Debbie Weil published this article in her WordBiz newsletter as advice for business bloggers. Best of all, the main expert source for the article is…me!

WordBiz: 5 Tips for a ‘Useful Resource’ Blog

AdTech is the leading industry event for the online advertising and marketing industry. At the last occasion of the conference, last November in NYC, MarketingWonk and I helped AdTech create the AdTech Blog, where a team of bloggers provided coverage of the event.

AdTech has invited us to repeat this, as it was quite successful. I can offer free attendance to interestest parties in exchange for your blogging efforts. To be clear there is no payment involved, and travel and accommodation are not included. But the pass to the three days’ worth of the sessions is a $1,095 value. For anyone interested in the Internet marketing and media sector, this is a valuable opportunity, as AdTech is the best educational and networking event in the sector, in my professional opinion.

Requirements:

• Should be reasonably knowledgeable about the Internet marketing and media industry
• Must commit to a minimum of five to seven short entries — mostly coverage of sessions, but we also plan to cover the (many) parties, the exhibit hall, and more. The blog posts can run on as long as you want, but you don’t really have to write more than about three paragraphs for any one entry.
• That’s about it. Good writing skills. Experience writing for a blog a plus. Your own laptop with WiFi is a plus, but you could alternatively take notes on paper and file reports from the press room.

If interested, email me. I am expecting to get more inquiries about this than I have passes for, so I’ll have to get back to you in a couple of days.

“Commentary on startups, small business, business planning and growth strategy” from the folks at Bplans.com, a business plan resource tool, and Palo Alto Software, a business plan software tool.

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This blog (by an anonymous author, as far as I can see) appears to have a media revenue model (i.e., ad support), as opposed to consulting. It just celebrated its one year birthday last week (Happy Birthday!). Various useful resources for business bloggers, which I will monitor regularly.

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Wayne Hurlbert has been blogging about the intersections of blogs and businesses on this site since October 2003. It doesn’t appear to be a business blog itself, in that I don’t see any About Us or consulting service links on the blog, but it is a useful resource for folks following this trend.

As usual, you can count on me to rip off all of his best links for this blog. (As either Stravinsky or Picasso is meant to have said, “Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.” Probably Stravinsky said it first, then Picasso simply stole it.)

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John Rhodes, of WebWorld.com, writes what may as well be the business plan for Business Blog Consulting. Basically, he describes in some detail how blogs are a great opportunity for businesses, but most businesses are “blog ignorant,” and that therefore there is a good opportunity there for the taking to build a blog consulting company. He writes, ” I would set up this company myself but I have too much on my plate right now.” Well, the truth is, I’m too busy to do this, too, but it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up, so I’m just foregoing sleep these days.

If this is my business plan, why do I bother linking to it? Well, for one thing, it’s not like John and I are the only ones who have thought of this so far. Griff Wigley is one such blog consultant, but he has thus far concentrated mostly on small businesses in his home state of Minnesota. There are some others also banging this drum who are maybe more direct competitors to me, enough that I don’t feel like linking to them just yet.

More to the point, however, if a significant part of this blog consulting opportunity is blogging for hire, and I think it is, there’s room for a network of blog consultants out there. I already do blog regularly for one client, BizNetTravel, and obviously if I’m doing so for 10 clients, I’ll need a lot of help. So, take a read of John’s essay and if you’re inspired, let’s talk.

Thanks to Rafat for the pointer.

WebWorld: Building a Blog Marketing and Media Company

Marketing resource for the pharmaceutical industry from pharma-specialized agency Greater Than One, with help from marketing and web design consultant Ari Paparo

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In addition to profiling business blogs, I plan to use this site to keep track of a number of useful resources for bloggers, especially those that advance the interest of business bloggers. So here’s one. The About Us page explains:

There a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. However it would be expensive for all the services crawl all the blogs in the world all the time. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you’ve updated so they can come check you out. They get the freshest data possible, you don’t get a thousand robots spidering your site all the time. Everybody wins.

So why would you want to be on these sites? One word: traffic.

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Ali Mohammad Abtahi

This is nothing short of mind-blowing: a blog by Ali Mohammad Abtahi, Vice President of Islamic Republic of Iran. In English, no less. Talk about blogs being revolutionary.

Blogs have actually become very popular in Iran, as this Wired story and this BCC story attest. But a senior politician in any country blogging is remarkable, particulary one that we, in the West anyway, think of as so restrictive as Iran. It will be interesting to watch what becomes of this remarkable site, which has been around since January, 2004.

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Seattle P.I. has set one of its reporters, Todd Bishop, to cover the region’s biggest corporation around the clock with this popular blog, founded in September 2003.

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This isn’t breaking news — it was first reported by the sources below a few weeks ago — but I’m still getting caught up with my backlogged notes for this blog.

Anyway, news is that Microsoft is readying something called Blogbot, a kind of search tool focused on weblogs for release in the next couple of months. The idea is likely to be something similar to its Newsbot search service, already in beta in the U.K., which is strikingly similar to Google News (at a glance, anyway). A U.S. version of Newsbot is also expected in the next few months. Makes me think the new blog aggregation service Kinja may have its work cut out for it.

Reports on Blogbot come from Seattle P.I.’s Microsoft Blog, the San Jose Merc and eWeek.

Microsoft has already demonstrated itself to be quite blog savvy, with a host of blogs of its own, including that of its corporate evangelist Robert Scoble, the round-table video blog of several of its product architects at Channel 9 and a large collection of other company-sanctioned bloggers.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/

Debbie Weil

Consultant Debbie Weil has been publishing an email newsletter called WordBiz about business copywriting online for more than two years (as of this writing). She makes money by running seminars, consulting and selling reports, as well as ads in her newsletter and on her blog. Her blog features the same kind of breezy writing and straight-forward advice that has made her newsletter so popular among small and large businesses.

Her blog also includes a category on Blogging for Business, which I’ll be sure to scrape for all interesting entries to plug into this directory in the coming weeks.

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Debbie Weil’s WordBiz organized a teleseminar on the topic of Business Blogs a few months ago, in which I partook as one of the “experts.” She’s done a nice job packaging the audio of that seminar with a companion PDF report. Some of the points she promises you’ll learn from the report:

• Why blogging is better (and easier) than updating a regular Web site
• How blogging is different than sending an e-newsletter
• The best technology for publishing – and subscribing – to blogs
• How a blog fits into an overall marketing and communications strategy
• Plus, the tools you need to start your own blog right now!

Price: $59.

WordBiz: Blogging for Business

This article in the Washington Post describes how popular advertising on weblogs has been in this political season. The story notes that most of these ads are going through the BlogAds network.

The story includes an anecdote of A.B. “Ben” Chandler, a Kentucky Democrat running for a special House election back in January who spent $2,000 for ads on 11 blogs, which was perceived as a risky idea in a tightly funded political campaign. The ads were so successful that in two weeks, some 1,700 readers from the blogs donated $80,000 to the campaign, mostly from out-of-state, which the campaign plowed back into tradiational broadcast and print ads and went on to win the campaign.

W. Post: Some Candidates Turn To Blogs to Place Ads

The popular blog publishing platform Movable Type, from Six Apart, is starting to accept beta-user accounts for its long-awaited version 3.0 upgrade. Much excitement in the blogosphere for this announcement.

(Updated info on the 3.0 release here.)

Business Blog Consulting uses TypePad, which is also by Six Apart.

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CEO Henry Copeland launched this do-it-yourself ad network for blogs nearly two years ago, and at that time there was a fair bit of skepticism that the business would ever pan out. Well, it has. The service now has more than 200 blogs using the system, each of which has at least 3,000 ad impressions each week. Some, such as InstaPundit and DailyKos, have millions of readers per month. The service has proven particularly popular with political advertisers — more than two dozen candidates in the presidental and other races have used it to reach political junkies through blogs. But many smaller and medium-sized companies are also find blogs a great way to advertise niche products. Blogs are ideal “for products that have a sensibility, not commodities, those looking to find audiences with a particular mindset,” Copeland said. Some of the biggest bloggers using the system are now earning thousands of dollars a month in advertising.

I have counseled BlogAds about its overall business strategy.

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A New York Times reporter, Julie Flaherty, attended BloggerCon II and wrote this piece about the discussion at the conference about trying to make blogs make money for their writers.

NY Times: Many Started Web Logs for Fun, but Bloggers Need Money, Too

Hugh MacLeod is best known around the blogosphere as “the guy who draws cartoons on the back of business cards.” Something about his cartooning style has really struck a nerve with bloggers. His own blog features a lot of his original drawings. His background is in advertising creative, and I think he still does some of that on a freelance basis, as well.

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Rafat Ali, formerly a journalist for Silicon Alley Reporter, runs this blog about trends in online publishing. He also sells advertising for the blog, which is his sole occupation for more than a year. He says he earns more off the blog than he did as a staff reporter, although he also spends a considerable amount of time selling ads himself. He notes that he has also lost advertisers due to his uncompromising coverage of the industry. He’s a pioneer among one-man-brands as far as commercial blogs go.

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MarketingVox (formerly named MarketingWonk, Up2Speed and MarketingFix) is a new aggregation blog focused on Internet marketing trends. The site is funded by Andy Bourland, who pays a salary to the site’s full-time editor Tig Tillinghast. The site accepts advertiser and aims to be a commercially viable nano-publishing media property focused on an industry niche.

I am one of this site’s co-founders, and I remain a shareholder, contributor and strategic consultant to the business, although I am no longer involved in its day-to-day operations.

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