The Business Blog Authority

Why Business Blogs are not a Fad

2009-05-19T13:43:58-04:00

Business blogs are here to stay. They are not a fad. They are not going to disappear or lose importance over the next year, 3 years, 5 years, or even 20 years. They are a long-term and powerful marketing tool for your business.

Facebook is hot right now along with Twitter. Businesses are showing mixed results using these forms of media to spread their brand. Currently, each has a place for a company's marketing strategy, but neither is as obvious, nor as simple as a company blog. Furthermore, each of these tools show shortcomings that could wipe either of them off the face of the 'net within a couple of short years if a savvy competitor stepped in to challenge them.

Other forms of communicating with the public such as creating podcasts and online video will also continue to gain ground. However, the time commitment for either approach is substantial compared to blogging ensuring that they will be utilized by a very small portion of the business world for years to come.

Blogs, on the other hand, have several fundamental reasons that point to their long-term value for businesses:

1. Simple to use
Creating a blog post is just like writing an email.

2. Create value for customers
Blogs provide all sorts of information to people interested in your company. They provide answers to questions, details about products, company news, and an insight into the personalities of the employees.

3. Cost
Blogs range from nothing to a couple of hundred bucks a year unless you hire an employee to write the blog, which may very well be worth their salary.

4. Search engine rankings
Blogs score very well in search engines, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. The reason is because search engines continue to get smarter and smarter, weeding out web pages that don't have very good content compared to search terms people search for. As these get weeded out, blog posts climb the ladder as web pages that contain useful information while being part of a large website.

5. All the advantages of Direct Mail, without the postage
Blogs allow your company to reach hundreds (thousands) of customers instantly...for free. RSS subscriptions and tools like Twitter allow you to inform your customers when you have written a new blog post, prompting them to visit your site to read it. While most of your posts will be strictly informational, there's nothing wrong with writing a purely sales-driven post every once in a while if it gives real value to your customers. Within minutes you can generate a measurable response to a sales offer and even test different sales approaches. In the past, this would take months and thousands of dollars in printing and postage costs. With a blog it doesn't cost anything.

6. Blogs are seemless
A customer often has to download a podcast in order to enjoy it. If you offer a video, they have to be in an environment that allows noise to come from your computer. Many companies put restrictions on audio or video in the workplace. But a blog is just a website. Blog pages show up in regular Google searches, they use regular web site navigation, and they don't require any kind of special plugin to read. Customers often don't even know they are reading a "blog," especially if the blog is designed with the same graphics as your normal web site.

7. Blogs evolve
Unlike Facebook or Twitter, blogs are not "owned" by any one company. As a result, the companies that create blogging platforms are constantly evolving, adapting, and reinventing what a blog means. New features and functions are constantly being added. These improvements will keep blogging at the forefront of internet technology for the foreseeable future.

Technology changes our internet experience very fast. The internet as we know it did not exist before 1994 (when Netscape Navigator was created). Blogs entered the non-tech world in approximately 2002, but took a few years to gain widespread recognition.

Here we are in 2009, not even a decade later. But blogging again may be compared to direct mail. While direct mail was popularized and turned into a science in 1923 (Scientific Advertising, Claude C. Hopkins), it is still perhaps the most effective form of advertising in terms of return-on-investment. The fundamentals of direct advertising apply to blogging, and this is why your business blog will continue to be an important and profitable marketing strategy through 2029.

[Photo: Hooray for Hula Hoops by JonDissed on Flickr. Used with permission under Creative Commons Copyright.]

10 Business Blog Guidelines

2008-05-07T14:02:24-04:00

1) Spelling
Use your blog platform's spell check. Even better, use the automatic spell check included with Firefox. To enable, choose Tools > Options > Advanced > General tab > check the check box for 'Check my spelling as I type.' Firefox automatically underlines misspelled words with a red dotted line just like typing in a fancy shmancy word processor.

2) Grammar
Equally important to spelling, grammar is a little more difficult to wrangle. Word processors like MS Word include a grammar check, but who wants to write their blog posts in Word and then copy and paste them into your blog program?

Instead, write conversationally, the way you would talk. Then, before you publish your blog post, save a copy as a draft and view the draft in the Opera browser. Use the 'speak' function in Opera to read the blog post back to you. This will usually expose any large grammatical errors, much better than simply rereading your post.

3) Write an effective headline
The vast majority of your readers on a given day will view your blog post in an RSS reader, or through a social media outlet like StumbleUpon, Digg, or Delicious. They are sifting through dozens or even hundreds of stories and deciding which ones to read based on your headline. Your headline must succinctly reveal what your story is about in a way that attracts readers to click on it. I've written more about headlines here.

4) Use a photo at the very top of your story
After headlines, photos are the main reason a person might begin to read your post. You should have a photo at the very top of your post because it will appear directly below the headline when viewed in an RSS reader. This one-two punch gives you the maximum chance to have someone click on your story. I've written more about photos here.

5) Clear RSS feed link
Most of your return visitors will be visitors through their RSS reader. Make sure the link to your RSS feed is clearly visible. Don't throw up any obstacles to get in the way of letting your readers subscribe. A link to the feed at the bottom of every post is great too.

6) Humor
There are a few business blogs that might get away without humor. If you are an attorney or doctor, you can probably be all serious and people will still read your blog. For the rest of you, show us your sense of humor. My favorite business blog, El Bloggo Torcido, is a great example of someone acting like a complete nut in the blogoshpere, and getting tons of readers as a result.

7) Search
Readers must be able to search your blog. The nature of blogs means that the blog will sometimes have hundreds and even thousands of pages read. About half the people on the internet ignore a web site's navigation system and rely exclusively on the search box. If you don't have a search box, they leave. Read my article on adding a Google-powered search box to your blog.

8) Keep your blog fresh
Write at least 2-3 posts a week to make sure Google understands that you are a mover and a shaker, and also to keep RSS readers from automatically unsubscribing from your site due to idleness.

9) Allow comments and trackbacks
One of the most useful parts of a blog is the ability to have an ongoing conversation with your readers through your comments and trackbacks. This is one of the easiest, no-cost methods to get customer feedback you will ever utilize.

10) Please add the 10th guideline in the comments below.

[Photo: Teaching Math or Something by foundphotoslj on Flickr, used with permission under Creative Commons Copyright.]

Wanted: Blogger for full time position

2008-05-06T16:34:43-04:00

Lets get this straight. I'm not offering a job (I can hear the thousands of back buttons being clicked now).

But if you are a company that does not yet have a blogger on staff (or maybe you've given the job to an already overloaded marketing peon), then you'd better put this ad in your local paper (or on problogger.net) soon:

WANTED: Blogger for full time position
Our super-duper company wishes to hire a person in the position of "blogger." Until yesterday, we didn't really know what this meant, but we did some research on the internets and realized we are really missing the boat here.

Writing
What we're looking for is someone who is good at writing. You might have a degree in English or communications or something, but the really important thing is that you can write. This includes spelling and grammar. We don't really care how educated you are as long as what you write doesn't make us cringe every time you use the word 'your' when you mean the word 'you're.'

Photography
Next, you should know how to take a photo. We've heard that photos really add value to a blog. Many people are much more likely to read a post if it begins with an attractive blog photo.

For this reason, you need to get out from behind a desk and explore our company. Look for interesting things to take pictures of. People are great subjects for photos because it shows we have real people working here with real names.

Reporter
You should have good interviewing skills. Perhaps you were once a beat reporter, or you've always dreamed of being one. You need to call people up, send them emails, and most importantly, walk into their office and interview them. We're not looking for news-breaking hard-hitting interviews. We want human interest stories. The kind that make readers really feel good about our company.

Editor
You will invite prominent experts in our industry to write reports and articles for the blog. You will be in charge of assigning them subjects to write about and editing their final drafts before they go live.

Engineer
You need to understand our products completely. You will be writing about how to use them, why our readers need them, how they can't live without them, and why ours are better than anyone else's.

Teacher
While you gain product knowledge, we want you to use what you've learned to create tutorials for our customers. The blog will be a tremendous resource for those who have purchased our products because you will be able to take a customer question from email and write up a tutorial that answers their question, and potentially the same question hundreds of others will have, all in the same day.

Spokesperson
Although you won't be the "official" PR spokesperson for the company, you will be expected to respond to company problems, scandals, or news items in a professional and timely manner through the blog. We recognize that our readers want honest information ASAP and you are one of the quickest direct links to the company.

For this reason, you will have uncommon access to key members in our upper management, especially the CEO, so that you can quickly respond to public relations situations.

Podcaster
In addition to writing articles, you will also provide interviews, tutorials, or industry news in MP3 audio format at least once a week. Readers appreciate different media to learn about our company and products. You will also be in charge of coordinating the release of our podcasts with iTunes and other music services.

Video Producer
In addition to podcasts, you will also be expected to create short videos. This is very important as video is absolutely exploding on the internet and may account for tens of thousands of viewers seeing our product that never would have known we existed.

While we don't expect the videos to be of the highest production quality, we do expect them to be entertaining, educational, and effective in promoting our brand. You will become an expert in creating the videos and distributing them to all the big video sites through a web site such as tubemogul.

Salesperson
You will be in charge of creating an opt-in email list through a company like AWeber. With this list, you will create a newsletter for the specific purpose of converting our readers into buyers. AWeber has a proven program of tutorials to help you meet this goal, but it will be up to you to write and execute the actual sales material.

Social Media Wizard
In addition to the blog, you will open and maintain accounts for the company on Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and any other network that becomes hot.

You will make contacts through these networks in order to market our products, spread the company name, and attract highly qualified candidates to our office.

Search Engine Optimizer
You must be able to harness Social Media tools to produce outstanding search engine rank. We are not looking to "game" the search engines, but rather to leverage social media to create a real value that the search engines recognize and reward.

Frequent Flyer
Although you should be able to do 90% of your job in our office...and even in your home, we will expect you to travel to some major events in our industry so you can write about them just like a news reporter. If readers visit our blog to get news about a conference, that's a tremendous advantage over the companies that do not. We may ask you to provide daily podcasts or videos of these conferences or meetings.

In addition to conferences in our industry, we would expect you to attend a few conferences on blogging and/or social media throughout the year. While we are confident you will stay abreast of all the latest trends, you will gain even more authority with our readers by attending and blogging about these events.

Please reply immediately so that we can get out of the 90s.

PS: if it will save your company the time of placing this ad in a newspaper, I am available for this position. -Brian

PPS: I'm sure I missed some skill sets. If you think of any extra skills a blogger needs, please add them in the comments.

[Photo: Not the only photographer by cstrom on Flickr, used with permission under Creative Commons Copyright.]

5 blog posts to write before you die

2008-05-05T12:35:25-04:00

So you're cruising through life, carefree, sipping a Coke, and then I slam this title on your screen. Sorry to break it to you, but you're going to die.

I know you spend most of your time denying this fact. You've got your new red convertible, you've added ten friends on MySpace in the past week, and you get all the jokes about Smallville. But someday, you're going to drop like a rock and your soul is going to pass its time somewhere else.

Before that happens, think about your blog, and how completely unsatisfying it would be if you hadn't written these 5 world-changing posts:

1) "I wish I were somewhere else"
This is the post where you confess that for the moment, you are sick of blogging, your eyes are cracking because you haven't blinked in the last ten minutes, and if you have to deal with one more tag, you'll gag...one more stumble, you'll crumble...one more digg, you'll wig...one more feed, you'll bleed...and one more tweet, you'll jump off a bridge.

I'm not saying you always feel like this. I'm just saying that the one time you do, write about it. It will be totally off-topic and entirely entertaining.

2) "3 things about [your company name] I would only tell you if I was drunk"
It helps to write this one after a bottle of Charles Shaw Chardonnay ($3, Trader Joe's), regardless of what Jeff Stai thinks about it.

3) "What I would do with $100 million"
You've won the lottery. After taxes, you are left with $100 million. What now?

Blow it on houses and cars? Travel to outer space? Pay off 1/10,000th of the national debt?

According to Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, clergyman Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus once gave a sermon one Sunday titled, "What I Would Do If I Had A Million Dollars." At the end of the sermon, Phillip D. Armour approached him and handed him a check for the full amount. With the money, Gunsaulus founded the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The point is that it would really suck if that could happen to you, but you never told anyone what you would do if you had the money. Notice I increased the amount from a million. Does anyone even get excited about one million dollars anymore?

Your readers will love this because it will show how imaginative you are, or possibly how full of BS you are (cure cancer? yeah right).

4) "Me and my brother/sister/best friend"
This post is simply a photo. It tells the world, "I have a family," "I have a best friend," "I'm just like you," and hopefully, "I'm a dork."

5) "Probate? What do you mean probate?"

OK...this is totally selfish on my part. But before you die, I would like you to write a post that tells a joke. The punchline of the joke should be, "Probate? What do you mean probate?"

I don't care if you already know a joke with this punchline or if you have to make it up. And don't worry about your readership being annoyed that you are off-topic. How often do you step aside and tell a joke? Everyone loves jokes.

You see, years ago my best friend (see photo above) was waiting for an elevator in New York when the doors opened and a man said these words. The half dozen people in the elevator broke into raucous laughter and then went home, happy and satisfied.

But my best friend was left with the troubling puzzle of what joke could possibly be this hysterical while having that as a punchline. Many years have passed, and though my friend and his friends have searched for the joke, it has never been known to us.

Please help put my friend out of his misery.

[Photos: Brrrrrr! by Ack Ook, Earthly Paradise. by skyseeker, NBP Gold by covilha, used with permission under Creative Commons Copyright, and Bryan and me, by me.]

Typepad support is worst in the industry

2008-05-02T13:20:54-04:00

When it comes to dealing with a technical issue on a web site, Typepad ranks dead last for all of the dozen or so services I've used in the past ten years.

It appears that Typepad is over-charging their customers and providing no service. A major problem with my blog was finally addressed 39 hours and 14 minutes after I contacted support. By "addressed," what I mean is that Typepad finally got back to me and told me they couldn't help.

What takes longer than an hour?
I have had many technical issues with web sites in the past, ranging from design, to login problems, to complex database issues. I don't recall any of those problems taking more than an hour to resolve except for when my gmail was hacked. In that case I was dealing with a company that was known for being difficult to get hold of and gmail isn't exactly their main product.

Typepad's "great" service
But Typepad tells you how great their service is, and their main product is hosting of blogs.

From Typepad's 'About' page:

We’re here to help. Here at TypePad, we’re passionate about customer service. We provide customer support 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We want you to get the answers you need, and we’ve developed a huge Knowledge Base and a responsive online help system to make sure that happens.

They pretend to appreciate me
Pajama Market has been featured as a Typepad Featured Blog. They have also interviewed me in their Typepad Featured Interviews. Finally, Typepad uses my quotes on their testimonials page, one of only 14 quotes they use. So it's not like they don't know I exist.

Fix it or let me know you can't ASAP
My problem was very simple. I had screwed up a file (my style sheet) and I asked them to replace it with the version from yesterday, or a week ago (every web host I know of has daily, or at least weekly backups of all the web sites they are managing).

I was a little concerned when I found that the only way to contact support was through their trouble ticket form. No phone, no IM. When a day had passed and I hadn't heard anything, I attempted to contact them through their sales department. That left me even more frustrated. Read about it in yesterday's post.

Then I was even more concerned when I found there was no way to prioritize how bad my problem was. With other web hosts I've used, you get options like 'minor problem,' 'major problem' and 'web site crashed.' With no way to prioritize, it left me wondering if my "major problem" was going to be handled after thousands of stupid questions that support gets every day. Apparently it was. What if my blog was completely down, not working?

Simple fix not possible at Typepad
The response I received today was that they couldn't do what I was asking. If you are so inclined, you may read their response here. They couldn't do this simple thing that any other web host in the country could have done for me in five minutes. And it took them a day and a half to say so. What crap!

What am I paying premium prices for?
So the question remains, WTF am I paying for? $15 a month is a lot of money for a web site. If they can't do a simple thing like restore a broken page, I'm not sure what the value of the service is...especially if it takes them 37 hours to tell you.

WordPress is free, and if you host it at a company like GoDaddy, it will cost you under $7 a month, and that's with any domain name you want. You don't have to have a stupid one like pajamamarket.typepad.com (I pay extra to have a "regular" looking web site address).

My follow-up trouble ticket
Finally, I sent a second trouble ticket to the support desk this morning, wondering if anyone was working there? They responded in 35 minutes (one minute after responding to my other trouble ticket). Their response? Upgrade to the "Premium Package" at $30/month and service would be guaranteed within six hours.

So I can pay twice as much for my web site, and still not get service equal to GoDaddy's at less than $7 month. That makes sense. Here is that email:

On May 2, 2008 11:37:44 AM, you (Brian) said:

Hello? It's been 39 hours since I submitted ticket #801568. I haven't heard anything. Is there any support at Typepad???

On May 2, 2008 12:12:27 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brian,

We receive a large number of support requests each day and respond to them in the order they come in. If you require priority support, we'd suggest upgrading to Premium. Users at the Premium level have a guaranteed response time of six hours.

There are more details about the different levels here:

http://www.typepad.com/pricing/

If you'd like to upgrade to Premium, you can do so via Control Panel > Account Info > Upgrade/Downgrade Account.

We hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns.

Thanks,
Zalary

They get a customer who is very frustrated and not getting any action so they try to up-sell them. Great customer service Typepad.

[Photo: #151 27-11-2007 by worak on Flickr, used with permission under Creative Commons Copyright.]

How long will it take Typepad to respond to my trouble ticket?

2008-05-01T15:59:14-04:00

[UPDATE...5:09 PM. Here's a screenshot of my support ticket items.]

Typepad customer support nonexistent

2008-05-01T14:08:02-04:00

Typepad has still not responded to my trouble ticket. It has officially been 16 hours and 2 minutes since I placed the request.

I did a quick check of other popular hosts:
GoDaddy: 24/7 phone or email support
Rackspace: 24/7 phone or email support
SiteGround: Resolves 95% of all critical issues in less than 15 minutes...damn!

If this blog were hosted with one of those companies with a different blog platform...say Wordpress...my problem would have been long fixed.

Since there is no way to directly converse with the support staff (I submitted a 'support ticket' last night...that's one-way conversation only and I'm beginning to feel like I was talking to a wall), I contacted a salesperson at Typepad just now via instant message chat.

My hope was that they might relay to the support desk that I was...annoyed. Read the rest of this story if you'd like to see how that chat went (hint: I don't think I'm their favorite person right now).

Chat InformationPlease wait for a site operator to respond.

Chat InformationYou are now chatting with 'Kymberlie'

Kymberlie: Hi there. Are you having a problem registering for a TypePad account?

you: No, I'm having a problem reaching someone in support.

Kymberlie: At this time, our live support is set up only to handle TypePad registration issues.

Since you have a TypePad support question, please log in at typepad.com and click to your Control Panel > Help tab. There, open the New Ticket link to submit your support request. Your account information and history is available then to help with resolution, and support questions are handled in the TypePad help system.

you: I've done that

you: No one is responding!!!

you: 15 1/2 hours now!!

you: Ticket: 801568

Kymberlie: If you've opened a help ticket, someone will respond to you as soon as possible.

you: Why am I paying $15/month to wait 15 hours for support???

Kymberlie: If you require priority support, we'd suggest upgrading to Premium. Users at the Premium level have a guaranteed response time of six hours.

Kymberlie: There are more details about the different levels here:

Kymberlie: http://www.typepad.com/pricing/

Kymberlie: If you'd like to upgrade to Premium, you can do so via Control Panel > Account Info > Upgrade/Downgrade Account.

you: Wow! So I can twiddle my thumbs wondering when support will help me, or I can spend TWICE AS MUCH as I'm paying now to get some communication going?

you: That sucks.

Kymberlie: I understand your frustration, but at this time, support is handled through the ticket queue. Someone will assist you as soon as possible.

you: 15+ hours is not very soon and I'm very unhappy.

you: Especially since I don't even know if support can assist me.

Kymberlie: Support should be able to assist you with your issue. Please have patience and someone will help you as soon as they can.

you: It says right on the Typepad pricing page that ALL customers "enjoy professional service and support". http://www.typepad.com/pricing/

you: I wouldn't call 15+ hours in the dark very professional.

Kymberlie: Yes, and they you do, but we receive a large number of support requests each day and respond to them in the order they come in.

you: Would you say the service I'm getting on this issue is 'professional?'

Kymberlie: We appreciate your feedback, but if you have any further questions, you can open a new Help Ticket within your account. Since you do not have a registration question, I am going to end this chat.

you: :(

Kymberlie: Thank you for chatting. Good-bye.

Chat InformationChat session has been terminated by the site operator.

PS: If you're reading this after the issue was fixed, check out how awful the site looked here.

[Photo: Kids #43 by Jekkyl on Flickr, used wit permission under Creative Commons Copyright.]

Where is Typepad support?

2008-05-01T11:42:40-04:00

So...as you can see, I've messed up the layout of my blog pretty horrendously. This is what happens when you play with the style sheet and accidentally delete half of it without having a backup copy lying around.

Rather than try to reconstruct the many many parts that I deleted, I contacted Typepad last night through their support ticket service and asked them to replace my style sheet with the one that was being used on Tuesday.

I'm a little concerned though. That was about 13 1/2 hours ago and I haven't heard a peep from them. For most web hosts that I've dealt with, this wouldn't be too much of a problem. Usually, a web host will back up all the files on a server every few nights.

But I haven't heard anything one way or another. What exactly am I paying $15/month for?

Enjoy this "new" format while it's here. Limited time only (I hope).

[Top Photo: YELL AT YOU! by katiebate on Flickr, used with permission under Creative Commons Copyright.]

Flickr: spicing your posts up with other people's photos (legally)

2008-04-29T11:16:06-04:00

When it comes to photos on your blog, beware the copyright cops.

They will knock down your door, tie you to a chair, and explain in great detail why you can't use someone else's work, even if the creator of the work has been dead for 42 years, the work itself is now 80 years old, and the law keeps changing specifically so the piece in question can be kept under the ownership of a multinational corporation.

But I digress.

Flickr is your solution to finding photos for your blog legally, quickly, and funly. Not bad for a website that doesn't use "e"s.

Flickr allows users the option to post their photos under a cool standard called Creative Commons Copyright. This allows you to search for photos that you can use and even edit for your blog. Awesome dude!

Hold on partner, don't just start grabbing Flickr photos for your blog. Not all photos on Flickr are usable. Here's how to find the ones you want to use:

Search for a photo. For this article, I chose 'London Police.'
When the search results appear, look for the 'Advanced Search' link next to the search button and click it.
Scroll to the bottom of the 'Advanced Search' page to find the Creative Commons check boxes.
Check all three check boxes because you are using the photo commercially if it's for your small business blog, and you probably will want to "modify, adapt, or build" on the image. (I almost always at least crop an image before it gets posted, for example.)

Now hit 'search' and all of your results will be free for the taking. Just remember, when you use a photo you must:

attribute! This means telling the world who took the photo. It's best to provide a link directly to the Flickr page where the photo appears.
declare that the photo in question falls under Creative Commons Copyright. This means that just as you used the photo, anyone else can come along and use the photo as well, even if you've altered it or added to it. Fair's fair. To declare, link the attribution to the license page for the copyright located here.

Some of my favorite post photos come from Flickr. You can see three of them here, here, and here.

And finally, here's the attribution for my 'London Police' photo at the top of the article (the photo itself is also a link to the Flickr page):

[Photo: Untitled by .craig on Flickr, used with permission under Creative Commons Copyright.]

AWeber: the ultimate pursuasion tool

2008-04-28T14:53:16-04:00

I just found out that Satan himself uses AWeber for his maniacal ends. It's true, AWeber is so pursuasive that the devil is using it to build a huge database of potential minions.

Oh wait...you don't know what AWeber is? Let me explain...the quicker the better.

AWeber is a web site that offers "autoresponding" service. This is a form on your blog where readers give you their name and email address, and they are sent responses from you, automatically. Clever, huh?

Even though it seems that the Dark Lord is sending personal, timely messages to the weak of faith, they are actually just getting canned emails that one of Satan's copywriters (probably Brian Clark) wrote long ago.

Everyday, the poor soul waits impatiently for their next email from www.all-your-problems-vanish-I-just-want-one-thing-from-you.com, not knowing that the emails he is receiving are all personalized by AWeber ("Dear Elliot," instead of a generic, "Dear Soon-to-be-Damned,"), and even include a date-sensitive call to action such as, "Reply by Midnight, Friday, May 2, or this opportunity to have unlimited wealth, a date with Jacqueline MacKenzie, and the ability to fly will expire."

Think about how this can work on your blog? It's not just the eternally blazing that are taking advantage of automatically-sent emails. Businesses use them to send their loyal readers special coupons or buying opportunities.

Studies show that the average heathen takes at least 7 emails before signing away their soul with reckless abandon. AWeber sends 7, 10, 15 emails, or however many you want, automatically, effortlessly, and effectively.

I use AWeber because they are 100% legal (that means they are compliant with CAN-SPAM laws...or is it canned spam laws?), and readers can unsubscribe anytime, without any runaround.

The devil agrees:

I am not being paid to endorse AWeber automated emails. I am endorsing them because they work. AWeber makes things easy with video tutorials, step-by-step instructions, and guides and tips on how to make your mailings more and more effective. Give me your soul.

-Mephistopheles

[Photo: "Tonight, the part of Satan will be played by Uncle Kage" by dmuth on Flickr, used with permission under Creative Commons Copyright.]

Google Analytics: tracking your visitors, prospects, and sales

2008-04-23T14:09:24-04:00

Today is the first stat of the rest of your stats.

Every great journey begins with a single stat.

Make stats, not war.

Is it me, or does everything in life just seem to revolve around stats? Oh wait, it's not me, it's Google. That goofy "do no harm" company is at it again with a stat program that is totally armed and dangerous: Google Analytics.

The old way
I've been using Sitemeter for the longest time with Pajama Market. It's nice. It tells me how many visitors I have. What web sites directed those visitors to me. It gives me cool graphs to see the visitor numbers go up and down like my nieces hot air balloon. (Yeah, my niece is a hot air balloon pilot. What does your niece do?) What more could you ask for in a stat program?

The new and vastly improved way
And then Google came along and slapped me across the face three stooges like (or is it Marx brothers like? Or is it Honeymooners like? Quick, someone turn over to Nick at Nite and let me know!)

I pay like $5 a month for Sitemeter. Google Analytics is free. (Ok, sitemeter has a free version too, but then my stats are public. I don't want someone's dirty muggs on my stats.)

Flexibility
Sitemeter shows you stats for today, this week, this month, or this year. GA shows you stats for any time period you want (from when you installed them on your site). GA is flexible like that cool slinky you had as a kid. The metal one, not the plastic one. The metal ones are so much better...until you step on them by accident.

Google also has about 487 additional features that other common stats programs don't have. Roughly.

As an aside, can I just say how much Typepad's statistics totally suck? I mean for $15/month you would think they would throw their users a bone and let them track referral links for more than a day. Ha! Fat chance. Good thing there's Google Analytics.

Track your goals
The real gem of the Google Analytics package for the small business blog is the "goals" section. If you are selling something from your blog, you can track a specific landing page, a page where someone is sent after they buy a product from you, to determine how well your blog is meeting its sales goals. I can't find that in Sitemeter.

We want faster!
The one, tiny tiny downside to Google Analytics, is that it is not live. There is a lag of a few hours between someone visiting your site and that visit showing up on GA. A small price to pay for...well, free stats.

To sign up, visit Google Analytics and add their code to your blog. You can add the code to a sidebar item pretty easily.

Feedburner: streamlining your RSS feed

2008-04-22T09:42:12-04:00

Your blog comes with a feed. That's a fact Jack.

But, your feed is so vain, it probably thinks RSS is about it. And it's not.

Can your RSS feed tell you how many people are subscribed to it? Can it place useful links at the bottom of each and every blog post? Can it offer your readers services like sending your RSS feed to their email address?

I doubt it!

Unless of course you have signed up with Feedburner, the super-cool RSS feed totally legal growth hormone. It turns your wimpy vanilla feed into something that could star in Predator and then run for governor...that's governor of California and Minnesota!

And it's FREE, as in don't cost ya nothin'!

Easy to add
Add as many blogs as you want. Feedburner gives you the code to add a link or button on your site. Now when people look for your feed, it's a new-and-improved Feedburner feed that's part of your complete and balanced breakfast (yes, it's 8 am and I'm hungry).

Two super functions
I recommend Feedburner just because it tells you how many people are subscribed to your feed. That's enough for me to praise its glories. But the 'Feed Flare' is a tip top reason as well. That's where the cool links at the bottom of every post show up, such as 'Email This,' 'Subscribe to this feed,' 'Technorati Links,' etc.. And you get to choose what those links are.

Tons of extras
Have a podcast? Feedburner works with podcast feeds too.

Geotag your feeds if you want. Yep, that means telling the whole world your location so precisely that smart bombs could fly through your office window if they were programmed to those coordinates.

Feedburner can also give you visitor stats for your website. That's kind of cool, but later in the week we're looking at Google Analytics which makes Feedburner's stats look, well, erm, inadequate.

So if you haven't, sign up for free at Feedburner.com, register your blog and then add the Feedburner code to your blog. It's pretty simple, and you can always leave a comment here if something doesn't make sense. Cheers y'all!

[Photo: IMG 4861 by 7263255 on Flickr, used with permission under Creative Commons Copyright]

Opera: the browser that talks

2008-04-21T12:02:52-04:00

What? Huh? What did I say? I wrote what?

Yeah, that's what you'll think after you use Opera, the browser that talks (someone should trademark that phrase).

You don't write good
Lets say you're zooming along, typing 87 words per minute about cheesecake and BAM!!, you've got yourself a nifty blog post. Of course you don't notice that you wrote the word 'are' twice in one sentence, completely didn't type the words 'strawberry sauce' in another (although you thought them), and your grammar generally sounds like you just came off a legendary drinking binge.

Wait, there's hope. You click on the trusty Opera icon and the most ignored browser on the internet points out your ill-advised variations on the Shakespearean tongue. How? Glad you asked.

Opera's super-cool function
Highlight the text on any web page displayed in Opera. Right click on the text (Mac users do that Option+click thing), and choose 'Speak' from the menu. Opera will now blab about whatever text you've highlighted.

Unless you don't have speakers, or
Unless you don't have the volume turned up, or
Unless you can't hear anything like my brother who had his ear drum punctured from a rifle being shot next to his ear when he was a teenager (in all fairness, he was the one firing the rifle).

Assuming you can hear Opera, it will sound like a computer trying to talk. More like a Stpehen Hawking type computer than a HAL 9000 type computer.

Why this is cool
Sit back and listen and hear all the stupid typing mistakes you make, like repeating words, misspelling words (even though the spellcheck doesn't catch it because you've typed a completely different word by accident), and missing words.

I've reread something several times and not noticed a typing (call it grammar if you want to) mistake over and over again. But listening to a post once uncovers nearly all of the post faux pas.

I recommend saving your post as a draft before publishing it and running it through Opera before posting it live on your blog. If you don't, the original post with the mistakes is generally the one that gets sent out on your RSS feed even if you correct the mistakes later.

[Photo: Singing Spring by tanakawho on Flickr, used with permission under Creative Commons Copyright.]

Next week: the 5 blogging tools you can't do without

2008-04-18T18:44:11-04:00

No matter what program you use for your blog, there are a few tools that every blog should consider using to make their life easier, more efficient, and happier. Next week we'll take a look at five that I use and highly recommend to anyone who is writing a professional blog.

We'll take a look at:

I hope you enjoy the series.

Niche market glue: keeping your target audience coming back and buying more

2008-04-18T14:51:30-04:00

One of the biggest reasons (reason #2 on my list of 101 reasons to have a business blog) to have a blog for your business is to get return traffic. If your blog is any good, readers should return to read new posts again and again. Why? Because you have chosen a niche that they care about.

Blogs are the direct mail of the internet
When people care about a subject, they will read about it forever. The best direct mailing advertisements are often five or more pages long. They've discovered that customers will throw away a direct sales letter of any length if they don't care about the subject, but if they do care, they will read many, many pages.

This is critical because the more they read, the more emotionally invested they become with what you are saying. Longer letters create more sales. Some direct sales letters have been more than 20 pages long with highly successful results.

In today's world, a blog is that 20+ page sales letter.

Few readers will return to your blog
With great content and a subject your readers are interested and excited about, they will automatically become repeat visitors, right?

You already know the answer to this question. Most readers will never see your blog again. Even with the tools available to encourage repeat visitors, many will stumble upon your site once, find it somewhat entertaining, and then leave...forever.

We need to do everything we can to help them become returning visitors.

If you haven't already done so, here are the three vital tools to get tons more people coming back to your blog:

1) Visible RSS feed. Many people read blogs from their RSS reader instead of visiting each one individually. You must have an RSS feed available on your blog so readers can take advantage of this. Luckily, almost all blogging software creates the RSS feed automatically. It's your job to make it easy and provide a highly visible link to it.

2) Create a newsletter. Collect readers' email addresses so you can send them personalized information about your company and products. It might be a coupon, an announcement of a sale, or just a reminder to visit the blog. If you have no idea how to do this, it's very very easy. You place a form on your site that collects a person's email address, and emails get sent to them automatically, even if you have 10,000 people to email. All you have to do is write the email, and a program like AWeber takes care of everything else.

3) Offer something for free. Many people will sign up for your RSS feed or newsletter just because you're offering it. However, many more people will sign up if you are giving somethig away. Offer a free booklet or information that is exclusively available only if your readers sign up to the RSS feed or newsletter. Ideally, this is something that takes you an afternoon to put together, but has true perceived value to your audience.

I hope you enjoyed this week's niche marketing series.

[Photo: Release by MousyBoyWithGlasses on Flickr, used with permission under creative commons copyright.]

Back end products: the secret to niche marketing

2008-04-17T15:17:56-04:00

A back-end product is something you sell to a customer after they have made their original purchase. Back-end products often result in more profit than the original purchase did, and sometimes makes the original purchase worth giving away for free.

Diabolical Gillette razors
Long ago, when I entered my beloved dormitory called "Upper Tupper" at the University of Vermont for the first time, I was presented with a box that held all kinds of nifty stuff for students. One of these super-cool items was a Gillette razor. I still remember the wood handle with notches every few millimeters that provided a steady grip under wet conditions.

Before going to college, my shaving experience included the joy of the Bic disposable razor, the elation of using a Schick disposable (because dad was out of the Bics), and the mystery of the electric razor, seemingly designed to give you a consistent 4 o'clock shadow with every shave. At my first day of college, for the first time in my life, I held a serious shaving tool in my hands, and it felt great!

The diabolical mastermind that is the Gillette marketing department has been written about elsewhere in great detail. Suffice to say that by giving me a free $7 razor, they have probably made up for their "loss" a few times over. Their back-end product, the blades for the free handles, are now like $40 at Costco for maybe 20. I mean, holy crap, they're expensive.

Yet, I still shave with a Gillette, though it's now called the Fusion (not to be confused by the car...I made that mistake once and ended up with tire tracks across my face). I even buy the special Fusion shaving cream that matches the razor's oh-so-orange packaging (I swear the shaving cream is necessary for the best shave).

Back-end products and blogs
You are building an audience. Readers return to your blog because you are an expert of something they care about. Your niche is superbly defined to your market. You have your customers interested in your main product or they have already bought it. Now what?

You must keep selling people who have already proven themselves to be customers. It is so much easier to sell something to someone who has already purchased from you than it is to get someone new to buy something from you. Make use of this and don't stop until you've exhausted all the possibilities.

If you make chess pieces, sell the board, a carrying case, and then get creative. How about creating a chess clock out of the same wood the pieces are made from? How about making a checker set for the board you know they already have? Backgammon? Even Monopoly! Who wouldn't want a hand-carved monopoly set complete with a maple top hat? Your customers have already established themselves as game players who appreciate finely crafted artistic pieces that replace the ordinary. Exploit that.

I swear, if someone doesn't start a company hand carving chess pieces because of the posts I've written this week, they are totally missing out on a gold mine. I wish I could whittle!

Create the perfect products for your audience
The thing is that selling to people who follow your blog is easy. You already know what they're interested in. They are interested in what you are writing about, and who knows about what you're writing about better than you? Even if you aren't sure, you can always ask your readerswith a quick email survey, or even ask them in a post and let them answer in the comments.

Once you know what they are interested in, come up with products. And then...come up with more products. Keep selling to the people who already bought until 1) you don't get any response to a product, or 2) you retire to Vieques where you can swim with the glow-in-the-dark plankton.

[Photo at the top of this post: Line of Butts by Jeff Kubina at Flickr, used with permission under creative commons copyright.]

Niche marketing will make you an expert

2008-04-16T13:21:51-04:00

How would you like to be an expert in your field?

What makes someone an expert? The letters P, H and D come to mind, but lets not get too hasty. You hardly have to spend $120,000 and seven years of your life in order to be an expert in your field.

The secret of becoming an expert
Many years ago I met a man who told me a secret of becoming an expert. The secret was to pick a very specific field (a niche). If your field is specific enough, you can spend 3 hours a day reading, researching and studying on that subject and within two years you will be an undeniable expert in that field.

Sounds cheesy doesn't it? Yet this friend was speaking from experience. With no degree and no formal training, this man was giving lectures to medical doctors on the temporomandibular joint, better known as the TMJ, within a couple of years of personal study. I don't recall why the man had an interest in the TMJ to begin with. Perhaps someone in his family or even he, himself had a problem with the joint. The point is that he chose a very specific field and then did his homework.

One story inspires another
A little over a year after hearing this story of becoming an expert, I happened to be hitchhiking from Houston to Dallas (on my way home to Vermont!) when a businessman in a rental car picked me up for the four hour drive. As it turned out, he was an 'expert' in his field which was teaching a program called Lotus Notes. He told me he was one of the top 50 instructors in the country and had just finished a class with Motorolla in Houston. He also told me his income which was substantial.

Eventually, I asked him what his background was? Did he have a computer science degree? Did he work for Lotus (I think this was before IBM bought Lotus)? The answers to both questions was 'no.'

Then how did he get the job? He told me he answered an ad in the newspaper. Huh? He was making a solid 6-figure income from a newspaper ad? He sure was, and he went from knowing nothing about the program to being certified to teach it within six months. With further certifications, he became one of the most highly sought-after instructors in the country.

And finally, my story
A couple of years later, these stories inspired me to start using Photoshop. I happened to be working at a newspaper at the time and had constant access to the program. Every night, after I was finished writing stories, I would sit with the program and try to figure out something new. Within six months I was offered a job in the production department, and within a year I was leading that department.

But that was just the beginning. When I no longer found it easy to live off a newspaper salary, I inquired about teaching at a computer learning center. I was asked what programs I knew, and I said I was an 'expert' in Photoshop. It just so happened that one of the graphic design instructors had recently left the company and I had walked in at the right time. I was hired and taught my first class on Photoshop within a month.

But...I was hardly the 'expert' I thought I was. It turns out, Adobe, the company that makes Photoshop, actually grants the title 'expert' to those people that manage to pass a test on the software. I wasn't able to pass this test for another six months, but once I did, it meant a substantial raise and it allowed my training center to become an "Adobe Certified Training Center" which was worth thousands in sales. Within two years, I went from someone who had never touched the program to being an expert on it, placing me in the top 1% of users in knowledge and performance.

I don't know about being an expert on any given subject, but I do believe anyone can become one of the top experts in the country on any piece of software within two years. Part of the reason I believe this is because most every program substantially changes about every two years.

My new 'expertise'
Over the past couple of years I have been doing two things: 1) writing this blog, and 2) playing poker. While poker playing eventually failed, this blog has given me some notoriety. Because of the blog, I have been mentioned in the USA Today, Fortune Small Business Magazine, and MSNBC.com, and have been interviewed for Entrepreneur Magazine. All of this without a degree in marketing, without a degree in anything, only because I chose a niche and kept learning about it for weeks and weeks, eventually months and months.

My niche was small business blogging. A couple dozen people were writing about business blogging, but no one was specifically targetting small businesses when I started this blog. As a result, members of the media have emailed me and called me to ask my opinion on blogging because they see me as an 'expert.' This has had the direct result of my blog reaching thousands of people that wouldn't have seen it.

If I had been another blogger writing about business blogging, I would have been hopelessly lost in the noise of the other bloggers who were already established. Choosing a subset of this general subject allowed me to leapfrog over many of these writers when it came time for a reporter to look for an 'expert.'

Find your niche. Read about it. Write about it. Become an expert in no time.

[Photo: Archer by Snake3yes at Flickr, used with permission under creative commons copyright.]

Niche marketing and the 80/20 rule

2008-04-15T19:47:23-04:00

The 80/20 rule:

80% of your profit comes from 20% of your products
80% of your sales are obtained by 20% of your sales force
80% of your time is spent dealing with 20% of your business
80% of your hassles are caused by 20% of your employees (especially problematic if you are the sole proprietor)

Sound familiar? People like to talk about the 80/20 rule in business, as well as everyday life. I wonder how accurate that ratio really is? It certainly seems accurate, and barring a study from Princeton to the contrary, I'm willing to accept the 80/20 rule as a reality in business.

When it comes to niche marketing, I think the most important aspect of the 80/20 rule is that 80% of your profit is made by selling 20% of your products. There is usually one or two products that really shine, relative to the others.

The reason to bring up the 80/20 rule in the first place is to take another look at our products, make our top selling product even better, and stop wasting our time on the 80% of the products that aren't giving us nearly as good results.

80/20 rule in action
Take your product...hand carved chess pieces, for example. Even with a highly unique product such as this, there is probably an 80/20 rule that emerges with sales. It may be a certain type of wood, or certain size chess piece totally dominates your sales. The question is how to capitalize on this.

It's easy. If it's a certain type of wood, start using pieces made of that wood in all of your promotional material. Get it on your home page, your brochures, photos of it in your blog posts, just hammer all your materials with it. If it's a size that sells great, mention the benefits of that particular size, show photos of the pieces next to familiar objects so people really connect with the exact size of the piece.

Your customers know why they want the product better than you do
Maybe you don't know any benefits of that best-selling size. If not, you need to ask your customers, because there is some reason that particular size is dominating your sales.

This product is selling because it is fitting a niche. Your product may have competition and it may be selling better or worse than your competitor's product, but if it's selling at all, there are reasons in the mind of your customers to buy your product over another. If you can't decide what these reasons are (and very few people are gifted with mind reading talent), you have to actually ask the people who buy what you're selling. Follow up surveys are ideal for this purpose.

Don't hide the benefits
They may be buying simply because they are unaware your competitor is selling the same thing for $10 less. More likely is that there is something your product has that the other doesn't. Find out what it is and then YELL in your marketing about this benefit. This is your niche, the one thing that makes your product better or unique. Let everyone know this great thing as soon as they visit your website.

On top of that, find other ways to capitalize on this benefit. If you are selling a huge amount of cherry chess pieces, you certainly should be selling chess boards with cherry squares and offer a carrying case made of cherry as well. In fact, every year starting around September, that customer better be getting marketing material from you reminding them you have a cherry carrying case for the pieces they bought, and it might make a good Christmas present if they let their family know they want it.

The 80/20 rule is like a divining rod toward your niche. Small business people often start a business around a certain product, and then completely change their business when another product they've developed suddenly and surprisingly takes off. When this happens, regroup and focus on this winner.

[Photo: Massacre by daily dog at Flickr. Used with permission under creative commons copyright.]

Finding your niche in 7 steps

2008-04-14T19:11:51-04:00

What does your business do that no other business on the planet does? What distinguishes your customers from everyone who isn't your customer? Knowing the answers to these questions will greatly improve your marketing strategies, making your advertising more effective, less expensive, and far easier to produce.

So without further delay, lets find your niche...

Step 1
What does your business do? We have to start with the number one basic thing about your business. What does it get paid money for? If there is more than one thing, what is the main thing it gets paid to do (see the article on the 80/20 rule later this week to see why this is important)? Be very specific. "We sell hand-carved chess pieces made from a variety of woods that the customer selects."

Step 2
Who are your customers? Again, be very specific. Many of you won't really know who your customers are. You may have a store or office, and meet most of your clientele face-to-face, but what do you really know about them? It's time to find out.

The reason big companies conduct customer surveys with the Gallup Poll that cost tens of thousands of dollars (I know because I used to work there), is because the data they discover tells them exactly who their customers are and why these people have chosen their company to do business with.

"My customers are 30-50 years old with household incomes between $80k and $120k, they typically have college degrees, and are most like the 'Achiever' segment of the VALS psychographic chart."

Step 3
Who is your competition? Ideally, you will have no competition. That's one of the definitions of being in a niche, you are the only company filling a very particular need. However, lets be realistic. You have competitors that are offering the same products or services to (what you think) is the same audience.

More competition is not necessarily a bad thing. If there are a lot of companies selling similar products, it may very well mean that there is a huge market for that product. On the other hand, if no one else is selling what you are, perhaps it's because no one wants what you're selling.

Naturally, you would like to be the only company selling something that a huge amount of people want. On the internet, a huge amount of people does not mean everyone. When you market to everyone, no one wants your product. When you are able to send a meaningful message to someone who is actually interested in what you have to offer, you have a powerful marketing strategy.

"My competition consists of major retailing web sites selling hand-made chess sets, but no individual artisans."

Step 4
Differentiate. What sets you apart? You must answer this question: why should someone buy from you and not your competitor? Most business owners can not answer this question, or if they do, they say the same old crap like, "better prices," "better service," "faster," or "higher quality." Guess what? Those answers don't fly. They are the same garbage every single customer hears from every single business they come into contact with. Furthermore, they probably aren't true! How could everyone say these things and all of them be true?

Instead, either figure out what sets your company apart, or start doing something that sets it apart. Jay Abraham, one of the most successful marketers on the planet, calls the thing that makes your company different your "Unique Selling Proposition." It sums up in one sentence the thing that makes your company stand apart from all the competition you have. When customers know the exact reason they should choose you, it sets you way apart from all the others who aren't offering any particular reason for that customer to choose them.

"We are the only place to get one-of-a-kind hand-carved chess pieces directly from the artisan."

Step 5
Now that you know what makes your company different, is there a market for it?

It's time to do a little legwork and see what the chances of your company succeeding are. Start off by searching for your product on Google. 'Hand carved chess pieces' produces 625,000 results. Yikes! The good news is that there are a lot of sites, so that probably means there is a lot of interest for the keywords we searched for.

Next, we might try Wordtracker. This service estimates how many times a search term is hunted for each month. Keyword Discovery offers a similar service. These websites not only estimate how many searches people do in a month, they give you an idea of how many people are competing specifically for the keywords you want to focus on.

My first venture into the world of internet marketing was writing an instruction guide for a video game. I decided to publish it myself and market the guide online. My first attempt drew absolutely no sales. After doing some research, I targetted a website for the specific phrase 'America's Army strategy.' Within a couple of months, my site was the #1 search result on all the major search engines pulling in over 100 visitors a day from search alone. Although the traffic wasn't huge, it was highly targetted to my product and sales took off. Using the keyword tools from Wordtracker, I was also able to target phrases such as 'America's Army walkthrough,' 'America's Army hints,' etc. Before I spent hours building a web page for these terms, I already knew they were getting searched for, and I knew no one else was targetting these keywords.

Another great tool that helps find keywords is Google Adwords. If you suggest a keyword phrase, Adwords will find synonyms for you and give you an idea of how popular they are, and how many people are paying to have advertisements appear for those keywords.

Finally, another great weapon to determine your market is to visit forums that have something to do with your industry. If I can return to my video game guide, before I wrote a guide I visited numerous forums looking for help to play the game better. While there were tons of discussion about the game, no one was actually writing any specific strategies to beat the game. This was the reason I wrote the guide to begin with. I was so frustrated not being able to find help, that I knew tons of others must be feeling the same thing.

Before you settle on a product, read the forums and see if you notice a need that's not being met. It may be a golden opportunity waiting for just the right business owner to pounce on.

Step 6
Fill that market! Now that you know there is a market for your product, fill it. You must reach those people who actually want to buy your product.

Online, the holy grail of marketing is getting ranked highly in search engines, partiularly Google. If your product or service truly has a niche following, there will be little competition standing in your way for good search engine rankings.

Having a blog is one of the best search engine tools on the internet. Search engines love websites with lots of content that are updated constantly, and that perfectly describes a good blog. Going beyond that, there are all kinds of techniques that may be used to make your website friendlier to search engines. There is an entire industry devoted to helping people do just that called SEO or search engine optimization. You could hire a company to help you with SEO, or research ways to boost your site's rankings on your own. I highly recommend Aaron Wall's SEO Book because he constantly updates it to keep pace with new programs the search engines are using.

In addition to SEO, another way to get your name in front of your customers is through SMO, or social media optimization. SMO covers 'social networks' like Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. On these sites, you create 'friends' based on similar interests. For example, there may be a group called 'chess players' on Facebook, and that would be a great group to join if you made chess pieces. Or you might load photos of your chess pieces to Flickr and join groups about chess, while tagging all of your photos with keywords that would be found by people searching for chess pieces.

Step 7
Don't lose your customers! After you finally get in front of your customers and they visit your website, don't lose them. Way too many websites allow their readers to visit once, and then never hear from them again. Use a simple program to keep your customers coming back over and over. If they bought once, they are astronomically more likely to buy from you again compared to a random person off the street.

The two tools you should make use of are RSS feeds and a newsletter. RSS feeds are automatically created by blogs and allow people who are interested in your writing to read your posts in their blog reader. It may sound bad that they aren't coming to your site to read a post, but it's actually a good thing. See my tutorial on RSS readers to discover how they work and why they're good.

The other tools is a newsletter. A newsletter is where you collect the email address of a reader and send them something of interest to their email every once in a while. This can be a powerful marketing tool as it can be fully automated and designed to lead a reader to a sale over a long, no-pressure, period of time. The service I use for newsletters is called AWeber and it helped grow a list of over 40,000 readers for my strategy guide a few years ago.

The point is that once you've dragged your customer to your site, hook them in so they return.

I hope you've enjoyed this first part of our Niche Market Week. In the next article, we'll take a look at the 80/20 rule.

Niche market week

2008-04-14T15:08:19-04:00

Inspired by my last post on going after niche traffic, I decided to expand on the niche market concept this week by writing a series of articles on niche marketing. Here is what I have planned:

I hope you enjoy the series!

Blogging Dos #14: Go after niche traffic

2008-04-11T17:39:44-04:00

Niche traffic on your blog is the holy grail of having a blog in the first place. If you get thousands of visitors a day who don't care about what you're selling, it's wasted. If you get 100 visitors a day, five of which turn into life-long customers, you've got a gold mine.

Here's an example. Digg.com is a "social media" website that generates tons of traffic for anyone who makes it to one of their top tier pages. Think of Digg like a news website where the readers vote on each story, the stories that get the most votes get closer and closer to the top tier pages which is where most of Digg's visitors are. Getting "dugg," as it's called in the industry, can literally drive tens of thousands of people to your website in a matter of hours and has been known to crash servers hosting unprepared websites.

The problem is that very few of these visitors ever return or buy anything. Furthermore, it's a lot of work and luck to get your page "dugg."

Instead, work to get a steady flow of traffic from people who are genuinely interested in the subject matter you care about. Slowly, but surely, you will build a monster list of repeat customers who will likely subscribe to your RSS feed, or join your newsletter.

There are even a couple of examples of what not to do on Pajama Market. There are two articles off the top of my head that I shouldn't have wasted my time on. One was writing about a YouTube video that featured tons of online "stars." The other was writing about my Gmail getting hacked. Although these were fun to write, and they've generated some of the biggest traffic to this site, they bring in only casual visitors that don't really care about blogging for their small business. The time I spent writing the articles could easily have been put to better use.

I should have been writing a killer article on blogging, leaving comments on someone else's great blog post, or working on a video

[Photo: richardmasoner at Flickr. Used under creative commons copyright. Click photo to see more of his work.]

My office

2008-04-10T15:27:28-04:00

I just spent 20 minutes installing my new white board. It cost about $15 and is 5' x 4' in size. It rocks! If you want to make one yourself, use this guy's website for instructions:
http://www.johnmurch.com/2007/10/20/diy-whiteboard-on-the-cheap/

Where the heck has Brian been?

2008-04-09T14:42:04-04:00

Hi All!

I'm fascinated to see that there is still a steady stream of traffic visiting Pajama Market considering I haven't written an article since last September. I'm sure many of you are wondering, "What the heck happened to Brian?"

Well, I've had this distracting dream for a few years now, and I finally decided to pursue it full time. I began playing poker seriously about a year ago and found my way to the local casino in Milwaukee last summer where I did pretty well.

The thing with poker is that it's a lot like chess. I played chess fairly seriously about 12 years ago, and there is an incredible amount of study involved to become really good. Poker is very much the same way. The math involved is fairly complex, and there is also a huge amount of psychology to study. That's where my attention began wandering over a year ago, and it soon took up all of my time. For example, just the drive back and forth to Milwaukee was three hours.

In December, I was fortunate enough to win a tournament in Milwaukee, earning $12,400 on an entry fee of $200. This spurred me to make a major change in my life. I packed my bags and headed east to the largest casino in the world...Foxwoods in Connecticut. I chose Connecticut over Las Vegas simply because my family lives in Vermont, a mere four hours away.

The experiment went badly. The bankroll I had reserved for poker disappeared in about two and a half months, and I resigned to come back to Wisconsin to reevaluate what direction I wanted my life to go in.

One of the biggest influences was my good friend Bryan, who reminded me of all the passion I held for marketing, particularly online, and how much of a stick-in-the-mud I was when I was playing poker. It's true that blogging, marketing, advertising and writing all get me very pumped up, and his lecture gave me something to think about on the 20-hour ride home.

The result is that I'm typing today instead of shuffling casino chips. If you are a new visitor since I last wrote in September, welcome! If you are a returning visitor, welcome back!

I am definitely changing things with Pajama Market. I will no longer be reviewing small business blogs for a 'blog of the day.' Frankly, it's just too time consuming. Instead, my goal is to give small business owners tools to really maximize their marketing efforts online (in the 'pajama market'). Feel free to heckle me for this decision, but I think you'll like the results.

Incidentally, if you are curious about my experiences at the Foxwoods casino, I recorded my adventure in a blog (how else?) called A Fox in the Woods.

Cheers,
-Brian

Andrew Keen, the enemy of blogging, uses terrible example

2007-09-25T18:18:52-04:00

Andrew Keen is the author of The Cult of the Amateur, a book that takes a very critical view of Web 2.0 technologies.

In the article titled Blogged Down in this month's Entrepreneur Magazine, Keen describes how blogging is destroying big brands in the marketplace.

The article mentions a "damaging crusade" against Dell Computer by blogger Jeff Jarvis. The article then quotes Keen on ways to protect yourself: "don't allow anyone to post on your site anonymously."

Um...gee, Andrew. Jarvis published under his real name on his own blog. If Dell wasn't letting anyone publish anonymously on their blog, it wouldn't have made a bit of difference.

Give the article a read. It's short.

Also check out the reviews of his book on Amazon. This may be the first time I've seen a bestselling book rate 2.5 stars. If you look carefully, you will find my review of the book, which isn't complimentary.

Introduction to Facebook

2007-09-24T18:56:44-04:00

I finished an introduction to Facebook for businesses today for Work.com. The article is officially titled, "Guide to Facebook Basics for Your Business."

Check it out and feel free to give it a "10" rating.

Printable Gmail Shortcuts

2007-09-24T18:46:10-04:00

Printable Gmail shortcuts aren't super-easy to find, so I thought I would go ahead and make some. This is off-topic as far as blogging is concerned, but since I went through the work, I thought I would share the results with you in the hope it might increase your productivity.

I wanted them printed out because I didn't want to toggle back and forth between web pages. Since they appear on a webpage, they aren't necessarily print-friendly.

My solution was to copy and paste the info into a Google Doc, change the width of the tables to fit nicely on a printed page, and print 2 pages per sheet, black and white. It came out nice and I published the actual page I printed, so if you ever want to print these for yourself, just visit this page (Print-Friendly Gmail Shortcuts) and print away. Here' how they look:

Ahoy! It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day (ITLAPD)

2007-09-19T10:18:15-04:00

Arrr! That's right, it's the time of year to keelhaul grammar. September 19 is always International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and this yar be no diff'rent. This be about thar only Holiday celebrated liberally on blogs.

You'll be readin' a history o' the Holiday har.

Tis arly, yet bloggers a'ready in thar spirit be Twisted Oak, Savage Chickens, and of course, thar Official Osprey Publishing Blog.

And as last year, I didn't bother wit' thar spell check today.

Note: Photo provided by Brett L. under Creative Commons Copyright.

Warning: Are you missing out on Work.com's resources?

2007-09-18T18:49:29-04:00

I just finished writing a couple of articles for Work.com. If you haven't visited the site, it's a tremendous resource for businesses. They have tons of articles, most written by highly-credentialed experts in their fields.

My latest articles are:

Check them out and let me know what you think.

BlogRush creating legitimate blog traffic free?

2007-09-18T14:41:30-04:00

On September 9, a new service to drive traffic to blogs was created called BlogRush. The idea is that if you display their widget on your blog, your blog headlines will appear on other people's blogs. Supposedly, your headlines only appear on "related" websites, but I found the categories that BlogRush uses are somewhat limited. For example, I chose "Marketing" for Pajama Market, which makes sense, but is a pretty big category.

Here is a video that explains how it works:

The service is free.

I'm going to try it for a few weeks and see if it has any real impact on my traffic.

Note: Links in this post are referral links. Traffic photo provided by SqueakyMarmot under Creative Commons Copyright.

The first place to advertise your blog

2007-09-13T15:17:04-04:00

Advertising your blog to build traffic is almost as important as creating and maintaining the blog to begin with. So, what's the first step for promotion?

Get new business cards with the blog address on them.

This is one of the cheapest, and most effective ways to advertise to the people who are most likely to benefit from reading your blog...your current customers, and people you come into personal contact with.

The rule of thumb is that it's something like ten times more expensive to get a new customer than it is to get a current customer to continue buying from you. So don't spend money trying to get totally new people to visit your blog until you have done everything you can to advertise to people you are already doing business with.

Later, you can publicize your blog by getting your blog address in the signature of your email, leaving comments and trackbacks on other's blogs, or advertising your blog through online ads or with conventional advertising.

But first, get it on your business card.

Taking out the trash

2007-09-12T00:08:54-04:00

I spent the day getting rid of comment spam that has accumulated over the summer. As strange as it seems, I have barely glanced at Pajama Market in several months now, thus the huge gap in posting dates (April to September?).

I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome back those of you who wondered where I was, and to welcome new folks who have found the site.

Oh...where was I? Well, on a journey of sorts. Exploring new horizons, trying some new things, and getting a different perspective on what has happened in the past few years and on where things are going.

I hope you won't hold my absence against me too badly. The change was good, and now it's time to get back to work.

Cheers.

Complete List of Internet People with links from Meth Minute 39

2007-09-07T22:06:29-04:00

Here's an idea after my own heart. This blog is about other blogs. The video at the bottom of this post, is a viral video about other viral videos. Brilliant.

What does this have to do with business blogging? Well, using video is an emerging technology for marketing, and these videos are all examples of attracting millions of visitors. It might be something to look into.

But who are the people in the video? Here's the list, in order.

1) Dramatic Chipmunk

2) South Park (The Spirit of Christmas)

3) Star Wars kid

4) Numa Numa

5) Back Dorm Boys

6) Napster Bad

7) Winnebago Man (called Winnebago Guy)

8) Bert is Evil

9) Goatse (ewww...hint: it's the first alternate London 2012 drawing. For this one, you may need the Wikipedia definition.)

10) Jib Jab's This Land

11) G.I. Joe "Public Service" spots (which I find particularly hysterical)

12) You're the Man now Dog

13) We Love the Moon (another personal favorite...eventually made into a Quiznos commercial...yes, I am weird)

14) Andy Milonakus, The Super Bowl is Gay

15) Ask a Ninja

16) Danny Blaze

17) Lonely Girl

18) House of Cosby Clones

19) Chad Vader

20) Ze Frank

21) Lazy Sunday

22) Kid From Brooklyn

23) Bubb Rubb

24) George Lucas in Love

25) Kramer's racist remarks (Mike Richards)

26) MySpace the Movie

27) Chuck Norris List (or Facts)

28) The Geriatric

29) I Kiss You guy

30) Stanley Kubrick audition

31) Leroy Jenkins doesn't listen

32) Homestar Runner

33) Grape Stompin' Woman

34) Paris Hilton Sex Tape (I'm not touching that one)

35) All Your Base (Are Belongs to Us)

36) Diet Coke and Mentos

37) OK Go, Here it Goes Again

38) The Shining movie trailer (as if it were done by Cameron Crowe, director of Jerry Maguire and Say Anything)

39) Sneezing Baby Panda

40) Dick in a box

41) Amanda Congdon of RocketBoom

42) Yacht Rock episodes

43) Snakes on a Plane

44) Insane German kid

45) Otters holding hands

46) Dax Flame

47) Psycho bride cuts hair

48) Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondent's Dinner

49) Little Superstar

50) Lightning Bolts from LARPing dudes

51) Kelly's Shoes

52) Oprah zapped by Tom Cruise

53) Weird Al, White and Nerdy

54) Kevin Federline playing Popozao

55) George Washington Rap

56) Ashlee Simpson's Saturday Night Live non-performance

57) Boom goes the dynamite

58) Lily Tomlin in a fight

59) Peanut Butter Jelly Time! or Family Guy version (which has even more views on YouTube)

60) House with Christmas lights

61) William Shatner (Captain Kirk) "sings" Elton John's Rocketman

62) Evolution of Dance

63) Bar Fight (Ok, there are a lot of bar fight videos, but I can't seem to find one where a drunk guy in a green shirt and white hat sucker punches a guy in a rugby shirt).

64) Webcam (Again, a lot of webcam candidates, but I didn't happen upon a blond, brown-shirted dude that may be the love child of Arnold Schwarzeneggar and Brian Dennehy).

65) Tay Zonday, singer of Chocolate Rain

66) Zombie kid likes turtles

What's frustrating is not knowing exactly where #63 and #64 are from. It's like a murder mystery trying to figure it out. If anyone knows, please let me know.

Here's the vid:

What is a blog?

2007-09-06T18:48:22-04:00

For your viewing pleasure:

My Kurt Vonnegut post

2007-04-13T17:06:44-04:00

This post has nothing to do with business blogging, so it will be short.

By coincidence, I began reading Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan five days ago. Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. I just finished the book. Here are the last lines of the book:

"Get in," he said

"And go where?" said Constant.

"Paradise," said Stony.

"What's Paradise like?" said Constant.

"Everybody's happy there forever," said Stony, "or as long as the bloody Universe holds together. Get in, Unk. Beatrice is already there, waiting for you."

"Beatrice?" said Unk, getting into the space ship.

Stony closed the airlocks, pressed the on button.

"We're--we're going to Paradise now?" said Constant. "I--I'm going to get into Paradise?"

"Don't ask me why, old sport," said Stony, "but somebody up there likes you."

Goodbye Uncle Kurt.

RSS and Newsreader Tutorial, Part 5: Using the OPML to load and export multiple feeds

2007-03-26T14:12:32-04:00

Suppose you want to switch Newsreaders. You don't like yours anymore or perhaps you just want to try a different one. You might be thinking, "What a pain it's going to be to add all of my feeds all over again from scratch."

That's what OPML was made for.

OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language and is used to import or export all of your feeds from one Newsreader to another. You can use this to take your feeds to a different RSS Newsreader than you are currently using, or you can use this to share your RSS feeds with other people. (For a more detailed explanation, see the Wikipedia article on OPML.)

In your Newsreader, there will be an option in your menus for 'Export.' Use this option and a file will be placed on your computer in OPML format. If this option isn't available as a link in your Newsreader, it is probably available in your drop-down menus. You know the ones at the top of your Newsreader program...File, Edit, View, etc. In Bloglines, the option is a link below my list of feeds and is called "Export Subscriptions." Nearly every type of Newsreader has this option available.

Once the file is saved, you can email the file or put it on your website to share with other people. To use the file, simply open the Newsreader and find the option for 'Import,' again either a link, or available in a drop-down menu.

Importing will load the feeds into your new Newsreader, although you will have to recreate the file/folder structure you were using in your old reader.

Please let me know if you have any questions with the basic use of OPML.

RSS and Newsreader Tutorial, Part 4: Loading the news feed into your newsreader

2007-03-20T13:18:33-04:00

Certain types of websites create an RSS feed. What types? Nearly every blog, most news websites, many search websites, and "social media" websites where the public is constantly updating the content of the site. A great example of a social media website is Flickr.com where the public can upload and share photos. This website creates an RSS feed that allows you to subscribe to photos from, say, Janesville, Wisconsin. That way, whenever someone uploads a photo and "tags" the photo as being a photo of Janesville, I can automatically be informed of it in my RSS newsreader.

Regardless of what type of website you want to keep track of, in order to track it you need to load its RSS feed into your RSS newsreader. There are hundreds of RSS newsreader programs, most of them are free to use. My current favorite is Bloglines because there is nothing to download (it is web-based) and because it is straight-forward.

Keep in mind that no matter which newsreader you choose, you are not locked into that newsreader. There is a very easy way to transfer all your feeds from one newsreader to another which I'll talk about in Part 6.

How to get the feed into your newsreader
As I mentioned in the last part of this series, browsers are making it easier and easier to subscribe to your favorite websites' RSS feeds. If you use Firefox or Internet Explorer and find yourself on a page that produces an RSS feed, you will see the RSS icon appear in the address bar. Clicking on this icon allows you add the page's feed to your favorite RSS reader, assuming your favorite RSS reader is in the list that Firefox or IE provides.

What if your reader isn't in the list? Don't worry, you can always add a feed manually.

First, you need to find the feed for the website you wish to track. We tackled this in Part 4: Identifying the RSS feed on a blog, news website, or search.

But what...exactly...is a feed?
The feed itself is a webpage. What you are loading into your RSS reader is the webpage's address. When you find a feed on a blog and click on it, you might notice that you get taken to a plain text page with very little formatting that contains the same content as the blog you were reading. This page is the feed.

What's special about the feed is that it is automatically updated whenever the site it is linked to is updated. If a new story is added on a blog, it's feed automatically adds the new story as well. It's like a second version of the original website.

The difference between a website and its feed can be seen in the formatting. A feed has to meet very strict criteria that includes plain text, date and author information, and simplified formatting. This standardization is what allows it to be viewed in a hundred different RSS readers. But this also means most of the formatting and design of the original website disappears. A story from one blog looks pretty much the same, format-wise, as a story from any other blog.

Manually adding the feed
Once you find this page that displays the feed for a website, copy the URL of the webpage. In your RSS reader, find a link called "Add feed" or something along these lines. It will open up a form that asks you to type in the feed's URL. Simply paste the feed you have copied and your feed is now loaded into your RSS reader. Some readers may ask you to configure the feed just the way you like it, but this is essentially all there is to it.

1. Find a feed
2. Copy the URL
3. Click 'Add Feed' in your RSS reader
4. Paste the URL

Finally, some RSS readers don't even require you to locate the specific web page that contains the RSS feed. You can just use the URL for the homepage of the site, and the RSS reader is smart enough to search the website until it finds the feed associated with it. Not every reader works this way, but between manually loading the feed, using Firefox's and IE's shortcuts, and using newsreaders that find the feed for you, you will have a solution that produces tons of content for your reading pleasure in no time.

Next time we will look at transporting your feeds from one newsreader to another, or adding someone else's list of feeds into your list using a format called OPML.

RSS and Newsreader Tutorial, Part 3: Identifying the RSS feed on a blog, news website, or search

2007-03-14T12:26:38-04:00

The three main types of websites that use RSS (really simple syndication) technology are blogs, news websites, and search engines. These are not the only websites that use them, but these are the websites with the most use for a business owner, at least right now.

Furthermore, while most blogs, news sites, and search engines use RSS, not all of them do. So how can you tell if the site you are looking at offers an RSS feed for your Newsreader?

Some RSS Newsreaders are able to detect whether or not there is a feed available on a website. Simply copy and paste the web address (URL) of the page you are on into your Newsreader, and it will tell you whether or not this page has a feed. Beware though, not every Newsreader is capable of doing this, and even if the website has a feed, the particular page you are on may not indicate the existence of the feed to your Newsreader.

For example, when I am on the internet, I use the Google toolbar in my Firefox browser. There is a 'Subscribe' button on the toolbar that appears orange when there is an RSS feed available for the page I'm on, gray when there isn't.

Clicking the button automatically adds the feed to one of seven Newsreaders that you select from a list. In addition to the Google toolbar, Firefox has a similar RSS feed indicator in the address bar:

Internet Explorer (version 7+) includes an RSS button near the tabs:

If you haven't noticed a common theme here, it's that a webpage with an RSS feed is represented by the little orange square that is now a standard on the internet.

If the options above are not indicating the page you are reading has an RSS feed (or if you don't use these options), you can usually manually find the feed on the page if it offers one. For example, on this blog, you will find the icon for the feed in the sidebar under the heading 'subscribe.'

Subscribe means one of two things on a webpage: 1) the page has an RSS feed and this link leads you to that feed, or 2) this page can be subscribed to through daily emails. Sometimes it means both. Usually this is the link to the page's RSS feed.

Some webpages don't use the standard icon to indicate a feed. This is usually due to the author of a blog using one type of RSS Reader (like My Yahoo! for example) and believing that most of the world uses the same RSS Reader (not a good thing to assume). In this case, the blogger might use the Yahoo! feed icon instead of the standard icon:

While this may mean something to those readers who actually use My Yahoo! to track RSS feeds, it means nothing to the rest of us who track feeds with a different reader. As a result, you may find sites that list multiple icons:

This approach tends to clutter a blog and isn't as useful as the author of the blog might hope. Displaying the standard RSS icon is just fine, more elegant than this collage of icons, and isn't likely to frustrate the person who uses the one RSS Reader you have forgotten to include.

Finally, RSS may not even be called 'RSS' on some webpages. It may be called 'Atom,' or 'RDF,' or 'XML' on some webpages. Don't be fooled, they are still RSS, just specific types of RSS. Every major Newsreader can use these types of feeds and produce the same end result with them.

Some websites even offer you a choice of two of these technologies (RSS or Atom, for example), but your RSS Reader really doesn't care which you choose. Why do they offer a choice? Because they can. In the old days (2 years ago), it may have made a difference in what the feed would produce. These days, it doesn't really matter.

When you click on one of these links, whether it's the RSS icon, the word 'Atom', or the word 'subscribe,' you are usually brought to the RSS feed for that website. It looks like the page you were on, just stripped of some of its format. When you reach this page, copy and paste the web address (URL) of this page and load it into your Newsreader. This is the page the Newsreader is going to display from now on. Load 20 blogs, or a Google Blog search, or the top stories from your favorite paper this way, and you may never have to visit the actual sites they came from ever again.

Next time, we'll look at exactly how the RSS feed is loaded into your Newsreader.

What is comment spam?

2007-03-09T12:19:38-05:00

El Jefe of El Bloggo Torcido left a comment the other day that included a link back to his blog. This got me thinking about comment spam. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't consider El Jefe's comment as comment spam, but I realized it might be helpful to write about identifying and pointing out why it wasn't comment spam. [note: you can see the comment I'm referring to, and some witty banter, at the bottom of this post.]

Comment spam is when someone leaves a comment on your blog for the sole purpose of creating a link back to their blog. The theory is that this creates a link to their blog from another website and will boost search engine rankings, which is somewhat true.

The gray area is that it is OK to include a link back to your blog in the comments of another blog as long as it contributes to the conversations being discussed on the post and in the comments.

That's why El Jefe's comment is perfectly fine, although it might not obviously appear that way. Taken out of context, it looks like El Jefe's comment is a blatant attempt at comment spam. However, El Jefe is a frequent commenter on PJ and when he says to check his blog out for great examples of what I'm talking about in my post (which happens to be the use of comments!), he's adding value to my readers because his blog is a great example of how readers use comments to create a conversation.

Had I not been familiar with El Jefe and his blog, I may have flagged his post as comment spam. This means the comment would be deleted as 'junk' and his computer's IP address would be banned from ever leaving a comment on this blog again (fairly straightforward things to do on a Typepad blog). But since I've "spoken" with El Jefe many times, I know he's leaving the link to add value to my post, not for selfish reasons. Well, maybe a little for selfish reasons, but that's fine because it still adds value to my readers.

The real problem comes when computer programs are leaving spam comments. Your blog might end up with 100 comments a day that aren't even being written by real people, just to add links to someone else's website. Fortunately, the major blog platforms use methods to thwart such nastiness. Typepad has a nice feature called CAPTCHA, for example, which requires you to type in a secret code that is displayed on the monitor to ensure you are a real live human being.

As a result, most blogs on Typepad and Wordpress receive very little comment spam, and when we do, it's pretty easy to take care of.

Finally, the proper way to publicize your blog on other people's blogs is to leave good, constructive comments. As long as you are adding value to the conversations, it's pretty acceptable to add a link back to your blog if there is a particular post you've written that ties into the subject of conversation. Keep in mind that every comment you leave does not have to contain a link back to your site. Just add one when it's helpful and the numbers of visitors on your blog will steadily grow.

RSS and Newsreader tutorial: Part 2, Reading Feeds in a Newsreader

2007-03-09T10:15:50-05:00

As I mentioned yesterday in Part 1, a Newsreader emulates email programs by providing a folder structure in the left-hand column, and the content of feeds in the wide right-hand column. Here is an example of the Newsreader Bloglines where I have a few feeds loaded on the left-hand side, and I am displaying the content of the "Small Business Blog of the Day" feed in the right-hand column (click on the image for a larger view).

In the left-hand column, you can see that your feeds may be organized into folders. For example, I have a local news folder that contains the RSS feeds for the Google News search for "Janesville, Wisconsin." Any time something gets posted to Google News with those keywords, it appears in my folder. Also, I have loaded the RSS feed to my local newspaper back home in Vermont. Many newspapers feature an RSS feed on their websites so you can do this. Unfortunately, my local paper in Janesville does not, so I use the Google News search instead.

You will notice that in addition to the Burlington Free Press feeds and Janesville Google News feed, there is a feed called "AES." This stands for Applied Ecological Services, the firm my girlfriend works for. Using RSS allows me to track any news about her company as soon as it hits the web.

Notice that AES is displayed in bold with the number (35) next to it. Bold indicates there is something new to read in this feed and 35 is the number of new stories in this feed. This is just like how a folder tells you there are 35 new emails from a person in your email program.

Clicking on the feed displays the content of the feed in the right column. Notice in the first graphic that the content of "Small Business Blog of the Day" (the feed for Pajama Market) displays the same thing that is on the Pajama Market website (for March 8, 2007). After I save this post, this post will appear in the "Small Business Blog of the Day" folder about 15 minutes after I've saved it.

As you can see, the right column is kind of like a browser. It displays the same information that's on my blog, but with some of the design stripped away. For example, it doesn't display my logo at the top of the page, nor does it display my navigation bars. It only displays the most recent story I've written. That's what an RSS feed is, it's a stripped-down version of the stories you write on a blog. The RSS Newsreader displays this stripped-down version.

After I've read the story in the right-hand column, the story will disappear. This means the stories that appear are always new, things you haven't read yet. If you want to bring up an old story, you can always find it by searching, or by changing a setting that allows you to read stories you've already read.

This feature is great because you don't have to remember if you've read something or not. I've been on blogs where I get half way through the blog post and realized I'd already read it in the past. But if I read the post in my RSS Reader, I know the post is fresh.

Sometimes you won't be able to read the entire post. The author of the post will often have an option to allow the entire post to display in RSS Readers, or to only allow the first 200 words, or even just the headline to appear. I hate it when they do this because it requires you visit their site to read the whole story which very much defeats the purpose of using RSS feeds with RSS Readers.

Finally, although the Newsreader displays a stripped-down version of the story, it still includes the photos and the active links for the post. In fact, you can always click on the headline or the name of the feed's source and you will be brought directly to that blog/news website/search. But the beauty of a Newsreader is that in many cases you don't have to leave the reader to read the post. You can skim it and quickly go the next post on your list, reading several blogs in the same time it would otherwise take you to read just a few.

In Part 3, we'll take a look at how to find an RSS feed on a blog, a news site, or on a search website.

Happy Birthday to Pajama Market!

2007-03-08T19:02:11-05:00

Holy Cow! I nearly forgot, and then it hit me this afternoon. We're a year old! On March 8, 2006, I wrote my first PJ post about English Cut. Where has the time gone?

[Photo is from Kaptain Kobold on Flickr and used under Creative Commons copyright]

RSS and Newsreader tutorial: Part 1, What is a Newsreader? (Why would I want to use one?)

2007-03-08T18:44:35-05:00

A Newsreader, also called an RSS Reader, is a program that allows you to read dozens of blogs, news websites, and searches, in the time it would normally take to read a couple.

The main thing is that Newsreaders save time. A lot of time.

How a Newsreader works
For most readers, they simulate an email program by using a two-pane system, folders in the left pane, content in the right. Folders contain the feeds you are tracking. When someone writes a new post in the feed you are tracking, it becomes bold and displays a number next to it showing how many posts are unread. This is just like receiving an email in your email program.

When the reader shows that someone has written a new post, you simply click on the folder containing that feed and the post appears in the right hand pane. You don't have to actually visit the blog to read the post, the content of the post appears in the reader. In this way, you can quickly skim headlines and posts without actually having to visit dozens of feeds individually.

Every blog produces an RSS feed (though it may be called an Atom feed, or RDF feed or XML feed among others). In addition to blogs, these RSS feeds may be found at news websites, searches (Google News, Technorati), and with other websites where content is constantly being updated or changed by its users (Flickr for example). Any site that has a feed can be loaded into an RSS reader.

The benefit of tracking blogs this way is obvious...it cuts down on the time it takes to read several blogs at once. But using the RSS feed for searches can be even more useful.

For example, do a search for your company in Google News. This will list any articles written recently that include the name of your company. This search has an RSS feed that you can load into your Newsreader. Now, whenever someone writes an article that includes your company's name in the future, you will automatically receive a notice in your Newsreader that there is a new article.

Use this method to keep track of articles about your company, your competitor's company, or for individuals. Also, use this method to track keywords that important to your industry. Whenever someone writes an article containing those keywords, you know about it. It's completely customizable news.

Two great Newsreaders: Bloglines (web-based), and Great News (download the program to your computer).

In Part 2, we'll take a close up look at the components of a Newsreader to see how it works.

How to use RSS and newsreaders: 5 part tutorial

2007-03-08T15:38:04-05:00

A new client of mine inspired me to write a short series on RSS and newsreaders. The client hired me to set up a newsreader for their company so they could keep track of any news related to their company and their competitors.

The tutorial will appear in four parts:
Part 1: What is a newsreader? (why do I want to use one?)
Part 2: Reading feeds in a newsreader
Part 3: Identifying the RSS feed on a blog, news website, or search
Part 4: Loading the RSS feed into your newsreader
Part 5: Using the OPML to load and export multiple feeds

Hopefully, this tutorial series will be thorough and clear enough to understand. I will rely on my readers to ask me questions in the comments if something doesn't work for them.

Welcome Fortune Small Business Magazine readers

2007-03-08T08:10:14-05:00

A funny thing happened on the way to the office today...Ha ha! That's kind of funny since I work at home.

Anyway, Pajama Market has grabbed the attention of another major media outlet...Fortune Small Business Magazine. I'm not sure if the magazine is available on newsstands or is subscription only (I haven't had any luck locating a copy), and I only found out I was in it because a new client called me up as a result of the blurb.

Since I couldn't locate a copy of the magazine, the client was kind enough to scan the blurb and email it to me. I wasn't interviewed for the magazine, they simply printed an excerpt from an article I had written at the end of January. I had actually forgotten that Fortune called me in February to ask my permission to print the excerpt.

So for any readers who found PJ through FSB, "Welcome." I began this site to help small businesses create an effective blog to promote their company. If you have any questions about blogging, ask me (leave a comment or send me an email) and I'll post my answer in this blog.

I've included a photo from my "office" window this morning. The white speck at the top is the moon. I hope the snow is gone soon.

What's a Permalink?

2007-03-07T19:53:25-05:00

Des Walsh mentioned the other day that when he first began blogging he wasn't real sure what a permalink was and how it was different from a trackback. Here's my confession...when I first started blogging I had no idea what either of these were.

I went over trackbacks a couple of days ago, so today I wanted to give you my straightforward explanation of a permalink.

When you write a post on a blog, it gets sent to the top of the home page. If someone else reads your post and wants to link to it, there's a problem, because if they link to the home page, a few weeks from now your article will no longer be on the home page!

The permalink comes to the rescue. The permalink is the website address that goes to that one individual article you have written. That's the link the other blog should use to link to your story. It will always go exactly to that one story.

You can find the permalink to a blog post at the very bottom of the blog. It's usually a link called "permalink" and oftentimes is near the "comments" link. Also, the title of the blog post is often the permalink to the story. To find out, just click on the title. If this brings you to a page that displays the article all by itself, it's the permalink, and you can copy and paste the URL in the address bar and use that to link directly to the individual story.

Sometimes the title isn't a link to anything. This used to be the case with Typepad (until they changed their format just a couple of months ago) and is still the case with some blogging formats. To make it even more difficult, some blogs don't call the permalink a "permalink." It might be the date and time at the very bottom of the article. If you can click on the date and time and it brings you to a page that displays only that blog post, it is a permalink.

Finally, the permalink can be deactivated on a blog, usually by accident. This stinks because it makes it extremely difficult to link specifically to that story. The last thing you want to do when linking to a story is make your reader go to a page that has 100 posts on it and make them wade through it to find the exact post you are writing about.

You can find out how I use permalinks to create links in my blog posts by reading my article called, Blog Dos #5: Link to websites within posts.

Comments: a business blogging weapon

2007-03-07T01:39:30-05:00

Comments are one of the real weapons of blogging. "Traditional" websites don't have them. This is the reason that blogs create conversations instead of lectures.

While attending the University of Vermont, I sat through dozens of lectures in auditoriums with 200+ other students. It wasn't very personal, and frankly, they weren't very interesting. Each year, the classes got smaller and smaller until you were actually having a conversation with the professor and the other students. This is the time where you could ask questions, contribute your own ideas, and actually learn something.

Blogs are the equivalent of the "senior year" on the web. No longer are customers forced to sit through the lecture of a website where all you can do is receive the information the website wants you to, which usually isn't very much.

Blogs allow you to participate by clicking the 'comment' link found at the bottom of every article on a blog and adding your own thoughts and asking questions. Sometimes the author of the article will answer your question or further the conversation, and often times other readers will do the answering and the continuing.

This feedback results in tremendous value for your company when your readers:

ask questions you haven't thought of yourself
point out problems in your products or services you hadn't noticed
give you ideas for new products
start developing a relationship with you that eventually translates into sales

Negative Comments: the greatest weapon
The big fear my clients have with comments is the negative comment. No one likes to be criticized, particularly in such a public way. I will ask the client at this point if they are committed to customer service and they always answer, "Of course."

"Than it isn't a problem," I tell them. After I let them have a funny look on their face for a few seconds I explain that negative comments can be the best weapon of all. They allow you to address a problem in a very public and permanent way and show the world what a good guy/gal you are. Furthermore, your other readers will often jump in and defend you without you having to lift a finger yourself. And that's an awesome feeling when your customers come to your own defense!

Finally, should a comment go over the line and include profanity or really offensive language, you can always delete it (you can even pre-screen comments before they are 'live'). But don't delete the ones from folks who are just upset for a valid reason. Address their concerns and let the comment and your response become a testimonial of how committed you are to having happy customers.

Janesville Noon Rotary

2007-03-05T21:25:51-05:00

I spoke to the Janesville Noon Rotary this afternoon. I was given about 20 minutes to speak about blogging which meant I had to talk fast and the President still had to cut me off so the Rotarians could get back to work!

My favorite part of the talk was receiving my pen. Every guest speaker at the Janesville Rotary receives a Parker ball point pen as a "thank you." The Parker Pen Company was started in Janesville, so there is a reason the Rotary does this. I think it's a great personal touch.

The crowd was really great even though I was warned that a dozen or so Rotarians were retired and didn't even own a computer. I didn't notice anyone falling asleep, which is good news, and the crowd asked me a ton of questions after the talk. It was really fun to hear the immediate questions folks had after their first introduction to business blogging. It reminded me of all the questions I had when I started writing about business blogging.

Finally, if you ever happen to find yourself in the Janesville, Wisconsin area, visit the Rotary Gardens. This is where the Rotary holds their meetings and includes the amazing botanical gardens built by the local Rotary for the community. The gardens were one of several wonderful surprises I discovered shortly after moving here, and for anyone visiting, they are a must-see attraction.

Blog Dos #13: Use Trackbacks

2007-02-20T11:07:06-05:00

One of the most difficult parts of blogging for me to explain to clients is trackbacks. A major reason I'm writing this post is to clarify it for myself and provide a resource for my clients down the road (in the future I can just tell my clients, "Read my post on trackbacks," instead of trying to explain it to them on the spot, LOL).

What is a trackback?
It's best explained by telling you when you would use trackbacks...

Let's say you're reading someone else's blog. You find a post that you really like, and it inspires you to write a post on your own blog that elaborates on one of the ideas from the other blog. You will probably include a link to the other blog somewhere in your post that your readers will use to expand their knowledge of the subject and see where your inspiration came from.

But wouldn't it be cool if the readers of the other blog somehow knew you had written something further about that post's subject?

You could leave a comment on the other blog and link back to your new article to send readers to your story. That's very risky though, as this is often considered to be blog spam and may get you banned from ever leaving a comment on the other blog again.

Instead, you would use a trackback. A trackback places a short excerpt of your blog post on the other person's blog to let their readers know you have written further about this subject. The blogger at the other blog either approves the trackback, if they think it's appropriate, or deletes it. If they approve it, part of your blog post actually appears on their blog!

An example of a trackback
Des Walsh has added a trackback on my post titled A Perfect Blog Post. You will see the trackback at the bottom of the post, just above the comments. He wrote an article that linked back to my post, and adding a trackback allows my readers to know about it and read more at his blog.

How to use a trackback
First, keep in mind that the author of the other blog has the power to approve or delete your trackback request. For this reason, I recommend always linking to their post somewhere in your article. That's only fair, right?

Second, the trackback feature has to do with a blog's programming. Some blogs offer trackbacks, some don't. Typepad and Wordpress, for example, offer trackbacks. You will know if the blog you are writing about offers trackbacks if the word 'trackbacks' appears at the end of the post next to 'comments.'

Third, click on the word 'trackbacks' on the other post and it will show you other posts that are using a trackback with this article (if there are any), and it will also show you the trackback URL. Copy this URL.

Finally, add this URL to the trackback section of the post you are writing. Whether you are using Typepad, or Wordpress, or another blogging platform, there is usually a an area to type in a trackback URL. This is where you paste the URL you have copied.

In Typepad, this area is labeled "Send a Trackback to these addresses" and appears below the area where you type the body of your post.

After you submit a trackback, the author of the other blog usually has to approve it before it appears on the other blog. This can take 5 minutes or it may take months.

But once it's active, you have created a two-way street for your readers. Your readers find the other blog through a link, and their readers find your blog through the trackback. Very cool.

Formatting photos on your blog post

2007-02-19T14:02:25-05:00

El Jefe from El Bloggo Torcido (one of my favorite small business blogs...a winery), left a comment this morning on how difficult Typepad is to format photos in a blog post.

I wanted to address this issue in a post of its own, because it's so important. Specifically, El Jefe expressed frustration with a particular post he wrote on February 18 that contains several photos (warning: this post contains some, ah, adultish material). The problem was getting the text to wrap correctly around the photos was a pain in the butt.

Do you remember when the first line of a paragraph used to be indented? If you pull a book off your book shelf and read it, you will see that the first line of paragraphs is always indented to give the reader a visual reference to begin a new paragraph.

But something happened on the way to the web. It turns out that creating code to express that first-paragraph-indent on a webpage is very difficult. So over the years, a new convention appeared, which is simply to have a line space between paragraphs when you are reading something on the web.

Now you might be asking what all this has to do with photos? It's the same problem...displaying photos and how text wraps around photos is straightforward in print, but exceedingly difficult on the web. The web, and particularly blogs, have come up with its own rules as a result.

For this reason, I recommend not getting too frustrated over formatting, and keep to a few simple conventions. After all, people are not reading your blog because it looks cool. They are reading it because the writing, and the photos, are cool (at least to them). I don't know a single person who returned to a slick-looking blog because they liked the graphics!

One or two small photos
Feel free to wrap text to the left or right of photos if there are only one or two photos in your post, and there is enough room so that your text doesn't look scrunched. I like to leave at least a 200 pixel wide space for text if I'm going to have text next to a photo.

A large photo or multiple photos
When a photo is large enough to take up most the width of your blog post, then turn off the "wrap text" option in Typepad so that text automatically goes beneath the photo instead of next to it. (Technically, the text begins next to the photo at the very bottom, but hitting 'enter' once drops it below the photo.)

When using multiple photos to tell a story (a very effective type of post on a blog), don't try to wrap text. It's a pain, and you spend a lot of time trying to get the photo size just right so that the text next to it applies just to that photo (I believe this was the source of El Jefe's frustration).

Instead, introduce the photo with a paragraph, then add the photo beneath the introductory paragraph. Turn the 'text wrap' feature off, and write the next paragraph to introduce the next photo. Repeat.

This is a linear approach, no fancy formatting, but it's very effective and easy for a reader to understand. More importantly, it's easy for the blog writer to do and contains zero frustration.

Captions
If you are using "text wrap", save your captions for the end of your post. If you have turned "text wrap" off, you can add photo captions directly beneath each photo.

I've probably opened a can of worms here, so if you have a particular post that you have a question on, let me know in the comments and I'll take a look.

Remember, the main goal is to keep your blog posts simple, and stress-free. If writing posts is painful, you will never enjoy blogging enough to have a successful one.

How to add Google search to your blog

2007-02-17T11:00:00-05:00

Adding Google search for your blog is easy. Real easy. See the search box on Pajama Market? It's a Google search, but it only searches Pajama Market. Google is great and returns very accurate and relevant results for your search terms.

Not everyone can use Google search on their blog. You can only use it if Google is currently listing your blog in their regular searches, a process called "indexing." As long as your blog is "indexed" by Google, your blog can use a Google search. Being indexed by Google can take up to six months, but many blogs get indexed much faster, sometimes in as little as a week after they've been started.

Finding out if your blog is indexed by Google
Simply visit Google.com and do a search for your blog's name...like "pajamamarket". If your blog appears for this search, or for any search, then your blog has been indexed. Another way to tell is by checking your site statistics. If you notice that visitors are arriving at your blog because of a search they did in Google, then it must mean you are being indexed by Google (this is often how bloggers first discover that Google has indexed them).

Add the Google Search Typelist for Typepad blogs
To place a Google search on your blog, create a new notes-style Typelist called something like "Search" and add the following code for the Typelist's item:

<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search">
<div>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr><td>
<input type="text" name="q" size="20"
maxlength="255" value="" /><br>
<input type="submit" value="Search" /></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">
<input type="checkbox" name="sitesearch"
value="www.pajamamarket.com" checked /> only search PJ<br />
</td></tr></table>
</div>
</form>

Replace "www.pajamamarket.com" with your blog's URL, and replace "only search PJ" with "only search YOUR BLOG'S NAME." Click "Save" and you've just created your Typelist. After activating the typelist and deciding where in your sidebar you would like the search to appear (I recommend the very top), you can start using your new search tool.

That's it. You're done. Enjoy!

(PS: If you need some instruction on activating or ordering Typelists, just let me know in the comments. I'll be happy to point out where to go.)

Writing a blog post is as easy as writing an email

2007-02-16T09:19:16-05:00

I received a comment this morning from Gabe where he made the point that "usability is key" for clients having success with a blog. If a blog is difficult to post to, it's not going to have a lot of posts.

I have found that many of my clients are intimidated by a blog when I first introduce the idea to them. So I pull out my favorite phrase to explain how hard it is:

Writing a blog post is as easy as writing an email.

And I mean it! Take a look at the Typepad interface:

Like writing an email, there is an area to write your post, some text formatting options for things like bold or italic, and a button to add a photo (similar to adding an attachment in an email). Click save at the bottom (like clicking 'send' in an email), and BOOM, you've created a blog post.

Of course this assumes the blog already looks the way you want it to look, has the features you want it to have, and is getting the exposure you want it to get. Also, you need to have something to write about.

But that's why you might hire a blog consultant (me) to design the blog, maximize the exposure tools, and even show you where to find things to write about. In the end, all you should have to worry about is writing the post, which really is as easy as writing an email.