On January 18th, 2004 Rok Hrastnik released what I consider to be the best book on RSS to hit the planet.

I'm know I'm bit late on publishing my buzz but I wanted to seek my teeth into all the good stuff first. :) Man, I was not disappointed one bit. This is great stuff!

Rok has done a fantastic job of capturing the state of RSS and how RSS is trending up in use and application. What is so phenomenal is the sheer volume of information that is both easy to follow, easy to understand and practical to apply. This piece of work doesn't just tell you what RSS feeds are it completely explores the whole paradigm-shift to distributed Internet content publishing and the changes that are influencing the increased usage of RSS feed for marketing.

Rok Hrastnik has ...   more »

Yes! The Professional Bloggers Association (PBA) has been in the works for some months now as first introduced by Paul Chaney of Radiant Market Group. The Professional Bloggers Association has 20 founding members of which I have been privilege to be named among them.

The PBA has made great progress in short time. It established it's founding members just weeks ago and now I'm pleased to announce that the officers and board members have been elected.

They are as follows:

President: Paul Chaney - Radiant Marketing
Vice President: Anita Campbell - Small Business Trends
Secretary: Tris Hussey - Larix Consulting
Treasurer: Toby Bloomberg - Diva Marketing

Board members are:

Amy Gahran - Contentious
Dana VanDen Heuvel - Internet Marketing and Sales Technology
Jeremy Wright - Ensight
Steve Rubel - Micro Persuasion
Yvonne DiVita - Lip-Sticking

The formation of ...   more »

What is Search Engine Marketing?
A well written and tightly focused blog will create a traffic bonanza of high quality visitors. Blogs are generally tight center and focused on a topic and several related topics.

Search engine marketing is simply getting your blog and your blog content a high enough ranking in the search engines for your keywords so that your content will generate visitors to your site from search results pages (SERPs). Compelling site and content titles and descriptions help compel users to click on your links in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and visit you.

Search engine marketing requires a search engine optimized web site. This is a web site that displays a configuration that makes it very attractive to search engine spiders. The spiders will visit your site and crawl your content. When they do this ...   more »

I want to talk to you today about measuring your blogs ROI or return on investment. I like to consider myself more than just an practitioner of blogging, that is, one who publishes niche content with a blog but I also like to observe the blogosphere and in particular the ways in which blogs are being use to help individuals and businesses promote their messages more effectively into their "space" on the Internet.

There is a lot of writing and publishing on the usefulness of blogs for all kinds of powerful marketing and promotion of products and services. I've done quite of bit of writing on this topic myself. :-)

But there isn't as much content being published on blog or blogging ROI as there is on other points of interest. So a walk through on blog promotion wouldn't be ...   more »

Blogs are here to stay and online marketing is changed forever. Blogs are forcing marketing messages to perform at a higher level of integrity. Some people think marketing, advertising and even capitalism is evil. Blogging will weed out the imposters and allow the cream to rise the top. Credible messages will be shared across blogs as people refer other people to the messages they like most.

The online marketer has to realize this sea change and adapt. Blogs are not a direct marketing medium nor are they e-mail for the web. They are relationship tools through and through. Relationship denotes mutual interests and sharing. Blogs are social tools and communities of people form around blogs that in turn reach out to other blogs that also have communities around them.

Marketing messages must share and provide value to a social network ...   more »

Reason #6 Market Timing Mechanism
Blogs and RSS are powerful market timing publishing tools. They allow your business to stay in tune with market sentiment as it unfolds. You can literally monitor and get a good sampling of what is happening in your market at-large by monitoring the other blog leaders in your niche. What are they saying? What type of comments are being posted by the audience? In what context are others linking to them?

How about your own blog? You do have one right? If you do, what type of feedback are you seeing? How are others linking to you and in what context are they linking to you? Blogs and RSS allow you take advantage of the rise and fall of market sentiment allowing you to obtain a competitive edge. The goal of market timing with investment ...   more »

Reason #1 Your Markets Are Getting Smarter, Faster, And More Organized
With all the attention blogs and RSS has gotten in 2004 it is a sure bet that blogs will be even bigger news in 2005 as we move forward with defining more effective business uses for blogs. This one thing is for sure, thousands of blogs are created every day. The last statistic I've seen quoted by Technorati.com is that 23,000 blogs a day are created which is equal to about 1 blog every 3 seconds that joins the World Live Web.

This means that more and more people in your markets have blogs and there is no faster way of sharing ideas than with blogs and RSS. This represents a growing community of discourse among your customers and prospects that desire to talk with you. Additionally, this means ...   more »