One of the things I learned very early on in my time at sea was that you wanted to be sure you had the right tools with you to do the job. One of the big reasons was that your ship was out there in the middle of the ocean and help might not be very close at hand.
As a business blogger you need to have the right tools in your belt as well. Sure help is a whole lot closer for you (unless you happen to be in the middle of the ocean.) But your time is precious and if you can learn to use the tools yourself you will save yourself a tremendous amount of time in the long run and make your blogging that much more effective for your business.
As I talk about some of these tools I will use SuccesCREEations here as the test bed to help demonstrate and explain how they are useful and how you can use them to support your business blog.
Links
As a business owner I’m sure you understand the value of measuring and tracking results. One of the beautiful things about working in the internet environment is how quantifiable everything is. The computers can track just about everything about our blogs if we use the right tools.
Links are the basic currency of the blog world. They are how folks find your blog, in more ways than one. First of all people will come to your blog directly through links from other people who have written about you. Also it is through following links that most of the search engines out there gather web sites (and blogs) to put into their search results. Their spiders and crawlers are traveling the web from link to link recording data all along the way.
Finally many of the search engines use the number of links to a particular site and where those links originated from as part of their formulation to determine the rankings of their results.
So then links are probably something you want to track to measure how your blog is doing.
Enter Technorati
Fortunately there is a tool that does just that (and a whole lot more!)
Technorati has become one of the core metrics of the blogging world. Currently they say they are tracking 63.2 million blogs with something like 175,000 blogs being added every day.
Once you get your business blog up and running it would be a very good idea to go to their site and open an account with them. Just click on the “Join” link in the upper right corner, fill out the basic info, check your email, click on the confirmation link, and you are ready to get started.
You are going to want to claim your blog right away.That way you can get to tracking it and see who is linking to you.
Searches
There are three basic ways to search using Technorati.
The Technorati search box has three drop down tabs and the second one is in Tags. This will let you search “Everything in the known universe” according to them. If you are looking for anything out there that has been given a Technorati tag with something of interest, like say SuccessCREEations, you can find it here.
The third drop down tab is in Blog Directory. Searching for a specific blog’s domain there, like SuccessCREEations.com for example, and you will find the Technorati directory listing for that blog. This is why you want to claim your blog so that it gets listed in the directory.
I saved the best for last. The first drop down tab is in Blog Posts. This one is your bread and butter because you can search for any term or any site and see what others are saying about it. Here is the results for SuccessCREEations.com.
But that isn’t the reason I like it so much. If you will notice in the address bar at the top of your browser there should be a little orange RSS feed button next to the URL of the search. Here is the example of the search feed again for SuccessCREEations.com.
Notice the URL is slightly different than the search URL in that it has “feeds.” at the beginning before technorati.com. This way you can subscribe to the feed and only have to search once. Or as Mike Sansone is so fond of saying, “Search once and subscribe.”
There’s a whole lot more to Technorati than what we’ve talked about today. But that should be enough to get you started.
Enjoy!
Hey Chris,
Pardon me, but I think this infomation they gave is….
Utterly Rubbish!!!
I just came from technorati, trying to fish some quality posts related to my blogs…again I so dissapointed to see so many splogs (and some seem “legitimate” blogs made to filter to other spammy blogs). Guess what, I didn’t even have to search far for them–they are mostly on page two and onwards!
And you know what, three of my blogs are nowhere to be found in technorati.
Justifiable? You tell me!
Renée, I have no doubt that there is a large percentage of junkola out there. A quick look at Askimet’s Live Spam Zeitgist gives a striking graphic of the ratio of spam as far as comments go.
I’m curious how you were searching on Technorati. For example doing a tag search for “dogs” seems to give better results than an “in Blog Post” search for that same general term.
It’s not much a difference, Chris!
If you look closely, quite a few are “disguised” spblogs–the so called better looking spblogs.
To prove my point, here’s one example
posted on Jan 03
posted on Jan 27
FYI, this is on the main page, number two on the list!
These days, I’m getting really pro at spotting one without having to stay long!
Perhaps you might do better using a more specific search term?
What tool do you prefer over Technorati for tracking your inbound links?
Great coverage, Chris.
Technorati is a great tool, but can also be frustrating. Playing T’rati Roulette each day can be a bummer. You never know what links are going to drop off, or how your ranking will fluctuate.
Fortunately, they’re extremely responsive in their support. Liz did a post on her issues, and passed along my comment, and it was corrected quickly. When it happened again last week, Janice let me know about an outage and it was corrected.
So a great tool with some bugs. But I wouldn’t do without it.
I pretty much given up hope on Technorati, when searching for related topics (be it small dogs or pets in general) is concerned. I get better result via others’ blogroll or SEs.
Thank goodness, health and fitness topics are not that bad overall, otherwise I’m dead meat.
No problem in tracking inbound links looking at my wp dashboard. But my server stats are much more reliable!
I don’t care much about my ranking in Technorati, but Text-adlink does. This has affected my advertiser rate. Luckily, I have advertisers coming to me directly than through Text-adlink.
I’m happy for you, Tony!
Unfortunately I don’t share the same fate as you have regarding the “responsive in their support”
Renée, have you gone in and claimed your blog with Technorati?
Thank you Chris. I’ve been on Technorati for my personal blogging and never really gave it a thought to our business site’s updates, notices and material that we’ve posted.
Hey Margaret, you can use it to track the conversations about your business name, products or industry. You can also tag your business posts to help increase “find-ability” of your site for potential customers.
And that’s just for starters.
(Did you make it to the Un-conference Friday? If so I’m bummed we didn’t get a chance to meet.)
Tony, I didn’t miss your comment up there. I just spaced! (Doh!) I’m with you. Not perfect. But very useful.
And obsessing too much about your link count can be just as frazzling as worrying about your daily site traffic or feed subscriber count. They are going to change, often for reasons that are really hard to figure out.
I’ve never really found Technrati to be that useful of a site.
I dont find Technorati that reliable. Nowadays , it has lost its value. With an experiment Dosh Dosh entered the top 100 blogs list by exchanging technorati favourites