Biz Tips Blog: Internet Marketing Tips

The Blog Squad quoted in The Wall Street Journal

In today's print and online edition of  The Wall Street Journal, I'm quoted in an article about pitching bloggers.  Also included is a case study from one of our clients. I blogged about it on Build a Better Blog.

If you've arrived on this blog as a result of The Wall Street Journal article, welcome! You can learn more about The Blog Squad at our hub site. And if you're new to blogging, get our free white paper on The Great Internet Marketing Challenge: How to Get Your Business Found on the Web.

Everything you ever wanted to know about business blogging is covered on our blog at Build a Better Blog.

Southwest Airlines Team Blog

During the Thanksgiving holiday I had the good fortune to spend quite a bit of time at the airport waiting for my flight to Northern California to be cleared for take off. The Burbank airport was socked in with uncharacteristic fog and all flights were delayed about 2 hours.

Fortunately, the folks at Southwest were very communicative about the delay and ended up accommodating my request to change flights so I could fly to a different airport and meet my family on time for our Thanksgiving celebration. I fly Southwest a lot and I cannot remember having a bad experience with them.

But that's beside the point. While hanging out at the airport at 6:30 a.m., I decided to catch up on some podcasts. One of my favorites is Marketing Voices, weekly perspectives on social media marketing. The interviews with major players in the Web 2.0, social media and marketing arena are always enlightening, informative and interesting.  At approximately 10-15 minutes, they pack a lot in and are perfect those moments when you have some time to kill.

The first podcast in my list happened to be with Paula Berg, the PR Manager for Southwest.  Paula was being interviewed about Southwest's popular blog, Nuts about Southwest, and their team approach to blogging.

Guest Bloggers on CoachEzines.com

Patsi is on vacation this week but that doesn't mean her blog CoachEzines is languishing unattended.  She invited several guest bloggers to post while she's away.  Check out a couple of great articles posted now:

Rich Brooks: Doin' the Biz Blog Boogie: Two steps to profits

John T. Unger: What to Do When Someone Steals Your Content

Blogs as Stores: A Comprehensive Overview of Ecommerce Solutions for Bloggers

This is the most comprehensive overview I've ever seen of how to monetize one's blog. Some of the solutions require HTML knowledge, and there are many that are relatively simple for TypePad bloggers to integrate on their blog.  Here's what's covered and I urge you to read the complete post if you are looking for more ways to sell your products and services.

1. The Concept: Why blogstores make sense.
2. The Ideal Blog Store: What I'd like to be able to do in TypePad.
3. Current eCommerce Solutions for TypePad: What works, and how well.
4. Blog/Commerce Hybrids Off TypePad: What's being done with Blog/Store Hybrids on other platforms.

read more | digg story

Social Media Article Directory

A quick announcement...we have set up a new article directory devoted solely to articles on Social Media, Internet Marketing and all things related. 

Categories include: Affiliate Marketing, Computer, Software, PHP, Web, html, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Blogs, Podcasting, Social Bookmarking, Tagging, Video, Technology, Broad band
Mobile.

You're most welcome to set up a free account and submit your articles on any of the topics we cover.  Check it out: Social Media Marketing Articles

If you're looking for articles for your blog, ezine or website, we also have directories with articles on diet and fitness, PC gaming and leadership, professional and personal development (fee-based).

Blogs Better Than Email Marketing

I've been scrolling through my blog feed reader (I use Google Reader) catching up on my favorite blogs and landed on Kevin O'Keefe's Real Lawyers Have Blogs.  I met Kevin at the Blog Business Summit last month in Seattle.  We had a chance to chat over dinner and I really admire the blog business he's created by catering strictly to the lawyer market.

But I digress. While I was on Kevin's blog his latest post caught my eye.  He was quoting a new study that finds blogs are becoming a more trusted source of advertising than email marketing and TV advertising. This was a survey of 2000 Europeans.

It doesn't surprise me, actually. As a marketing tool, blogs are about creating conversations and relationships.  When a relationship is formed between author and reader, the reader grows to trust the author. Therefore any product recommendations made by the author carry weight as if the information is coming from a friend.  And we all know word-of-mouth marketing works the best.

So my question to you is: have you integrated a blog into your marketing mix yet and if so, what kind of results are you seeing?

Blogger PR Article

I posted an excellent article by Joan Stewart, The Publicity Hound, on Pitching the Best Bloggers over at Build a Better Blog. 

This isn’t just for PR professionals. In this day and age, if you’re in business, you have to do a lot of your own PR. Every professional and business owner with a product or service needs to know these tactics.

Blog Marketing: I'm an influential authority!

I was just alerted that this blog, Next Level Biz Tips, is considered an "influential authority" on blog marketing.  I rank #8 in the top 20 according to a study done by Onalytica, a company in the UK that "identifies, measures and monitors who has influence on issues, markets and brands."

You'll see I'm not very popular but I do come in ahead of some very big name blogs.

I'm shocked as hell, so let me show you the definition that Olyalytica provides about influence and popularity:

The difference between influence and popularity
The difference between influence and popularity can be highlighted by looking at the parameters taken into account when measuring the two.

When you want to measure the popularity of a stakeholder, you count the number of other stakeholders who refer to the first stakeholder in the context being analysed. So the only variable taken into account is “number of referrals”.

Analogous this can be used to measure the link-popularity of a particular website by counting the number of inbound linkers.

However, when measuring influence we take one more variable into account: The influence of the endorser (linker).

I have to confess that this is a bit too complex for me so I'll take it at face value and accept the honor with gratitude.  Thank you, Onalytica.  I'm glad to know what I'm doing has some influence!

One more thing, AllBusiness.com came in at #15.  I also write for that blog network at Your Project Partner.

Read Press Release here.

Blog Advertising

• Blog ads - are they worth it? | Blogs and News | E-consultancy.com
  (tags: blog advertising PPC)

For some blog advertising works, for others it doesn't.  One of the benefits of advertising on blogs is that the audience is generally very targeted.  When I want to get some additional exposure for a service or product, I submit ads through Blogads.com.  I also accept ads through Blogads (see ad for diet articles in left sidebar). One of the things I like about Blogads is that as the publisher, you have total control over what you charge for your ads as well as what ads you want to accept.

As an advertiser, it's a relatively inexpensive way to reach more people and is a good way to test your ads in front of your target audience.

What's your experience with blog advertising?  Please share by clicking the comment link below.

links for 2006-03-29

• How to Harness the Marketing Power of Blogs
  Hmmm, I wonder where this guy has been for the last year and a half while we've been saying how powerful blogs are to market your business?
  (tags: marketing blogs internet business)
• Bloggers Blog: Oops! Google Deletes Its Own BlogSpot Blog
  I'm hearing more and more stories about Google deleting perfectly legitimate Blogger blogs because THEIR automated systems determine that are spam blogs. Problem is you cannot get your blog back and a spammer can get hold of your blog's name. You get what you pay for.

Read a post about Blogger experiences over at Get Known Now Blog.

(tags: Google blogs blogging blogger)

• StreamCast Sues Skype - Forbes.com
  (tags: StreamCast Skype eBay)