Business Blogging - How to Build A Better Blog

Blogging- The Gateway Drug to Web Addiction?

More BlogHer conference meet and greets: Can we call these women "blogher-ati?" They certainly meet my definition of 21st century literati: Toby Bloomberg, Lisa Stone, Teresa Valdez Klein, Halley Suitt, and so many more to add to Denise's list in the previous post.

This photo is the cover of the Austin Chronicle, and proclaims women bloggers to be the "Queens of Cyber Space!

Denise  met and talked with Mena Trott, founder of Six Apart and Typepad. Since we are such heavy users of Typepad, I guess this is akin to an addict meeting a South American cartel kingpin!

Lisa Stone, co-organizer of the BlogHer event, called blogging the "gateway drug" to other kinds of web and writing addictions.

Here, I am with law expert Lauren Gelman and Yvonne DiVita of Lipsticking blog fame.

Denise and I  had dinner with one of the best looking bright young men at the conference: Phil Hollows of Feedblitz.com. Well, okay, so did 750 other people, and we thoroughly enjoyed getting to know about the big things coming from his forward-looking company in the near future.

In fact we are so excited about Feedblitz and their new features, that we invited Phil to speak with our Conversations with Experts listeners soon. Phil is an English gentleman transplanted in the US, and in spite of his technical engineering background, is a lot of fun to talk with. Stay tuned!

BlogHer Conference - Day One

It's day one of BlogHer in San Jose and Patsi and I are excited to be here and meeting some of our wonderful blogging colleagues whom we've only previously know virtually.

We've met Yvonne Divita, Anita Campbell, Phil Hollows (Feedblitz), Susannah Gardner and Toby Bloomberg, so far.  That's quite a line up of powerful women in the blogosphere. 

The first session we attened was on Community blogging which is not my primary interest, but I wanted to meet Susannah (you may remember she was a guest on Conversations with Experts last year, and I hired her company to do the website for one of my clients, Mani's Bakery Cafe).  The session was sponsored by Blurb and I really wanted to meet Eileen Gittens, the CEO, because we've been on conversation with them for a year about getting in on the beta test of their blog slurping software for creating books, for our Blog to Book Project participants.  We were glad to hear that the project is going beta in 2 weeks.

The Blog Squad Goes to BlogHer, San Jose

Our next posts will be Live! from San Jose where the Blog Squad will be meeting and greeting other women bloggers, and some lucky men too. There are many people we've been communicating with by email that we'll meet face-to-face for the first time, always fun.

We'll take a few snaps and post directly from the conference floor, giving you an insider's peek at what all those women are up to, blog-wise.

Power, DSL and Brain Outages, Or, How I Spent My Day

Denise wrote a good post about summer power outages this week, and reminds us all that there are tips we can do to protect our files and online work.

Jokingly, I said Mercury must be in retrograde, because I had complete Internet connection failure all morning. When AT&T assured me that the DSL outage would last until noon, I decided to go out to do some errands.

Bear with me, folks, this story has a point.

But my car wouldn't start, complete dead battery. Okay, this story could go on, but are you getting the picture here? I was having vague recollections of my early years on the 'Net, when people laughed at me and called me a techno-dummy.

Long story short, more calls to AT&T, and the DSL outage continued until 4 in the afternoon. A technician and I worked every conceivable rebooting trick and still we got a flashing red light on the SpeedStream modem.

It wasn't until my husband walked into the office and spotted the phone line on the floor, disconnected, that the mystery "outage" was resolved.

The point? No, it's not that I am an idiot. It's that our expectations dictate our world view. Since there had been power outages, and DSL outages, everyone assumed that was what the problem was.

Moral: check your plugs and outlets first. Sometimes feet and cats get tangled in all those wires down there and things mysteriously get disconnected.

P.S. Mercury IS in retrograde, as Denise's hairdresser confirmed later that day!

31 Questions about Building Your List

Last month Patsi and I presented a class on proven ways to grow your ezine list.  What grew out of the class was a multi-media program with audio and ebook that we released last week.

Part of what's included in the program is a list of 31 questions people sent to us about how to grow their ezine lists.  We answered them all.

Now, we're making this FAQ available to you.  But there's a catch, of course.  You can get the special report free when you subscribe to our ezine, SavvyeBizTips.  The only other way to get the report is if you purchase the List Building Program. Even if you only have a blog, you need to know how to build your list so you have a group of people who want to hear from you and know about your products and services.

Free or fee, it's up to you.  We received excellent questions and answered them all in full.  Subscribe to SavvyeBizTips and you'll get the report as our gift to you.

Related posts:
Ezine Broadcasting
List Building Tips
List Building Tips - Part 2
Newsletter or Not?
Ezine Broadcasting: Should Your Eggs Be All in One Basket?

Coporate Blogging Book

I just received my advance copy of Debbie Weil's The Corporate Blogging Book. Visually, it's very appealing.  I'll take it with me to the BlogHer conference and hope to get some time to go through it and report back later.  The book is due for publication on August 7 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com.

Blogs Help Create Credibility

I just read an excellent blog post by Yaro Starak on his new blog about building blog traffic.  He talks about creating credibility through blogging -- something Patsi and I stress with every client and in every blogging class we present.

Yaro shares an example of how traffic to his blog significantly increased when a popular site linked to him on their home page.  He did not go after the link; it was "organic" as they say, since the company did it on their own.  The benefit to Yaro is that his credibility as an expert is significantly enhanced by having this respected site feature a link to his blog.

This is part of the same discussion as our previous one on influence and authority. 

How long does this take?  No one can answer that.  I've been blogging consistently on 7 blogs for nearly 2 years and my credibility and authority have been growing over that time.

Here's a response from Yaro to that question posed by one of his commenters:

It’s impossible for me to give you an accurate answer, it could take months or even years. It’s something intangible, I couldn’t really provide an exact measure for when someone has credibility in general.

If you keep blogging and people start offering you things, or asking for advice, or following your recommendations or proposing partnerships or quoting you or telling other people to read your work or any number of these things, it’s a sign you have built some credibility.

BlogHer Conference in San Jose

Anyone going to the BlogHer Conference in San Jose this weekend?  The Blog Squad will be there and we'd love to meet you.  Let us know and we'll figure out a way to meet and say hello in person.

Blogging Leads to Influence

Did you see my post on Next Level Biz Tips?  The one in which I'm tooting my own horn about being identified as an "influential authority" on blog marketing?  What an honor to be included with the likes of Seth Godin, Micropersuasion and Wired News!  An article in WebProNews covers the story well (they come in at #9, right below Next Level Biz Tips!).  The study, done by Onalytica measures the influence and popularity -- I'm not very popular :-(  -- and you can read about it on their blog.

My original intent was to write about PRWeb.com because I was over there today submitting a press release about my new-found authority.

Feedblitz Stats: How to Check Them

If you use Feedblitz to deliver email updates to your blog readers, it's important to log in to your account from time to time and check your stats.  I do this at least weekly, because frequently there are deliverability issues with various ISPs and some of your subscribers may not be getting your updates.  For example, today I discovered that a bunch of subscribers who use AOL are bouncing back.

It's simple to check and reinstate the undeliverable addresses:

• Log in to your account.
• You're on your Dashboard and in a box on the right, you'll see all your subscriber stats.
• If you have undeliverable emails, you'll see a yellow warning sign with the number of undeliverables.
• Click on the warning sign and you be on a page that lists all the undeliverable addresses.  Some of these may be legitimate due to bad addresses and some may be a one time fluke.
• You can click on the green check mark next to each address to change the status to OK, or you can put a check in the box above the orange bar, above the Email column to select ALL the addresses, then click the green check mark to make them all OK.

If you notice the same addresses coming up week after week, then it's probably a bad address and should be removed from your subscriber list.

Technorati Tags: Feedblitz, AOL