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Blog Business Summit: 10 Ways To A Killer Blog

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Features, Marketing, Planning

Robert and Maryam are speaking on getting noticed in the new word-of-mouth network.

1) Blog because you want to. A story without live is not worth telling. Maryam talks about how Robert kept pushing her to blog for four years. Then one day, she started to blog. As soon as she started, she was blogging about Robert and he tried to get her to stop talking about him on her blog.

If you are blogging about something you don’t really care about because you think it’s profitable, you won’t have passion to go long-term.

2) Read other blogs. Use Technorati to find blogs that are similar to the topics you want to discuss, pick up writing styles, and learn about your competitors. If you read 50 blogs in two weeks and you aren’t compelled to answer back the things that you are reading, you probably won’t be a good blogger.

Maryam started blogging because she was going to a lot of conferences, but people told her they had no way of linking to her. It brings out community and a bond that she hadn’t experienced before. Through blogging she has gotten a much better job and has made a lot more friends. She loves it.

3) Pick a niche you can own - be different. There are two kinds of bloggers - ones that want to make things, and shake things. Others just want to talk to their friends and use their blogs to post baby pictures, talk about books they read, etc. Either way, each group should have a common set of values. When Robert visited people outside of Silicon Valley, he studied the way people use their computers. People go to Google and search for Yahoo because they want to get to Yahoo. Same for Yahoo, one of their top terms is Google.

Normal people outside the tech world aren’t using things like Google Maps, Google Groups, or Picasa. Everyone comes at this world through the search engine, so how do they interact with that?

Question - if you were to pick a category to be different in, would that be the tech category? Yes, it would be hard, but Mike Arrington came in late to the game and went to number one. He was also very focused on a very specific part of the tech industry, being Web 2.0.

There was a niche blogger in London who talks about the London Underground transportation system. After the London bombing, everyone hit her site, and now she is popular. Of course, we don’t want to have a terrorist act happen to make us famous, but you get the point.

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Blog Business Summit: Jason Calacanis Keynote - From Weblogs, Inc. to Netscape

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Features, Marketing

9:07: Jason hits the stage and says you don’t have to have the gin tasting the night before the conference instead of the night after.

9:08: Blogging is a great way to build a business, and it’s a business in and of itself. back in 1994, people thought the web was the place to get text, and then thought it was a magazine, then maybe the future of TV. However, you can do a lot of different things with it. Same with blogs - they are like paper. You can make a marketing brochure, a beautiful book, or toilet paper.

9:10: Blogs are real and authentic. There is a movie called “Homepage” which Jason recommends to the attendees. No one knows who Justin Hall is, which blows him away. In 2002-2003 there was a lot of mistrust overall. This is where blogs became free, and started gaining traction. People wanted to express themselves, and that created the perfect storm for blogging. Enter Weblogs, Inc.

9:12: Rafat Ali over at www.paidcontent.org earns about $70,000 from blogging, twice what he was earning working for Jason at Silicon Alley Reporter. Jason started to see the power in the medium. Xeni Jardin flourished after working for Jason, which is when he started wondering if he was holding people back rather than letting them loose. The proof was that when they left, they did better and more interesting work.

9:15: When Silicon Alley Reporter was over, Jason and his CTO Brian Alvey started talking about blogging. They started building blogs in the fall of 2003, and Jason’s idea was that they make is similar to About.com with a bunch of mini-portals.

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Blog Business Summit: What’s Next In Online Communication?

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Design, Features, Marketing, Planning

Jeremy Pepper, Jeanette Gibson, and John Starweather

How does Cisco manage relationships with End Users when there is a reseller middle man?

By providing them a unique way to interact with the company online. They can log in and get a personalized view, along with interactivity.

Can they talk about steps they are taking to educate employees internally about the potential for engagement, so that they understand the impact of blogs, podcasting, etc.?

To educate, you need to have some good data so that you can show how influence really moves across the Internet, and how something you might post online actually reaches customers and hits the community. Cisco puts a blog, podcasting, and news section on their Intranet system, so global employees can all get to that information easily.

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Blog Business Summit: Setting Up TypePad

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Business Tools, Features, Software

11:30: TypePad is a hosted blogging service that gives you a 30-day free trial. Keywords are very important. What words do people use when they try to find your product or service? This aids in choosing a TypePad subdomain for your blog address.

11:35: Dave takes everything through the basic TypePad setup process. Filling in fields, choosing a domain, Terms of Service, etc.

11:38: Question - Are you giving traffic to Six Apart rather than to yourself when going with a hosted blogging service? The blog should be subset of your domain. You can redirect your domain from TypePad through their interface, forwarding your TypePad blog to your personal site.

11:43: Focusing on title of the blog - again, focus on keywords here. Then moves to choosing a TypePad layout template. The further down content is on a page, the less relevant to Google. As for sidebar, 2 column right is much better than 2 column left as far as ranking.

11:49: Password-protected blogs are an option, which is great for private communication or corporate blogs.

11:56: Dave goes on to show the TypePad interface and posts a blog post right from the stage.


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Live-Blogging Blog Business Summit: Dave Taylor Keynote, The Future of Findability

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Business Tools, Features, Marketing

We are here at the 2006 Blog Business Summit in Seattle. Dave Taylor just took the stage to give his keynote.

9:00 AM: Dave begins by asking how many people updated their website in the past seven days. Of course, many of them have, since this is the Blog Business Summit. However, maybe 5% of site owners update at least weekly.

9:03: Google aims to provide good, fresh content. Same with all search engines. Since most info on the web is out of date, this is the dilemma of the search engines.

9:04: What is findability? When customers try to find your product or service, can they find it? This is what is critically important to your business - especially if they find your competitor instead of you. Every time someone finds someone else, they aren’t finding you.

9:05: No one really understands what the best practices of blogging really are - they are case by case. If you can’t be found, you’re already dead. If I ask my cellphone for the closest Chinese restaurant, and the Chinese restaurant across the street doesn’t show up as a search result, they’re dead.

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$100 Off Blog Business Summit Registration Fee

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Announcements, Blogging, Business Tools, Product Offers

Blog Business Summit 2006Okay Mind Campers, we have a bit of a treat for you. The Blog Business Summit conference is happening here in Seattle at the Bell Harbor Conference Center from October 25-27th. We were able to get special discounted rate for anyone who wants to attend. Simply put, if you would like to mingle with the major movers and shakers in the blogging world, this is the place to be. By using our link and coupon code, you will get a $100 discount off of the entrance fee. Here are the details:

Head on over to The Blog Business Summit and click on “Register Now” at the top of the page. During the checkout process, enter coupon code AESM06 to receive the $100 discount.

If you know anyone else who may be interested in attending, feel free to forward this information to them!


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The French Maids Show How To Video Podcast

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Software

Video is starting to take off in a big way on the Internet, what with services like , , , and others. If you have access to a camera and a Mac, the video lesson from the French Maid Podcast (above) should serve you well to beginning your way to creating video for the Internet. Wanna make money? Upload your videos to for a revenue share.

Anyone out there doing video for the Internet? Feel free to share the tools you use, or other general tips.


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How To Determine Your Link Popularity

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Planning

A great metric tool for a webmaster or site owner is knowing how popular and important their pages are to search engines. A great tool for figuring this out is the Site Explorer utility available from Yahoo!. What Site Explorer does is give you a listing of all indexed pages within a site, in order of importance. You can use this to see what subjects you should cover on a more regular basis, and also can use it to spark some creativity. For example, if you know that two really old pages are highly popular, you may want to highlight them in a new post, or in a dedicated “Hot Stories” section on your site. This helps new readers find your popular content without having to go through a search engine.

The video above gives you a look at the Site Explorer tool, and gives a bit more information on link popularity.

Read More | Yahoo! Site Explorer

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Turn To Attempt To Give Adsense A Run For It’s Money

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Business Tools, News

Looks like a new startup is going to attempt to steal away some of Google’s Adsense members. The new company is called “Turn,” and will be led by Jim Barnett who served as Altavista’s CEO in the past. With $10,000,000 in startup capital, Turn just might have what it takes to make a dent. Of course, Yahoo! Publishing Network is already trying it’s hand at taking down Adsense, as will be MSN’s AdCenter once it hits the states. It’s a good time to be an Internet publisher. Turn will be located at Turn.com.

Read More | Turn via ProBlogger


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Big Companies And The New Internet

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Planning, RSS

So you are an in-the-know Internet entrepreneur, and have all the lingo down, right? Remember that major companies are starting to take notice as well. Large companies are being tuned in to the blogoshpere, and are dipping their toes into RSS. The thing is, their use and yours, for the most part, are very different. There is certainly room for everyone on the vast world of the interweb, but it’s always good to know the approach that the larger firms will likely be taking.

But corporations that want to use the web strategically to build corporate value will not just need to make radical cultural changes, they may also need to master a new vocabulary with terms such as Wikis (software that allows anyone to update and edit web pages instantly and democratically); Weblogs (online journals more commonly known as blogs); and RSS (really simple syndication) feeds, which distribute content from the Internet.

Read More | Wikis, Weblogs, and RSS


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