Back when I was just getting started blogging I made a mistake that I think many new bloggers make - I started blogging about blogging because I wanted to share my excitement, my new experiences with my developing audience.

Most new bloggers who get sucked into that morass quickly veer into another vapid tangent, namely the area of corporate blogging.

“OMG, this is so easy and effective - I can’t understand why every small businesses doesn’t start doing this right away!!”

I did it - I wrote about why corporations should have blogs without any first-hand experience as a corporate blogger. Thankfully, I’m not the first blogger to drink the Kool Aid and make that mistake.

Fast-forward to August of 2008

I’ve been working as a corporate blogger for a small software company since May. I have certain performance goals that have to be met each month (subscribers, sales) and my performance has been solid. However, this job has not been easy - not nearly as easy as many overly-enthusiastic newbie bloggers make it out to be.

What I’ve come to realize is everything that I ever thought about what it’d be like to blog for a business is wrong, and today I’d like to share some of the insights I’ve learned over the start of my career as a corporate blogger.

There are a number of myths perpetuated about corporate blogging that need to stabbed in the heart with a wooden stake, so let me begin:

Myth #1 - In the eyes of readers corporate blogs are just personal blogs authored by a corporation

Personal blogs are very straightforward - an individual or a group of individuals author posts around a central set of ideas with the objective of getting as many people to read the posts as possible.

Corporate blogs are a different animal. Personal blogs have a significant advantage - they’re authored by humans. Readers trust humans, not faceless, monolithic organizations like corporations.

Therein lies a whole set of challenges that rarely occur in the sphere of personal blogging - corporations have to continuously demonstrate their humanity just to catch up to that basic level of reader-author trust that personal bloggers take for granted.

Humanizing an organization, no matter how small, is a delicate operation which requires a lot of forethought and gruesome trial and error.

In addition, corporate bloggers have the additional problem of anti-corporatism innate to social media - people are more hesitant to subscribe to, link to, comment on, and vote on corporate blogs. That’s a fact. Unless a company is part of the “cult of free,” its corporate blog is going to have a much harder time finding the same kind of success as personal blogs.

Myth #2 - Corporate blogs are just like TechCrunch, ZDNet, CNet, TechRepublic, Etc…

The biggest misconception about corporate blogs is equating them to major news and commentary blogs like TechCrunch. Here’s the difference: even if TechCrunch and ZD Net are incorporated, those blogs are the business, not marketing mechanisms for the business.

They have the advantage of not having to use the content of their blogs to sell stuff - they have advertising to take care of that for them. The bloggers at all of those big publications rarely have to put themselves in the crosshairs at the risk of being called “corporate shills.”

Corporate bloggers run a much larger risk - they can’t distance themselves from their own monetization activities like how advertising-supported blogs can. Instead they have to put themselves into the fray and use their content to lead potential customers towards their own products while still retaining the trust and confidence of their audience. This is hard.

Myth #3 - Producing a blog post for a business takes about as much time as a personal blog entry

It doesn’t take that long to write a personal blog entry, and heck, a business blog isn’t really all that different - it seems pretty reasonable to assume that it’d take about the same amount of time to produce a blog entry for a corporate blog, right?

NOTHING could be further from the truth. Blog entries for corporations are time-consuming and expensive, because a corporate blog has to be 100% consistent with all of the company’s other marketing messages and because the corporate blog has to be treated as though every customer will read it.

In addition, there are some very tough objectives that have to be accomplished by corporate blogs - you want to use your content to lead people to eventually buy your product, but you just can’t shill it at non-customers mercilessly. Each piece of content requires careful planning and coordination at a level beyond anything I have ever done for Marketing Ninja, and it’s hard to describe just how difficult and time-consuming that coordination and planning really is.

When you write a personal blog entry you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want without significant ramifications, so long as you don’t do something absurd. When many of your readers happen to be paying customers the entire situation changes - they’ve given you money and now you owe them something of value - you can’t get away with writing any thing that comes off the top of your head, your readers often won’t let you.

Myth #4 - Traditional marketing tactics for personal blogs work just as well for corporate blogs

Ugh. I wish. Read point #1 again for background on this area. Here’s what doesn’t work for corporate blogs:

• Signing up on a social media account and submitting your own stuff  - doesn’t necessarily work well for personal blogs, but it’s not even an option for corporate blogs.
• The “Beg and Thank” StumbleUpon model - Most social media experts advocate a system that amounts to asking people to give votes to your article and then thanking them afterwards in order to retain them. If I think this is a bad practice for personal blogs (I do) then I also think that this behavior has the potential to be a PR disaster for corporate blogs.
• Commenting on Other Blogs - I’ve made it work for my corporate blog, but only because I have a methodical way of determining what blogs to comment on - I read a blog for a full calendar month before I even consider commenting on it. I don’t think most other corporate bloggers are nearly as diligent or proactive.
• Blog Carnivals - IMHO, blog carnivals don’t jive well with the required clean-cut, professional tonality of most corporate blogs. I’m sure there are exceptions, but that’s just my take.
• Classic Linkbait - List posts, link posts, gimmicks, and other types of classic linkbait are actually counter-productive for corporate blogs. Professionalism and engaging the right kinds of visitors are the two most important aspects of running a corporate blog, not blanket broadcasts. Some companies can actually pull off some pretty ingenious linkbaiting - Blizzard’s April Fools’ gimmicks are a fantastic example, but bear in mind their audience. What works for video game manufacturers doesn’t work for people who make CRM software.

Myth #5 - Getting paid to be a corporate blogger is just like getting paid to do your hobby

The biggest misconception of all - once you get paid to do your “hobby” then it is no longer your hobby. It becomes your profession. When you spend most of your time formulating blog posts, integrating other marketing activities into your blogging, coming up with content ideas, getting the IT team to make changes to the blog engine, and so forth then some of the original “fun” of blogging dies on the vine.

I enjoy my job immensely, but for different reasons than I enjoy personal blogging. I enjoy my job because I get to educate potential and current customers on the best practices for using our products and I see sales generated as a result; I enjoy personal blogging because it’s an opportunity for me to share my experiences and learn from them.

The satisfaction from professional blogging and personal blogging are two entirely different things and I am sure that there are some people who cannot make the adjustment from blogging as a hobby to blogging as a professional. Bear that in mind if you’re ever faced with the decision of doing this stuff full-time.

To Conclude

There are likely a ton of other myths that I’m forgetting to include on here, but I’ve spent enough time ranting about how big the difference is between “perceived corporate blogging” and “actual corporate blogging.” The point is that there are a lot of things that personal bloggers take for granted which corporate bloggers have to claw and fight for. So to all of you people who remain blogging hobbyists and personal bloggers - count your blessings and stop taking some of those nice bonuses for granted.

What none of these bloggers talk about, however, is the subject of why marketers hate bloggers.

I’m not in the mood to write out any lengthy anecdotes this morning, so I’m going to stick with a simple list.

3 Reasons Why Marketers Hate Bloggers

1. Some demand bribes - In Lifehack’s “How to Get a Blogger to Promote Your Product” the author mentions that bloggers like to receive gifts, but not bribes, from companies that want reviews for their products. What the author doesn’t mention is how many bloggers will demand some form of payment up-front. “Oh that’s cool, want me to mention how your software can actually solve many of the IT problems that I often write about? Maybe if you comped me a free site license I’d consider it…”
2. Some bad reviews become vendettas - If someone from the New York Times or the Washington Post gave one of my products a bad review they probably wouldn’t log onto Amazon, copy and paste the bad review and give me 0 stars, repeat the exercise for CNet, Yelp, and so on. They wouldn’t log-on to Twitter and tweet about their bad experience with my product, and so forth. Some bloggers act vindictively when they have a bad experience. If you take a look at some of the bad reviews I’ve given you’ll notice that my bad review starts and stops with Marketing Ninja.
3. Some write reviews with a clear, personal bias - Reviews are meant to be an objective account of one user’s experience with a product; a number of bloggers don’t fundamentally understand the concept of “reviewing a product on its own merit.” I’ll read reviews of new product offerings by Dell or Microsoft and somewhere towards the middle of the article I’ll read “yes, Popfly is a moderately average web service but Vista still sucks and the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft have set the software industry back two decades.” What does Vista have to do with Popfly? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Many bloggers can’t shake off the old habit of writing things from a purely personal angle and in the process end up writing a review that is simply unfair. Vendettas against companies, previous product offerings, and resentment about prior experiences with the producer in question should be left at the door when reviewing a product.

What are the other reasons why marketers hate bloggers? Feel free to add to this list.

There’s a great post on LifeHack today by Dustin Wax about "How To Get a Blogger To Promote Your Product." I originally began this blog entry as a comment on LifeHack in response to Dustin, but it quickly became evident that I’d need to dedicate an entire post to the subject.

As someone who is both a blogger and a marketer by profession I can appreciate both ends of the situation:

• Bloggers don’t want to lose integrity or audience members by appearing to simply shill product that any marketer throws at them and
• Marketers want to move product and use bloggers to inexpensively reach new potential customers.

From A Blogger’s Perspective…

I’ve been asked to review some stuff before on the behalf of marketers and occasionally I’ll review products, like Trackur, because I think it’s a product that my audience might want to know about.

A Good Encounter with a Marketer

I like getting asked to write reviews for products and services that fall within my domain as a blogger; for instance, I was politely approached by a publicist for a major technical books publisher who wanted me to review one of their new works on ASP.NET, a technology that I was blogging about at the time I was approached.

They sent me a free copy of the book and I wrote what I thought was a pretty honest review and in return they offered to send me another book of my choice from their library - I can’t remember if I ever followed up or not.

Either way, I’d classify that encounter as a positive one because:

• I felt like the marketer had done his homework - I felt special because the company had picked me out, of all people, to review one of his company’s new texts that applied directly to my field and my blog; it’s a nice compliment and it’s something that a lot of bloggers would like to experience every now and then.
• The product review was applicable to my audience - When I write a review I can’t just do it because I want to feel acknowledged by a marketer; I have to know that it’s something that my audience might be interested in. The product was applicable to my audience, but I don’t know how well my review went over with them given that I didn’t get many comments.
• The marketer got some recognition for his book - The marketer ultimately got what he wanted - exposure, however minor it may have been.

A Bad Encounter with a Marketer

I’m not going to call any specific companies out on this, but let’s just say that most marketers don’t know what the hell they’re doing when it comes to approaching bloggers. I’ve been asked to review products that have ZERO to do with my blog, interests, or my audience; this is what Wired’s Chris Anderson was complaining about in his directive against PR people.

LifeHack has already produced a great list of the things that marketers can do to reach out to bloggers more effectively, but I’d like go on record and explain some of the things that bad marketers do to irritate bloggers:

• Don’t do their homework up-front - All many marketers see when they look at a blog are traffic figures and opportunities to convert; they don’t stop to consider the preferences and tastes of bloggers and, more importantly, the bloggers’ audiences.
• Are relentless - "Don’t take no for an answer" is an old sales philosophy which has no place in connecting with bloggers. If a blogger tells a marketer "no" on the subject of doing a product review and the marketer keeps pushing then he might end up creating a P.R. disaster for his own company, depending on the blogger’s temperament.
• Don’t let bloggers know that they are appreciated - Many marketers forget their manners and don’t say "please" or "thank you." This is irritating, impersonal, and it often makes some bloggers feel belittled.
• Aren’t willing to take bad news - Too many marketers want to exercise full control over what the bloggers write and what the bloggers say about his company’s products. If a blogger writes an honest review, a review which may include some opinions that are not marketer-approved, the bad marketer’s first response is to perform damage control and sometimes this includes weak attempts to discredit the blogger.

A lot of marketers simply don’t get how to treat bloggers properly. However, as you will see in my post on Monday, there are plenty of bloggers that try to pull some pretty sketchy stuff with marketers like me. Have a good weekend.

On Monday I answered a question from a reader regarding how to locate relevant blogs within your domain, and today I’m going to cover a second question from that same reader.

Again, I’m going to share my insight as well as ask my readers for theirs.

Speaking of time consuming, what sort of presence do we need to have on other blogs before we begin requesting guest writers, etc? Should I go out and register for as many sites as possible and begin systematically commenting on anything I find interesting?

Only add comments that contribute value to the conversation

I’d recommend that you start establishing a presence on other, established blogs in your domain as soon as possible, but only comment if you’re able to provide additional value to the conversation. Commenting on other blogs can potentially hurt your blog’s brand if done incorrectly, so make sure you’re adding value whenever you post a comment.

Spending money on guest writers

As far as the sort of presence you need to ask for guest writers, it depends on if you’re willing to spend any money or not. Many bloggers routinely earn revenue through paid postings or through paid blogging gigs so it’s not an unusual request to ask bloggers if they’d be interested in writing about X for $Y. PayPerPost is a company that specializes in acting as a middleman between corporations looking to promote their products through bloggers and bloggers looking to earn a dime or two, but I have to warn you that PPP is a highly controversial organization and utilizing it may have adverse effects on your blog’s brand.

That being said, if you are willing to pay authoritative bloggers to guest write for your blog, the best approach is to look for a page with contact information and contact them privately. You’ll find that most bloggers work for cheap, so this can save you a lot of money.

Developing relationships with potential guest writers

However if you’re looking to develop your blog organically, which is probably the best way to establish a credible brand, then establishing your presence on existing, authoritative blogs is a good way to go about building up a natural relationship with those bloggers. Once you’ve established a good relationship with another blogger then it would not be out of line to ask if they’d be interested in writing a guest post on your site.

Again, if you’re not interested in spending money on recruiting guest bloggers, I’d recommend building up your blog to a decent size (a few hundred unique visitors a day, medium size) and then try contacting experts who work in vertical niches and don’t typically receive that kind of traffic; the allure of getting their name exposed to a larger audience and having their name affiliated with a higher credibility blog is very enticing. Another approach is seeking out aggressive, up-and-coming bloggers who are trying to develop their audience; these people may not be the strongest vertical experts, but they are people who may be willing to add value to your blog and lend credibility to your blog if asked.

I apologize for not updating AjaxNinja in the past week. I’ve been on vacation and I neglected to write automated entries beforehand, so I suppose I failed to follow some of my own blogging advice. Oh well

I received the following question from an AjaxNinja reader this past weekend and I thought I’d share my insight as well as ask my readers for theirs.

Finding the related blogs. I already have a large list of related blogs in fields such as presentations, marketing, business, productivity, etc but who’s to say that the list is any good? I just surfed around on Technorati and Google trying to find these sites. Do you have any good methods for this? One of our problems is that we want to cover a broad area and this becomes a time consuming task.

Finding authoritative and reliable blogs in your domain can be tricky but the two best resources are Google Blog search and Technorati, as you mentioned. Commenting and pinging authoritative, relevant blogs is a good way to increase your authority as an up-and-coming blogger.

Stick with the most authoritative blogs

One thing I recommend doing is going through your blog list on Technorati and picking out the ones with the highest authority out of the large list of blogs you’ve discovered. Although there are some simple ways to game Technorati to boost authority, you’ll be able to tell by looking at the “reactions to this blog” page if the blog has any legitimate authority. Blogs with legitimate authority will have “reactions” from a number of diverse blogs, whereas ones with gamed authority will usually have only one additional blog feed that pings back to itself.

Use Blog Catalog or other blog directories
You can use blog directories like Blog Catalog, where blogs are already categorized by DOMAINS rather than by search engine keywords. Given that you’re looking to cover a broad area, this may be a better place to look than using Technorati and Google searches.

Put yourself in the reader’s seat; use Google to search for specific problems within a domain, rather than broad keywords that target the domain itself

Most of the blogs that I link back to from AjaxNinja are blogs that I’ve come across as a result of specific Google keyword searches when I’m looking for answers to technical questions, so I’ve accrued a number of resources to link to over time.

However, this is precisely how casual readers discover blogs. I’d suggest putting yourself in the driver’s seat of one of your potential customers/readers and rattle off a number of precise queries that target specific problems within your domain, rather than broad keywords that target the domain itself.

A blog that addresses an array of specific problems or issues within your domain is going to have a more authoritative writer (a stronger vertical/niche expert) than popular blogs that fail to cover domain-specific issues in any depth below the surface.

• ASP.NET (Data layers, Facebook.NET, Phalanger),
• general blogging concepts (headlines, saving articles),
• blogging specifically for businesses,
• Facebook Applications & Social Media concepts,
• general website management issues (hosting), or
• business concepts and entrepreneurship?

Every time I write a post I think “am I going to lose a ton of my readers who are just here for the ASP.NET articles if I write about blogging concepts?” While I’m still not absolutely certain, the answer appears to be “no.“

If anything, I find that the diverse nature of my content helps AjaxNinja convert more readers into subscribers, but that’s namely because all of the subjects I blog about are related.

Who’s my target audience and how does AjaxNinja’s diversity help reach them?

While I appreciate the patronage of all of my subscribers equally, I started AjaxNinja with the intention of reaching people just like me: self-starting technological people who want to start a website, a blog, or an online business.

Thus all of my content, in one way or another, relates to my target audience.

• I write about ASP.NET, AJAX, CSS, SQL, and sometimes PHP to cover some of the technological facets behind website development.
• I write about blogging concepts, ethics, and etiquette as they are necessary components to operating a blog.
• I conduct interviews with entrepreneurs or I give my 2 cents about some market trend because they are directly relevant to running an online business and online marketing.
• And so on.

There probably not a whole lot of ASP.NET programmers/bloggers who are in college and looking to create or join their first startup; so if I were looking to target only people like myself then my audience would grow much more slowly.

But what’s the point?

By expanding AjaxNinja’s mission statement and content to broader themes I ultimately expand my target audience; instead of just targeting entrepreneurial ASP.NET programmers, I now have a blog that can target virtually any person who wants to learn how to start a blog, website, or online business. I can now cut a slice from a much larger pie.

A quick homework assignment: write a mission statement for your blog or website and make it visible somewhere on your site. In addition, define your target audience.

But how do you stop readers who are interested in only a dimension or two from unsubscribing?

If there are readers out there who are so fickle that they will unsubscribe from AjaxNinja after I write single post on something that isn’t of crucial importance to them, then I probably won’t miss them. I guess I don’t love all of my readers equally :p

The trick to making this multi-faceted blog work, however, is to do your best to try and cover all subjects equally.

I use a round-robin system where I’ll try and cover my bread-and-potatoes subjects each week and add in some special stuff in the variable days.

Here’s how a typical breakdown might look for any given week:

The meat and potatoes:

• 2 posts on ASP.NET/Facebook.NET (my ASP.NET niche) and
• 1 post on blogging concepts or blogging for business.

Extra days: (any two from the following list)

• 1 post on social media
• 1 interview / entrepreneurship post
• 1 business concept post
• 1 code sample
• 1 book / product review
• 1 resource list
• 1 hot news item coverage (like my coverage of the .NET 3.5 source release)

I make an honest effort to try and cover all of the concepts equally in terms of what I deem important and what I think my audience wants the most.

I know there are some SEO/Social Media/Blogging types who read AjaxNinja in addition to a lot of the good folks from DotNetKicks who want to read about ASP.NET, so I have to make an effort to leverage the wants of all demographics of my audience.

Final Answer

Diversifying your content will enable you to reach a broader audience, IF:

• all of your content is unified thematically or by the shared interests of your audience,
• your content is unified under your blog’s mission statement,
• you make an honest effort to service all areas of your mission statement equally, and
• you make an honest effort to service the wants of your audience proportionately equal to their level of interest.

If you’re struggling to build an audience in a niche subject, try broadening out your blog’s mission statement and relate your experience within your niche to more universal lessons. It’s worked for me and it can work for you.

In this post I’d like to discuss the influences that drive bloggers to write about particular subjects; specifically I want to touch on the notion of letting the tail wag the dog, or letting keywords/traffic sources be the sole influence in what subjects you write about.

I read an article the other day (I can’t remember where) but the author said thus:

Use Google Analytics to determine what keywords are sending the most search engine traffic to your site; based upon what keywords are sending in the most traffic, you should write articles about the subjects of those keywords accordingly to boost your traffic.

This notion makes sense from a search engine optimization standpoint, in fact I’m pretty sure I read the article from an SEO blog, but it is a HORRIBLE way to blog.

What if the keywords that send in the most traffic to your site are for subjects that you’ve only covered in passing and don’t really want to spend a lot of time on?

Succumbing to search engine keywords and allowing them to become the dictator of your blog’s content means becoming a “traffic-driven blogger,” which is comparable to a poll-driven politician.

• If you only write about the small one or two subjects that send the most traffic to your site, you’re ultimately going to burn out or lose interest because your own blog’s content may eventually drift apart from the interests that you wanted to blog about in the first place!
• What happens if your listing for those top keywords starts to drop as a result of increased competition or a decrease in the quality of your work? Wouldn’t having a ton of content on just those one or two subjects ultimately hurt your search ability in the long run?
• Narrowing your blog’s focus to a handful of SEO keywords will reduce your overall visibility in your blog’s domain; the best blogs are ones that are ubiquitous across their respective domains.
• The traffic delivered by SEO keywords is very temporal for the most part; the popularity of certain keywords ebbs and flows just like every other hot topic.

The biggest danger in being a traffic-driven blogger is simply losing interest in blogging entirely as a result of the keywords. Do not let the tail wag the dog!

On the other hand, being an entirely self important blogger isn’t any better. Self-important bloggers do not care what the audience wants; it’s all about what the blogger himself or herself wants!

• Self-important bloggers will drive away readers with irrelevant posts; readers come to blogs to learn about subjects. Only bloggers with a degree of celebrity can maintain a self-indulgent blog and get away with it, and even then they have to make sure to appease the audience from time to time.
• Dividing your blog over too wide an array of subjects, namely whatever strikes your fancy, will spread your blog over several domains. You may yield bursts of traffic from time to time but in most cases you will not be able to maintain steady amounts of traffic in the same way that targeted blogs can.

Hitting the Target Area: Meet in the Middle

• Hitting this target area, letting your wants and the audiences’ wants influence what you write about, is the best approach.
• You get the satisfaction of sharing your experience in subjects that are of interest to you.
• Audiences get access to the information they want to read about.
• You will be able to build a much more steady, stable readership as a result of being able to hold influence over what subjects you blog about, since you can direct the flow of your blog to evenly cover an entire domain.
• You will be able to build your audience around a domain instead of a few keywords, which ultimately give you access to a broader audience.

What are your thoughts? Please drop a line.

The first thing that my new headlines did was make it remarkably easy for AjaxNinja to make it to the front pages of DZone, DotNetKicks. Want to know why it was so easy? Take a look at some of the headlines on DZone as of writing this.

sample of DZone’s most recent headlines:

• The Death of “synchronized”? (79 click-throughs)
• Douglas Crockford: The Elements of JavaScript Style (65 click-throughs)
• Type-safe Scala sequence comprehensions (25 click-throughs)

DZone measures the articles on the front page using votes and how recently they were published, but it also displays how many people viewed the story on DZone and subsequently how many clicked through to the source, which is what I have displayed next to each title.

The “synchronized” article actually had a very effective title; it just wasn’t trying to reach me as an audience member but rather JAVA programmers who’ve used the “synchronized” keyword, and it reached them very effectively.

The average poster for DZone is a much, much better engineer than I am and they cover material well and at a fantastic level of depth, but they suck at writing headlines. That’s why it’s been so easy for me to make it to the front page: my headlines are simply more magnetic.

I read a post called Warning: Use These 5 Surefire Headline Formulas at Your Own Risk at Copyblogger recently and I have tried to utilize those formulas in my posts since. I believe that my improved headlines are what has resulted in a big boost in traffic in the past week.

Here are 5 things I have been doing to improve my headlines:

1. Don’t describe what you’re writing about; describe how it can help your readers!

   My Phalanger article is a good example; it’s title is Attention: PHP executes twice as fast when it’s run on ASP.NET. If I had named it Phalanger - Now you can integrate ASP and PHP my title would still be accurate and interesting, but it doesn’t hint as to why anyone would want to check out Phalanger; underscoring some of the performance benefits of Phalanger gives PHP users an incentive to read on.

2. Let the reader know that your article’s solutions are simple/easy

   Take a look at the title of this article; How 5 Simple Headline Improvements Increased my Traffic by 1000%. If you write a lot of how-to articles then this tip is especially pertinent to your blog. Readers love articles that present simple or easy solutions; underscoring the helpful nature of your suggestions with descriptors like “simple,” “quick,” and “easy” in the headline is an easy way to draw attention from readers.

3. Relate your article to a problem that your readers face

   Let’s say I wrote an article about using StumbleUpon and how it sends traffic; what would be the more effective headline?

   • How StumbleUpon Creates Traffic for Websites
   • How to Use StumbleUpon to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

   It’s obvious that the second choice is the better of the two headlines. The first headline will draw readers with a casual interest in StumbleUpon, but the second headline will draw anyone who wants to know how to get people to read their site; which audience is bigger? The second one.

   Just make sure that your content reflects the title; if you don’t even mention using StumbleUpon as a promotional tool in your article then you probably won’t get very many return readers, if any at all.

4. Relate your article to a success story

   Everyone loves success, so why not take your article and relate it to an anecdote or a success story? Let’s return to my StumbleUpon example; which of the two is the more effective headline?

   • How StumbleUpon Creates Traffic for Websites
   • How StumbleUpon Doubled my Traffic in August

   The second headline is again, more powerful, because it gives the readers an order of magnitude by which they can judge the effectiveness or your article’s solution. Readers want effective advice and the best way to demonstrate effectiveness is by positive example. This post serves a good example of such a technique; everyone wants to learn how to increase their traffic by 1000%.

5. Let the reader know how short your article is

   List posts are considered one of the greatest ways to draw readers; the reason is simple: list posts are simple, short, and easy for readers to digest. Readers do not have to do a lot of work; by explicitly bounding your article with a definitive number, like 5 in the case of this article, then they know they won’t have to dig through a mountain of an article in order to get to the good stuff.

   Which of the two headlines is better?

   • Some Tips for Improving Your Headlines
   • 5 Tips for Improving Your Headlines

   The second headline is better because it lets your readers know exactly how much they have to digest! I don’t know if readers prefer larger or shorter lists and I don’t know what the blogging convention is, but personally, I think keeping the advice lists like this one under 10 items and link lists under 20 items is a good convention.

Try improving your headlines with these tips and you’ll see a huge difference!

Digg has an immense amount of traffic and getting landed on the front page will send a tsunami of new readers to your blog or website, but getting onto the front page is incredibly difficult.

Getting onto the front page of a smaller, more appropriate niche portal, by contrast, is much easier, quicker, and ultimately you get a better return on your time/traffic ratio in the short run.

I have yet to determine the long run implications, although I am fairly certain that my high placement on DZone’s front page is what resulted in my 10+ Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers article being picked up by Lifehacker.

Here are 7 reasons why niche sites like DZone and DotNetKicks give you a better return on your time spent promoting/traffic ratio than Digg:

1. Digg has a very hostile user base; niche sites have supportive ones - The more popular you are the more criticism you will be subject to.
   

   Small communities are filled with passionate users who are genuinely interested in the specific subject covered by that site; Digg users are interested in a wide variety of topics, and if your article doesn’t meet their quality standards (or more accurately, your title; many of them never read the article), it’s the bury button for you.

   In addition, any site that makes the front page of Digg is going to be subject to flames, but this is true for any really popular website; when my Firefox article made it to the front page of Lifehacker I was raked with some genuinely good suggestions but also there were a ton of dive-by readers who just wanted to take a pot shot at AjaxNinja.

2. A lot of Diggers are in it for promoting themselves as power users - There are a number of Diggers who simply have egos; this is true of any online community. Some power users simply love the service and love spending time on it; others simply have nothing better to do; and others still simply want to feel important or feel that they have influence and attempt to do so by leveraging themselves against a large community of users.

   The second and third types of power users are the ones who cause trouble; they’re not in it for legitimately helping everyone else, they’re in it for their own amusement or to advance their own agenda.

   In a small niche community like DotNetKicks I don’t have to worry about Digg users who are PHP/Anti-Windows zealots burying my Phalanger article. My Phalanger article even made it to the front page of DZone, a community that has more than its fair share of PHP users, but since DZone doesn’t have a bunch of Anti-MS power users hell-bent on burying anything that makes MS look good, I still made it to the front page.

3. Digg has too broad of an audience - Digg is great if you’re a blogger who comments on news, liberal politics (you will NEVER see a Little Green Footballs article appear on the front page of Digg), Ubuntu Linux, offbeat news, life tips, the occasional SEO article, iPhones, or random photographs, but if you write about something outside of that realm then you’re not going to get much of a following from Digg unless your article is exceptionally good.

   update:A reader on Sphinn has pointed out that LGF has actually made it to the front page as recently as 43 days ago. Duly noted.

   Take a look at at the front page of Digg’s programming section. Upon writing this some of those “popular” articles have been up there for over 20 days; this indicates to me that the world of Digg/Programming is not very fast-paced or happening. Take a look at the Digg/Programming/Upcoming section too; many of the “hot” articles have less than 10 votes. My article on Phalanger, which was buried, had 16 diggs and it generated maybe 30 unique visits total.

   That same article made it to the front page of DZone and DotNetKicks within a day or two of me posting it, and they stayed there for approximately 24 hours.

4. Digg’s high volume of stories makes it hard to get noticed - Unless you have a ton of traffic to your blog naturally, it’s going to be hard for users to find your article when it hits page 2,3, or 4 of the “upcoming” section of the appropriate category within a few hours of your submission; this is especially true for programming, where there are more articles submitted than there are people who Digg them.
   

   DZone and DotNetKicks have a much lower volume of stories and it’s a lot easier to get yours noticed once you add it to their list of new submissions. The readers of DZone and DotNetKicks simply have less shit to filter through.

5. Digg’s categories are too broad - There is no category for ASP.NET, PHP development, or Facebook Application Development; there is simply “programming.” This means that if you’re hoping that Digg users will find your article in the programming section of Digg, then they’re going to need to not only be interested in programming, but Diggers interested in your kind of development specifically.
   

   Niche sites are already governed into one general category, like DZone is all about software development in general and DotNetKicks is about .NET development, but they also give you a more fine-grained amount of control through additional sub-categories; this makes it easier for interested readers to find your works in their listings.

6. Digg is not transparent; we don’t know why some stories get buried - One of my recent free-lance pieces on health and fitness that I wrote for Dumb Little Man was initially Dugg by one of Digg’s most powerful users, Mr. Baby Man and it received 40-60 votes within a 4 hour Window of submission. That’s more than enough to appear on the Hot section for Digg/Health/Upcoming, but the article never appeared there. Dumb Little Man is one of the most popular blogs out there (top 1000 in Technorati.)

   Update Jay White of Dumb Little Man wrote me this morning to inform me that while Digg’s algorithm is a bit odd, DLM made it to the front page as recently as last week.

   Tamar Weinberg wrote a great letter to Kevin Rose addressing some of these transparency issues with Digg and I’d recommend giving that a read.

   However, I’d like to point out that niche sites like DZone and DotNetKicks are VERY transparent; you can even download the source code for DotNetKicks. With DZone you can see how many people looked at the article, how many people clicked the link, how many voted it up, and how many voted it down. DotNetKicks adjusted the front page of the site based upon how long it’s been up there, although the Kicks do help. There’s no secret sauce behind most niche portals.

7. In order to improve your effectiveness and visibility on Digg, you have to invest a lot of time into its social network - A lot of SEO sites out there recommend building “power accounts” on major social media sites like Digg and Reddit. While I believe that networking with other people with similar interests is a great thing (it’s actually one of the things I enjoy most about StumbleUpon), I don’t believe that bloggers, companies, and website owners should have to invest HOURS into using Digg like it’s World of Warcraft.

   Bloggers should be spending as much time possible reading, researching, and coming up with interesting material to write about, not methodically gaming a social network for leverage. If you spend a lot of time using social networks because you enjoy using them, then go for it.

   If you’re willing to spend hours tweaking your site for search engine optimization, why not spend some of that time building up a social network?

   1. I don’t have to spend any time building up a social network if I use niche sites to drive interested readers to my content and
   2. people who use search engines are not casual browsers; Google users are users with intent and they will click on my advertisements at a much higher rate than social media users.

In a nutshell, I think using small Niche sites to promote your content will not only save you a lot of trouble, but I think ultimately you’ll find more interested readers rather than casual browsers from niche sites.

If you want to find a niche social network for your blog or social network, I suggest you look at my article, 30+ Media Sites for Promoting Your Blog.

Add me to your social networks
If you want to add me as a friend I’ll go ahead and friend you back.

• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• del.icio.us
• MyBlogLog
• PageFlakes

Update: Corrected some typos; I was in a rush for boxing practice when I wrote the last bullets :p

What is “Social Media?”

For those of you who have not heard of social media, it’s simply a technology on the Internet that allows people to explicitly share content and experiences with other online users. YouTube is a great example of a video-sharing social media website.

We’re going to run down a categorized list of social media sites for promoting your blog or website.

A word of caution: there are hundreds of social media websites out there; if I don’t mention one, it’s probably because I’ve never used it or heard of it. Leave a comment on this entry if you feel that I’ve made a critical error.

The Big Players

If you land on the front page of one of these sites, even for a few hours, you’ll be on the receiving end of a tidal wave of traffic. The best part is, once your of your pages makes it big on just one of these sites, you’ll probably end up getting highly ranked on another.

1. Digg - Digg is the ultimate social media site; it’s become notorious for producing traffic waves so massive that they can have a DOS-style impact on smaller hosts. Digg is scrutinized routinely for being an intensely negative community, and it has become difficult to make the front page.

2. Reddit - A popular Digg clone. It has less traffic than Digg does but it may be easier to make the front page; I’ve never used it but I’m going to begin experimenting with it.

3. StumbleUpon - I think StumbleUpon is by far the best service on this list; not only does it send more users over time than making the front page of Digg, but the bounce rate for an article that has been reviewed multiple times is ridiculously low. My average bounce rate is pretty high; my bounce rate on a page that’s doing well on StumbleUpon is usually 35-45%, with 85-95% of those users being first time readers to AjaxNinja.

StumbleUpon is doing a better job marketing my site than I could! StumbleUpon is basically channel surfing for the Internet, and it’s advertising campaigns are very effective in the right hands. By far the most worthwhile service.

4. del.icio.us - del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website; users can mark their favorites with del.icio.us and share them with each other; making it onto the front page of the “recently popular” section on del.icio.us will send a decent amount of traffic so long as the category you’re tagged into is popular. My article on Firefox extensions was tagged approximately 300 times within 24 hours and that was enough to slap it on the front page for a brief period. This is a great service for recurring traffic over time as well, but not as good as StumbleUpon in that regard. I guess del.icio.us’ traffic effects are a bit of a mix between Digg and StumbleUpon.

5. YouTube - I was going to stick this in my “video blogging” category, but honestly, if you do video blogging and you haven’t heard of YouTube then you’ve probably been living in a cave for the past few years.

General & Offbeat News

Here are sites that are similar to Digg and Reddit but aren’t as prominent as those two in the lexicon of the average user.

6. Netscape - Didn’t they used to make a web browser or something?

7. Fark - From Fark’s about page:

[Fark] is a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site. Every day Fark receives 2,000 or so news submissions from its readership.

8. Newsvine - A standard news aggregator complete with comments, voting, etc. Probably the best service if you’re interested in getting real news junkies to visit your site.

Blogosphere Pulse Detectors

While you cannot explicitly “submit” your entries to these services (they can be read automatically via RSS when you publish), you can register your blog and make it easy for your readers to add you as a favorite and make it easy for other bloggers to find you. Definitely register with these two services and publish Technorati Tags along with your entries in order to improve visibility.

Update: You actually can submit articles explicitly to Technorati as “favorites.” I overlooked this; my apologies.

9. Technorati - Every blogger knows about Technorati and the authority ranking it assigns to bloggers based upon how many other blogs link to them. Another prominent feature of Technorati is that it aggregates some of the latest blogosphere buzz on the front page; having never been anywhere near the front page I wouldn’t be able to tell you how much traffic it drives, but it has been alleged that Technorati’s system for determining what appears on the front page is fatally flawed.

10. TailRank - Another service similar to Technorati; TailRank’s front page serves as an indicator for what the blogosphere is talking about. Technorati and TailRank both have explicit voting/tagging systems for determining popularity, but the most important metric they measure is blog responses, i.e. how many blogs are linking to one of your entries.

Marketing and SEO Services

If you’re in the business of writing about marketing, search engine optimization, or some sort of promotional business, then these social media sites are for you.

11. PlugIM (Online Marketing) - Right now all of my blog entries are syndicated to PlugIM for voting, and I don’t think I have even received a single pageview from it. I’m not impressed, but hey, it’s effortless given that you can automatically syndicate your RSS feeds to PlugIM, so why not sign up for it?

12. Sphinn (SEO & Online Marketing) - I’ve never used it but apparently it has a pretty active user community. I can’t say the same for PlugIM!

13. DNHour (Domain Names) - I couldn’t think of an appropriate sub-category for domain names but I figured that domains are pretty pertinent to online marketing; anyways DNHour votes up and down on the latest domain name news.

Programming, Development, & Geek News

14. SlashDot (Technology of all kinds)- The grand daddy of them all; SlashDot was one of the earliest and most successful online communities, although it may be over-shadowed somewhat today by Digg. When you submit a story to SlashDot, it’s evaluated by the editors, and then pushed to the front page; it’s similar to Fark. SlashDot’s audience is primarily techie.

15. DZone (Developement and Programming) - Thus far every time I have used this service I have landed on the front page, and received a decent amount of visits (over 1000 unique visits). Writing a good headline that catches the eye of developers is key, but you don’t really need too many votes to make it to the front page; I also find that the people who comment on DZone are generally very positive and helpful. This is one of my favorite new social media websites.

16. DotNetKicks (.NET Technology) - I made it onto the front page of DotNetKicks today and received a nice wave of traffic (a couple hundred uniques); DotNetKicks is an absolute must for submissions if you blog about ASP.NET at all. In addition their site is all open-source so if you want to start your own social media portal you should check out their code.

17. Tweako (General Computing, Internet) - From Tweako’s about page:

Tweako.com is a place to learn and share information and knowledge about every computer and technology topic out there. We hope to create a website where users can find information and help for all their computing needs that accommodates all levels of skill and difficulty, from programming to cleaning spyware.

Please note that Tweako uses human editors to determine what appears on the front page.

18. Pixel Groovy (Web Design) - Covers a lot of different web development and web design aspects, but really the forte of Pixel Groovy are the slick CSS/AJAX tips, which usually populate the front page regardless. You can still try and submit articles about PHP/ASP.NET design as Pixel Groovy has categories supporting those.

Video

19. Game Diggity (Gaming Videos) - Video voting community for gamers.

20. Video Bomb (Videos) - Social Bookmarking for videos… Seems a bit sketchy to me.

21. Video Sift (Videos) - More social bookmarking for videos… Classier than Video Bomb.

Politics and Political Issues

22. Care2 (Social Action) - The tag line says “green living, health, human rights, and more.” If I ran a non-profit or an interest group this would be a stop in my story submission route.

23. Plant Change (Environmental Issues) - Most of the articles on the front page do not have a very high vote count; I honestly would not be able to tell you how much traffic runs through Plant Change.

24. News Heat (Politics) - Social media outlet for politics, mostly American. The vote counts aren’t very high here either so I’m not sure what the traffic levels are like.

25. Hugg (Environmental Issues) - Higher vote counts than Plant Change, but it’s the same idea.

Deals & Bargain Hunting

Honestly I think these sites are beyond boring, but then again I don’t find much interest in bargain hunting.

26. Dealigg - Social Bargain Hunting

27. AgentB - More social bargain hunting.

28. Judy’s Book - Find what’s on sale near you.

Sports

29. ScoreGuru - Vote up and down on the most interesting sporting news.

30. Ballhype - a much more popular social media outlet for sporting news. Go Chargers.

WHY ISN’T COPYCAT SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SERVICE [ABC] ON THIS LIST?

Because I’ve either never received traffic from it, or because I’ve never heard of it.

Credits to Tropical SEO for a great list of niche social media sites, most of which I put onto this list.

Dave McClure, whom I met I met through an internet slap fight over TechDumpster and VentureBeat, was the Director of Marketing for PayPal between 2001 and 2004. He knows way more about online marketing and advertising than I do, and I’m begging all of my Blogging for Business readers to read some of his recent posts from his famous, blog, 500 Hats.

To all executives with firing power reading Blogging for Business:

If your marketing guys do not read these links, fire them.

Let the fun begin:

1. Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR - Attract visitors, retain them, have them spread news about your site by worth of mouth, and convert them into customers.
2. Facebook Advertising Sucks? Nope, CPM Sucks. - Why the timeless advertising model left over from Web 1.0 is a disaster for online marketing.
3. User Engagement is a Depth, not a Breadth, metric (and # UV’s / # Facebook App users are crappy UE metrics) - Don’t mistake a high volume of “tire-kicking” visitors for interested users.

Dave has a treasure chest full of great articles, but I would tell you that if you’re interested in making the online aspects of your business effective, you should read these articles even if the room you’re in is on fire at the moment.

Imagine you have a friend who’s a very experienced gardener; you’re looking for a faster, better way to mow your lawn and you turn to him for advice, since you trust him. He recommends a handful of mower models, one of which you subsequently purchase from a store he mentions. You find out the next day that your friend received a referral commission from the store as a result of sending them your business.

What do you think upon hearing this news? Was your friends’ recommendation affected by the financial incentive to refer your business to a specific store which carries a few specific models? Would his recommendation have been different if there were no financial reward for recommending the models that he did? Was your trust in him violated?

Bloggers have to eat just like everyone else

The vast majority of bloggers do not run their blogs, cultivate readership, write new and interesting material, and relentlessly promote their blog for the sake of earning money. Most bloggers write because they have a passion for the subjects about which they write and they simply want to be heard.

However, those bloggers wouldn’t mind getting paid for all of their blood, sweat, and tears.

Many bloggers who monetize their blogs do so because they can passively earn a small amount of income to help subsidize the costs of blogging in the first place, whether the cost is the hosting fees or the blogger’s time. Most bloggers earn less than $20-$50 a month, according a very old ProBlogger article.

So we know that we aren’t going to be able to afford that Porsche anytime soon by merely blogging, but hey, at least we can help pay off some of those hosting fees! Monetization in principle is not unethical; far from it. Monetization in practice often is.

And how are we earning our “food money?”

When I first began blogging, I spent many hours scouring over numerous ProBlogger articles detailing Darren Rowse’s techniques for blogging, growing an audience, and blog promotion, but one fine day I stumbled across one of his monetization articles covering how to earn money using affiliate programs.

Jackpot!

I signed up for an Amazon account and made a page on my blog listing all of the ASP.NET books that I used to help teach myself the technology, Amazon links to all of them.

Every now and then when I made a post I’d link to a relevant book using an Amazon link.

I didn’t think much of it.

I’ve had some orders trickle through for products I’ve recommended; not much, but some. This is called “placing deep links in context,” and it’s one of the strategies Darren recommends for monetizing effectively with affiliate links.

Darren also recommends a few other techniques, such as building best-seller lists and pre-selling with product reviews for monetizing affiliate links specifically.

These all seem like sound ideas at a first glance, given that major news organizations often employ best-seller lists and product reviews, but it wasn’t until I explained this monetization technique to a friend that I realized that this technique bears no similarities at all to what major news organizations do and that this technique is, in fact, a violation of my readers’ trust.

Even relevant, helpful affiliate link product placement can be construed as unethical

When you gain readership, you’ve done so by gaining the readers’ trust in your experience and authority in the domains you blog about.

Bloggers with audiences wield authority, and they can use that authority to build revenue through product recommendations, link placements, and best sellers lists. But what are they really doing when they use such techniques?

• Do they really believe in the products that they’re referring?
• Would they refer the products anyways if there were no financial incentive?
• Would they fudge a mediocre review into a decent review for the sake of pocketing a few extra dollars?
• Do they really care if the products they recommend help their readers?

The real question though:

How in the hell are your readers going to be able to answer these questions about you and your blog?

Can you see where I’m going with this?

Are you abusing your power as an authority to recommend certain products simply because you can earn a commission by recommending them?

This would absolutely not be tolerated in a major news organization like the New York Times; why should readers tolerate it from bloggers?

Darren Rowse’s comparison of bloggers’ reviews and best-seller lists to those of a major news organization is totally wrong

I have nothing but profound respect and awe for Darren Rowse, but his comparison of earning money from a best-seller list or product review on your blog to a best-seller list on The New York Times is absurd for the following reasons:

1. Major news organizations are expected to behave in an objective, journalistic fashion; a financial incentive for readers to purchase reviewed products sits in 100% contradiction to the notion of journalistic integrity and objectivity.
2. Major news organizations produce product reviews and best sellers lists in the interests of its readers, not in the interest of the news organization’s ability to generate sales referrals.
3. Major news organizations monetize with unmistakably clear advertising; it is self-evident what is an advertisement and what is not. Affiliate links sitting in deep context are ambiguous.
4. Major news organizations disclose their sources of income; I’ve seen very few bloggers who disclose all of it.

If a major news organization tweaked a review of a product because it had a financial interest at stake, if word of that tweak ever hit the press, it would be a major blow to that organization’s credibility and readership; news papers are a business, and a loss in credibility to them means a hell of a lot more than a decreased FeedBurner subscriber count. It means lost customers, advertisers, and money.

This is why news organizations cannot get away with the shit some bloggers try to pull.

How to use affiliate links to generate revenue honestly

My post a couple of days ago regarding the release of Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET is a total advertisement by me for the book; I am still waiting on my copy, along with a book I purchased on ASP.NET and AJAX. I wrote the post with every intention of earning some money from it.

But I let the readers know that from the beginning of the post with the following warning:

Warning: If you click on any product links on this page and subsequently purchase a product, I will earn a small commission from Amazon.com. I only refer products that I use or intend to use.

If there are any AjaxNinja readers who are opposed to earning money, please leave now. This is a free-market blog. While I don’t disclose my revenue from my Amazon affiliate activities, I disclose the fact that I earn revenue from recommending products, period.

After I realized that my initial techniques for advertising for products was ethically questionable, I went through a number of my blog posts and tried to either remove links that weren’t up to my standards or I added that warning to all of those pages where I included such links.

My warning may perhaps drive down my revenue, but you know what, I don’t give a damn, because I care way more about transparency with my readers than I do about a 4% Amazon commission.

The Moral

Think back to the hypothetical about the gardener friend real fast; would your trust have been violated if your friend had told you up front that he makes money by referring a line of mowers, but that he also honestly believes in their product and is proud to endorse them? I think not.

It’s just as important to be 100% honest about why you want readers to follow your recommendations as it is to give them in the first place.

Thoughts?

In this edition of Blogging for Business we’re going to discuss the two types of audiences that generally read blogs and how they read and participate in blogging.

Fact: blogs are just starting to penetrate the consciousness of the average Internet user.

The sort of person who regularly reads blogs, subscribes to blogs, comments on blogs, or operates a blog may not necessarily your best candidate for a potential customer.

This does not mean, however, that blogs are not going to help your business!

You simply need to understand how to properly leverage these two audiences in order to improve your company’s overall visibility on the Internet.

The Two Distinct Kinds of Blog Readers

There exists two kinds of readers out there who interact with blogs in very different ways:

• Casual Readers
• Expert Readers

Casual readers are the people you are trying to reach, and expert readers are the ones who are going to help you reach them.

Casual Readers - People Looking for Answers

A casual reader is someone who does not read blogs regularly; they may get referred to an article via email by a friend or they may stumble across a blog entry via search engines like Google, but rarely do they subscribe to blogs via Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

Casual readers are people looking for answers on the Internet. They do not read blogs because they like the style of a blog or because they like the following of a particular; they read blogs because blogs can be adept at answering very specific niche questions where larger organizations fail.

For instance, when I was a casual blog reader, I used Google to try and find answers to some questions I had regarding ASP.NET and Google ultimately led me to Scott Guthrie’s blog. After I had finished reading the first article that Google referred me to I went ahead and implemented Scott’s solution to my problem (which worked) and went about my business for another couple of hours. I soon ran into another challenge and used Google again to find an answer; again, I found Scott Guthrie’s blog.

This occurring pattern of frequently finding answers from the same place for similar problems within one domain is what lead me to become a full-fledged RSS subscriber of Scott Guthrie’s MSDN blog. This is what you want in a corporate blog: a mass of content that casual readers can find in multiple locations under similar search terms.

However, Scott Guthrie himself isn’t the only reason why his blog is so successful; the other readers on the blog frequently contribute their expertise and advise, which brings us onto the second type of reader.

Expert Readers - People Looking to Provide Answers

An expert reader is someone who subscribes to multiple blogs, reads them regularly, and provides comments/other forms of feedback when appropriate.

Expert readers are innately curious people seeking out people with similar interests for purpose of sharing those interests; blogging is one of the best available online venues for meeting such people, thus expert readers participate in blogging via comments or running their own blog as a way of sharing their ideas, interests, and enthusiasm.

Expert readers provide answers, not because they have financial incentive to do so, but because they enjoy simply sharing their experiences with other like-minded individuals.

Expert readers are likely not your best potential leads for your business simply because most expert readers already have their own solutions to the problems facing your average customers; however, many of them may already own or use your product in which case they provide valuable peer experience to casual readers.

Expert readers build value for your corporate blog in the following ways:

• they contribute their credibility
• they contribute their expertise
• they contribute content to your blog, which search engines index
• they read your blog frequently
• they will often encourage colleagues to read your blog

While expert readers may not constitute the largest potential sales demographic, they do create content that will ultimately help draw casual readers to your blog and potentially to your products. Make an effort to draw expert readers and ultimately it will begin to yield casual readers.

I will be writing more about the two kinds of blog readers in the future.

Today in Blogging for Business we are going to check out a quick post by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger on 10 Ways to Hurt Your Blog’s Brand by Commenting on Other Blogs.

In a previous Blogging for Business entry I mentioned how you can build up your blog’s authority by commenting on other blogs which is still the case if you do it properly; however, Darren raises the point that some techniques that bloggers use for building up their brand are not only counter-productive but potentially harmful to your blog’s brand.

I’ll have a full-length post up tomorrow on “the two kinds of blog readers.”

Today we’re going to step away from AjaxNinja.com for a little bit and visit one of the blogs I subscribe to, Search Engine Optimization Journal.

Their most recent article is of particular relevance and interest to us, as it on should your corporate website link to your business blog? It’s a good read, and we’re going to be looking at this article again when we start talking about building conversations on your corporate blog.

Blogging for Business Pageflakes.com Pagecast:

If you’re interested in seeing what RSS feeds and resources I have been using for research for the Blogging for Business campaign, I encourage you to view Blogging for Business‘ public Pagecast on Pageflakes. If you’re a Pageflakes user I highly recommend adding it to your start page today

Today we’re going to discuss how trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments on other blogs can improve your search rankings on popular engines like Google, Yahoo, and Live.com; increase your readership; and establish your company as an authority in your domain.

Everyone knows that a high ranking on search engines for search keywords relevant to your product will help drive sales to your business; an entire industry has grown around the concept of search engine optimization, techniques used to help websites increase their exposure on popular search engines.

We will not be discussing many SEO techniques beyond the basic principle of “the more external and internal links to your site, the better,” so if you want to get yourself up to speed on the latest and greatest search engine optimization techniques then I highly recommend reading SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

The Basic Principle of Search Engine Optimization

To quote Google on how their PageRank relevancy ranking algorithm works:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

So to summarize in absolute layman’s terms

the more links pointing to your site from external, relevant websites, the greater your rankings will be in search engine results. Internal links within your website also help improve your search engine rankings.

This is as far as we are going to get into search engine optimization.

Now we are going to cover how blogging can help us increase our number of external links through trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments on other blogs!

Step 1: Find authoritative blogs in your company’s domain

It’s research time. Here are a few good places to get started searching for blogs within your domain:

• Technorati - The blogging search engine. Technorati is unique in the way it ranks blogs, by authority, meaning that the blog that has the most posts written about it by other blogs appears highest in the search results.
• Technorati’s Most Popular Blogs - These include the most popular blogs in the world in all categories. What you’ll want to do though is find a blog that fits your GENERAL domain; for instance if you are involved in the technology industry, you should go to one of the appropriate “top blogs” from this list, like engadget, and then use that blog’s internal search function on keywords relevant to your niche in the business. Top blogs utilize a lot of smaller, niche blogs when they want to write on specific subjects. Find those niche blogs.
• Bloglines - Another popular blog search engine.
• Google Blog Search - Google’s at it again

Step 2: Look, listen, learn

One of the lessons my 10th grade English teacher taught me is particularly relevant:

The best way to learn how to write is not to practice writing, but rather it is reading the works of great writers.

Let’s go ahead and adjust this pearl of wisdom for the world of blogging:

The best way to learn how to blog is not to practice blogging, but rather is is reading the works of great bloggers.

While you may have professional copywriters or publicists in your employ, you are going to want to read the blogs not to see how the blog authors write copy, but you’re going to want to see:

• what the bloggers are discussing
• what the hot topics and controversies are
• how the bloggers generate discussion
• what the commenters on those blogs are saying

If you write material that is relevant to the popular discussions, you’re going to have a much better chance at drawing attention to your corporate blog from the beginning. Understanding the blogging trends in your domain is key to getting effective links and passionate readers.

Step 3: Deploy your blog

Now that you have a sense for what’s popular in the blogging communities for your company’s domain, go ahead and get your blog deployed, and start writing content for your blog relevant to the buzz in those communities.

I will be adding entries down the road on what sort of content to write, but just remember that you’re blogging for your customers and not for your business.

Step 4: Include trackbacks and pingbacks in your posts

I posted a video tutorial on what trackbacks and pingbacks are as part of the Blogging for Business series.

In addition on my BlogEngine.NET test blog I stepped into the difference between how the Wordpress and BlogEngine.NET blogging platforms handle trackbacks and pingbacks, but for the sake of thoroughness I’ll reiterate what trackbacks and pingbacks are:

Notification Services: Technorati, Newsgator, and a number of other services out there are used as “notification” services by blogs; whenever a new post is made the blogging platform (Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger, BlogEngine.NET) checks the content of the new blog entry for any links to other blog entries. The blog engine itemizes these links and alerts the notification services, which then contacts the sites hosting the links’ destination. If the destination site subscribes to the same notification service that your site subscribes to, it may choose to register your inbound link as a pingback or trackback.

Pingback: A pingback is an organic link that occurs within one blog entry. It extends from one blog entry to either another blog entry or some external site that uses a pinging notification service. When a pingback occurs on a blog a new comment gets added with the following information:

• The title of the blog entry that pinged the article
• A link to the blog entry that pinged the article
• Some context in which the “pingback” link occurred
• Time at which the blog was notified about the pingback

Here is an example of a pingback appearing as a comment on my blog

Trackback: A trackback is a bit of a different animal from a pingback. Pingbacks are organic; they occur naturally in the process of referencing relevant sources. Trackbacks are explicit pingbacks; they were added to blogging back in the day when sophisticated blog engines that could detect pings within articles didn’t exist.

In order to publish a trackback to a blog, you have add explicit trackback URLs to your post before you publish it. Here’s an example of a trackback to my own blog (click for a full sized image):

Trackbacks also appear as comments on the blog that you tracked back to; sometimes they are even given prominence over the comments and listed above as separate entities. The world’s most popular web 2.0 start up blog, TechCrunch, does this for instance:

Trackbacks and pingbacks are the most conceptually challenging part about writing blogs, but for those of you who need it in absolute layman’s terms:

1. reference authoritative and relevant blog entries in your corporate blog entries frequently. Obviously, do it naturally, but through referencing these blogs you will accumulate backlinks to your site.

Benefits of Pingbacks and Trackbacks:

1. Backlinks increase the number of external links to your site, which increases your search engine rankings
2. Readers of other blogs may follow pingback/trackback notifications back to your site
3. By having your blog’s entries appear on the trackbacks section of a more authoritative blog, you reap some of the benefits of branding by domain association

If you are not convinced that trackbacks and pingbacks are helpful in improving your readership then please read DmNews’ column on using blogs to improve search engine rankings.

Step 5: Provide thoughtful, insightful, and genuinely helpful comments on authoritative blogs

Establishing yourself as an “expert reader” on an authoritative blog is a great gateway to building up your reputation within the blogging community for your company’s domain. Here are the immediate benefits to commenting on other authoritative blogs:

• It establishes YOUR NAME as an authority on the subjects being discussed on popular blogs; you are effectively creating a brand name for yourself.
• It gives you instant exposure to a large audience.
• It provides links back to your blog. Most comment systems allow for you to specify a website address; usually your user name is used as the text for the link.

The third bullet is where the SEO benefits rear their head. Posting comments on other people’s blogs helps build external links back to your site, which will ultimately help your search engine rankings. Even if it doesn’t help your search engine rankings it will still drive traffic to your site if your comments are thoughtful and helpful.

So remember,

the key to being a good commenter is to provide genuinely helpful advice and feedback.

Pointy-Haired Pitfalls:

In honor of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss, I am going to add a new section of each of these Blogging for Business entries with some pointy-haired pitfalls, which is just another way of saying areas where corporations often get it wrong.

Here are the pointy-haired pitfalls for using trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments on external blogs:

• Pinging/Tracking back to irrelevant blogs - This will hurt both your authority and your search engine rankings at the same time.
• Spamming ping/track backs - Link posts are fine every now and then, but if you are really reaching to link every possible blog entry you can find, you are going to ultimately damage your authority and reputation as a blogger.
• Spamming comments - Ruins your credibility and authority.

Further Reading:

• How Not to Improve SEO With Blogs: 5 Golden Rules
• ProBlogger.net: No-one links to the linkers (for those of you considering doing link posts)
• ProBlogger.net: Grow your blog’s readership by targeting readers

Today we’re going to cover the difference between blogging for your company versus blogging for your customers. This idea of blogging for your business versus your customers is directly related to an old problem that plagues bloggers still today, writing for yourself versus writing for your audience.

Why Many Corporate Blogs Fail

Many corporations create blogs assuming that customers have an innate interest in their products or services; many corporate executives think something along the lines of “oh well we already have tens of thousands of customers, if we create a blog I’m sure they’ll come to read it just to get the latest news on all of our products!”

The reason why the corporate world has been slow to adopt blogging is because of the number of failed corporate blogs is significantly greater than the number of successful ones, largely because those failed corporate blogs were started by people with thick-headed notions like the one I described.

One history lesson that industry never learns is that if you embrace an entirely new technology using the same approaches you used in the last decade, you are going to fail, miserably.

BNET has a great list of why many corporate blogs fail.

Out of all the reasons listed, BY FAR the best way to guarantee that your blog will fail is to write self-aggrandizing infomercials about your products in every post you make on your corporate blog.

When you write your blog solely for promoting your business, rather than for making your customers’ lives easier, you have punched your blog’s ticket. Game over.

Reality Check: What Customers Want to Read on Your Blog

It’s time that we take a reality check before we get your business going on the blogging track. Why would customers want to read your corporate blog?

The answer has nothing to do with your products. Not initially.

Your blog, like any product or services that your company provides, will only work if it helps make the customers’ lives easier. Your blog is supposed to have answers to their questions.

This is where most companies miss the point of blogging. Blogging isn’t just public relations, it’s customer service, and it’s an additional, new information service that your company is providing for its customers.

How to Blog for Your Customers

So let’s get into the right mindset before we start building our corporate blog; here is what your corporate blog should be:

• My corporate blog is an extension of my company’s customer service
• My corporate blog is a resource for gathering feedback on my company’s existing products and services
• My corporate blog is a service provided free of charge to help potential customers find answers to their questions, and to have customers help each other find the answers to their questions
• My corporate blog’s content should be dictated by my customers’ needs

While the end game is to ultimately produce sales from your corporate blog, you are not going to accomplish it by simply writing about your products on your blog. In a later post I am going to describe the proper method for pitching your products and services to potential customers without violating any of the trust you establish with your readers.

Further Reading:

• Why Character Blogs Fail
• Seven Rules for Corporate Blogging
• Ars Technica: Bloggers flog corporate blog - How Dell got it wrong