Today is Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Blogging

Google’s Adsense is a waste of time for serious bloggers

Google’s Adsense is a waste of time for major bloggers who don’t think Google is giving them the revenues they should be getting.

The Big Picture’s blogger, Barry Ritholtz, is pretty open about his frustration.

And he confirms my concerns, which have kept me from putting Adsense on this site. At the moment, it costs me only $240 a year for hosting this site, but since I’m not a techie, I have to hire a consultant to do some of the coding and site maintenance. So far, I get paid by my own investing activities, which are enhanced by the thinking and research I do as I write my blog posts. But a little revenue would be welcome if it didn’t require too much time, which I prefer to spend on blogging as opposed to selling ads and administration. I assume a lot of bloggers feel the same way.

If anybody has some advice, please e-mail me at thebusinessword (youknowthesymbol) yahoo.com.

 

How to use Yahoo Pipes to track mentions of your organization on the Web

I’m reading Always On, Advertising, Marketing and Media in an Era of Consumer Control, by Christopher Vollmer of Booz Allen. I’ll review the book for FAR and here soon.

Anyway, it got me to thinking about Church of the Customer by a couple of other social networking and marketing consultants.

There I found this post on Yahoo Pipes, which I want to followup on as soon as I get time. The link is here.

How can banks and small businesses capitalize on social networking, personal CPM?

J. P. Hannan, a media guru, offers some intriguing ideas about social networking, personal CPM and online advertising over at Seeking Alpha.

 

Tools used by bloggers useful for investors, small business owners, market researchers

The whatsnextthing.com blog looks at the research tools top bloggers use to find information and keep up with their industries and key words. You can track keywords and stock symbols on the major search engines, which will e-mail news about any key-word you specify.

I’m old fashioned, I guess. I surf the web and read blogs, newspapers and magazines.

Join our message board to discuss stocks, business, health care, politics

The Business Word message board is where you can comment on blog posts, stocks, business issues and problems, health care and health insurance issues and even national and local politics. Click here to see the forums.

While blogs like this are mostly top down enterprises where the bloggers start threads and conversations, message boards are bottom-up ventures in the sense that both the blogger and members can start threads. Message boards generally foster more open discussions, are easier to post on and are easier to moderate for spam and other undesireable content. I will try to participate in most threads, and I’m hoping we can develope communities of serious investors, options traders, technical analysts, health care policy wonks and business owners. If the political forum takes off, that will be a bonus for this politics and news junky.

What it takes to attract readers to your blog

Some top bloggers offer their blogging tips to Paul Boutin.

 

Capital One’s joinslingshot.com attracts me with an ad in the Rocky

Capital One Services Inc. (COF) has launced http://www.joinslingshot.com, “the new business marketplace designed to bring Denver business owners and customers together.”

The ad promoting the new site that

 

Should small businesses’ employees be encouraged to blog?

Corporate blogging has been discussed a few times on this blog. Lee Gomes takes a stab at explaining the pros and cons. But he doesn’t address the problem of finding employees who like to write, know how to control their opinions and know their company and how to make their bosses and company look good. For more of my opinions on this, search this site for “blogging” and “blog.”

Should you publish a wiki on your web site?

What is a “wiki” and how will it help you mobilize your employees, retain clients and customers or sell equipment and supplies?

Westminister Wiki Business Consultants recently started a blog to sell their services, but isn’t doing the job. (This is my 49th post on business blogging. Search “blog” in column three.)

What’s missing?

Posts. The owners post infrequently, which means they’re not building readership.

Content. This blog appears to be written by techies who don’t know how to market their services. They don’t do a good job of defining a wikipedia or even link to one in the pioneering http://www.wikipedia.com. Nor does the blog give good examples of how a wiki might be integrated with a small business’s web site.

www.expressionengine.com is the web site for the creators of the content management system I use on this site. Back in September, 2006, I participated in this this thread on how to use a wiki.

This was my contribution (click on headline):

Small business blogs and news sites abound; some are worth reading, some not

Owners, creators and buyers of small businesses can find hundreds, if not thousands of articles and blogs about running, starting and buying small businesses online.

Some of them are very good, and, of course, you have to wonder about others.

USA Today’s Rhonda Abrams, for example, has published several articles on small business each month for almost five years. She seldom writes about buying technology for small businesses, but here she writes about the buy or lease question. It’s an interesting article that would benefit from a few links to more detailed articles and online calculators.

The Wall Street Journal’s wsj.com includes a very professionally produced section for small business owners. At first glance, the articles appear to be boiler plate. But if you click on the “technology” tab, you’ll see a lot of interesting articles for companies in the technology business as well as for those shopping for new technology solutions. The wsj.com Small Business reporters frequently “ask an expert,” and they get some good advice on, for example, outsourcing technology. My only complaint is that the article is pretty short and doesn’t really explain what “outsourcing technology” means. It probably means outsourcing system administration or web site administration, which is something more interesting to larger “small businesses” than to organizations with only 5 or 10 employees.

Nevertheless, someone thinking about starting a business could spend a couple of days on the wsj.com Small Business site. (Subscription may be required.)

Smallbusiness.com’s wiki is very interesting. I’ve linked to their directory of small business technology weblogs. This could be very useful, but the first blog I clicked on had only two posts, and they were made almost a year ago. Somebody’s not keeping the links current, but if you’re shopping for technology, you might want to check out some of the blogs and the wiki itself.

Is your blog a success?

Marketers should check out Avinash Kaushik’s essay on blog metrics.

When you hire a blogger for a bank or other organization, be sure the bloggers know their places

Former Sen. John Edwards, a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, has learned the hard way that not all bloggers know their roles.

A corporate blogger must recognize the difference between being an indepdent soul and a spokes person for his employer.

Now Edwards has at least one major Catholic organization angry and vowing to turn the Catholic community against him.

And by refusing to fire the offenders, he’s revealed a basic character flaw. He doesn’t have the guts to fire incompetents, and he’s too loyal to those who fail him.

Number of new blogs may be peaking but blogs are getting more attention

Micro Persuasion examines Technorati’s data on blogging and finds that some indicators suggest blogging may be peaking. At the same time, other data suggest blogs are gaining in influence.

Impact graph:

Banks can use viral marketing, but be careful

Banks use advertising and web sites to attract new customers, and they count on word of mouth referrals to bring in new accounts as well.

Word of mouth advertising, referral advertising and viral marketing are all pretty much the same thing. That is they depend on “buzz” to bring a bank or other business to the attention of potential clients and customers.

Banks and other financial institutions, of course, are conservative marketers, because they have important reputations to promote and protect. Movie and TV program promoters, on the other hand, can take big risks, because they’re promoting events and not institutions.

With these thoughts in mind, you might want to take a look at 7 tips on viral marketing.

Blogs increase media attention on corporate web sites that publish them

Porter Novelli has published a survey that shows corporations that publish blogs find they get increased media attention as a result. Tip of hat to Buzz Marketing With Blogs, which is promoting a book on blogging. Nice site.

The reason’s pretty simple: Search engines rank frequently updated sites higher than sites that aren’t updated, and when the content is interesting and rewarding, readers come back for more.