Panicking a Stats Junkie

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Checking on a few link stats this morning I ran smack in to the message over there on the right.

Ooch!

I know systems require maintenance and things have to be done from time to time. But I wonder what Technorati is doing this morning that required them to pull their entire site down.

Do you suppose they are burning the midnight oil to create better tracking systems to capture links better?

Better is better (as long as it really is better,that is).

We’ll just have to see.

If you are a stats junkie, don’t panic. I’m sure they really will be back up soon.

Cutting Through the Social Media Noise

Yesterday Renée Alexandrea commented about all the junk that comes up when she searches on Technorati for stuff. She brings up a good point. There’s a lot of crapola out there and it can be hard to sift through.

Then last night Mike Sansone hosted a podcast with a roundtable discussion about Social Media Tools.

The show is two hours long and I haven’t had an opportunity to listen to it yet. However Mike solicited topic questions so I asked if they’d discuss the issue of sorting the signal from all the noise out there on these tools.

Knowing Mike, I’m sure they covered the topic and have a bunch of pointers waiting for us.

Check it out. I’m looking forward to listening to it on my new iPod myself

Enjoy!

Blogging Tools: Technorati Overview

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!

Savannah Bloggers Noticed By Local Old Media

As you’ve probably heard Friday was the BIG DAY for Un-Conference ‘07 hosted by BlogSavannah.

And the Local Old Media took Notice.

On The Record

Saturday there was a write up in our local paper, the Savannah Morning News, titled Savannah rides the blogging wave at Un-Conference. Everything I do and say is on the record

Personally I’m a little fond of that one because they mentioned yours truly. (And it’s all about me, right?)

Then there was one of the local TV stations, WTOC, who showed up for a while in the morning with a camera and a reporter.

Here’s the text version of their story, Bloggers Gather for Conference. The video version is below compliments of Burton Sauls and YouTube.

I think the most revealing quote that the Old Media folks found was this one from Josh Hallett that was in the newspaper’s article:

“Everything I do and say is on the record. There’s nothing I say that’s off the record, and that’s kind of the way of the world now.”

And Josh is right. From all the people with their laptops typing away at one of the 69 wi-fi hotspots in town to folks like Amber Rhea walking around with pocket sized recorders wearing t-shirts that say, “I’m podcasting this” you never know who is going to be reporting what you say any more.

From what I saw Friday, the Old Media still hasn’t gotten their collective minds around that little point of change yet. So small. Yet it may very well change everything.

Here’s the video from the TV station for those of you who prefer that medium.

Maintaining Your Blogging Passion

One of the things we talked about at the conference on Friday was about blogging from your personal passion. Passion and interest are the fuel that will keep you going when the luster of the “new thing” that blogging is when you get started wears off.

One of the participants asked a valid question as we were talking about sustaining business blogging activity and addressing how much time is involved in successfully blogging in support of your business.

He wondered if he’d be able to maintain that over the long haul. My initial response was that as a business owner did he have trouble being passionate about going to work? If so, blogging was probably not for him.

One of the beauties of business blogging is that it can be a natural off-shoot of the passion business folks have already for their work. If you don’t have any passion for what you do in your business, then blogging probably isn’t a good fit for your business model.

I was talking with my dad last night who is considering starting a personal blog. He said, “Blogging because it’s the next new thing is not a good enough reason to get started.” Dad gets the need for passion.

Most of us spend more time working than we do with our families. The vast majority of business owners have a tremendous amount of knowledge about their business (at least they should!) Couple that knowledge of what they do gives them a unique perspective to speak about their business.

And the familiarity that comes from all the time we spend at work gives us a comfort level talking about what we do.

Ideally all that will blend together into a passion cocktail that can spill out into the blog posts and keep propelling our blogs forward.

Do you have challenges with motivation when it comes to your blogging?

If so why do you think that is?

And what are some things we can do to keep ourselves motivated and moving forward?

BlogSavannah Un-Conference ‘07 Wrap Up

It was a good day. We met lots of interesting folks. Learned some things too. Go figure.

Gorgeous was amused by the number of folks who came in, opened up their laptops and immediately buried their heads in them. Welcome to the blogger world, honey.

There were camera’s everywhere. I got busted trying to feed my addiction at the Starbuck’s trough. I think that may be one of the least flattering pics of me taken in quite a while! That’s what I get for letting a camera wielder sneak up behind me.

I was a little disappointed about the schedule because the session I was facilitating was opposite the session on podcasting led by Phil Sellers of iTourSavannah. Since I (finally) acquired an iPod of my very own a week or two ago I find myself suddenly interested in things podcastish.

However it all worked out because our intrepid host Drew over at BlogSavannah realized very early on that there was a significant portion of the attenders who haven’t started blogging yet and really wanted a brief introduction to the basics of what blogging is, the terminology, and such.

So he set up an impromptu session and had Josh Hallett, who is a blog and social media consultant out of Orlando, give a basic intro to blogging for the uninitiated while the rest of us met with Phil and learned about podcasting.

Phil started by telling us how easy podcasting was and how little equipment you need to get up and running. But then spent a bunch of time sharing all the equipment he uses to create his podcasts. He made the whole thing sound rather expensive. Read more

Conference Day Today

Today’s the day of the big Un-Conference ‘07 here in Savannah!

The driving force behind the event, BlogSavannah reports that there are over 100 folks registered to attend!

Good job on the promotional end!

It promises to be a wonderful day meeting new folks who are blogging or are interested in learning about blogging here in town. Gorgeous is going too, so I know I’ll have a good time.

I’ll let you know how many folks are interested in learning about Business Blogging 101 and how my session goes.

Gotta Run.

Enjoy!

The Steady Growth Blogging Strategy

Wealth from get-rich-quick schemes quickly disappears, but wealth from hard work grows over time.

I was hanging out with some folks last night and we were talking about business and someone brought up the old proverb above. The idea being that where money and finances are concerned slow and steady will win the race in the end.

Someone pointed out that something like 70% of all lottery winners are poorer (i.e. deeper in debt) than before they won their millions in just 5 years.

Poking around this morning I see that figure mentioned a lot but I can’t find the source reference anywhere so I don’t know if that is a real number or was made up by someone. But Google lottery winners broke years and you get the idea that it might not be that far off.

One thing I did learn this morning is that 5% of all lottery players buy half all lottery tickets. And I’m guessing those ticket purchasers aren’t the Bill Gates type either.

Most of the folks who win the lottery don’t understand the principles of how money works. Apparently some of the same skills required to accumulate wealth are necessary to keep it. People who earn their money are much more likely to use it wisely than those who just receive it as a gift.

Parallels in Blogging

It is very possible to build your blog very quickly, especially where solid traffic and links are concerned. It takes a lot of work to make that happen, though. Read more

CREEating Value - 24 January 2007

CREEating Value - About once a week I go through my feed reader and pull out a few gems that bring value to you as a business blogger. Here are this weeks juicy finds.

Enjoy!

Renovate Your Life (feed) - Craig Harper is an Australian motivational speaker, author, radio host, TV commentator, Life Renovator, Business Coach, Trainer & Educator, and Exercise Scientist. He sounds like a very busy guy. Even so, he has recently added blogging to his portfolio. I find his posts inspirational without all the fuzzy kumbaya fluff that seems to be so common in self-improvement circles. Craig goes straight to the matter and tells it like it is. I appreciate that.

Orbit Now! (feed) - Troy Worman calls his stuff “Positive Pop Pulp”. Me, I tend to write longish posts. In contrast most of Troy’s posts are refreshingly short and to the point. Little juicy nuggets of tasty mental goodness. And I especially like that it seems every time I click through the feed he’s got a different theme up and running for his blog.

Small Business Hub (feed) - This blog is written by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah primarily as a way to get the word out about their blogging platform designed for small businesses called HubSpot. (OK that’s a simplistic explanation of their product, but you get the idea). They are smart about their blogging, though because they consistently offer valuable information that has kept me reading for several months even though I’ve never tried their product. This blog is a good resource for any business blogger.

Gearing Up for Un-Conference ‘07

Friday is the day we are all focused on now. And not just because it is at the end of the traditional work week either.

That’s the day for all the sessions in Savannah’s own very first blog conference. They’re calling it Un-Conference ‘07 and it promises to be informative as well as a whole lot of fun.

A quick look a the Session Topics shows attenders will be learning more about a wide variety of blogging subjects including Podcasting, Women, Social Media, Journalism, PR, Media, Corporate, and (my personal favorite) Business.

Gorgeous counted something like 75 people already registered for this free event. I expect in true Savannah fashion there will be at least a few more last minute registrants. So I expect there is still time to register if you are in the area and want to connect with some bloggers in Savannah.

Oh, and in case you are wondering what to expect, Drew over at BlogSavannah has a post up with a link to this post by Dave Winer that describes what an Un-conference should be all about.

I’ll be structuring my “talk” on business blogging so that there will hopefully be tons of discussion. My goal is to make it like a live blog post, with the same kind of interactivity.

It will be interesting to see how it comes off.

Hopefully I’ll see you there!

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