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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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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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Seven Ways to Warm Your Prospects Using Website Audio

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Marketing

Gone are the days when putting audio on your website consisted of subjecting your visitors to gaudy musical fanfares and various clichéd sound effects. Fortunately, audio has now become a lot more sophisticated and new techniques that allow audio to be streamed have made it possible to use your own voice as a highly effective marketing tool.

Most visitors to your website will have computers with audio capabilities. Using your own voice, you can deepen the impact of your sales message and develop a stronger connection with your visitors. Many websites using streaming audio to promote and sell services claim that audio increases their conversion by as much as 300%! Learn how to put audio to use after the jump.

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26 Steps To 15,000 Visits Per Day

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Marketing

Let’s be serious for a moment - no matter how astounding your website looks, or how nicely you promote the product, none of it means anything if you aren’t getting a steady flow of traffic. Many people put up a website, and then sit confused as to how to garner a nice, consistent readership. SearchEngineWorld has a nice, brief tutorial detailing some basic things you can do to bring your readership up to 15,000 uniques per day. From experience, I can tell you that it does work - and that content is king.

Read More | 26 Steps to 15k


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Why You Should Use (Not Abuse) Forums to Increase Your Traffic

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Features, Marketing

There are dozens of reasons why you should look up the forums that are related to your market and post to them often. Here are 3 to get you started, after the jump.

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Do you have a linking strategy?

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Marketing

Getting a high ranking for your site in Google requires good, frequently updated content and good inbound links. The content part is fairly straight forward, but how do you get other sites to link to you? Well, you can cross your fingers and hope that other sites find your content good enough to link to or put together a more proactive strategy.

Some linking strategy tips after the jump.

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How to Quickly Gain Traffic to Your New Web Site

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Marketing

The problem with a new site is that it often takes a long time before it is indexed by the search engines. This means you are missing out on getting traffic and making sales. Google places new sites in the “sandbox” which means they are on “hold” for a period of time before they rank.

Here are some ways to generate immediate traffic to your web site:

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More RSS Marketing Opportunities

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Marketing, RSS

I have recently been getting into RSS and studying it for all that it can be, which is a lot more than a method to syndicate blog content. As it turns out, you can use RSS to distribute audio, video, and just about any other type of media you can think of. Think of the marketing opportunities - you have a new product you want to show off; instead of just posting a blurb about it on your site, you can do a video demonstration and include the link in your blurb. Anyone subscribed to your RSS feed automatically received your commercial in their reader, TiVo-style. Or you can have a weekly audio blurb giving a general overview of the textual content you posted on your site over the past week, and it will be waiting in your subscribers iTunes program when they get home. Companies like FedEx are even allowing customers to track packages via RSS, eliminating the need to visit their website for that information. Check out this article from for more RSS marketing information.

Read More | Marketing Studies


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