I spoke today at the Future of Publishing. Was on a panel with people I both knew and did not know: Kris Krug, Ben Garfinkel, Janet Johnson, and Eric Karjaluoto.

I spoke about my path to professional blogging and what I am doing now. I talked on the changing dynamic in business communications and the role of blogging in dialogue. Of course, I believe strongly that being a part of the conversation in blogging is no longer a choice but a necessity. I spoke of the passion of self publishing that drives me to do what I do and to really enjoy it. I also gave a brief demo of Qumana, which some readers might have caught in the RSS feed before it was deleted.

As promised to many in the audience, here are my subscriptions. They are a good place for many to start in on a ton of topics - all organized into easy folders.

The Q/A period was really great. Was a change to chime in with the other speakers on a whole bunch of really great issues such as the role of blogs in publishing, what to do with massive amounts of content, how to manage negative commentary and more.

Thanks to all who came today and especially to those who posed some great questions. Would be happy to elaborate more on any topic, openly or via email. Leave comments and I’ll respond as well.

If you want to contact me to be on a panel or to speak at any conference, please email me.

Technorati Tags: conference, event, publishing, sfu, future of publishing

Lee Odden gives some excellent suggestions for ways to mine your own content to improve your ranking. This advice is for business blogs who think, incorrectly, that they have nothing to write about.

Here are the suggestions:

* Archive your newsletters

* Archive and syndicate your own press releases and media coverage

* Add syndicated news

* Add press releases content syndicated from other sources

* Use articles open for re-use from article directories

* Use Yahoo Creative Commons search to find available content

* Publish a glossary

* Publish client testimonials

* Publish product/service demos

* Publish a Q & A and/or FAQ

All great suggestions. Once you get in the flow of it, you’d be amazed how much more you have to say than you think you did. As Lee so correctly mentions, creating a content strategy is more than just a short term SEO approach. It is an approach that optimizes you for the long-term.

Technorati Tags: blogging, seo, business, writing, content

I started playing with BlogPulse today. I particularly like the citations view. It’s still a beta tracker, but looks like it is set to beat both Technorati and PubSub for accuracy.

When searching for my blogs, I found people referencing us that I’d never been notified about. Now, I like to always pop over and look at the blogs, leave comments, etc so this had me a little annoyed.

Well, cannot wait for BlogPulse to come out of beta and to create the RSS feed for the results. Great program!

SEO Roundtable links to an interesting way to increase CTR with Google AdSense.

This is how. A woman made a very interesting experiment of using images to draw the eye to the ads. This leaderboard is at the bottom of her site, and she managed to increase CTR on the ads x4 by using the images.

Now, it is not a trick all can do, as there is a very fine line between this an between violating the TOS.

But, innovative nonetheless.

Technorati Tags: seo, adsense, ctr

Good advice from Steve Rubel

Run a Conference, Then Invite Bloggers

If you run any kind of industry event, be sure to put bloggers on your invite list. It’s a no-brainer.

I’d go a step further: invite bloggers to help you advertise the conference. Right from the get go, months in advance.

Why?

Simple - increased exposure, varied audience background, increased interest in your topic, hype, sharing of knowledge and information, and dialogue between speakers and attendees. Need I say more? Get that event hyped, and get that internal, live dialogue that makes the conference just that much more valuable for those there.

Great value - probably the easiest and most inexpensive aspect of conference marketing.

Conference/event blogging is a great way to get known in your industry, and if you don’t do it, you may find your conference getting a bit stale. Or maybe it already is, but you haven’t noticed it.

Well, my advice: start up your blog and get bloggers in to work on it.

Technorati Tags: professional blogging, conferences, bloggers

Sharon Housely at FeedForAll makes a good argument that RSS make the biggest splash for enterprise users.

The most simple explanation: it’s a pull medium. People, in this case consumers, can select which content they want to receive. This pull for content will keep the case for good quality high and the hard sell low - after all, you can just as easily hit unsubscribe.

Although I seriously do not agree with some of Sharon’s assumptions (that without monetizing blogs, bloggers will abandon them and the blogosphere as we know it will die), I will pull out those tidbits which are significant. That companies are increasingly finding value in the medium of RSS and that this trend will continue (although not, as Sharon thinks, to the detriment of personal blogging).

As businesses adopt RSS and consumers experiment with feeds, the popularity of RSS will grow. Ultimately, consumers are the driving force behind technology. The convenience of RSS and increased popularity will set a precedent for consumer expectations. Businesses using RSS as a communication vehicle are able to create keyword-rich, themed content, establishing trust, reputation, and ongoing communication with current and prospective customers…

Consumer expectation will drive businesses that are slow to adopt. Ultimately, RSS will be a standard, like email addresses and websites are now a “must” for businesses. RSS feeds will join their ranks.

Blogs and RSS propose a challenge to companies to drop the old way of thinking and to adopt a different approach to communications. An open sharing of information, insight and perspective. It is an inexpensive tool in the communications toolbox that for now provides significant business benefits but that will, in time, be less of an option and more of a requirement for business success.

via Sally Falkow

Technorati Tags: blogging, monetization, communications, rss

Having a blog with a good PageRank, as explained in the previous post, has its benefits. But it also comes with somewhat of a curse.

Darren Rowse gives a good example:

You see when your blog ranks well it means that you can become highly ranked for many search terms that you may not necessarily wish to be highly ranked for.

For example I remember the day that I found I was one of the most highly ranked sites on Google for ‘Spanish Porn’ (I’d used the words separately on a post). Earlier this week a friend found my site in a search engine when he did a search for ‘bubble wrap’. Another time I wrote a post with a critique on one aspect Australian church and became the number 1 result for people searching for that church. Another time a friend asked me to link to his blog and I became more highly ranked for his name than he did. This is also how I came to be quoted in the New York Times for being an expert on Lord of the Rings and it’s spiritual themes and in an Aussie paper as an expert on Spam. All of these situations illustrate both the power of a highly ranked site but also the responsibility that one with such power to blog wisely.

I’ve had the same experiences. On blogaholics, I often write about things I think are funny or weird. Two examples: corset piercing and camel porn.

The latter was an intentional experiment a la Boing Boing to see if using words such as “porn” would spike our traffic. Well, it was successful in driving traffic, but apparently just for that specific phrase. And, yes, people search it. Often.

Anyway, the first one on corset piercing was just a picture and me asking why the heck anyone would want that. Well, they do. And, I expect that post to be popular now for many months, short as it is.

So, on the plus side my article on Canadian identity continues to be strong, and this profiles me well as a writer. On the negative side, I get associated now with camel porn and corset piercing. But, it’s all a part of the game and is interesting to watch.

Technorati Tags: serendipity, pagerank

Darren Rowse takes an in-depth look at PageRank on ProBlogger

So is Page Rank important?

I would argue that it is on some levels. I can’t see that Google would keep it going as a system if it were not. Their PR updates come every couple of months usually and must take significant energy and resources for them to do. I doubt they’d do this just to keep us believing they still used it. It must have some usefulness to them.

I keep an eye on my blog’s page ranks because it gives me some sort of indication as to how important Google thinks they are. It may not be directly linked to traffic but it gives me an indication if I’m on the right track to improving quality which I believe eventually leads to more traffic.

PR is also important to me because it also helps me monetize my blogs. On a number of my blogs I sell text links to other site’s operators. One of the few ways that seems to be used to judge the worth of a site for such purposes is Google’s PR. As a result if I see one of my blogs promoted from one level to another it’s a cause for a mini celebration. I guess in addition to this it’s good for the prestige and reputation for your site to be highly ranked.

I agree that PageRank has its place in our set of tools to understand our blog, our readers, and our profitability. It plays a good role in determining your search engine placement, which is important to drive traffic to your blog. But it is only one factor involved in this placement. So, as Darren suggests, use PageRank as a guide to how you are doing.

Another great value in PageRank is what it can offer to people who sponsor your blog with text links or banners. The link back to their own site is valuable for their own PR. As I move closer to this attempt myself, I look forward to offering an ever improving PageRank as a benefit to advertisers.

Technorati Tags: pagerank, google

Darren Rowse talks about what to go by when choosing a profitable blog. Before deciding you want to blog and make money, make sure you choose a topic also that will be enjoyable to write - unless you have content that has value, spirit and authority, you will find it more difficult to post and to make money (at least I think so).

So, here are the tips from Darren as well as some commentary of my own:

1. Topic Popularity - it’s the old supply and demand theorem. Choose a topic that is in demand by a lot of readers, and where you meet that demand because the supply of other blogs is either low or not well done for one reason or another.

2. Topic Competition and Narrow Niches - most topics you can think of already have blogs. Some, however, are underserved. Maybe they don’t post much, don’t add commentary, or simply leave something to be desired. You can also choose to make your blog more narrow - by decreasing the span of what you write on you can carve out your own very specific and informative niche. The more narrow you are, the likelihood is that it may take longer to gain profitability (decreased audience size).

3. Availability of Revenue Streams - some topics on Adsense or similar revenue programs simply don’t pay as well. More competition between advertising companies usually leads to higher click payouts. You need to balance this with point 2 above. You can also seek out different advertising revenue such as sponsorship or various affiliate programs.

4. Availability of Content - if you are going to write often, and in detail, on something, you’d like it to be as easy as possible to get right to it. You can write from knowledge for only so long - and research is time consuming. Services such as PubSub and Technorati let you subscribe to words or phrases - you can pull in information easier this way from many blogs, especially those whose topics are diverse and whom you may never read again. You can use other services such as Topix.net to pull in news information that may or may not be blog related.

5. Measure your Energy, Passion and Interest - motivation for money can only take you so far. You need to like what you are doing, as I noted in the preface.

6. Pull it all together - if you can meet some of these factors, go for it! The mixture of these will determine how much you make and how quickly - but it does not mean that you cannot be profitable. Most blogs can achieve a good level of revenue, but you’ll need many months of dedication to get there. At the same time, you may see an opportunity for a blog that may not last forever - Darren started an Athens Olympics Blog, for example. Great way to build a ton of traffic for a while, and then you can simply let it go after. Maybe leave it online just for passive revenue. But you’ll need to be well prepared for it!

Thanks Darren once again for some great advice. It’s something I’ll be taking to heart, along with some ideas of my own, as I start out on some new blogging ventures soon.

Technorati Tags: problogger, professional blogging, commercial blog, adsense

The WordPress people want to remind everyone about the importance of backing up your blog and they are calling the week of July 23 to July 30 a WordPress Backup Week. Backing up your blog, or any other important documents, is something that should be part of your routine. It is your insurance in case something goes wrong and things do go wrong occasionally, a few of our friends have had to learn the lesson the hard way. They’ve learned that a few minutes of their time every week can save them from a world of trouble.

So go look at the WordPress backup instructions and the backup restore instructions, just in case.

Why Blog? by Paul Chaney has linked to a great resource for bloggers. It’s a PDF of business blogging. Kind of an intro or how-to, really.

The PDF was developed by Rich Ottum of eStrategyOne. It includes some good pointers, including a top 10 list of things to do before you start your blog with a lot of good descriptions.

The publishing strategy includes:

• become a blog reader
• learn the terminology
• formulate an objective
• find your voice
• select a publishing platform

There’s also a great section on how to market your blog.

The file is here: PDF

Technorati Tags: blogging, business, corporate, PR, blogs

There are a lot of reviews out there about blog software, so it can be hard to know what to choose.

Here are some helpful resources:

Online Journalism Review comparison chart (missing community blogs)

Online Journalism Review comparison article (by Susannah Gardner)

Wikipedia entry

Blog Breakdown chart (comprehensive comparisons, server install only)

Blog Software list

There should be enough in there to give you a good idea of what is out there. If you have questions, let me know.

Thanks to Qumana and Derek Miller

Technorati Tags: blog software, blogging, blog tools

If you still use the OLD PR (and I’m not talking PageRank people), then these are the places you should go:

http://www.prweb.com/ (my fave)

http://www.prleap.com/

http://i-newswire.com/

http://www.webwire.com/

http://www.pressbox.co.uk/

http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/

http://www.clickpress.com/

http://www.przoom.com

http://www.pr.com/

http://www.marketwire.com/

I’d also add www.webwire.com

So, the old PR has its uses. I’ve used some of these. And they do tend to get some blog coverage, if nothing else. So, whether you consider that old PR or new PR - have your go.

Thanks to Lee Odden of Online Marketing Blog for the list.

Technorati Tags: pr

New AdSense Notifier is up to work with the new Google AdSense interface.

Thanks mincus!

A PageRank update has just taken place. If you’re lucky, your Google PageRank will go up. If not, you may find it has stayed the same or gone down.

The updates don’t seem to happen often. Every couple of months it would seem.

Anyway, our sites have all gone up, and that is a token to what we do. :)

Technorati Tags: pagerank, google, seo