 to pursue an investigation on local water quality that the Web site has begun.

Mr. Cone, the blogger, said that a paper's authority came from "accuracy, authenticity and trust," not from how it was produced. "They haven't given up authority," he said of The News & Record. "They've gained it."

In Trade Street Journal, Squarespace Edition, we feature Podcasting and Godcasting in North Carolina

Trade Street Journal, Squarespace edition



Miami Baptist Church in Concord, North Carolina may look like a sleepy little Southern church where nothing has changed in 50 or a hundred years, but look inside and you will see that they are podcasting, or "godcasting", doing e-commerce, and are expanding their congregation far beyond their walls...

With blogger conferences blossoming around North Carolina like so many gardens, we think that the trend of podcasting and blogging will ensure that other churches, organizations and businesses follow the lead of these early pioneers.

Become one of 50 bloggers going backstage to the Live 8 Concerts

Sifry's Alerts

...the goal of this is also to get millions of bloggers posting about Live 8 - the fact is that there are 30,000 children dying in Africa every day - no one is reporting on it, and we aren't doing anything about it. So one of the goals is to help set the agenda of the mainstream media, and this represents a moment of pregnant possibility - for bloggers to create proactive change, not just reactive change based on other news events. It is our opportunity to help to shape the news conversation for the good of us all. And for our leaders to hear the voices of millions when they sit down at the G8 meeting.

(Thanks to Evan Williams for the link)

For more on bloggers at Live 8, see Ed Cone's blog.

Greensboro July Biz Blogging Event

Greensboro Is Talking ? Blog Archive ? July Biz Blogging Event

The next Triad Biz Bloggers Networking Event will be held Wednesday, July 13 at the Revolution Mill Studios.

The event will begin at 7 PM and will run until ???. Refreshments and hot dogs will be served or feel free to bring something to throw on the grill.

All are welcome so come on down to the Mill to join in the discussion about blogging as a business and business opportunities in blogging.

Corporate Blogging Survey 2005

- Executive Summary

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
With all of the buzz around corporate blogging, we wanted to understand the real value of it for companies. Why would a company want to start blogging, who should blog, what makes a blog successful, and how can a company use this type of website to make a positive impact on business?

To answers to these questions, we asked bloggers at hundreds of companies to participate in an online survey and conducted in-depth interviews with leading individuals from six corporate blogs that were selected as representative of the diverse spectrum of the corporate blogging world. What we discovered was that for the majority of our survey sample, (which includes some of today's biggest corporations and scrappiest underdogs), corporate blogs are living up to all the hype. We discovered that corporate blogs are giving established corporations and obscure brands the ability to connect with their audiences on a personal level, build trust, collect valuable feedback and foster strengthened relationships while and at the same time benefiting in ways that are tangible to the sales and marketing side of the business.

Just like in other aspects of life, success breeds success. What we see with successful blogs is a chain reaction that starts with a sincere interest on the part of the bloggers to provide their audience with great value in terms of useful and engaging content in the form of information, help, discussion and ideas. If a company can harness their customers' knowledge and ideas, a company will find better ways to satisfy their customers needs and wants. Listening to customers and acting on their suggestions is one of the best ways to build a group of customers who are committed to expressing their goodwill to their community. It is a common practice in blogging to provide a link back to a thought originator, which is valuable because backlinks are a way that search engines distinguish the order of the editorial rankings. When customers start commenting, posting or tracking back to their blogging community it can have a viral effect - spreading the word through other blogs. We discovered that it is a company's blogging strategy that will produce the strongest community goodwill, and that goodwill brings the most marketing and sales returns.


You are welcome to quote from the paper, we request you cite the authors and include a reference to Backbone Media, Inc with a link http://www.backbonemedia.com.

Carnival of the Vanities at Sophistpundit

Blog Business World

"The 145th edition of the longest running internet blog carnival, the well known Carnival of the Vanities, is up at at Adam Gurri's political and philosophical blog known as Sophistpundit.

Carnival of the Vanities is the original collection of blog postings, assembling some of the best and wide ranging bloggers on the internet.

This week's Carnival of the Vanities entries include politics, literature, science, medicine, technology, business, culture, comedy, and sports."


We got to meet "Silflay Hraka", the creator of the Carnival of Vanities, and even share a few beers with him after the Triangle Blogger Conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (USA) ((Earth)). A swell gentleman with good ideas.

Fuentes sobre blogs corporativos

Informacion empresarial

Spain blogger, Aránzazu, writes about corporate blogging and the like. In this article there are an abundance of fine links to essential reading, corporate blogs, books about blogging, and so on.

En un magnífico artículo Fernando Polo recopila diferentes recursos y artículos de interés relacionados con el uso de weblogs como herramientas de comunicación empresarial, "tanto de la empresa al cliente, como del cliente a la empresa".

Después de definir qué es un blog hace lo mismo centrándose en las bitácoras empresariales. "Business Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Corporate Blogs, Weblogs corporativos, Bitácoras empresariales ... una nueva disciplina de comunicación para las empresas emerge con una sencilla herramienta que ha cautivado la atención de millones de personas en todo el mundo.El blog, como herramienta de publicación y de conversación online, orientada a escuchar lo que dice el consumidor o ciudadano y a dirigirse a los mismos". MORE

WordPress vs Blogger

being an assessment from the desk of the BlogDog.

Add Cartoons to Your Blogs

Everybody likes a good cartoon. Innovative cartoonist, Mark Anderson, has created a way for the more playfully minded blogger to add an "on topic" cartoon of the day to their blog.
...
Many toon topics to choose from including Marketing. Check out the Free Toons Section of his site and, yes, he has a ToonBlog so you can see the toon service in action.

(via BloggingBusiness.com)

Blogcritics.org

"A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, technology, and politics."

Blog Sidebar Experiment--Part 1

Blog Core Values examines how 33 bloggers organize the "peripheral content"; the "margins" of their blogs.

Ed Cone, Tech Pioneer

With blogging by businesses and organizations getting lots of media love...a look back at what may have been the first national magazine article on the topic, and certainly the best headline I ever got past an editor. (The Scoble column did not include the use of blogs as project and knowledge management tools within the enterprise -- that came later, and such blogs and wikis are still widely ignored by the press in favor of the outward-facing sites.)

Ed has been covering technology, blogging and related topics for many years in national publications, and is a columnist and blogger in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Blog Tips - ProBlogger: Helping Bloggers Earn Money

Darren Rowse

Bloggeropoly

Blogger Recruiting Agency

RSS Universe Delivers RSS Tools, Marketing, Publishing, & Metrics For Business People & Bloggers

Articles including one by yours truly.
Therefore a class act....

"It is precisely minds of the first order that will never be specialists."

from the
LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS
SERIES


The Art of Business Blog Writing

"It is precisely minds of the first order that will never be specialists. For their very nature is to make the whole of existence their problem; and this is a subject upon which they will every one of them in some form provide mankind with a new revelation. For he alone can deserve the name of genius who takes the All, the Essential, the Universal, for the theme of his achievements; not he who spends his life in explaining some special relation of things one to another." - Arthur Schopenhauer, "The Art of Literature"

"We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. Advancing science has now discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general adaptability. Thus the specialist's brief for pinpointing brevity is dubious. In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war." - Buckminster Fuller, "Synergetics"

What do you do?

We live in an age where people are more likely to ask "What do you do?" rather than the more proper "How do you do?". People are expected to specialize. Granted, I am speaking generally. I am a generalist.

But what if people were to heed the advice and warnings of a Schopenhauer or a Fuller? Is it possible they would become more fully human? More well-rounded as we say? More of a lady or gentleman, as was once the code?

Bloggers, from what I have seen in my years of blogging, tend to be more generalist than specialist, except for a few who are both...which is to say they have wide knowledge and interests, but also have one or two things that they know a great deal about.

Business bloggers, ideally, fall into this last category. They know a great deal about their company, service, products and so on, but also have a wide-band tuning which allows them to connect with people of all stripes, types and interests. After all, one should not expect that a customer or client know all the fine points of what they are seeking to buy, yet the seller should know those fine points, but also a good deal about the customer as well. This is where a wide-band understanding comes in handy.

The business blogger is a specialist AND a generalist. And if she's not, you might want to remedy the situation, one way or another. The kindest way is to educate them.

If they don't know the products or services...teach them about them. If they don't know how to write, how to deal with people, the give-and-take of conversation...you have a more difficult problem, but not an insurmountable one. Just one that may take more time. So when hiring your business bloggers, look first for those who have decent social and verbal skills. You can teach them the bidness in shorter time.

To Everything, there is a Seasoned Blogger

But...should you hire a seasoned blogger, or a new blogger? Would it not be better to create your own Frankenstein and have them simply say what you want them to say?

My vote is for seasoned bloggers, for a variety of reasons. The first being perhaps best exemplified in this quote also from "The Art of Literature":

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. While the one have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, the others want money; and so they write, for money. Their thinking is part of the business of writing. They may be recognized by the way in which they spin out their thoughts to the greatest possible length; then, too, by the very nature of their thoughts, which are only half-true, perverse, forced, vacillating; again, by the aversion they generally show to saying anything straight out, so that they may seem other than they are. Hence their writing is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they betray that their only object in writing at all is to cover paper. This sometimes happens with the best authors; now and then, for example, with Lessing in his Dramaturgie, and even in many of Jean Paul’s romances. As soon as the reader perceives this, let him throw the book away; for time is precious. The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.
Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. - "The Art of Literature"

Seasoned bloggers have written, oftentimes, for years for little or no money at all. People who say they will blog if you pay them may write what they are told, but in that case, why not write it yourself?

The Blog and the Walking Stick

"The pen is to thought what the stick is to walking; but you walk most easily when you have no stick, and you think with the greatest perfection when you have no pen in your hand. It is only when a man begins to be old that he likes to use a stick and is glad to take up his pen." - "The Art of Literature"

Another advantage to hiring seasoned bloggers is that you can see where they've been, see what they've blogged, learned whether or not they can sustain the writing over time. A new blogger may actually run out of things to say. Seasoned bloggers are seasoned because they are still writing. The others you call ex-bloggers.

New bloggers may enjoy blogging for a time, but then they are seized with youthful wanderlust, and the next thing you know they are out chasing phantoms. A good seasoned blogger, on the other hand, is interwoven into the fabric of the blogosphere, and is content to make his or her mark there. And because they are part of the blogosphere, they are not an island, but rather a constellation, or, in some cases, a galaxy. You have not hired one yea-sayer, you have hired potentially dozens or hundreds, even thousands of yea-sayers. I daresay that, in some cases, you may have won even millions of yea-sayers. These, of course, are few and far between, but the future is likely to look a lot different than the past.

And should you get the occasional chorus of nays, count your lucky stars that you have a free feedback mechanism. Your adjustments might prove far better press than the grunts that led to the change. And all companies change. Only some never learn the reasons why they should have, and suffer the consequences of their ignorance.

The question is not if. It is when. So when you hire someone (or a team of someones) in order to connect your company to the blogosphere, you may want to keep some of these points in mind. Your blog need not be literature, but there is nothing wrong with having a beautifully written, edifying body of work associated with your company. In time it may be your greatest legacy. For surely a future Twain or Faulkner or Ogilvy will be borne in these enabling laboratories of discovery. And the world needs more employment, not less. Choose, act, but act wisely. It's good to be first. But it's better to be good.