Instigator Blog

There’s no question that blogging can present you as an expert. Blogging can raise your profile significantly. And it’s not hard to do.

The common belief is that blogging makes people far more accessible than they were before; bloggers are out there, promoting themselves and their ideas, and hopefully giving their audience plenty of opportunity to get in touch.

All true.

But I also know that many people do feel apprehensive about contacting bloggers, particularly very popular ones. They see a person who speaks their mind, is an uber-expert and has a big audience. They see a star. They see an A-lister. They see someone who is obviously very successful and wouldn’t want to communicate with little ole me, right?

Bloggers need to be aware of this. Some definitely are. Liz Strauss does an insanely good job of being open and available. Anyone visiting her blog can tell it’s very popular. Scour the blogosphere for even a few minutes and you’re bound to find Liz Strauss somewhere. But she’s the farthest thing from unreachable that you can imagine.

I can’t speak for Liz directly, but I bet she’d tell you she’s very aware of people’s apprehension when it comes to contacting popular bloggers.

Some popular bloggers play up their popularity by acting or coming across like movie stars. They’re not. They’re not untouchable. And that attitude of superiority will come to haunt them later. I’d say this is rare, but it’s out there. Clique-mentality exists in the blogosphere, but it sucks. It’s bad business.

Popular bloggers look more successful than they really might be.

I’m not insulting anyone, but just because someone has a popular blog doesn’t mean they’re incredibly successful. It doesn’t mean they don’t want to talk to you. It doesn’t mean they don’t NEED your business.

Used properly, blog popularity can be a great thing! Those who work hard to grow their blogs will look like authorities and have an eager audience. If they’re accessible too, it’s a winning combination!

A quick anecdote - some people consider my blog successful (thank you!) When I was running Blog About 5 Things Week, I checked out a participant’s blog and saw that he had Google AdSense ads in the middle of his posts. I emailed him and asked him if he found those ads successful. He replied (paraphrasing), “I’m surprised you would be asking me! Your blog is great, and I just started. I was just copying another popular blog I saw.” Flattering as that was, it made me realize that some people might be hesitant to get in touch with me; and I’m no A-lister. Imagine how people feel about communicating with the most popular bloggers!

You’ve started a business. Secured a few clients. Generated some cash flow.

You’ve paid the bills. You’ve got some visibility into the future. Business is growing steadily.

You’re investing more into the business. A few extra dollars go into marketing. You hire a sales person to help out. Or maybe you finally start a business blog with the help of a blog consultant.

You’re workload is increasing. But you’re happy about that because it means you’re heading in a good direction, right?

Question: Have you paid yourself yet?

Oops.

Too many entrepreneurs forget to pay themselves, even something small, when they’re getting their businesses off the ground.

I completely support re-investing in your business; that’s critical to its success. But you can’t live off future possibilities forever. Promise and opportunity don’t pay the bills. You can’t be chasing the proverbial carrot non-stop…every so often you need to take a wee nibble.

So take out some money from your business when you can. As soon as you can afford to pay yourself regularly, even if it’s $100/month, do it. It’ll make a big difference emotionally. It’ll help make your business feel tangible and valuable. That little bit of money isn’t the only value in your business - far from it - but it’s nice to see the money go into your bank account just the same.

Blogrolls are everywhere. Almost every blog has one…that endless list of links along the sidebar on the left or right of the content. Sometimes they’re categorized, sometimes they’re displayed alphabetically. Sometimes they’re tossed in there seemingly at random. Who can tell anymore?

Blogrolls are useful. But, they’ve gotten a bit out of hand.

When I first started blogging I was interested in finding humorous and satirical blogs to start generating some buzz for IGotNewsForYou. One of the fastest ways of finding those blogs was through people’s blogrolls. I’d find a good satirical blog, poke around a bit and then launch a whackload of other sites into new browser windows looking for similarly good content.

When it came time to look for marketing and PR blogs, I took the same tactic. Find a couple of good blogs, scour their blogrolls and you’re all set. More than enough great content to feed me for quite some time!

For people just getting into blogging (both reading and publishing), a good blogroll is essential.

Mark Evans questions the value of the blogroll, and rightfully so:

…I would argue many blogrolls are either collecting dust or have become outdated. For people still keen on growing their blogrolls, the problem is the larger they become, the harder they are to navigate.

My own research shows that this is definitely the case. People forget about their blogrolls. They’re rarely updated. And, as a person gets more familiar with consuming blog content, they start to ignore blogrolls altogether. I don’t remember the last time I’ve used someone’s blogroll to find new content.

Still, I went ahead and put up a blogroll anyway in the form of a Resources page. Call it a test…

I didn’t want to clutter my sidebar so I chose to put the links on a separate page, categorized by areas of interest for me (and hopefully others.) I ignored the page almost immediately after putting it up, but I’ve recently started adding links to it again.

In the last 2 months my Resources page has received 130 unique visitors. That’s not a ton, but it’s not bad. Hopefully people found something useful there.

Even if the blogroll is becoming less effective as a way of finding new blogs for more experienced blog consumers, it’s still a nice way of linking to others that are important to you. And it can help in generating links back as well. Lynn Terry at ClickNewz linked back to me after I added a link to her site.

So…with a bit of research, testing and validation, here’s what I’ve gathered:

• Blogrolls are less valuable than they used to be, particularly for more experienced blog readers and writers.
• Blogrolls suffer from neglect.
• Blogrolls can still be valuable to newcomers to the blogosphere.
• Blogrolls can still be valuable for gaining links (although they’re not the best method for doing so.)
• Blogrolls don’t hurt anyone (although they can clutter a sidebar). So there’s no harm putting one up.

The best thing to do with your blogroll is keep it active, updated and organized into logical categories of importance to your audience.

This is the fourth and final part of a multi-part series on fine tuning your blog through research, testing and validation. The first part was Increasing RSS Feed Subscribers. The second part was Making Money From Your Blog. The third part was Why an ABOUT Page Is So Important.

I’ve been using Bluehost for over 6 months. They provide high quality web site hosting. It’s also inexpensive web hosting. Bluehost is not the cheapest web hosting, but aside from one hiccup where my post on 5 Things You Shouldn’t Spend Money On When Starting a Business hit the front page of Digg, the service has run quite smoothly.

No web hosting service is perfect.

Let’s tackle some of the negative points first.

• You will wait on the phone when you call for sales or technical support. They’ve been working to improve wait times, and the worst was about 10 minutes, which is still acceptable. I’m not sure any professional web hosting company can totally eliminate wait times.
• More important, I’ve questioned their technical know-how on 2 occasions. It wasn’t something definitive where I could say, “These guys don’t know what they’re talking about,” it was more an uncertain feeling I was left with after having my question answered. One of those questions was whether I could transfer a .tv domain to Bluehost. The sales person said “yes” but I’m still not 100% sure. They don’t register .tv domain names, so I’m not sure if you can transfer it and then renew it from elsewhere.

Neither of these points surprised me when I signed up with Bluehost. Sales people at web hosting companies aren’t necessarily the most technically savvy, and waiting in line on the phone is a reality for many businesses. I do wish they’d tone down the “on hold” music!

I think there are more positives than negatives with Bluehost. These aren’t necessarily unique to them, but they’re still worthwhile.

• You can host 6 domains on 1 account for the base price. That’s pretty good. If you’ve got multiple websites you don’t need multiple accounts. And, if you need more than 6 domains you can buy them in groups of 5 for less than a new hosting account. I run all of Grasshopper New Media’s websites at Bluehost (or will be soon!) and so I’ve purchased 1 hosting account + 5 additional domains (so far.)
• Automatic installation of many software applications, including blogging software, forums, etc. I use WordPress for the most part; the auto-install is easy and helpful.
• An active CEO (Matt Heaton) who blogs. He emails customers regularly, openly admitting problems and focusing on customer needs. It makes me feel like he does care (which isn’t always the case for web hosting providers.) Note: I did email Matt Heaton directly about something and never heard back, which soured my view just a touch…(people: answer your emails!)

Web hosting is one of the hardest things to pick. There’s an absurd number of web hosting providers, and plenty of positive and negative reviews on most of them. It’s a minefield of technical details, promotions and shoddy customer support.

For the price ($6.95/month), Bluehost is meeting my needs. I think it’s a great choice for people hosting a small-medium sized website or business blog.

[tags]web hosting, cheap web hosting, inexpensive web hosting, great web hosting, matt heaton, bluehost[/tags]

The big boys are blogging. Fortune 500 companies are slowly but surely getting onboard with the business blogging wave…but like the rest of us, they’re just trying to figure it out. In fact, I’d venture to say that Fortune 500 companies are behind the times, and behind what many smaller businesses are doing with blogging. They’re big, corporate machines, with lots of complicated politics, policies, etc.

Now, Easton Ellsworth of Know More Media and Business Blogwire is spearheading the Fortune 500 Blog Project.

In a nutshell, from the site, here’s what it’s about:

The Fortune 500 Blog Project is an independent, volunteer-driven project to identify and evaluate public-facing corporate blogs owned and/or operated by Fortune 500 companies. Secondary purposes of this project include finding out to what degree Fortune 500 companies are using internal corporate blogs, and highlighting blogs that discuss Fortune 500 companies.

The site is a wiki - anyone can sign-up, pick a Fortune 500 company and get into it. Do the research, write reviews of their blogs, and tell the overall community what’s going on with the big corporate muck-a-mucks.

Popularity for the project is growing.

Why is something like this important?

Business blogging is a legitimate and extremely valuable marketing, sales, public relations, and community outreach endeavor. Big or small, businesses can get a lot of value out of blogging. A project like this helps us get a better sense of what’s out there, what companies are doing, what works and what doesn’t. It opens up immense lines of communication within the community and ideally to these businesses. And when we start to see positive and productive blog efforts out of Fortune 500 companies, I guarantee it will improve our current framework for successful business blogging.

So kudos to Easton and everyone else involved! Keep track of the Fortune 500 Blog Project, we’re going to gain a lot of valuable insight and discussion from it over time.

[tags]easton ellsworth, fortune 500 blogs, fortune 500 blog project, know more media, blogging, business blogs, business blogging, online community, social media[/tags]