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!
