Away for a Bit

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Thanks for visiting!

I will be away from the blog until next week sometime. We got a call this afternoon that my wife’s father passed away.

We are leaving early in the morning for Wisconsin.

I’ll get back to the blog after I return.

Thanks for your understanding.

Business is About People not Stats

As we work through the current series on Promoting Your Blog with Social Networking Sites, it is important that we pause for a moment and remember that ultimately business is about people and not about stats.

Business blogging is no different.

Show Me The Money

I’ve had discussions in the past with folks who subscribe to the conventional wisdom that Business is about money. That thinking misses the mark.

People ultimately control the money.

You build relationships with clients and customers, who are ultimately real people - even when the clients are businesses - and the money will follow in a solid stream.

You try to short circuit that reality and your income flow will be less certain and less steady. Read more

Promote Your Business Blog with Social Networking Sites: MyBlogLog

We are going through some of the social networking sites that are out there and talking about how we can become active in them to help promote our businesses.

Yesterday we talked about StumbleUpon. In the comments of that post Tony Clark pointed out an article on DoshDosh that gives a very comprehensive introduction to StumbleUpon that is worth reading though. Head over to yesterday’s post and check out the link. Thanks Tony!

MyBlogLog History

Today let’s take a look at MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog started out as a statics program specifically for blogs. I opened an account with them at the beginning of last summer because they were one of the few (free) programs that tracked where people clicked leaving your blog.

There are lots of metrics packages that tell you how people come into your blog. But at the time I was curious about the other side of the equation and MyBlogLog fit the bill nicely. They still do that well. Read more

Promote Your Business Blog with Social Networking Sites: StumbleUpon

Over the next several days we are going to be talking about some of the different social networking sites out there and how we might be able to effectively use them to promote our businesses.

Today we are going to be exploring one of my favorites

StumbleUpon

The first social networking site I’d recommend for just about any blogger is StumbleUpon.

The way this site works is that you open a free account with them and then download their tool bar for your browser. They’ve got versions for both FireFox and Internet Explorer. This tool bar has a “Stumble” button which will take you to a “random” site of interest.

I put random in quotes because the sites StumbleUpon will show you are based on your own interest. One critical step in the process is to fill out your profile as completely as possible. That way their system knows what kind of sites you’d like to see.

Then whenever you see a good web page (or a good blog post) you can click their thumbs up button to vote the page up. If you especially don’t like a site you can give it a thumbs down.

Over time StumbleUpon learns what you like and don’t like and shows you more of what you like.

StumbleUpon friends also play an important role in what you see and don’t see. By selecting someone as a friend you are saying that you’d like to see the web pages they think are good. When they select you as a friend they will see the pages you like.

The beauty of the system is that you can just be yourself, express your interests honestly. With over 2 million folks in their network Stumbling around the internet you are bound to find some who share your interests. Read more

What is Google Really Up To?

There is a brilliant new guest post up over at ProBlogger.net by Alister Cameron titled How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts… In their own words!

It’s a long post, and very technical. Alister analyzes some of the wording found in Google’s patent application a couple years back for their Blog Search and he brings up several interesting questions.

Here’s one of the things he brings forward that might be a little disturbing for some folks.

Apparently, according to the patent application, Google goes through folk’s GMail and Google Talk accounts looking for links and somehow incorporates that data into their search algorithms. They also apparently use data gathered from their Google Reader users accounts with regards to feed viewing and clicking habits.

If you are a user of one of these services (I use use all three), how do you feel about Google looking over your shoulder to glean information about your habits?

Do you think Google culling your email or IM conversations for links is an invasion of your privacy?

If you don’t use these services, does knowing Google is watching what you do discourage you from ever using them?

Food for thought.

Promote Your Business Blog with Social Networking Sites

Steve Bowman over at Coastal Uruguay asked me a great question yesterday about increasing blog traffic.

He said he’d been actively building relationships with other bloggers in his niche and seeing some good results from that approach. But now he is ready to step up the pace a bit.

What is a good next step?

My first suggestion was for him to start getting actively involved with some of the social networking sites out there.

The general idea behind social networking sites is that they make it easier for folks to find quality stuff on the web. The different sites go about it in different ways and use different criteria for their own definition of quality. But that gives you the gist of what most of them are trying to accomplish.

Social networking sites can be a great source of traffic for your business blog because so many people congregate at those sites. For example, people have been known to overload their servers by making the front page of Digg or Slashdot because of all the traffic that heads their way.

The way I see it that is a very good problem to have.

Probably the biggest trick is finding a social networking site that is at least somewhat oriented towards your niche. For example very little of what I write here would be at all applicable for Slashdot because that site is all tech all the time. SuccessCREEations isn’t a tech blog.

Over the next few days I’ll take a look at some of these sites in more detail. I’ll describe the pros and cons of the sites and explore some reasons why they might work for promoting your business blog.

Here are some sites that we’ll explore:

• StumbleUpon
• MyBlogLog
• Digg
• Reddit
• Del.icio.us
• Netscape
• YahooMyWeb

If there are any others that you’d like to explore, let me know and I’ll look at them more closely in this series.

In the mean time here are a couple of great resources to help get your creative juices flowing when it comes to promoting your business blog.

52 of the Best Ways to Promote Your Blog and Your Business by Mark White of Better Business Blogging.

23 Ideas for Finding New Readers for Your Blog by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net.

Enjoy!

Praying for the Folks in Virginia

The horror yesterday at Virginia Tech struck a little too close to home for me.

My brother is very much younger than I am (by, oh, 20 years) and is in college right now. Even though I was raised in New York, my folks moved to western Virginia when he was a toddler so that’s the only home he’s really known.

Tech was his second choice school.

In order to get into his first choice (RIT) he had to both get accepted and raise a ton of financial assistance. He’s a Cree and got it done so he’s up in New York at school now instead of in Blacksburg.

But he’s got a lot of friends down on that campus. And he’s was involved in several summer programs that happened there while he was in high school.

Fortunately it sounds like all of his friends are accounted for and OK. At least that was the early line through the grapevine when I talked with him yesterday. Even so it has rocked his world and he’s taking it pretty hard.

Gorgeous and I will be praying for all the families and friends of the victims. They are going through a horror that I can’t imagine.

Sunday Morning Goodness - 15 April 2007

I know it is tax deadline day. But it’s Sunday so they probably are giving you until tomorrow to file since the mail isn’t running today. (Don’t hold me to that, though. I filed a while back because I’d overpaid and wanted my money back quickly.)

Anyway I was just poking around my feed reader this morning and there is so much great stuff out there you oughtta see. For example,

• Blog Business Summit shares how Listening to the Demands of Online Communities Can Bring Profit. Don’t make the mistake Viacom is making. Find out if folks are talking about your business on line. Then join the conversation!
• Robert Hruzek at Middle Zone Musings shares a life lesson with a dose of humor in Fear of Flying. Be sure to read to the end of that one. His point is one you don’t want to miss.
• Over at Small Business Hub Brian Halligan is comparing the differences in the cable TV and traditional periodical publishing (on dead tree) industries in Let a Million Diggs and Reddits Bloom as a lead in for their new Digg-like service oriented specifically for business folks called Daily Hub. I think the idea has potential.
• Rich G. over at simplerich shares about reading one of my favorite leadership books in Spring Cleaning and Navy Seals?!? I like the book so much I quoted it in my very first post over here at SuccessCREEations, Success Principle #1 - Get Started! (I think somehow exclamation points are required when referencing that book. )

Grab yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy!

Good Thing I’m Not Superstitious

Yesterday was Friday the 13^th of April.

It’s a good thing I’m not superstitious. Because I happened to look at my Technorati stats and saw this on my screen.

What an interesting day to happen across the threshold of “666 links to this URL”.

Fortunately my day was none the worse for having those omens converge on me yesterday. It did give me a good laugh, though.

Performancing Metrics Goes Down Hard

As a consultant I experiment with different metrics packages to see how they compare. One of the packages that I like is Performancing Metrics.

However if you click on that link right now you will get a “Server Not Found” error massage.

If you are using Performancing Metrics you might want to take the script off of your blog for the time being as it has gone down hard. If you leave the script on your blog it may cause some significant problems for your blog until they get it back up and running.

Fortunately Raj Dash, one of the regulars over at Performancing, put up an announcement to let us know Pmetrics is Down. Thanks Raj for passing the word!

Up until it went down, Pmetrics was a good stats package.

I started using it nearly a year ago. I was originally attracted to Performancing because they had a great blog publication plugin for FireFox where I could blog straight from my browser.

That was before WordPress had the auto save feature that came with one of the new updates. It only took one or two posts being deleted when I had a web connection problem before I started looking for an off-line solution!

I used a few before I found Perfromancing. An it was just what I wanted. Simple. Integrated seamlessly with FireFox. Perfect.

I signed up with Performancing’s main site about that time and discovered they had a stats package as well.

Back in January they separated out the three areas. The plugin changed from a blue color scheme to orange and became ScribeFire. (That site is also down at the moment because of the server switch.)

The Pmetrics became a separate project and the Performancing blog community re-focussed on blogging.

Sounds like they’re experiencing some bumps in the road with the server change. Hopefully the dust will settle soon and everyone can put their great stats package back up.

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