Well what a surprise. I'm away at a Marketing Conference to speak about blogging and discovered by reading the blog of my good friend Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing Blog about being nominated for the 2005 Business Blogging Awards for Best Marketing Blog.

Paul writes about that here: Radiant Marketing Blog. Well I'm pitted against Paul himself and the likes of Seth Godin. I'm honored just to be nominated and mentioned among all of these celebrated bloggers of extraordinary talents.

I have some votes but I'm way being behind in the polls! :-)

Thank you everyone for the nomination. It is appreciated! I'm honored.   more »

According to my friend John-Paul at Advanced Business Blogging we can look forward to the delivery of services to help us gather better metrics and meaurements on the performance of our RSS feeds.

John-Paul mentions SyndicateIQ, Pheedo, and FeedBurner as services that are working on RSS solutions for measuring RSS metrics.

FeedBurner is especially useful in providing content publishers with some rather useful metrics for RSS. FeeBurner is like a proxy service for RSS. You "wrap" your regular RSS URL into a FeedBurner named RSS URL (this is called Burning your Feed) and you then marketing that FeedBurner URL.

FeedBurner then checks your RSS feed for you and polls it for updates just like an RSS reader would. I believe the last information I read from FeedBurner is that they check your RSS feed every 30 minutes or ...   more »

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 »

In more Professional Bloggers Association news you can now get more information on the mission and purpose of the PBA by clicking over to the Pro-Bloggers Association web site.

Watch this space for more information as it becomes available. The PBA blog will also be unwrapped very soon also.   more »

Are are some ideas on how to create blog content that will improve traffic and rankings for your blog. High ranking content can be simplified through these simple key points that you may want to keep in mind as you blog.

These important points for high ranking content are:

Know Your Niche
Know Your Keywords
Write To Inform
Watch Your Stats

Know Your Niche
Before you start you should research your niche and know your niche. I recommend grabbing surveys and review statistics on market trends and behaviors happening within your niche and those happening around your niche. This is great info that will be useful in guiding your topics or it can help you understand how to position yourself within your niche when you open your blog for business.

If you've been a player in a particular niche already ...   more »

Hi everyone,

Today I'd would like to post a public apology to Sheila Coggins. For those of you who don't know Sheila, she is the publisher and Weblog Guide at About.com. You can read her here: Sheila Coggins

I published an article entitled How To Blog 102. In the article I cite her work but I did not give proper attribution or link to the article in question regarding blogging styles.

I am issuing this apology publicly because my error was public. This is poor blogging etiquette and is totally my error. Understandably Sheila is upset and has accused me of being a thief posing as a blogger. This is obviously untrue but I take responsibility for my mistake and acknowledge the disservice done to Sheila.

Sheila is an outstanding publisher and does fantastic work at Weblogs@About.com. Sheila, ...   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 »

Open Source Media = Social Marketing
Blogs and RSS are heralded as "open source media" where no one controls the medium and all have equal access to any social discourse and ideas related to ones personal interests.

This trend is greatly changing the way marketing and communications are being conducted online. Print, radio, and TV represent the old way of reaching markets with your business offerings. Print, radio and TV are not irrelevant but businesses do need to recognize a new way to reach their markets.

The new way is Social Marketing with blogs and RSS.

Blogs and RSS represent the rise of social networks and community that are exercising great influence on the minds and purchasing decisions of consumer groups all across the Internet. Your markets are now comprised of a living and vibrant community of voices that you ...   more »

Blogs Are Social Tools
RSS allows you to subscribe to the ideas and conversations within the filtered web of social networks. Blogs themselves are filtering tools because each blog is under the control of a real person who acts as a content gatekeeper who publishes content they personally decide is relevant to their given audience.

When that blog becomes a trusted source of content it also becomes the news filter for it's audience. Users know that a blog will give them timely content that is on target and immediately useful. There is no need to wade through unnecessary content or irrelevant messages.

Social Networks is a alternate term used to commonly describe the new face of the web...BLOGS. Blogs as social tools communicate ideas virally across the Internet because they are ...   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 »

Introduction

Why a Un-Marketers Guide and is Un-Marketer a real word?

Great questions so I’ll explain.

First I am writing this guide a how to for people who just want to blog for fun and profit. This means you simply want to get on with the business of learning how to make you blog work for you.

That is what I’m about. I love blogs and how they work for people is so many ways. I recognize there are people who want just the facts about succeeding with a blog and without secret systems and complicated processes for marketing their blog.

So I wrote this for you. I am not a marketer but I do recognize marketing is an important component of doing business online. Plus I practice what I preach. I publish two blogs and publish nearly everyday. I ...   more »

Welcome to BlogBack Radio!

What is BlogBack! Radio? BlogBack! Radio Is your Podcast channel for all that is new and news to help you create blogs that work. I am developing this podcast to extend my reach in helping customers, clients, prospects and partner with learning how to be better bloggers and create blogs that work for you and what you want your blog to do for you.

Blogged In 60 seconds! May return as a spot in BlogBack! Radio but for now I want to experiment with a longer format that may be more helpful in a more practical manner. That doesn't mean I'm not working on adding some entertainment value. :-)

I'm also working on videoblogger but I'm not quite ready for primetime on that yet. Take a listen and contact me if you like. The podcast is ...   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 »