A few weeks back I blogged some advice here for business bloggers who might want to consider text link advertising as part of their blog marketing mix.

Well, there’s been a lot of controversy as of late about buying text links. Blogger Phil Ringnalder published a scathing post accusing publishing house O’Reilly of being a search engine spammer. O’Reilly’s founder, Tim O’Reilly, responded to the accusations on his own blog. Google engineer Matt Cutts posted a comment to Tim’s post admitting that Google has decreased the voting power of sites like perl.com and xml.com and downgraded the reputation of some of their outbound links. Ouch!

Matt’s (and presumably Google’s) position was loud and clear:

If you don’t want your own site to suffer the same fate as O’Reilly, you better tag your link ads with a rel=nofollow attribute so that you don’t pass any PageRank score to your advertisers.

In my mind, that doesn’t seem quite fair. Website owners and bloggers work hard to build a content-rich site with good PageRank score. Google’s black-or-white stance on this equates to a diminished earning ability for these websites by insisting webmasters cut off the flow of PageRank to their advertisers. This of course decreases the value of the link ads to those advertisers, and consequently the revenue likely to be realized from them. Granted, no savvy advertiser is going to buy a text link ad solely based on PageRank score, but PageRank does factor into the equation.

This makes me wonder what Google’s position is on BlogAds.com is, which is part banner ad, part text link ad. A good blog ad contains useful content. Why shouldn’t the blogger be allowed to “vouch for” (by not tagging the link with nofollow) the links contained within that ad if they so choose?

Most “white hat” SEOs such as Christine Churchill believe text link advertising is a legitimate practice. I agree with her.

I wonder what Google would do if all the websites across the Internet decided to take all their banner ad inventory they have and bypass the click-tracker redirect that counts all the clickthroughs. Suddenly all these new votes would start counting all over the Internet for commercial advertisers and sponsors. Wouldn’t that throw Google for a loop!

So what is the bottom line here for bloggers who are looking to advertise? It’s basically this: be discriminating in your link buying. Text link advertisements are not inherently evil. Just don’t buy ads on sites where any of the other advertisers on the site are misleading, deceptive or misrepresentative. By that, I mean things like the following:

1. Setting the ad’s link text to some keyword-rich phrase that doesn’t accurately reflect the page that is linked to.
   e.g. An ad on SeacoastOnline.com proclaims “The North Face” but that isn’t The North Face!
2. Linking the ad text to a landing page that is built for search engines and not for people.
   e.g. the “Discount Vacations” ad on DailyItem.com points to one of Orbitz’s many “doorway pages”.
3. Hiding or obscuring the link so human visitors can’t see it, only search engines.
   e.g. Doing a “View Source” on the home page of PRNewswire.com reveals these hidden links:
   
</noframes>
<a href="http://www.icrossing.com">Search Engine Marketing</a>
<a href="http://sev.prnewswire.com">Search Engine News Release Optimization</a>
</frameset>


And it goes without saying that you should refrain from such practices yourself when you advertise.

This post is based on material taken from on my own blog across three separate posts: Link buying – ethical or unethical?, Buying links – Google’s perspective, and Buying link ads – the ethical debate rages.

Dave, I have an executive placement, coaching and consulting business in the Chicago market. In an effort to market and brand myself better I have launched a blog, but I’m unclear what I need to do to get more traffic and exposure to my blog. What do you suggest?

Let me spend some time answering your question because it’s one of the top queries I get from other bloggers, particularly after listening to one of my BlogSmart! workshops…

First off, the core answer is actually pretty easy: the best way to generate traffic for your blog is to reframe the question. Instead of asking “how to I get more visitors to my site?” you need to be asking the question “how do I become part of the blogosphere discussion?”

Bloggers that don’t get this crucial point end up being tiny islands in a very big ocean. Some of them can gain a readership by being phenomenally good or astonishingly prolific, but that’s a very tough path to travel and for most ends up being the blogosphere equivalent of the old Web site complaint of “I’ve built it, but no-one’s come to visit.”

Instead, you need to get involved! Regardless of your topic, I bet there are…

I recently completed a survey of small businesses over at Duct Tape Marketing that I think sheds some light on the impact of blogging as a small business marketing tool

It seems that the recent hype surrounding blogs and blogging has made the average small business marketer aware of blogs to the point that many have even dipped their toe in the blog water. What’s not so clear is the benefit many of these bloggers are receiving.

75 percent of the respondents shared that they indeed knew what a blog was. Another 46 percent admitted that they regularly visited from 1-5 blogs weekly. 13 percent stated that they visited more than 20 blogs per week.

However, of this same group, only 37 percent actually published a blog and, of those that did not currently publish a blog, 57 percent claimed they had no plans to in the near future.

It occurs to me that many small business marketers still don’t get the real power of blogs as an integrated marketing tool.

Adding to this claim is the discovery that 27 percent of those that
do blog post less than once a month. Given this fact it is no wonder
that 36 percent of the respondents also claimed that their blogging
activity had done “nothing� for them in terms of marketing.

A telling fact came to light however when considering only those who
said they posted to their blog anywhere from 3 times a week to once a
day. In this group the marketing benefits soared. 39 percent claimed
that search engine traffic grew, 18 percent stated that leads were
generated and 11 percent could attribute sales activity directly to
their blog. Another key point made repeatedly by this group in open
ended responses was the fact that their “expert status� in a chosen
industry was enhanced.

The benefits of blogging are immense and those that get that, and take advantage of it, will win long term.

While the marketing benefits of blogging may be questioned in some
circles it is clear that those who approach marketing as a serious
business building tool and commit to blogging on a regular basis seem
to gain the most from this technology.

Source: Survey results were based on responses from 488 small business owners who responded via email.

The disaster of Hurricane Katrina is mind-boggling. My heart goes out
to all those affected. Like so many folks, I have a special feeling for
the city of New Orleans. Inconceivable to think of 80 percent of the
city being underwater.

I’m writing a
chapter in my book that considers the crossover of blogging from the
realm of the personal to that of small business and corporate
America.

One reason is human behaviour. In a crisis, people increasingly are turning to blogs to get an account of what’s really happening. They
expect a blog to tell them in an in-the-moment, ragged, authentic voice, typos and all. They
expect to see photos and video, however raw and unedited. It seems more real than the packaged report of a reporter in a wind-whipped anorak.

That’s what mainstream adoption of a new technology or phenomenon
means. It’s based on reflexive behaviour, not on a carefully planned
marketing strategy.

The connection to business is obvious, don’t you think? Just as we turn
to Google and an online search to answer almost any question these days
( …when was the last time you trekked down to the public library?), so
blogs and blogging are becoming a habit.

Useful Links for Hurricane Katrina disaster relief & information

KatrinaHelp wiki

Blog for Relief (see Paul Chaney’s post)

NoLa.com blog (dozens of stories submitted by survivors)

List of disaster relief agencies

I live in the state most affected by Katrina, Mississippi. Needless to say, the devastation this storm has caused not only my state by Alabama and Louisiana as well has captured the attention of the entire nation. It’s caught the attention of bloggers as well.

Truth Laid Bear is sponsoring Blog for Relief Day tomorrow, Thursday, September 1. I really want to encourage each of you to participate. Truly, this is our nation’s tsunami and everyone ought to do something to help ease the plight of the victims and their families. As my own family further down state has been directly affected by the ravages of Katrina, I extend my personal thanks to those of you who do.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association is trying to stir things up with a new group blog Word of Mouth vs. Advertising, which is also the topic of an upcoming WOMMA conference in NYC on Sept. 28. Seems like wishful thinking that Word of Mouth marketing would somehow "defeat" traditional advertising and actually shift much of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually by U.S. marketers on "traditional advertising," but WOMMA is nothing if not plucky. The danger, of course, would be to burn out the PR interest in their presently buzzing topic with too much hype.

If it wasn’t enough trouble to come up with the right string of words to describe your brand, now you gotta worry about what your brand sounds like. That’s right. You need an audio logo for your podcast. What’s your cue music, your sign off… and those little bits in between, like NPR radio uses between segments? MarketingSherpa writes here and here about what’s involved in developing their theme song for podcasting.

Check out Podcastinglogos.com to hear snippets of music used by the New England Journal of Medicine, the Baseball Network and other organizations for their podcasts. The site was just launched by independent film score composer Michael Whalen.

Whalen helpfully poses 10 key questions you should consider before commissioning an audio logo. Here are the first five:

1. How is your company perceived in the marketplace? (big, small, cool, traditional, fun, forward thinking, etc.)
2. How do YOU perceive your company? Is it the same as your answer to #1?
3. Do you think your audio ID should support or work against this impression(s)?
4. Who is your ‘typical’ audience member or customer? (demographically, sense of their tastes, etc.)
5. Should the audio ID appeal to your audience’s taste or should it only support your company’s image? (see question #1)

Follow this link and click on Pricing and Suggestions in the left-hand column to get the rest. (This site is designed in frames… bad idea as I can’t give you a direct link!)

The Nooked.com blog published the results of their Influencer study recently with 87% of respondents reporting the use of a RSS reader to keep current. 

"The Nooked – Influencer survey set out to
establish if key influencers – journalists, analysts and bloggers – are
using RSS to collect information for analysis, news & reports
and/or determine their future plans for adopting RSS as an information
gathering & tracking tool."

Respondents included 200 individuals broken down as: Journalists – 25%, Analysts – 15%, Bloggers – 45% and the remaining 15% comprised of interested parties.

While this was not exactly scientific research, it does provide yet more information in support of the notion that business RSS feeds (usually accompanied by a blog) can be effective as marketing and public relations tools.

Via Rok Hrastnik

Deutsche Welle International is running its BOBS (Best Of the Blogs) 2005 Awards, commencing September 1. This is the second year running and the winners from last year are listed here.

The site says there are thirteen categories, although it looks to me more like five categories, one of which has nine language sub-categories. Categories are: Best weblog, Best multimedia weblog, Best podcasting site, Special award from Reporters without Borders, Best journalistic site in one of the following languages – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.

Interesting that there is no category for business blogs, let alone corporate, small business etc sub-categories. Can we take from that omission that this very well established European media company does not see business blogging as having a sufficiently distinctive place yet? The jury composition looks strongly weighted to a journalist’s view of the blogosphere and is interestingly international. And there appears to be only one non-media sponsor, a hotel, in among the Sponsors and Media Partners.

One reason I’m very interested in this is that I’ve been communicating with some other Australian bloggers about the idea of a business blogging conference in our part of the world. I guess we all see the blogosphere, as we do the world generally, from our own vantage points, but the BOBS categories suggest to me that the idea of business blogging as a significant sector of the blogosphere, with its own characteristics and issues, might not not have achieved a high level of recognition outside the USA.

SEO Book’s Aaron Wall was sued today by Traffic-Power.com for alleged inaccuracies and lies appearing in comments other people have left on his blog. If this case goes to trial, it’ll set an important precedent in the blogging community and the Internet at large, answering a critical question, particularly for business blogs: are the comments others leave on your blog a legal liability?

Some background: Aaron Wall runs SEO Book.com, a site focused on search engine optimization strategies and on selling his smart ebook of the same name. In a discussion venue of that nature, it’s no surprise that community members talk about different SEO firms, positively and negatively, and one company that’s been the frequent recipient of negative comments on Aaron’s blog is Traffic Power.com.

Today Aaron was surprised by a certified letter from a Nevada Attorney’s office notifying him that the parent company of Traffic-Power.com was suing him for the content of his weblog.]

With Aaron’s permission, I reproduce some relevant sections of the notification in question:

“Plaintiff undertakes rigorous and extensive measures to safeguard information about its business. Internet placement optimization is a highly competitive business, and if Plaintiff’s trade secrets are revealed competitors can gain a prejudicially unfair advantage over Plaintiff. Accordingly, Plaintiff’s trade secrets are provided to a limited number of people, only on a need-to-know basis and subject to strict confidentiality agreements.

“An unidentified individual, acting alone or in concert with others, has recently misappropriated and disseminated through web sites Plaintiff’s confidential information. This information could have been obtained only through…

There’s a very good article by eMarketer’s Ezra Palmer on iMedia today about harnessing the power of blogs. From reputation management to customer service, Palmer describes the opportunity companies have to connect with the slice of the population the best responds to the blog format.

Though I’ve written this article focused on professional networking sites like LinkedIn, it’s exactly the same set of questions you need to consider when you’re thinking about how many sites to include in your blogroll or exchange links with. Read on, you’ll see what I mean…

One of the discussions I’ve been watching with great interest in the greater LinkedIn community and with professional networking sites in general is whether it’s a better strategy to have a small number of quality connections, or a large number of relevant but varied connections.

This discussion is so common, in fact, that some people have started to abbreviate it as QvQ.

But what are the pros and cons of each strategy? Let’s have a look…

First off, like much else in life, the connect / don’t connect decision is one that you have to consider anew for each potential professional connection, regardless of your individual connection criteria. Specifically, even if you decided that you’d only link to very high quality people (that is, people who you have know for at least X years, or worked with on at least Y projects) you’re still placing yourself on a continuum of networking connection restrictions where one extreme is that you won’t connect to anyone and the diametric opposite extreme is that you’ll connect to everyone, their Mom and their dog.

Clearly both of those are pointless strategies, the former because you quite literally don’t have a network at all if you only have a single node, you. It’s the “no man is an island” revisited for the digital age. The latter strategy doesn’t work either because if you have no method of screening potential contacts then you might as well pick up a phone book or randomly dial your telephone hoping to make a good connection.

To understand the relative value of different points on the continuum, then, I think it’s important to understand why you’re networking in the first place…

From the Threadwatch blog…

Threadwatch has recently persuaded some of it’s more knowledgeable members to run specific blogs, or columns.
I’m pleased to say that we now have a handful of experts on a good
range of subjects who will shortly begin posting to their blogs.

As you may know, Threadwatch is a multi-blogger blog discussing topics related to SEO.

Tony Williams, the esteemed mayor of Washington DC, has joined the blogosphere. On the 15th of August Mayor Williams launched Mayor’s Blog. He  posted a couple of paragraphs and told his constituents to "stay  tuned." Expectations were set that the new blog would connect the Mayor with the citizens of DC.

The people chatted; they welcomed Mayor Williams to the blogosphere,
expressed their concerns and even offered the Mayor blog advice: need
an RSS feed, filtering comments is not transparent, read other DC
blogs and don’t forget to remind people it’s really you.

And then they waited. And waited. And waited. The people were getting
annoyed. Where was their leader? Where was the connection?  "When
are you going to say something interesting, helpful, provocative or
something? So far it’s a snooze with a long time between snores."

Mayor Williams came back a week later with Star Wars humor. Yoda would say, "a weekly paragraph will not an exciting blog make." Then he really got serious and set expectations for himself….

Generally speaking, I will try to be cogent and consistent. By this I mean: first, providing you observations you can’t find elsewhere in over 100,000 pages of the website; and second, stating the same, take your pick – distinctive or disgusting comments regardless of the audience and the circumstances.You should know my position on an issue, whether you agree with it or not. Blase press releases will not a …YODA!

And expectations for the readers … the blog is not a service line but righteous indignation or comforting, supportive comments are welcomed.

Mayor Williams, I think you’re getting this blog stuff….go forth unto the blogosphere and prosper.

A lesson for all bloggers – "a weekly paragraph will not an exciting blog make."

Article in the Washington Post (free subscription required).

Gartner released yesterday its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. The research firm has pegged Corporate Blogging and RSS as being two years away from mainstream adoption. For now, both are tumbling into Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment (along with wikis and desktop search) as a result of too much media buzz. If you believe Gartner, Corporate Blogging is already sooo… last year (2004).

They’ve got a point. The media rumble about Corporate Blogging is almost deafening by now. It’s not a “new” story anymore. Which is not to say that blogging isn’t still a “new” thing to many companies.

At any rate, the five stages of hype make a lot of sense. It works something like this: new technologies get overhyped in the beginning; then they go out of favor; eventually they mature and are adopted by the mainstream but by that time they’re no longer news.

The five stages are: Technology Trigger, Peak of Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment and Plateau of Productivity. Oh, and podcasting is on the upswing, according to Gartner. It’s sliding up the Peak of Expectations. That sounds about right, doesn’t it?

The way I understand it, the hype cycle is measuring the buzz as well as the adoption rate. It
doesn’t necessarily correspond to the long-term utility – or success –
of a phenomenon like Corporate Blogging. Only time will tell.

Read more about Corporate Blogging’s downward slide into the Trough of Disillusionment…

 

I cannot disagree that the Web log, or blog, is definitely the   Flavor of the Month. But even when chocolate is the Flavor of the Month, that   doesn’t make it any less tasty. Sometimes trendy is OK, and this is one of   those times.

• strengthening relationships;
• building your brand;
• improving customer service;
• increasing employee awareness;
• building a reputation;
• benefiting search engine rank; and
•   making money through advertising.

With that much upside, the article should sway many to consider the use of the blog in their small business.  Be trendy, why not order both chocolate and vanilla?

If you’ve been following the story, you know that BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis has been pissed at Dell for their lack of customer service. According to MediaPost, Dell says it  has implemented new procedures for dealing with
the blogosphere. The company’s PR department has been monitoring
blogs, looking for commentaries and complaints. Starting about a month ago the department began forwarding complaints to the customer service department so that reps
can contact dissatisfied consumers directly.

After my well-received Business Blogging 101 workshop at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco last week, my strong exhortation to the audience that PR is Dead was the buzz of the Summit. Even publications like the San Jose Mercury News and InfoWorld were talking about it, even though I’m certainly not the first to propose that the traditional job of public relations has been supplanted by the blogosphere.

The most interesting discussion I had on the topic, however, was with Doug Free, Group PR Manager for Microsoft and Lynann Bradbury, Senior VP of Microsoft’s PR agency Waggener Edstrom. To set the scene, Lynann greeted me with “Hi. I’m not dead yet!”

But as we talked about the impact of blogging and, more generally, findability and the online world on traditional public relations, something became very, very clear…

What we agreed upon is that there are two types of public relations firms and that any informed public debate about the impact of the blogosphere and Internet on the profession of public relations must take these into account.

Large companies like Waggener Edstrom offer companies counsel on how to present themselves and their message to the public and their market segment. They are truly focused on, quite literally, public relations. But they’re in the minority.

I contend that there are in fact a significant number of so-called PR Agencies who believe – and their clients believe too – that PR stands for…

I wondered when ClickZ was going to enter the blogosphere, now they have. I know Search Engine Watch was blogging, but now they’ve added the ClickZ News Blog. Here’s an article explaining why it took them so long and what the blog will be used for.

The Free Money Finance site (Is there really such a thing as “free” money?) has an essay on how to build traffic to your blog via blog carnivals. It’s based on the blogger’s extensive research into the subject over the past few months.