Business Blogging Buzz Marketing

What follows below are some of my favorite WordPress plugins and why. Many of them I have in common with Cavemonkey’s excellent Top Ten WordPress Plugins list. Here’s my list, in no particular order:

• PodPress - makes it super-simple to post podcasts; includes an inline media player
• Popularity Contest - offer a leaderboard of your Most Popular posts based on views and ratings
• Google Sitemaps Generator - creates a Google Sitemaps XML file. What’s killer about this is that it uses Popularity Contest’s ratings for the priority scoring that Google uses to determine how frequently to spider your pages
• Akismet - you’d be a fool to run a blog with comments turned on and not use this plugin to stop the flood of comment spam. ’nuff said!
• Adhesive - gives you the ability to flag certain posts as “Sticky” so they float to the top of the category page regardless of whether it’s the most recent
• Ultimate Tag Warrior - creates tag pages and a tag cloud. Great for SEO as I’ve said before.
• EmailShroud - an email address obfuscator to thwart those evil email harvesters. Scans for email addresses in posts, but won’t work on email addresses hard-coded into your theme.
• Transpose Email - another email address obfuscator. Doesn’t automatically scan for email addresses, but can be used from within your theme files.
• WP-EMail - “Email this post to a friend” functionality
• WP-Print - Printer-friendly version of posts
• Subscribe2 - let your readers subscribe to your blog updates via email
• In-Series - link posts together into a series, regardless of dates posted or categories selected
• Permalink Redirect - fixes the canonicalization problem where the same page loads whether the slash is there or not. Important for SEO.
• Gravatars - puts the commenter’s “Gravatar” image next to their comment
• Subscribe to Comments - a commenter can check a box on the comment form so that they get notified of further comments to that post
• WP-Notable - places a row of buttons alongside your posts so the reader can easily add your post to their favorite social bookmarks service (del.icio.us, digg, etc.)
• A Different Monthly Archive - a pretty way to display links to archives by month
• Related Posts - link to related posts automatically based on the content of the post
• Related Posts for your 404 - your File Not Found error page can now suggest related posts to the misguided user. Cool!

What are your favorites? Did I miss any important ones?

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This session explores how specialized blog and feed (RSS/Atom) search engines gather content and provides tips on tapping into these growing forms of traffic.

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services, FeedBurner
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

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A report conducted by the recruitment firm OfficeTeam, the Office of the Future: 2020, looks ahead to the future of office work and the kinds of jobs that will be invented in the coming years, which they purport will include such things as Virtual Meetings Organizer, Human Resource Coordinator, and Information Integrator/Abstractor.

It was the Information Integrator/Abstractor role that intrigued me the most. According to the report, the job will include the collecting, compiling, and indexing of text, data and images in order that this content can be searched in a variety of ways.

It occurred to me that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the information integrator/abstractor of the future. After all, what does a business blogger do but the following:

• identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
• take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
• ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
• cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
• republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world

This could be the job description for a Corporate Blogger in 2006 as much as it could be one for an Information Integrator/Abstractor in 2020!

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You’ve probably heard it before, that the vast majority of the jobs that our children will hold when they grow up haven’t been invented yet. But what you may not have heard yet are some example future job functions being postulated.

According to the Office of the Future: 2020 report, these new roles will include:

• Virtual Meetings Organizer
  who will help employees schedule conferences and set up the required cameras, projection systems, electronic whiteboards, meeting software, audio equipment and related tools
• Contract Resource Coordinator
  who will bring together the right contract workers for a given project, like a movie producer assembling a cast, camera crew and production team
• Information Integrator/Abstractor
  who will collect, compile, and index text, data and images so this content can be searched in a variety of ways

It was this last role that most intrigued me, since I am a search geek after all! I just imagine a scene from The Minority Report where the Information Integrator waves his/her hands in the air purposefully and talks to a computer while within a virtual world of information projected onto the back of his/her retinas. In this world he/she categorizes schemas for datasets, slices and dices incoming datastreams into more manageable segments, gives directions to an AI to do further categorization on its own, and so on.

As a business blogger, I also got to thinking that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the “Information Integrator/Abstractor” of the future.

Think about this, what does a business blogger do but the following:

• identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
• take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
• ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
• cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
• republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world

Sounds like a plausible job description for an Information Integrator/Abstractor of the Year 2020!

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If your blog isn’t linkworthy, it’s not going to get very far in the blogosphere. Indeed, links are the currency of the Web, at least as far as search engines are concerned. No links = no rankings, and lousy links = lousy rankings.

One might even go so far as to valuate a business blog on its links (at least in part). For fun you might try out the free tool at the Business Opportunities Weblog and see how much your blog is worth. The computation is based on the link-to-dollar ratio of the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. According to the tool, this blog is worth $200,000. Anyone want to buy it from Rick?

So how do you make linkworthy posts? In The Art of Linkbaiting, Nick Wilson and commenters offer some great suggestions:

• Offer a niche-specific blogroll, tool, How-To, or compilation of news stories.
• Post a scoop.
• Expose a story as flawed or a fraud
• Be a contrarian about a story, product, or prominent blogger’s opinion.
• Be humorous. Good topics include a bizzare pic of your subject, “10 things I hate about…”, and “You know you’re a when…”
• Publish or commission some original research
• Creative-Commons-license photos you made of an event you’re blogging about
• Make available for free a theme, plugin or piece of software
• Start a meme that others can replicate and that links back to you (e.g. buttons/stickers/tools for bloggers/webmasters to post on their sites, contests, quizzes, surveys, etc.)

Building links is both art and science. It requires a great toolkit as well as loads of creative ideas.

MarketingProfs is holding a webinar on Feb. 16 on the topic: “Inside Secrets to Building Links for Online Publicity, Buzz and Search Engine Optimization”. The undisputed link guru Eric Ward and I (Stephan Spencer) are both presenting. Sign up here.

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Netconcepts President Stephan Spencer has some key advice for Technorati to counteract the challenge from its new blog search engine rival: Google.

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I heard at the Search Engine Strategies conference earlier this month in Chicago that the Ask Jeeves spider doesn’t cope well with websites that don’t have robots.txt. So if you don’t have a robots.txt file hosted on your blog’s document root, create a blank one.

Another detail often missed by bloggers is to create your own custom favicon.ico file. The favicon is a little 16 pixel by 16 pixel image that appears in the location bar on people’s web browsers; many of the RSS readers use it as well. Peter Brady at Performancing has some interesting things to say about whether or not bloggers need to have a favicon. My take on it is this: with a custom favicon, you look cooler and more with it, plus it differentiates you from the rest of the pack in your subscribers’ RSS subscription lists. If you don’t have time to mess around creating one in Photoshop, you can do a quick and dirty one pretty easily using the free web-based tool Favicon Generator. It took me all of two minutes to create my favicon for my blog using this tool.

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This session explores how search engines are dealing with blog and feed (RSS/Atom) content and why providing such syndicated content can drive new search-related traffic.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com

Speakers:
Dick Costolo, CEO, FeedBurner
Nan Dawkins, Partner, RedBoots Consulting
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

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